Over here, The Scribe talks about her experiences with 'sleeping paralysis', and also over here she talks about her experience seeing a ghost, or something like it. Welcome, Scribe, to my reality. *grin*

However, her sleep paralysis reminded me of my own similar experience, back in 1992. I was dreaming, and in the dream I was one of a small group of people. We were in a house, it was night time and the lights were off - or there was no electricity; I was unsure. We were hiding from something or someone, but I don't know who or what. Then there was the sound of a car coming, and we all tried to find somewhere to hide. Everyone was afraid. I laid down on the bed and tried not to move. The car turned into the driveway of the house we were in, and the lights flashed onto the wall opposite me as they swept over the window. I was lying on my side on the bed, with my head at the top of the bed under the window. The car stopped, and I could hear the door open and someone get out. There was silence for a few moments, and my heart was pounding. I was completely afraid, but I don't know why.

Then the person who'd gotten out of the car - if they were a person, that is - started walking up the driveway, getting closer to my window. The driveway was covered with gravel, so as they walked the footsteps crunched in the gravel. Crunch - crunch - crunch. They were getting closer to my window, and I was just terribly afraid. Then the sound of the footsteps in gravel merged and became one long crunching sound, before it changed tone slightly to sound like gravel falling on a tin roof, with the crunching turning into clattering. It was at this point that I opened my eyes, coming out of the dream and finding myself awake in my bedroom.

I was laying in the same position as I was in my dream, looking at the cupboard next to the bed. It was daylight, I could see through the door and into the lounge room. I couldn't move, however, and the sound of the gravel was still clattering in my ears. I realised that I felt like there was something on my chest, something heavy. I couldn't breathe, and I couldn't move. I was paralysed, with something invisible on my chest, and this horrible sound in my ears. I did what any person is likely to do - I panicked!

With a wild exclamation of something I can't remember in my panick, I was able to move again. The weight disappeared, the noise in my head faded away, and I jumped off the bed looking back at it, scared, wondering what the hell that was about.

About a year or two later I was reading a book on psychic attacks, lower astral entities, and spiritual protection. According to what I read in the book, which mirrored almost exactly my experience: paralysed after having come out of sleep, and the weight of something on my chest. According to the book, I had been the victim of some kind of lower astral entity, a being that had attached itself to me in my weakened state, and was causing the fear and paralysis. The reason for this was that I was basically opening myself to spiritual energies, moving my awareness up into the 'higher realms' of understanding, and opening myself up to receiving whatever spirituality wanted to offer me. This was a common occurrence with people who were delving into spirituality, becoming psychic, etc. They were open to receiving a higher energy, usually in the form of psychic energy that allowed them to be clairvoyant, etc. But it was like a gateway, and when you opened the door, not only good things came through, but so do bad things. (This is why seances can be so dangerous.) If you didn't actively protect yourself spiritually, then the entity would have various side effects on your own energy as it fed on it or caused disharmony with it.

I realised I was lucky, because it was around the same time that I experienced that event that I also started actively protecting myself (spiritually), after having read about the value of it from various books I had been reading. Understanding protection was very important, or so a lot of those books said, and I certainly understood - from my own experiences with demons and energy that Kate had introduced me to - that the value of protection could not be understated.

This experience, and the drug-induced experience mentioned previously, both had a common factor - the sound of gravel raining on a tin roof. A couple of years later, I was speaking to someone who was quite knowledgeable about spiritual experiences, and when I related mine to him, it was his opinion that the sound meant I had somehow crossed that barrier between the physical world and the spiritual world, which is apparently where a lot of heavy drug users end up without knowing it. In this merged reality, one can be at peace or be in turmoil, depending on the 'area' that they have transgressed and their state of mind at the time. Like attracts like, and in the spiritual reality where thought has power, a chaotic mind will unknowingly invite chaotic influences, while a peaceful and positive mind will be inviting similar influences.

He said that my dream, where I experienced fear, was also a transgression where I carried that fear with me, and as a result, gained the attention of something which fed off it. But when I transgressed while on the drug-induced high, I wasn't experiencing fear at the time and therefore the experience was without fear and chaos. The sounds I heard both times were likely the physical mind trying to interpret a non-physical sound, which some people experience as a ringing sound, and has also been described in the past as the ringing of angels.

I can understand that those people who may have experienced similar transgressions and seeing or talking to angels or other such higher spirits, they might have heard ringing sounds and associated with the arrival of angels. Mine, however, certainly wasn't ringing, and was instead quite disturbing.

But happily, ever since I began protecting myself on a daily basis, I've never had any such experiences since.

Categories: Spirituality