Author Michelle Heaton has been acquainted with Sasquatch since she was a 5-year-old girl living in a rural farming community in Michigan, but she didn’t realize at the time what she was seeing.
It was a recurring dream where the eyes of sleep saw what, at the time, Heaton believed to be a boogy man.
Now an adult living in Sweet Home, Heaton is ready to share how that dream led her through a journey to “change her understanding of reality” in her book, “The Dream Guardian: Sasquatch and the Path to Awakening.”
She will be sharing her story at the Sweet Home Public Library on Saturday, March 14, at 1 p.m.
As Heaton grew up, she began to see the creature in her dream as Sasquatch, leading her to research the mythical creature and, one day, actually see what she believes is evidence of his existence.
That first experience took place in 2024 on an out and back trail off Highway 20 when she saw the back of a creature that made her do a double take. Each time she looked back in his direction after a brief moment of not looking, he would be another 30 or so feet further away.
“(It) amazed me because there was, like, berry bushes and ferns and broken trees,” she said. “It was like, no human could do that so quickly.”
After that, Heaton said she “kind of got obsessed with it” and began going out looking for him. She has since started a Facebook group, Sweet Home, Oregon Sasquatch Research Group, and published her book, which can be found on Amazon.
“I see Sasquatch as my dream guardian,” she said about her book title. “He was my guardian. He was like my protector.”
As Heaton had gotten older, the dream faded from her sleep, but a move to the Pacific Northwest in 2014 began to unpack some of the childhood memories.
She said her story shares “where the boundaries of reality blur and the heart begins to remember.”
“I started having experiences and then I started to remember details and feelings about the dreams, and it all just kinda came together for me, it all made sense,” she said.
Through her journey, from childhood to today, Heaton came to learn the boogy man in her dream is not a monster but, rather, a flesh and blood creature very much like humans, with feelings, families and territorial boundaries, “but there’s more depth to them,” she said.
Heaton’s 97-page book shares how “she discovered a presence that awakened her soul and challenged her perceptions of what it means to be human.”