My therapist and I are going to discuss this eventually but I’m trying to examine things on my own first to try to figure out why I experience frequent demonic attacks. (Hallucinations? Delusions? Sometimes I don’t know.) Maybe anyone here could help offer insight? I like to take everything I experience and dissect it thoroughly.
The attacks started when I was 15 or 16, sophomore year of high school. Started out with me suddenly being VERY sleepy, a lot. Almost like I was being given sedatives or something. Knocked out. But I would only get this super sleepy feeling if I was in this one room in my house. The room where I also experienced sleep paralysis for the first time in my life, which sort of began the weird sleepy period. When I’d get that super sleepy feeling, I’d hear a voice. It was crooning and oily. I knew it was bad. It would tell me I was nice and pretty and that it liked me. Then it would tell me to do things. I generally ignored it but through my sleepy-drug mind state I was mostly curious and amused by it. One day I obliged it and did what it said.
Then bad things started happening to me. Very bad things. It followed me into my room and lived in my bedroom. I was sleepy all the time, I’d come home and I wasn’t tired I was COMPELLED to go to bed, it wasn’t right. Sleep paralysis became an increasingly frequent experience for me. I would lie in that sleepy state, and right before I fell asleep I’d be paralyzed. That freaked me out and kept me awake. This is when during the sleepy periods I’d start getting BIZARRE dark thoughts, thoughts I’d never had before. Disturbing ones, mostly sexual, I won’t go into it, but it was very uncomfortable. Not normal sexual fantasies/thoughts.
When I tried to stop thinking about them I couldn’t, like my brain was trapped, like my eyes were taped open and I couldn’t look away. If I did manage to fall asleep during this process, I would go immediately into disturbing sexual nightmares.
This continued for some time. Things began to get weird in my room. These tapping/knocking sounds started up. I repeatedly checked for things that could be causing it and couldn’t find any. Distinctive sounds of something tapping on the window or knocking on the wall by my bed. My lights began flickering even if I had just put in a new bulb. This is when I began to see horrible faces when I closed my eyes, lit up in the afterimage of my room.
I started not being able to sleep. At night I was filled with this awful paranoia that I was NOT alone. I tossed and turned and was generally miserable. This would not improve.
Then physical attacks began. It hated when I sang. I especially felt unsafe in my bathroom, in the shower. When I would sing, scratches would appear on my body. One time I remember it really hurting. I looked at my ankle and there were NAIL MARKS dug into my skin. It left scabs. How does something like that appear on its own?! Those weren’t the only physical attacks I experienced though. Sexual ones began too. They got worse and worse until the night I was raped for the first time. There was nothing I could do. I had been barraged with those dark thoughts, drugged with that unnatural drowsiness and I hardly processed what was going on aside from that it was INCREDIBLY strange, and felt very, very good.
For a long time after that, there were no more physical sexual attacks, but everything else continued. A few months passed. I tried to forget thee strange incident and chalk it up to imagination or something. At this point though I was terrified that I was dealing with something demonic.
Things kept getting worse and worse. Soon attacks became incredibly frequent. They happened almost every night, and eventually they would happen during the day too. I was powerless. There was nothing I could do. It would say HORRIBLE TERRIBLE things to me as it did this. Especially when I fought. When I obeyed it it praised me. If I tried to force myself to sleep during its attacks it gave me nightmares. I had so many nightmares.
I became a zombie. I walked through school continuously telling myself that nothing had happened to me. That it was my imagination. That I was going crazy. Thinking anything different would have been unbearable. But now things set me off. Seeing things about rape or abuse threw me off for hours. I had trouble focusing in class. It was just bad. But what could I do? There was nothing I could do.
I did everything I could to fight. I slept with the bible every night. I crossed myself with holy water before I went to bed. (Which actually helped??) I even put salt around my windows and door. I prayed constantly, though the thing would hurt me extra bad when I did this. Any time I challenged it it would attack me and MAKE SURE it hurt. Sometimes I was still sore the next morning. Disgusting. I’d have bruises circling my wrist as if someone had grabbed me there, which I hid.
I finally worked up the nerve to tell a close friend of mine who believed in the supernatural and had had psychic experiences about what was happening. (This was after an event where I lost my holy water. I couldn’t find it anywhere and then ages later found it buried under sheets in my closet. My mom had not put it there and no one else ever goes in my room. Then I started hiding it. One day I walked into my room to find my sister, 3 at the time, holding the water I had carefully hidden, and with a blank look on her face, pouring it out. The cap was screwed on tightly, I have no idea how she opened it. When I called her she seemed to snap to awareness and dropped the bottle. Having lost that protection, I was desperate for help, hence the friend.) Anyways so all I told my friend was that I might have spirits in my room. That was it. Well she ended up attacked as well. First she said she caught a glimpse of something with no eyes lunging at her. Later when I was sitting on my bed and felt a chill on my arm she turned pale and said we should leave the room immediately. She told me when we had left she had seen a creature with no eyes on the bed beside me with its arm around me possessively, glaring at her, right where I had felt the chill. She was also pinched several times in that room, so hard it left a mark. When she and her mom stayed with us while my parents were away, her mom told her that she felt uncomfortable in the house, and that she had heard children playing and running upstairs when no one else was home. They also both heard the strange tapping and knocking.
Aside from her and her mother, one other person had strange experiences, a girl who my mom had hired to help out around the house. The girl was cleaning my room. She bent to pick up a notebook on the ground and when she touched it it sent a burning sensation up her arm. She heard footsteps behind her and felt a dark presence. She was so scared she ran to tell my mom, who laughed it off because she has no belief in the paranormal. The notebook happened to be the journal that I chronicled everything that happened to me with the demon in.
Anyhow me and the psychic friend had a falling out because I had involved her in my delusions, which were VERY paranoid and frightening at the time, the first time they had ever been like that. I think it was because of what was happening to me with the demon. Anyways the attacks carried on until FINALLY we moved from that godforsaken house.
For 1 1/2 years, nothing happened. Nothing. No tapping. No knocking. No weird scratches or bruises. It was…weird. For once I felt alone at night. I didn’t know how to feel because I’d lived with it for about 3 years. I was also entirely addicted to it. Now I was kept awake at night by my cravings for it to come to me. I actually called out to it I was so desperate, even though I hated and feared it. But nothing happened. The weird sleep spells stopped. Paralysis stopped. Nightmares and dark thoughts stopped. Is this because my stress levels dropped significantly? No. During this time period I experienced more anxiety than I ever have in my life, it was when I first developed the issue. The attacks occurred completely separate from my stress levels, unlike my panic and paranoia at night, which were definitely raised by it. So that was weird.
Anyways everything stopped until right before I went to college. Until I finally got over my addiction (though I still haven’t stopped wanting it again, to be honest) and started to feel like I was finally free. Then things started happening again. The dark thoughts returned. Nightmares returned. But nothing physical. I also don’t recall any sleepy spells or paralysis. After a full year the first physical attacks I would experience again would be over summer break of my freshman year. But they were different. And the voice was still there but it wasn’t hurling abuses like before. And I found I could distract myself from it. It was all much weaker, the sensations didn’t feel as real and physical as they had been. Tapping and whatnot has started again and I have been seeing faces when I close my eyes, flickering lights have been happening also, but…is it coincidence? Is this PTSD? Is it possible I suffered true demonic abuse and am now dealing with flashbacks and nightmares from that? All my mental health confidants keep asking if I was abused, and I say no, but I was. For those three, miserable, terrifying years of my life. Those years that took away my desire to ever have sex with anyone, that made even the most innocent touch feel sexual and wrong, that made me deeply ashamed of myself and feel I was evil, a whore, just like it told me. Those years that made me age so much faster than my peers. Those years that made me doubt my relationship with God. I’ll never get them back.
What was it caused by?? Guilty sexual attitudes? I had none!! I had NO negative attitudes towards sex. Prior abuse causing it? Could the demonic attacks themselves have been flashbacks? I was never abused!! Never! I had a fantastic childhood!
So it’s one of two things. Either a) it was a real demon and all those unspeakable things actually happened to me or b) I hallucinated everything, making me pretty messed up and very hurt and confused as to why my brain would randomly put me through that hell
Whatever answer I choose, it sucks.
Anyways that’s my whole story. If you stuck with it and want to offer outside input I would be entirely grateful. I will definitely be sharing this with my therapist at some point. Maybe not now. I can hardly speak about them at this point. (I knew it would be difficult but dear lord…) Later down the road I guess.