Hey all, I've done quite a bit of meditating and have had some really spiritual experiences without the help of psychoactives ever in my life. I would really like to grab my balls and go for it but I'm plagued by an incident I had when I was younger. I never practiced meditating. My parents were going through a brutal divorce, I had no identity just playing games going to school. I wouldn't say depressed but I wasn't happy either. I had an encounter one night with a very vivid dream that felt very demonic and horrible and when I woke up from the dream I felt a very real and evil presence. I bolted up to my sisters room crying my eyes out. When I dont think about that experience or anything negative I sleep just fine but some nights I cant help but feel like a darkness is there or its just my mind toying with me I have no clue, but ive never had an experience like this in my life since. I've let go of the fear for a long time but since I'm now becoming more spiritual and more aware of the positive and loving spirits around me I also know im opening myself to the other side of things. the not knowing is what is plaguing me. If this isn't enough information I can explain the initial dream I had in detail.

this was a nightmare of nightmares. the dream was of me standing at the end of my bed talking with my girlfriend at the time, She was crying and whimpering. I told her that everything was going to be alright, I love you, you don't have to cry. After awhile of consoling her to no effect she looked up at me with red eyes (not looks like shes been crying red eyes, like actually red eyes). She grabbed me by the throat and lifted me in the air while shouting in some demonic voice that I couldn't recognize but every damn word felt like daggers into my heart, I never felt such hate directed at me with such a physical feeling. As her shouting went on her arm went go go gatchet and she lifted me so I was reverse plank in the sky putting me back into my bed. I felt my ass touch the bed first, then slowly my back and finally my head, as soon as the hand lifted from my throat I shot up from my bed eyes wide open staring into the dark and feeling the very dark presence where my girlfriend had be standing. I sucked every ounce of courage I could muster to bolt out of my room in the basement ran up the stairs to my sisters room just balling my eyes out.

I would like to know why the hell that had happened to me when I was young and vulnerable, what the fuck was it and why I haven't had it happen again? What can I do to protect myself? I need answers that I just don't have not knowing about the spiritual world.

Thank you all

Dreams can be pretty crazy things and the depths of your mind can churn out some bizarre stuff while you are experiencing them.

It sounds to me like a particularly intense dream was triggered by this stressful period of your life. I myself have experienced the sensation of a lingering 'dark presence' following dreams many times. I personally attribute this to the fact that you can go into intense and sometimes odd mind spaces when you are dreaming. If you awake abruptly then you are still essentially in the same emotional state and it takes a few minutes for you to 'normalise'. Hence you will experience heightened terror, if that's what you were experiencing during your dream.


I believe you've answered your own question here, i.e. 'when I don't think about...' Your thinking about it creates a negative reinforcement loop of fear. It's just in your mind! There's nothing there! Even if there was something there, can it do anything to you? I remember as a child seeing something on TV where a monster's hand came out from under the bed and grabbed someone's ankle. Following that I was often afraid to get into/out of bed at night, usually opting to take a running jump onto the bed, thus ensuring my safety. Once the idea was there it was difficult to shake... Just remember, there's nothing to fear but fear itself! You don't even exist, apparently...



Because you were young and vulnerable and going through a traumatic period.


See above, and because you are not as young/vulnerable and have not been through a trauma like that since. Also there's no guarantee that a traumatic experience will yield a bizarre and terrifying dream.


What do you need to protect yourself from? Fearful dreams? Dark spirits? Fear itself? Suffering?

Chances are that you will occasionally have fearful dreams, perhaps not as intense as that one though.

I don't know about dark spirits/forces, but all you can do is observe your own senses and thoughts. Don't worry about anything else.

Fear is a form of suffering that results from attachment/aversion (fear of losing something/or of something occurring) to phenomena.

The goal of meditation is to free yourself from all suffering by observing the 3 characteristics of everything you perceive.

So I guess you should meditate!

That said, if you want to "grab your balls and go for it" then you will most certainly have some intense dreams on retreat and no doubt encounter your fears along the way (see dark night).

That's just my humble opinion anyway; hopefully you'll find some use in it.

Hi Kato

Here's an angle which may help you to classify or integrate that dream. It's not an explanation, just a different way of lining up the specifics of your experience. I've had several dream experiences similar to yours. There's a kind of dream with distinctive features, which can include:

• a sense of flying or being lifted up
• a sense of being pulled or blown by a strong wind
• noise (thunder)
• sleep paralysis
• sense of another presence, often malevolent
• grainy black-and-white vision
• takes place in bedroom or same apartment

I notice that several of these features occur in your description: being lifted up (flying/pull), noise (growling demon voice), bedroom location, and sense of another presence (first your girlfriend, then the demon).

So here's the alternate way of lining up these specifics: Out-Of-Body-Experience/Dream reports often contain descriptions of a strong pull towards the real body, or even a link (at upper chest height) between the real and out-of-body bodies. Noise is often reported as well. The location of the OOBE is in the vicinity of the real body, same room or adjacent room(s). The sense of another presence can be understood that the person having the OOBE is not used to getting sense impressions from both the "real" and "out-of-body" bodies, so it gets interpreted as another presence; and due to the unfamiliar circumstances, what with being linked up with (gripped by) the other body, it can feel very threatening, when the "other" presence was in fact the "other" body.

That's it. Same experience, different conceptual framework. For me at least, reading up on other peoples descriptions of OOBEs took away a lot of the terrifying aspects of these experiences, and the last few were actually quite interesting, leading to lucid dreaming states when I realized what was going on. Maybe the stressful experiences in that period of your life (where you were confronted with a lot of suffering, and depending on your personal make-up were maybe quite mindful of it), coupled with strong concentration (from gaming) and a desire to "get away" triggered that OOBE. Just a shot in the dark, not a diagnosis.

Also, these dreams are (in my case) landmarks for A&P territory. YMMV, of course.

Another hint, to "deal with" threatening presences: Send them goodwill / metta / kindness. Or do noting practice or some other kind of mindfulness. If you can remember, of course Making a regular practice of it will make it more likely for you to remember it in a dream.

Keeping up a regular practice of meditation or equivalent will move you through the insight stages, and thus into and beyond A&P territory. Thus, if you experienced this kind of dream in the past, it might come up again in A&P.

Finally, welcome to the DhO!

Cheers,
Florian

Hi Kato, welcome

Florian's reply reminded me of a book by (I think his name is) Robert Bruce called 'Astral Dynamics'. When I was in my twenties, a friend gave it to me after I described a period in my life filled with many experiences similar to yours, when I was a young boy. By this point they didn't bother me quite so much-- in fact, I'd always found them somewhere on a spectrum from strangely enthralling to terrifying, but never so disturbing as you found yours-- and I was just sharing an altered-state 'war story'. The book shared a similar conceptual frame to what Florian described, along with many concrete methods for working to trigger more full astral projections, which I utilized a bit thereafter when the state would present itself, with some success. Ultimately I found astral projection draining, and the practices Bruce recommended for developing a stronger, more richly developed energy system not flashy enough to overcome my laziness, so that was more or less that, at that point in my life. However, subsequently once I entered a phase of life when I practiced seriously, I found Bruce's techniques really simple, effective, enjoyable, and helpful in multiple dimensions of contemplative development.

-Jake

I have a lot of experience exploring the dream world and other non-ordinary states via intense psychedelics such as high doses of mushrooms, DMT, ayhuasca, datura (not a psychedelic but a dangerous hallucinogenic plant very related to dreams and lower astral realms). I am amazed at some of the stuff I have been through. I have literally looked death/rebirth-in-hell in the face a number of times and death turned away.

First of all, whether you know it or not, YOU HAVE NO SELF TO PROTECT! If you are afraid, there is always a deeper level where fear can't touch you. This is like the analogy of if a hostile entity grabs your sleeve to attack you, you slip out of your jacket and escape. The worst that can happen is not complete annihilation (you would find safety and refuge in the three characteristics, especially no-self, and in the three jewels). Also, any entity (whether benevolent or malevolent) also has no self. They are just dreams or I wouldn't be here today.

That being said, these entities can have powerful affects on you if you are not prepared for them. When you are scared, it is good to remind yourself that it is a dream. A reality check. This is just a dream. Your dreams cannot physically harm you.

There is something that happens every night to everybody during sleep. It is called sleep paralysis. This is so you don't sleep walk or run into the wall as you dream of walking or running. When one encounters this with a conscious mind either due to meditative practices or not, it can be quite alarming. Usually unprepared people think they woke up to find that they were being attacked by a demon. I have experienced this a number of times. Now when it happens I like to dream of Tibetan monks in my room chanting. Or angels. Yours sounds slightly different because you were still dreaming. But the dream/awake thing is a spectrum, not a duality. There are infinite little points along the spectrum between Buddhahood and unconsciousness and we can pass through strange convergences of awake/dreaming.

With skill in dreaming people actually seek out these experiences to further practice their skills. For example, in such a situation that was good advice to radiate out metta and goodwill to the being. I have had success creating a ball of love and light to emerge from my heart which I have thrown at demons and I say "catch!". When they catch it they usually transform into a little, harmless, drunk-on-bliss, cute creature like an elf or a cartoon platypus or whatever. I have turned sharks into dolphins also by being aware of fear and consciously choosing metta. I have turned back packs of wild dogs, armies of skeletons riding skeleton horses, classic demons, and mind-controlling aliens. Have you read "where the Wild Things Are"? The boy Max arrives on the island full of monsters and they jump all around and threaten to eat him up. He yells "BE STILL!" and stares into their eyes without blinking, and tames them, and they make him their king. Another thing people do in such situations is to shapeshift into a bigger demon and either scare that other demon off or eat it. People also like to play Harry Potter and wave a magic wand at the demons. My favorite tool that seemed to cure all my nightmares is looking into the monster's eyes while feeling compassion and love and say clearly "You are the part of me that will never forget you." This is advanced stuff but it goes to show you how one can use situations like this to actually transform fear itself into compassion and fearlessness.

But a more practical method is to first have no fear, then ask the demon what it wants. Basically you try to understand the demon. This is using the assumption that this entity is a dream entity and a creation of your mind which is only being dramatic to call attention to an aspect of your mind to be understood. Much of the time if you show the entity that you are not scared, or mad, but willing to understand, the entity will totally change and you will become its best friend realizing that it a part of yourself that you have alienated and now accepting. There is a story about dreaming that I heard from a master dreamer that tells of a boy in a village in thailand who kept having a nightmare of a tiger stalking him. He was scared and asked the wise man what to do. The wise man told him to ask the tiger what he wanted. The boy asked the tiger what he wanted and the tiger said that it wanted to eat the boy. The boy was scared and the next day he told the wise man. The wise man said "you have to kill the tiger". That night in the dream the boy killed the tiger. He was relieved. However, the next day he was sick. The wise man asked him if he had killed the tiger. The boy said yes. The wise man said "well now you have to eat the tiger." The boy thought tiger meat sounded gross so he didn't want to do it. The wise man explained that the tiger was part of himself and he had killed it, now he needs to eat it so it becomes part of himself again. That night in the dream the boy took the dead tiger and burnt it in a big fire and took the ashes and sprinkled them on a garden and immediately big vegetables grew and he picked them and ate them. Then the boy was no longer sick. A good question would be to ask yourself where all this hatred that was projected at you come from? We all have hatred inside of us, we all have the devil inside. In this case it was most likely have to do with your life at the time and you personifying the negativity of your parents' relationship onto the characters of your girlfriend and you.

Nightmares are rare for a positive person. I never have any scary nightmares or dreams anymore (knock on wood).

Another point is that these kinds of entities are like viruses. They only can get to you when your immune system is weak. Having a positive fearless attitude, affinity for "lighter" "realms" and "higher" "beings" will ensure your glowing future in spiritual practice. And a demon is just a huge shadow on the wall cast by a little mouse. Remember: NO SELF, EMPTINESS, IMPERMANENCE.

Somebody asked some Tibetan lama "What do you do if you find yourself in Hell?" and he just smiles and said "Keep meditating."

Darkness and light are artificial dualities created by the mind. Good and evil: illusory outside the minds of humans. I don't know what religious conditioning you may have had but I would recommend investigating your hidden (or not so hidden) beliefs and assumptions regarding good and evil. It might help to look at nature and to see that although there are predators and prey, parasites and hosts organisms, harsh impersonal forces of nature like lightning and natural disasters, polar seasons of life and death (summer and winter), etc... there is no malevolence or evil intent. Every thing just does what it has to do and is all interdependent. For me, this gives me an affinity for pagan religions and nature based religions. I am not actually religious but my dreams reflect pagan mythologies. I don't have Satan and demons, I have Pan and satyrs and fauns and nymphs and faeries. The dark ages really did a number on our psyches. In this sense I don't fear the darkness, although there still should be some caution, but I find it exotic and sexy sometimes. This is safer with its own lesser dangers to it, but it is easier to merge with exotic sexiness than to demonic evil.