Here is one of those events:

It was a Monday afternoon about eight years ago. I was with my youngest child, my only daughter, and my husband. It was around 2:00 p.m. and my daughter needed a nap. I took her into my bedroom to lie on my bed to take a nap with her.

My husband decided he wanted to watch a movie, so he lay on the bed with us and began watching a DVD. I was just dozing off when I heard him call my name. Sleepily, I kind of murmured, “huh,” but didn’t open my eyes.

A brief moment later, he said my name again, a little firmer this time. More awake now but still not wanting to wake completely up and still not opening my eyes, I responded, “What?”

He then said very firmly, “Honey, open your eyes.”

When I opened them, I completely freaked out because I thought our house was on fire! All I saw was smoke. I jumped up yelling, “Something is burning!”

I looked at my husband who had a completely bewildered and somewhat scared looked in his eyes and yelled again. “I think the house is on fire! Something’s burning! Don’t you see the smoke? Quick — go see what’s going on!”

My husband, while still acting confused, obediently got up and left the room. Almost immediately, the smoke dissipated. In a matter of seconds it was completely gone, as if it had never been there.

I felt confused and foolish as I tried to come up with a rational explanation for what I had just witnessed. Was I more asleep that I had first thought and woke up in the middle of a dream? Or maybe my contacts had clouded over and “that” was the smoke I thought I saw. A moment later, as I was trying to sort all this out in my head, my husband came back into the room to inform me he had found nothing on fire.

I apologized for my peculiar behavior and explained that my eyes must have been playing tricks on me.

My husband asked, “Didn’t you hear me call your name?”

I answered that I had.

“Do you want to know WHY I was calling your name?”

Again, I answered “Yes.”

He then described how, as he was lying there watching his movie while my daughter slept and I was drifting off to sleep, a smoky apparition appeared above me. He said it was the size and the shape of a man. He said he watched it hover above me, then come down directly on top of me, which was when he began calling my name.

He said, “When you woke up and thought you saw smoke, you were looking directly into the apparition.” When I asked him why he didn’t explain all that when I yelled the house was on fire he stated that he was so freaked out and confused himself, he didn’t know what to do or think, so he just did what I asked, which was go look for a fire.