Ghosts in my Room

Well, not exactly, but I am sure this was more than a dream. First you should know some history.

For the last year, I have been having a strange thing happen to me. Once in a while, shortly after I fall asleep and begin to dream, I will start feeling strange (in my dream). I will begin to pass out, and start falling to the floor. I would usually try to move and yell out for help, but then wake up realizing the reason I can't move is because I am sleeping. My wife would tell me I was making a very strange yelling noise. I still don't know exactly why this is happening, but I have a hunch that my mind at least partially wakes up and realizes that I can't move, because I am asleep. In my dream I try to explain the feeling by passing out in the dream.

Well, lately I have been diagnosed with a heart problem that actually causes me to come close to passing out. The doctor told me that if it does happen, don't panic, just lay on the floor and pass out if I need to. Once on the floor, my blood pressure goes back up and I wake up again. Thankfully so far it never got to that point.

Ok, now on to what happened. I had just gone to sleep, and had started dreaming. I was dreaming that my wife and I were in a diner at a table talking to an older lady. I don't know who she was, and I don't remember what she was talking about, but I know it was mostly unimportant chatting.

Anyway, I started to feel that strange feeling again, and knew I was passing out. It kept getting worse, but for the first time I didn't panic and try to yell out. Instead, I just put my head on the table, stayed calm, and let it happen, remembering what my doctor had told me about my heart.

The dream went away, basically shut off, and I regained consciousness and realized I was in my bed. I am guessing that I was simply waking up. As the visual of the dream faded, a very interesting thing happened. As I watched the diner face away, I could still see the woman chatting away. Only now she was in my bedroom, standing next to my bed. Even stranger, I could see her, and my bedroom, through my closed eyes.

Everything was bathed in a strange light, very high contrast, that didn't seem to come from anywhere in particular. Everything seemed almost outlined in the strange light, even the woman, who was still chatting. I could sort of hear a voice, but I could no longer tell what she was saying. She seemed happy about it though.

I decided to open my eyes so I could tell if what I was seeing was actually my room, as it was beginning to fade. I took a few quick mental notes of exactly where things were and opened my eyes. I don't know how to describe it, but once my eyes were open something about how I was seeing changed, as if I was using a different pair of eyes. It's like my brain thought "Oh, there are my eyes, I was looking through the wrong pair." Compared to when my eyes were closed, it seemed dark, lit only by my alarm clock. But everything was exactly as I saw it with my eyes closed, except the woman was no longer there.

Another thing I simply can't explain is that for some reason I was, and still am, SURE that in some way, what I was seeing was reality, more so anyway than what I am seeing with my eyes open. It felt like I was finally actually, truly SEEING.

I don't make any claims to what was going on, including the possibility that I was still dreaming, but that's what happened. And I don't believe I was still dreaming. My wife thinks that I saw her in the room because I was just dreaming about her. I believe that the reason she was in the dream was because she was there in the room.

Paranormal Section Introduction

This first post will cover ghosts and the afterlife as an introduction to this section. Future posts will cover more of the paranormal, and will inculde some of my research and conclusions.

My definition of terms used in this section:

Soul: the "being" of a person or animal, the part of life that is conscious and self-aware
Ghost: the soul of a dead (once living) being
Angel: an angelic being that obeys God
Demon: an angelic being that has broken away from God and follows Satan
Spirit: a ghost, angel or demon; a created consciousness
Poultergiest: a spirit that intentionally causes trouble
Spectre: the physical manifestation of a spirit
Satan: the "leader" of the fallen angels
God: the creator of the cosmos
Hell: The realm apart from God
Heaven: The realm where God resides

To me there is no question that the afterlife is real. There are too many stories, too many photographs and too many people that believe in its existance. While I believe that many, if not most, of the photos and stories are hoaxes or simply not supernatural, there are too many to believe that every last one is not real. I also believe in God, and that would certianly have an impact on my afterlife beliefs. So as you can see, I believe in the afterlife. The question is not of its existance, but rather its nature.

My interest in ghosts is simple. I want to understand exactly what they are. I don't care to contact anyone, I don't want to interact when them, I primarily simply do research on the internet, interviews, and rely on my own past experiences.

The reason I want to understand ghosts is different than anyone else I have spoken to with similar interests. It is not exactly the ghost I am interested it, but rather the soul, the consciousness. I want to understand how it interacts with the physical. It might be said that my interest is more with the brain than with the ghost, because somehow the soul interfaces with the body using the brain. Since I cannot go cutting up peoples' brains (and wouldn't understand what I am cutting up anyway), I will study the question from the other end. This section will also include my research into dreaming as I believe there are some answers to this question there.

MYTHS:
I believe that many of the clues to the nature of the afterlife and the supernatural lie in the stories of the past. Myth is almost always based on reality in some way. Many myths of the past are part of a specific time period. I believe that most of these myths can be ignored from the beginning, I am most interested in the ones that have held throughout time, such as the myths that say you can see through ghosts. Even today that holds true in most stories I hear. Another is hauntings- many ghosts seem to stick to the place they died, had a strong emotional event (usually negative emotion) or a place that was special to them. There are also many stories of intense emotion coming from ghosts. If people are able to get over their own fear, they often seem to feel the ghost's emotions. These emotions are usually of a sad nature, but can often be anger or terror. Rarely there is a report of a ghost giving a peacful emotion, although I would also speculate that such cases simply would not be as likely to be reported.

MY EXPERIENCES:
I have seen two ghosts that I know of.

The first was at night in when I was a young teenager. I was standing near the top of a small cliff, about ten feet high or so. Floating right off the top of the cliff, a ghost appeared. It looked just as a ghost on TV would look. It was gray and transparent. It seemed to be clothed in ripped ghostly cloth. The cloth floated as if it were under water. Immeadiately I felt sadness, and I seemed to know that this woman was killed by her family. It only lasted for about 5 seconds.

I have seen the second ghost twice. I was driving to Tucson from Phoenix on I-10 at night. Suddenly out of nowhere, a man dressed in tan plaid pants, a brown coat and a brown bowler hat darted out into my headlights. I was going 75 miles per hour, there was no time to stop. Just before I hit him he vanished. My wife was with me and saw it too. A few months later I saw the same guy at the same place, this time he was stumbling back off of the road.

I have also had experiences with demons on many many occasions, and I don't care to have another one. 99% of these happened in Jordan. There was a time period of about a year that every third night or so demons would enter my room. Through thoughts and the occasional audible sound, they would try to convince me that God could in face lose to Satan, and with my help Satan was sure to win. In return, they could grant me popularity, power and magic. I kept telling them to go away and let me sleep. Sometimes they would, other times they would stay for hours until I finally got to sleep. It got to the point where I really was not scared, I just wanted to sleep.

There were a few that I actually saw. Two in particular I only saw when I would close my eyes, but it was more than imagination. It was almost like my eyes were still open, I could actually see something. the strange part is that when I left the house, they would be completely gone. One of them kept asking me to say his name. He told me over and over what his name was and asked me to say it. Eventually I did, while I was holding my cat. The moment I did, my cat looked at me and started hissing and scratching at my face. He bit at me and jumped from me in a fury, running away from me hissing. A week later or so, after almost going mad from seeing this demon when I closed my eyes, I made sure that there was no cat around and I said his name again. This time an ant on my foot bit me leaving a nasty little welt. I never said it again, and since then I have very intentionally forgot his name.

There were some demons that I saw with my eyes open. There was one that was generally in the shape of a stingray. It was so black that it seemed to suck in the surrounding light, or perhaps the surrounding darkness. If you were in a cave with no light source, you could see this thing because it would be blacker than the darkness. I know that is hard to imagine, but it's what it looked like. The first time I saw it I was in Jordan, again as a young teenager. I was with my brother Mike and a friend Jon who was staying over that night. We were downstairs in the livingroom near my room. We heard noise coming from the hallway that lead to my room. There was no way in or out of that area other than through the livingroom that we were in, and everyone else in the house was upstairs asleep. We called my dad on the intercom thinking that some Arab person may be in the house. He didn't believe us, which was strange in itself. Usually he would at least come take a look... We tried to forget about it, but we kept hearing noise. Eventually we saw a figure walk across the hallway door to the other room across from mine. We ran upstairs and called my dad again on the intercom. Again he didn't believe us, VERY strange being that we actually SAW a figure in the house. We grabbed anything that could be used as a weapon and hid in the livingroom upstairs. About an hour later, we convinced ourselves that we were making things up. We were hungry, so Jon Hart and I slowly went downstairs to get the poptarts that were stored up in my closet. We snuck into my room and no one was there. We searched the other rooms in the area and found nothing. The escape door on my window was still latched, meaning that no one had left the room because it could not be locked from the outside. We grabbed the poptarts and headed toward the stairs. On our way through the downstairs livingroom, we stopped dead in our tracks. Outside the window was the stingray that I had described, lurking in the dark walkway. It slowly floated upward toward the upstairs window. We didn't was anything to eachother, we just ran up the stairs. We both described the same thing to my brother who had remained upstairs. After a while, we had once again convinced ourselves that we were making it up. We decided to try to sleep. Mike climbed onto the couch, Jon climbed onto a chair and I got the hard tile floor. A few minutes later, all three of us shot up very suddenly. We all described the same thing- a very cold hand grabbed our backs, even mine, through the hard tile floor. Luckily nothing else happened that night. In the morning my dad made fun of us for being so scared that someone was in the house. It was years before I told my father what really happened.

There have been several other experiences, but those were the worst of them. Needless to say, I do not want any more.