It’s either real or it’s a dream
There’s nothing that is in between
Twilight
I gave you time to steal my mind away from me

-“Twilight,” Electric Light Orchestra, 1981

As enticing as the idea of a “dream server” or “dreamwalking” is, it’s a trope that tends to stay in the realms of fiction and myth. If it were possible—if, say, the same entity visited myriad people in their dreams—surely it would have happened and been documented by now, yes? And yet, can a lack of evidence even be viewed as a conclusion when billions of conscious beings on the planet Earth alone spend hours every night dreaming and yet exhaust precious little time discussing/documenting the rare dreams that can be vividly remembered, let alone with a means to cross-reference at such a scale? Assuming that a person or being was able to actually travel between others’ dreams, how infinitesimally small must the chance be that any of those observing dreamer visitees would ever overlap?

The internet era provided the framework for this to be possible. Near the end of the “message board” era of the net, and before the later dominance of walled-gardens like social media groups and discord servers would again raise artificial barriers which make such a feat nigh-impossible, users on several public message boards and blogs stumbled across something seemingly defying both coincidence and our existing understandings of “reality.” In the 2010s, a green-haired, black-clad entity named Aurelia would travel through enough individual’s dreams spreading messages of questioning reality and of the interconnected nature of consciousness that she would not go unnoticed.

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I’m one of the at least 4 who experienced an unexpected Aurelia visit—though one can easily make the assumption that for every one of us who found the experience awe-inspiring enough to make a post or website (or even band!) about it, there were many others who have no idea they were not alone. For the first time, a full chronology and archive of the sightings is presented in a single location. For me, this experience would change the way I perceived reality itself and lead me down the path of metaphysics and consciousness experimentation that I pore over to this day. For you, hopefully it at least makes you think, inspires a bit of wonder that we’re rapidly lacking in day-to-day life in the 2020s, or at least entertains you for a few minutes of your day.

(Please note: sightings are listed here in the order they were discovered, for narrative coherence, and numbered in the alleged chronological order in which they occurred.)

The Grouped Wave of Sightings (Starmen.NET/ld4all, August 2012)

Sighting 3, August 3rd 2012: Me

Forgive the roughness of the following prose, as it is directly from my account of this encounter in high school (written at the time, originally posted in 2014 on my old Dreams of Aurelia site and posted in less detail on the CYBEROCCULTISM.online site (now defunct) and on the CYBEROCCULTISM POCKET GRIMOIRE site I now maintain):

“[The “dream”] started out with me looking over the balcony of a large house (which seems to exist in a neighborhood that’s only in the dream world, as far as I can tell, and which is unlike any home I’ve had) and witnessing a black portal open in the sky about thirty feet higher than the house’s roof. With a sonic boom, a figure fell from it with great force, as if they were being launched from a cannon, and slammed into the ground with a deafening noise that shook the earth.

I could see as the dust cleared that the object in the crater wasn’t a UFO or anything mechanical, but rather a young girl, probably 18-22. The most striking thing about her was her bright green hair which contrasted brilliantly against her all form fitting all-black dress and black flip flops. Her skin and hair glowed with a heavenly, ghastly green aura that illuminated the night slightly with her presence. The portal closed back in itself and all turned to stillness.

I raced out to see if she was alright, but as I approached her she leapt up from the crater entirely unscathed and opened her eyes--beautiful, glowing green eyes, otherwordly [sic] in appearance, but not unsettling. I was struck with an overwhelming feeling that she wasn’t supposed to be in this world, wasn’t supposed to be a part of it, but that her presence was a good thing, and that she was something seperate [sic] from me. She introduced herself as Aurelia, told me that I was dreaming but that I should avoid waking up, and that she entered my dream because I was going to be important in her mission.

I invited her inside for tea and we sat on the balcony, watching through the fog as the sun rose and discussing things. In dream time this took several hours, and the majority of the early discussion was fairly unimportant and mostly just trivialities about my personal affairs. I do recall that I had begun to ‘fall for her,’ in my own in-dream terms. Unfortunately, I lost much of the discussion in the time it took me to wake up, shake the impact of the dream off (it felt like reality, and like coming back to the real world was the dream, if that makes sense, and was a jarring reality I’d never felt upon waking before), and run to my computer. However, these highlights from the end of the conversation, the important part, I retained:

• She isn’t human

• She can travel between dreams with the portals, and possibly to other things as well

• She has an important mission

• I somehow am vital in the completion of said mission, and she requires my assistance

• It’s a matter of life or death importance (these last two could have been relating to the fact I helped her “escape”—I don’t know.)

Just as she was going to elaborate on what her mission was and how the hell I was supposed to be involved, another portal opened, over the sidewalk, as a series of men in black suits emerged with weaponry. She whispered to me that they were the ones who had been trailing her, and I told her that I would handle it and ran out to meet them. I stalled for time as she worked to open another portal, telling them that she had gone in the opposite direction when they asked me where she had gone. However, the sound of her portal opening alerted them, and they shoved me to the ground to chase after her. She went through first with a few second delay, but the men reached it mere seconds after, and by the time I got to it, the portal was closing and I failed to get in.

I spent a good amount of time just wandering around the street, trying to open a portal myself lucid-dreaming style or trying to find any clues, but I was entirely unsuccessful. Realizing it was useless, I forced my real life eyes open, snapped out of the dream, and reflected on it for a bit, feeling unsettled by the level of reality it had seemed to represent. I ran to the computer, jotted down my notes, then went online to research, where I discovered I was not the first person to encounter this being.”

Aside from the sensation of it feeling “real” in a way precious few remembered dreams do, this would have been just an entry in a dream journal to be shared as a curiosity had it not been for what I found when I went to post this account in a topic about “Weird Dreams” on Starmen.NET (it’s become a walled garden now in the long interim it appears, but that was the link I’d saved, and should still work if logged in).

Sighting 2, August 3rd, 2012: PSI Reaper

My blood went cold when I read one of the most recent posts documenting a dream from that same night, seemingly from earlier in the evening based on the post time, from a user called PSI Reaper:

"There was a random beautiful girl who was laying down in a void of darkness and her skin was fair white but it also had a tint of green because she had a bright lime green aura surrounding her. She was pretty for sure and had beautiful green hair:D. ….Sad thing I wish I can remember what her face looked like though. If anything, she didn’t do anything but she stared at me like she was smitted [sic] with me (like I was for her). God it was amazing."

I replied with (and this was all I posted about the dream on the forums at the time):

Okay, this is too weird. I had that dream too. Like, exactly, including the green hair, and starting with her lying in the void. In mine she landed in it after falling from the sky. Same look too. I was coming in here to post about it. She eventually told me that she was able to invade dreams and was an otherworldy being and then the police tried to take her away and she told me to wake up before something bad happened to her, so I did. I was like LOL there goes my sci fi mind again. She even inspired the novel I’m working on right now. Now I’m not so sure it was fiction

Was she in a black dress in yours too!?

His reply:

“…I’m literally freaking out here. The same girl with a glowing green aura around her body and fair white in the middle?! Holy moly….Now I don’t remember if she was wearing anything. (What I’m being honest here >_>) and she was staring at me, no conversation just a beauty in front of me in my dream state. But this is reallly freaking me out. If this is the same girl, this has to be too much of a coincidence, I tell you for sure!”

And mine:

Indeed. The green aura faded a bit later but the hair stayed. I later thought she was a Roman goddess for some reason but that wasn’t in the dream I think. It is indeed quite freaky. It was one of those “epic dreams” that stuck with me all day. The green hair and aura and the super fair skin is what’s throwing me. I actually wrote a poem about it right after it happened, not sure where it is though. O.o anyone else had this one yet?

The topic was briefly derailed by people freaking out about this synchronicity and searching for additional encounters. At the time I first called her “Cydonia” in the poem I was writing as I couldn’t remember exactly what her name had been, but had noted that I thought it had an “A” instead at the start and wasn’t Athena. It was finding the Aurelia Trio post that made it come back like a bolt of green lightning.

Sighting 4, August 10th, 2012:

One such discovery was a post on a lucid dreaming forum—the link has changed since I first saved it, but I was able to find it again, still live. The poster, MichelleMaBelle, wrote the following:

The Green Haired Girl

So, I had a dream of this beautiful girl, she around 18, and she was floating in a black void. I was in that void with her, and we just looked into each other’s eyes, and I was mesmerized. I thought perhaps this was the feeling of pure joy. Which is very odd because as complex as my emotions are in real life, this girl just stopped everything. She had flowing green hair, a black dress, and flip flops.

After a while I performed an RC and realized that I was in fact, dreaming, and using my knowledge of lucidity I transported us to my bedroom, where we sat on the bed. She giggled a beautiful little giggle and said simple, “You’ve done it!” and then she hugged me. Then she looked into my eyes and said, “The Waking World my feel more real, but in all honesty, we have no proof that the dream realm may be the actual life.” then she stood up and said, “To the next one I go.” and then i woke up.

After reflecting upon her words, it dawned on me that they may very well be true, life itself can be a simulation created by the brain, where the dream realm may be the one time we are allowed into the actual plan of existence.

I just wish I can see her again, I feel like she might have answers for so much.

Now, considering this post was made after the initial Starmen.NET post, I had my doubts—until I realized the mundane detail of her wearing flip-flops was mentioned here, something I had documented myself but never posted about. This one coming after mine seems to be indication she did “escape,” but I’ve been unable to find any sightings after this one. Before, though, may be the strangest of all.

The First Modern Sighting (Tumblr, Northwest Magazine, AURELIA)

Sighting 1 (2010~2011?): The Aurelia Trio

An additional lead surfaced in the topic that honestly broke my mind all over again. It was a Tumblr post from a musical festival’s blog, originating from an interview with Sasha Bayan of “The Aurelia Trio”:

[in response to a question about the band’s name] "I had a dream about a green-haired girl who was half present and half transparent, stuck between a metaphysical, spiritual dimension and physical reality. Her name was Aurelia."

…

“I [Sasha Bayan] had a dream about a beautiful, green-haired girl named Aurelia. As I was interacting with her, I noticed that she was almost transparent; she was simultaneously existing in this physical world and transitioning into a metaphysical, spiritual realm. I had never heard the name Aurelia before; when I looked it up, it turned out to be the Latin word for gold. I see our musical objectives as intricately linked to the magic of this name. We are all alchemists pursuing perfection, working to find that ethereal combination of sounds that transcends this physical world and plunges deep into people’s hearts.”

A still live interview from 2013 in Northwestern Magazine’s archives specifies the Aurelia Trio was active for two years… so that put the window for Sasha’s encounter somewhere around 2010-2011, at the latest: our first sighting now chronologically. This was somebody who had encountered the same exact green-haired entity named Aurelia.

Further decreasing the chance of “coincidence” was the revelation that “Aurelia” is a word for gold, when the entity herself has green hair/eyes and has been described in multiple encounters as being dressed in black… it’s not like people all dreaming a woman made out of gold named Goldie or a blue woman named Aquamarine.

French 1800s Novel: Sighting… 0?

Sighting 0 (1850s), Gérard de Nerval

There are more than a few differences, and the characters are nothing physically alike, but some readers of my past sites have directed me to the work Aurélia ou le Rêve et la Vie (literally translated: Aurelia or Dream and Life”) by Gérard De Nerval, a famous French novelist best known for his descent into madness and his dramatic suicide. In his work Aurélia, which many claim is mostly autobiographical… well, let’s translate this excellent summary from the Nerval fan page of SYLVIE LÉCUYER:

Aurélia originates in Nerval’s experience of madness in 1841. He then discovered the power of the “supernaturalist” state—a term he himself coined—which he attempted to explain to his friend Victor Loubens at the end of 1841: “...imagine my surprise when I suddenly awoke from a dream that had lasted several weeks, as bizarre as it was unexpected. I had been mad, that much is certain, if indeed the complete preservation of my memory and a certain reasoning logic that never left me for a single moment cannot give my illness any other character than this sad word: madness!”

…

The Promethean experience would recur at various points in Nerval’s life, and his prolonged confinement in 1853 prompted him to write about it, under the title  Le Rêve et la Vie (Dream and Life ), and later Aurélia . The first part was published on January 1, 1855, and the second on February 15, in the  Revue de Paris . Between the two publications, Nerval committed suicide on the night of January 25, 1855.

One of the first people I showed this site to remarked that the parallels were simply too much and that if Aurelia were real at all, she was the cause of the author’s madness too and that I’d slowly lose my mind if I continued to pursue the truth about these odd encounters. However, it seems if anything that the entity or whatever/whoever is behind it named themselves for the work, as the work itself, while thematically consistent, does not involve the Aurelia entity, as explained in a translated segment of a critique from cairn.info:

Aurélia is also a tale of mourning, its elegiac tone drawing on autobiographical material steeped in various losses that deeply wounded him. This is primarily the case with the unrequitedly loved actress who first appears in Pandora (1853), whose essential features Nerval later recaptures in Aurélia while erasing references to the real person. Loss is the foundation of this work, just as it was in his life: “A lady, whom I had loved for a long time and whom I will call Aurélia, was lost to me,” he announces (p. 124). Appearing at the very beginning of the first part, she reappears at the beginning of the second: “Lost a second time! All is over, all is past! Now it is I who must die, and die without hope” (p. 156). This appearance/disappearance is thus manifested under the sign of the double , another essential motif of the work.

So supposedly Aurélia the dream deity in his book is based on an actress he used to love who left his life and left him in shambles, and she doesn’t have any of the iconic physical qualities of the ‘real life dream’ Aurelia—meaning this may be the one part of the whole bizarre sequence of events that really can be called coincidence!

I do confess the fact there’s a work from the 1800s that’s partially based on reality about a dream deity named Aurelia showing a man truths in his dreams about other worlds and the secrets of reality to be... unsettling. There are enough differences to keep it from being a direct connection to the specific dreamwalker that’s been encountered by the 4 of us in the 2010s, but there are enough similarities to make it incredibly eerie.

(It is curious, though, that like in my encounters the “dream” mentioned first here contained the same element of “time dilation” of much more time occurring during the dream than in the waking world during the same period. And he does later describe a being taking her form repeatedly, or with similar features, who shares some similarity at least as far as metaphysical role. From a translated excerpt of the actual work:

I wished to fix my favorite thoughts more firmly, and with charcoal and pieces of brick that I gathered, I soon covered the walls with a series of frescoes in which my impressions were realized. One figure always dominated the others: it was that of Aurelia, painted as a goddess, just as she had appeared to me in my dream. Beneath her feet turned a wheel, and the gods formed her retinue. I managed to color this group in expressing the essence of herbs and flowers. — How many times I dreamed before this dear idol!

So can we call this a sighting of the same entity? …probably not, especially with so little physical detail given. He does describe her as amazingly pale, but it is in a single vision of her ‘unwell’ before the ‘real’ Aurelia dies much earlier, so it is hard to correlate the two honestly.)

The novel is certainly an uncomfortable synchronicity, though, and warrants consideration in the overall tapestry of the mystery.

Recurring Traits/Sightings Comparison

For good measure, here’s a chart of each sighting as reported above showing which traits are carried between sightings.

NOTE: Nothing from Sightings 1-4 contradicts any of the others: it’s just as likely a detail missing was forgotten or simply neglected to be documented as opposed to clashing with the rest. (i.e. nobody remembered a name from sightings 2 and 4, but the only times she’s provided a name, it’s been provided as “Aurelia.”)

*It should be noted that Sighting 0 is from the 1850s novel, and its similarities seem to be more conceptual than immediate, whereas the other sightings appear to be portraying the same physical being. For this reason, only traits appearing in at least two non-1800s sightings are included in the chart for comparison (i.e. no “time dilation in dream” row since that was only documented in my account and in the novel).

15+ Years Later… what now?

As both my fiction and the content on my metaphysical sites (and soon more posts here) will attest to, the Aurelia saga was the spark that lit a beautiful flame in me that still consumes my cognition and perception with a mysterious emerald glow. I’ve never gone long without deep-diving across the web for any mix of the traits correlated with Aurelia, but whether she stopped appearing in dreams, nobody bothered to post their encounters, or encounters were discussed in “walled-garden” communities, nothing further has surfaced. I’ve spent hundreds of hours over the past decade and a half, even employing the top “deep dive” or “deep research” modes in modern LLMs, and nothing else has appeared. (There’s a WEALTH of people reporting similar men-in-black dream encounters, but that’s archetypal/generic enough that I’m not sure it warrants a separate dossier.)

Instead, the opposite seems to have happened: what DID exist seems to be slowly fading away. It’s not a surprise… the internet has changed a lot since then, mostly for the worse, and old Wix sites like my original Dreams of Aurelia page, Tumblr interviews with bands for long-past festivals… these are just the kind of ephemera that we don’t even think about fading until it’s just a digital whisper of a memory. But before we get any further from that wave of sightings in the 2010s, before even the links and saved text vanish into their own black-portal abyss, I wanted to archive every last detail for posterity.

I do have some hope that, if this eventually gets around enough, that others who encountered Aurelia will see it and know they weren’t alone, and we’ll have more sightings to report—though, of course, anything further has to be seen with a grain of salt now that this whole piece is live. (The whole experience sent me down a crazy rabbit hole that’s led to the creation of my entire CYBEROCCULTISM field of experimentation and chaos magick; more on that coming soon.)

I’m clearly not the only one who’s still feeling the lasting impact of the encounter, either: since the Aurelia Trio seemed to have been discontinued, Sasha Bayan has now started a duo called simply AURELIA where the same etymology can be assumed. (From what I’ve found online, their music is a JAM, too—definitely check them out!)

Have you ever encountered Aurelia? Do you know anyone who has?