THE DREAM-CONSCIOUS STATE: A PERSONAL JOURNAL OF INNER EXPLORATION
Bruce G. MarcotJOURNALS -- PART TWO (1986-present)
Sensations of -- Spirits?
Quite a few times during the waking hypnogogic condition, I have had very strong sensations of the presence of -- what I can only describe as spirits. These sensations were acute, intense, startling, and in at least one case rather frightening.
Very recently (in 1996; this section is written in early 1997), while asleep on a couch in my older brother's house in California, late at night in a dark and silent house, I entered my "regular" conscious, hypnogogic, paralysis lucid state. I knew I was falling asleep on the couch and knew that my limbs and eyelids seemed leaden and unresponsive. Suddenly, though, I heard a great deal of whispering all around the couch. It was unintelligible but undeniable and fairly loud and definitely close. It had a true three-dimensional quality; I heard it clearly from the left, right, and all about me.
I then had the intense sensation of being surrounded by a number of ethereal beings. As sometimes happens, I had to try several times to force myself out of the hypnogogic paralysis condition into wakefulness (this may be the frightening sensation reported by others). I wasn't afraid, it wasn't a nightmare, but it was a rather startling experience. I finally opened my eyes, alert and awake, and the sounds and sensations vanished.
I can only assume that I had a very different kind of "waking dream" unlike the "regular" lucid dreams I've come to know and control so well. If this had been a regular lucid dream, I would have recognized the images as my own -- that is, projections of my own mind -- and could have forced them to change or disappear. This didn't happen. I do not know what "class" of lucid dream this waking dream constitutes, and need to experiment further with it, perhaps to try to induce it during my next waking-lucid experience.
In another example of this "waking dream" experience, I was lying in bed at home one weekend late in the morning, and as I slowly emerged through the paralysis condition I suddenly had an utterly clear and undeniable sensation of someone in the room with me. It was my sister Marilyn, now some 23 years deceased and a close and loving sister and friend of mine when I was young. She suddenly appeared in the room and zoomed past the foot of the bed, tickling the sole of my foot as she passed, giggling and smiling like she used to when she pulled mischievous pranks. In a split second she was there, then gone, flashing by more like a phantom than a physical person. I sat up, startled and now fully awake, but still feeling the tingling in my foot. I was mostly amazed that I had forgotten for so very long how mischievous she would get, and how she would laugh like that when pulling a prank. I don't think I would have ever remembered that as clearly, when thinking of her consciously. What a bizarre, startling, amazing experience.
In a rationalist mood, I could attribute these "spiritual" experiences only to a very different kind of lucid, waking dream that is somehow unique in experience than regular lucid dreams (even those that I often have during waking periods).
I have had other such dreams of "spirit" forms, but these two vivid examples best illustrate the sensations.
I have since heard and read that others often experience the sensation of a "presence" particularly while in the waking sleep-paralysis state. This may be the same sensation that some have reported as ghosts, phantoms, angels, succubi, incubi, faeries, aliens, or even alien abductions. I make no claim to the validity of these charges, or to the existence of heavenly spectral forms or bug-eyed aliens, or to the potential motives of angels or aliens for taking an interest in an incoherent and sleep-paralyzed human being. I don't believe I have experienced angels or aliens or abductions, and rather think the reality has much to do with a semi-lucid state of hypnogogic paralysis, and might even have a biophysical basis.
But I really just don't know.
I wonder if there is even a deeper, evolutionary, adaptive significance to this, as when humans inhabited the veldts and woodlands of our distance ancestral habitats and needed to be ever-alert to moving shadows of predators. In my own work in field ecology, I've slept out in rough and remote conditions many a night, and know first-hand the significance of sleeping lightly and waking quickly when I hear nearby footfalls in the dark. Usually these were deer, rodents, wild horses, or other benign beings, but a few times not -- such as one Siberian tiger that padded nearly up to my tent in the blackness of night, during one expedition in the remote Siberian forests of the Far East.
