Before the Word Existed

A strange position

Everyone is talking about reptilians now. Disclosure hearings, podcasts, documentaries, a feed full of men with whiteboards and theories. I find myself in an odd place. I have carried one memory for nearly sixty years, and the culture has arrived at it late, loud and in a hurry.

When I write about it now, part of me hears how it sounds. Another man jumping on a trend. That is the problem with being early to something you never chose: by the time you speak, the room is full.

So I will not argue about who got there first. I will tell you what happened, in the order it happened, and let you see where the words came from.

Winter, 1968

I was a small child. Our house in Ore, on the edge of Hastings in East Sussex, had no central heating. Winter meant frost patterns on the inside of the glass and a coal stove in the corner of the kitchen, with copper pipes running up through the ceiling. My mother polished those pipes for hours. I still love the colour of copper because of them.

Bath time was a ritual. Afterwards she wrapped me in a towel and set me on the floor of her bedroom in front of the heater. Warm air, baby powder, her voice somewhere nearby. I was walking, but I was not yet talking in any real sense.

That evening something shifted. An awareness came over me, and I stood up. The towel fell from my shoulders. I walked along the hallway, past the bathroom, and into my brother's bedroom. The room was dark and the door was open. I climbed onto the bed beneath the window and reached for the sill. The tiles were ice cold under my hands. The glass was a single thin pane.

I stood on tiptoe and looked out into the dark, waiting for something I could not have named.

A face rose up on the other side of the glass and met mine.

It was large, twice the size of my own head. Black eyes like discs, no lids, no lashes. Almost no nose. No lips, only a small opening where a mouth would be. Scales of different sizes, dark green. On either side of the face hung long ropes of the same green. I have always called them dreadlocks. It wore something over its head, a hood or a light cloak.

We looked at each other and the world went silent. The presence was dominant, masculine, old. It did not frighten me. It looked into me, through me. What it wanted, I had no way of knowing.

Then the cold reached me, and unease with it. I climbed down and ran back to my mother as fast as my legs allowed. She was in the bathroom. She picked me up and I cried, and I had no words to tell her why.

The words came later

I owe you some honesty about language. A child that young has no word for reptilian. I had no word for dreadlocks either; I would not see them for years. What I had was a picture, a feeling in the body and a fear of the cold. Everything else I have written above is the adult reaching back and finding words for the child.

The culture supplied some of those words, and it did so after the fact. In 1968 there was nothing on British television to give a toddler that face. The BBC aired its reptilian Silurians in 1970. Zecharia Sitchin published his Anunnaki books in 1976. V arrived in 1983, and David Icke put "reptilian" into every pub conversation from 1999. I grew up inside a Jehovah's Witness household, where unseen beings had one explanation and it was not a comfortable one. Nobody around me had a framework for what I saw, and I did not ask for one.

So when I use the word now, I use it the way you use a borrowed coat. It fits well enough. It was not made for me.

The memory itself holds its own detail, and that detail has nothing to do with any trend: the copper pipes, the baby powder, the cold tiles, the thin glass, my mother in the bathroom. Those are the anchors. The label sits on top of them.

Where this sits in the book

I first wrote this night down in Harmonic Being: An Introspective Journey. It is there because the book begins where I began: with the body registering something the mind had no words for. Long before I trained as a therapist, before I understood energy as a field I could work with, a small child stood at a cold window and felt a presence through his whole body.

That is the thread the book follows. Every chapter returns to the same idea: the body knows first, and language catches up later, if it catches up at all. The breath practices in the book exist for that reason. They give you a way back to the place where experience arrives before the explanation.

In the book, this memory is one part of a longer story. Here I wanted to look at it again, sixty years on, in a world that suddenly has a great deal to say about it.

Why the order matters

I do not ask you to believe what I saw. I ask you to notice the sequence. The experience came first, without language. The language came decades later, from a culture that had not yet invented it. Most of what you hear about reptilians today runs the other way: the word first, then the experiences shaped to fit it.

That difference is the whole of what I can offer. I was not first, and I am not keeping up. I am a man who has carried a picture without a caption for most of his life, watching the world rush to write captions for pictures it never saw.

The child at the window did not know what he was looking at. Sixty years on, I am not certain either. What I know is that something looked back, and that the looking began long before anyone was talking about it.

If you carry something similar, a memory from before you had words, I would like to hear it. Get in touch through the contact page, or sign up below to receive the next piece.