The Man in the Moon

Our House in Fort William

We moved to this house when I was less than a year old. We remained here until we moved to Hinton, Alberta in August 1961.

When I was about two years old, I had a long series of recurring nightmares that involved “the man in the moon”. Every time I had the nightmare, it was always exactly the same. At the beginning of the dream, I am standing beside my two older brothers by our bedroom window. We are all in our pyjamas and it is night time. I am still so short that my eyes are below the ledge of the window, but I can still look up through the window into the night sky. We are all looking at a round light that looks like the full moon. My brothers are laughing at “the man in the moon”. Suddenly, the man in the moon, comes down. I am suddenly alone in the dark. Although I can’t see anything, I know the man in the moon is there, and he is taking me away. I try to scream out for my father, but when I do this, nothing comes out because I am completely paralysed. I then wake up.

I had this same nightmare for months on end. Finally one time, instead of waking up after the man in the moon took me away, the dream continued. In this continuation, the man in the moon had taken me back to the moon or another planet. He had hidden me below the ground in some sort of clay. Something scary and evil was flying in the sky, looking for me. There was great heat that sort of baked me under ground, and the scary thing in the sky couldn’t find me. Then I woke up.

For some reason, after I had this longer version of the dream, I don’t think I ever had the nightmare again.

In the mid 1980s, I had moved to Vancouver where I shared an apartment with a friend I had met in Calgary. One time I told him about the dream. He was the first person to suggest that the dream had sounded like it was possibly related to alien abductions. I had argued that it must just have been something psychological, and at the time, I strongly rejected the notion that it might suggest aliens. One odd part of this was the name of my roommate was Robert Wilson. Of course, this was fifteen years before I ever read about the Kinross incident and the disappearance of Lt. Gene Moncla and Lt. Robert Wilson, so I certainly didn’t note any irony or coincidence at the time.

There were other recollections that came back to me later relating to the man in the moon and Fort William. In one incident, I remember I was with my family and my mom was pointing up to the moon and was trying to show me the man in the moon. She was trying to tell me that the vague looking shadows and patterns on the moon were a face and that this was the man in the moon. I thought she was deliberately misleading me, because in my mind I had the idea of the man in the moon as a real being, a sort of short funny looking man. He wasn’t just a vague pattern that people thought reminded them of a face, like looking at a cloud and saying it looked like a pirate ship or something like that.

Another event that I more recently recalled was one day when I was very young, I was in the kitchen with my mother and older brother David (he is two years older than me). He was telling my mother with some earnestness in his voice that “the man in the moon” had taken Gordie away. My mother was trying to reassure my brother that I was alright. My memory is that this was before I could talk, but I certainly had no difficulty understanding what my brother and mother were saying to each other. Neither of them tried to ask me if I could remember anything about this. I couldn’t remember anything about the man in the moon, and I guess (if this is a real memory), that this must have occurred before my dreams started.

I recently spoke to my oldest brother Barry who is four years older than me. He told me that he could remember that we used to talk about the Man in the Moon, and that they used to try and tell me that the Man in the Moon would come and take me away. Of course, I know that this is the sort of storytelling and imagination that a lot of children experience, but the recurring dream was very real to me and I did grow up with a sense that there was someone on the moon who was always looking over me, a sort of guardian. It was a little creepy, but also sort of comforting feeling most of the time, because I felt the being was looking out for me. It was sort of a little like the angels who guarded me by night in my prayers, although I certainly did not view the angels as being the same thing as the Man in the Moon.