Dreams have been a big part of my life, even before I started having Narcolepsy symptoms. Hallucinations and sleep paralysis were not new to me, but at around the age of 15, I began to have particularly interesting experiences. In retrospect, these were episodes of sleep paralysis and hallucinations, but I never thought of them as such.
Sleep paralysis
When laying in bed and going to sleep, I started to feel something I could only describe as an invisible body laying on top of my body. It did not happen every night, but it happened often. I felt my body was being pushed down into the mattress and it was hard to move. Sometimes I could not talk or scream, and sometimes I felt like I was moving my legs up and down, but they did not really move. Sometimes I felt like the comforter was being pulled or swooshed away and I had to hold it with all my strength so it would not lose it. I also remember waking up in the middle of the night, feeling the calm state of my body, heart beating slowly. I was aware of laying in bed, but in such a peaceful state of mind that I felt I did not need to breathe. For the first times I suddenly realised I was not breathing so I took a deep breath because I knew I could not live without breathing, but after experiencing this more often I was not afraid, I just enjoyed the peace, took a breath when I felt it was time and went back to sleep when I was ready. These experiences progressed, and I started to hear strange sounds when I was laying in bed, waiting to fall asleep. It was something like the sound of rain or white noise. It usually came around the time I was starting to feel the invisible body pushing me down. After a few nights of hearing this noise, I began to notice that when I took a breath my body levitated. This felt very strange, and I was unsure if this was okay, if this was dangerous.
Consciously transforming from awake to dreaming
As time passed and these experiences did not stop, I decided to let this go it’s natural way. With a breath, I levitated, and with breathing out, I sank again in a sort of three steps up, two steps down movement. The time passed, and every time I had this happening, I wanted to know how far I could go. I ended up close to the ceiling, then I slowly moved to the ground and looked around my room. This happened a few times, and I figured out that I was aware in that state of mind. I tried to decide beforehand what to do and what to explore, but I never did those things. I even tried to make a note of what I wanted to do, but of course, I was not thinking of a todo list on my table in this state of mind. My awareness was somehow different than when I was indeed awake.
One night I got farther than ever before. I exited my room, walked through the hallway, stopped to look into my parent’s bedroom, saw my father go to the bathroom and back to sleep, then entered my brother’s room and flew out the window and started to dream. There were a few interesting things that I noticed during this particular experience. First, I was never afraid of what was happening. Second, all this was like an uncut sequence, from the time I had my pyjamas on and entered my bed, until I flew out the window. Third, I asked my father the next morning if he had gone to the bathroom in the night and he said he did.
I started to Google this and did not find much. Something called astral projection came up during my search, in my mind, this was more like conscious or vivid dreaming.
Beating the Devil
These experiences were so frequent that I could not ignore them. Most of the time it was peaceful, but sometimes it was frightening. Many of those felt like someone was trying to take me and I had to fight back with all my mental power to win. I remember one incident where an evil red hairless being that looked like the devil tried to pull me from the bed up to the window shelf and held me in a chokehold. He wanted me to come with him, but I refused, but he was going to take me anyway. This was a difficult mind battle. He held his hand in my mouth so I could not speak, with the fingers like he was squeezing my cheeks, the index finger on one cheek and the thumb on the other. When he was about to move away from the window shelf, I bit him, as had as I could, in the muscles between those two fingers and to my surprise, it felt like biting a sponge. This was very strange but it made him let me go, and he disappeared. I cannot tell if this was a dream or a hallucination, but I woke up exhausted, and I am sure that “night”, I beat the devil!
I still have these experiences but after many years of “dream training” I am rarely frightened by them, it is more like a mission that I have to deal with, and I never give up!
Have you experienced something like this? How did it make you feel? Please comment below!
