Nightmares
Nightmares. An old meaning of this word refers to entities from the spirit world who eat energy to survive. Because of their lower-level energetic vibration, these dark beings like to eat negative energy full of anger and fear, so they attempt to affect their victim’s dreams and turn them into unpleasant situations. They drift around at night looking to find someone sleeping so they can take their energy without them knowing. As a person dreams of something unsettling, their emotional field begins to release the energy of fear and anger and other sad emotions. The entity scoops up this energy and eats it while the dream continues, riding the energy waves released by the dreamer for as long as they can.
Some old European legends believed to be from the sixteenth century say that this type of malevolent spirit includes the incubus (male) and succubus (female), both creatures that reportedly grabbed your hair in order to hang on while they rode your dreams. Some people believed back then that if you woke up the next morning and your hair was especially tangled and messy, a spirit of this type had caused this entanglement. They also believed that the incubus and succubus could encourage a person to dream about sexual activity so they could absorb the waves of sexual energy rising from the person during their dreams.
Some people wake from a bad dream with the feeling that there was a negative entity in the room around them while they were dreaming. While we describe any type of bad dream as a nightmare, very few nightmares are caused by a hungry spirit. In reality, these are very rare. Most nightmares are part of daily life dreams, through which we are working on our problems and concerns.
Feeling Something around You
When You Sleep
I teach my students psychic self-defense to help protect them in their daily life and in their dream state. This is helpful, as some dream practitioners like to engage in advanced practices, which can include astral traveling in their dreams. As they travel to the different planes in spirit world, it’s a good practice to ensure that they return from their travels with only the purest and highest energy surrounding them. The easiest way to keep a force field of protection around you is to surround yourself in the white-light field around your body, which I shared in chapter One.
However, there is a simple way to test if any type of entity has come around when you were asleep. This is a very old tradition. Here’s what to do:
Step 1: To ensure that no negative forces have been around you during your sleep, place a glass of spring or artesian water on the nightstand before you go to bed.
Step 2: In the morning when you wake, take two sips of the water. If the water tastes normal, all is well.
Step 3: If there is a bitter or acidic taste to the water, pour the rest of the water down the drain and surround your body in the white-light force field. Once this field is around your body, see the field expand until the white light fills the entire bedroom. Visualize the light clearing all the energy from the room. Continue expanding this powerful white-light shield outward from your bedroom until it surrounds your entire home. State out loud while doing this that nothing of a lower vibrational level can remain around you or in your home and that only beings of the highest and best vibration are welcome.
Again, this is a very rare occurrence. The old stories about nightmares come from a time when people did not fully understand how the conscious and unconscious mind operate to help us work through problems in our dreams.
Typically, this type of test and protection is only for advanced practitioners who are actively engaging in traveling to the various astral and spiritual planes through their dreams and sometimes need to do a cleansing checkup afterward.
How Nightmares and Dreams
Affect Us When We Sleep
To understand nightmares in general, we have to first understand what happens when we sleep. Each sleep cycle is important for the mind, body, and spirit. As we discussed earlier, sleep helps us work out our thoughts and emotions from daily experiences as well as travel to the other planes to communicate with the other side.
Sleep also allows the brain to sort out everything that we learned and encountered throughout each day—good, bad, and neutral. As we sleep, the brain sorts through all this information. It decides what is important and needs to be saved and stored, which we then refer to as a memory. It discards some data that was gathered that day that seems irrelevant and files the other experiences in the appropriate areas so that we can retrieve them at will.
Our brain is like a huge computer collecting and processing information so that we can use this information to help us in our lives. Just like our work on a computer, sometimes we browse the web, look at information, and move on to something else. Other times we bookmark this information to return and look at again at a later time. Some information we document, write down, and record so that we can refer to this material anytime we want.
We do this same action with our mind. We absorb information and store it, which we call learning something. When we sleep at night, our mind does a backup of the important data, just like we back up information on the hard drive of our computer. Some data we store in our higher-self consciousness, where it’s accessible in the global consciousness and on the other side. This is like storing data from our computers in the cloud.
Each bit of information and experience that we learn from helps us grow and evolve, taking that knowledge gathered and turning it into wisdom that we’ve gained. It’s really an amazing course of action of how we process and work at the mind-body-spirit level of connectivity.
In addition, while all this massive data collection and sorting is occurring each night, each sleep cycle is also allowing the body the time to repair and restore itself, which is why we are advised to sleep and rest for long periods of time when we are not feeling well. A good night’s sleep is so important because it allows us to sort through and release the stresses from the day. If we sleep well, we awake refreshed and revitalized, ready to face a new day, and we immediately begin to gather data and sort through it as soon as we wake up, including instantly noticing how light or dim it is outside, how warm or cool the temperature is, and what’s going on in our immediate surroundings.
Next, our thoughts kick in about what we need to do right away: get ready for work or school, wake the children—all the millions of bits of data that we process on a daily basis. At this point, many of us haven’t even gotten out of bed yet to start the day!
Holistic healers in ancient times would begin to treat a patient with a medical condition by sitting with the patient overnight and watching over them as the person slept and dreamed. When they noticed that the person was dreaming, they observed the process. When it appeared that the dream was over, they would gently wake the person and ask them what they had dreamt about while it was fresh in their mind. The clues provided by the patient from these dreams, especially their nightmares, often indicated what was going on with the person on the emotional and mental level. These dreams provided information about why the person was feeling stressed and ill at ease, which can contribute to physical illness in the body.
Most nightmares come from the worries that we carry with us into bedtime. As we are subconsciously sorting through this data of information that recently happened to us, some experiences have a stronger, more disturbing effect on us.
When we are in the deepest part of REM sleep, we dream, which is how we work through these thoughts and things in the subconscious and conscious minds that have been affecting us in some way. Some nightmares are not data driven; rather, they occur when we are physically ill or feverish, as the body is diverting all of its energy into healing. Nightmares can also be caused by eating too close to bedtime. When the stomach has to work overtime to digest food late at night before bed, it can cause unsettling dreams. This can especially be a problem with greasy food like pizza or heavy food like burgers.
Recurring Nightmares and
Night Terrors
The most disturbing nightmares don’t seem to be the ones people described in the old days as caused by an incubus or succubus. Rather, the most troubling are the recurring nightmares.
Some recurring nightmares are trying to send us a message, which we’ve discussed in the prophetic dreams chapter, chapter Three. There are also recurring nightmares, which are part of a daily life dream situation and which many times are caused by deep anxiety and stress related to a traumatic event in a person’s lifetime. High-stress events and PTSD are related to these types of dreams. The dreams can escalate from nightmares into what are described as night terrors, in which the person can act out while dreaming, moving around the bed, waving their arms and legs, punching, and speaking out loud. Night terrors continue as a type of recurring dream and can escalate during times of stress and anxiety in a person’s daily life.
Unlike a typical nightmare, which occurs and rarely happens again, night terrors continue to come to the person. In these cases, seeking the assistance of a psychologist is helpful to the person and allows them to release the emotional energy attached to the situation that is causing them the anxiety so that they can work it out in the conscious mind, which in turn helps the subconscious mind with its work in the dream state. The mind, body, and spirit are a very complex system of connections between the earth plane and the spirit planes, and we still don’t fully understand how it all operates on these levels.
In the case of night terrors, sleep studies have shown that they typically occur during a non-REM pattern of sleep when the person is transitioning from one sleep state to another. When we are having a dream or a regular nightmare, we are in deep REM sleep, and the body is prepared for dreamtime. Our brain sends signals to temporarily paralyze our muscles so that we don’t move during this stage of sleep. This is a nightly process in which the brain helps the body through the dream process.
During this sleep cycle, we stay in one position in order to keep our physical body from acting out the dream. This is why when you wake up from this deep stage of sleep with your dream on your mind, you also notice that you feel the need to change positions in bed. You may feel that you need to stretch, and maybe you even drooled on your pillow. Imagine if our brains didn’t keep our bodies from moving during these dreams—we could be running around the house and acting out all types of scenarios in our dreams every single night.
Sleep Paralysis
Many people ask me about a frightening condition called sleep paralysis, which is very different from the temporary muscle freeze of the nightly deep REM sleep cycle. In the deep dream sleep cycle, you are not aware of your physical body at all or that it is temporary paralyzed. If you wake up during this cycle, you feel disoriented, and it takes you a minute to feel fully conscious, but you are able to move your body instantly like normal.
In sleep paralysis, it is the opposite experience. The person wakes up mentally and is fully conscious, but they are unable to move their physical body, which is understandably a very frightening experience. You feel trapped in your body with no way to communicate to anyone else that you are awake.
Many people who have experienced this in the past didn’t understand what was going on with the body, and they feared that a supernatural being was holding them down and paralyzing them. I’m not saying that this may not be the case sometimes, as there are thousands of reports of alien visitations in which people report this happening to them and watching the alien in their room. I have never had an experience of this kind, so I only know what others have reported. My experiences have more to do with entities in the spirit world, and I have found that while they can be in the room and try to suck energy that is released from each of us, like an incubus or succubus, they don’t seem to be able to forcibly hold our body down in what I have experienced and studied.
Sleep researchers report that when sleep paralysis occurs, the body continues to operate and function with breathing and the heart pumping, but for a few awkward and scary moments (up to several minutes), the body is stuck in a paralyzed state until the brain reconnects and notices that the person has woken up and that the muscles in the body need the ability to move freely again.
Returning to the computer analogy, this phenomenon reminds me of when my computer is backing something up while I’m trying to work. If I move the mouse to perform an additional action, the computer can freeze up for a second as it tries to simultaneously respond to me as well as back up information.
If you ever experience sleep paralysis, try your best to remain calm. It helps to focus on trying to move any tiny part of your body: try wiggling your fingertips or toes at first. Small responses like this will be possible first, and then the rest of your free body movement will be restored. But don’t worry about this too much; it’s a rare occurrence.