When it first started, the lucid dreamer had been suffering from a rare combination of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. His doctors couldn’t agree on which one he should be diagnosed with, so he was categorized into a gray area between the two, called schizoaffective disorder. The symptoms he showed- wild mood swings and mild hallucinations- weren’t cut and clear for either diagnosis; they were shared symptoms between the two. He’d been taking an even rarer combination of antipsychotics- Venalfaxine for his depression and Zyprexa to offset his psychotic mania. Several medication combinations could have been used to treat his illness, but the one they selected turned out to give him the strangest side effect any of them had ever seen: the sensation of getting paralyzed in between sleep and awake.
The first time it happened, he heard a strong buzzing noise in his ear, what he described as “tinnitus on steroids”. It felt like he could hear all the millions of chemical reactions occurring in his brain while this was happening. The episode didn’t last long; he woke up about thirty seconds after it started. Another time he had difficulty breathing and couldn’t move a muscle. It felt like he was dying. He struggled for a few minutes to force himself awake, but it still wouldn’t happen. This frightened him so much that he wanted to be taken off the drugs they’d put him on. When he asked them for an explanation about what was happening, they didn’t have a clue, however they did allow him to try new medications.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work, and the sleep paralysis kept happening after he was transferred onto the new meds. He thought they’d messed up his brain chemistry for good, and he regretted ever letting them influence his mind. Sleep paralysis was the most awful feeling he'd ever experienced, even worse than when his stepfather left him, or when he'd wanted to kill himself over the unrequited love of a woman. Even physical pain was preferred over the terror it brought him. The doctors were more inclined to write the issue off as another symptom of his psychosis instead of admitting that the drugs they’d administered had caused it. That was when he stormed into the head’s office in defiance, demanding that these drugs be taken off the market and threatening to take legal action against the facility. The head reminded him that they were doing the best they could to help him cope with his illness, and that while the drugs worked well for some, others suffered from unforeseeable side effects like these. The man slammed his fist on the table and said, “Well, you can add this side effect to the list- intermittent moments of paralysis during sleep!”.
It only got worse as time went on. One time he woke up and saw a dog with red eyes staring at him from a doorway across the room. Another time he was sleeping on his stomach, and something came down from the air and landed on his back. It tapped its claws on his skin several times before trying to plunge itself into his body. He woke up panting in disbelief about what was happening to him. He didn’t know whether he was imagining these things or if they were really happening in some parallel dimension that he’d been able to access. One of the symptoms of his mental illness was the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. After that thing attacked him, he started to think that the doctors might have been right; that since he'd hallucinated things in real life it was certainly possible during sleep. But he still wasn’t satisfied.
At the time he was in close contact with his father, the same one who'd abandoned him years before, who also believed they were hallucinations. He'd been seeking a rational explanation for his paralysis that satisfied him, but instead he got the usual materialist’s opinion from him. During the paralyses he’d been fully conscious. How could they be hypnogogic hallucinations when he felt awake? To get off the subject, he told his father that since he’d never experienced what was going on inside him, his opinion on the matter had no credibility. When he spoke to his mother about it, she brought up the idea that they might be demonic entities punishing him for something cruel that he’d done. But he couldn’t figure out what he’d done to deserve such a monstrous punishment, and neither could she. He decided that he had to get to the bottom of this, so he went looking for more radical explanations regarding the strange phenomenon.
There had been countless stories written about similar things occurring to innocent and otherwise sane people, so he felt less and less like his mental illness was causing it. He came across several articles that suggested he had access to a portal between worlds, as he’d suspected. They told him that if he relaxed during the paralysis, he’d be able to do some miraculous things, such as leaving his body, lucid dreaming, talking to spirits, and offering up his own spirit as “food” for the damned- the way Shamans would do in Indian tribes, or Tibetan monks during a practice they called Chod. This made a lot of sense to him, because it felt like these beings were trying to gain access to his spirit while he was paralyzed. He read that the spirits of the living were made of richer energies than the dead, and that the Shamans offered their bodies to them as an aid to reach higher stages of existence.
Bearing this in mind, the next time it happened he tried relaxing and focused on levitating his body. There was the sensation of his body rising, but it didn’t fully come out the way the books had told him it would. And it didn’t even feel like his real body; it was only his nervous system that seemed to rise off the bed. He could feel it as an electrical bundle of waves, unbound to matter and the organs of his body. The next time it happened he tried again, with little success. He kept at it, eventually being able to crawl out of the bed and walk around the room. He would try turning on the television, but it wouldn’t work. One time the radio was playing, and after he woke up, he knew it was a continuation of the program he’d heard in his sleep.
One of the most exhilarating moments in his life came when he wasn't just able to rise out of his body, but actually flew out of it at full speed. It didn’t start well because it was an episode involving another attack. The entity pestering him this time was a cat, so he forced himself to grab it as hard as he could. In the middle of the struggle, he felt a trance and slipped into a meditative state that allowed his spirit to soar. This was a sensation he’d never felt before; it felt like he could go anywhere and do anything at will. He looked for the cat inside his bed sheets, but it was nowhere to be found. Then he flew through a wall into his roommate’s room, but he wasn’t there either.
This wasn’t his actual body that was flying; it was more like a glowing orb that resembled his soul. It was more real to him than a typical lucid dream, which he'd had many times before, yet he wasn’t crazy enough to think that it was the real world he was actually flying through. It wasn’t an out-of-body experience either. People who had those reported seeing a chord that was attached their bodies, and everything they saw were things in the physical world. What he was experiencing was pure astral projection- like a lucid dream but based in a dimension that resembles the real world more.
After being in his roommate’s room, he flew outside the door of his house. He tried to project himself onto the dream plane by imagining Tibet as he went through the door, but the transformation didn’t manifest. Some shades of white, resembling the snow of the Tibetan peaks, did appear for a moment before gradually dissipating. He wondered why this didn’t happen since he’d been able to do it in lucid dreams before. When he got outside, the desire to fly took full effect. He flew above the trees and saw his whole neighborhood. Bouncing into the air so effortlessly gave him such a euphoria that he might have called it the greatest moment of his life if it had taken place in the real world. When he looked down, he saw the cat that had been harassing him, running away down the street. But he didn’t follow it; he wanted to fly higher, into a sky that was overcast instead of dark, like it should have been.
Outside of his neighborhood he saw someone on the ground and came down to see who it was. A homeless, crippled old woman lay laughing on the ground in front of him. He threw her a bag of groceries that he’d conjured out of nowhere. She didn’t thank him; all she said was, “This isn’t a test.” The intensity of her eyes made him feel unsettled, so he walked away. Then he saw someone from the place he worked at, and it felt that his projection was turning into something more like a dream. He flew up in the air to impress the man, which made him start to laugh, so he flew higher and higher. He went so high that he thought he might reach the realms of God and the heavens. A vaulted ceiling suddenly appeared across the wide expanse of the sky. Not being able to stop in time, he hit his head upon it, feeling like a fish that had jumped out of the water for a glimpse of the sun, only to be caught in the net of a fisherman, or a higher power; and like that dying fish, his first astral projection had caused him to descend from the heavens and back into the mundane Hell of the Earth plane. God had not allowed him to enter the planes above; not while he was still alive. Instead, he was followed home by ominous beings, all the way to his doorstep. When he turned around, two giant eyeballs were watching him. He slammed the door on them and woke up, swearing that he'd been followed home by aliens.
Sometime after this happened, he was institutionalized again, this time for delusions of grandeur. He claimed that he was being watched by aliens and that he was hearing messages from God. A minister had convinced him that the minions of the devil were fighting for his soul. He was taught that the metaphysical war going on inside his body was being fought because of his allegiance to goodness; that demons were trying to do this in order to destroy one of God’s greatest children. Once his father learned of this, he desperately tried to convince him that the delusions were Freudian in nature; that his unconscious desires were taking the form of psychological demons he was too afraid to confront, not real ones. Oddly, he also tried to convince him that a transformation was taking place inside him; that a being was trying to come out which denied his sex. The father likened his submissiveness during the attacks to that of a woman being raped by a man, which truly astonished his son. The attacks weren’t sexual at all; in only one of them had it felt like he’d been sexually molested- that was when a female entity had grinded itself into his body against his will. When he told the minister about his father’s outrageous theory, the minister denounced him as Satanic. This had more to do with the fact that he’d first experienced the attacks just after meeting his father in real life for the first time and not his theories (though they certainly helped). It had been a few days after traveling to meet his father that he'd had his first sleep paralysis attack, which the minister didn't think was a coincidence. The minister claimed that the father had unleashed his own demons upon the son he’d abandoned; that the folly of his messianic pride, along with the fact that he’d changed his sex, meant that he’d attracted some of the worst demons of the netherworld after he’d traveled to Israel trying to convince people of his androgynous holiness some 30 years ago. It was only natural that his father would try to get his son to follow in his footsteps by relating his troubles with his own, but to do it in such a manipulative manner sickened the minister. Here is a letter the father had written to his son:
I cogitated for several hours on how to tell you this, but in the end, I decided to keep it simple and just say it outright. The "Old Hag" that assaults you in your sleep is the female that you did not grow into. She is Lilith, the woman who was sacrificed so you could be a man. The Hag is the repressed deformed woman that you, in your fear and loathing, have created to represent her. She is real, and she lives deep in your subconscious mind. She is struggling to come out by using every trick at her disposal. And in order to come out, she has to kill the man that you are.
It was 1986 when I went through it, making me 29 years old at the time, like you. What happened was that I eventually stopped resisting her attacks. But she didn't go away, instead she turned into a seductive little girl. Now I resisted her again, but the roles were reversed. It was horrible and the "marriage" was never consummated. I eventually surrendered to her seductions, but at the moment of climax my orgasm turned into an excruciating full body seizure, which by then I was wide awake. It was truly the worst pain I have ever felt in my life, and I have experienced some severe pain.
Apparently, there is a deep neurological mechanism by which the pleasure aspect of sexual arousal can be turned off at a critical moment, and Lilith has access to the switch. The same thing happened many times over the years but with decreasing intensity, I was literally being trained to not respond sexually in my dream state. And as my male sexual response gradually faded away, the woman took control. That, my son, is how she killed the man I was.
For this to happen you still have to surrender to her as the Old Hag, which you may or may not do. I realize it is the scariest thing in the world for a male, and that is fine. I honestly don't know what would happen to you if you do surrender, you would probably become an even more feminized male than you already are, but with enhanced brainpower. I went through years of feminization and neurological changes that were not medically induced. Of course, the simplest explanation to the world was that I was transsexual, but I never believed it myself. What I believe is that there is a natural built-in mechanism by which a male becomes feminized, and I had somehow triggered that mechanism because I was in Israel when it all happened. There is, by the way, many biblical references to this sort of thing happening.
I should emphasize that at no time in my life did I feel like a male homosexual, nor did I engage in such behaviors. The process simply erases male sexual response, although I do regularly have female sex in my dreams complete with female orgasm. So even though my body may not physically conform, none of that even matters from the perspective of the subconscious and related neurology. The whole thing is pretty weird and obviously I have never told anyone this stuff.
What will happen if this process doesn't happen to you? I think there is a limited time it can happen, probably ending around age 35-40. Your mind at that age becomes less plastic and the fundamentalism takes over. The woman you could have let out becomes repressed under layers of ignorance and neuroses. Most people who have the capacity for this process end up in dogmatic religions or ideologies, because they decide the Old Hag is evil. I wouldn't want that to be where you end up, but it's not my life.
I wouldn't even claim the same thing would happen to you, should you allow it to begin. The effect it had on me was probably unique to myself, and for you as an otherwise happy male it would have an entirely different outcome. I believe that there is a higher evolved state of collective consciousness over there, and some people carry the potential to get there. If enough people would, we could discover what is there. In such a social situation we would reproduce consciously rather than by gratifying animalistic sexual urges. I believe that is what we are evolving into, a new human species with an additional growth stage that occurs between age 28-40. And I believe you have that potential- that is the battle you are fighting now.
After reading this the minister claimed that his father had been possessed by Lilith herself; that Lilith was trying to get back to the real world through his son because he was younger, healthier, and had the same type of effeminate genes that his father possessed. This seemed outlandish at first, but at least it made more sense than what his father thought. When he'd met him three years ago, he didn’t seem entirely human. His hair had been as disheveled as a sheepdog, and one of his legs was severely malformed, as if he had polio. Nobody took care of him, and he was rude to strangers. He lived alone in a van on one of his friend’s properties, who only let him inside to use the bathroom. And with all his contradictory opinions, such as calling his dreams hallucinations yet claiming Lilith was real, it seemed that his father was the mentally ill one and not him. Things just weren’t adding up. Either way he looked at it, the entity called Lilith was trying to release itself through his body, and the only way he knew how to fight it was through a manic allegiance to a higher power. His submission to God consumed his life. The fear of Lilith became so great that it was all he could think about, and in social situations everything he said reflected his convictions about the nature of evil.
At the institution he explained his dilemma to Carter, a dissociative mathematician who was in for thinking he’d solved the Grand Unified Theory of physics. Carter was a savant who had a negligent father of his own. He could calculate great sums in his head without using a calculator, which made him feel superior to everyone. Numbers were his religion; he thought he’d solved all the riddles of the universe by knowing special properties about them that nobody else did. Carter’s explanation for what was happening was simple, yet infinitely complex. He told him that each person was like a book in the labyrinth of a library. The people reading the books were people on the “other side”, where another universe ran parallel to our own. There was no such thing as demons or Lilith; they were only archetypes that people projected onto spiritual beings when they were dreaming in order to receive codes about emotional problems they needed to resolve. The codes are in the books; all our dreams are written in them. The entities reading them are people who passed over, seeking to influence the real world by interacting with the dreamers. Everyone we see in dreams are discarnate entities we’ve put faces on in order to place ourselves into stories that can teach us what we need, like an interface between worlds. The lucid dreamer’s trouble was that his readers had seen him vulnerable as he struggled to wake up, and mistakenly tried to possess him once they saw an opening. Carter assured him that it wasn’t possible for them to actually possess him, and that the spirits who tried were always blocked by the interface. He didn’t need God or a minister to protect him from them; the laws of science forbid them from crossing back over until they are reborn.
Yet the man couldn’t help thinking it might be possible. When he’d offered his body to them and not resisted, they’d dug into his flesh, and he’d felt a gushing pain. He always woke up before they fully entered him, but that wasn’t until he started fighting. What if he resisted fighting altogether, like his father had? Would he have become someone else?
Over the years he's enhanced his ability to dream lucidly. In one of the dreams, he walks down a hallway and hears someone screaming in the next room. He goes in and sees a wicked witch straddling a helpless victim who can’t move. Talking to spirits was always useless when he was paralyzed, but now that he’s mobile he can speak freely. He asks the spirit why it is tormenting this poor girl. The witch says it isn’t her fault because the girl's image of her reflects her emotional state. It wishes she wouldn’t be afraid, because if she loved her, she could hug her and show her its true admiration for the life she’s living. And if she weren't so afraid, she might appear to her as a kitten instead of a monster. Maybe she’d even be willing to offer her spirit up as food, so it could reach higher astral planes. She follows her around because she wishes she could become her on the physical plane. Her longing to return to the world is great and her fear of losing the girl keeps her attached. Her mistake is thinking she can return to the world through someone else's dreams, but the man tells her it doesn't work that way. He tells the spirit that she has the power to transcend the realm on her own; there is no need to stalk and torment the living. He’d reached higher realms before, and he didn’t even live in the dream world. Ignorance is the spirit’s problem- she doesn’t know how to get there. The lucid dreamer wants to show her the way, but the spirit won't let go of the girl. Her attachment to her is too great. The only thing left to do is banish her, in the name of God, from ever having access to her dreams again.
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