Sleep Paralysis & Demons of the Night

[effilang]

So i am talking with a friend right now and we are both spiritual and have our own different personal approaches to the study, understanding, practice and application of the principles of cultivation. Suffice to say they are Christian and i am Taoist haha

 

As we all know when you peel of the outer lining of religion the manifestations of practice tend to be the same and often we share very similar experiences.

 

My friend in question is regularly visited by an entity at night between the point of sleep and wake.

She explains she feels it drains her and refers to it as an "energetic vampire" something some of us are aware of and others may have even encountered and had to deal with in our Tao Bum brother and sisterhood.

 

Similarly to me her first encounter with this visitor was naturally frightening.

 

Personally it has happened only once to me, this was before i had taken the time to educate myself in depth-ly about these manifestations and the event scared the shizzle out of me.

 

Yesterday as we conversed i described the physical appearance of my manifestation: Dark, static figure, knees bent, arched back, pointy horns or ears, bright eyes... sitting on my lower back, very heavy feeling gravitationally, but sucking at the same time, and today after she mentioned something about sleep paralysis which we hadn't until now considered investigating i came across this picture:

 

 

So naturally i'm thinking to myself shit, i could as well have drawn that picture, only the common difference in our mutual experiences is that we are found lying on our bellies with the entity on our backs. Reading the wiki further:

 

In Nigeria, "ISP appears to be far more common and recurrent among people of African descent than among whites or Nigerian Africans",^[6] and is often referred to within African communities as "the Devil on your back."

 

Relevant to me perhaps seeing as i am half Nigerian, so this kept on getting more interesting with every revelation.

 

Terminology: "the witch riding your back", "the Devil on your back."

 

These occurrences seem to have been registered globally and are obviously not constrained to people of African decent such as myself. Europe, America, Asia... everywhere.

 

My outlook and understanding of spiritual manifestations of this sort, whether of genuine nature or as a form of personal psychological manifestation has changed greatly since i began practicing Taoism and today i have little if no fear of such events. So i am ok, not looking for any form of solace, i think. However i would be very interested in knowing what those of you with similar experiences have to say about this sort of phenomena and how such experiences can be deciphered through a pair of Taoist/Buddhist/Zen goggles.

 

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia....Sleep_paralysis

 

Langster Out!

Edited August 14, 2010 by effilang

[Birch]

Wasn't there already another thread about this with that pic in it and an explanation of the night-"mare" ? (That's the horsey standing in the corner).

 

Physical explanations of sleep paralysis aside, the actual content of imagery during such events is a really interesting topic.

 

If cultures share content - seems easy enough

 

If genes allow cultural transmission of content - wow. Problem being is I reckon it's hard to isolate anyone of specific genetic descent from any cultural contact. Just knowing you have that origin in you could make you seek out your own cultural imagery x 5 as much and so you'd upload those archetypes much more willingly.

 

Still, it does seem that several of the archetypes share common characteristics across human experience of them. But it might be a "false" agreement. In other words, we'd more readily jump to a shared explanation of something fearful rather than be the only person in the world to have had the experience. That would be alienating (no pun intended).

[Astral_Anima]

haha yea i had this and posted about it awhile back. Mine appeared as a snake beside my pillow. It was neat in hindsight but pure TERROR in the moment. The fear in those situations isn't logical fear. I could see a cute kitten but still be scared. It's not what you see it's what you know it is. Like mine was a snake with big googly eyes. It didn't look to frightening but it's PRESENCE caused fear. I actually just had a dream last night where this guy i used to know introduced me to a "reptillian" as he called it. It was like yellowish green lookin humanoid, about my size, sleepin on the other side of my bed O.o. I screamed out and accidentally woke him up, then I apologized and woke up, lol. Wierd shit.

 

Anyway its seems to happen most when you're on your back (according to what I read and experienced). I sleep on my side/stomach so i don't get night terrors very often. And before bed I always think happy thoughts, laugh and smile and pray to god/godess of love to be with me through the night. My theory is that negative entities feed off your fear and negative energy. So if you emanate love and child-like nature it's like a poison to them.

 

As for what's going on...from an eastern standpoint...I'd say you're "shifting gears", sliding into another dimension or realm. When you can consciously do this it's called an OBE. I don't think it's a sign of spiritual progression as it happens to ALOT of people, but cultivating awareness in general can lead to this i think. My other night terror is when I woke up and rolled over but my physical body didn't move. I was in this light blue hologram of myself watching my physical body lye there. Then I started screaming and trashing and yelling for someone to wake me up, then I woke up. Oddly enough both night terrors happened when I fell asleep to "energy body, chakra clearing" tapes...

 

Thats my story

Peace

-Astral

-Astral

[dnice]

So i am talking with a friend right now and we are both spiritual and have our own different personal approaches to the study, understanding, practice and application of the principles of cultivation. Suffice to say they are Christian and i am Taoist haha

 

As we all know when you peel of the outer lining of religion the manifestations of practice tend to be the same and often we share very similar experiences.

 

My friend in question is regularly visited by an entity at night between the point of sleep and wake.

She explains she feels it drains her and refers to it as an "energetic vampire" something some of us are aware of and others may have even encountered and had to deal with in our Tao Bum brother and sisterhood.

 

Similarly to me her first encounter with this visitor was naturally frightening.

 

Personally it has happened only once to me, this was before i had taken the time to educate myself in depth-ly about these manifestations and the event scared the shizzle out of me.

 

Yesterday as we conversed i described the physical appearance of my manifestation: Dark, static figure, knees bent, arched back, pointy horns or ears, bright eyes... sitting on my lower back, very heavy feeling gravitationally, but sucking at the same time, and today after she mentioned something about sleep paralysis which we hadn't until now considered investigating i came across this picture:

 

 

So naturally i'm thinking to myself shit, i could as well have drawn that picture, only the common difference in our mutual experiences is that we are found lying on our bellies with the entity on our backs. Reading the wiki further:

 

In Nigeria, "ISP appears to be far more common and recurrent among people of African descent than among whites or Nigerian Africans",^[6] and is often referred to within African communities as "the Devil on your back."

 

Relevant to me perhaps seeing as i am half Nigerian, so this kept on getting more interesting with every revelation.

 

Terminology: "the witch riding your back", "the Devil on your back."

 

These occurrences seem to have been registered globally and are obviously not constrained to people of African decent such as myself. Europe, America, Asia... everywhere.

 

My outlook and understanding of spiritual manifestations of this sort, whether of genuine nature or as a form of personal psychological manifestation has changed greatly since i began practicing Taoism and today i have little if no fear of such events. So i am ok, not looking for any form of solace, i think. However i would be very interested in knowing what those of you with similar experiences have to say about this sort of phenomena and how such experiences can be deciphered through a pair of Taoist/Buddhist/Zen goggles.

 

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia....Sleep_paralysis

 

Langster Out!

 

 

 

i never had a demon on my back or a demon on my chest, but once or two times i felt fingers stroking my back when i was in sleep paralysis , It was 100% real , it was as if somebody was sitting next to me and stroking my back .

 

also one of my spiritual friends had the same experience alot of times . Perhaps it is our own energy that is creating it , or it is a energetic being that is doing it .

This is the main reason why im scared of astral projection . But im hoping from now on to free myself from this fear .

 

 

The worst thing to do is feel the fear , instead you should just allow it to happen and cultivate courageous power . My worst experiences were when giving into the fear , instead i should of tapped into my inner power .

 

 

 

When i was young i would awake at night and feel people in my room , i dont know if it was my own fear or if they were spirits . I had so many experiences like that when i was young . Once at night i felt a woman approach me and talk to me , I had courage to listen because i was sleeping next to my mom , ..

 

My gnostic friend told me every time you masturbate , demons from the astral come and collect the semen , he said it was food for them . (he is a gnostic practitioner) (he believes that saving sexual energy will bring one to the astral plane) .

[Birch]

Oh no. Not the old stuff to stop boys (and girls) touching themselves. More recently it was a kitten that died...

 

Then we wonder why people associate sex with such terrible things.

 

We can do better that that, surely.

[Astral_Anima]

Kate- How about "Every time you touch yourself you lose precious jing energy and and if you make it a habbit you'll always be stuck at a low level and looked down upon by your peers"

[Moonbar]

Yes ive had the "Devil on my chest" experience it was quite terrifying,

Accompanied by paralysis & an overwhelming feeling of something else in the room that had a strong dislike of me

It happened quite a few times in my teens & twenties along with a few brief OBE's , It was however what sparked my interest in things spiritual

 

... fear ... what a great learning tool

[Vajrahridaya]

Yes, all this is quite true.

 

I found that relaxing into the fear during the paralysis transformed the whole experience into a blissful energetic awareness experience where I'd then get satsangs with great beings and energy would float me around, it felt like I was physically doing it out of the bed, only to find later my physical body hadn't moved. I don't get the scary type of sleep paralysis anymore.

[Stigweard]

Here's one of my "encounters" that I originally posted here Sleep Paralysis or Demonic Possession?:

 

-----------------

 

I'm not sure what time it was when my intruder entered my room. I only remember awakening to sense it's inky presence oozing into my room. There was no shape as such, just a glutinous oppressiveness that poured its way into my room and descended on my prostrate body.

 

It was the summer of 1996, I was staying in a seedy men's hostel just near the CBD of Rockhampton, Australia. This place used to be a pub (public bar) and the hallways still echoed of a hundred years of debauchery. My tiny room on the second floor, lacking any form of cooling to speak of, opened up onto a verandah from which I had a unique view across the road to perhaps the nastiest, foulest pub in town.

 

This pub was frequented by the towns' urban aboriginals and many were the nights where I was serenaded by a chorus of vulgarity, violence and the midnight screaming of police sirens. Only a week before the events I am about to relate I had a box office seat to a mini-riot which left a stream of blood trickling into the gutters.

 

On this particularly hot night, that left me gasping in my room like it was a furnace, I had decided to leave open the french doors that opened onto the verandah trying to catch the non-existent breeze. After endless minutes of sweltering listlessly I managed to plunge into the reprieve of sleep.

 

My first waking instinct, when I was pinned fast to my bed, was of course to panic and scream, but before I could even gasp this incredible weight had extinguished my speech and severed my very ability to think. I say "weight" but it wasn't a physical weight as such, more like a density that tore its way through my mind and sunk it's tendrils deep within me to assault the sanctity of my soul.

 

I can't say how long I lay there, helpless, I couldn't even think let alone contemplate the passing of time. I do know I struggled desperately but in vain because every avenue my mind fled down was slammed shut by my unyielding captor.

 

But then some unknown part of me surged forth. My mind was flayed and stripped bare to reveal something deeper, something filled with an incredible raw potency. I was like the Earth itself with its crust sundered apart to release the primal magma of its core.

 

In an instant my awareness flew to my lower Tan Tien and my lower abdomen erupted in a explosion of pure light. I felt my adversary convulse above me which gave me my chance for escape. I surged this pure light out to my hands and I blasted the full potency of my being into my foe.

 

It flailed in protest, yet still I sent forth torrents of the unquenchable light. Finally my intruder routed, releasing its hold on my mind, fleeing back out of the door. Immediately I was up out of my bed streaming my light before me, nothing could resist my advance. I got to the door and sealed the portal with the light from my hands, creating a impenetrable web of light.

 

With incredible relief coursing through me I turned around ... only to behold my own prostrate body, eyes closed, sweating on my bed, a full fifteen feet from where my awareness 'stood'.

 

I jolted awake on my bed, bolting upright with a startled cry. Confused I looked around my room, back toward the door where I had only just been standing, but it was eerily normal. Then I noticed the sensations in my body. My hands burned furiously, waves of Qi pulsing out of them, my lower abdomen was vibrating tempestuously and I could still feel the 'little sun' that burned there.

 

Out of instinct I got up and repeated my cleansing process. Sending streams of light from my hands through my room and out the door and then once again I sealed the entrance way.

 

For hours I stayed awake, journalling as much as I could remember. And as the dawn broke that morning I gave sincere and hearty thanks to my teachers and to all the qigong and nei tan I had learned up to that point that had helped me win freedom from my midnight intruder.

 

-----------------

[Birch]

Kate- How about "Every time you touch yourself you lose precious jing energy and and if you make it a habbit you'll always be stuck at a low level and looked down upon by your peers"

 

 

Oh, yes, that IS a good one

 

I guess it comes under the "technical" issue.

 

As far as I can tell, us women don't have that problem. We have a bunch of other ones

[gendao]

My gnostic friend told me every time you masturbate , demons from the astral come and collect the semen , he said it was food for them . (he is a gnostic practitioner) (he believes that saving sexual energy will bring one to the astral plane) .

Interesting, I have a friend who masturbates a lot (like several times a day), who has also suffered from entity attacks and encounters at night. Hmmm...

 

And I also wonder if drug usage makes one more vulnerable too (this person smokes pot as well)?

 

Anyone tried using Joel Signeur's symbolic entity repellant (Fig 5) before?

[metal dog]

I have a close friend who told me of an episode in her bedroom with a shadow.

It had appeared twice before, but both times were very quick glancing observations kind of out of the corner of her eye. So a quick dismissal was her likely response. But there was that question of whether something was just there in he mind...or was it just a trick of the light.

 

The third time was a charm. It appeared more openly and did not leave so quickly.

It came off the wall and stood at the foot of her bed, crawled over her and held her down. As she was being held down, she could not any longer actually see the shadow. It held her down for what she recalled as a minute and a half.

It would not let her up.

After ordering it to go away several times it disappeared and she could now get off the bed.

She never had another encounter like this.

Edited August 15, 2010 by metal dog

[metal dog]

I had one incident myself of something unseen making its way around my space.

Edited August 15, 2010 by metal dog

[That Guy]

My gnostic friend told me every time you masturbate , demons from the astral come and collect the semen , he said it was food for them . (he is a gnostic practitioner) (he believes that saving sexual energy will bring one to the astral plane) .

Sperm banks must be like some kinda all you can eat buffet

[Seth Ananda]

Sperm banks must be like some kinda all you can eat buffet

Rofl! Damn you I nearly fell off my chair!

[That Guy]

Rofl! Damn you I nearly fell off my chair!

sorry bro

[Vajrahridaya]

 

For hours I stayed awake, journalling as much as I could remember. And as the dawn broke that morning I gave sincere and hearty thanks to my teachers and to all the qigong and nei tan I had learned up to that point that had helped me win freedom from my midnight intruder.

 

-----------------

 

Wow! That's awesome!! Great writing too! I saw it like a movie. Cool...

[Vajrahridaya]

Oh, yes, that IS a good one

 

I guess it comes under the "technical" issue.

 

As far as I can tell, us women don't have that problem. We have a bunch of other ones

 

Lucky to be a women in a certain sense. My wife gets charged through her masturbation. I had to learn how to do that through breath and focus. You women can just do it naturally.

[Birch]

"You women can just do it naturally."

 

Seems we can

 

[Vajrahridaya]

"You women can just do it naturally."

 

Seems we can

 

 

You mysterious beauties you! I wonder if I was ever a women? I've never remembered being one. My wife says she remembers being a man before.

[Taomeow]

In China, these entities are known as the Sitting Gui. They are considered very dangerous.

 

A family member needs to be taught a procedure to use whenever something like this (or other frightening visitations) happens to someone in the family. They should pull the sufferer's both ears, strongly and painfully, and keep repeating, many times, "Your name is such and such. Your mother's name is this and this, your father's... son's... girlfriend's... (whoever the close people are, they should be brought up and their names clearly stated and repeated.) You live in (full home address, beginning with country, state, etc.). This is where you live. You are happy here. You want to stay here. Come home. Come home. Come back home. You are loved here. You are safe here. "

 

This is done to assure that parts of the soul frightened away by the entity return instead of getting permanently lost. This is an emergency procedure, very efficient if used right away.

 

If a Sitting Gui is just one episode, hopefully it has left. If it keeps happening, the room should never be slept in. (They are heavy and seldom move from room to room.)

[Birch]

Heh.

 

Reminds me of that recent thread where Shaktimama recounted asking the patient "What year is it, who's the president...etc" as part of hospital protocol to bring them back to shared reality.

 

What wasn't mentioned in that account and what seemed to be mentioned here, is the love/welcome/desire of the family expressed to have the person come back. I keep seeing this part come up again and again as (ritually) missing in "conventional" therapies and very present elsewhere.

 

I can't help but wonder, why the difference? Would "conventional" therapies work better if the people just gave a damn? And even if they don't really. Would it hurt to "go through the motions" on behalf of a spaced-out patient.?

 

 

 

Why the ear-pulling?

[Taomeow]

Heh.

 

Reminds me of that recent thread where Shaktimama recounted asking the patient "What year is it, who's the president...etc" as part of hospital protocol to bring them back to shared reality.

 

What wasn't mentioned in that account and what seemed to be mentioned here, is the love/welcome/desire of the family expressed to have the person come back. I keep seeing this part come up again and again as (ritually) missing in "conventional" therapies and very present elsewhere.

 

I can't help but wonder, why the difference? Would "conventional" therapies work better if the people just gave a damn? And even if they don't really. Would it hurt to "go through the motions" on behalf of a spaced-out patient.?

 

Why the ear-pulling?

Excellent catch, Kate. I'm sure being grilled by a "medical professional" at the critical moment when consciousness can be made or broken doesn't help one bit. A frightened soul might recall all those traumatic tests and exams of its childhood and recognize the place it has arrived at as difficult, emotionally bu-ren (numb) and even hostile. I'm sure there's many, many cases where the soul/consciousness promptly decides, OK, I"m outta here, THIS, I don't need.

 

Why the difference? Well, the emergency soul-healing procedure I've described was created by people who believe people actually have a soul... Our medical emergency procedures were devised by people who don't.

 

The ear-pulling -- for body awareness, to draw vital force into body awareness, to counteract the paralyzing numbness accompanying soul loss. The ear is a reflexological model of the whole body, in acupuncture it can be used as such (auriculoacupnctue, where only the ears are treated as a stand-off for the body). They are easier to handle in emergency than trying to stimulate the whole body all at once, and yet efficient enough. A recent Chinese Shamanism thread has pretty good lectures posted (I haven't finished listening and I found very little shamanism in the parts I have heard, but a lot of good solid taoist thought instead), and the author asserts, rightfully, that spirit must fully incarnate for there to be wholeness. Disease is the state where parts of the body are separated from parts of the spirit, incarnation is incomplete. (In an extreme case we have a zombie, incarnation largely absent, i.e. the body is functional because vital centers are intact but the will is gone, i.e. one or more of the shens are completely missing, are not incarnated in this body.) So pulling the ears physically is an aid to re-incarnation, in this case of parts of the soul that may have fled the horror rather than the whole soul as in the case of a death and rebirth.

[rsalazar]

Interesting, I have a friend who masturbates a lot (like several times a day), who has also suffered from entity attacks and encounters at night. Hmmm...

 

And I also wonder if drug usage makes one more vulnerable too (this person smokes pot as well)?

 

Anyone tried using Joel Signeur's symbolic entity repellant (Fig 5) before?

Hey Vortex,

Interesting that you mention this, Franz Bardon writes in Initiation into Hermetics that this whole process creates thoughtforms called larvae, which are created involuntarily by most people during times of extreme emotional excitement. There is a natural cycle of birth and death with these larvae in the mental sphere, but if these energy manifestations are given more energy by repeated returning to the same source of excitement over time, they will condense to a point where they develop their own will for self-preservation. His specific term for larvae created during repeated fantasies is "schema."

 

Years ago, I had a lady friend that was also visited by a classic incubus one night and called me one morning in hysterics crying about the event. She was unaware of these things and badly frightened. She told me she was awakened that night by what looked like a small man with large "greedy" eyes, which then jumped on her chest and made it hard for her to breathe. Interesting to note that this young lady had also been chronically indulging in masterbation from a young age (I believe from the age of 10), watching porn, etc. It seems in these cases that the initial development of some of these entities is within us, but then after a certain point they take up a life of their own.

 

I keep Joel's recommended symbols on my walls. All has been quiet, although I had a girlfriend recently that was fairly sensitive and occaisionally would hear stuff moving around at night. Interesting that this only happened when she was staying with me. For the most part, I heard nothing, although on one occaision she woke me up and I did hear something dragging across the floor in the next room, which was a first for me. I got up, went into the room, did an LBRP, and promptly went back to sleep. This seemed to quiet things down and she heard nothing further. This all happened despite having the symbols on the wall. He does state that these symbols are for souls that need to ascend, which the symbols help facilitate. So in this case, if there was something external, maybe the symbol didn't work because the entity was not human. In the end, I don't know.

 

Great background reading for general protectice procedures is Robert Bruce's site, www.astraldynamics.com, he is a treasure trove of info.

Cheers,

R

Edited August 16, 2010 by rsalazar

[Ninpo-me-this-ninjutsu-me-that]

Here's one of my "encounters" that I originally posted here Sleep Paralysis or Demonic Possession?:

 

This place used to be a pub (public bar) and the hallways still echoed of a hundred years of debauchery.

 

 

I remember staying in a hostel in Thailand where there were some pretty bizarre entities wandering the corridors due to the debauchery factor. I got out of there right quick the next morning.

 

Onto a nicer one though, staying in another hostel close to some Buddhist temples I was having a lie in, minding my own business, when what I can only describe as a Thai imp with a golden Thai roof type head and a big silly grin loomed his face right in front of mine(my eyes were closed)and shouted "get up, get up!!!". Needless to say I did. It's probably not polite to refuse Thai Buddhist imps with golden roofs for heads.

 

I've tried to find a picture of something similar online but can't. I rather liked him.