A nightmare of demonic possession
This one is a bit uncomfortable to write. I thought about not writing it for the sake of not, in some way, calling back into existence whatever it was that I just experienced. Then again, I feel like it might be even worse to bury it. Let’s hope I’m right because, boy, I’m scared right now.
I got out of bed, walked across the room to the desk, turned on the orange salt lamp, and took my phone off the charger. I lay back in bed and clicked the button on my phone. The screen lit up and the clock said 2:20.
Since I’ve been home in Kansas, I’ve been sleeping in the bottom bunk of a bunk bed. It’s the same bunk bed that my brother and I slept in when we were growing up.
I heard something in the bunk above. I could hear the springs of the mattress squeaking, like someone was rolling around up there. Then it came down over the side of the bunk. I couldn’t see it because the lights were out, but it sounded just like whenever my brother would get down from the top bunk when we were growing up. It sounded like someone slid down over the side railing on top and then their feet landed on the side railing of the bottom bunk.
All of a sudden, it was in bed with me. I recall having difficulty screaming. It was like I didn’t have lungs or vocal cords. I had to muster a guttural force from deep in my stomach. When a sound did come out, it was just a wheezing bellow for help.
Interestingly, my brother was there. The same brother who used to sleep in the bunk bed with me when we were young. Except he was the age he is now.
I was still bellowing. He was in the main room of the basement, sleeping on the couch. He woke up and came running through the doorway of the bedroom, in the dark, following the sound of my voice.
I was on the mattress and I desperately shouted for him to help. He came over to the mattress and felt around for me in the dark. And this is the part where it gets weird (and incredibly scary) ...
In terms of my visual perspective, I was sitting up toward the top of bed, looking down at the bottom of the bed. What I saw was my own body being pulled, head first, over the edge of the frame at the bottom of the bed. Only one of my legs was still dangling where I could see.
When my brother came into the room, he followed the sound of my voice. He came over and helped pull me back into bed by grabbing onto my leg and yanking my body back over the edge of the frame and onto the mattress.
There was a moment of respite. My body lay in a limp pile at the bottom of the bed. My brother was in the middle of the mattress. And my voice was coming from somewhere, as if I was sitting up at the top of the mattress.
My brother looked back and forth between where my face should have been and where my body lay in a pile. Then he started shouting in terror as he realized that my voice was not coming from my body.
I wonder what my brother saw. If it was just a void of empty air where my voice was coming from. Or if he saw something horrific.
It was when my brother started shouting that I became aware that I was out of my body. I could see my body, but I felt like I was sitting and speaking from a spot on the bed that was about four feet away.
Then my body was dragged off the mattress and out into the hallway, where it raised up into the air, hanging limply. My brother stumbled helplessly behind, his face white and sunken with horror. He rushed in, nearer to my body, with his arms reaching out, and then stepped back with his arms at his sides, unsure of what to do. He pleaded desperately, sobbing. I can remember his words clearly: “Please don’t be dead. Oh, please don’t be dead.”
That’s the last detail I can remember from the dream. When I woke up, I was back in my body, sweating. Then I got out of bed and went over to the desk to turn on the lamp and get my phone.
Now, it’s 3:13. I’ve been lying in bed typing on my phone for almost an hour. As usually happens with dreams, the details are getting more and more difficult to recall. When I first woke up, I was still terribly frightened. Now, I am less scared but still afraid for when the clock is about to turn to 3:33, because that is when demonic possessions happen, according to the movies I watched when I was young.
The scariest part of the nightmare was how real it seemed at first. I was lying in bed, just as I am now, with the top bunk above me.
The events of the dream are starting to seem more ridiculous, but that’s only because I feel grounded in reality again. I feel safe being back in a dimension where demonic possession is unlikely. I know there are stories and movies about it, but it’s never happened to me or someone I know. Or at least nobody has ever told me that it’s happened to them.
Still, even though I think it’s unlikely, I don’t think it’s impossible. I remember someone telling me when I was growing up, “If you believe in angels, then you have to believe in demons.”
I don’t know what I would do if I started to hear noises in the bunk above me now. My brother isn’t actually here to help me.
The idea of getting possessed fills me with a fear similar to the fear I have of dying. In both cases, barring an exorcism or a revival, your life, as you knew it, is over. This leads me to believe that the cause of our deepest fears is attachment to ourselves. If you don’t care what happens to you, then of what is there to be afraid?
I may be biased in this line of thinking based on my experience of my own natural life. I don’t think I have a sense of the maximum amount of pain that can be inflicted on a human being. If I did, I might be more afraid. In other words, I might be less optimistic about achieving a level of detachment that makes one capable of dealing with even the maximum amount of pain.
As humans, we have an out. No matter how terrible things get, it ends with death. But what if it didn’t? This is the dilemma I faced when thinking about hell when I was young.
Hell, as I understood it from my Catholic upbringing, is infinite pain and torture. Something like burning forever. Does this extended timescale make things scarier?
I’m getting off track. What I’m trying to get at is what made that nightmare so scary for me. Beyond just the fear of physical harm to ourselves, I think we have a fear of the unknown.
We have a built-up memory of how things ordinarily are. When something unordinary happens, it’s scary. I’m guessing this is evolutionary. We have a pre-wired mental system for checking unexpected events for danger, but we pass off expected events mindlessly.
Not everything unexpected is scary. There are pleasant surprises. If an angel walked through the door and crawled into bed with me, I would be pleasantly surprised. But I am imagining the angel as a beautiful woman. What if the angel were a shape-shifting dark cloud? Then I would probably be afraid. So it seems that something just being unexpected is not enough to make it scary. There must also be a threat of danger.
In some cases, we may sense a threat of danger due to associating the unexpected thing with something else from our past experience that we know to be dangerous. For example, a black cloud may remind us of smoke or a thunderstorm. In other cases, we may sense a threat due to the unexpected thing being truly and completely unknown. Though it’s hard to imagine how anything in our material world could be completely unassociated with anything we’ve experienced before.
This, so far, is my best attempt at rationalizing the fear I felt from that nightmare. I never actually saw a demon in the dream. I heard something moving in the bunk above me and there must have been some physical force that pulled me over the edge of the bed frame and then dragged me out of the room and lifted me up into the air. But I never actually saw anything.
We are used to there being apparent causes when objects are set in motion. Even when leaves are moved by an unseen force, we assume they are being blown by the wind. But something unseen with the strength to lift a body straight up in the air is harder to explain, more unknown, and, therefore, very scary.
If the demon were, say, a bear and I could see it dragging me and lifting me up in the air, then I would still be scared, but only on the base level of fear—on the level of there being a threat of danger. A bear is a known threat. What makes a demon so scary is that it’s an unknown threat.
It’s 5:14. As I continue to type this on my phone, I worry that I will in some way invite evil spirits into my life. I hope not. For the record, if any spirits are reading this, I’m just a humble human trying to process my fear.
If there are spirits, it seems to me that they would be like people in the sense that there are people who do good things and people who do bad things. I don’t believe that there are good or bad people. I believe that there are people and they sometimes do good things and sometimes do bad things. A person can even do a good thing and then later do a bad thing, or vice versa. When I say “good” and “bad”, I am referring to generally accepted universal moral laws, such as “murder is bad”. Philosophically, I’m doubtful that moral statements are verifiable truth statements.
If spirits are similar to us, then it might be that when a demon tries to possess a human they are just misbehaving. They might not even be aware of the distress that possession puts us under. Or they might have a good reason for doing it. In that case, the problem would just be that humans and spirits don’t share a common language to communicate.
If a demon woke me up and said, “Hey, I need to possess you because I need to use your body to go say goodbye to my wife who I didn’t get to see before I died.” Would I be startled? Certainly, yes. But then I might think, This demon is speaking English. How bad can he be? I would probably ask, “Do I get my body back when you’re done?” As long as the demon agreed to that condition, I might be okay with temporary possession.
But then there would also be demons who are not so polite, just like there are people who willingly harm others. That’s not to say these people are bad people, but they may be so wound up with their bad intentions that they become difficult to reason with. In human affairs, these conflicts usually regress to physical violence. In demon-human affairs, I’m not sure how it would play out. Presumably the demon would have the upper hand. They seem to be higher on the supernatural food chain.
In that case, if I came up against an ill-intentioned demon, I’m not sure what I would do. Assuming I could get past the initial fear, I like to think I would first try to come from a place of understanding. I would use my emotional intelligence and conversational skill. If that didn’t work, then I would put up a fight, even though I wouldn’t know how.
At that point, it would be an old-fashioned unavoidable conflict in which there is an attacker who refuses to be reasoned with and a defender who has only two options: fight back or submit to the attack. Still, the more conscious approach might be to submit to the attack.
If you believe that you are One with all that there is, that you are not separate from the air you breathe, the mattress under your back, or a demon attacking you in the middle of the night, then it doesn’t really matter who wins the fight.
What is, is what is. What happens, happens. If, by fighting, you have a chance at bringing more goodness into existence, then you might fight. But you will fight neither because you are unconsciously struggling for your own survival nor because you are afraid of the unknown.