I apologize if this isn’t the sub for this post, but I will drop the same text in a few different subs. I just want to tell this story to people who might believe me and not laugh at this.

I (M20) have been telling people for years all about this experience that I had when I must have been about 3 or 4 years old. I can confidently say this is my first ever memory of my lifetime. I was born in October of 2003 and this happened before my sister was born in June of 2008. But I’m not sure of my exact age.

Every time that I would sleep on the couch in my parent’s living room, I would have the same dreams. I would wake up, look over, and see myself playing with my parents. They would do all sorts of activities but I could never speak or move, I just had to sit there and watch. This was years ago and I was very young so I don’t remember every detail and I apologize for that. They would do every day activities with me for what would feel like hours and then take me upstairs to go to bed. These dreams would happen seriously every time I fell asleep on the couch in the living room.

I could never move or interact with my parents or other me, until my second to last dream I had. My parents were out of the room and other me was laying on the floor when I was finally able to talk and say “who are you”. I’m so serious when I say that I could see evil or hate in other me’s eyes. He snapped his head around, glared at me, came over to me and had a physical altercation. What’s weird about the altercation is that I had never been introduced to violence at this point in my life, but other me was trying to hurt me. Although he was fighting me, it was still in a childish toddler way because he was hitting me with a blanket and toys. But I still could not move, just talk and yell at him. I didn’t feel physical pain but I remember how scary it was watching myself try to hurt me.

In my last dream that I ever had where I saw other me and my parents, and the dream after this altercation, they were all 3 headed upstairs and other me was watching me on the couch as he was heading upstairs. I made eye contact with him and somehow was able to get up at that moment and I ran over to the stairs and upstairs to my parents. My parent’s shadows were on the wall going upstairs and when I looked at one of them, the shadow sort of jolted at me. It didn’t necessarily attack me or come at me, it just engulfed me. And the shadow didn’t really move forward, it almost fell off the wall but came around my body. I cannot explain what really happened.

After this shadow dream, I never saw other me again. But 16-17 years later I still think about it constantly. And no matter who I tell or what I search for online, I cannot find any answers. One thing that is still weird about these dreams is that I’m now afraid of shadows. Not deathly scared of them but they make my skin crawl. I used to watch Bear and the Big Blue House when I was younger and it got to the point where I stopped watching because of the shadow character. I turned on Disney to watch it for the nostalgia a few month back and the shadow still made me feel weird. At 19 years old I was scared of a shadow on a children’s TV show.

Every once in a while I will use psychedelic mushrooms because I’m into aliens and the universe and seeing different things and I just think it’s cool. But every single time that I trip, I become afraid of the shadows. I know that people become scared and paranoid when they trip. Even over little things, but this is different. I’ve had bad trips where I see demonic things or hear bad things, but the shadow is a legit fear that just chills my whole body and gives me goosebumps.

I just find it so odd that my first lifetime memory is a dream and I still remember parts of it so vividly but now I can’t remember dreams that happened last night. I also don’t understand the feeling that shadows give me. I thought that only cats and dogs were scared of shadows.

Has anyone heard of something like this? Is this just because I was 3-4 years old and clueless about life? Am I putting too much thought into this? I’m telling you this was such a real and scary experience for me and it happened so often when I’d sleep on that couch.

Full disclaimer: I’ve used cannabis about every night before bed since I was 18 and I have been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder since about 12 years old but it’s not very severe. I’m not sure if that matters in this but I just want to put it all out there so that I can maybe maybe get some sort of reasonable response to this.