In the night I heard the sound of a child and a woman’s voice. They had come into my flat. Groggily, I hauled myself out of bed and called: ‘Hello? Can I help you?’
My mind was sluggish, but I knew full well the door was locked and there was no way someone could come in. So I made a logical deduction: they must be spirits.
In case they were malevolent, I traced a pentagram with my arm and intoned the only words of power that would come to mind: SHADDAI EL CHAI.
A woman sat and stared at me from the dark corner of my bedroom. Evidently, she wasn’t evil – else my banishing would have done for her already.
By this point I’d started to realise that all of this must be happening astrally. Yet it seemed so real, I simply hadn’t understood I was in the lucid dreaming state.
The woman had a chaotic character and – as we spoke – she made demands on me that I tried at first to meet, but soon realised I would have to resist. Refusal didn’t offend her as much as I’d expected, but she continued to pressure me for what felt like a long time, yet became progressively easier to resist.
What is the status of ‘human’ figures encountered on the astral plane? They’re not as transparent to me as they once seemed. Sometimes they have knowledge that’s beyond my own: they can tell me ‘who’s in charge’, for instance. But sometimes they know as little as I do.
The woman who came into my room last night seemed different again. I wondered if she were the astral emanation of an actual person; one of my sleeping neighbours, maybe. Whatever she was, she presented not as a ‘passerby’ or the passive inhabitant of a visionary scene, but as an invasive entity, a palpably aggressive spirit.
