Date: unknown, but at least no later than 2003

Introduction:

This is the oldest dream experience of mine I can relate in such high detail. This occurred when I was no older than 18 years. Few of the other dream experiences in this journal measure up to it. It happened on a night between Saturday and Sunday. At the time I worked at a reptile shop, where they sold all kinds of exotic animals. At home in my tiny attic room all the walls were shelved up from the floor to the ceiling, and on each shelf stood a terrarium (an animal enclosure that mimics a habitat – a terrarium is the terrestrial counterpart to an aquarium). Though the room was small I had utilised every inch to the max for this hobby, and so I kept quite a lot of animals of various types. Spiders, insects, other arthropods, amphibians, and lizards. One of the lizards was an especially tame bearded dragon. This is how I got him.

One day my colleagues and I arrived at the store, to find a carton box with three of these beardies out in front of the door. Whoever brought them probably couldn’t take care of them any more, but maybe they felt ashamed and hoped this would be the best thing to do, like leaving a baby in front of a fire station. One of these beardies was incredibly tame. We could not house them all, so I adopted him and named him Raenk. Now, if you are not a fan of lizards, it may be hard to understand how deep this dream experience below was, so I do have to address this first before I proceed. To most people, all bearded dragons look alike and they don’t look friendly. But for those that keep them or who kept them in the past, each looks unique. It’s the same with people who observe orcas in the wild; they can tell them apart from a glance, and they can describe character traits of each.

The same goes for me when it comes to beardies. Anyone who has cared for beardies can attest they each have their own unique character and habits. No one beardy is quite the same as the next. To most people they do not look cute nor cuddly, but I assure you they are. I was close to these animals the same way most people are close to their favourite dog, cat, horse, etc. This was especially true for Raenk. I had given him a big enclosure, which was open on the above side, with a bright brood heating lamp hanging on a cord above it. This enclosure sat in an unused corner of the room, under a sloping wall. The space was otherwise unusable, but I made the enclosure in such a way it used every inch for Raenk to explore.

And he absolutely loved it. He would climb and dig, and spent hours on end basking under the brood lamp. But Raenk never slept there. Ever since I had gotten him I had picked him up in the evening, and put him in between an old towel, and laid him next to my pillow in the far left corner of my bed. During weekdays I would wake up before he did, and put him inside his enclosure while he remained asleep. During the weekend and off days however, I would sleep in, and Raenk would wake up before I did. These were my favourite mornings, as Raenk would perform a morning routine. He’d come out of his towel, and warmed himself on me, sometimes even crawling onto my face with his cold body. After an hour or so of heating up, he would jump off the bed and run around in my room. He would bother the other lizards in their enclosures on ground level, or ran back and forth in my room.

Raenk was a male, and male bearded dragons ‘head bang’ to show dominance to other males and to impress any nearby females. I did also have some female beardies, and Raenk made sure to give them a morning show every time he could. It annoyed me sometimes as I couldn’t really sleep as soon as he was awake, but deep inside I found it was actually hilarious and joyful. It was a morning routine on all my off days. Until one day I came home and Raenk didn’t want to eat. It was nothing to worry about because they sometimes skip a meal when for example they are shedding skin. But he kept refusing food in the days after, and back in the exotic pet store we had some kind of disease outbreak which killed off part of our inventory.

It soon seemed to be the case I had brought this infectious bug home with me, and Raenk now had it. He got worse by the day. The disease was a microscopic parasite that infected the intestines of its host. Infected animals stop eating and develop diarrhea. When the disease persists because it isn’t treated in time, or the medication isn’t working well, the diarrhea will worsen and become bloody. Unless treated the infected animal dies. We had plenty of the stuff needed to treat this at work and I was quick to start the medication, but Raenk wasn’t getting better. His condition would approve one day just to worsen the next. The diarrhea dragged on, even though I had taken all kinds of measures to prevent reinfection. 

Even going to far as to clean out his entire enclosure whole, boiling all the stones, discarding the sand, and washing all other items with bleach water, the same for every millimetre of the inside of his living space, and having him sleep in a fresh towel each morning. He gradually got worse over the span of a few weeks until I one day came home to find a pool of bloody diarrhea in his enclosure. Raenk looked terrible. He was near his end. A sick bearded dragon can look so horrible just before death and their eyes can sink so far into their skull you’d swear the eyeballs are touching each other on the inside of their little heads. He looked up at me and I just broke. I didn’t want to lose my little buddy. Raenk was truly my own, not some shared family pet. I had never seen a bearded dragon with his level of personality. During summer he would run around in the backyard and play with our rabbit and a tame male blackbird. He was truly unique among the unique, and I felt he was my pal.

I went downstairs to tell my parents Raenk was probably not going to make the night. They were sorry to hear it, but there was nothing they could do but to see me go through this. I went up that evening after dinner, and didn’t leave his side. I sat on my bed and had Raenk with me in a towel, stroking his little head. I could see he was in pain. I was going to make sure he would pass as comfortable as possible, and he wasn’t going to die alone. I wanted to make sure he knew I was there, watching out for him. Time crawled forward. Occasionally I would check if he was still here. As time progressed it became harder to tell, but sometimes there was movement because he took a breath, or he opened his mouth because he felt a jolt of pain.

Eventually it became so late that I was getting tired myself. I fought sleep but after some time I couldn’t any more. So I took Raenk in his towel, laid down in my bed, but instead of putting him next to me, I placed him in his towel on my chest, so his head would be near my chin. I put my pillow upright so I could see him. I then pulled the blanket over the two of us up to his head. I kept fighting my sleep, until I suddenly woke out of a slumber, realising Raenk was squirming in the towel. He was squirming and squirming, and I could see he was in so much pain. I panicked and didn’t know what to do, until he pooped something hard and bloody from his rear end. Defeated he laid to rest on the towel as I examined this weird bloody expulsion. 

Raenk now looked deader than before, but he was still here. I examined the bulb he pooped out and couldn’t identify what it was. It was stony, but it was no stone or clutch of sand. Eventually I repositioned us as before. As I entered the twilight of the dreamworld again, thoughts in my head began to grind. This was so unfair. Why did this animal, who was innocent in everything, have to suffer so much for something it hadn’t caused? I was especially obsessed with how unfair his death would be, and I felt I was ever less acceptive about the prospects of his inevitable end that night. My focus on the unfairness of it and my rejection of having to say goodbye moulded into one shape in my mind, that became my motivation to try and mentally cheer him on to keep fighting.

My focus intensified to such a degree that in that moment I forgot where I was, didn’t care whether I took regular breaths or not, didn’t think of anything else but to try and keep Raenk with me. I was not going to accept his demise, and I felt like I was opening a dialogue with death himself, telling him: “No!” And that’s when it happened.

Near Death Extraction:

Suddenly, I felt a motion as if the bed was being lifted up one feet into the air and started spinning counter-clockwise from my perspective. The motion felt subtle at first, like being in an elevator as it started moving. While I looked at the ceiling the room was spinning by slowly. But it picked up speed in a quick but gradual way, until it was spinning so unbelievably fast that I couldn’t make out any details of my surroundings any more. The spinning created a smudge of the room as it passed by, so I focussed on the centre point on the ceiling. As it sped up this visually morphed into the shape of a tunnel. The feeling of being inside a washing machine stopped instantly as soon as the tunnel had completely formed from the swirling vortex, and I was immediately blinded by the whitest light imaginable coming from the tunnel.

As my eyes got used to the light I began to see details of the tunnel. It seemed like a straight tubular tunnel with rocky walls, with a smooth silk white path down in the middle of it. At the far end a bright light was shining. Dumbfounded and perplexed I was processing what had just happened. I only knew one thing for sure; I felt a strong sense that I was not allowed to be here. It felt like whoever held agency over this place was surprised to see me here and who – in a fun, and light hearted tone – shared with me the thought: “Hey. You’re not supposed to be here?” Like a mother who had discovered a butterfly on the bed sheets which had been hanging outside to dry. Then I noticed movement halfway up in the tunnel in the distance. It was Raenk, walking happily and healthy away from me towards the light.

Without hesitation I jumped into the tunnel to run upwards and get him, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move forward. I could move every which way, except forwards, like I was being forced back by an energy barrier. I kept trying to no avail, and Raenk was getting further and further away from me. I then tried to yell out his name, but again I couldn’t. I even brought my hands to the side of my mouth to form a cone as to increase my audible range, took a deep breath, and yelled as loud as I could: “RAENK!!!“. But no sound came forth from my throat. I was muted here. I kept trying to shout my lungs out but I could not even produce so much as a squeak. Raenk kept moving away from me. The rules in this place were different than in my own realm.

In a last ditch effort I thought to myself: “What if I just think his name as loud as I can? Just really focus and call out to him from my mind.” I focussed and focussed, and thought about my little buddy, and asked him to come back to me. And… Raenk slowed down… He stopped… Sat there for a moment… He looked over his shoulder, and he saw me. It was working! I ushered him with my hands to come back towards me. He hesitated a moment, but eventually he did! He turned around and started walking back to me. I readied both my hands to pick him up the moment he would come into reach, and as soon as I got him I picked him up and put him on my chest, looking at my all healthy little Raenk. Immediately I woke up in my bed holding Raenk with my two hands while he was still partially under the covers. I was laying in the position I was standing on in that experience.

It was late in the morning now, and it was light outside. The whole night had past by in a blink. Raenk looked very lively. He had lifted up his head, and he looked at me through healthy eyes. As if someone had pumped his body up with life juice or something, his eyes were no longer sunken into his skull. He looked fine. Skinny, but otherwise healthy. He wriggled himself loose from my hands and happily warmed himself on my chest. He wasn’t dead. When I came down, my family was up. My mother saw me in the kitchen, all pale white and all perplexed, and she thought Raenk had died. But I told her he was not just still alive, but he was completely fine, and I related to her the surreal experience I had gone through. She didn’t know what to make of it. It would take a few days, but Raenk would be back to his old self again, eating, showing off to the ladies, etc. He lived for quite some time after this experience.

 

Aftermath:

It was such a strange and unearthly experience. Truly surreal. It felt like it wasn’t even a dream, but somehow felt so real that it seemed fake. That sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s somehow accurate. I don’t know how to explain this any other way than to say it felt like it happened not to me but to somebody else, and that I was a spectator through their eyes, going through the motions. And yet it was me. I made all those decisions. I just can’t explain it any other way.

But whatever happened, I think that this was sort of a ‘near death experience’ (NDE), though it wasn’t me that was dying. I got pulled in with my dying pet, who’s loss I did not want to accept. In my rejection of the reality of this situation I found and held a focus I had never held before in my life. And even as I write this in 2024 I can say I have not yet held on to such a level of focus for any such length of time again since. I think I was so attached to this little creature that this attachment pulled me with him the moment he died. And the attachment was both ways I think as he seemed to have chosen to stay with me.

How he was completely fine after this experience is inexplicable to me. A sceptic might say that the thing he pooped (a stony hard ball of clay-ish material mixed with blood) was bothering him, but I can tell you he looked worse after he got it out. He looked like he gave his last to do this, which maybe shows not even he was ready to leave this world himself, fighting until his very last breath. Before I got pulled into the tunnel it was like I could feel his life slip through my hands.

This experience changed me, deeply. Even though I became an atheist eventually still despite having had this experience, it has always remained with me as a vivid memory. An anomaly. It feels to me like I almost had a sort of NDE, without all the happenings that many people who have had such an experience go through. I never actually entered the tunnel. They most often did. I was unable to do so, not allowed even.

I have a feeling that when I forced myself into that realm, something in that realm took notice of me. Maybe that something is responsible for the other experiences I’ve had in the dream realm. It’s speculation upon speculation, yes, but I don’t feel like holding back in my own writings. This is what I think is the case. I was grateful Raenk was okay, and am grateful I was allowed to have had this experience.

Raenk did eventually die, about 6 months later, and from the same disease no less, though his death was quicker and less painful this time. I guess I wasn’t allowed to keep him on my own terms.

I know for sure this happened on the night between Saturday and Sunday, as the day I found him I had come back from work (my working days were Wednesday to Saturday), and the next morning my parents were both downstairs and not at work (their working days were Monday to Friday). The date on which I write this experience on my website is Friday 23-02-2024. When I posted this I just changed the year to 2003, and left ’23rd of February’ as it was. Curious, after having saved the draft, I looked up which day this date is. The 23rd of February 2003 is a Sunday. Who knows… Could be the correct date.