I haven’t told anyone about this, and for the sake of my anonymity I don’t intend to reveal my name. But all the same, I haven’t been able to forget about this experience, as much as I’ve tried to push it from my memory. It’s been haunting me for years now, and honestly I was hoping someone would be able to tell me what happened that night. I guess that’s part of the reason why I decided to share my experience with the blue moon.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “once in a blue moon” before. Well, do you know what a “blue moon” is? Maybe, maybe not. I’ll explain it, just in case. A blue moon is an extra, additional, full moon. It appears extremely rarely, maybe once every one to two years or so. Whenever the blue moon appears, a year will have 13 full moons instead of 12. The moon itself rarely looks blue, except on rare occasions.
Anyway, the experience I would like to share happened about three to four years ago at the time of writing this. I remember that due to a shortage of employees, I had landed the late shift at the gas station where I worked. Bad luck, I suppose. It was a chilly day, but the snow the forecast predicted hadn’t fallen yet when I finally locked up the store, got in my beat up truck, and turned on the engine. I remember that as I turned on the radio and prepared for the twenty-something minute drive home, I noticed the entire car was illuminated with a blue light. I glanced upward, through the windshield. The moon was shining, a bright blue.
It puzzled me, because I had never seen the moon tinted such a vivid blue before. I made up my mind to Google it when I reached home. As I drove along the highway toward my apartment, the roads seemed unusually quiet. I don’t recall seeing a single living soul the entire way. Once I reached my house, a little apartment near the edge of the city, close by to the factory district, I had forgotten all about the blue light and the moon.
I was tired. All I wanted to do was go to bed. And as I remember, I headed directly to bed. I turned off the truck, got out, and locked the door. At that point, I hadn’t yet noticed the unusual silence which permeated the dilapidated neighborhood. But reflecting on it now, I should have. I would have, but I had been listening to the radio the entire way home to stay awake, and my ears hadn’t yet adjusted. Before they did, I had crossed my lawn – if you could call it that, it was mostly dead grass and weeds – and walked up the steps to my front porch. I remember getting ready for bed, and then eating a microwave meal (I know I should have brushed my teeth before I ate, but I forgot). As I walked into my room, however, the blue light which shown brightly through my curtains reminded me of what I had wanted to search up while in the car.
I jotted it down on a sticky note by my bed – I was in no condition to research anything tonight – and fell back, exhausted, on my bed.
I must have fallen asleep quickly, but before I knew it, I was awake again. The sun shown brightly through the windows, and the birds chirped and twittered outside in the frosty morning air. I got up, and brushed my teeth. As I walked out the door, however, I felt a tremendous pain in my chest, and bent over, coughing up blood. I tried to reach my phone and dial a number for help, but I felt my head becoming foggy, and it became hard to remember what numbers I had to press, or what I was even doing. I struggled to think, and eventually I realized that I must have been dying. I remember panic filling me, just before I collapsed over. I assume it must have been death.
Here’s the weird part though. Moments later, I woke up, sitting up straight in bed, cold sweat covering my body. The blue moon’s light shown through the window. I remember thinking that was one crazy nightmare. And I could remember it vividly as if I had lived through the experiences. I got up to get some water before going to bed. As I was grabbing my cup from the cabinet, my hand started to twitch and shake, and before I could move I felt such an intense pain that I cried in agony. It felt as if all the muscles in my body were clenched, and I couldn’t move. I strained to fight it, but the pain overwhelmed me. As you might have guessed by now, I died then, too.
I can’t remember the amount of times it happened that night. Countless times I thought I had woken up, and then I died. And then I woke up again. The process repeated. Eventually I gave up hoping that I would actually wake up – but then the next time I woke up it lasted so long that I started to think I had actually woken up – and then I died again.
Each time I died the agony I felt was extremely real. I can’t even begin to describe the pain I felt that night. But finally, after what seemed like an eternity, it was all over. I finally woke up, and I think it’s lasted so far. After all, it’s been about three to four years.
But here’s what creeps me out. Every once and a while, I’ll have a dream about dying. And whenever I wake up with a jolt, sweating and cold, I could almost swear that for a moment, the blue moon is still visible in the sky outside. It makes me wonder if I’ve ever really woken up, or if I’m still lying there asleep in my bed.