The Couch (The Alchemy of Sulfur, part I)
Brimstone burning, boiling, bubbling — oh, so troubling.
That same fog curled up next to me on that couch that night, its weight pressed against me who knows how long.
The Watchers were curious about me. How could I know there was someone there, if I never saw them—not even once? Maybe it was the Jinn, but I’m not a Muslim, or Persian. Maybe it was the Greys, or the Fae. Supernaturalists depict cryptids and egregores as various as the colors of the electromagnetic spectrum. Mine must have come from the part of the spectrum humans can’t see. Perhaps they were born from me, from within my bowels. They did carry a sulfur smell after all—a smell that lingered in my nose.
It was the smell that woke me at 4:30 A.M. Brimstone, burning sulfur.
Whitley Strieber, who wrote “Communion”—Christopher Walken played him in the movie, you know—claims 4:00 A.M. in the summer is the witching hour if it’s Daylight Savings. It was a smell I could have dismissed were it not for the dreamtime memories poking through the night’s fog. The misty, single-paned windows stretched above the opposite armrest of my second bed, the family room couch, which flanked a windowless wall next to my son’s room. The couch is my friend. I wasn’t in the dog house or anything; I just sleep so darn well there. I don’t have to worry about my snoring disturbing my wife.
I did go to bed meaning to catch a glimpse of moonlight through the window above my feet. I did hold an intention for contact, the same I’d been holding for about a month or so of slowly letting the ineffable erase my nihilism and materialism that year. The comfort I’d held for years was now peeling away.
No blankets in the summer, here. We try to give the AC a break, but no luck with that in this Houston heat. That same fog curled up next to me on that couch that night, it's weight pressed against me who knows how long. Restlessness bubbled up through the miasma in fits and starts.
Three more memories rode those bubbles all the way to the top of my awareness:
The first, before the smell, was of a light, familiar, bright blue, electric white, on the windowless wall. I peeped it through half-lidded eyes, sensing how it stayed “on” throughout the fuzziness. What’s uncanny is that I rationalized it away as Oscar’s light, just reflecting off the wall. Oscar is my pool robot. It has a blue LED, but to reach me it would have had to shine up boldly through the pergola, the oak tree’s leaves, bend around the balcony the windows overlooked, then curve again into the window and reflect off the wall I saw it on. Impossible, yet I believed it. The mad story made sense, but I wasn’t awake.
The smell had made its home in my nostrils, but there was a heat to it.
The second memory was of the smell, which, obviously, had to come from my kiddos, sound asleep in their rooms. Bless their little hearts—what did they eat? I remember smiling, half-conscious.
The third memory was when the blue light went out. Finally, I thought. I’ll sleep better now that Oscar’s done. The smell had made its home in my nostrils, but there was a heat to it.
That was the trigger.
NO, it couldn’t be them—their rooms are too far away! I thought, while stirring, but I couldn’t open my eyes. I struggled and wiggled until finally I woke up with a grunt.
And there it was, the hot, egg-rot reek. I stood up with a jolt and looked around. Someone was there with me. There go those fucking chills again. The red-glowing night light on the far wall added to the sinister feeling. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up with me.
Shit, the kids! I ran into each of their rooms. They were all sound asleep.
I returned to the couch, sat down, stood up, walked all around the room, letting my nose guide me, drawing in deep sniffs—a strange meditation. The smell seemed to move. It was first strongest above and the left of where I’d had lain, near my head. The ceiling vent was pushing out gentle cool air, moving the fan, which I thought I’d left off? It was still there, just as strong as two minutes earlier, but it was over the couch now, dwindling still as olfactory fatigue set in. The smell was behind the couch now, along the windowless wall. Was I their quarry? Did they do anything to me?
I saw the lamplight from my actual room downstairs and knew my wife was having insomnia, so I went downstairs, feeling like a coward. If there was something there, I’d just left my kids to them, but I took the shrinking smell to be absence. Of course it was nothing. That’s what my wife told me. It had to be my nasty ass. Occam's razor and all that.
I wish I would have taken her upstairs to smell it, because the smell persisted weakly in my nose for about an hour.
To cap off the experience, my wife said she thought she saw a swirling light in the corner of her eye after I told her everything. Once she looked at it, it was gone. She immediately changed the subject as if she never saw it. Just last week, I asked her if she remembers saying she’d seen that that morning, and she tells me, “No.”
That morning, a palpable humidity permeated the East Texas home. Outside, the late-summer air felt like dank doldrums over land. After sunrise, I posted about it in the r/Experiencers subreddit. One redditor advised I call the gas company, but I knew the smell wasn’t natural gas. Nevertheless, I called them out right away and had them check everywhere—no leaks. I also wondered if the smell was a spontaneous sulfur dioxide plume from either my water heater or my AC drain pan. That remains a small possibility, but I have zero proof. I snooped in the attic, smelled around the appliances. Yes, they put water heaters in the attic here!
There was no trace or whiff of it anywhere. I even considered if a stink bug or cockroach—good luck avoiding them in East Texas!—could have gotten fried in a wall socket.
The phenomenon wanted me to know it was real, giving me one more piece of evidence (but only for me, no one else should take my word for this). That’s how the Phenomenon works. They play with perception and probabilities. The proof is only for the experiencer(s). I could concede that the smell could have come from me.
What had I eaten? Laugh it up.
Some believers claim a sulfur smell could be the residue of a portal. In the famous Varginha, Brazil UFO case, the beings and their bodies, had a sulfuric smell in some reports, but most who claim to have seen those beings attest to their very foul ammonia smell. The crashed craft had a mix of ammonia and sulfur.
The Roswell crash smell was also clocked as “putrid”, a mix of decay and sulfur. I’ve been down rabbit holes on this one, friends. Jacques Vallée’s “Passport to Magonia” catalogues close encounters and in it, a sulfur smell is mentioned 3 times, either in reference to a UFO craft or abduction encounters with the Greys. But the Greys have been described as having a cinnamon smell, or a pleasant smell as well. The smells run the gamut, with the Greys.
Of course, the Jinn (Djinn) seem to have the strongest link to a sulfuric smell in all phenomenology. I do have some Arabic ancestry perhaps via the Moorish occupation of the Iberian peninsula (via my mother’s Spanish line).
One more possibility, apart from it being all “in my head”. If they are extraterrestrials who somehow have an interest in “awakening” souls like me (I hate that term, by the way; it’s too ego-loaded), there should be some hypothesis for the hellish fart odor, right? Well, there just may be:
A molecule [Phosphine] that’s known for its smelly and poisonous nature on Earth may be a sure-fire sign of extraterrestrial life.
I held onto this nugget during my era when I half-believed in the Extraterrestrial UFO hypothesis, which just refers to the notion that UFO experiencers have interacted with physical ET beings from outer space.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It turns out when you dig into UAP sightings, abduction reports, stigmata (anomalous body marks), and even crop circles, often there are indeed prosaic explanations, which unfortunately are then used to discredit the very real impact of the experience. That they have such a profound effect on the experiencer leads me to see the synchronicity as both that impact and the anomaly together.
Do the Watchers, the nonhuman intelligences (called “NHI” in UFO research), toy with the edges of these phenomena? What if they recruit the dreaming faculties of the experiencer to interact with us? Could that explain it all? This is a key premise of the Shamanic Dreaming Hypothesis of ET/NHI contact, one which I’ve come to hold myself.
But I digress.
I never found the source. Only the memories stayed behind once the smell left and the day broke. These were breadcrumbs towards a more expansive cosmology. Stuff no gas meter could show me. Whatever it was, it was a guest that intruded on the peace of my world then slipped away, leaving only my questions.
The investigation wasn’t over.
I caught sulfur once myself. Only once, and I'm not sure who it was either.
I'm reminded of HP Lovecraft's 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,' and the horrible smells experienced when a character seeks to resurrect the dead using their body's preserved 'essential salts.'