I had nightmares as a child. Seeing a man sitting, facing me in the dark as I returned from the bathroom, I would scream. Answering my scream, my mother took me into her bed. In my early thirties, I woke seeing a man’s head on the plant pot instead of the plant. And in one swift move I could strip off all of the covers of our king-sized bed onto the floor before wakening. Evil appeared shapeless and black on the bedroom door. Upset isn’t strong enough for my concern. Eventually, a poet mentor, Margaret, understanding, gave me the word hypnogogic. Writing this I found hypnogogic hallucinations (something that does not exist outside the mind) occur between wakefulness and sleep. My nightmares did end when fleeing from men chasing me, I turned and ran after them, driving them down a stairway, not to return.
In 2009, night after night, strong dreams followed my broken bone surgery—military men climbing in the window of my grandmother’s apartment—until frustrated, I remembered I had inner power. I began countering the dramas with a denial of their existence. The most draining was a second appearance of evil. Staring at its location in the dark, in hardset determination, I set my God-inspired power against it until—with my energy at an ebb when I thought I couldn’t last—it disappeared.
Following dental surgery requiring anesthesia in March 2014, with no information that the drug might cause hallucinations, I was the first patient to report them. Geometric shapes like architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and Persian-like carpet designs (formed from energy) grew taller than I was. I walked into them saying, “You are not real.” At night, looking out a window, holding onto the bars while bouncing on a bosu ball, in a close tree I saw a tiger, a giraffe, Vietnam soldiers in combat, and more coming toward me. I kept shifting my field of vision hoping to get rid of them. But they’d reappear. I saw people walk through (not between) the iron bars of my car gate and converse, leaning against my car. The next night when I said my prayers in the living room, a crowd at a tall, narrow window peered in watching. I tried to keep my focus away but keep glancing, wanting them to disappear. One night it was so hot, as I was getting into bed naked, I glanced at my front window where a man stood watching me. He then motioned others to join him until the window was crowded. Under the mosquito netting, I lay back and closed my eyes. The last hallucination was a man standing in my kitchen who I saw as I headed to the bathroom, but instead walked directly toward him until he disappeared. Loudly with annoyance, I said, “Enough!” and the drug reaction ended, but it caused me to think of people I’ve read about who talk to themselves and are considered mentally ill. I can now imagine that to them there may be a reality not audible or visible to the observers.
Several months later, reading in Love Without Conditions, I found a line about evil that prompted my memory of the two experiences I hadn’t understood. In spite of my hallucinations, if asked whether I believed in evil, I would answer no. Channeling Jesus, Paul Ferrini had written, “The question of evil does not arise until one doubts one’s own worthiness to give and receive love.” I knew that I could not have articulated this view at the time of my experiences, but that from somewhere deep within me, fear had created the thought-form of evil, and from another part had come the courage to resist the second time.
God consciously entered my life in A Course in Miracles in 1991, and I now live knowing that He is within me and loves me and that I am worthy of giving and receiving love.
My realization is, “We have experiences that remain mysteries until we reach a readiness to see through new eyes a new explanation and accept that all we have been through has been necessary for our spiritual growth.”
In 2009, night after night, strong dreams followed my broken bone surgery—military men climbing in the window of my grandmother’s apartment—until frustrated, I remembered I had inner power. I began countering the dramas with a denial of their existence. The most draining was a second appearance of evil. Staring at its location in the dark, in hardset determination, I set my God-inspired power against it until—with my energy at an ebb when I thought I couldn’t last—it disappeared.
Following dental surgery requiring anesthesia in March 2014, with no information that the drug might cause hallucinations, I was the first patient to report them. Geometric shapes like architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and Persian-like carpet designs (formed from energy) grew taller than I was. I walked into them saying, “You are not real.” At night, looking out a window, holding onto the bars while bouncing on a bosu ball, in a close tree I saw a tiger, a giraffe, Vietnam soldiers in combat, and more coming toward me. I kept shifting my field of vision hoping to get rid of them. But they’d reappear. I saw people walk through (not between) the iron bars of my car gate and converse, leaning against my car. The next night when I said my prayers in the living room, a crowd at a tall, narrow window peered in watching. I tried to keep my focus away but keep glancing, wanting them to disappear. One night it was so hot, as I was getting into bed naked, I glanced at my front window where a man stood watching me. He then motioned others to join him until the window was crowded. Under the mosquito netting, I lay back and closed my eyes. The last hallucination was a man standing in my kitchen who I saw as I headed to the bathroom, but instead walked directly toward him until he disappeared. Loudly with annoyance, I said, “Enough!” and the drug reaction ended, but it caused me to think of people I’ve read about who talk to themselves and are considered mentally ill. I can now imagine that to them there may be a reality not audible or visible to the observers.
Several months later, reading in Love Without Conditions, I found a line about evil that prompted my memory of the two experiences I hadn’t understood. In spite of my hallucinations, if asked whether I believed in evil, I would answer no. Channeling Jesus, Paul Ferrini had written, “The question of evil does not arise until one doubts one’s own worthiness to give and receive love.” I knew that I could not have articulated this view at the time of my experiences, but that from somewhere deep within me, fear had created the thought-form of evil, and from another part had come the courage to resist the second time.
God consciously entered my life in A Course in Miracles in 1991, and I now live knowing that He is within me and loves me and that I am worthy of giving and receiving love.
My realization is, “We have experiences that remain mysteries until we reach a readiness to see through new eyes a new explanation and accept that all we have been through has been necessary for our spiritual growth.”