Nightmare or Astral Attack?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

And although at first glance it may seem that a direct intrusion into our dreams may seem very dangerous, nevertheless night contact with spirits is not always aggressive and violent. If a ghost appears in your dreams, it is possible that he simply wants to communicate, and not scare you. The very content of the dream often reveals the intentions of the entity. Sometimes we are only required to free ourselves from the inner fear of this kind of contact, and then we can understand what message the spirit wants to convey.

But you cannot misunderstand the ghost that looms over us in a threatening dream. These predatory attacks have much in common with the phenomena known as nightmares; ignoring our dreams, they concentrate on our half-asleep state.

Many of us have had the experience of waking up with the feeling of someone else's presence in the room. It can often appear malicious or, at the very least, threatening. Confident that he is fully awake and is now awake, a person tries to react to a hostile creature - and understands: he cannot move, as if something evil had completely paralyzed him.

Often, those with whom this happens feel as if they were nailed to the bed, or experience a sensation of strong vibrations in the limbs and throughout the body. They are not able to scream, therefore they simply lie helplessly, and meanwhile the evil entity creeps up to the bed, bends over the victim, and sometimes sits down or lies on it. Those who go out to open their eyes and peer with a blurred gaze at their tormentor, as a rule, see a blurry figure - as if a shadow had taken shape; sometimes her face is familiar to the unfortunate, but often resembles something of the worst nightmares.

The above example is a classic one, but although it has the hallmarks of spiritualistic attacks, it also describes well the phenomenon known as "paralytic attack". It is also called nightmares - this is a universal phenomenon, closely related to the physiological process of sleep itself.

Plunging into drowsiness, a certain part of the brain blocks our ability to move, therefore we do not actually replay the content of our dreams. Sometimes, upon awakening, a person comes to a state when he has not yet fully awakened and did not have time to get rid of natural paralysis. Arriving in a semi-conscious and hallucinatory hypnopompic state, a person realizes that he cannot move, and explains this by a series of visions that appeared to him from the world of dreams and still have not left him.

Dr. David Hufford, in his landmark work The Terror that Comes in the Night, offered a complete exploration of the myths and folklore associated with the classical paralytic attack, as well as an informational summary of the completely natural processes that lead us to mistake this phenomenon for supernatural.

As a rule, the above example is just just a classic paralytic attack and is explained by absolutely ordinary physiological factors. But almost all of these symptoms can be present with real attacks from otherworldly entities. This has caused serious disagreement between people who insist on purely scientific explanations for this kind of sensation, and those who believe in the supernatural.

In reality, neither side generally wants to hear that both are right. Sometimes these experiences are only triggered by shattered nerves and misinterpreted hypnagogic hallucinations. And yet, in a number of other cases, he testifies that the ghost makes predatory attacks on a person, while the unfortunate is asleep. But how do we distinguish between these two so closely related (and hotly debated) phenomena?

Skeptic's Corner

Mental illness and dreams

One of the symptoms of schizophrenia, a very serious mental illness, is the inability to distinguish dreams from reality. When studying a situation where only one person in the family complains about nightmares, you should pay close attention to the sensations that he describes. Also, note how he talks about it. In schizophrenia and some other mental illnesses, a person's thoughts get confused and a state called "magical thinking" develops, in which case the patient begins to link unrelated events in an inexplicable and bizarre way.

There is some degree of abnormality in almost all paranormal situations, but when the alleged attacks of ghosts actually turn out to be a manifestation of mental illness, the level of abnormality increases by an order of magnitude. Treat people suffering from these experiences with empathy, but do not forget that sometimes it can be due to a mental disorder. If you have the slightest doubt about the client's stories, strongly recommend that he see a qualified psychiatrist to rule out the possibility of hallucinations.

It is not difficult if several people living under the same roof experience similar sensations. Despite the fact that people sometimes realize with horror that they are unable to move due to a certain function - it turns on in the brain stem region to cause sleep paralysis in falling asleep - it is unlikely that this condition is contagious. The probability that two people will have the same version of a paralytic attack in one place and at the same time is extremely small.

If you want to make sure that this kind of phenomenon affects several residents of the house, also ask all participants to document their impressions. Have them record the date and time of each incident and describe how they woke up, what the room looked like, where they lay, and other relevant details of the attack. Ask clients to compare notes only after each of them has transferred all their feelings to paper.

If, as a researcher, you are called after an unpleasant incident, isolate the participants and talk to each one separately. Take notes and compare the results of the survey. If many of the details match up - especially the descriptions of the malicious entity itself - then you are most likely dealing with actual ghost attacks.

If the victim lives alone and cannot know if someone else in the house is experiencing the same, how can you be sure that this phenomenon is precisely an attack by an astral entity, and not an ordinary nightmare? There are a few specific things that often happen in a spiritistic attack, but are extremely rare in a paralytic attack:

• after attacks, noticeable marks remain on your body that do not disappear for 15 or more minutes after waking up;

• Prolonged attacks have a serious impact on your health - much more than the usual lack of sleep;

another person becomes a witness to the attack in reality;

• you will find out that other people, having slept in this place, have complained about this kind of sensation;

• during the attack, you clearly distinguish the numbers on the alarm clock and in the future you can make sure that you saw exactly the time when everything happened (because during a person's sleep another part of the brain is involved, letters and numbers in our dreams appear blurry and indistinct. If the numbers on your alarm clock are clearly visible, this is a sure sign: you are awake and awake).

Absolutely supernatural incidents rarely leave distinct physical traces on the human body, although sometimes this still happens. Scratches, scars, areas with burst capillaries and unexplained bruising - all these consequences can sometimes be observed in a particular victim of a paranormal or spiritualistic attack. If you suspect that the marks were left by an entity, your first task is to document the phenomenon, and then to study it in detail and rule out all possible earthly explanations. Once you are convinced of the absence of natural causes, move on to considering the supernatural.

If you are suffering from more frequent nocturnal attacks, and at the same time your health is severely deteriorated, the two phenomena may be interrelated. When you are constantly feeling sick or completely exhausted, because you cannot rest and sleep in any way, you should consider the possibility that an uninvited night visitor is feeding off your energy. Here, as in the case of other symptoms of the alleged spiritualistic attack, it is possible to move on to considering supernatural causes only after making sure that there are no natural ones.

If necessary, you should see your doctor to rule out any physiological factors that may explain your weakened immune system and other complaints. Remember, the subconscious sometimes speaks to people in an unusual way, and it may well be that nightmares are a manifestation of your instinctive awareness of a physiological illness - they are a warning that prompts you to check your own health. Take precautions and do not disregard possible material explanations for a supposedly supernatural phenomenon.

This information about the spirit, which is easy to verify, is another good indicator that you are suffering from the attack and not from nightmares. Many eyewitnesses who have experienced both a classical paralytic attack and a spiritualist one say that their tormentor seemed to them like a shadow bending over the bed. Ask the victim to write a description of the attacker. If you yourself survived the attack, do your best and try to examine the ghost in detail, and then write down all the details of his appearance - everything you can remember.

Although spirits rarely give themselves away, giving their full name, date of birth and date of death, sometimes it is still possible to find out such details and determine a specific deceased person. When investigating the data obtained during the night attack, do not limit yourself to just studying the history of the house itself. Of course, it is very useful to find out if one of the previous owners died here, but the ghosts are not at all tied to their place of residence, as many folk legends say.

Human ghosts love to hover in areas that played an important role in their earthly life, but they are not tightly attached to them. In addition, if a new house is erected one day next to the old dwelling, it may well be that the ghost from the destroyed building will move to the one built in the neighborhood.

Sometimes the spirits are very devoted to a friend or relative, and when moving, they follow him to a new place of residence, even if it is many kilometers away from their grave. And some ghosts may even become attached to a person whom they did not know in earthly life. Ghosts have their own desires and quirks - they are as changeable and mysterious as those of living people. Some of them begin to obsessively pursue the first person they meet, who, due to his misfortune (or luck), simply drew attention to them.

In the case when it is not possible to find out the identity of the spirit, there is another technique with which it is not so difficult to distinguish a nightmare from a spiritualistic attack. When attacks occur regularly, it is worth asking someone to watch the sleeper. If this person witnesses the attack and clearly senses the presence of a malicious entity, you will have strong evidence: the victim is tormented by more than just nightmares. It is better to choose an "observer" who has some sensitivity and ability to make contact with spirits.

Personally, it seems to me that for the perception of otherworldly phenomena, mankind has not yet invented a device that would be more perfect than our senses, but sometimes technology can still cope with such a task. Nevertheless, carefully analyze the data obtained. On the camera, images of ghosts are extremely rarely obtained the same as mediums see them - this is due to completely different methods of perception - hence the different pictures.

Be open and always double-check your results. Keep in mind: when a technique breaks down, this can also be a sign of ghost activity, especially if several devices break at once or breakdowns always occur at the same time as the attacks on the sleeping person.