By Rosemary Ellen Guiley

c. Visionary Living, Inc.

A nightmare is any dream that is unsettling or frightening to the dreamer. Nightmares can vary from dreams in which we are in unpleasant circumstances to truly terrifying and vivid experiences in which we are threatened, harmed or in great danger. Some persistent nightmares are part of psychological stress syndromes and require therapeutic help. For many dreamers, the occasional nightmare or repeating nightmare deals with unhappy circumstances that need attention in waking life; they cease when the problem is rectified.

Certain nightmares may have paranormal origins. The dreamscape may be invaded, such as by a haunting presence in a specific locale. If we accept the premise that we can encounter other people and beings in our dreams, we cannot assume that all of them are benevolent. One must consider the possibilities discussed in this chapter with great caution, however. I believe that our dreams generally are protected space, such as is the personal boundary around us. It is important not to leap to conclusions, but to eliminate all other possibilities through traditional dreamwork.

When a nightmare isn’t “just a bad dream”

“Adene” (a pseudonym) is a woman who has experienced a certain nightmare periodically throughout her life. An invisible but palpable evil presence suddenly makes itself known beside her bed and then sexually molests her. There are no sounds or smells, but the bedroom takes on a heavy, unpleasant atmosphere.

To Adene, the nightmares are not “just bad dreams” but strange and very real experiences that involve dreams. Sometimes she isn’t certain whether she is awake or dreaming. The attacks are unpredictable and she has never been able to link them to anything in particular; however, she acknowledges she carries a lot of internal anger and frustration, and has never had a good sexual relationship. She refers to the invading presence as “It.” In the past, she had tried to send It away but it always came back.

When Adene’s husband died, she was frightened that It would increase its attacks. On its next return, she screamed at It to go away and leave her alone for good. Perhaps her intensity of emotion made the critical difference, for It left without molesting her and never returned.

A psychologist might regard these dreams as caused by repressed sexual tension and emotions that were relieved by the death of the husband. This explanation has never satisfied Adene, who regards “It” as an external force that somehow managed to invade her dreams.

She is not alone in this experience, or in this conviction.

Some dreams are “real”

Modern dream researchers regard dreams as subjective, and distinguish between “dreams” that reflect our internal states and “reality” that is the outside world. But according to more universal and ancient beliefs, dreams can serve as a medium for visitations by otherworldly beings and the dead, some of whom may cause mischief. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans – as well as other cultures – believed that a person could be visited in one’s sleep for healing or receiving a message, or to be plagued by demonic beings who wished to molest the dreamer or suck off his life force.

Numerous cross-cultural accounts exist of dream visitations by ghosts, poltergeists, vampires, demons and nightmare hags, as well as helpful and benevolent beings such as angels, fairies, religious figures and spiritual guides. Dreams of ghosts can be either pleasant or unpleasant.

Visitation dreams are distinctly different from ordinary dreams. They are intense and vivid in imagery and sensory experience, and the dreamer often is not certain of being awake or asleep. The dreamer may awaken certain that the “dream” was a real event.

Let’s look at some of the darker aspects of visitation dreams.

Hag attacks

The dreams experienced by Adene are a well-documented universal and ancient phenomenon known as the “hag attack.” The hag attack has been documented around the world. It intermingles with lore about vampires, werewolves, witches, incubi and succubi. Our term “nightmare” comes from the Old Hag syndrome: mare is Old English for incubus. In medieval lore, nightmares, or bad dreams, were caused by witches (hags) sitting upon one’s chest, riding the victim to exhaustion.

The dominant characteristic of a hag dream is an unpleasant entity or presence that invades the room. Sometimes, but not always, it comes up on the bed and may press upon or sexually assault the victim. Other characteristics of hag attacks are awful smells; grunting, shuffling, scraping and unpleasant sounds; grotesque dark shapes which may have red eyes; and a pervasive atmosphere of fear. The victim may feel as though he is having a lucid dream, or may be uncertain whether he is awake or dreaming, or may feel completely awake. The victim often awakens in the morning feeling drained and exhausted, as in this example:

From time to time I have these dreams in which a horrible “something” is trying to get into me to take possession of me. I never see it, but I can “feel” it – I know it is there. I always feel like I’m awake when this happens. I try to make it go away, but just when it seems that it’s going to get me, I wake up for real. I am always exhausted all day long after one of these dreams.¹

In his book The Terror That Comes in the Night, folklorist David J. Hufford describes different hag attacks, including this one had by a man:

The first thing that occurred to me was that I was dreaming. When it [the hag] got into the room it sat down on the floor and it looked to me like an elephant of all things! Just a blob, but white. I was – ah – I knew I wasn’t dreaming! I thought I was dreaming but I knew I wasn’t dreaming! And I broke out into a sweat and was just forced onto the bed.²

From my case files is the account of S., who had a history of related haunting and hag dreams from childhood. S. described herself as “a really happy, out-going person. I love life and I make a conscious effort every single day to thank God for something that he has shared with me or the experiences that I have had. I have prayed every night since I was a little girl because I used to hear my grandparents whispering prayers in their room before they went to sleep. I knew it must be important.” The nightmares were hard for her to understand:

These have continued into my adult life. They are recurrences. They are both nightmares. The majority of my nightmares take place in this house. It is a mansion out in the country, very old southern style. I have never seen this house, been to anything like this house, nor have I any relatives that lived in such a house (as far as I know; I have a large family.) This is my nightmare house. Sometimes it is in its day, grand and beautiful, but the majority of the time it is almost demolished, overgrown with weeds, etc. It has a horseshoe driveway, there are more trees and such on the right side of it. It also has a big front yard. It is always haunted and only on a few occasions has someone I’ve known lived in it. I am always trapped in it. Usually I am either trying to open or close a door, but some force won’t let me. It’s very cold and I usually get a strange smell. I can’t describe it. If fear had a smell I am sure that would be it. I don’t associate it with anything pleasant. When I get it I know that something bad is going to happen.

All kinds of different things occur in these dreams, but the house and it’s surroundings are basically the same. This house has been with me for as long as I can remember. I am trying to figure out what it means.

The other dream that I have is similar in nature in that I have had it since I was a child. The first one that I really remember was when I was about eight or nine. I was dreaming that I was lying in bed and I heard someone enter my parent’s room and then my brother’s room. I heard heavy breathing and got that weird smell that I mentioned before. Suddenly, this man (because that is what I sense) comes into my room. I wake up just as I see the silver blade of a knife coming right down at me. I literally woke up screaming and drenched. You could have wrung my clothes out.

I don’t really remember many of those types of dreams for a few years until I got into my twenties. At one time I was having them about every two to three months. These dreams were always the same. I’d be sleeping, I’d hear someone come into my room, I’d hear breathing, I’d even feel the pressure on the bed. At this point I’d start telling myself to open my eyes, that it was just a dream, but they are so heavy that it is nearly impossible. Later in life they did not include the knife aspect. I just awake with no one there and my heart beating out of control. On one weird occasion, I think it was a cat. I felt a cat-like creature walking on the bed and even felt its whiskers on my nose just before I woke up. (I don’t have a cat.) Only once did I actually get a vision of a man’s face as I woke up. All of these dreams took place in the morning. Usually after I would kiss my boyfriend goodbye and drift back to sleep. These dreams are so realistic that I feel like I am being haunted. They have occurred in many different places that I have lived.³

S. acknowledged that psychic experiences had occurred to her mother and to herself: visions of the Virgin Mary, and also of the dead and ghosts. In dreamwork, she acknowledged that the house could represent circumstances in her life in which she felt trapped; however, the dream had recurred since childhood, and it stood out as distinctly different from her other dreaming.

In earlier times, it was believed that such nightmares were caused by a demon called the hag. In medieval times, the hag was sometimes described as a witch who rode all night on the chests of victims. Dream sexual assaults also were attributed to demons called incubi and succubi, who had monstrous human forms.

Modern attempts to explain hag dreams arrive at no definitive cause. They have been linked to psychological stress, mental disturbances, sleep disorders, physical discomforts, sexual repression, repressed anger and even diet, but there are many cases which simply have no obvious explanation. An average person is likely to experience at least one hag dream in life, and some people have them periodically or frequently.

Just as there are no satisfactory explanations for hag attacks, there are no certain “cures.” Some people who experience them frequently have successfully repressed them through sheer will by telling the invading presences to go away, or invoking divine help. Others endure them. Medical help and counseling may or may not offer any relief. This dreamer was able to banish a hag attack dream by praying to her guardian angel:

The first time I remember having this happen to me was when I was five years old. I remember the feeling of not being able to speak or talk; I remember trying to call my mom, but nothing came out, and I remember the feeling of the presence of something with me in the same room, and it was hard to breathe, and I was very wide awake. This has happened five or six times in my life so far. The last time this occurred, I remember feeling the presence of something there in my room like I was being watched, so I knew it [the choking presence] was going to happen, so I said the guardian angel prayer and the feeling slowly went away.⁴

Another of the cases described by Hufford involved three college girls who shared a lonely country house. One of them had a history of being sort of a psychic lightning rod: wherever she lived, weird things happened, such as poltergeist and haunting phenomena and hag attacks.

Soon after they had moved in, the “lightning rod” girl began experiencing nightmares. The nightmares spread like a virus to the other girls, increasing in unpleasantness and violent, bloody imagery. They were visited by a hag presence. Poltergeist phenomena occurred in the house. They called in a priest to bless the house, but that only made things worse. Finally they had no recourse but to leave the house, and went their separate ways.

The two secondarily affected girls experienced relief. Whether or not the “lightning rod” girl continued to have problems in not known.

Psychic attack

Can the living invade dreams? Magical rituals exist in many cultures for causing a sleeping person to have a certain kind of dream or get a certain message in a dream. A person might be deliberately psychically attacked by wild or supernatural animals or demonic beings in dreams.

A vulnerable person might also be “dream-attacked” by another person who harbors anger and intense dislike against them. Such dream attacks may occur without conscious effort, due to intense negative emotions finding pathways in dreamtime.

The great occultist Dion Fortune wrote extensively on psychic attack. In her book Psychic Self-Defence, Fortune says that “characteristic dreams” are the first sign. She goes on to describe the features of hag attack dreams – a weight on the chest, foul smells – as well as other features, such as the precipitation of slime, mysterious footprints, poltergeist effects, and most important, a severe weakening of the victim. Fortune herself was the victim of psychic attack from a hostile superior at work, and learned on her own how to neutralize it. She stresses that though psychic attack can occur, the average person has natural auric barriers of protection against it and is unlikely to encounter it.

Extraterrestrial encounters

Many extraterrestrial abductions are said to occur while the victims are asleep. John Mack, Harvard psychiatrist and ET expert, reports in his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens that typical of abductions are “frightening dreams that seem more real than ordinary nightmares.” The victim may recall the “dream” upon awakening, or may need hypnosis to remember. Mack divides ET dreams into three types: 1) abductions distorted as dream experiences; 2) dreams that relive abductions; and 3) ordinary dreams that contain UFO material. Many ET dreams are recurring. Said Mack:

When abductees call their experiences “dreams,” which they often do, close questioning can elicit that this may be a euphemism to cover what they are sure cannot be that, namely an event from which there was no awakening that occurred in another dimension…

Allow for the time being that there is little knowledge about the domain from which the alien beings derive – perhaps not even language or concepts to describe it. Yet acknowledge too that something is going on that cannot be dismissed out of hand.⁵

ET experiencers say they are sexually assaulted in medical probings, and some feel they are being used to propagate a hybrid race. These attacks bear a resemblance to old accounts of demonic dream invasions, and may be a modern version of “high strangeness” in a multi-dimensional universe.

Not all dreams are unpleasant, however. Some ET experiencers feel they are contacted in dreams for special instruction, and to cooperate with aliens in benefitting the earth.

Ghosts

The ancients regarded dreams as a halfway house to the land of the dead. In dreams, the dead lament their deaths, give burial instructions and provide warnings. The Greeks in particular believed that the unburied dead would haunt the dreams of the living until they were properly interred.

Ghosts also appear in dreams to reenact their own violent deaths or traumatic events in their lives. A person can spend the night in a haunted place, not knowing it was haunted, and be visited in dreams by the resident ghost.

A case in my files concerns a woman who had strange dreams while vacationing in a cottage; no one else she knew who had stayed there had similar experiences. She woke up in the middle of the night choking, to find a strange man with his hands around her neck; she was looking right at him. The only man present in the cottage was her husband. The next night, she woke up to see a semi-transparent woman with a pillow in her hand in the bedroom. The woman went away.

In another case, a ghost seemed to be reenacting a violent event. During a vacation in England, Carol and her husband Jack (pseudonyms) stayed overnight in an old pub. They settled into bed with expectations of a comfortable sleep. But during the night, Carol experienced a vivid and terrifying dream in which a man dressed in a bloody soldier’s uniform charged into the bedroom swinging a knife. The experience was so real that she thought she was fully awake and that they were under some bizarre attack. But just as the figure reached the side of the bed, it vanished. Jack slept peacefully throughout the entire episode.

Carol shrugged off her experience as “just a bad dream.” The next morning, she learned from one of the employees that the pub was haunted by a ghost of a soldier from England’s Civil War during the mid-17th century. She was not the only guest to have that or a similar dream.

Carol hadn’t known anything about the history or haunting lore of the pub prior to the dream. The probable explanation is that her dreaming mind tapped into a ghostly recording imprinted in the psychic space of the pub. Her husband did not share the dream because his dreaming mind did not, or could not, attune to the presence; perhaps he was occupied doing others things in the dreamscape.

A recurring haunting dream was reported to me by a young woman:

The first time I ever had the dream I was just walking around this big, old white house. I remember thinking to myself it felt familiar; like I had been there before. I was walking through the house feeling the walls as I walked. When I reached the stairwell I heard something and a little door, a panel in the wall, opened. I went through, I was in pitch black. I walked down the hall. Nothing but black. Before I knew it there was this girl. A beautiful little girl with long blonde hair. She is wearing a white dress or sleeping gown. She is probably about six or seven. I was so scared, I started running. I went down black hall after black hall, I couldn’t find my way out. I was crying. Then I awoke. The next couple of times I would fall asleep I would end up looking for the panel on the stairwell. I could always hear my friends telling me not to go, it was dangerous. I always went over.

Despite my fear I was drawn to her. The more I have the dream the more I began to enjoy it. You see, I am scared to death of this little girl because every time I see her I think she is trying to kill me. On the other hand, I like the mystery. The house isn’t like a black maze anymore. I can now recognize rooms I have “been in” before. One room in particular. It’s a bedroom with an antique barber chair in the comer. The room and everything in it has an iridescent glow. Its my safe room. She doesn’t follow me in. I have only been in there once. Some rooms I run into are full of people. I beg for help but no one listens. It’s like they don’t even see me. I feel like I know the house. I just needed to familiarize myself with it again. If I wake up, I always fall back into where I left off.

At this point, one might speculate that the little girl in the dream is symbolic of an aspect of the dreamer. However, the experience gets much stranger:

The most confusing thing for me is my uncle and‑my dad have the exact same dream. The only difference is, my dad has gotten chased to the attic. He said the ceiling is low and there are statues of gargoyles.

I haven’t had the dream in about a year. Since the last time I had it, I have built a house on my dad’s property. I live in front of his big, white farm house that was built in the 1700s. I have since found out it has tunnels in the basement and was used to move slaves underground. There are also two doors that will not open and look as if they lead outside. If you go outside and look, you don’t see a door. We tried to bust the doors in with a 15-pound sledge hammer. No luck! Both my dad’s house and mine are haunted. The previous owners and neighbors have told us that a young woman and her child walk the house. There have been many sightings but that’s another story.⁶

In the American Civil War, the “underground railroad” was a network of anti-slavery people who aided slaves in their escape to northern, non-slavery states. Slaves were hidden and moved in underground tunnels. Many homes and buildings where these tunnels are located have haunted histories to them. Perhaps the intense emotions of fear and anxiety, combined with deaths that surely occurred in tunnels, have imprinted the spaces with ghostly presences.

How can we explain haunted dreams?

Non-paranormal explanations advanced are sleep paralysis and normal hypnagogic, or “near sleep” visions. It’s normal for the body to experienced a certain degree of “paralysis” during sleep; otherwise we might act out our dreams. In cases of sleep paralysis, people can wake up feeling paralyzed, choked and confronted by ghosts or presences. Experts say that the dreamer hasn’t entirely awakened; the effects of sleep paralysis and lingering dreaming create misleading impressions about supernatural attacks.

Many cases of presences and ghosts seem to occur in the twilight stage of near-sleep, a state of consciousness that is well-known for its fleeting, jumbled images of faces and snatches of voices.

These explanations can account for some cases of haunted dreams, but not all of them. They especially do not explain situations in which diverse people have similar dreams in the same place, without prior knowledge of a place’s “dream history.”

Why do some people have visitation dreams and others not? In my book Dreamspeak: How to Understand the Messages in Your Dreams I tell about a woman whose dead mother-in-law explains in a happy visitation dream that she cannot appear in the dreams of her son to deliver messages to him because “of the way that he dreams.”

Our visitation dreams are influenced by many factors: emotions, physical conditions; auric fields; and natural psychic channels and abilities. Parapsychological studies show that most of our psychic episodes – up to 70 percent of them – occur in dreams rather than in waking consciousness. Some of us may be more naturally receptive to the “unusual” when in the dream state. Emotional links can play a significant role in dreams of the dead. Emotions seem to provide a “psychic electricity” for dream connections.

Place also is important. Paul Devereux, an expert in ancient mysteries and earth energies, has researched dream patterns at sacred sites in the U.K. He has found certain patterns occur at certain places, which suggests that earth energies – perhaps electromagnetic forces – influence dreaming consciousness. Such patterns also may be linked to other phenomena reported at sacred sites, such as mysterious lights, hauntings, UFOs, fairy folk, etc.

Perhaps the most important but unknown factor is our “consciousness DNA” – something within us that affects states of consciousness and psychic receptivity, and which is evolving within us on a collective level. This may be the most significant factor explaining why, for example, two people can sleep in the same haunted place and only one of them will have a disturbed dream.

If you experience a haunted dream

Don’t rush to assume that a nightmare is more than symbolic. Look for natural explanations first before assuming the supernatural. Nightmares and troubling dreams may need to be scrutinized in dreamwork with a qualified therapist or practitioner, as they are likely to carry symbolic meanings pertaining more to the dreamer than to any outside agents.

If you do feel vulnerable, give yourself an affirmation of protection and light prior to going to sleep. The vulnerability itself must be dealt with, for fear can help to create the very dreams one wishes to avoid. Only by thoroughly understanding dreams through dreamwork can we sort out their true meanings.

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From The Dreamer’s Way, by Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Berkley Books, 2004.