Colorful, Playful, Jumping Lights

When I was 5, my parents and I took a trip to Yosemite, with some family acquaintances, who had a child my age, "Sarah." Sarah, to put it in the kindest of terms, was mischievous. She liked to lock people out of their own rooms and then trash everything. She liked slamming other kid's fingers in doors. She liked pretending she saw something scary, work everyone into a fit, and then laugh at them when she saw how frightened they'd become. We did not get along well, and to this day maintain civil yet strained relations with each other. But at that age, my parents had not yet realized that when I said I disliked her, I meant it, and said that the both of us and her older brother should stay in a tent together during the trip.

Anyway, one night as we were sleeping, Sarah shook me awake. "WHAT?!" I yelled at her. It was the middle of the night, I was a tired little kid, and I did not want to be bothered by her of all people.

She pointed outside. "Lights There are lights outside!" She looked genuinely afraid for once, but I'd by then still learned to doubt everything she said. "So it's just a flashlight! Go away, I bet you're lying again!" She grew increasingly agitated. "No! Go look!"

Sarah forcefully yanked me out of bed and shoved me outside the tent, where I saw to my surprise, she wasn't lying. In a field a bit away from the tent, maybe 50 feet away, there were lots of lights floating above the grass, in all the colors of the rainbow; bright orange, pink, blue, red, green, everything. Some were orb shaped, and some were bar shaped. They all kept moving in odd patterns, figure eights, jagged lightening paths; some even appeared to spin in the air, at varying speeds. They were moving anywhere from ten to less than a foot above the ground. There wasn't much interaction between them they never hit each other, though occasionally they would spiral around each other. I thought they were quite pretty and calming to watch. I wanted to go play with them.

I ran to my parent's tent, and pulled them outside so they could take me across the field to play with the "pretty lights." They could only see a few of the lights, whereas I could see many of them still. They told me they were probably just teenagers, playing with glow sticks.

Now that I'm older, I've noted the flaws in my parent's explanation, In my experience, a regular glow stick wouldn't have been bright enough to see from that far away, nor were they thick enough or the right shape to match the size of the lights I saw. Neither could a human move so quickly or as smoothly as I'd seen the lights.

I recently met Sarah again, and asked her if she'd remembered the trip, and the lights. What she told me was very strange. She said she'd been soundly asleep and dreaming, but felt as if she was getting warmer and warmer, or as if a light were getting increasingly bright around her face. When she woke up, through the thin material of the tent, she could see a light floating right next to her head, outside, as if waiting for her to notice. When she got up to look, it zoomed away, into the field, which was when she woke me up.

Somehow, I get the feeling that they were children's spirits. They didn't seem at all threatening, like they were just having fun with each other. I still wonder what I would've seen if I'd gone over to the field that day. Would they have disappeared? Would they have turned into the children I thought they were, or something more sinister?