Night Terrors, Posession and Hell

Has anyone here experienced this before? It runs in my family; my mom has had it, and my uncle continues to sometime deal with it. I've experienced it no more then 4 or 5 times in my life, but every time it is quite psychotic in nature, and extremely discomforting.

First, or rather, when it begins, you wake from your sleep and you find yourself pacing back and forth across your room or house. In your mind, there is something terrible, but you cannot quite say what it is, because what you perceive and the feeling produced - the idea that some 'imminent' danger is around, cannot be transformed into logical terms. Its purely in the 'attraction' that the irrational thought has logical validity, that you worry and pace.

Another odd feature of night terrors is the odd connection between the idea of 'quantity' and 'quality'. I remember having one awhile back where once I got up, I woke my mother up and I started explaining to her in a medical type fashion the irrationality of this idea in my mind of some connection between quantity and quality. Of course by itself this means nothing. It's in the panic and fear that some 'quality' exists; in my mind, I experience some highly explosive emotional form - a quality - which impinges on my mind a feeling of imminent dread, some causal connection between it and something in this world i.e quantity. What I feel is an effort of some 'thing' to cause me to act in some harmful way, in effect, transferring itself from a mode of pure 'quality' into a state of quantitative possibility.

Fortunately, I am far too aware to not realize the sheer insanity of the worry, so it only last at most 3 or 4 minutes before I can calm myself down and separate myself from the memory of the experience.

A deeper question I have is, "what" is the content which drives me into awaking, and then worrying? It feels very much as if I were being possessed. Of course, there are somatic factors (such as lack of sleep and overall bodily tiredness being prerequisites; it only happens if I'm particularly tired and stressed out) which lead to the experience, but outside the somatic, or psychogenic explanation (such as persisting worries of fears), could there also be an ontological aspect as well???

In terms of experience, it is just me - the individual consciousness, and the force of some 'entity', irrational, or demonic in nature, which seduces the conscious mind into reflecting upon it's qualitative power. After the initial experience, there is this seduction factor, where you 'want' to return and understand what the thought was - but you know this is a diabolical ruse designed to trap you in the web of its power.

I think this experience is an interesting example of purely spiritual experience...of a demonic nature. I wonder if this 'thing' which I experience is actually something which has formed over life; for example, if you have a stress or phobia about a particular thing, if you were ever made weak enough (since physical weakness seems to be a 'base' which the night terror grows from), what you experience in the night terror is merely the transmogrification of the content of the 'phobia' or 'worry' into a content of conscious experience.

A balancing factor is the influence of the conscious mind, which can recognize, and then separate itself from the content of the worry. But in other cases, such as in the psychotic, the conscious mind or ego is sufficiently 'subsumed' so to speak, by the power of the 'unconscious' content. In short, the sane person who experiences night terrors (and there is no connection between night terror and mental illness), he can recognize and then distant himself from the content: he is an active force. In the schizophrenic, or psychotic, they are already 'passive' minded, being worked upon and used as a 'vessel' for some irrational content, without any conscious freedom to separate themselves. from it.

I mention this because the ego acts as a stabilizer. It 'saves' the mind from the fear and anxiety of the content. Many psychologists have termed schizophrenia as the 'anticipation of death'. In short, the ego is already truncated and the contents of their unconscious flow in. In schizophrenia, we may have an intimation of the afterlife state where the ego 'dies' i.e a state where self awareness dissolves, and what is left are the 'contents' of ones life experiences. The essentially 'evil' or destructive experiences of life need to exhaust their energetic content, which they do by tormenting the deceased 'consciousness'; but the "consciousness", is similar to the consciousness one experiences in the beginning state of a night terror, or what the schizophrenic constantly deals with: you are passive, while the 'content' is active. This is what religions call 'hell'.

reply to post by dontreally

i would recommend, some strong sedative in hand-reach all the time.

I have woken up feeling terrified or sometimes I even wake up feeling very bizarre and crazy with racing, incoherent thoughts. If you want to stay within the realm of this world, it is most likely just your subconscious mind still asleep and in a dream. I usually wake up but do not fully wake up and have a dream still playing in my head.

If you want to talk in terms of other worlds, some people believe when we dream that we go to different Universes or dimension, or worlds, whathaveyou, so it is possible that you wake up but part of you is still in one of these worlds and the world you are in is quite fearful.

In simple words, we live in a universe that was created, it is realm of its own with its own denizens - it has its own places for those that are overbalanced or underbalanced, and it is imperfect - it has holes, it has passages into the unknown - you are on the other-side of its perfection, you have tasted its chaos, and as you were a part of its existence, its nature is built into you - and there are parts of you that need to remain in tact and connected to it, the true existence is "anything goes" - and it is a nightmare for most, those that exist there have developed a stable sense of being, they are "self-contained" and they can exist in their own bubbles of reality, you need to start patching things up in your mind, find the idiosyncracies and harmonise them, because when you enter that state, you are dipping into small holes in your being, and like being forced through a funnel, it is not a pleasurable experience.

One reason for bad dreams is that it gets the adrenaline going incase of danger while asleep, and helps you to deal with it if it strikes. Its not so much of an issue now in our so-called civilised, urban society, but in tribal and less advanced societies, animals or other people could much more easily pounce while you sleep. It goes without saying that this trait is passed on, because those with it are more likely to survive.

Of course, these mechanisms, like all other attributes humans possess, can be more pronounced in some people, and they get worse nightmares than the rest of us get. Its just how it goes, its purely down to variation in our makeup. There is nothing supernatural about it.

I noticed that when the room I am sleeping in not well ventilated or is hot, the dreams I get are absolutely crazy. Stuff i can't even describe.