About two years before I realized I was an experiencer, I had a sudden flash of a deeply old and resonant memory. For as long as I could remember, I had filed it away as a childhood dream, something that surfaced only in fragments over the years.
Have you ever had a dream from your childhood that feels so real you can still see and feel it decades later, yet you cannot explain why it stayed with you? This was like that, less like a dream and more like a core memory. In my mind, though, it remained only a dream, perhaps the first one I ever remembered. But why would such a strange, seemingly small dream linger so clearly, like a bookmark from another time?
The image etched on my brain happened at dawn. I was about three or four years old, still living in Chicago when my parents were together. This is in the era of George, my imaginary friend.
I was standing at my second-story bedroom window just before sunrise. The sky was soft with pink and orange fluffy clouds. On the lush green lawn below stood a man-sized bunny, waving at me. He stood upright, adult-sized, but unmistakably a rabbit or someone in a rabbit suit. The whole feeling was friendly, playful, a kind of “Hi!” in energy form, nothing more. It was like a giant Easter Bunny appearing at dawn. Cool dream, right?
I used to tell people about it all the time, that I saw the real Easter Bunny, thinking it was just a quirky childhood memory, a fun fact about me I could share in Two Truths and a Lie.
But this Easter Bunny scene was emblazoned on my mind. It was a sticky memory, so real—whatever that means. Maybe it was just a dream. If so, does that make it less real? We spend a good portion of our lives in dreams.
Or maybe I really saw a flesh and blood weirdo dressed up as the Easter Bunny at dawn, whose main aim was to freak children out. Yes, I have heard of Donnie Darko, and I probably should see it. I’ve never been a fan of horror, which might make more sense once you hear some of my stories.
My brother saw Santa a few years later. Lucky family, right? Or just wildly imaginative. Then I learned about screen memories.
Screen memories are a way the mind remembers something in a harmless form so we aren’t terrified by what really happened. Freud came up with the idea wll over a hundred years ago. In Spielberg’s phenomenal series Taken, for example, a child sees a cartoonish squirrel instead of the being actually in front of him. This, I discovered, is common among experiencers- memories of strange, impossibly real characters from childhood that feel vivid and alive but may be something else entirely. I have a friend who is terrified of muppets. It makes me wonder.
Once I began to wonder if the Easter Bunny had been a screen memory, the possibility opened up that something entirely different had visited me. The image of the Bunny might not have been what it seemed at all, but a cover my mind created to protect me from a reality it could not yet face.
Midjourney was pretty new at the time, 2021, and I started obsessively creating hundreds of AI images of this strange moment.
A few months later I learned there were other experiencers out there who had seen other wordly bunnies.
I decided to post my experience on Reddit in r/experiencers. The response stunned me. Hundreds of people wrote back saying they had seen something similar when they were young. My memory seemed to spark theirs.
The replies are surreal and an excellent read. Take a look:
Maybe that is how memory works, like a spark, igniting other sparks.
So what was that Bunny? I have no idea. It’s no secret I have an active imagination but I don’t remember most of the things I imagine. This one stuck.
Was it some other kind of non‑human intelligence wrapped in a friendly costume? Or was it simply a persistent and vivid dream? Was it something in between?
I may never know, and I’m okay with that. Yet the not knowing stirs a constant swirl of curiosity in me about the nature of reality, memory, and perception. Perhaps this is part of what it means to be an experiencer, learning to live inside the mystery without demanding it resolve.
Do you have any connections? I would love to hear them!