The Shadow Doomed

This is an essay I wrote for my English class. I still need to add to it and make it better. 

Is It a Dream?

Lying in bed, I drift off to a place where I call my own. It’s where all the nightmares form inside and my spirit splits from me. It feels as if I’m in two places at once. It comes on slowly, then rapidly until it’s done and I’m thrown right in the middle of a scene. There are very few clues on how it got that way.  The area is flooded and there are few people there. The only one there is in my arms; my cat that I haven’t seen for a couple of weeks due to school. The water feels cold, but not unbearable and the air feels neutral; I can hardly feel it. The colors are dull: red, blue, and a greyish yellow. Everything else seems colorless.  I wade through the water, until I stop. I’ve caught a thought. An independent thought. Where are my other cats? Why aren’t Louie and Armand here? The world feels like it’s falling apart; an earthquake makes itself known and blindness comes over me. I pause and tell myself not to try and bring them in.  

It takes an immense amount of concentration to keep it together, but I manage it somehow. I let it become like a rail shooter, taking me wherever it wants until I regain enough mental strength to control myself again.

After a moment I look up and see a building. Thought: school? It’s the only thing I can think of calling it. It has a greyish red color to it, is made of bricks and has a few windows. Next to it is a tree with the greyish yellow color to it. I can see I’ve made the wind start blowing subtly.

      The next moment I’m in the building with my cat on the second floor. Imagine it as clicking the channels on the TV. It’s the only way I can describe it as it feels just like a click. I’m in a hallway and there is an open room on the end. I set my cat down and try to find someone else there. I turn around and there I find another just coming up the steps. Silently I ask if this room is alright. No answer, but I get the feeling it is. When I return to the room, another cat is there. Not my cat. Suddenly I can feel the waking world again. Its close; I can feel time while here. I have to start my way back. I know what happens when I don’t go on time.

It all happens at once. I’m thrown back to the waking world. Thrown back into my body. This time its less painful. Then I’m awake, and able to start my real world day.

Lucid dreaming comes more easily now than it has in the past. I’ve always done it, just never to this extent and this often. For me, its been happening at least once a month with the more easily controllable ones happening during naps.  Practicing this allows me to experience other things more easily as well, but before I get to that I should start from what I call the beginning.

8^th grade was the year everything changed for me. After my first break up, I decided I had to learn more about myself and so I started doing research at night. At night so my parents wouldn’t bother me about it.  My research started out just on lucid dreaming and then took me to more spiritual matters. I came across the topic of energy and spirits. 

Around the same time, my mom ran into a psychic. This wasn’t an advertised psychic. She was a masseuse.  One of the things said was about me. She had no way of knowing I even existed, how old I was, or really anything. Apparently I am an Indigo Child; a person with the rare color of indigo for their aura.  This gave me some fuel for my research. I looked up Indigo children and found that they are supposed to be older spirits and have psychic abilities (to an extent, not talking about making things fly around the room like Matilda).  

Fast forward.

Something strange happened one night during my 2^nd freshman semester. The night it happened felt different. It was the first time I actually felt worried about this particular friend and on top of it the entire feeling of the air felt off. Jess, the friend, was going through a tough time and I kept my phone in my hand waiting for his text to let me know he got home safely.  I feel asleep. I don’t know when, and I didn’t even know I did until 12:30am.  I woke up suddenly laying on my stomach. The covers where still over me, but I felt a chill hit the back of my neck. The kind of chill that makes you cuss involuntarily. I was instantly fully aware of everything around me, but I couldn’t move. Something wouldn’t let me. I don’t know if it was my own illogical fear or if it was some other force, but I finally gathered enough strength and turned over in my bed and looked. A white mist was floating across my room from the window to the door. It was as tall as a person would be, but it couldn’t hold its form. I watched it with only a slight hint of fear at this point as it disappeared through the door.  In that instant I was thrown back to sleep. I guess this is what happens when you live between two graveyards and you make yourself more aware of their existence.  

That night happened before I had done real research on ghosts, or watched the entire series of Ghost Adventures. I had no way of actually knowing what form ghosts are said to show themselves as. I do know now that a white mist is generally a friendly spirit. Black mist is an entirely different story.  I only have one thing to say about the black mist; get out. It will probably tell you to get out anyway, so I would listen.

After that night I had a couple more experiences while I was with Jess. We were sitting in my room talking. It was late when Jess suddenly pauses. I felt it too. There was someone else there; someone friendly to me, and not to him. I could feel his anxiety rise and I asked him what was happening. He tells me that he’s being told to leave. The only thing I could do was to believe him. He told me of his experiences with spirits as a kid and I’ve seen him start to slip before. As soon as we left my house and walked to his truck I could sense his relief to be out of there. The air didn’t feel as heavy outside either. After he left, I went back in the house and up the stairs to my room and tried to go to sleep.  I was on my stomach, again, and as soon as I felt like I was falling asleep I got the jolt I felt a couple months before.  This time I turned over right away. There wasn’t much to see because my eyes weren’t adjusted to the dark, but I felt myself staring right at the spot where Jess and I felt a presence.  I decided to speak and I told it that I’m alright, and as soon as I spoke the feeling went away.

Over this past summer I’ve continued my research and it’s brought me farther than the previous 5 or 6 years.  I found a group that has similar experiences and does a type of meditation that teaches you your own energy signature. The energy flowing through a person is called Prana. The meditation allows you to pull Prana out from your body and it forms into a ball called, well, a Prana Ball. Supposedly everyone’s energy feels different. Mine feels like it has a pull of two magnets pushing off each other, or like what happens when you are holding an on external hard drive and tilt it around in a smooth circle. When I close my eyes I picture it looking something like whitish blue gooey electro plasma. The magnetic pull I feel makes it feel sticky like goo.  I believe Prana is what one would see if a ghost is able to manifest itself into a form the human eye could see.  Being able to know how myself feels, I’ve been able to identify what I’m picking up from certain other people, which are mostly my closer friends and family.

This brings me to last September. It was an awful month. At the very beginning while I was in the car with friends, I felt like I was about to fall apart. It was brought on suddenly and just as suddenly my friend’s name popped into my head. I decided to text her asking if she was crying. She told me yes. That night she broke up with her boyfriend. I didn’t know they were having problems. I could feel every wave of emotion she was feeling, and she was on the other side of the country, Florida. I found out later that we both had been listening to the same song nonstop and feeling the same connection to the same lines in that same song.

A week later, I felt the break of my only other close connection, at least a connection to that extent.  It was 3am on September 11.  I was in the middle of a dream that suddenly shifted. I had lost something precious to me and I couldn’t get it back. I was never going to get it back. It was taken away by a car. I felt the yell build up in my throat. I woke up. Woke up really isn’t a good way to describe it because I was holding back a scream. I felt my entire body shake. It felt like the world was ending and my soul had shattered. After I regained myself, I laid in bed crying until I fell back asleep. When I finally woke up that morning, the world just didn’t seem right. I couldn’t get myself to shower, or eat, or do the homework that really needed to get done. My subconscious knew before I did. I got the message from a mutual friend on Facebook. I thought it was a joke, but why would they joke? Just as soon as that thought hit me, reality also hit me. I couldn’t move. He was gone.

I kept going back to the feeling I had the night it happened. For three days I dwelled on it. I had no dreams. No real thoughts of anything else. On the third night after his death something happened. I was asleep, but I was pulled someplace. I’ve been to a similar place before a few years ago, except this time was different. He was there.

Everything was white around us. I could still feel my sadness and that’s when he hugged me.  I could feel him: from his clothes to his lip ring to his touch. Everything was exactly like it was the last time I hugged him. There was no talking. We just sat with each other. After a while, I’m not sure how long, he got out his phone that he had one him when he died. I of course started to mess with it like I would if we were on the living plane.  My sadness had been lifted, at least temporarily. When he left, it was like he turned on a switch. My mind was flooded with a dream that he would have found awesome. It had lots of action, guns, and zombie killing. I found out at his funeral that his sister and niece also had experiences with him that night. His sister saw his shadow in the kitchen of their house. His niece had been watching Lord of the Rings because it was his favorite. She had told me the volume was up kind of loud and then suddenly cut out. At that moment she could hear him playing his guitar.

While watching them put him in the ground, I felt a chill on my right side. I had been standing in direct sunlight, and it was still warm out, so there was no reason to feel the chill. It was wrapped around my arm and I knew it had to be him there with me. I was probably the only one there that could even attempt to recognize if a spirit was there.

I somehow think that the things I have learned in the past year have helped me get through the biggest loss I have ever experienced. I’m not sure what others believe or how many others will believe anything I have written here, but I started with just one foot in. I don’t just dive into things blindly and even now I am not sure if I should even believe myself. What I felt and have seen even with a doubtful mind, a very doubtful mind, has caused me to go a little deeper and believe it a little more. Lucid dreaming has allowed me to see and experience things that are more epic than what could happen in the waking world while maintaining the sense of reality. It has also allowed me to see the waking world in a different light and notice things I never knew existed.