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Classic Archive Merged: Bedroom Animals

<<<It pinned me to the bed and I was immediately paralysed. I couldn't even scream or anything>>>

Well, that reminds me of what a girlfriend of my mother's aunt went through in some house where they were staying together in the 40s or 50s. They were sleeping in adjacent bedrooms. When they went to bed, that woman immediately felt something heavy land on her feet and legs and hold them. She was terrified but could not scream. She lay like that until next morning when it let her go. When she told about this horror to the people they were staying with they said that someone had hanged himself in the room a long time ago. There you go.

Jemma,

I just wanted to say how much I agree with your views and interpretation of your and others' scary experiences. Saying a prayer or just mentally picturing an icon of Jesus or Trinity normally dispells evil presence or physical pressure. Besides Lord's Prayer and Credo there are other very effective evil-disabling prayers and anyone who is able to read can learn them. For non-Christians it's just too hard to acknowledge that otherwise these Christian basics of protection wouldn't have existed for 2,000 years - and worked.

Anyway, I have to confirm that children are an easy prey for evil spirits - especially unbaptised children and infants. Presence of such a spirit (a restless soul that didn't get a proper burial, as it is traditionally interpreted in the Orthodox tradition) can be extremely traumatic to a young child. My mother's parents neglected to have her baptised after she was born. All the years until she turned 18 and left home she had been literally tormented by an evil creature living in her bedroom. Things were especially scary - unbearable - when she was 5 or 7 years old. She was a "key child" and would be left alone from morning till midnight when her mother's shift at textile factory ended. Whenever the poor little girl was alone in her bedroom (on the top floor of a turn-of-the-19th-century block of flats) she would hear evil, terrifying giggling coming from behind the old cupboard. She just knew that there was something that hated her for some reason. Furniture would shake and move by itself. All this would make her scream and run down the stairs and hang around outside the building on the street until 12 at night waiting for her mother to come home. Just imagine what it was like growing there.

Myself, I have similar memories of being watched whenever I tried to take a short nap during the day when I was a child. It was so intense that I as soon as closed my eyes I would have to immediately open them again - but there was no one in the room. This happened every time when I was at home alone and parents away at work. Very unnerving.

Personally, I know all this is true and don't care if someone may doubt this. I just want to stress that children - and especially infants and toddlers - should NEVER be left unsupervised. And that baptised children DO get invisible protection from evil.
 
Bannik said:
Nor did I mean to suggest that you were. I just thought you might find it an interesting response on my part.

By "response", I mean my response to the sighting not my response to Ath's original post. How I immeiately tried to convince myself it was my imagination seems to be the exception to the rule of how a young child would react to seeing dancing troll in his room.
 
Re: You have to experience it yourself.

Jemma said:
I know 2 younger Christian kids who unknowingly shared an experience of a bedroom Lion who scared them. A fullgrown lion but wearing a crown. Their father was a Pastor and he soon exorcised this demonic feline.

Interesting manifestation, vision, dream, hynagogic vison or whatever, it's a sort of anti-Aslan (CS Lewis, Aslan was the Christ-figure in the novels).

If you care to look at it from a symbolic viewpoint lion = strength. lion = king, the crown = earthly power, King of this World. Isn't that supposed to be satan?

BTW I'm just chucking ideas around here, I don't necessarily believe it.

The only bedroom animal I ever got was a small Welsh Dragon (about 3 feet long) that walked across the dressing table then up onto the top of the wardrobe where it vanished. I was about seven at the time and had woken up in the early hours of the morning. I wasn't frightened, it was just there.

In retrospect I'd put to a dream spilling over into consciousness, as an adult I've had the odd dead person do this for a few seconds after waking, and I sometimes get the hooded entities as I'm trying to get to sleep. Again I've always put them down to existing in my head and not outside it.

The being pinned to the bed sound a bit like sleep paralysis.
Its discussed here:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7409&highlight=sleep+paralysis

In it's simplest terms your brain switches off most of your body's volunatry motor functions when you go to sleep to stop you acting out your dreams. Sometimes you wake before your motor functions come back on-line properly, so that for a few seconds you can't move, which some people experience as something pressing down on them.

It can be a frightening experience and you tend to interpret it according to your personal belief system, or the cultural mores as Night Hags, Incubi etc.


I'm not saying this is what Jemma experienced, it's just an observation that this is an explanation for some people's similar experiences.
 
Protecting children

Gloria, thanks for that. I agree with most of what you said. I've found though that it doesn't matter whether you are baptised or not. But prayer is the key. To acknowledge a child's experience is important, rather than saying they are imagining it. Then prayer really does work. I had to go to my niece's flat and pray through it as her little boy was too scared to sleep in his room. She would hear footsteps up the hallway and also plants and things would move. I went there and after praying through the flat, I went into Toby's room and it was so cold and a heavy atmosphere that is hard to describe. I prayed in there and it left. It moved to another flat in the same building. I found out that being an old converted hospital, that little boy's bedroom used to be the old mortuary. Our Mum used to switch off our light despite our pleas not to and shut the door with just a crack showing. That was the cue to dive under the covers even on a hot night. We couldn't tell Mum as she wouldn't have believed us. Kids need to know that they are believed. :)
 
Re: Re: You have to experience it yourself.

Originally posted by Timble

In retrospect I'd put to a dream spilling over into consciousness, as an adult I've had the odd dead person do this for a few seconds after waking, and I sometimes get the hooded entities as I'm trying to get to sleep. Again I've always put them down to existing in my head and not outside it.

The being pinned to the bed sound a bit like sleep paralysis.
Its discussed here:
In it's simplest terms your brain switches off most of your body's \experiences.

--I hadn't had time to go to sleep as I had just switched my lamp off and was trying to turn over to settle down for sleep when I was pinned down. The prickly "blanket" felt extremely uncomfortable and terrifying. I was wide awake.

Interesting you saw the hooded people. They are very common. Usually brown robes. My middle sister has seen them several times. They are mentioned in a few books I've read too. Both Christian experiences.
 
Re: You have to experience it yourself.

Jemma said:
I know 2 younger Christian kids who unknowingly shared an experience of a bedroom Lion who scared them. A fullgrown lion but wearing a crown. Their father was a Pastor and he soon exorcised this demonic feline.
What if the lion was there guardian spirit?:( Read this thread for an example:http://forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10591
 
You've got to admit though...

...it is a bit odd that at least two of us on here, thousands of miles and a few years apart have had remarkably similar experiences.

Whilst I agree that children can easily mix reality and fantasy, especially in a state of semi-consciousness, I do find it bizarre that the same entities appear in each case.

I suppose from my own personal point of view, I could put it down to such early influences as the evil dwarf on the Singing Ringing Tree or Ladybird's Rumpelstiltskin book, both of which gave me the heebie-jeebies as a small child, but the creatures that appeared on the top of my wardrobe didn't resemble either of these to any great extent.

Strange also that this animal-as-human theme keeps cropping up. Is this stemming from the world of fairy-tales that a child is introduced to from an early age, where animals so often take on the roles of people?

Or are we talking about brushes with another dimension, where these things actually exist...beyond our wardrobes!
 
Lions and Wardrobes

To Bannik and Filthy Le Dog. First of all, the lion that the kids were seeing in their bedroom was evil as they were terrified of it. It wasn't friendly at all and they found it very intimidating although at first neither of them knew the other saw it either. Not until one of them told their Dad. Angels, real guardian angels don't have to appear as animals. But a lot of demons do. I'll tell you about my meeting my own guardian angel on a different thread later.
Second, the strangeness of the wardrobe experience isn't so rare. I've since read over the years of wardrobes featuring in quite a few children's night horrors. I don't know how to post pictures here. Can someone tell me? Can we? I will try to draw what the demons looked like. I did once and gave it to an investigator into the supernatural. They are very hard to capture on paper because it is just an image and you can't portray the evil that emanates from them on paper. So... if we can post pics on here.....????
Ahh! I see where we can attach files. I'll do that tonight and see how it goes.
 
If you buy into any sort of Shamanism - it is possible you were simply seeing animal spirits attached to an object/place/You. They could be totems, could be not. And totems don't *always* appear as beneficial, docile guides. I used to see a fox, regularly, both outdoors and inside until about age 7 as well. I've never considered the fox a particularly strong animal for me, so I'm not sure who/what it was. But it was something that appeared at least a few times a month - mostly during daylight, waking hours for many years.

In retrospect I think it may have been some sort of protective spirit. Or perhaps just something that hung around me for a period of time. :confused:
 
Originally posted by minotaur
And totems don't *always* appear as beneficial, docile guides.
I agree. Just because something's frightening doesn't necessarily mean it's evil. Often it's the things we fear that can teach us the most about ourselves.
 
The Lion, The Hippo And The Wardrobe

Good stuff. What strikes me is the overwhelming percentage of these kind of encounters that people seem to experience (whether it is a "real" experience or a psychological one) when they are children.

And had you read C.S. Lewis' classic "The Lion, The Hippo And The Wardrobe" by that stage?
 
the lion, the hippo and the wardrobe

Lianachan, do you mean 'The Lion, the WITCH and the wardrobe'?

No I had never read that book till I was an adult. But that is a fictional book written as a parable. Jesus is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah but he has never appeared as one, it denotes part of his character and station. CS Lewis wrote from a Christian perspective.
Fear does not come from God:eek!!!!: On His presence and any visitations is only peace:p When the Bible mentions the fear of the Lord it means the absolute awe of Him.:eek:
When one has a visitation from Him or a good angel, you often only realise it after the event because there was no fear. But after there is a 'wonderment' that lingers for years.
 
It was a joke, based on the original post in the thread - sorry, I'd been replying to that and hadn't been following any of your posts in the thread. I am well versed in C.S. Lewis (and, more so, Tolkien), including the religious aspects, although I am not a Christian myself.
 
I've had many hypnogogic / hypnopompic hallucinations, although they've pretty much worn off now. They are indistinguishable from reality, but I've never confused the two. The similarity of things seen is simply due to the similarity of the human brain. If dreaming wasn't the explanation then why do all such visions occur in bed?
 
Visions or dreams etc.

I have had visions while wide awake and not in my bedroom. I've had them in the middle of the day as well at night. I've had them standing up in a group of people. These are not dreams but in most cases I have had my eyes shut. It's usually in the middle of prayer that this happens to me. And these visions are very real accompanied often by physical sensations or emotions of fear or joy etc. and quite unexpected at all times as far as i remember.
 
please don't take this the wrong way jemma, i am not suggesting this is the case, are you aware of any mental health problems you or your sister suffer may suffer from?

don't feel pressured to answer or anything.
 
Re:visions etc. to esoterrorist

Hi Eso, no we don't suffer any mental conditions.. lol. It's a wonder though because of the things we (all three of us) have experienced, some of them shared. We have maintained our senses of humour (english spelling--hahah) and also our sanity and interest in things paranormal and spiritual. No one can help what they experience in life, it's what you do with it that counts. I've been able to help others to understand and cope for instance. Haven't you ever experienced something that was unexplainable and you know you were'nt having a breakdown or something? I think the paranormal/spiritual side of life is fascinating and without it life would be a little mundane. Cheers!
 
Animal magic

"All the animals I saw were African in origin - as is humanity as a species. Could it be possible that visions of these creatures in childhood serve as a 'warning' to stay away from such animals in real life? Perhaps for the children of a million years ago, such visions were widespread? As humanity developed civilisation and crept to the top of the food chain, there was no longer a need for such warning visions and we 'grew out' of them."

Perhaps more likely than it sounds, actually.

I'm pretty certain that humans are 'hardwired' to dislike certain animal shapes - snakes and spiders seem to be the two most common, and I believe studies have shown that kids shrink from these basic shapes even if they've had no actual contact with the animals themselves.

So the idea of a 'folk memory' or even some kind of Jungian archetype of Dangerous Animals might not be so far from the truth.

That having been said, out of all the sightings of kiddie animals, there's not been one spider or snake in the lot of 'em!

In fact, it's interesting to look at what the kid sightings I've read on the board have been of:

animal toys
gnomes/sprites
full-sized humanoid figures

(an incomplete list, I know, but I can't be bothered to go back and check...)

So in fact, I'd say all of these were human shaped, or with surprisingly human characteristics. There aren't any 'pure' animals that I can think of.

Could this be because children are more likely to imagine (or filter real entities through their consciousness) in the form of what they know? Cartoon anthropomorphic animals, for example?

(Doesn't explain the octopus, though!)
 
Re:Bedroom Animals

Hi Tsuchenoko, You're surmising that the visions of chidren are generated from their own minds. You're also surmising that they are just visions. Or dreams. What I was describing were not just visions but shared experiences of visitations of evil entitiess. I've also had visits from good entities too but haven't shared them yet. My own children have also experienced some and I believe them. These weren't animals like you described as if from a subconsious mind born to protect the developing human psyche from dangerous real animals. That smacks of evolution which I don't believe in. I don't remember if I posted about the children of a pastor who all saw an old lion with a crown on his head that frightened them. None of these kids shared with the others what they saw, just told their father. He prayed for them and they never saw the lion again. I don't believe that was just a vision of some random fear because all three saw it. I believe children are more open to seeing things from another dimension and these things are there to frighten the children at that. I always remembered that when my own children had night terrors that it was likely they sprang from a real thing scaring them. They have to learn to resist the fear so it doesn't keep bothering them.
IMHO:eek!!!!:
 
I did allow for the possibility that the sightings were real entities,
("filter real entities through their consciousness") but I find it interesting that children tend to see childish things rather than, say, actual dead people or flaming, horned demons. Could the way they appear be dependent on the viewer?

Of course, you could argue that the entities are disguising themselves to fit in with what children expect to see... but it's quite Fortean to work from what you know, n'est-ce pas?

Jemma, have any of your sightings changed as you've got older, or has there been a consistency to the way they've appeared?

For that matter, do you feel you've seen actual consistent entities throughout your life - real personalities, as it were? Or have they been different 'people' all the time? And I'm sure we'd love to hear about the good side as well as the bad...
 
Re:Bedroom Animals

Well, I no longer see the hideous and scary heads on the wardrobe that I saw as a child. That was a shared experience with my youngest sister. She still saw them up till a few years ago, so she's had that for about 50 years.. Wow that's giving away my age now isn't it?? LOL. Since I became a Christian I can see where these things are coming from and one good thing about them is that they woke us up to the reality of a spiritual side of life and a desire to find out what makes the world tick. By that I mean to explore the spiritual realities in life rather than just the fleshly.
This worked for both of my sisters and we are all Christians now and have had many other adventures of one sort and another. Some wonderful, some a warning etc. Too many to relate in one post. My middle sister has been to a part of heaven for instance, as has my daughter. Just last week I had a visit from my beloved dog that had been euthanased just two days before. You could argue that it was just a lucid dream but I know it wasn't. Lucid dreams aren't always JUST dreams. I had asked God to show me he was ok (the dog that is.. lol) He woke me up bumping his head under my hand to pat him as he used to do. I could feel him and also smell him. I kissed him on the nose.. he loved that. He was 15 1/2 years old before he died. He'd had a stroke the day before he went and he looked fine when I saw him again. No longer leaning over on one side trying to stand up. I'd also had a visit from a neighbour a few years ago as she was dying. I couldn't see her but she was speaking and telling me she was in the process of "leaving". We heard the news later in the morning that she had passed away at an early hour.
I don't know if I've answered all your questions. All I know is I'm still learning new things and I love that. :D
 
Kiddie spiders

tsuchinoko said:
That having been said, out of all the sightings of kiddie animals, there's not been one spider or snake in the lot of 'em!
There's a couple mentioned on this page.
 
*shudder* bit of an arachnophobe, so that thread (no pun intended) scared me silly!

But in a physical rather than metaphysical way.

As for snakes, I almost forgot that I, tsuchinoko, am myself a cryptosnake or snake demon..!

Jemma, are you familiar with the English poet William Blake? He constantly had visions of angels, the dead and even God himself, all of which inspired his poetry. Some modern critics (well Peter Acroyd, anyway) claim that his was a case of Spontaneous Eidetic Imagery. Meaning that wherever they came from, he 'actually' saw these things rather than simply seeing them 'in his mind's eye.'

In fact, Blake saw God looking in through his window when he was extremely young... that must have been a sight.

And that particular story seems to tie in particularly well with the rest of this thread, so I might try and look it up a bit too.
 
Originally posted by tsuchinoko


As for snakes, I almost forgot that I, tsuchinoko, am myself a cryptosnake or snake demon..!

Jemma, are you familiar with the English poet William Blake? He constantly had visions of angels, the dead and even God himself, all of which inspired his poetry.


Wow tsuchinoko, are you saying you are really a reptilian hybrid?
Can you shapeshift? hmmmm...

On the other note about William Blake, no I'm not familiar with his poetry, never read it as far as I know. Sounds interesting, I'll have to look him up.
I've never seen God in person but I have seen Jesus though it was in several visions and the most vivid one, I painted. How can I post that here. Do I have to have a web page and send a link? The closer he got to me in the vision, the less I could breathe. It was so powerful. I wasn't scared of him but he was showing me that I was full of fear of death at the time. So hence the fear and breathlessness. In the OT there are many instances of angelic visitations where the person being visited fall to the ground helpless with no strength. Till the angel spoke and said "Fear not" etc...
 
Re: Animal magic

tsuchinoko said:
I'm pretty certain that humans are 'hardwired' to dislike certain animal shapes - snakes and spiders seem to be the two most common, and I believe studies have shown that kids shrink from these basic shapes even if they've had no actual contact with the animals themselves.

I'm not buying this without looking at the studies. Any chance of your digging up your source?

The thing is, I have never been afraid of spiders. I like spiders, get angry if people go to squash them, and take great care to rescue them if they are accidentally endangered in the course of my daily round. The most probable reason for this is that my mother also likes spiders. Since many people do in fact have an irrational fear of them, along with fear of bees (who I promise do not want to sting you!), no study which does not control for parental influences is going to impress me much. Given the commoness of spiders, I don't know how you'd get a kid who had never seen one and could still be experimented on.

Roaches now - giant mutant flying water roaches - *those* are scary and disgusting. (My mom thinks so too!)

As for snakes, they're pretty and interesting, but not pettable. I was grossed out the first time I saw an earthworm, but my mom pushed it into the earth with bare fingers and told me they were good for the garden, and that took care of that.
 
Did a bit of funky internet searching using the excellent science search engine http://www.scirus.com...

This seems to sum up the concept of 'ancestral fear' in science words:

"The disease-avoidance model of animal fears (Anxiety Res. 4 (1992a) 314; Matchett and Davey, 1991) suggests that common animal fears may be mediated by at least two kinds of selective associations: (1) a bias towards expecting physically harmful consequences associated with predatory animals, and (2) a bias towards expecting disgust or disease-relevant consequences associated with animals that are fear-relevant (FR) but normally physically harmless. "

Spiders would seem to fall under the disgust/disease heading rather than the fear one anyway.


But then I read this from another source, which seems to say that idea's a load of tosh...

"The tendency of Europeans and their descendants to be fearful of spiders does not seem to be shared by people in many non-European cultures, and this is not consistent with those evolutionary accounts of spider fear which suggest that spider fear should be a common feature of the human gene pool regardless of culture (e.g. Seligman, 1971). However, it is consistent with the present thesis which argues that spider fear developed as a result of the association between spiders and disease in Europe after the tenth century." In other words, arachnophobia began as misplaced fear during the plague (having historical basis), then was passed down through European families adding a cultural basis."


So it looks like spider fear is perhaps a cultural rather than a genetic thing after all. I guess I'm just an arachnophobe who assumes everyone gets that *eurgh* thing from spiders, even when many or most don't...



Nothing on Blake's kiddie visions yet though. Does anyone out there have Peter Ackroyd's biography of William Blake to quote from?
 
Originally posted by Bannik
You're so cute, tsuchinoko. :p

Hmm. I look like a pink poo. That can't be a good thing, no matter how curled up my mouth is. :D

As for Blake...

In 1761, when he was four and, as I remember, living in central london (quite near Carnaby Street, I think), he saw God.

Apparently he wrote that God 'put his head to the window and set him a-screaming.'

I can't find any more details on the net, though. I think it's from a letter, rather than a published work.

If you've seen Blake's paintings of God, you'll understand just how easy to get "a-screaming" it might have been...

http://www.uah.edu/colleges/liberal/philosophy/heikes/302/time/blake/ancient.html

But somehow I always imagine it looking more like his Nebuchadnezzar...

http://saucyjack.phys.columbia.edu/sjk/images/blake_nebuchadnezzar.jpg
 
Re: BEDROOM ANIMALS

Originally posted by Sean Campbell
It was perhaps seven feet high and covered in sandy coloured fur, a lion's head and face atop two impossibly long legs.
Do you think maybe you had seen some surrealist art painting in a store somewhere and that's what led you to have these visions of bizarre animals?http://www.allposters.com/IMAGES/SHD/40027.jpg
 
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