When I was a kid, I had night terrors. Years later, I still think about them
After quietly lurking in this sub for quite some time and reading all of your stories and experiences, I finally decided to share some of the things that happened to me when I was younger.
I'm not really sure how to categorize what I experienced or whether anyone here will relate to it, but I'm very interested to hear your thoughts and see if anyone has gone through something similar. I want to take my time and explain everything from top to bottom, so this will probably be a long post. Thank you for reading in advance. I appreciate every input this post might get.
TLDR As a child, I suffered from recurring night terrors and always felt a terrifying presence in my room after waking up. One night, I saw a shadow looking down at me from my dresser. My mother woke our neighbor, who was very spiritual. My mother didn’t see anything, but our neighbor claimed she could see the presence as well. After that, she cleansed my room, asked the spirit to go, said the furniture placement might be blocking energies connected to the nightmares. We rearranged my room, and the nightmares stopped.
When I was in elementary school, I was terribly scared to go to sleep. I can’t remember when it started or why, but the earliest memory I have is sitting next to my mother on my bed, crying and begging her not to make me sleep because of my nightmares.
Every night, for a specific period of time (I think it lasted well over a month), I was terrorized by the same “presence” or “dream entity”—whatever you want to call it. It looked like a black abomination made of cloth and shredded fabric, forming what resembled a floating hooded cloak. It seemed to wrap around something dark and evil, but I was never able to see what was hidden underneath.
Every time I fell asleep and started to dream, I would find myself in a scenario where I was running away in fear, knowing this thing was right behind me. It was never able to catch me, or at least that’s how I remember it. I always woke up before it reached me. And every time I woke up, I was trembling in shock, feeling an unnerving pressure and presence in my room, as if something was observing me. Most of the time I would hide under my blanket and cry until I eventually fell asleep out of exhaustion. It was a really intense feeling like this feeling of fear was coating my whole body.
I can still clearly remember that every time I woke up, my heart was beating extremely fast too. (although I may have perceived everything as more intense than it actually was, since I was very young).
(At this point I want to point out that I was on very strong ADHD medication at the time, which may have affected my emotional regulation a lot, so maybe there is a connection there.)
Again, I woke up from a nightmare. I looked up and can still clearly remember freezing in shock as I stared toward my light switch. Standing there was a figure that looked almost exactly like my mother, silently staring at me without any emotion.
It just stood there, staring. Nothing else. Eventually, I fell asleep again after hiding under my blanket.
It looked glowing and slightly transparent, resembling the “typical” image of a ghost. In hindsight, this encounter could have just been another nightmare as well.
This was the point where my mother and I sought help from her friend / our neighbor. As far as I can remember, she was very spiritual. She was a hypnotherapist and likely had other specialties that I’m not aware of. My mother took me to her, and I started telling her about everything that was happening to me and in my dreams.
There was one part of this conversation that really stuck with me. She gave me some specific advice: whenever I became aware that I was dreaming and running from this entity, I should imagine myself holding a protective ball of light that would hold it off and scare it away.
So the next time I became aware in my dream (these nightmares were always lucid), I tried exactly what she told me. I imagined a protective light protecting myself.
But the moment this light appeared in the dream, it was corrupted by the entity, leaving me with nothing to protect me.
After this, I think the nightmares became more and more intense, until one night they reached their "peak" if you can call it like that.
At that specific night, I woke up after a very intense nightmare. I remember that I was never caught by this entity before—I was always running, always trying to escape. But in this particular dream, it caught me.
I don’t remember anything from that night itself, so everything I’m telling you now comes from my mother’s telling, which she has told me several times over the years when I asked her about it, never fully believing it myself.
Apparently, I woke her up in the middle of the night screaming, “Mom, please come to me, there is a man sitting on my dresser.”
Of course, she rushed into my room and turned on the lights, but she didn’t see anything. All she could sense was a freezing coldness in my room that wasn’t present anywhere else in our apartment. She also couild confrm that no windows were open or anything that could have caused such a drop in temperature.
Her first instinct was to take me out of the room and wake our neighbor, who lived in the same house. My neighbor then came into my room with together my mother and told her that she could sense the presence as well.
Apparently, she “cleansed” the room, opened the windows, and gently asked the spirit to leave the House. She also said that the way the furniture was arranged might be blocking certain energies, and that we should rearrange my room.
My mother also told me that our neighbor apparently drew a “protection spell” around the house.
After this, I (at least in my younger years) never had a nightmare again but till around age 16 I would always see some weirder things in our Apartment. But never in my Room itself. If interested i can share these in the comments as well.
Thank you for reading this far. I would be interested in the way you see this whole scenario