Nightmares

Jack had first started noticing the figure several weeks ago. For a start he'd just catch him out of the corner of his eye, then as time went by he'd see him clearer. It was funny but at the beginning he could never look at him directly, like trying to force two magnets together, repulsive pole to repulsive pole. He'd distort and move away but not like an ordinary person would, who was trying to avoid being looked at. It was more like a reflective sheet of silver plastic, being poked in the middle. Even before that Jack would look where he thought he was and see nothing unusual - no dark figure or shape even. He knew though that he was there. He could feel it, sense it but not see it.

Now today though it was different. It was like the whole world had stopped and there was just him and Jack. Their eyes met but this was no romantic meeting across a room. Jack felt probed, prodded by another mind. It was almost palpable. He wanted to take his eyes off this mysterious stranger but knew instinctively not to. It was like he knew that he'd be thrown across the platform and slammed against the far wall, if he broke contact. And then it was over and the being had gone completely. The world unfroze and moved on again, in its daily business as though nothing had happened. Jack got on the train and made his way to work as normal but felt he'd just been stared down by some wild animal.

That night Jack returned home. He had his tea, watched TV and went to bed. Suddenly he awoke in the darkness.

'Who's there?'

He felt a presence - in fact this was what woke him.

'I know you're there - speak!'

Only silence filled the room.

There had been a spate of burglaries in the district, over the last few months, so he feared the worst. He wanted to turn on the bedside lamp but feared any sudden movement might bring down a blunt object on his head, by someone whose eyes had adjusted to the lack of light and who was fully conscious, unlike him.

Courage overcame dread. He made a sudden grab for the switch. The room was empty.

He jumped out of bed, looked under it, behind the curtains, beside the wardrobe. Nothing.

He went into the kitchenette. Nothing. Tried all the doors and windows. Locked. Shut.

He made himself a cup of tea and went back to bed, for an unsettled sleep.

The next day he was at the station again as usual. No sign of the strange being this time.

Suddenly a voice popped into his head.

'Yes it was me last night.'

He looked around, agitated but no-one was close enough to have said anything to him that loudly, without others hearing.

'No, you're not imagining things. I'm really here and speaking to you, mind to mind.'

'Who are you? How do I know this isn't all happening in my head?'

'Look at the man to your immediate right - the one talking to the pretty girl on his left.'

With that Jack turned his head slightly, to get a better view but without being obviously intrusive. The couple were laughing at the man's animated conversation, when suddenly stopped in mid sentence.

'What's wrong Charles?'

He didn't answer but looked furtively about the platform, his body still as ice. Like a rabbit eyed by a fox, he froze on the spot.

'I can do that because he doesn't know me. I've played that trick on other regulars but couldn't do it with them again for this reason. They've become acclimatised should we say.

About my visit last night. When we do this, that is my kind, ordinary people think it is The Devil or demons - incubus, succubus, vampires, ghosts or what have you. They do not understand, so they invent names and roles for us that really have little relevance to what we are. Their fevered imaginations must supply an answer, so that they feel in control and not victims of a power greater than their own. Tragic. Nowadays we even get mistaken for aliens - they exist but again the feeble urge to create an answer comes into play - they don't know, so make up explanations. We are sorcerers, magicians, shaman. We are immortal outsiders, looking in on the boring world of the mundane. The wallowing in materialism and petty, selfish means to ends, disgusts us. Don't get me wrong - once we were like them but have moved on, grown up, abandoned childhood and we would like you to join us and do the same.

You are already hypersensitive and aware. This is the first step. Like waking out of a dream, you will discover who you truly are. Your allergies, migraines and seeing things your peers cannot, should have told you that you were different and didn't really fit in here. The flying saucer you saw in your youth that your friends couldn't or else interpreted as a star, plane or something else mundane, should have told you that. They didn't want to know something greater than themselves existed and defended themselves against it, to protect their tiny egos from being shattered - you didn't. You embraced it whole hog. The incident your father never told you about, where he too saw a UFO by the quarry edge, disregarding the voice in his head trying to tell him it was shed. Like you he could see and now it's time for you to join us.'

'What if I should say no?'

'That is your choice. The addictive lifestyle these mere mortals have, will stay yours too as will all the niggling intolerances and prejudices that drive this world. These are sheep, hooked on effects - is that what you wish for yourself?

I, we, offer you space and time, not herded cattle flocking together in fear of the night. You will be alone - even I will only be with you occasionally. You will no longer feel lonely in a crowd but powerful, strong, yourself - no longer panicked into reacting to an imagined threat. My will could make one of these ants walk off the platform, into the face of an incoming train. They can make us do nothing because they refuse to even acknowledge our existence. I'm invisible - I don't exist to them, except in nightmares and as the voice of conscience in their heads which they ignore or struggle against, driving themselves insane. We are aligned with the will of the universe - they are not.'

The voice stopped. Silence fell into the mind of Jack. He looked around and saw the dark figure again - this time not on the platform opposite but behind him on the stairs. The shape beckoned and Jack followed him into another world, another dimension outside normal time and space.

His last thought was, would anybody notice the difference? (They didn’t).

#Insomnia #CBT #PTSD

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD) is characterized by a chronically heightened state of arousal after a traumatic event. PTSD often gets worse over time or develops insidiously, so that people may not realize they have it until many months after the traumatic event. The disease is more common in women, though it can happen to anybody. An estimated seven people out of 100 will experience PTSD during their lifetime.

PTSD and sleep have a complex relationship. Though sleep problems accompany many mental health conditions, sleep problems in PTSD are actually considered part of the disorder. Among the symptoms used to diagnose PTSD, two are directly related to sleep: hyperarousal and intrusion, which can manifest as insomnia and nightmares. Researchers are still trying to understand whether sleep problems precede PTSD or whether PTSD causes sleep problems.

Individuals with PTSD frequently have trouble falling asleep and awaken easily, often waking up many times throughout the night. Many people with PTSD also have nightmares. These issues result in disrupted, non-refreshing sleep.

Those with chronic pain, substance abuse, traumatic brain injury, depression or other medical problems face an additional barrier to getting quality sleep. Certain sleep medications also interfere with REM sleep, which is the sleep stage during which we dream and an important sleep stage for dealing with traumatic memories.

You can refer to this:

resiliens.com/resilify/program/cognitive-behavioral-therapy-...

Several years ago I had a series of nightmares, involving the subject of the unknown. In one I was pursued by a Greyhound bus and scrambled down an embankment, to have the vehicle charge down the slope, with its headlights beaming (I am into flying saucers in a big way and saw this as a UFO abduction scenario); I woke up screaming. Another involved me being in a 'U' shaped building, with my wife in one wing and me in another and a corridor between. Suddenly but very slowly the door behind me started to creep open, revealing nothing but a dark, empty space (yes, you guessed it, I woke screaming). A third dream involved me being in my old family home, in the kitchen, when the back door slowly crept open, revealing nothing again (woke burbling as I was in sleep paralysis stage and couldn't utter any other sound - in my childhood I had another instance of this and eventually got out of bed and dozed outside my parents bedroom, before going back to bed). A fourth dream involved the same scene but I had my old dog with me from present time and it warned me that someone was at the front door. Again it crept slowly open to reveal nothing but darkness. I think the symbolism here is simply fear of the unknown. When I attended the Leeds UFO conference, I mentioned these dreams to John Mack, the well known psychologist, involved with contactees.

Recently I had a super real dream that woke me. I suddenly saw to my right these waves that look a curled spring, where strong winds have whipped up an ordinary but gigantic wave in a storm. I

feared I had been cut off by the sea with water beneath my feet but then realised that I was

standing on the sea itself, with water all around me as I was in the middle of the ocean.

Afterwards it made me think of Christ on the sea of Galilee.

I have been woken several times in the middle of the night but it wasn't until this morning that I cottoned on why. I am back to dreaming about deep water and the one that woke me this morning involved a ledge I stepped on in the dream that was inches under water but then the water after that plunged into infinity (from the shoreline you simply couldn't tell what was deep water and what was shallow).

The second lucid episode of the night and the one that was freaking me out as a theme, was suddenly finding myself up high and realising where I was, like a sleepwalker waking up from a dream. This one had me on a ledge of an extremely tall building, while there were birds of prey flying across the way on top of a another building, in which the queen lived and was enjoying the spectacle

We were coming back after a long trip away recently and I kept nodding off to sleep (my wife was driving). Twice I woke up seeing representations of the dream content - once was the snow covered roads perspective, disappearing into the distance in reality and it was the same landscape I caught in the dream. The second was a reclining figure, which when I opened my eyes was the dashboard and the upright part of the passenger window. It reminded me of an advert where this sleeping girl’s form became hills.

I am not an academic but I do have a recurrent dream theme in being at university (I lived in Cambridge for a while and had a friend at Fitzwilliam college from the same town). This is I believe because I am always in pursuit of knowledge. Another regular theme is waking up needing to use the toilet and not finding one (in reality it is because at my age I need to urinate)

My conclusion about my own experiences is that it shows a continuum from the internal world of dreams to the outwards manifestations of phenomena in the real world.

It all started strangely enough – odd lights in the sky behaving oddly. Then came the funny dreams – funny bizarre, not funny ha-ha. Before I knew it, it was spilling over into the daylight hours. I thought I was going crazy. I started getting messages on the radio, in the papers, on the television. It was like the Twilight Zone or Outer Limit - ‘We will control the horizontal limits of your awareness. We will control the vertical limits of your knowledge.’ The only thing that convinced me I was sane was all kinds of odd people coming up to me and imparting strange information - people you would have hurried passed normally, embarrassed by their utterings. If it wasn’t for that I would have felt truly ‘alienated.’

Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night, maybe miles from where I lived, totally oblivious to how I got there or could have got there. It was like I was living my life in a trance. My appetite had gone and I felt exhausted beyond belief. The headaches I’d had as a child returned with avengeance. The sickening migraines had me vomiting down the toilet, without end. It was the old conflicts with different realities, reasserting themselves into what had seemed like a normal, everyday life. The nightmares of creatures that walked through walls, being paralysed in bed and unspeakable things being done to me, re-emerged. Who was I? What was I? What were they? It felt like I was in some weird science-fiction movie. All the certainties of life disappeared, crashing down the toilet pan, like the contents of my stomach every so often. I was down the rabbit hole with no way out.

Then came the night he when he appeared.

“You humans. You think you know it all and can do it all. It’s as though you truly believe the universe begins and ends with you, on this puny little planet in the middle of nowhere. You stupidly think money will solve all your problems. It won’t but conscience and consciousness could. No, you prefer addiction to materialism and screwing down what you don’t screw up. You worry about death and consider others as wrongdoers for stealing your goods, when in reality nobody owns anything or can. It’s just one of your many delusions. Likewise you worry about criminals harming your body, when in fact the true you is made of energy and can’t be damaged in any way, shape or form. If you didn’t think you were bodies, you wouldn’t threaten others with violence, in order to try to manipulate them. You think that a belief in the afterlife, means life will seem worthless and you will want to die quicker. Balderdash! It gives you reason to live. It turns you into missionaries, wanting to spread that joy. Oh you may die like Christian martyrs but not by your own depressed hand. Like Salmon swimming upstream, you will inspire others to live and want to live, seeking a better life and as acting as a torch to lead them into the future. Suppressives and depressives are scared to live and let you live, so stamp on and stamp out any free thought, any hope, in case it starts a fire that consumes their own limited dreams of conquest and domination, be it the world, their own country or their cultural heritage. Man must change and move forward, not wallow in self-pity and fear.

You don’t know how insane your race is. You think that by being serious that means you are sane but your behaviour suggests otherwise. You would be thousands of years more advanced than you are now, if you didn’t keep killing yourselves off in suicidal wars, revolutions and simple murders. Like Jason And The Bean Men in Twice Told Tales, you are willing to fight and kill each other over everything and nothing. You shoot down our craft, even though we are only flying over your territory on route to somewhere else. You don’t do that to civil aircraft do you, so why assume that just because we are more powerfully armed than you, that means we are hostile?

We could have wiped out your civilisation fifty years ago, if we feared you as much as you seem to fear us. You invade other countries at the least provocation or none at all, in your greed for resources. How could we land openly here and live among your people, when you massacre others others who have different beliefs, different cultures or appearance? Is it any wonder your world is quarantined? You’ve polluted your oceans, wiped out species after species and are now on the brink of another threatened nuclear war.

Pretentious fools, trying to prove you are what you are not. Proud monkey suits, lumps of flesh, piles of mud! Only a fool who is fooling himself, can fool another fool and that is not us. We have tolerated you as an adult tolerates a child but our patience isn’t infinite. You are an experiment gone wrong. We are spiritual beings made of energy, not flesh robots, so addicted to it that we have lost our true identity.”

At this point he disappeared in an explosion of exasperated light, then suddenly reappeared.

“Oh yes, we can condense energy into matter and vice-versa. We have no permanent form, unlike you.” He disappeared in a flash again.

Malcolm thought about what the being had said, deciding if it were true, logically it shouldn’t matter whether, we did blow ourselves to pieces and turn the planet into a nuclear wasteland or not. After all if everything is just energy…

“You are correct, it doesn’t matter, ultimately but we put a lot of work into this project, so forgive us, forgive me in particular, for being a little peeved.”

He was back in the corner of the room.

“Yes I read your thoughts by the way,” he said, grinning like a Cheshire Cat.

We have guided your efforts through the years or tried to, from shaman, then magicians like Dee and Crowley as your civilisation grew. Now it is sensitives and mediums like you. We nudged those you consider genius’s, through downloading data and through incognito appearances – God, I don’t know how many times we had to point out to Alexander Fleming the value of penicillin and the significance of what was happening in his Petri dish! In dreams we gave you pictures worth a thousand words – symbols you could make sense of. For instance Kekule’s benzene ring and Einstein’s general theory of relativity – now there was a bright man! Soon caught on to the implications.

We have always been here as far as you are concerned. Yes the ancient astronaut theory is true. Ancient civilisations were kick-started by us. You called us gods but we were, indeed are no different from you. As for previous ownership, ask the reptiles who ran the planet and existed here millions of years ago, before you hairy hominids arrived. These and other sitting tenants left strange artefacts that now reside in your museums, mostly hidden from public view. Yes, your authorities can do this quite easily but find it harder to hide structural anomalies. Vitrified stone forts and ancient architecture are evidence but most people prefer to believe the reasonable answers your government’s give or the unreasonable ones your religious authorities proffer as an alternative.

You people love your fairy stories. If you can’t understand something, you make up a fiction to explain it. In other words you lie to shut others up or threaten them with implied or actual violence. How you people have interpreted us through the lens of your own ignorance and superstition over the ages, has amused us greatly. In fact we have used it for own purposes at Lourdes, Medjugore, Fatima and elsewhere, to guide ordinary humans, looking for hope in the world that seems to have abandoned them.

We have also used séance room tricks, changing matter to energy and back again, to show what is possible, when mind overcomes matter. We used it with the alchemists and we used it with mediums, to guide you into the future.

It is night. Rome is under a spell. Strange things are afoot. An owl was seen in the Capitol, in broad daylight. Men all afire walked through the streets. Dead women were seen abroad. Priests reading the entrails of slaughtered beasts, saw portents of doom and most telling of all, Caesar's statue wept blood. What more could the gods do to warn mortal man of the dangers now facing him?

"What a night? Who knew the heavens to quake so and light the sky with such a terrifying spectacle!" 

"Such weather reflects the hearts of men at such times." 

"You talk of Caesar?" 

"Be who it may." 

"I don't think Caesar can be that ambitious, after all he refused the crown three times didn't he?" 

"A joke between him and Mark Antony. A bunch of old laurel leaves thrust at him. I saved his life once, when he fell in the Tiber. Did you know that?" 

"No."

"I wonder if I should have bothered. It left him deaf in one ear and that's the one I spit my venom into. He thinks I must love him because I saved his wretched hide but that was then and this now. 'For always I am Caesar!' What a pompous ass! I detest the man. 

He lost the first Gallic war."

"But he won the second." 

"What about that disastrous invasion of Briton?" 

"The siege of Alesia was pure genius, with its two lines of defence; one to keep Vercingetorix in and one to keep reinforcements out." 

"Crassus was a fool to take on The Parthians." 

"I don't doubt it." 

"Without him the triumvirate as an alliance failed." 

"Does that mean you blame him for the civil war then?" 

"No but him and Pompey were patricians, men of class. Caesar is an upstart, a man of the people. Do you want to be ruled by a populist, a lover of the proletariat?" 

"Not I!" 

"Then you are with me on this?" 

"I am indeed." 

"Good for I have much to discuss with you then. Will you join me and some other like minded friends tomorrow night at my house for supper?" 

"Good. Until then Casca fair the well." 

Several days later…

"My dear I fully understand your nightmares and fears for my safety, after all I am the most powerful man in Rome but look Decius has arrived and I am expected at the Senate" 

"But-" 

"Enough, for always I am Caesar!" 

"Come Caesar, we must away. Great things await us!" 

"You know it wasn't only my wife's fears that detained me. I received a scroll from Artemidorus warning me of something but it was so vague, it was almost gibberish."

(They both laugh). 

"No names then? Nothing definite?" 

"No. 

I've been through two campaigns against the Gauls and even visited that God forsaken rock they call Briton - cold, miserable, perpetually wet. Imagine the cheek of sending troops from there to support their fellow Celts. Perhaps they came across, not to fight but just simply to get warm!"

(they both laugh again). 

" I suppose Metellus Cimber's brother is going to petition me again about his return? "

" Alas Caesar "

" Well he's out of luck. I remain firm on this, for always I am Caesar! "

(under his breath)" And don't we know it! “

Hello, writes here to say I hope you'll having a nice day and in either case wish you all strength, health and the best⭐ that you all may find new possibilities to come true.

Also just needed to write this of my chest:
Nightmares I really hate them. They make me feel exhausted, sad, angry and desperate. I do my best to fight on, but it's just damm hard sometimes, cause they are just so deep and nothing really works against it and don't know what to do about it. But I'll fight through the storm and the dark till I find the light. 💪
#Health #Nightmares