Hi all,
I would first of all like to express my sincere gratitude at the work skeptics do to debunk fraudsters, dubious beliefs and general misinformation in our world. I want to let you all know, before you read the following, that I consider myself a sane, intelligent person. I am also a natural-born empiricist, rationalist, and materialist. I love the 'real' material world, and the notion that the world we're born into is it, and all that we have is material. Nonetheless, I have had experiences I find it hard to rationalise in a solely materialistic world. I want nothing more than a skeptic to debunk all my experiences as total products of the mind (i.e. the physical brain), nonetheless I also want truthful insight, not biased by any held worldview.
I have had what I perceive to be experiences of pure evil, experiences which I can only interpret to be demonic or satanic. These have manifested in my 'dream states' as well as in real life.
It all started when I was around 19, approx. 4 years ago now. I took this 16 year old guy to bed (I am gay), we fooled around, and after finishing up and being very satisfied with the handsome young man I had landed myself, lay there peacefully in the post-sex bliss. I was facing him as I laid there. I was in no way under any stress nor did I feel any guilt, but pure satisfaction and relaxation. As I faced him, his eyes rolled up into his head, he started shaking, he then came over to my side of the bed, sat on my chest and started choking me, with those eye-rolled demonic eyes. I felt as though I was going to die, become possessed, or otherwise something purely horrible was about to occur. I kept saying 'No, no, no', but I felt like I couldn't speak loudly. Next thing, he was no longer on top of me, but back right next to me in the bed, still shaking, eyes rolled, and I continued to in my terrified voice say 'No, no, no!'. I "woke up", and every single thing about the room stayed the same, except his face, which now was a 'normal' face, but looked very concerned at me like I was crazy, I could do nothing but apologise and say 'sorry, I had a really bad nightmare'. The whole time I felt I was totally awake and aware, but paralysed. During and after this experience, I felt as though this guy was demonically influenced or otherwise cursed, and probably had something very evil happen to him. Furthermore I felt complicit in seducing this young fellow into a gay encounter, as though this made me complicit in this evil and hence why the evil was interested in me joining the 'force'. I later learnt that this guy did indeed have a very dark childhood, I won't go into detail.
About 2 years later, I began having extremely disturbing, extremely vivid 'nightmares', night after night. Often, my whole room would stay exactly the same as in real life, and I didn't feel like I was sleeping at all. I would often feel an extremely evil presence lurking behind the storage area door at the other side of my bedroom. These dreams would mock me, and in one I was paraded with figures in my life who by the very tone of the discordant music playing were clearly cursed and seemed to me were being shown as being complicit with the devil. Notably I got up, walked into the hall outside my room (again, it didn't feel like a dream, everything was as it should be), with my step mother curled up in a ball on the floor, wickedly laughing . In these dreams, I would often 'wake up' repeatedly in my room, only to find I was still in the nightmare. One night I finally "woke up" for real looking at my alarm clock ominously reading '3:33'. I remember one time being so horrendously terrified I got up out of bed, switched on every single light in the house, went downstairs to the lounge room, turned on the television loudly. For a number of nights in a row I didn't dare sleep in my room, only on the couch with the lights and tv on.
Around a year later, when I had moved out of home, I started having demonic nightmares again. I often knew when I was going to have a horrible nightmare night, as I would feel a sense of intense evil lurking in my apartment and the place would creak incessantly far beyond what one would normally expect with the natural expansion and contraction of things in a home. There would also often be a very distinct buzzing vibration noise, like when you have tinnitus of the ear, but it would come out of nowhere and be quite a distinct and loud vibration. I remember one night waking up from a nightmare, and I kid you not there were red pentagrams burned into my retina floating around the room for a good 4 or 5 seconds. They were so discernable, and there were there, in my eyes, in my waking hours..
I couldn't help but research these phenomena and their spiritual implications. After all, these experiences seemed to me almost deniably real. I can't explain to you how terrifyingly real they were. One notion that I liked the thought of was that Satan was some pagan God that Yahweh (the Abraham God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) had dethroned, scape-goated and that he now was really pissed off, and for whatever reason felt the need to come to communicate with me. At the time, a deity that represented strength, self-reliance, and male fecundity and sexual prowess (which my research indicated he was) seemed really appealing, so I gave worshipping him in my mind and verbally a go. It felt really good, as though I was being filled with power, ego and strength.
One occasion that completely astonished me was when I was particularly enamoured with his worship whilst grocery shopping, and when I went to the automated check-out to pay for my goods, I kid you not, the receipt printed out a total of $'66.06'.
I have since for the last year or so ceased to have such dreams, and thus I've defaulted back to the world-view I've long been most comfortable with - agnostic, secular materialism. Nonetheless it has been playing on my mind again as of late, these unresolved, experiences, and I want to know what to make of them. I feel as though something doesn't want me to post this post either.
What is everyone's opinion on all of this? Surely you can all see how improbable all this is by materialistic chance alone, and the real kicker for me was that receipt. What are the chances the one time I go grocery shopping with this mindset that I get the number of the beast on a physical receipt in the middle of the day??
Your thoughts and input would be much appreciated.
Thanks all,
