I See Dead People

The memory of my first out-of-body dream is vague, as opposed to the lucidity of the myriad I have encountered since.

I was seventeen and had been working twelve-hour night shifts, 7pm to 7am, and in the mornings, when I was finally home, I would collapse into bed and pass out from fatigue.

That particular day, although unclear details, the puzzlement has stayed with me; the shaking myself out of an intangible parallel dimension — even though I hadn’t been entirely asleep as I came around to get myself up.

Unable to establish a feasible explanation, I can only recount it as a hallucinogenic trip without the stimulants or chemicals. Beyond puzzled, my logical mind tried to pore over the abstract actuality at the time.

Back then, I hung out with three older rebels, who were way out there, screaming unconventional. On one occasion — one of them decided to make a homemade Ouija board — just for fun!

Being a teenager, it was more than my life’s worth to appear anything but cool. So I just went with it, despite my anxiety over the indoctrination of my religious mother’s warnings of the occult.

I was absolutely shit scared!

The upside-down wineglass — a substitute for a planchette — darted with strength and speed across the board, with us hardly touching it, and definitely not pushing it. We all experienced a sudden sinister energy enter the room. We all bolted into the bathroom.

I have often reflected on that time and questioned if I had opened an occultic door to an unknown world.

I left home at fifteen, moving from place to place innumerable times. Looking back, I can vouch my out-of-body dreams only happened at properties where there was an unhappiness or oppression attached to them. Whether buried in the people or the circumstances and objects, it became a familiar theme to me. I have even contemplated if there is something more malevolent, such as an evil presence, to these stories.

I was eighteen when I moved in with some friends — a young married couple. My out-of-body incidents moved up a notch. All too often, I would overhear the husband punching out at his wife, hissing at her through his gritted broken teeth. Slaps and kicks would follow, along with her poor cries.

This was the 1980s, and we weren’t clued up about abuse.

I would take cover in my bedroom, and as I lay on my bed shutting out his abhorrent behaviour, I would attempt to zone out with meditative breathing — yet conscious I was unable to escape my surroundings. Out of nowhere, the couple’s yappy Jack Russell charged straight through my closed bedroom door — like wizardry — right through the wall at the opposite end of my room.

I witnessed this scene, with the dog running through my walls often and as an eighteen-year-old, it felt pretty fucked up to me.

A friend I lived with in my early twenties collected Wayang Golek puppet dolls when she visited Indonesia. They look like miniature devils.

Night after night, a large group of similar hooded spirits would huddle around me and gibber in a foreign tongue while they stared down at me. There I was, looking up at them, wondering what the hell was going on.

Every new home held unique sightings, and they were as real to me, as you and I. For years I wasn’t able to open up to anyone, it sounded too insane.

Decades later, watching a daytime Television show, I discovered the term: sleep paralysis. This little-researched, terrifying sleep disorder claims that possible causes may relate to people who either suffer from sleep deprivation, work unusual shift patterns, or suffer from PTSD.

I hadn’t tied in this phenomenon to my childhood trauma or disrupted circadian rhythm. Still, many times, the scientific explanation hasn’t always correlated with my acute paranormal experiences, or even the circumstances in which they occurred.

Still, when I was a new mother and exhausted from the nightly two-hour feeding responsibilities, I would close my eyes and leave my body, floating up to the ceiling or, at times, drift right out of my bed and through to the skirting boards.

One time when I was up at the ceiling, I turned back to look behind me to check I was conscious, and saw a tall man, wearing a long black coat and pork pie hat, lying right next to my daughter’s father.

For thirteen years, until recently, I was living in a flat that not only oozed oppression but had severe issues with damp and mould. It wrecked my belongings and health, and there was little intervention from the uninterested landlady.

Throughout those years, I witnessed uglier and uglier apparitions, who would either attempt to penetrate me, lay next to me, stand at the foot of my bed, or stand in a huddle at the entrance of my bedroom door. Much of the time I would float up above the bed.

One morning, on the cusp of dawn, I witnessed a distressed spirit standing on the other side of my room, clearly (to me), once a human. He desperately paced the width of my room, continuously cussing: Fucking…, fucking…fuck…fuck!! He looked up and saw my eyes peering over at him, and darted straight towards me, then jumped over my body, landing in the space next to where I lay. I was petrified, and I knew I needed to get myself above the thin veil of sleep or consciousness.

I had contemplated many years later whether I suffered from sleep apnoea, rather than possible sleep paralysis. At least with apnoea, it could be deemed I was passing out because of the difficulty in breathing, and witnessing ‘the other side’.

These visitations were so extreme and out of hand that I started to share my experiences with a Reiki therapist. I discovered she was also a Diviner and informed me during a telephone plea that she could sense twelve spirits in my flat.

Following her visit and divination skills, my friends and I felt a serene sense of peace and calm — the difference in energy was distinguishable.

Still, even though I stopped seeing the ugliest of visitors, nearer to the pandemic, ‘less was more’ became apparent, when the face of one of the evilest beings in the history of man, appeared not a metre from my face, as simply a stunningly beautiful man. Yet his 'evil' presence was tangible. I have never sensed that sinister feeling EVER, not even with the most frightening visitations or horror movies. There is nothing worldly that could explain that presence.

It is a fascinating yet unbelievable phenomenon; nonetheless, no matter how I acknowledge to my core each episode as a reality, it is of course, unintelligible to others.

I can now reflect, particularly on those past thirteen years in that dire, mouldy flat — those years were one of an entirety of personal pain, loneliness, dark desperation, and an awakening for me.

Many refer to this as the dark night of the soul, with Carl Jung comparing this transformational phase to ‘the alchemists’ concept of nigrido or chaos, emphasizing the confusion and uncertainty that accompanies this transformative experience’. Source.

My spiritual and emotional growth sprouts were pushing through, as arduous and intense as birth pangs, breaking me out of old dysfunctional restraints, paradigms, and unhealthy relationships. I had to dig so deep to find, even just a part of me, the true me, my authentic self, was buried so far down my psyche that even I was unable to know what I looked like.

Trauma can split us in half to the very depths of our psyche, rupturing our core. We don’t live in a two-dimensional world as much as we would wish to believe so, perhaps in order to feel unchallenged, a safe, unquestioned logic. And yet all isn’t always what it seems — our nightmares may be simply reflections and pointers to the nightmares in our inner world.

In the last few years, the more I have worked on myself through healing, talking therapy, and unpacking difficult memories through writing, the less out-of-body dreams have transpired. Even though there have been some answers with science, I believe Jung’s alchemical thesis holds more truth, for the spiritual and emotional transformation expression.

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