Hey everyone 👋,
This post is a little different from everything else I have written on this blog. All my other posts have been about technology, about language models, about the broken job market, about God, about aliens, about intelligence and what it actually means. This one is not about any of those things at the surface level, though I promise by the end you will see how everything connects, because everything I write always ends up connecting. This post is a documentary. It is a personal record of things that happened to me during my childhood that I still do not have clear answers to, events that I have carried in the back of my mind for decades without being able to fully explain them, and that I am finally putting down in writing partly because this blog has become the space where I am honest about things I would not say anywhere else, and partly because I genuinely want to know if anyone else has experienced what I experienced. I am not writing this to claim something dramatic or to construct a mythology around my own history. I am writing it because the experiences were real, they were documented in my memory with unusual clarity, and they have never fully let go of me. I wrote in my first post about my childhood in a small village, about the poverty, the isolation, the absence of internet and all the technology that most people assume shaped their worldview from birth. I had none of that. And yet I saw things. I experienced things. And for the first time, I want to talk about them in full.
I also want to be clear about something from the start, because I know how this kind of post reads if you are coming to it with a skeptical mind, and I respect that skepticism because I share it. I am not a gullible person. I have spent post after post on this blog demanding evidence, rejecting comfortable myths, and following arguments wherever the logic leads even when the destination is uncomfortable. I wrote in Be Aware of the Current UFOs Pandemic that I do not believe in alien visitation, that I think the alien narrative is a combination of classified government programs, psychological phenomena, and the deeply human need to not feel alone. I stand by everything in that post. But the events I am about to describe happened before I had any exposure to alien mythology, to shadow people legends, to internet rabbit holes, or to any of the cultural machinery that might have planted those images in my head from the outside. I was a child in a poor village with no technology. Whatever I saw came from somewhere that I still can not fully account for, and that is exactly why it has stayed with me.
The House, the Corridor, and the Complete Absence of Explanations
Let me set the scene as precisely as I can, because I have learned from years of trying to explain this to people that the details matter more than the summary. I grew up, as I described in my first post, in a small village in northern Lebanon called Sfireh in the Danniyeh region. I shared a house with my parents and five brothers, and through a combination of circumstances I ended up with my own room, which was unusual for a family at that economic level and which I realize now was both a privilege and the source of a particular kind of nocturnal isolation that shaped some of the strangest years of my early life. My room was at the end of a long corridor, which is the most important physical detail in this entire story, and I need you to hold onto that image as you read the rest of this section. The corridor ran from the main entrance of the house to the far wing where my room was located. It was the kind of corridor that a child walking through late at night notices more than an adult ever would, because children are closer to the ground, closer to the shadows, and much more attuned to the peripheral vision experience of something moving at the edge of sight.
The image below is a diagram I put together to give you a spatial sense of what I am describing, because words alone do not fully capture the geometry of the experience:
What I saw, on more than one occasion and over a period of several years starting from when I was roughly five or six years old and continuing through early childhood, was a dark figure moving at extremely high speed through that corridor. Not walking. Not running in any way that a human body moves. Moving in a way that is hard to describe without sounding like I am dramatizing, which I am actively trying not to do. The figure was dark, distinctly darker than the surrounding space, with a shape that was humanoid but not quite right in proportions I noticed even as a small child without being able to articulate what specifically was wrong about them. It passed near the door of my room when I was lying in bed, moving from one end of the corridor toward the other, and it happened fast enough that each individual sighting lasted only a second or two. But in those one or two seconds, the impression left on my nervous system was so strong that I would lie awake afterward for a long time, perfectly still, waiting to see if it would come back.
I want to be extremely careful about the framing here because I spent years second-guessing these memories. I know what childhood imagination is. I know what surreal hallucinations are, those vivid perceptual experiences that happen at the boundary between waking and sleep when the brain starts generating imagery before the body fully loses consciousness. I have read the sleep science on this, and I understand the mechanism well enough to know it is a serious candidate explanation for some of what I experienced. But there are details that do not fit cleanly into the hallucination explanation. The sightings did not happen at the boundary of sleep. They happened when I was awake and alert, sometimes when I had been awake for a while and was simply lying in the dark the way children do when they cannot sleep. I was not in a sleepy state. I was watching the door of my room because I was already alert, already paying attention, and the figure moved across my field of vision while my eyes were open and my mind was fully engaged. That combination of full wakefulness and clear perceptual experience is what has made these memories impossible to fully dismiss, even decades later.
I also want to note something that is easy to overlook: I never told anyone about these experiences at the time. Not my parents, not my brothers, not anyone. This was not because I was afraid of being disbelieved, though I probably would have been. It was because something about the experience felt private in a way that I did not have language to explain when I was 5 or 6 years old. Children often sense, without being able to articulate why, that certain experiences are not meant to be shared through normal channels. I kept these sightings entirely to myself for years, which means there was no feedback loop, no external shaping, no one telling me what I had seen or what it meant. The memory developed in isolation, uncontaminated by other people's interpretations, which is one of the reasons I trust it more than I might otherwise.
Shadow People: When the Internet Confirmed Something I Already Knew
In recent years, when I finally had internet access and started exploring the world of information that had been closed to me during my childhood, I discovered that there is an entire documented phenomenon called shadow people, or the shadow person. I want to be precise about the timeline here because it matters for the integrity of what I am saying. I did not start with the internet, discover shadow people, and then construct a memory that fit the mythology. The experience came first, followed by years of carrying it alone, followed by the discovery that other people across different cultures and different countries had described something strikingly similar. I am not claiming that the similarity is proof of anything supernatural. What I am saying is that the convergence is significant enough to be worth taking seriously rather than dismissing out of hand.
The Wikipedia entry on shadow people defines the phenomenon as the perception of a patch of shadow as a living, humanoid figure, and it has been documented across cultures in remarkably consistent terms: dark, often featureless, distinctly human in shape but wrong in some detail of proportion or movement, typically observed flickering at the periphery of vision, through doorways and corridors, and disappearing when looked at directly (1). The folklore database at Villains Wiki catalogues the cross-cultural history of shadow figure encounters in detail that is striking precisely because many of these accounts predate the internet, predate mass media, and predate the possibility of global cross-contamination of stories (2). People in medieval Europe, people in pre-colonial indigenous cultures, people in isolated rural communities across Asia and the Middle East, have described experiences that map almost precisely onto what I experienced in that corridor. This is either a remarkable coincidence of collective imagination, or it is pointing at something real that current scientific frameworks have not adequately addressed.
I want to engage with the scientific literature here because I said at the start that I am not going to wave away empiricism, and I mean that. The most robust scientific explanation for shadow person experiences is a combination of hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, sleep paralysis phenomena, and a perceptual process called face and figure pareidolia, in which the human visual system, primed by evolution to detect humanoid shapes for survival reasons, generates false positives in ambiguous low-light conditions. These are all real mechanisms with good experimental support, and I am not dismissing them. Research published in the journal Nature has documented that focal electrical stimulation of the left temporoparietal junction, the region responsible for integrating the brain's multisensory signals into a coherent sense of bodily self, can generate a vivid, repeatable perceptual experience of a humanoid presence standing close behind the subject, with no external physical stimulus present whatsoever (3). The question is whether these mechanisms fully account for all reported experiences, including mine, and I am genuinely uncertain about that. What I am certain about is that I was not asleep, I was not in a state of altered consciousness, and the experience was clear and repeatable over a period of years, all of which makes the simple sleep-phenomenon explanation feel like it is carrying more weight than the evidence strictly supports.
There is also a compelling thread in the parapsychology and consciousness research literature, which I approach with significant skepticism but do not ignore entirely, suggesting that certain persistent visual phenomena might be connected to infrasound, to electromagnetic field anomalies, or to other physical variables that affect the visual and auditory cortex in ways that produce consistent perceptual experiences across different individuals. Vic Tandy's research into infrasound at around 18.98 Hz and its documented ability to produce feelings of dread, cold sweats, and peripheral visual disturbances through mechanical resonance of the human eyeball is one of the more interesting data points here, though it has not been replicated widely enough to be treated as established science (4). I mention it not to claim that infrasound explains what I saw but because it illustrates that the space between "I saw it, therefore it is real and supernatural" and "you imagined it, therefore it is nothing" is larger and more scientifically interesting than either of those poles acknowledges.
What makes my case genuinely unique, and I am careful with the word unique because I know how it sounds coming from anyone describing their own childhood experiences, is the specific context of no external influence. I grew up without television, without internet, without books that contained any shadow person mythology, and without a cultural environment in which these entities were discussed. My village was religious and conservative, and supernatural conversation in that context was about djinn, about evil eye, about angels and demons in the specifically Islamic framework I described in my first post. Shadow figures moving at high speed through corridors were not part of that vocabulary. So wherever the experience came from, it did not come from cultural contamination. It came from somewhere else, and that somewhere else remains the open question at the center of this post.
Dreaming of Rockets, Space, Wars, and Things Far Too Large for a Child
The corridor figures were not the only thing from my childhood that I have never fully resolved. From roughly the same period, I had dreams, and I use that word carefully because some of them had a quality that is hard to distinguish from ordinary dreaming. I described the most significant of these in my first post: the recurring dream of a great battle between God and the Devil, a cosmic war that I was somehow a participant in rather than an observer. I was a soldier in that dream, standing at the front lines of something vast, and I would wake up crying with an emotional weight that felt completely disproportionate to anything that a five or six year old child should be experiencing. I want to expand on that here because I said more than I intended to in the first post and less than I needed to, which is a paradox I seem to encounter often when writing about things that matter.
These were not ordinary nightmares. Nightmares in the clinical sense are fear-arousal experiences tied to the amygdala's threat-processing during REM sleep, and they are common in children, well-documented, and generally connected to daytime stressors or fears that the child's brain has not fully processed. But these experiences did not have the texture of fear. They had the texture of grief and exhaustion, which is a completely different emotional register and one that is not typically associated with childhood dream content. I was not afraid in these dreams. I was tired. I was sad. I was fighting something enormous for a cause that I understood to be important but could not have named or explained in language available to a child that age. And when I woke up from them, the exhaustion did not fade quickly the way nightmare fear fades. It lingered for hours, which is unusual enough that I still remember it distinctly even after all these years.
Alongside these cosmic battle dreams, I had an equally strong and equally persistent dream about space. About rockets. About leaving the Earth and going somewhere vast and cold and beautiful and silent. I wrote in my first post that the adults around me used to say I would one day work for NASA and change the world, which as I noted there is an ironic thing to say about a child in a poor village in northern Lebanon with no access to technology. But the dream preceded the adults' commentary. Before anyone told me that NASA existed, before I had any coherent understanding of what space was in scientific terms, I was dreaming of it. The dreams were detailed in a way that I find difficult to explain: not just dark sky with stars the way a child who had seen a picture book might render space, but actual experience of weightlessness, of looking back at something very small and very bright in the distance, of the specific quality of silence that is not quiet but is the absence of the medium through which sound travels. I do not know how a child in Sfireh in the nineteen-nineties accessed that phenomenology. I genuinely do not.
Part of what makes the space dreams remarkable in retrospect is that they connected so directly to something I later discovered was a real intellectual passion, as I described in my posts about mathematics and physics and the structure of reality. In Mathematical Equations are Multimodal by Default, I wrote about the moment in electrical engineering college when I realized that equations are not just symbols on a page but descriptions of how reality actually works, and how that moment felt like recognition rather than discovery. That feeling of recognition is relevant here, because the space dreams had the same quality. Not that I was learning something new, but that I was remembering something I already knew and had temporarily forgotten. I am not making a mystical claim about past lives or soul memory or anything that requires extraordinary evidence. I am describing a phenomenological quality of the experience that was distinct and that I have never found an adequate naturalistic explanation for, and the honest response to that is to report it as accurately as I can rather than to paper over it with an explanation that does not actually fit.
The rockets I dreamed of were not the toy-rockets of a child's imagination. They were large, technical, complex structures. I had never seen a real rocket. I had no access to anything that would have provided that level of detail. And yet in the dreams, they were specific enough that when I eventually, years later, looked at images of actual launch vehicles, the visual match was close enough to produce the same quality of recognition that the equations produced in college. Something in me already knew what it was looking at. I still do not fully understand what that means. But I think it means something, and I think refusing to look at it carefully because it makes the naturalist framework slightly uncomfortable is exactly the kind of intellectual timidity I have been arguing against in every post I have published on this blog.
The Brain-Cloning Theory and Other Things I Believe Might Be True
This section is the most speculative in the post, and I want to flag that clearly before I say anything in it, because speculative and wrong are different things and I do not want to conflate them. What follows is my honest attempt to integrate a set of experiences that I cannot fully explain using only the frameworks that science currently offers, and I am aware that this puts me in uncomfortable territory. I am going to say it anyway because intellectual honesty is the only value I have consistently held throughout these years, and I am not going to abandon it now when the subject matter is personally sensitive.
I believe that something during my childhood was paying attention to me in a way that went beyond ordinary coincidence. I know how that sounds. I know how it reads on a page in a context where I have spent several posts arguing for empiricism, for evidence, for the rejection of comfortable myths. But the accumulation of experiences, the corridor figures over multiple years, the vivid dreams with qualities that my current knowledge of neuroscience does not fully account for, the early intellectual development that multiple adults found unusual, the IQ of 142 that I mentioned in my first post and that was itself a surprising data point to everyone who administered the test, all of these together have pushed me toward a hypothesis that I cannot prove but cannot dismiss.
The hypothesis is this: I think that something or someone, in a framework I do not currently have language adequate to describe, was interacting with my cognitive development during childhood in ways that were not random and were not benign in the simple sense of being purely pleasant. The figure in the corridor, whatever it was, appeared over multiple years, always near the door of my room, always moving in the same direction, always at the same unusual speed. That is not the behavior of a random perceptual glitch. Random perceptual glitches are random. What I observed had a pattern, and patterns require either an explanation or an acknowledgment that no explanation is currently available. I choose the latter because the former would require inventing something I cannot support with evidence.
I also believe, and this is the part that sounds most unusual and that I hold most tentatively, that my unusually strong performance in school during childhood was connected to these experiences in a way I still find hard to articulate. I was the first in my class consistently. I processed information with a speed and accuracy that my teachers commented on regularly. I had an intuitive grasp of abstract patterns and structural relationships in subjects like mathematics and logic that went beyond what my educational environment should have been able to produce. I wrote in my first post about my interest in tinkering, in taking things apart to understand how they worked, in the almost obsessive desire to find the mechanism behind the appearance. Where did that come from? I grew up poor, isolated, without models of intellectual achievement around me, without libraries, without any of the environmental inputs that developmental psychology would point to as predictors of that kind of cognitive profile. The question of where it came from remains genuinely open to me, and the corridor figures are part of the same open question even if I cannot formally connect the two.
I am aware that the brain-cloning hypothesis, which is the shorthand I use in my head for the idea that something external was systematically influencing my cognitive architecture during early development, is not a scientific claim in the formal sense. It does not make specific, testable predictions that could in principle be falsified. But neither is it purely superstitious. It is an attempt to make sense of a pattern using the most honest framing available to me, and the most honest framing available to me is that something unusual was happening during my childhood and I do not currently have an adequate explanation for what it was. I would rather say that plainly than pretend the experiences did not happen or that they fit more neatly into existing frameworks than they actually do.
What I Understand Now That I Didn't Then
The thing about carrying strange experiences from childhood into adulthood and then into a life of serious intellectual work is that they do not stay static. They get filtered, reinterpreted, and reorganized by everything you learn along the way, and what they mean in your twenties is genuinely different from what they meant when you were eight. I want to try to articulate what these experiences mean to me now, in the context of everything I have written on this blog, because I think the connection is real and important rather than retrofitted.
In Language is Limited. ASI is Impossible, I made the argument that the brain operates through channels that language can only approximate, that huge portions of what we know and experience exist in a pre-linguistic or non-linguistic register that words can point at but never fully contain. That argument was made in the context of AI and the limitations of language models, but it applies directly to childhood experience. A child of five or six has almost none of the linguistic scaffolding that adults use to categorize and defuse unusual experience. When I saw the figure in the corridor, I had no word for it, no frame, no story to put it in. The experience existed raw, in the pre-linguistic register, and it is precisely because of that rawness that it has been so persistent. It never got adequately packaged into language, which means it never got adequately processed and filed away the way experiences that fit into known categories eventually are. It sat in the same uncompressed, unfiled state that it had when it first happened, which is why it still carries its full original weight when I think about it now.
This is also why I am skeptical of the explanation that childhood memories of unusual experiences are reconstructed confabulations rather than genuine retained events. The neuroscience of memory reconsolidation is real and important, and I am not dismissing it. Elizabeth Loftus's work on false memories is some of the most important research in cognitive psychology, and the central finding, that memories are not recordings but reconstructions that can be influenced by post-event information, is well-established (5). But there is a crucial difference between memories that have been socially processed, discussed, and potentially cross-contaminated by other people's narratives, and memories that were held in isolation. I never told anyone about the corridor for years. I never heard anyone describe anything similar. There was no social context in which the memory could have been reconstructed from outside materials during childhood. What I have is an isolated, undiscussed, uncontaminated perceptual record from a period of life where I had no access to the cultural frameworks that would have given it meaning, and that is a different epistemic situation from the typical false-memory case.
I have also spent enough time thinking about consciousness to take seriously the possibility that the standard materialist account of mind is incomplete in ways that occasionally become visible at the edges of ordinary experience. I said in my first post that I started as a born Muslim and moved to agnosticism, and in the posts on God I explored what a theory of consciousness and divinity might look like that takes phenomenological experience seriously as evidence rather than dismissing it as noise. The experiences I am describing in this post are part of that phenomenological evidence base. They do not prove anything supernatural. But they are real data points about the range of human experience, and a complete theory of consciousness needs to account for them even if it ultimately explains them in materialist terms. The interesting question is not whether I am right about the metaphysics. The interesting question is why so many people across so many cultures and so many historical periods have had experiences that share these specific structural features, and whether the overlap is telling us something about the relationship between consciousness and the world that we do not yet have adequate frameworks to describe.
I think about the shadow people phenomenon in particular in connection with what I have been building with Wise AI and with the argument I made in LLMs are Useful. LMMs will Break Reality about the difference between systems that describe reality and systems that model it. The corridor figure was, in some sense, a data point that my internal model of the world could not account for. My five year old mind had a model of what belonged in that house, of what moved through corridors at night, of the shapes that physical objects take, and the figure violated every constraint of that model. The response to an unmodeled observation is either to dismiss it as noise or to update the model. I was too young to dismiss it, and too honest to update the model by pretending I had not seen it. So I have been carrying a persistent contradiction between my internal model of the world and the data from my own perceptual experience for decades, and this post is my latest attempt to sit with that contradiction without resolving it prematurely.
The Questions I Am Still Asking
I will not close this post by pretending that writing it has resolved anything, because it has not, and I have a profound disrespect for the kind of reflective essay that wraps hard questions in a ribbon of false resolution for aesthetic purposes. The questions that drove me to write this are the same questions I have when I finish it. What were those figures in the corridor? Where did the space dreams come from? Is the connection between those early experiences and my subsequent intellectual development meaningful, or is it the kind of retrospective pattern-recognition that human minds perform automatically on any sufficiently complex personal history? I do not know. I genuinely do not know, and saying that is not defeat. Saying that is the only honest position available.
What I do know is that these experiences were real in the sense that matters most, which is that they happened in my subjective experience with a clarity and persistence that has survived decades of attempt to rationalize them away. I also know that I am not unique in having them, which is the part that I find most interesting from a scientific standpoint. The shadow person phenomenon is documented across cultures and across centuries in ways that predate any possible common media contamination. The experience of early childhood visitation by anomalous entities is a recurring feature of the biographical accounts of people who later show unusual intellectual or creative development, a pattern that has been noted if not rigorously studied in the literature on prodigies and exceptional cognitive development. I am not claiming I am a prodigy. I am noting the pattern because patterns deserve examination even when they do not yet have explanations.
I also want to note something that I think is important for the broader conversation this blog is building: these experiences have shaped how I think about the limits of scientific frameworks. I am a deeply empirical person. I built a cryptocurrency trading system. I built an automated reasoning tool in Rust. I spend my intellectual energy arguing for mathematical models over verbal ones, for equation discovery over statistical correlation, for simulation over description. None of that changes when I sit in front of a childhood memory that the available scientific frameworks do not fully account for. If anything, the experience has made me more committed to the idea that the interesting territory is always at the edges of what current models can handle, because that is where the genuine unknowns live and where the most important work is still to be done.
If you are reading this and you have had experiences that sound like what I am describing, I want to hear about them. Not because I am collecting anecdotes for a paper, but because the most honest thing I can do with this post is treat it as a genuine request for information. I spent my childhood alone with these experiences. I spent decades not talking about them. I am talking about them now because silence has never served the search for understanding, and the search for understanding is the only project I have consistently believed in across all the years of building things and losing things and searching for something that I still cannot fully name.
Whatever those entities were, I do not believe they were random. Whatever they wanted, I do not believe they got it completely. Whatever unfinished business exists between my childhood self and that corridor, it is still unfinished. And I have learned, slowly and with considerable resistance, that unfinished is not the same as concluded.
Till next time 👋!
References
1. Wikipedia contributors. 2026. "Shadow Person." Wikipedia. September 25, 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_person.
2. Wiki, Contributors to Villains. n.d. "Shadow People (Folklore)." Villains Wiki. villains.fandom.com/wiki/Shadow_People_(folklore).
3. Arzy, Shahar, Margitta Seeck, Stephanie Ortigue, Laurent Spinelli, and Olaf Blanke. 2006. "Induction of an Illusory Shadow Person." Nature 443 (7109): 287. DOI: 10.1038/443287a.
4. Tandy, V. & Lawrence, T. R., A Ghost in the Machine, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 62, No. 851, pp. 360-364, 1998. Background and overview: Wikipedia: Vic Tandy
5. Loftus, E. F., The Reality of Repressed Memories, American Psychologist, Vol. 48, No. 5, pp. 518-537, 1993. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.48.5.518
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