Just some things...

[Kol]

Some time the next week, a gay temp worker told Jon he was kinda cute and asked him if he wanted to hang out. I remember wondering what had happened to cause everyone I knew to suddenly be so ready to jump in bed with everyone else. Even the modicum of inhibition and self-restraint most people innately have was nowhere to be seen in anyone around me. I was especially surprised at what was going on around myself. I was 26 and had never really had much of an interest in girls. They'd never really shown an interest in me either, and I had been happy and comfortable with that. I'd had a girlfriend when I first moved back to Georgia, one in California, and one in tech school. Beyond that I dated a little, but there was never anything serious. Since I had started working at Sony though, girls had begun to stop what they were doing when I talked to them. My dream girl Sara had shown up out of nowhere, Kaitlin had put me through the test of my lifetime, Melissa had offered me a 3-way, Stephanie had asked to spend the night at my house, and someone had stuffed a pair of panties into my backpack at work while I was on break. I suppose I should have been flattered and thought I was really something, but..I refused to give in to that world. Instead I was paranoid and suspicious.

And then one day, Jon said something that finished it all for me.

He was talking about his old girlfriend-he always talked about her-and he finished by saying that he'd just started to feel lonely lately and unloved.

That word lonely echoed in my mind.

When my stepdad had taken the family out for dinner, I was the only one by myself, and every once in a while I must admit, I did feel a bit lonely.

All the same, everyone else was married and I wasn't. I was alone, and I started to feel more and more lonely.

Lydia told me she'd been feeling lonely lately and she wondered if she needed a new love interest.

...with the new baby and his wife getting the other kids ready for school, his life was even more hectic now. He said he had felt a little lonely himself lately.

Stephanie called me at home the next night. She said she felt lonely and just needed to complain.

I knew full well the real reason behind the episode with Kaitlin and Melissa. I knew that when I first tossed my occult paraphenelia, I'd felt depressed and had a desire to pick them up again. Knowing that this had been an "attack", I knew as well that the enemy had started it. He'd enticed me to feel depressed and offered me a way to make it better-pick up those cards again.

Saul's attendants said to him, "See, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you. Let our lord command his servants to search for someone who can play the harp. He will play when the evil spirit from God comes upon you, and you will feel better." -1 Samuel 16:15,16

...Whenever the spirit from God would come upon Saul, David would take his harp and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him." -1 Samuel 16:23

Evil spirits can make you feel whatever they want you to feel. They will use this to try and lead you in to sin.

Granted, I thought, most of these people never held out for too long to begin with, but this..this is overly excessive.

Something was cleaning house.

I thought back to it, to all the things that had happened to myself. Most times, the guy is the one who initiates something. With the exception of Sara, that was not true in my case. In Melissa's and Stephanie's cases, I had even gone out of my way to not show an interest. Being lonely for other people was not normally so strong in my makeup as a person... I grew extremely suspicious. What relationship have you ever had that started with loneliness? Before this time, I had refused such things. If I liked someone, I liked them. But no one at the plant was happy with what they had. Kaitlin had a boyfriend, but wasn't happy with him. Stephanie had a husband-they'd come to Georgia together-but suddenly she wasn't happy with him. Jon had a girlfriend and Lydia had a roommate, but everyone had suddenly become lonely and set out to find something new. Just like that, they'd all started to feel alone and the thought occured to them all to find someone new to sleep with.

Stephanie's name was on the bulletin board on the list of people who could not enter the plant. She'd been fired. Beside her name was Tim's.

 

[Kol]

As soon as she'd left my house that night, Stephanie had run to Tim's and the two had moved in together.

When Stephanie's husband had tried to find her that day, he couldn't of course-she'd ran from home. Since he knew where she worked at, he'd shown up there and waited for her, all day. When Tim came later to take her lunch, Stephanie's husband confronted the two. He stole the keys to the company van and got in a fight with Tim. Since this happened on Sony property, the husband was charged with trespassing and the two guards, Stephanie and Tim, had been fired.

Lydia explained this to me in no uncertain terms. I was hurt, feeling that Tim had taken advantage of the girl because it was easy to do. Lydia was furious. Whatever last thread of hope she'd had for men was gone. I told her I'd felt sorry for Stephanie because of the situation with her abusive husband and her children. Lydia told me though, that the reason Stephanie had lost her kids in the first place was that she'd been on a 3-day cocaine binge and the step-mother had found out. DFACS took the children and the step-mother gained temporary custody. The couple had moved from Ohio to Georgia, where the children were now at, but Stephanie had started drinking and the husband had decided he would have a better chance of getting his kids back on his own so the two had split.

I had been completely tricked and made a fool of. But there was nothing I could do. . .

It was beginning to seem most of my life's problems revolved now around other people's mistakes.

 

[Tinkerbell33]

.

 

[Kol]

...

 

[Kol]

When I first stopped all my "wicked ways", an angelic spirit had come to me and convinced me that he could get me closer to God. This spirit had been a guide to me, trying to teach me how to better serve the Lord and know Jesus Christ. This spirit then led me to focus my life on self-dependence and a rugged type of individualism; a life view which mirrored the pastor of the Shepherd's Chapel church. As I progressed in my walk with the lord, it became desireable for me to return to the church where I'd been baptized, so that I could pull myself closer to the source of my spiritual life and remember why I now sought God so much.

At the time it happened, I was aware of none of this.

Before my conversion to Christianity, I had been an occultist. I used a special set of cards called "tarot" cards, to tap into my subconcious mind and find the answers hidden there. I also used "scrying", looking into crystals, fire, water, and smoke, in order to relax my mind and allow my guardian angel to communicate with me and to lead me in my life. I had dreams at night of heaven and of a void, and in these places I was taught by spiritual masters how to love others, better myself, and seek out my destiny in the cosmos.

When I was led by the angelic spirit to revisit my church, I had an out of body experience in which my former "guardian angel" revealed to me that I was being deceived. I learned that I had been following the advise of this second angel, which I had not realized in my awake state, and that this angel was not of Christ. He was a lier and a deceiver. This being shown to me in a type of vision, I ran from the church and never returned.

When I came back home, I began to have bad dreams. Nightmares of aliens and abductions, of the end of the world and of the world before Noah's flood. I felt a strong desire to use any of the old methods I knew to gaze into the spirit world and see what all this meant, but I refused. Instead I began to go to a baptist church and to order gospel music through the mail. I took a basic job as a security guard and started to get myself together for college. I made new friends and started to open myself up as best I could to other people. Over all of this, I tried my best to seek the Lord with all my heart and to be a normal person.

As time went on, a very old friend of mine named Sara showed up, and, being changed in who I was now, I fell in love with her. We had a good time together, but she eventually left for school and I was left behind. As a rebound I met a girl named Kaitlin, who I was first attracted to out of simple lust and a desire to stop hurting over Sara. Although this girl would not give up her boyfriend or even go out with me, I didn't let myself care. We both felt a desire to sleep with the other, and I began to let myself move in this direction.

I began to have spiritual experiences warning me against the situation. At the height of this I had a dream in which a blond haired man warned me that this adultery would be treason and that the cause of my desire was my former, Christian, angelic guide. I then began to fight against my desires, knowing that in the spiritual realm I was also fighting against this angelic spirit.

I won, but was badly beat up, emotionally speaking. I did not know what had happened to the spirit, but I did know this: I had since been warned in a dream that demons were coming to retaliate against me and my family.

Since that time, I had met another girl to whom I had felt a desire to engage in adultery, but had not. As I resisted though, another Christian gave in, and I felt that, symbolically speaking, he had just been killed. I now felt certain that some type of evil spirit was in my work place and home, causing a feeling of loneliness and depression on anyone it could, and leading them into adultery. I was convinced that the present peacefulness in my spiritual life was the calm before the storm, and that soon, everything would explode at once.

Spirit guides: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_guide
http://www.crystalinks.com/spirit_guides.html
http://freespace.virgin.net/russel.steward/guides.htm

The Shepherd's Chapel Church: http://www.shepherdschapel.com/
http://www.carm.org/shepherds_chapel.htm

Tarot Cards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot
http://www.allabouttheoccult.org/tarot-card-meanings-faq.htm

Guardian Angels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_angel
http://www.viloria.com/viloria/adi/guardian.shtml

Aliens and Abductions: http://www.alienresistance.org/ce4.htm
http://www.zetatalk.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZetaTalk

...

My mother decided on chicken marsala and wisely chose a coca-cola instead of wine. I meanwhile ordered chicken parmigiana with a dr pepper. We sat at the Olive Garden near Arbor Place mall in Douglasville, Georgia on a Thursday night. My sister Ashley was tormented over whether or not she should order off of the kid's menu; she wanted to but felt embarrassed. Amanda was texting on her cell phone and picking at a bread roll, uninterested.

"David, I think you're putting *way* too much into your dreams. We live in the real world," my mom said, "and even if all that stuff is true, you have to live this life here, now." She smiled at me, trying to soften what she had to say. "You should focus more on your life here, with people, or you might drift off, and I wouldn't want that."

This would end up being the last time I went out to eat with my family, and the last time all of us would be gathered together at once. It would be the last time I would see my mom so happy, the last time Amanda would still have such a good chance at life, and the last time Ashley would ever be so innocent.

"You believe in past lives and karma," I argued, "so why can't all of this be true, too?"

"I'm not saying it isn't, just that.." she tried to find the right words but couldn't. My momma sighed. "I think you're taking a little bit of string and just running with it. You're imagining things where they aren't really at."

"Momma," Ashley interrupted, "is it okay if I get the spaghetti?" Her little face was red and I felt extremely sorry for my little sister. She was 13, and stuck smack-dab in the middle of that horrible world between childhood and adolescence.

"Sure, Ashleybaby," my momma said.

I remember twisting the straw on my drink, thinking. Because my teeth are so sensitive, I can't drink anything with ice in it, but the waitress had filled my soda full of the stuff. So I'd had to take use a straw, even though I think there's something decidedly unmanly about the things.

I looked to Ashleybug and asked her if she ever read the Bible I'd given her. She shook her head 'yes' and kept shaking it, making a face. My mom hugged her and kissed her on the top of her head. Ashley was still having a hard time with our mother, and my mom was quick to repair the damage done. I looked to Amanda. She let her hair fall over her eyes as she read her messages, then let out a shrill scream. Matthew had told Tanitia at school that he thought she was cute.

I was afraid that demons were coming for my family, and I told my mom this. It was hard for me to get the words out, and I had to settle on the word "something" instead of "demons." In response my mom asked Amanda what she was going to order to eat.

I felt that I stood at the last possible point before the end, and that despite all my warnings to others, it would benefit nothing. I was warning the villagers about the huge rock that was going to crush the town, and no one would believe me. If I hadn't seen it for myself though, I might not even believe. There was nothing I could do.

...

 

[Kol]

A temp worker came out on his 15-minute break to stare out the glass doors to the ruined parking lot outside. Back in the '80s, Sony had hosted weekend dinners and contests in that lot, and attendence had been several thousands strong. Now the pavement was buckled and most of the lot was used to store pre-loaded trailers.

I told the worker he was only allowed to go outside on his lunch break.

"I don't want to go outside," he said dramatically, "I know I can't have my freedom. I just want to look out at it."

I laughed, but his comments made me think of ancient Egypt and I wondered if I too should set out on an exodus. I knew I wasn't going to have the money needed for school in January, and I would probably have to work a lot of overtime to finally earn it while still paying my bills. Lately though, I had started to think about moving out to stay with my grandmother. She wouldn't charge rent, and I could quickly save up the money I needed if I stayed with her. At the same time I knew I needed a quiet place where I could get over all that I had been through. I was hurt, and being around the same place, the place I'd been since I was a kid, wasn't helping. I needed to get away from Carrollton, away from Mt. Zion, away from Villa Rica, and away from the people still there.

Two years before, I had prayed night after night for the Lord to bless me with my own life, an unmarried life. In the old days, I had wanted to be alone. After I became a Christian, I was so happy to be with the Lord that I'd wanted to do everything I could to stay as close to Him as possible, and I knew that would include an unmarried and unfettered mind. I had been a spiritualist since childhood. I had spoken to ghosts and spirits, looked for signs from the afterworld, and set my life to be in touch with the next. When I had gone into the military, my feet finally touched the ground, but only long enough for me to decide I wanted nothing to do with the corporeal world. Afterwards I locked myself into the occult, but that failed me; it made me miserable. Everything I'd ever worked for was gone. That was the moment Christ entered my life for the first time, for the first real time. I loved him so much, I quit everything I'd ever done. I wanted nothing more to do with my beloved cards, or my pretty rocks or all my magic runes. Forget the dreams, forget the out of body trips, I fought hard to leave it all behind..and I succeeded. Instead, I began to believe in his love and his holiness, His perfection. Spiritual things had always been the greatest happiness of my life. My love for those things had always easily overpowered any drive or desire my other half held. I built the walls up high. But now, after this sudden barrage, a barrage caused I knew, by the things I'd left behind, I could no longer resist. If they couldn't have me in the spiritual world, no one would. They would make sure of that. For 26 years I had gone to hide on my own, because I thought I understood things that no one else did. I loved hidden, secret things, and I wanted to stay close to those things. Having found God, I had prayed with all my heart to stay near only Him. Now though, I prayed for the opposite, and it hurt me very badly. I hated it.

But there was nothing I could do.

I still couldn't get Sara completely out of my mind. The last time I'd called her, the conversation had been horrible. Drag it out, nothing to talk about, horrible. I tried my best to forget her number but that's always a tall order. I also needed to forget Kaitlin's. I needed to forget them both, period. Moving might make that a shade easier. It wasn't companionship I wanted, it was sex, plain and simple, and I hated it. I knew that desire would fade in time; it had been caused by teasing myself with Kae. But I had barely been able to resist the girl, and I had been in the best spiritual health a man could be. It was a hole in my defenses, and I knew I had to cover it before the next time my unseen enemies tried to make use of it. Since freelance relationships were disallowed in my new faith, life-long marriage was the only solution.

I hated it more, day after day, and repeated it when I first got to this site:

This is not man's only purpose, or highest purpose, but it is a faculty we're blessed with. The highest purpose of mankind is in communion with God. Children may be a great blessing, but there is no other blessing than that which God grants.

We are to have our purpose focused on God, not just reproduction. Also, I would hope that I am not in the same boat as you - I still believe that I will have a wife and family someday.... but that is dependent on my trust and faith in God and not myself.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with not getting married and having children. But where I get confused is how you say you do but you don't at the same time want any of them. To me, this just means that you're not ready for either of them, and that's OK

I hope I'm not the first to say this to you but: welcome to life, buddy! I'm not sure what you were expecting or what image of life you got for kindergarten, but I'd hate for to be delusioned.

Marriage and mating are common place in life, they're not the purpose of life, neither is meant to be "crippling" for your spirituality. I mean come on, God created it. You really think God is going to create, promote, and bless something that's going to cut-off your "manhood-ness" of your spiritual life? I'm guessing no.

But that was much later. Back in Carrollton, I decided to get away, to give myself time to think, and to do once again what had become so essential during my bout with Kaitlin: to run.

 

[Kol]

At first I didn't know when I'd make my move, but soon the choice was made for me. The manager of Human Resources had found out about the male stripper our boss had hired, and our company's contract was not renewed. I took the opportunity to leave. I never quit, I just never signed up for the new company.

I told Lucas that I was leaving, escaping out of Egypt.

"Out of Egypt have I called my son," he joked. He gave me a copy of his band's cd and shook my hand, wishing me luck.

When I had first come back to Carrollton in 2001, I had been a Christian, but not yet become truly dedicated in it. Now I belonged to God, and I would be leaving the last bits of my old life behind for the last time. The next stop after my stay at my grandmother's would be my Christian college. My old life would be nothing but a bad memory, and my grandmother's house would represent the trip there to me. So in more ways than one, I was setting out on a journey.

My last day was somewhere near the end of June, and I decided to leave at the beginning of August. That gave me about a month to get my things organized and packed. I bought a new game for my Gamecube and alternated between packing and playing Metroid. My mom called when she wasn't working, and Ashley came to see me once or twice. I stopped by my brother's once and suggested he begin to go to church, now that he had a baby on the way. He said he would think about it. I visited my cousin Jennifer and ran the same thing by her. She was much more receptive; we talked for a while about God, until her daughter Hanna woke up and my cousin had to take care of her baby.

Before I knew it, the month was over, and it was time to leave.

The last few days, I spent a lot of time at my mom's house with my sister Ashley. We tossed the baseball in the backyard-I didn't have a glove, but since Ashley didn't throw the ball very hard, I got by with using Amanda's tiny glove. We invented a game where one of us rode on the lawnmower and the other one pitched. Whoever sat on the mower had to steer and swing the bat at the same time. Ashley's pet cat Suicide (it liked to run in front of cars) got stuck in a tree. My sister grabbed her glove and told the cat to jump.

Amanda was at the house a fair amount of the time, and what i saw bothered me. Amanda didn't have any girl friends. They were all guys. I caught one or two looking at Ashley, and what bothered me was that my baby sister was so completely unaware of it. My sister looked like an adult, but she was still a little kid in her own mind.

Once again, I told her she should stay away from bad company, to include her sister, and once again, she disagreed with me.

The last day at my mom's house, Ashley drew a face in the basement that was supposed to be me. In a dark corner of the place, I wrote Ashleybug and Ashleybaby and told my sister to watch out for both of those people, because they were crazy.

The last day in Georgia, it was pouring. I stopped by two places. The first was my momma's old house, the one where she'd started taking pills. Back when that had happened, Yoshi (the dog) had been killed. There was blood on the concrete near the road which wouldn't wash away. The house was still a mess, and kids from the nearby high school had broken in to skip school in the place. There were condoms and beer cans with cigarette ashes on the rims, and a pair of sunglasses which had been smashed.

I thought back to my dream and despite my mother's worry that I was just losing it, I was worried.

In the yard, I found the teddy bear Ashley's old bf had given her. Yoshi must have dragged it out months ago. It was soggy and filthy, and just plain forgotten. I threw it in the back of my truck and took off.

The last place I stopped by was Jason's, to return a book.

"You're going now?" he asked.

"I am. You wanna go with?"

He looked surprised. "You'd really take me? Your grandmother would have a place for me?"

At first I seriously considered it, but the thought crossed my mind that the only reason he wanted to go to Arizona was that it was so much closer to his gf in California.

I just looked at him. My time in Arizona was going to be used to spend time with God. I was going to my secret place to strengthen my faith. I felt like I was a little kid again, hiding in my chestnut tree or sneaking down to the basement at my granddad's old house. It would mean more than anything if I could take my buddy with me, but..this was my walk with God, and I knew my friend didn't have the same trip in mind.

"You would go with me?" I asked him, meaning something other than what he realized.

"Yeah, sure," he said.

I'd known this guy since the 8th grade. I remember wishing he really could go. Not to Arizona, but to church, to God. But that's something that every person has to do on his own.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I can't take you with me."

...

 

[Saro]

what is this?!?!???

 

[iDEA4u]

I appreciate the time you take to type your thoughts.

 

[Chocolatesa]

gah! another abrupt ending... I hadn't read this thread till today Waiting for the rest. God bless!

 

[Kol]

Sorry for the abrupt ending. I try to make these things have closure and follow a logical point, but really I'm just remembering them all and sometimes I just try to get it all down too fast. And really a lot of them *don't* have closure. They make much more sense now than they did when they were going on. I understand things now, I think, but back then I had little if any idea of what was going on...

 

[Kol]

The week before I did leave, things at my apartment had been weird.

I had only a few things left to me that were not in storage. The television, the furniture, the bed, it was all in a room at Barnes. I slept on a sleeping bag with a tiny 12-inch set beside me in my old computer room. The desk and monitor were gone, and the laptop itself was in one of several travel bags near the far window.

I couldn't bring myself to sleep in either my room or the living room. I didn't know why. Aliens. You're just thinking that because the apartment's empty now and it looks scary. But no, my mind argued, it's not that. With everything gone, you're not distracted and you can feel what was here all along. Now I knew what my mother and sister Amanda had told me months before. I felt something new. Almost as if being in the apartment brought certain things to mind, like a word would its connotations, but this was always present. I kept thinking about science, and small, organized things, and a something with a sharp intelligence. Some kind of world that was a miracle, and about making things okay again.

I was 26 years old and refused to be afraid of invisible monsters in my own apartment. I decided to watch a few movies. Greene's Video had a sell on old VHS tapes, $1.00 each. I bought Men at Work, King David, and Beastmaster III. I took a break from games to watch a few of these. As I did, I tried to shake my bad feelings, but nothing seemed to help.

One night I woke up in a panic to find both my arms were asleep and I couldn't move them. I'd been having a nightmare, but seem to have come out of it on my own. I'd fallen asleep with a movie playing, and even set the VCR to repeat after it finished playing. The movie had finished, and snow was on the screen. I couldn't move either one of my arms. I could sit up though, and I did.

Something was wrong. I had no idea what it was. It was kind of like in the movies, where they say "it's too quiet". It was like that, but..not in any way I could tell. As if I were used to hearing a noise that I suddenly couldn't hear anymore. I wasn't paralyzed, and I was fully able to talk, although my voice was a bit asleep. I struggled to get to my knees, and it was hard to do so, because I couldn't use my arms whatsoever. They were flopping around at my side-I didn't even feel a tingle in them. After a second more, I found I could move my right arm but only slowly, and after a second more, I found I could move both my hands in the same way. I couldn't feel what I was doing. I tried to move my hands, and I could, but I couldn't feel myself doing so. I just tried, and then sat there watching them do so.

I managed to get to the knife beside my bed, and I pulled the thing out, although there was no way my sleeping hands could get a good grip on it. If I had to stab something, I would not be able to keep the thing in my hand after I jabbed.

I looked to my door and waited for my eyes to pick something out in the near-blackness.

I would not have been surprised if little gray aliens had been outside my door, but they weren't. I didn't feel anything inside in my apartment. But there was something wrong. There was some kind of very dark feeling, almost heavy in a way, and there was something wrong with me.

My mind was not thinking. It was..closed. I couldn't tell what the back of my mind, my subconcious, was doing. Instead, I had an almost animalistic awareness, and that was all. I could have held an ordinary conversation, sat and sipped tea, or discussed the finer points of the fall of British Imperialism. But my awareness, my higher consiousness, was gone. Not just asleep-I had no contact with it. There was a wall between me and it, and that hadn't happened for a long, long time.

It's difficult to really explain.

I was in this world, and that's all there was. The world was flat, and the only thing that was there was what I could see. I could see the lamplight outside, hear the breeze slip through the pines, and see the doorway in front of me. And that's all there was.

My arms would not wake up. They weren't even beginning to stir awake. I could take my right hand and pull up my left arm, but it did nothing. I let go, and my arm flew back down, dead weight-it swung back and forth and I felt it tear at the inside of my shoulder.

I began to mumble, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," over and over again, and I stood up to walk around my apartment.

There was nothing there, and I couldn't feel anything. Somehow my mind and my arms were asleep, and for some reason they weren't waking up. I went through the kitchen, the bedroom, and the living room, but saw nothing. I felt nothing. No "evil alien" feelings, no ghost feelings, nothing. Whatever part of my mind sent me those thoughts, I was no longer in touch with.

I sat up for about 15 minutes. My arms eventually came back awake, but my brain just wouldn't wake up.

...

When I woke up in the morning, things were fine. All the things I had opened my mind up to as an occultist were there again. I could feel Christ's Spirit, I could feel the atmosphere, I could feel the "veil" between me and the world. I have debated saying these things here now, but my purpose is to tell this story, and this is how I experienced these things. All the things I sense and see, I could sense and see again.

And at the time I had no idea what had happened.

 

[Kol]

Because my mother was an alcoholic, I could remember living in a few different places; from Austell to Villa Rica, there were six more places in between. I'd since added 5 more to the list. After a while they just all run together. The longest I'd ever lived in any one place was my 3 years in Carrollton. My mom would always get drunk and embarass herself, and we'd move to hide our shame. So none of those towns really seem to be home to me. Bad memories, and i didn't really miss any of them. The interstate between Georgia and California though, is something I can remember. I can't recall if my old address from high school was 2816 or 2618. But I know that if I can make it to Meridian, I'll be in Mississippi, and that in between Jackson and Vicksburg there are no good places to stop for gas. I know that Tyler, Texas reeks of cattle, and that it continues like that until El Paso, which smells much worse.

After you come out of the "Talladega National Forest", you're pretty close to Anniston, and once I got there I stopped to get a fresh Dr Pepper and some Pringles. Yuma was still about 1900 miles away, going west the whole time. I filled up on gas, checked the oil in my truck, then jumped back in and continued on to Birmingham.

I'd had to cancel my cell phone. Before I left Sony, they had cut all overtime as the company prepared to lose the contract, and bills had become much too tight. So I continued on through Alabama, thinking about calling my mom but not having a way to do it.

As I entered Mississippi I was faced with the choice of I-20 or I-10. The latter would take me by my old tech school. That story was so old tho, it wasn't even worth remembering. I stuck to 20 and wondered if I would make it to Texas before getting tired that night.

All I could think about was school and what kind of classes I would have to take my first year. I wondered if the school had a jogging track or if the nearby town had a gym with a treadmill or stairmaster. I'd checked on apartments in the area. They ran from 250 up to 450. Pretty cheap. So I could probably get a good place without having to worry a lot about money.

That first night, I stayed at a Motel 6 in Jackson, Mississippi. I found a clean place for about $45, grabbed a few things out of my truck, and headed to my room.

I made sure the room number was not 222.

In the morning I woke up on my own about 8 or 9, took a quick shower, and grabbed a fresh set of clothes to wear that day. I rechecked my map, noted where the best towns to fill up on gas would be, then tossed the keycard on the desk and headed out the door.

Sara and Kaitlin were completely out of my mind, and for good. The entire episode with them was Carrollton, and Carrollton was just one town of many. I didn't have to go to my grandmother's. I could stop in any town I wanted to, get a job, and live there. I never had to go back to Georgia if I didn't want to. I was free and on my own.

In my cd player I played old 80's songs and sang along, as off-key as I could.

I had really learned to follow Jesus, and that's what I was now, a Christian, a follower of Jesus. I thought back to my room in California, when I'd been so miserable before. Black lights, heavy curtains, and God-hating metal music. Those things were behind me now. I'd fought off the last of it in Carrollton and when it came time to leave, I'd left.

In one of the boxes now riding in my truckbed, I had the trophies of my victories: a pass from the Shepherd's Chapel to attend their passover service, which I never went to; an altoids can filled with the last of my clove cigarettes, which I hadn't smoked in years but found while packing; my sister's teddy bear, washed and cleaned; the Bible my mother had given me as a teenager, when I watched preaching on tv; and a carebear blanket, still unwrapped in its original package.

I passed through Tyler and continued on my way to the 40-mile stretch of highway that is the Dallas/Fort Worth area...

 

[blankgirl]

The week before I did leave, things at my apartment had been weird.

I had only a few things left to me that were not in storage. The television, the furniture, the bed, it was all in a room at Barnes. I slept on a sleeping bag with a tiny 12-inch set beside me in my old computer room. The desk and monitor were gone, and the laptop itself was in one of several travel bags near the far window.

I couldn't bring myself to sleep in either my room or the living room. I didn't know why. Aliens. You're just thinking that because the apartment's empty now and it looks scary. But no, my mind argued, it's not that. With everything gone, you're not distracted and you can feel what was here all along. Now I knew what my mother and sister Amanda had told me months before. I felt something new. Almost as if being in the apartment brought certain things to mind, like a word would its connotations, but this was always present. I kept thinking about science, and small, organized things, and a something with a sharp intelligence. Some kind of world that was a miracle, and about making things okay again.

I was 26 years old and refused to be afraid of invisible monsters in my own apartment. I decided to watch a few movies. Greene's Video had a sell on old VHS tapes, $1.00 each. I bought Men at Work, King David, and Beastmaster III. I took a break from games to watch a few of these. As I did, I tried to shake my bad feelings, but nothing seemed to help.

One night I woke up in a panic to find both my arms were asleep and I couldn't move them. I'd been having a nightmare, but seem to have come out of it on my own. I'd fallen asleep with a movie playing, and even set the VCR to repeat after it finished playing. The movie had finished, and snow was on the screen. I couldn't move either one of my arms. I could sit up though, and I did.

Something was wrong. I had no idea what it was. It was kind of like in the movies, where they say "it's too quiet". It was like that, but..not in any way I could tell. As if I were used to hearing a noise that I suddenly couldn't hear anymore. I wasn't paralyzed, and I was fully able to talk, although my voice was a bit asleep. I struggled to get to my knees, and it was hard to do so, because I couldn't use my arms whatsoever. They were flopping around at my side-I didn't even feel a tingle in them. After a second more, I found I could move my right arm but only slowly, and after a second more, I found I could move both my hands in the same way. I couldn't feel what I was doing. I tried to move my hands, and I could, but I couldn't feel myself doing so. I just tried, and then sat there watching them do so.

I managed to get to the knife beside my bed, and I pulled the thing out, although there was no way my sleeping hands could get a good grip on it. If I had to stab something, I would not be able to keep the thing in my hand after I jabbed.

I looked to my door and waited for my eyes to pick something out in the near-blackness.

I would not have been surprised if little gray aliens had been outside my door, but they weren't. I didn't feel anything inside in my apartment. But there was something wrong. There was some kind of very dark feeling, almost heavy in a way, and there was something wrong with me.

My mind was not thinking. It was..closed. I couldn't tell what the back of my mind, my subconcious, was doing. Instead, I had an almost animalistic awareness, and that was all. I could have held an ordinary conversation, sat and sipped tea, or discussed the finer points of the fall of British Imperialism. But my awareness, my higher consiousness, was gone. Not just asleep-I had no contact with it. There was a wall between me and it, and that hadn't happened for a long, long time.

It's difficult to really explain.

I was in this world, and that's all there was. The world was flat, and the only thing that was there was what I could see. I could see the lamplight outside, hear the breeze slip through the pines, and see the doorway in front of me. And that's all there was.

My arms would not wake up. They weren't even beginning to stir awake. I could take my right hand and pull up my left arm, but it did nothing. I let go, and my arm flew back down, dead weight-it swung back and forth and I felt it tear at the inside of my shoulder.

I began to mumble, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," over and over again, and I stood up to walk around my apartment.

There was nothing there, and I couldn't feel anything. Somehow my mind and my arms were asleep, and for some reason they weren't waking up. I went through the kitchen, the bedroom, and the living room, but saw nothing. I felt nothing. No "evil alien" feelings, no ghost feelings, nothing. Whatever part of my mind sent me those thoughts, I was no longer in touch with.

I sat up for about 15 minutes. My arms eventually came back awake, but my brain just wouldn't wake up.

...

When I woke up in the morning, things were fine. All the things I had opened my mind up to as an occultist were there again. I could feel Christ's Spirit, I could feel the atmosphere, I could feel the "veil" between me and the world. I have debated saying these things here now, but my purpose is to tell this story, and this is how I experienced these things. All the things I sense and see, I could sense and see again.

And at the time I had no idea what had happened.

Wow this one is freaky! i had this kinda experience before; it was more like i couldnt get out of bed even if i wanted to. Keep writing!

 

[Kol]

A couple of ppl have had that experience i guess. Thanks for the info, there's more to it later.

 

[Kol]

I pulled into my grandmother's front yard at about 10pm. The lights in the living room were on, and my grandmother came out to open the gate for me. I inched into the driveway carefully, because i'd once hit the gate backing out of the yard when I visited from california.

That first night i sat up with her for about an hour, talking about things in general and just catching up on everyone else. I'd lived with my grandparents half my life, and had graduated school at their house. That had been 10 years ago, and my grandad had since been killed in an accident about 5 years before. My grandmother had then moved out to Arizona to live with her dad, and the two didn't have many visitors.

After she decided to go to bed, i took a few things out of my truck and opened the door to the guest room.

The house was at an angle, and didn't have a front door, only a sliding glass back door and a small carport door. My room was separate from the house, with archways linking the two. A waist-high brick wall broke the yard into smaller bits, and the entire house was surrounded by a walkway. There were cactus laid out like shrubs, and sage trees with oleanders in the back. It wasn't a beautiful house, but it was very neat and orderly. Peaceful, and quiet.

There was a swing in the front yard, and that first night I sat in it until midnight, rocking just a little and talking with God.

I lay down at about 2, and slept until 9 the next morning.

...

 

[Kol]

The guest room was a bit stuffy. It looked like a built-in garage in a way. A yellow orb-like light hung on one corner-beyond that, I had only dim lamps to light the room. I had a tiny bathroom sectioned off by an incomplete wall, and the way there was partially blocked by old sewing magazines. The room had been my great-grandmother's rec room in a way, and most of her things sat in the place as if it were her personal storage shed. Against one wall, there was a bookcase that reached to the ceiling. The books were ancient. There was an 1890 account of life in Minnesota, and a couple of Sears-Roebuck catalogues as well. Among the other things, I found the autobiography of the general who led the 90's Iraq war, and took it down to read it.

The next day then, I lay on the couch inside and began to read. The temperature outside was over 100, but the air in the house was so cool, I felt like falling asleep. The dog lay beside his bed and looked over at me once or twice, bored. The cat lay on the vent, stretched out and sound asleep.

My grandmother cooked pancakes, and the three of us ate together at the table. My great-grandpa asked about my trip, and whether or not i'd seen any indians on my way. My grandmother laughed. I'd once been rescued by indians when I crashed near Flagstaff. She told her daddy i might not want to talk about it.

The rest of the day I drank chai tea and read different books. After supper my grandpa put on a movie and the three of us watched it together.

That night I finished taking everything out of my truck. I called my mom and my sisters back home, and tossed the notepad with everyone else's numbers in a box, to not be opened. After midnight I made my way back to the front yard in slippers and sat beneath the ficus trees to watch the stars. There were statues near me, porcelain coyote pups all gathered around their momma, howling. I gave the momma a pat on the head, then lay against the tree and closed my eyes to pray.

Very peaceful.

 

[Kol]

I believe that type of experience is called "night hag".

Of course, it's not real, and there are no demons or aliens:

We all have nightmares at one time or another, yet we do not claim our nightmares were real demons attacking us. We understand that nightmares are fragments from our subconscious mind leaking into the conscious mind and that they generally can be symbolic, not actual.

Sounds like my mom.

Whatever. They're real.

As far as I know, these experiences are mostly attached to "abductions" and aliens. I have had them (fairly frequently), but I always call out to Christ and wake up. My buddy Jason (who 'has no opinion on God') has experienced them too, tho, and his are most definitely connected with "abductions".

Usually mine start in dream form. I don't know if they all start like this or not, because it's possible that over the years I've just become aware of it earlier, and fight it off before I wake up. Usually the dream will somehow be "wrong." It's almost always a lucid dream, or I become lucid (aware that I'm dreaming). For me, the sky in my dreams usually takes on a kind of "night-ness", as if everything were pitch black at midnight. There is an additional feeling to the dreams, but I can't describe it because it's not real. The dream can express it better than reality can I guess.

At some point in the dream I will come across something that isn't a dream. Most usually some kind of "alien" person or being, tho sometimes saucers or something else. If an actual entity, then it will always look me in the eye and at that point I'm paralyzed. I can pray, "Jesus, Jesus," and wake up. This type of experience started for me when I first moved back to Georgia and still happens, but very rarely.

It seems to me to be a type of "prep" for an actual abduction, but I don't really know.

 

[Kol]

So, two days deep in Arizona, my life was great.

...

Way back when my grandparents first realized their daughter was such a heavy drinker, the decision was made that if worse came to worse, I would be taken care of and not allowed to sit in a house with a drunk mother. After my mother shot my father, my grandparents began to gain custody of me. My grandmother began to keep a journal, complete with dates, names, and phone numbers, so that if something were ever questioned in court, there would be no question as to what had happened.

One of the entries, from the summer between my 3rd and 4th grade years:

...Both the boys miss their mother but right now she is still not working or able to take care of them like they should so they will stay with us. Michael (my brother) says that is fine with him. David is real afraid of ghosts in his room. We told him there is no such thing as ghosts there is no reason to be afraid someone will always be there for him.

I guess my grandmother thought I was simply afraid of being left alone, but I remember that room and I still say I saw a ghost. Left alone and told that what I was seeing didn't really exist, that summer was the first real time I ever became interested in spiritual things. It was near the time I first met Sara (so we'd had our talks about God), and when I began to see that thing in my room, it piqued my interest even more so. So in a way, I'd been looking for ghosts since I was 9. This interest eventually led me to a book on celtic magic and after that, tarot.

What I didn't know until years later though, was that I was not the first person to have such an interest.

My grandmother was an occultist years and years before I was ever born. She read tarot, scryed into the fireplace, and told peoples' future. The story goes that she became so good at what she did, no one would go to see her because her fortune-telling scared people. The cards are long gone now. She denies she ever did such a thing, though I've only asked her once. But I don't doubt the story. I catch her even now reading Sylvia Brown and watching shows on telling tea leaves.

My mother studies past-life regression and believes in spirit guides and reincarnation. She believes in the "Age of Atlantis", that we are on some kind of precipice, where enlightened spirit-beings will come soon and lead us into another "Golden Age" like lost Atlantis.

My granddad claimed to have dreams about the future and also professed a belief in the occult, though he never actively pursued those things. He was in the masonic lodge, which he vehemently defended as having nothing to do with occult matters. My granddad claimed his ability to see the future was from God, that it ran in families, and that he lost it because he did drugs when he was younger. I have seen my granddad and my blond haired man in an obe together.

My uncle has had dreams about the future, but after my granddad was killed, I never heard about this ever again, so I don't know what else has happened with him.

Both of my great-grandmothers on my mom's side seem to have been involved, at least to a small degree. One may have been into tarot, and someone hinted that the other would tell the future but only for herself.

..So this story actually started long before I was born.

All of this leads to some creepy situations. My cousin Brittany has seen my spirit guide. Amanda told me a story about aliens coming for her when she was 2. I had an OBE when I was 5, and saw my granddad with the blond haired man.

So although I have to take the blame for the things I did, I also have to realize that I walked in to what was a very bad situation starting out.

 

[connectadot18]

Keep Going...