Your True Tales
August 2003 – Page 11

Psychic Climate Control
by Everett S.

In summer 2000, I was living just outside Alamo Heights, Texas, a posh village completely surrounded by the city of San Antonio. My apartment was an older building in the Sunset Ridge Neighborhood. I was studying for the Texas Bar. After a day spent studying at the library, I would usually come home about 11:30 or midnight, with just enough time to smoke a cigarette and watch TV before going to bed. San Antonio is blisteringly hot and humid during the summer, and that doesn't change just because the sun goes down, so being in any building is only tolerable if the air conditioner is on. That particular evening I went to bed without turning on my window unit A/C, I figure I was too tired to care. At about 1:35am I woke up drenched with sweat. I kept thinking to myself, I need to turn on the A/C, but I was too tired to move. At that moment, I noticed a very cold breeze move over me, starting at my feet to my head. At first I thought that I was dreaming until I woke myself up and saw the minute change on my digital alarm clock. The only way I can describe how it felt is to imagine taking a fresh bedsheet out of the cold rinse cycle of a washing machine, stick the sheet in the refrigerator for about an hour, then have someone drag it over you slowly while you're lying naked, face-up. The breeze picked up intensity, and I could hear papers being shuffled on my desk and I could see my hair fluttering in front of my eyes (the light coming from a sodium vapor lamp on the building outside mine). I shot up, shouted, "what the hell is going on?!" and turned the light on. The breeze stopped instantly. I turned on the A/C and went back to bed.

The next morning I began looking for a logical explanation. My first thought was that a breeze had come from the outside. There were two windows in my apartment that were always open, one over the kitchen sink where my cat liked to perch, and one in the bathroom. The kitchen, I figured, was too far away. The bathroom was closer to my bedroom. However, for wind to be the culprit, the breeze would have to blow itself into the window, make a quick left, travel about seven feet, turn right and drop down to floor level, travel another eight feet, shimmy under my door (which was closed when all this happened), travel another six feet, make a quick left and then move over me. That was too many "magic bullets" for my taste. The last logical place was my roommate's room. he had left for the summer, and I had assumed all the windows in his room were closed, but one was open. That was it, there's my explanation. But the problem of the magic bullets arose again. From the open window, a breeze would have had to come in, travel about twelve feet to a wall heater mounted in the wall separating his bedroom from mine, go into the heater, come out in my room, drop down to about three feet high, make a quick right, travel about five feet, make a left and move over me, all while losing about thirty degrees of temperature (summer nighttime air in south Texas usually hovers around the 80s with high humidity) - the air that hit me was cold, as if it had been refrigerated.

The next day I tried to recreate what happened, sealed all the windows and went to bed without the A/C on. Nothing happened, except that I had a miserable sleep. That's my story. I would very much like to hear from others who have had benevolent or non-benevolent experiences involving changes in air temperature in enclosed spaces.

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