Welcome to the smoke pit.

As we sit down in the smoke pit to enjoy more of each other's strange stories, I would like to quickly set the stage for this episode.

In the last Smokepit episode, we listened to the story of an Air Force veteran, Xavier, and his numerous experiences with paranormal entities, what he believes were aliens, events that even he isn't entirely certain, were either real or part of a recurring nightmare.

But then there were things that happened during his waking reality, unexplained marks or wounds on his skin,

or both he and his father inexplicably sharing similar nightmares of alien visitation in the same night.

In this episode, we will continue to explore the strange nature of dreams,

another instance where what happens in someone's subconscious

mind appears to bleed over into his waking reality, which then gives his vivid dreams

the appearance of being something else.

No. I'm Luke Lamanah, and this is wartime stories. And this is wartime stories. When speculating on strange encounters or observations,

such as with ghosts, strange beings, or UFOs,

I've noticed that many of us can only shrug and admit that we don't know what it was that we saw,

or what it meant, if anything.

And perhaps over time these events fade into memory, or we determinedly make a conscious effort

to convince ourselves that what we saw was nothing unusual, or perhaps just an illusion, our

mind playing tricks on us. But then when these experiences happen for a second time or a third time,

it becomes much more difficult for us to forget about what we saw or to ignore its possible meaning.

So what if we had a dream about something? Something terrifying. And then later, when we were

wide awake, we saw something we thought was impossible,

something that we saw in our nightmare. What would we make of it? What will we do about it?

This next story is just such an occurrence, the account of a married man with children, now in his late 40s, a recent early retiree from his position as a bank operations manager.

His name is Chad.

...