First of all I want to thank the forum admins for keeping this place running. I used to listen to U&U back in high school and was on these forums back then as a lurker. Now that I've got something to share I'm sure glad this place is still around since I do NOT know where I'd post this otherwise.
This is the story of the most inexplicable thing to ever happen to me. It still keeps me up at night, just rolling it around in my head as I fail to make it make sense. This is the story of how I took a video from inside a recurring dream.
also forgotten my gmail password, which I need for all my other passwords, so I was completely locked out of everything.
One downside was the room would sometimes get extremely hot. It was east-facing, so you'd get slammed in the face with the sun every morning. I had to put-up some cheap blackout blinds over the window just to sleep properly. They helped with the sun, but only marginally with the heat. It was a sauna in there some nights.
The heat was probably the cause of my strange recurring dream. For some reason this dream was my brain's reaction to being overheated, and I'd invariably have it during those extremely hot days. During heat waves I'd have the dream almost every night.
In this dream I'm lying in bed and the house is spinning counter-clockwise. I'm just there in bed, staring out the window at the opposite end of the room, watching the world outside slowly pass by. That's all the dream was. I could see, behind the desk and computer monitor and blackout blinds, the view outside ceaselessly shifting along eastward to northward to westward to southward and back again and again. The world slowly drifting right, about one spin every minute.
Usually in the dream it was early morning, just after the sun had started to rise. The sunlight would bound around the room, sneaking in through the bottom-half of the window as our bearing passed south, south-east, east, north-east. Basking in those warm beams for several seconds before plunging again into that dim cool morning light.
I'd lie there, watching it go on for what felt like hours. Mesmerized and dizzy. I'd never know what to do, and I was never be able to get out of bed. Eventually I'd wake up, and every time I'd be drained and nauseated and soaked with sweat in my overheated bedroom.
This brings me to the one time my already weird dream got weirder. There was a single night when my recurring dream diverged from the normal pattern. I remember when it happened, early August 2023, because it was during a particularly stressful time in my life where I had to spend a bunch of time going to government offices, jumping through bureaucratic hoops with the help of my housemate Paula.
But enough of that, on to the dream. As usual the house was spinning, spinning, spinning, etcetera. But after a while I started hearing the doorbell ring from the opposite end of the house. I barely even registered it happening. I was totally out-of-it, just watching the world pass me by. Too dizzy to get-up and answer. I just kept lying there. Then it rang again. Over and over again. The person ringing the doorbell was really going at it. They started banging on the front door. They started yelling at me.
"STOP SPINNING!"
It was an woman's voice, strained with fury.
"STOP SPINNING THE HOUSE!"
She kept going on and on. Ringing the doorbell and banging on the door and screaming:
"YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO SPIN THE HOUSE!"
"STOP SPINNING IT!"
"STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP GOD DAMMIT!"
In hindsight, it's a hilarious image. I can just imagine this person out-front on the covered porch, clinging to the beams so she's not flung off. Screaming and screaming for me to stop this crazy thing, like I had any control over it.
But at the time, in the dream, I was petrified. This person was so angry, her voice whipped-up with this wretched unearthly animal rage. I was terrified she'd get into the house and rip my head off.
Somehow I managed to reach for my bedside table, for my phone. I had it in my mind that I'd call someone for help. But I couldn't make it past the lock screen. I couldn't remember my password. I kept trying different unlock patterns but none of them worked. The woman at the front was only getting louder and louder. I was desperate for something, anything to save me.
And then, well, I don't remember. I think I started to wake up, and the dream started breaking down. Everything came back to normal when I woke, sweating, in my too-hot room. And that was that.
Fast-forward again to November 2025. I'd moved back to Somerville to live in a shared apartment. My old phone was really starting to fall apart so a friend gave me hers as a hand-me-down. The new phone had this feature where it can automatically copy all my files and settings from the old phone. I didn't have any files because I always delete them, but I thought "why the hell not" and did it anyway.
Once it was done copying things over I discovered a pictures folder called "NFRAMETHUMBS" that was totally FULL of pictures copied over from the old phone. Like, hundreds and hundreds of pictures. They were all small low-quality thumbnail versions of every picture I'd ever taken on my old phone, even those I had deleted. Here's an example, it is a picture of my desk back at Jamie's place that I took right after moving in:
after my phone reset itself in 2019. So it was just a big slideshow of the worst time in my life.
There were also thumbnails for deleted videos. These thumbnails where different screenshots from the video, arranged in a five-by-two grid. I figured out that the frames are arranged in order from right-to-left and top-to-bottom. It goes 1 2 3 4 5, then the next row, then 6 7 8 9 10.
Here's a random example:
They were all pretty boring. But then I found something strange. Thumbnails for a video that I don't remember taking. It was clearly shot from my bed at Jamie's place, looking toward the window. The room is totally dark inside, and you can only see the silhouettes of the blinds, the desk and chair, and the computer monitor. Behind all that, through the window, is the outside world. I darted my eyes between each of the ten surviving frames, trying to make sense of what I was looking at.
Here's the picture:
Every frame has a different view. The outside world was spinning.
You can see that after the sixth frame, the camera zooms-in on the window. You can better make out what's outside, but even with the zoom it's hard to see what's happening. I'll do my best to explain it.
In frame number seven you can see where the white fence of the backyard is split into two sections by a tan-brick post. Above the fence are the leaves of a big tree. In the next frame, frame eight, you can see what's just to the left of the previous: a gap in the trees and the now-uninterrupted white fence. In frame nine there's another different tree. Then, in frame ten, you can see the side of the north-east neighbour's house. You can see the frame of their window slide into view.
See my notes below:
Aside from frame seven, every single one of these pictures would be impossible if the house wasn't spinning. I wouldn't be able to see the side of the neighbour's house from my room unless I stuck my head in the window and really craned my neck, let alone from the bed. In frame six you can make out a car down the road. You can't even see down the road from that window because the trees and fences are in the way!
It's pretty hard to understand what's going on when just looking at the grid. I wanted to be able to see it animated, so I turned it into a GIF. Hopefully this helps make it clearer:
I don't have any idea how long the video was originally, so I picked a random speed for the animation. But based on the filename it was taken August 6th 2023 at 8:23 AM. That was the same week as my bureaucratic fiasco and the weird version of the dream. The one with the doorbell and the woman yelling at me. The dream where I reached for my phone but couldn't unlock it. It could've been the same day. I never wrote down when it happened.
As you can imagine I completely failed to make sense of this. It defied all logic. After a solid week of frantically trying to figure this out, I eventually gave up because I got distracted by other life stuff. Once the confusion was no longer acute, this whole strange affair became relegated to just some fun story I tell to friends.
This brings me to the present day, and why I'm posting this now.
This Friday I'll be moving back to Jamie's place in Springfield. The plan is to tell my housemates the story when I return, since I haven't told them yet. But I wanted to double-check that there's not some obvious rational explanation I am missing. If you have such an explanation, please tell me before I embarrass myself in front of my housemates!
Also, after I'm settled I might be able to collect additional evidence somehow. I can't share any more pictures of my room because the mods said I can very easily doxx myself without realizing it. But if anyone has suggestions for things to look out for, let me know.
-Taylor