sleep

Sleep Stalking

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A follow up piece to Dreamy, or Terrifying?, speculating on things that might occur while sleeping. Subconscious, possibly supernatural things that seem a bit out of our realm. But maybe that’s because they are out of our realm, and perhaps when we sleep or are in a certain state, we too wander from what we normally consider ‘here’.

A couple of films first of how this thought manifested, the first one has been thought of by me, and quite possibly countless others over the years. As the concept was a new and shocking one at the time, and of course as I have mentioned before, psychological genius in the horror genre to make you afraid of something you have to do every night. Sleep.

Nightmare on Elm Street – if you don’t know it, look it up and you’ll understand. But for those who do know it, may or may not have been impacted by it, but some certainly were. In my mind rightly so, as the idea that something evil was waiting for you to fall asleep so they could stalk you wasn’t a comfortable one.

Flatliners – although this is about after death and coming back to life, something follows them back. And it is in dreamy or altered states they experience that creepy entity that is now ‘attached’ to them.

Ouija boards – it is said that they open a portal to that other side, but you can’t then see what you summon. And it is said they too can ‘attach’ to people, potentially causing disturbances and curses and even latch on generationally to a whole family. Maybe not entirely sleep related, but if that is a thing, maybe when you are unconscious, you are vulnerable to it.

Succubus and Incubus – both sleep demons and are the male and female counterparts for seducing people in their sleep. Sounds quite stalky to me. But it shows that there have been ideas of something latching onto you in your subconscious state for quite some time. The first mentions they say of them goes back to ancient Mesopotamia circa 2400 BC.

Reincarnation – in some religious faiths, they don’t believe in reincarnation, so if a child talks of a past life and experiences, some believe it’s demonic possession. That demons have accessed the child’s subconscious and are feeding them thoughts.

There is also the subject of night terrors that could be part of this, that it isn’t just sleep paralysis and they aren’t just made-up thoughts or hallucinations. Like I said, it could be that we are extremely vulnerable when we sleep, and not just because of things in the waking world…

(c) K Wicks

Are You Dreaming?

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Dreaming and the subconscious world we inhabit each night is an interesting subject. And one I have already speculated upon in my articles Dreams and A Quantum Leap, In Dreams and will probably reference this article in one being worked on currently called Sleep Stalking. But this one is for the meanings and beliefs around them from other cultures and times and how they were viewed, and to a point, probably still are today. It’s a strange thing that no-one can really define, test or prove with any certainty, yet many people experience them in some form. It’s interesting once you start to read about how they are viewed or understood by different parts of the world.

Baku Yokai – Japanese dream devourer “The Baku Yokai is revered as a powerful force of good and a sacred protector of humanity. It has been considered a symbol of good luck, health, and protection against nightmares and evil spirits. The image of the Baku has been used as a talisman and amulet to ward off bad dreams and illness.”

Aboriginal – Dreamtime “The Dreaming is used to represent Aboriginal concepts of Everywhen, during which the land was inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities. These figures were often distinct from gods, as they did not control the material world and were not worshipped but only revered“. I personally prefer the their term for it Everywhen, rather than the anthropologists naming it dreamtime.

Egyptians believed dreams were messages from the Gods. Although they had Bes the God of dreams, and Tutu, to protect from bad dreams, so gods protecting you from gods?

Chinese theory is yin and yang are out of balance and dreams come into being. Which ties into lots of the dreamology discussions in modern times, tying it into psychology and waking mental disturbances causing subconscious nocturnal struggles. But could it be that we are given a chance in our dreams to rebalance our waking lives, letting us run through some things that wouldn’t be possible in real life, or would take too long? Maybe that only counts if you remember the dream, I’m not sure, I still haven’t decided my position on that idea.

Greek mythology had a land of dreams. Morpheus being their God of dreams and nightmares and the subconscious sleep realm. Fitting them perhaps that they chose that name for the character in The Matrix.

Mayan – “the Tzotzil Maya see dreams as a way to “live a full life” and “stay alive.” They believe that dreams are a means of “seeing with the soul” what we can’t fully comprehend with our body and mind.”

The main religions also believe dreams often carry a message or prophecy from the divine.

Night Hag – closely related to the below definition of nightmare, this is now mostly known as sleep paralysis these days, not an incubus sitting on your chest giving you nightmares. But it is said that was the belief for quite some time and still is in certain places, folklore of it is found in Scandinavia, Europe, Africa, Canada, US. They have similar tales in China, South Asia and South East, The Middle East and so on. All having a myth about ghosts or demons affecting you while you sleep and paralysing your earthly body while you are forced to endure the experience.

Nightmare – original meaning – a mythological demon or goblin who torments others with frightening dreams. 

Day Dreaming – “Daydreaming is the stream of consciousness that detaches from current, external tasks when attention drifts to a more personal and internal direction. There are various names of this phenomenon including mind-wandering, fantasy, spontaneous thoughts, etc.”

An odd thing really, when you think so many clearly experience it and it would be appear to be a common occurrence, why it should be given a demonic overtone. Why is that the go-to for explanation, when we clearly have logical minds among us and always have. Why does the fantastical or the hysterical win out when to comes to coming to a conclusion? Or maybe the question should be, why do we suffer from such horrible visions in the form of nightmares, when we are supposed to be in the resting cycle? It’s not very restful or relaxing to be anxious about going to sleep, worried about what you will have to go through in a place you don’t recognise, where time doesn’t exist and you are at the mercy of the experience. But dreams entice you and can make the sleep world seem so much safer than the real world, until you start to see like Alice did when she fell sleep, and then fell down the rabbit hole. Whether you are asleep or awake, not all is as it seems…

Max Ernst

(c) K Wicks

Dreamy, or Terrifying?

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It’s a strange thing, that odd occurrence when you go to sleep that happens to many people. You dream. There have been studies, thought, ideas and speculations about what happens and where we ‘go’ when it does. Some say it’s our astral self experiencing things on another type of reality. Others think it could just be a bunch of electrical impulses creating images and thoughts while we sleep. But whatever is actually going on, you can’t deny that some of the ideas are really quite interesting. If you like that sort of thing.

Night terrors – a strange experience for those who go through it, acting out terrifying events in your dream they say. I can only presume that the normal mechanism of our bodies and minds recognising and acknowledging the ‘separation time’ of sleep, is absent in those people. And when encountering something that requires a reaction in the dream world, the body reacts in the normal realm to the other stimuli. Perhaps.

Nightmares – perhaps the lead in to the night terrors, but for most people they stop at being acted out physically in this realm, yet can seem to occur in the other one as a thought process and seem as though it is being acted out. Perhaps in a virtual reality kind of way Matrix style, because that was all done in their head, lying in a chair, only the point of death physically transferred. So, same set up for nightmares and maybe even dreams, where you are ‘plugged in’ to wherever it is that we go, and your consciousness is transferred somewhere else. Maybe the nightmares are where you get trapped in between and you are in both which is where it gets extra weird. The films Nightmare on Elm Street spring to mind here, and if you know them, you’ll know why.

Sleep realm – it’s a strange thing, to think we are kind of absent from our lives for around 6-8 hours per day, although there are speculations by some that we do go somewhere else and have ‘experiences’ there too. So, living a dual life of sorts I guess, but a subconscious one you can’t remember when you emerge back into this one. Funny to think of the terminology for it all to – you wake ‘up’ and ‘fall’ asleep. Could it be that we go down somewhere for the resting phase, and rise up again for the awake phase?

Dreams – and what of that process that occurs when we are submerged into the subconscious, we call it dreaming, but what is it? Just a recreation of all the input our daily life throws at us, being downloaded at night for storage they say, just like a computer I guess taking a back-up or archiving information. But it really does seem to be more complex than that, and although studied, it appears we still don’t actually have a clue. I wonder sometimes if that’s part of why they want a chip in people’s heads, and to try and get into their heads as they put it, because it may just be access to the other ‘reality’ that is created through the sleep process. Maybe.

And that’s where the potentially terrifying bit comes in, that there is somewhere else you ‘go’, where you can’t control when, or how, or what and are at the mercy of that. And is it possible that once something knows you can move between the worlds, and is not maybe restricted by two states as we are with sleep and awake, that they move freely between the two. Either we bring something back with us, or it follows us, or possibly always had its own route. Things we can’t see with our open eyes, yet in our sleeping state, we appear to ‘see’ without having our eyes open, so what it is we are seeing with? And who is to say that something is not there just because we don’t ‘see’ it, we are calibrated to be able to view certain spectrums of light so maybe there are things there invisible to us, yet they are there. Being named as apparitions or ghosts perhaps when a glimpse is caught, or if someone has a slightly different ability to everyone else and can see more than others. You just never know…

(c) K Wicks

A Quantum Leap, in Dreams

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Remember the TV show Quantum Leap? I used to thoroughly enjoy watching it, the funny yet poignant tasks Sam had to complete each time. Just trying to find that final leap to get home, and I guess, be himself?

But I thought of it again recently, in relation to dreams. Thinking although you might remain as you (some people are themselves and sometimes not in dreams I suspect), you are transported to different places, and times. And as we don’t actually know what happens when we dream, or where our consciousness wanders to if it is indeed away from our physical realm, who can say for sure?

Dreaming and sleep have been the subject of many studies and experiments, so is of interest to ‘the establishment’ in some format. Yet I wonder about the distinction between what we know as awake or asleep, the conscious and subconscious hours of our lives. Slipping in and out of worlds and states of being on a consistent loop. And in that, is it possible that we either create realms with the ideas and thoughts of dreams? Imagination Land episodes spring to mind from South Park. My article Creating a nightmare reality, covers that angle a bit.

Or, the other possibility. That there are things already existing on the ‘other side’, which can potentially gain access to us and our thoughts through sleep. And maybe, just sometimes for some people, they aren’t confined to the hours of slumber. Could be that some follow people back, once they have been disturbed and become ‘attached’. Are we sure that when we wake we leave where we were? And are we so sure that once we do wake, have we awoken to reality, or just another layer of a dream. Like the film inception depicted.

People write of terrifying things lurking in thoughts, dreams, ideas, other dimensions and times. Many people. Is it just an idea that hints at a darkness in ourselves, that the dream world allows to run wild? Or it is already something running wild, waiting to become part of someone’s thoughts, searching out a ‘host’ for its psychological torment and access to the physical realm? Quite possibly it is none of that, and while we sleep there is just a jumble of electrical signals forming strange and vivid ‘performances’ of life and experience which some people then imprint and retain knowledge of. Maybe they are for purpose and hold meaning, or maybe, it is just sleep and they really are just dreams…

(c) K Wicks

Don’t Fall Asleep

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When Nightmare on Elm Street was all the rage, I was too young to watch it, but went out of my way to as with many films of the 80’s and 90’s.

In equal measure I was impressed and mortified (and slightly affected). A simple function we have to succumb to, and is a requirement in our daily lives. Sleep. I thought Wes Craven was a genius, taking something so normal and so necessary you can’t escape it, and turning it into something sinister and well, nightmarish. Of course, there was the twist of what happened when you fell asleep, but the concept of just making someone fear normal daily life was something different. Usually, a horror film or scary concept has an atmosphere to go with it. It’s night, or dark, or there is a basement, or ghosts. But this was just an average daily routine turned into a terrifying idea.

I can’t help noticing, as many have, the strange number of deaths that appear to be occurring, and are being reported on, of people of all ages just suddenly dying in their sleep. I think most of us in the know, know what seems to be the contributing factor to that, but what is the mental effect of that on others? What are the psychological repercussions of fearing to go to sleep, to have a heavy weight constantly on your mind, wondering, not knowing if you have been marked.

I imagine it could lead to all sorts of thoughts, fears and worries. Especially as many don’t want to talk about it or brush it off as having always happened. And maybe it always did, but no-one noticed? Not so sure myself, but either way, we are all on a clock. Time keeps ticking for us all and one day will be our day, but as with all who get older, I guess you just hope it isn’t today…

(c) K Wicks

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Dreams

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DREAMS

(This is a chapter from my book Meeting in the Middle of Nowhere, link below).

Another reason for our differences arose shortly after we met. The subject of dreams came up and he reacted a bit strangely about it in my view. He doesn’t have them, none that can be remembered in any way at least, but found it bizarre that I did so much. And that I could replay them the next day. I have them every day, sometimes recurring, but mostly all dramatic and tiring. I had spent years despairing of them sometimes, unable to shake them upon waking. Having them follow me throughout the day, the feeling, the memory, the tiredness. Sleep is often not refreshing for me, but because my brain feels so overworked everyday just by thinking, I require sleep. I cannot escape it.

The whole concept of the above is as foreign as it could get to him when I broke it down. Why would you go through the motions of things that aren’t real when you’re asleep? All I could do was agree, it is weird and I cannot explain that bit, in fact, I have been trying to for a while now.

I watch a lot of horror (or at least have done), and often used to have apocalyptic dreams involving zombies, alien invasion or some such drama. Even when I hadn’t watched the films for quite some time, they could come back any time. Or that is how it looks on the outside. It’s easy to say that our dreams come directly from what we watch – and I have considered it, but what I go through is usually relevant to real life rather than fantasy. Anxiety, stress, worry, fear, anger – all the things we are taught to suppress in our daily lives. They just happen to manifest by way of ridiculous scenarios.

Again, to someone who does not have dreams, or visual replay of any kind, that is crazy talk. But to me it’s normal now, not enjoyable, but a bit more controllable. The trick is, not to get so wound up or anxious in real life, because it will follow me into sleep. There is no respite or escape in sleep, my brain does not shut down, and it just goes somewhere else and takes me with it.

As I got to my early twenties before I knew how to drive, I began to have driving dreams. I wasn’t even learning and had no immediate plan to, but as it was something I knew would come up, it began to feature. My mother didn’t drive and neither did my two older siblings so I had nothing to gauge it on either, so maybe that added to it. The amusing thing about those ones though, was that I had no idea how to drive, so in the dreams the car would usually roll into a hedge or down a hill. Expressing to me my main concern was that I didn’t know how to, rather than I would have to learn.  There was a partly funny, partly scary one though, where I was driving up a hill so steep that the car just tipped back on itself. So I will admit, when going up steep hills thereafter, my brain would default to a mild fleeting feeling of panic, remembering that dream.

Another that featured a few times, were teeth dreams. Occasionally I would have a dream where some of my teeth fell out. If you read any of the dream interpretation books, they say ones like that mean you are worried about money. Personally as I always had a dentist appointment booked around that time and have a fear of the dentist, I put it down to that. Although once you know how much you have to pay for your dental treatment, that could definitely give you teeth-related money dreams!

But as a depressed teenager cut off from the real world by my own mind, I found day-dreaming to be my saviour. I found living with my mother’s weirdness very draining and my only escape was to wander off in my head. I would dream of normality, try to imagine my future, what I wanted to be, dream of being brave and impetuous. Anything that could distract me from my actual reality, I read books, drew pictures, watched films, embroidered, wrote diaries, cleaned, walked our dogs (something that helped me get over agoraphobia), anything I could to not have to stop and be where I was.

I must admit, there is still a similarity as I do not have a quiet mind. But as an adult, I don’t need to daydream anymore, because I can change what I want if I need to. If something in my life is worrying me or is wrong, I can sort it out. I didn’t have that luxury when I was 15, so dreaming was my temporary way out.

The study of sleep and dreams has been going on for an age and I am aware there are people who don’t dream at all. Or some who don’t remember them in any way who do visualise, so this is a varied subject whatever your thought process or visualising capabilities. There are also the extreme sleep conditions, where people have night terrors and actually act out the fear or anxiety being experienced. Where dreams and nightmares can take on a life of their own. There really are some strange things going on inside our heads, whether we are in control or not, and even whether we are awake or not. That can be quite a scary concept.

(c) K Wicks