Let me backtrack a bit, to some childhood visitations I didn’t enjoy.
During my time at primary school, while I concealed my otherness during the day, I was assailed at night by beings very different from the ‘imaginary playmates’ or mysterious uncle.
This began when I was very young and went on through most of my primary school years. I can’t now fix a time when the visits stopped. It wasn’t a sudden stop so much as a gradual dwindling.
I expect this is one experience about which many of my readers will go, ‘Oh yes, me too!’ I know now that other young children have had similar experiences in the scary dark; many remember these even as adults, and talk about them quite openly. Does this mean they really are ‘imaginary’ in the sense of not being factually true? And if they aren’t ‘real,’ does that invalidate other non-ordinary experiences? I think there’s a case to be made either way. But I’m not investigating arguments here; I’m just recounting what happened to me, in my own awareness.
I’m not speaking of nightmares (though I had my share of them too). I mean waking experiences – far too wide awake, kept so across the hours by a fear of falling asleep and, I thought, being even more endangered thereby. Important to remain on guard! To resist.
As an adult, I’m able to compare my ‘clair’ senses – clear seeing, clear hearing, etc. I have only a little clairvoyance (when I see, as if with my physical eyes, things which for most people aren't there) – though it seems to have been working well when I was a child and saw my ‘imaginary’ people. I have more clairaudience (that is, hearing things which aren’t in everyone’s physical hearing). My strongest gifts are clairsentience (knowing things by feeling, either physical touch – e.g. when I do psychic readings I find it helpful to hold the client's hand – or via my emotions, ‘getting a feeling’) and claircognisance (an inner knowing).
Most of the time I didn’t physically see my night visitors, though sometimes I got an idea in my mind of their appearance. I heard them clearly enough, but in my head, which is not quite the same thing. I want to say it’s telepathy – which implies the visitors were real, with an existence outside my mind. The truth is, I don’t know. They felt very real at the time!
They were nasty, scary, threatening. Malevolent.
Some of them hid inside my bedroom cupboards, and resembled pictures of goblins; others lurked in the passageway just outside the bedroom door and were taller, indistinct in shape, somewhat like the stock portrayal of ghosts.
They spoke in whispers, taunting me. Because they were speaking inside my mind, they tried to take control of my mind.
Some manifestation of my subconscious? Or are there really demons? I know people who would subscribe to either theory. I myself don’t have any definite evidence either way, so I can only say I don’t know. When I do state categorically that something is or isn’t so, it’s based on strong empirical evidence that I have experienced in person. Although others may explain it some other way, I can no longer doubt. But the night visitors? Hmmm, maybe … I don’t know.
So why do I include them here? Because at the time I did think they were real, and that they were separate entities from myself. Also because of how I reacted to them, which I now think was important training for me.
Occasionally, when I was very little, I was scared enough to call out for Mum or Dad to come and save me. They always did. They did all the usual parental things in that situation: putting the light on to show me everything was really just as it looked in daylight; opening cupboards so I could see there was nothing there except what should be; leaving the passage light on all night; fetching me a glass of water; sitting and talking to me a while.
Dad was especially good at staying with me, telling me stories he made up in his head as he went along – enthralling stories full of good magic, which I begged him not to stop. This also happened after I had nightmares. I remember some nights when he stayed with me spinning tales until first light! (I am still not good at putting the light out and getting my rest if I am reading a particularly enthralling story in bed.) Then he had to get up and go to work next day after very little sleep, poor man.
But as I got older, I was reluctant to disturb Mum and Dad. Perhaps they were also reluctant to keep on being disturbed! Somehow I imbibed the idea that I was ‘too old’ to keep needing the same kind of comfort. However, the visitors kept returning, and kept whispering inside my mind.
So I embarked on a program of mental resistance, stiffening my mind (it felt like) against their words and the feeling of their malevolence … and against my own fear. By an effort of will I would shut out what they were saying.
Often, I needed to do something extra, like repeating lines from songs in my head over and over, or repeatedly saying a prayer. Sometimes it was the Lord’s Prayer (my parents weren’t religious, but they didn’t want to make me ‘different’ by refusing to let me attend religious instruction classes at school). Sometimes it was a brief and basic prayer of my own for protection. I myself believed in both God and Jesus, and also the angels.
Later I distracted myself by playing games: mind games which I devised myself, which were a way, it seemed, to temporarily alter reality.
I would imagine my head getting huge and my feet tiny, or the other way about – concentrating, visualising, feeling it happen physically (or persuading myself I did). Have lots of other kids played these games too, on wakeful nights? I don’t seriously think my physical body changed shape or size. But if there is such a thing as a mental body (a term I have seen used in some esoteric literature) then perhaps that really did. I FELT as if I physically changed.
So, although these experiences may very well not constitute psychic or magical phenomena, they do point to the power of the mind. I was able, eventually, to overcome and dismiss my fears.
The training I value most was the resistance by willpower – where, by a huge effort of will, I just shut my mind hard against the inner voices until they could no longer impinge. It felt like doing battle, and winning.
I was going to call it ’self-training,’ but I’m not quite sure if that's what it was. Could something so complex have occurred to me to do, as a child? Perhaps … if I’d brought the knowledge in from another lifetime. Or could it have been received from my guides? Or did I figure it out for myself, as part of the play by which all children learn?
Whatever, the experience strengthened my willpower, and suggested that it’s possible to reshape reality by the power of thought.