A guest post by my good friend, William Max Miller, telling the story of a night terror he experienced years ago. Enjoy! And dream well...
I found myself surrounded by
shadows and darkness, laying flat on my back on an altar-like stone slab. A
horrible, heavy lethargy paralyzed my limbs and, as I tried desperately to
move, I felt that I must have been given a dose of curare.
I could hear the
loud, pounding sound of my racing heart echo like rhythmic thunder through
my drugged body, and a dull roaring filled my ears as I struggled hopelessly
to open lead-encased eyelids. My breathing came in gasps as I fought to
force air into my frozen lungs. It seemed like I was sinking in quicksand,
or that I was slowly suffocating in a choking cloud of lethal cyanide
vapors. An overwhelming sense of menace oppressed me, and I realized in
horror that a faceless, black robed figure was approaching. The sinister
shape, like a figure from beyond the grave, floated silently toward me and
bent over my struggling body, its claw-like hands reaching out with
malevolent intent.
I realized that I was on an embalming table, and that the
black figure was about to drain my blood and fill my veins with
formaldehyde! I fought to awaken. By now a dim realization that I was still
half-asleep had formed in my frantic mind, and I knew that waking up was my
only means of escape. Summoning a last, desperate surge of strength, I
forced my eyes completely open and jumped to my feet, my arms flailing
outward to push the black figure away.
Picture by Stephen Gammell of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Trilogy
Now standing and completely awake, I began to see the shapes
of familiar objects take form and substance in the shadowy half-light of my
bedroom. Drenched with sweat, my heart still pounding with fear, I walked to
the kitchen, turned the light on, and poured a glass of water with shaking
hands. I was still convinced at that moment that I'd had a dreadfully
real encounter with an evil, supernatural force, one which had attempted
to drag me back with it into some nightmare dimension of ultimate darkness.
The sense of having just had a narrow escape lingered for
about half an hour, and it exerted a disarming power over my imagination
that required several cigarettes to dispel. The unsettling conviction
finally faded into the realization that I had lived through a not-uncommon
nocturnal adventure of a kind recorded in the annals of every culture
throughout history. I had experienced a dreaded
Night Terror.
A Night Terror differs from a nightmare because it
doesn't happen when a person is completely asleep. It seems to be a type of
parasomnia, or sleep disorder, which afflicts the waking-up process.
Many people who experience them on a regular basis describe a titanic
struggle to awaken, as though the ability to make the shift from sleeping to
wakefulness has become temporarily impaired. Night Terrors, with all their
sinister shapes and appalling sensations, inhabit that strange, largely
unexplored borderland between daylight and dreams; that peculiar region we
all cross through twice each night, once as we fall asleep, and then once
again as we awake. They are
transitional phenomena, and this probably
explains the terrifying sense of reality with which they are accompanied.
Since a person having a Night Terror is somewhat awake, he mingles actual
sensations and perceptions with subjective stimuli. These form an unholy
alliance in the imagination and, like an intoxicating witch's brew, cast a
disturbing aura of
realism over the experience.
Medical professionals who specialize in the treatment of
sleep disorders note the recurring similarities in people's accounts of
Night Terrors. Almost all of them report feelings of paralysis, increased
heart rate, difficulty breathing, and an overwhelming sense of great danger
accompanied by a horrible inability to escape. Frequently mentioned is the
feeling of being
under attack, and written records of Night Terrors
bristle with frightened descriptions of wraith-like malevolent figures
circling in for the kill, similar to the Black Shape which hovered over my
immobilized body and reached toward my throat with its claws...Individuals
who suffer from Night Terrors, sometimes frequently enough to require
professional help for the problem, also concur that the unpleasant
after-effects of these uncanny experiences often linger for hours. Some
people describe an oppressive malaise and sense of foreboding which saps
their vitality for days after the Night Terror invaded their bedrooms and
troubled their sleep.
The world-wide distribution of the Night Terror experience,
and its occurrence at every period of human history, probably lies at the
dark center of the ancient belief in vampires. The Night Terror frequently behaves
like the vampire of folkloric tradition. It comes uninvited in the night to
prey upon the sleeper, and leaves him shaken, weakened, mysteriously
drained. The worn-out feeling which oppresses the morning after such a
nocturnal fright can be easily explained as the body's normal reaction to a
little sleep deprivation, but it also coincides with the legend of the
vampire, who leaves its victims in an exhausted condition after draining
them of their blood. And the fact that Night Terrors often involve visions
of menacing figures, black shadowy shapes, and other entities which look
like the traditional vampire certainly hints that these experiences
could be the primal inspiration for strange tales about bloodsuckers and the
Legions of the Undead. Dracula, Nosferatu, Lestat, and all the rest of the
great Vampire Horde, which swarms through films, plays, novels and nightmares
like a cloud of bats, are probably literary echoes of
the Night Terror phenomenon.
My Night Terror occurred sometime in the spring of 1975,
during one of the most optimistic and anxiety-free periods of my life.
Theories that categorize Night Terrors as anxiety responses to stressful
life events fail to explain what happened to me. However, my friend Bill,
a serious student of the occult, was convinced that I had actually been
attacked by an "astral vampire." All this happened in the mid-seventies,
a time still very much in the grip of a social trend originally referred to
in
Time Magazine as "the
Occult Explosion." Books about witchcraft, black magic, Satanic cults, and
the supernatural became popular best-sellers throughout this cultural phase,
and films focusing on various aspects of the occult appeared almost daily on TV and
at cinemas. Most of the young adults I knew were interested in the
supernatural, and dabbled in Tarot card reading, amateur spell-casting,
astrology, and Wiccan practices. Bill did more than dabble. He was a
practicing Ritual Magician, who could quote whole passages of Aleister
Crowley and Eliphas Levi forwards
and backwards. (He had to pronounce
them backwards sometimes, he explained, because the particular ritual he was
performing might necessitate a
reversal of certain words of power.)
Although I remained skeptical of his astral vampire theory, some of my
acquaintances took the matter quite seriously, and began giving me
silver crucifixes and cloves of garlic as gifts to help me ward off any possible future attacks. All
these social reinforcers combined with the vivid sense of reality which had
accompanied the experience, and I found myself thinking more and more about
astral vampires from Beyond...
The concept of the astral vampire with which my friends
familiarized themselves derived mostly from the works of the 19'th century
occultist Madame Blavatsky. Dion Fortune, who further popularized the notion
in her well-known work,
Psychic Self Defense, wrote advice concerning
how to protect oneself from such evil creatures. An astral vampire is a
being who takes over the dead immaterial shell left behind by a spiritual
entity when it moves on to a still higher plane of existence. As a kind of
ghost's
ghost,
so the theory goes, the possessor of the dead astral shell descends to earth, where it feeds
upon the vital spiritual energies of flesh-and-blood mortals. Unlike the
vampire of folklore, such a monster does not need to drink the actual blood
of its prey. All
it needs is a psychic energy fix, and it obtains this when it attacks a
sleeping human. According to Dion Fortune, symptoms of such astral attacks are allegedly serious, and
prolonged victimization by such a monster can lead to depression, madness,
and suicide. Astral vampires are like the bandits and highwaymen of the
Astral Plane, and one does not eliminate them by pounding a steak through
their hearts. Instead, a person must use
magic to guard against the
astral vampire.
Due to several other strange occurrences which had taken
place in my old home over the past half century (more about these will soon
appear on this page) Bill became convinced that an astral vampire was afoot
and that it had singled me out as an energy source on the night of my Night
Terror. He offered to perform a ritual which would permanently banish the
foul night gaunt from my residence, and I eventually gave him permission to throw his
magical gauntlet in the face of the vampire. Bill picked a time in
conjunction with the phases of the moon and planets, and brought his magical
implements to the house. By candle light, amidst clouds of fuming incense,
he intoned the words of power inscribed in his ancient
Grimoires. He
scattered special herbs
throughout the rooms, and performed strange
gestures and movements. The ritual itself took about an hour, and left the
whole house filled with the churchly scent of Frankincense for days.
I never experienced another Night Terror. Of course, that's
probably because I simply wasn't destined to suffer from this
particular kind of sleep disorder, and has nothing to do with
successfully
exorcised vampires,
astral or Transylvanian. Sleep researchers who study Night Terrors
point to chemical imbalances, anxiety reactions, and seizure-like
disturbances
of deep, non-REM sleep as their actual, physical causes. Their
scientific
explanations sound very reassuring. But the vivid sense of reality
induced
by my Night Terror occasionally makes me question such bland
theories. Even
professional sleep researchers admit that the borderland separating
our daylight world from the land of dreams is
a dimly understood territory at best, where very old traditions say
many strange encounters take place, not all
of a pleasant nature. All non-technological cultures, whose shamans
and Holy Men have explored the world of dreams for millennia,
possess ancient oral traditions in
which sleep is seen as a process of leaving the body and entering
other
dimensions, and dreams are viewed as actual encounters with the
denizens of
different realities. We all must come to the mysterious threshold of
sleep each
night. For all humans, a regular passage through this gateway is
unavoidable
because sleeping, like eating and drinking, is a daily necessity
upon which
our lives depend. And, by a hard law of nature, such necessities
become
points of great vulnerability. As observant naturalists well know,
hungry predators always
lurk near bodies of water, to feed upon the unsuspecting creatures
who must come
there to
drink....
You can learn more
about Night Terrors by clicking the following links: