My earliest 'supernatural' experiences

Hello everyone. I was raised by scientist parents so I can't say I believe in ghosts or the paranormal, and I feel obliged to put scare quotes around 'supernatural.' I can only tell you what happened to me as a small child and wonder what the explanation is.

From my earliest memories I remember waking up in my bed and feeling a presence standing next to me. The presence would somehow pull my 'spirit' out of my body and would take me up through the roof of our house and we would hover over the building and look down on it and the trees around below. It was as if it was trying to show me something, but I couldn't figure out what.

Also from my earliest memories from around 2.5 or 3 years old I would wake up in bed and sense that a presence was walking towards my bed. I knew in my bones with total certainty that this figure was neither of my parents and had no earthly reason to be there. I was too terrified to open my eyes, but I could somehow sense exactly where it was in the room and if it was getting closer (it was.) It would stand by my bed and I could feel it looking down at me. Then, sometimes, it would pick me up and just hold me there for a few moments, then set me back down. I would be shaking with fear at this point.

These experiences all culminated when I was four and I woke up, got out of bed to go to the bathroom, and made it halfway across the floor when a man's voice behind me said, "Where are you going?" I whipped around to face him and at that second the delayed reaction of terror hit me and I was paralyzed on the spot. I saw a man floating through my window, half in half out. I stood paralyzed for what seemed like forever, then suddenly I unfroze and said, "To the bathroom" and ran out of the room. I went to the bathroom, turned the light on and locked myself in. I sat on the bathroom floor for half an hour hoping that was long enough to make him leave. Then I went back to my room and he was gone. I went back to bed and never told my parents. Other less dramatic things continued to happen over the years.

When I was very young my parents worked long hours and my mother in particular was overloaded with work and studying for her Ph.D. so she was a bit highly strung. There had come a point when I had wakened her so many times for my nightmares that she started to lose patience with me and furiously told me not to wake her anymore. This was before the “floating man in my room” incident, so when he floated on in I decided I was more afraid of her reaction if I woke her than I was of the “ghost.” That is why I never told my parents about this.

About the man: I don’t remember much about him except that he seemed ordinary and was dressed in an ordinary way for the time (1970s.) He seemed to be in his late 20s or maybe 30s, with dark hair, Caucasian and clean shaven. He was not a menacing or unfriendly presence and it was simply the fact he shouldn’t have been where he was and seemed to be not quite human that scared me.

I thought no one else on earth knew about all this but me, but my aunt, whom I hadn't talked to in years, astounded me recently by telling me a story about when she visited my family when I was four. She said I came out of my room sleepily and disturbed, and told her someone had been in my room. She asked me to explain and apparently I couldn't quite get it across, so she gave me a pencil and paper. I drew some stars and a small house below and then a long pencil line going up from the house to the stars. She said I told her that the man had been with me, then he flew up through the ceiling and way, way up into the sky.

Of course you could say I was dreaming and mistook the dreams for real experiences. Which is entirely possible. But I had frequent, vivid nightmares as a child and I could tell the difference between these things and them. I remember sitting on that cold bathroom floor with the lights on in the middle of the night, waiting for the man to disappear so I could go back to bed.