My paranormal-adjacent life experiences...

... and how they impact my comic book writing.

This post is less how I make my sausage and more why it has the flavor that it has given the ingredients sitting inside the cupboard of my consciousness.

The very first paranormal adjacent experience of my life wasn’t even my own experience, I was just a symbolic participant in another dimension. When I was around two years old, my mom had a late-stage miscarriage where she had to deliver a dead baby whose gender was never determined. In that process, she had an NDE (near-death experience). She had the traditional experience of going through the dark tunnel of the afterlife and arriving on the other side to a glorious, bright, warm and loving white light. She says she felt more free than she ever had before and she wanted to stay in the glow forever. For unexplained reasons, she looked back into the dark tunnel behind her and saw the image of me, her first born. Some sort of telepathic voice told her she should return to her body and her life on Earth in order to look after my Dad, me, and a son that would come later in the form of my younger brother.

My mom had a traditional NDE experience during child birth.

My fascination with the thin veil of our three-dimensional world, and what lies beyond it, has been with me all along and only continued to grow as I got older. When I was a little kid, my Dad bought a copy of Whitley Strieber’s seminal book on alien abduction, Communion. I was scared to death of the iconic image of an expressionless grey alien staring right at me — this image somehow resonated as a true and accurate representation of alien life in our cosmos. It not only resonated with me, but for droves of people that claim they have been abducted by the greys. Before this image was brandished on the cover of Strieber’s book, there really wasn’t a consensus image of what an alien looked like and it instantly congealed in the minds of everyone on Earth back in 1987.

Whitley Strieber’s ground-breaking book, Communion.

My Dad kept this book on the his nightstand, pictured below. Over time, as Dad would tell me things that he was learning from the book, I began to feel more and more comfortable with the idea of "we are not alone in the universe.” As I grew up, I began to get more and more in tune with my hunger to learn more about the dimensions that are just out of the reach our basic five senses. For the record: I have never seen a UFO, a UAP, or in plain English, an alien space craft.

My Dad’s nightstand where he kept a copy of Communion, among other books about aliens and UFO theories.

The first time I remember being able to see beyond the normal vision with my eyes was around the same time that my Dad was working his way through Communion. I used to be scared to death of a Star Wars Kenner toy called the Dianoga, a green monster that swims in the trash water of the Death Star’s compactor. My little brother, Tito, used to torcher me with that little piece of molded plastic. When he was a toddler, he approached me, hiding the Dianoga in his hand under the cover of a cloth diaper. I vividly remember seeing right through the cloth diaper and knowing that he held the Dianoga in his little mitts. I immediately ran in the other direction; he was forced to show his hand and began chasing me down the hall with the little green monster. His plan was foiled and he seemed disappointed that I had somehow got the drop on him. It was like having Superman’s x-ray vision and it felt amazing!

Kenner’s Dianoga from the Death Star playset.

Years later, now a young adult in my first year of college, still living at home and attending classes, I experienced sleep paralysis for the first and only time in my life. It was absolutely terrifying. Imagine waking up and your body is paralyzed—that’s what happened. I can’t recall if my eyes were in a fixed position, but I do remember being only being able to look forward, as if I had tunnel vision. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t tell if I was even breathing, as I was not in control of my body. It felt like an eternity as I struggled to move any part of my body in order to wake up and break through the freeze. It was probably just minutes and eventually I decided to just try to fall back asleep, which I did. Then I woke up again later, still in the middle of the night, but this time I had full control of my body. I immediately went and crawled in bed with my parents, a legal adult, acting like a toddler that wanted comforting. I was absolutely terrified and felt like some power beyond my comprehension had been toying with me. I don’t think my parents ever asked me about why I crawled into their bed that night and I’m not even sure I really told anyone about it the next day. It’s not a pleasant memory. This was my view of my childhood bedroom while I was in stasis:

My childhood bedroom in the family home I grew up in.

I often wondered if there was some type of invisible entity hovering just outside of my bedroom window, just of view, that had some manner of telepathic hold over me. There was no way I was going to look, and something told me I wouldn’t have seen anything if I’d looked out the window anyway. Deep inside, I feel that things like ghosts, spirits, angels, demons, and even aliens, exist in a dimension just beyond our perception of the three-dimensional world. It’s like a window we can’t see through, obscured by a veil we can’t manipulate… like the curtains that hung over my childhood bedroom window.

My old bedroom window in the family home I grew up in.

Toward the end of my college years, as I was preparing to go out on my own for the first time, my ailing grandmother from México moved into a small room that served as our family’s office/computer room. Abuelita made her home there until her final days, and to her credit, became a U.S. citizen, and was buried in a cemetery where relatives from both sides of my family found their final resting place. Before she passed, she told my Mom and Dad a wild story about a bright light and little beings coming to visit her… at our family home! She said that in the middle of the night, an incredibly bright light would appear outside the window and then tiny little bald beings with big eyes would appear. It’s not clear to me if they would appear inside of the converted office or if they were in the front yard, just outside the window. My abuelita, the most devout Catholic I have ever met in my life, confronted these little beings with a question: “are you from the devil, or are you from God?” The little bald beings told her telepathically that indeed they were from God and they were there to care for her and look after her. From then on, she referred to these little greys as her angelitos—her little angels. 👽👼🏽

The window of the office at my parent’s house, it served as my abuelita’s bedroom for some years before she passed away on the wings of angels.

Now I’ll share what I refer to as “the download.” When my kids were toddlers, my mother in law would baby sit them during the day at her house, and I’d pick them up after work, battling horrible Bay Area commute traffic to get back home at night. I’d often come home exhausted, and decompress with a short power nap upstairs in my bed. One night, one of these power naps became one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced—even more than the sleep paralysis incident.

I drifted off and felt like there was a google of data and information was downloading into my brain at an incomprehensible speed. The best way I can describe this is the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when Dave enters the stargate and he can’t comprehend what he is experiencing, before passing out. I also saw colors and geometric shapes whizzing by, representative of the data that was entering me.

Just like Dave the astronaut or Cooper from Interstellar, it was hard to comprehend another dimension with a 3D frame of reference.

The only thing I clearly remember learning from that massive download was that time is a construct that doesn’t exist. This is not a new idea, as there are many theories about how time is simultaneous and we can only experience it one frame at a time, as it were. I remember excitedly coming downstairs to tell my wife that we don’t have to worry about time anymore and how there is always enough time to do whatever we want with our lives. I think my enthusiasm fell flat because we live in a world where we revolve around a sun and we keep time with clocks and calendars—there is no escaping it. The next morning, I’m sure I awoke to an alarm clock buzzing, and reported to work on time, ate lunch at noon, and did all the other things I needed to at the appointed time.

Since then, I do have experiences where I feel like I am “in the zone,” or where time is standing still. It’s hard to describe and it seems to happen at random intervals, with no rhyme or reason. Sometimes it’s playing pick-up sports, at other times it’s as simple as living completely in the moment with loved ones and friends. I don’t have special powers as a result of this download—I can’t suddenly speak new languages or play instruments because I don’t have a musical bone in my body. Life just goes on, ticking one theoretical second at a time.

More recently I’ve become more and more interested in the blending of all of these ideas: the merging of religion, science, space-time, dimensionality, consciousness, spirituality, artificial intelligence and the existential threat it proposes. One of these sub-topics is known as remote viewing, or leaving your body to be able to perceive and see things that are far away in space and in time. Without any training whatsoever, I’ve begun experimenting during that liminal space in between being awake and falling asleep at night. On two occasions, clear as day, I was able to see images from my future… nothing major, in fact quite inconsequential. I was seeing frames from TV and movie content that I’d watch at a later date, sometimes weeks or months later.

The first image I was able to conjure and see clearly in my head was a giant black-and-white checkerboard rectangle. Not an amorphous flag, but a solid, flat rectangle. I thought for sure this meant I would soon be watching, or seeing an ad for Sony Pictures’ Gran Turismo, which was being advertised a lot at the time. To my delight, I was wrong! I ended up seeing both the giant checkerboard square and a solid black background with a white-colored, CG closed caption reading “100.” I saw both images, exactly as I saw foresaw them, watching an Apple TV WWII program called Masters of the Air. What tipped me off that I had seen into the future was how closely I saw the two images in the show, both in the same episode, just seconds apart.

A scene from Apple TV’s Masters of the Air.

The black and white “100” I saw in a vision came in the form of closed captioning.

In closing, here’s what I do know: after the download and expanding my curiosity about how our strange universe works, I started scratching the itch to make comics. Is it a coincidence? Maybe. I’ll never know, and that’s OK. Some people may ask why I waited so late in life to start a passion project, like comics, where I can explore my obsession with science fact, science fiction, the future of humanity, and my belief that homo sapiens will evolve away from the Earth and live among other sentient races in our galaxy. I guess I’d say I have all the time in the world to explore the stories I want to tell. Some of the themes I talked about in this post are explored in my new graphic novel, Major Thomás, available for purchase on Amazon’s Comixology Originals platform.

See you next mission! ✨

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You can follow me on any social media or gaming platform at: @omorales81 and on my website, theforcemedia.com.