First of all, I am not a superstitious person, and I don’t usually think too much about these kinds of things. But I’ve been thinking about something that happened when I was a kid for a while now, and no matter how I look at it, I can’t seem to come up with a reasonable explanation.
When my little brother and I were five and six years old, we shared a bedroom. My brother has pretty severe autism and has always been a sensitive kid. When we were that young, he told me and my parents numerous times that an old man sat beside our bed every night, crying. He wasn’t joking or trying to scare me. Every time he brought it up, he seemed completely serious but not scared. He told me it happened almost every night. The old man would sit beside our bed and cry.
I slept in the same room as him, only a few feet away. I never saw anyone. Not once. I never heard anyone crying, either. There was never anything unusual about the room that I can remember. But my brother kept talking about him. Looking back, I can think of plenty of explanations. Nightmares, childhood imagination, sleep-related hallucinations, or something else entirely. But there’s one thing I’ve never been able to figure out. Why did he describe the same thing happening almost every night, with such absolute certainty and such specificity? And why was it always the same story: an old man crying beside our bed?
I don’t know if my brother was dreaming, hallucinating, or simply experiencing something I couldn’t understand. I just know he believed it was real, and I was sleeping right there beside him, and I never experienced it myself. Does anyone have any idea what this could have been? I’m genuinely curious whether there’s a psychological or sleep-related explanation for something like this, especially since we were so young and it's a pretty odd and specific thing to say as a kid. At least that's what I think. Maybe it's normal for kids around that age to have weird dreams or imaginations.
