Added April 14, 2003
Dreaming Man
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Ian, Thornhill, Ontario, Canada, April 5, 2003,
momo_y@hotmail.com
I was sleeping in my bed, and was having a mild bad dream. The content
of the dream, though I can recall perfectly, doesn't really matter; it
was a rather silly and incoherent dream, and though the end was
nightmarish, it wasn't exactly horror-story material. Somehow during the
dream I KNEW it was a dream (I'm no stranger to bad dreams, and very
often I would try to struggle my way out of them), so I struggled to
wake up from it. Suddenly my vision shifted and I could see the corner
of my room, so I knew I was becoming awake. But that's not all I saw. I
also saw a faint profile of an elderly Caucasian man (I'm of Chinese
descent), probably wearing glasses, standing next to my bed, with an
apprehensive look to his face. He appears to be clothed in white. The
vision was very faint, and I could not really make out the exact
features of his face, but I'm rather sure I do not know this man
personally and have never even met him before. I immediately thought he
was a spirit and though I could not move at all at that time, I
struggled yet harder to wake up. As I regained control of my body and my
vision became less burred, I also saw an expression of awe in his face,
and as he vanished I could literally feel the vibrations of an external
force, possibly the very same which paralyzed my body, crumbling down.
Shaken by what just happened, and unsure about the nature of "his"
intentions, I calmly and slowly said "I don't know who you are, I don't
care who you are, I don't have anything to do with you, please leave."
I've had many experiences of being paralyzed during sleep, and though I
sometimes suspect it's spirit-related, this is by far the most explicit
case and the closest thing to an encounter I've had. I'm Buddhist, and
as such I do believe in spirits, and yet I can also honestly say that I
do not fear them. I'm just perplexed by his intentions. On one side I
fear that he was trying to prey on me during my most vulnerable time
(Chinese people believe that, during one's depression or nightmares,
he/she is most vulnerable to ghosts and spirits), and yet on the other
hand, because of his seemingly benevolent appearance (curiously, his
appearance reminds me of Catholic Priest), I also suspect he was trying
to rescue me from my nightmare. I live in a newly-built townhouse in the
suburbs that has no previous owner, and as far as I know the land on
which it is built had never been home to another residence.
As the days go by I'm becoming more and more inclined to brush off the
incident as simply my own hallucination, but the image of this creature,
the look on his barely visible face, is still very real to me.
