Night Terror

Night Terror

Putting the blackness of night terror into context

I was about 13 years old. We were living in a small rent house in a massive Virginia Beach subdivision. It was the middle of the night and I was asleep in the bottom bunk. But not quite asleep because I was having a lucid dream.

In my dream I saw a vast darkness. The only thing I could see were hundreds or thousands of stars, dots of light. And it was utterly and terrifyingly clear to me that they were alive. Even more terrifying was that each one of them was looking straight at me.

As my terror increased, it reached the point of explosive fear. They wouldn’t stop staring. I forced myself awake with a long, blood-curdling scream. I remember in the dream considering whether I should do that. I woke the entire house. My parents came rushing in. When I explained what was scaring me, they reassured me that it was just a bad dream. It wasn't. Because I knew what they didn't know - that it was real.

It took 30 or 40 years before I began to have conscious experiences of the same world. This time they were controlled in the sense that they didn't freak me out. And I didn’t see anything frightening. I was able to balance myself within them, able to stay calm and objective in the midst of what were often deeply subjective experiences. More real than ‘real life’.

Time and again I have encountered that indescribable darkness. Over time I was learning what it was and how to get there. I was also learning how to describe that which can't be described. 

Here is one of those experiences, which conveys a sense of a vast dark sea that was at the same time full of light... that is/was dark:

I am floating in the Nothingness. There is a sense of being enveloped and superbly relaxed. I am deeply content, at peace.

There is no movement other than the occasional thought. Each time a thought occurs, something arises out of the Nothingness. Small or quick thoughts are like very tiny pillars temporarily coming upward and out. But nothing is quick, even if it happens instantly. Rather, everything is deliberate.

When the thought disappears, it falls back in but without any splash or ripple. A larger, more formed thought causes a greater movement or pillar. Some thoughts congeal and take form. If I think of someone, someone emerges, walking toward me.

Yet all the while, there is the vast dark sea of brilliant light, Nothingness, remains calm. When I intend something to happen, it does. And I begin to realize that there is something that exists which precedes even intention. I’ve never considered that before, but it is clear that within the Nothingness is a 'something' which precedes intention. I can only call it Potential.