Happy Ides of March! This is a liminal time. What better day to publish Part II of my putrid, paranormal puzzlement — when a foul awakening plunged me into a whirlpool of investigation and discovery.
Please read part 1 first:
The Couch
"That same fog curled up next to me on that couch that night, its weight pressed against me who knows how long."
Did you read Part I? If you didn’t, please do, to read the whole malodorous experience.
The Watcher(s)
I’ll never know for sure if that experience was actually an encounter, or if it was some aberration in my environment—or gut. But the half-lidded memories and fuzzy logic remained echoing whispers of something more profound. The raised hackles and chill-bumps up and down my back suggested I was being watched…like prey.
This experience would help shape how I think and view reality itself.
Before I begin, a brief comment on what I mean when I refer to myself versus others. In a Paranormal context, I see no difference between the two, be they aliens/NHI, UFOs, cryptids, ghosts, or whatever. Whether NHI (non-human intelligences) are truly “other”—archetypes, psychological projections, or mere fantasy—is irrelevant to me.
For me, in a spiritual context, the Self encompasses the other and the other encompasses the Self.
They are us. We are them.
I believe something did visit me that day. It even bore the blue light signature of later transformative experiences that would follow. But the smell that lingered when I woke up was unique and unmistakable: that of lit matches infused with burning sulfur.
So, was it from the Jinn/Djinn, the Greys from UFOlogy lore, or did I or my attic appliances… “fart”? That was the suggestion from ChatGPT 4o, although it didn’t word it quite that way; the AI-generated hypothesis was that it could have been a plume of sulfur dioxide from somewhere in the attic, or my bowels.
I got the answer, but it came to me as layers, like peeling back an onion—which incidentally contains sulfur-rich chemical compounds galore.
The first layer straddles the fuzzy line between truth and story:
Although I’d mostly become a believer in aliens (NHI) through the lens of UFOlogy, I’d held onto some degree of skepticism, which offered little comfort. About a month later, I had one of the most transformative spiritual/metaphysical experiences of my life, and it was the kick I needed to finally peel back the onion—but with someone’s help.
I should comment on my emotional state at this point. Intellectually, I remained skeptical, but my angst about whether the Phenomenon was real or imaginary—and even more broadly, the afterlife—gradually worsened my ability to focus at work, as my lack of knowledge fueled both late-night and work-time research into the Phenomenon. I was heavily burnt out in the wake of two home remodels, a cross-state move, a layoff, two family deaths (my mother’s cancer and death, before that my mother-in-law’s passing), Hurricane Beryl (which toppled a huge oak onto the corner of my house and wrecked my roof and shed, narrowly missing my wife), the loss of my Mormon faith, and growing unease about my career in an AI-dominated future.
Enter the Shaman
In the r/Experiencers subreddit, I eventually found Daniel Rekshan of DSETI.org, who had been posting a lot about his hypnosis work, and I was happy that he didn’t deny the “false memory” problem inherent to using hypnosis for “repressed memory retrieval.” Another huge plus is that he wasn’t a strong proponent of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. Dan is a paradox, gracefully holding a nuanced space between skepticism and mysticism, and his psychology and computer science background appealed to me, as the social scientist/engineer type that I am.
Dan is a licensed hypnotist (in both the Depth Hypnosis and Quantum Healing methodologies), so I booked him right away and bought his book on the Shamanic Dreaming Hypothesis of ET/NHI contact.
His book was eye-opening. It helped me reconcile the skepticism I held with the veracity of my experiences, while offering me a metaphysical framework to mediate between my subconscious mind and spiritual world.
I had two sessions with him. The first, though brief, was transformative. I may write on it later.
The first onion layer came off during my second hypnosis session, wherein I’m pretty sure I “channeled” other beings for the first time. The hypnosis felt like a semi-consciously led dream. Over a Zoom video call, Dan helped me solidify my intention for the session, put me under trance, then facilitated by asking me the questions I’d prepared. Among the questions was this:
Who or what was the sulfur-smell experience?
Below is an answer, perhaps this onion’s outer layer, straight from the transcript.
In the transcript, note how I blur myself with the other. Here, I’d begun channeling a sleep paralysis entity who appeared to me next to my childhood bed at night as my older brother, before transforming into an axe-murdering, greasy, long-haired, smiling Viking guy who jumped at me in slow motion, large half-moon axe raised high above his head (my scream woke the whole house)
Transcript:
Greasy Axe-Murdering Entity (G.A.M.E.): The experience was meant to scare you. We have fun.
Me: Do you feed off the fear?
G.A.M.E.: Only in the sense that a bully…[trails off]
Me: Are you evil?
Me (voicing an intuition): I think it’s part of the play—we’re part of the play.
G.A.M.E.: We wear the masks. We don the costumes.
Dan (hypnotist): Is that the nature of good and evil—the sense of participating in a play that has comedy and tragedy? Could you speak more about the nature of good and evil?
G.A.M.E./Me: We’re the stage technicians as I said earlier. The feelings associated with good and evil are attached to the material world. They’re attached to the imprinting of your experience on our psyche.
Dan: Is the sulfur smell experience explained in the same way? …how do you understand that “stage scene”?
Me: It was a physical contact—a visitation. It was meant to scare me. I’d like to know what happened to me during that time. Was I taken somewhere else? Was I just visited in my space? Was I studied, observed? Who were they? How could I know who they were? Does it matter?
The Watcher(s): Doesn’t matter—if you want to think of us as Greys, then you can also think of us as the Fae. You’ve read so much on these subjects. Your mind can’t coalesce us into a particular form because you know that our forms are infinite.
The Mask Stays On
The session offered an answer. It was a “true-enough” story whose ambiguity was as foggy as the mist that clouded that room’s single-paned windows that smelly night. Whether the Watchers were faceless projections of my subconscious mind or something genuinely other, they refused to remove their mask.
So, were my visitors Greys, Jinn, stage technicians, archetypes, or all of the above? Although my fear of them had subsided thanks to that new framing, the ambiguity kept me wondering:
What in the hell was that damn smell?
I’d listened to a few Jinn reports on Islamic podcasts, I’d also read a few sulfur smell reports from Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia, whose latest edition’s cover incidentally mirrors its thesis that the UFO phenomenon may be an extension or evolution of folklore from ages past:
I didn’t know it then, but the truest answer was hiding in the gaps of my questioning.
It’s one thing to “know” the source of the smell; it’s entirely another to ask, “What does it mean?” I was so focused on entities and UFOs, I didn’t think to wonder about its symbolism.
A spiritual awakening doesn’t just awaken you to the existence of spirit. It instills a new way of looking at the world and at truth writ large. It’s a paradigm shift that shows you how life is replete with omens (symbols), just as dreams are. It awakens you to the dream that is life itself. You realize that regardless of the material provenance of unexplainable events, there is a design behind them, and we are the designers—architects building scaffolds of meaning as we climb upward out of the Void.
In shamanism, omen work looks beyond prosaic cause and effect thinking. Maybe my attic water heaters had actually “passed gas.” But the synchronicity of it—coinciding with the memory of my space being lit up by blue light on the wall above—matters more, hinting at greater lessons to unpack.
The Color Blue
The essential lesson came by way of color.
During that session, in delving into yet another experience, I arrived at an Earth-like planet orbiting a blue star in the Pleiades star cluster. There, I saw and described a majestic blue being lounging on an obsidian floor in a “star sanctum,” on a space station tethered to the planet. A blue and green spectrum of color flooded the room through the floor, and the walls were etched with hieroglyphics that told the stories of lifetimes of acquired knowledge and experience.
The colors’ vibrancy and ray-like movements felt significant, though I didn’t yet know how to interpret them. Some quick searching led me into a patchwork of metaphysical color systems, including New Age ideas about “Blue Ray Starseeds” and broader esoteric traditions of the Seven Rays, which appear in both Theosophical teachings and some later interpretations of Hindu thought.
My research led me to @officialthealchemist (Youtube), whose video “Who Are the Blue Ray Starseeds? Are YOU One of Them?” got me thinking about how color in the imaginal realm can be a vehicle for self-discovery and self-knowledge.
The hypnosis was my bridge from the materialist “alien” interpretation to a more personal, psychological one.
Suddenly everything felt so new and wonderful.
Rays of Creation? Cool! I thought. If that Blue Being was me, does that mean I’m a Pleiadian starseed?
What color does sulfur burn again?
In her other videos, The Alchemist (Sarah Elkhaldy) talks about how so-called Blue Ray Starseeds have an inherent ability to “transmute” pain and trauma into higher vibrational forms. Here was another new term: Transmutation. Though I've come to see it overused ad nauseam in esoterica, the word is often uttered in the same breath of Shadow Work, which got me learning more about Carl Jung. At the same time my wife, a psychologist, had been reading books on Jung’s life and works, sharing them with me.
Elkhaldy explains that Jung, drawing partly from his own intense inner experiences, visions, and “fantasies,” interpreted alchemical symbolism through the psychological lens he built into his concepts of The Shadow, the Self, integration, and individuation. His work also engaged deeply with Gnostic and Hermetic currents; his work reframed those older spiritual ideas into a more acceptable framework for modern psychology.
That was when I suspected it: the smell could be a real-world metaphor for my own alchemy.
Lead into Gold
Spiritual alchemy turns lead into gold, symbolically. It’s the process of the psyche’s transformation.
For Jung, alchemy became the symbolic language for inner transformation. My question shifted from,
What visited me, if anything at all?
to
What in me was being transformed?
Sulfur matters here, because in the alchemical tradition, sulfur is one of the core elements of transformation.
Zosimos of Panopolis was one of the first major alchemical writers. He wrote of alchemy in visionary and spiritual terms; for him, material transformation and spiritual transformation appear deeply entangled.
In Visions of Zosimos, sulfur was part of his “divine water” symbolism, in which his use of the Greek word theion carried a double meaning of “divine” and “sulfurous.” Like water, sulfur is a transforming medium, and it's used as an agent of coloration, dissolution, and pneuma—invoking breath/spirit, or the bridge between body (soma) and soul (psyche).
Zosimos’s was a visionary approach to alchemy, but Paracelsus made the sulfur symbolism much more explicit. Paracelsus described sulfur as the soul itself, linking spirit and body. His tria prima system consisted of sulfur, mercury, and salt, and sulfur was the combustible, “animating” principle.
Nigredo, Dark Night, Void
The smell of burning brimstone is an uncanny omen of ignition.
Burning it produces a mostly “smokeless” fire (with nasty fumes, certainly), best seen—in the dark—at night. And that period of my life—the hurricane, cancer and death, ADHD burnout, and the existential crisis threaded through all of it—had been the dark night of my soul, my own alchemical nigredo, during which the old me had been smelted down by the furnace.
In the alchemical tradition, the prima materia—the raw material of transformation—first passes through nigredo, the blackening stage of putrefaction and dissolution. The smell wasn’t proof of anything. It was an omen of the transformation I’d begun, and sulfur burns blue.
The fear I felt that night, and throughout that longer soul’s night, was my teacher. The beings I channeled may have been the masks over my own fear—the parts of myself that scared me into silence my whole life, the indoctrination that kept me submissive to a church I could no longer believe in, submissive to a version of myself that kept me safe by staying small and quiet.
Maybe they were the liminal stagehands, waiting in the wings for my unbecoming.
Thanks for reading!
Here’s the full hypnosis session report:
Here’s another piece on where this all led me, and how it brought me here to Substack:
Fantastic writeup
This resurrected something I had experienced ( pretty unsettling) and I think it's my Arab upbringing that explains it all to djinn occurrences. Your own personal journey in discovering the 'beyond' with all those interacties and that ending! brilliant!