This is a story about the paranormal, and about dreams, so I guess this is the best place to post. I first mentioned this story over on the UFO and Alien Experience board, but the story really belongs here.

I call this my 'beer story' because it usually takes a couple of beers before I tell it. Well, I've had my beer, so here it is.

I'm a 34 year old college-educated professional male. I don't believe in ghosts, demons, aliens, or the paranormal. However, it hasn't always stopped me from having paranormal experiences.

When I was a university student, my friends and I were very interested in all kinds of things. We did tarot readings, runes, oija boards, automatic writing, automatic drawing and all kinds of things. Our open mindedness opened a door that took over a year to close (and I'm not completely convinced that it's firmly closed even now). Friendships were destroyed, some people refuse to discuss it, some now say it was all our imagination, some don't (or won't) even remember it. Me? I was left with 16 years of nightmares.

On a cold, october night, my brother, a friend and I were sitting outside, under a covered walkway on our university campus. It was around midnight, it was unseasonably cold, we were just hanging out, talking, etc. While my brother and our friend talked, I started to feel strange, disconnected. I had a vision of being at the far end of the covered walkway (about 75 meters away, give or take a bit), looking down at us. The walkway is a concrete walk, covered by a concrete roof, and supported by brick pillars. There are lights spaced in such a way that as you walk, you pass light-dark-light-dark. The corridor is square, and if you look down the corridor at night, the opening at the end looks hazy because of the light-dark distortion. So I'm looking down the corridor at us, and suddenly, I start to fly, really fast towards us. The pillars are flying by, but I never seem to reach us.

I came back to myself, but I felt like I was in a kind of trance. I heard myself say (something that haunts my dreams sometimes) "Hey, guys! Do you see something down there?" We all looked and began to describe what we saw. We each described it, adding details, and it was obvious that we all saw the same thing.

At the far end of the corridor, about 75 meters away, there was a human form, a man, completely gray, man-high, and it seemed to be running towards us, waving his arms over his head, like in panic. It ran towards us, but once it got to about 50 meters away, it faded away, reappeared at the starting point, and continued running. We watched it running in that endless loop for over an hour. We tried approaching, but if we got closer than 25 meters from the finish line, it would disappear until we backed up again. After about an hour or so, it faded completely and we went back to our dorm rooms to sleep. We weren't afraid, or freaked out. We thought it was really cool. "We saw a ghost!" we thought.

The following night, I had the first dream. I dreamed I was lying in bed in my dorm room, but that there was something in the closet: something dead. The closet door (at the foot of my bed), slid open, and a shadow came out. I couldn't see it clearly, but in my mind, I could see it: it was like a half-transparent, green-glowing corpse. In my dream, I turned on my side, and tried to pull the covers around me so that it couldn't get me. It floated over the bed, twisted, then swooped into bed behind me, through a gap in the covers. I remember in my dream being terrified, because I knew it was behind me, and I knew it was dead. Then I felt something punch me in the back, right at the spine, at waist level. There was a bright flash of light, and suddenly, I was in another dream. I dreamed I was in the biology lecture hall, listening to my biology professor drone on and on (as usual). I turned to a friend of mine sitting next to me, and said "Hey! You wanna see something really weird?"

In my dream, we went to the corridor where I was the night before (the place was directly adjacent to the biology lecture hall). It was daylight, but as we looked down the corridor, we could see the gray man again. Only this time, he opened his mouth, and this sound came out. It was like a cross between wailing and howling, and it was the most dreadful, hopeless, lost sound I've ever heard. It howled and howled, and the next moment, my brother (who was my roommate at the time) was shaking me awake, terrified because I was howling!

I howled in my sleep five more times that week, a few times the following week, again the week after. My brother wanted a different roommate, not only because of being woken up at night, but because he said the sound always scared him.

Over time, the dreams decreased in frequency: a few times a month, once a month, etc. For a long time, I was down to 3 or 4 times a year. Then, I actually stopped howling for more than a year (I moved far, far away from where it happened). Then I took a trip, not close to the location, but closer, and they started again. I still have one every now and then.

The dreams are always different, but they follow a familiar theme. There's something malevolent nearby, someone dangerous, but I can't see them: only a blur when they move. I try to speak, to tell them to go away, but I can't talk, I can't make my jaws or tongue move: all I can do is wail and howl. The dreams don't feel like normal dreams. I have regular dreams, funny dreams, weird dreams, nightmares. But these dreams, the wailing dreams, feel different.

I remember one time, when I first moved a fair distance from where it first happened, I had a 'special' dream that wasn't scary. I was at a friend's house, and I dreamed I was sleeping. The room looked just the way it had when I went to sleep. The closet door at the foot of the bed slid open and two figures came out. One was impossibly thin. The other was very large, obese. They were both tall. At first I was scared, I tried to talk, but the wailing started. Then I thought 'NO! Don't be afraid. That's what feeds them!' So I smiled to show I wasn't afraid, they smiled and waved, and then passed my bed and disappeared through the wall. I was relieved. The dream ended, I slept on. I woke up the next morning, remembered how funny the dream was, not scary at all, and I told my wife that maybe the bad dreams were ending. Unfortunately, to prove me wrong, the following night I had ANOTHER howling dream, one that was really scary, but I no longer remember what it was.

Other than the first dream, which was by far the most frightening, the most frightening 'special dream' I ever had was when I was living in a two-story apartment. My mother was visiting at the time, and she was sleeping upstairs. I dreamed I was asleep, and the room looked just like always, and I saw what looked like my mother coming down the stairs. I could see her white nightgown in the dark, but something looked wrong. I called out to her: Mom? Mom? But I couldn't speak. When I talk in the dreams, it sounds like a dog trying to speak human words: like a mouth not meant to speak is trying to speak. The figure turned and came towards me, but it wasnt my mother. It was an old grey woman with claw-like hands and long grey hair (what in folklore is called a Hag). Like the Hags of folklore, the Hag crawled up on the bed and stood, squatting on my chest, the weight making it hard to breathe ... and again we, she and I together in the dream, I alone in the real world, started to wail and howl. My wife woke me up, and then my mother came downstairs to see what was wrong (my howling is really loud, I'm told), but it looked so much like the dream, that at first I was terrified that the dream was still going. I didn't go back to sleep that night.

As university student, our (my friends' and my) interest in the paranormal started before we saw our ghost, and continued long afterward. A lot of weird things happened. We got cryptic warnings, sometimes from people we hardly knew, who then couldn't tell us why they were telling us not to go out, or telling us to be careful tonight. There were weird news stories, especially about beheadings, blooddrinking and headhunting in the US, that unnerved us. Strange people, mentally ill, paranoid, sometimes dangerous people started moving into the dormitories (and a lot of new people started lying to us, telling us bizarre but completely untrue stories: for example, a forty-something man who claimed he was a folkdancer from Eastern Europe who had been a personal pharmacist to a former US president, and was now conducting an investigation into health violations in the school cafeteria; or the young woman who claimed that she was from a very wealthy family, and that she had just gotten out of mental hospital after a nervous breakdown following her fiance's death the terrorist bombing of an airline; or her boyfriend, who claimed to have been a satan-worshipper, and claimed he was being stalked not only by his former cult, but by demons and devils, too; although, maybe I shouldn't point fingers, since my story ultimately sounds just as crazy). One night we saw hundreds (maybe as many as a thousand) grackles (a variety of blackbirds) congregating in a small courtyard, lining the walks and infesting the trees, with many grouped around a dry fountain, coming up and going down, like members of a meeting going to the podium to speak. We saw images in automatic drawing that we would later see for real (like an image of a hand coming out of the ground, which looked almost exactly like a shrub when it lost all its leaves when the seasons changed: a shrub at the entrance to the courtyard). People who were generally normal and average started having weird dreams, and in the women's dorm, there was a rash of incidents in which female students felt someone touching them or pulling on their clothing when no one was there. Corridor lights would go out when we passed. There was bird (what we thought was a bird) that would sit in a tree near the library, and whose voice could be heard two or even three hundred meters away. We could even hear it inside our dorm rooms, but we never saw the bird. Sometimes we saw a man in the area (and we called him the bird-man because we thought maybe HE was making the sound). Birds on campus started dying, and we'd find them with their heads skinned, heads frequently disconnected from the body, sometimes missing entirely, and often with one foot (never both feet) skinned, disconnected or missing. One night we saw a line of people, about a dozen, wearing white hooded robes, walking near the library near midnight. We chased them but they went around a corner and we never found them. Some people started to have weird religious conversions. Others claimed to be in telepathic contact with mysterious people telling us to 'organize'. There was a rash of pervert phone calls all over campus, and prank calls that would follow us from payphone to payphone as we walked around campus. And everybody started telling us ghost stories about buildings on campus.

In the end, the friend of ours who saw the ghost with us burned the oija boards and tarot cards and books and notebooks, changed their hair and clothes and name and eventually moved away. I still keep in touch, but we don't talk about it anymore. My brother won't discuss it. I refuse to believe in the paranormal, though sometimes I'm curious about it still. The dreams aren't so frequent anymore, but I still have them, and they still unnerve me.

Anyway, that's the beer story. You can take or leave it. I have only this to add. I sometimes feel that there are really two worlds, two dimensions, so close to one other that they are frequently mistaken for being one place. In one world, weird things (the paranormal, monsters, aliens, psychic abilities, strange conspiracies) are possible. In the other world, they are not. Some of us live in one world, some in the other. We see each other, talk, maybe share our views, but we're not really in the same world ... though sometimes, and I'm living proof, we do sometimes cross the border.

So this is the thread you linked to in your post in When the light appears...The cult of the abductee....... I missed this when it was first posted, but judging by the date I would either have still been celebrating the new year or was on my way going a family member's kid's 4th birthday party... I have to read the date 'backwards' because to me that date of 01-03-2006 is the 1st of March and not the 3rd of January...

Arhhh... this is quite evocative and I guess it shows exactly what I was talking about in that thread... This is so well written, beer or no beer, very articulate and creeps me in some ways. And yet because it's not an oversensationalised type of story, appears in the Paranormal Forum and not in the Alien Experiences Forum and a fair share of it is dreams, is a gut response describing what happened (or as you say believe happened) it gets missed in the throng of made up experiences stories where posters can take their frustrations out and play around in... Make sense?

I've had a few odd experiences (and dreams) myself over time... One a few years ago now, where I and a few others, all members of a Parapsychology Resesearch Group (the group is still in existance) tried to create an 'entity'. We got the idea from a Canadian Parapsychology Research Group which called their experiment the Philip Experiment and many groups have tried it since with varying results... Where you can actually create (conjure) an unseen thing, an entity, a poltergeist, an identity (call it what you like) that doesn't exist in real life or ever did by using a group mind structure.. And then I tried it at home alone night after night... Some interesting results I got...

The Philip Experiment
The true story of ‘Philip’ is actually a remarkable experiment that was conducted in the early 1970’s by The Toronto Society Of Psychical Research. The purpose of the experiment was to see if a wholly fictious historical character - ghost could in fact manifest itself through the groups efforts of concentration on the bogus data.

http://www.pararesearchers.org/Ghosts/Arti...ticle_five.html
http://tribes.tribe.net/ghosttrackers/thre...19-e80ef575487c
http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa102201a.htm

The Humphrey Experiment - A group in the UK where the experiment didn't work out the way they hoped for but could be because they didn't give it the time some of the other groups did? http://www.mara.org.uk/humphrey_experiment.htm

Owhhh... I like this story very much and wow... almost a year and a half later I 'discover' this thread because I was 'led' here..... How spooky... :goblin:

Dingo
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Wow - much to take in - I'm usually phased by nothing - that scares the crap out of me....

Ben

Wow... That is creepy. Just plan creepy. I wonder what happened though. Espiscially with the people wearing whtie hoods... that sounds like some sort of thing that a cult would do...

If you don't mind sharing the info, which Uni was this??

Ah yes i was wandering myself :cool:

No really, I would like to know which University it was, only because if such highly paranormal activity happened there would be records of it from other students I'm sure. Have you ever researched the Uni after you left? To see what other's reported while attending there?

If the two world dimensions exist, it sure could explain alot that has happened to me in this dimension. Something to ponder over.

(for people who don't know: I'm mr-e. I changed my name to avoid confusion with Mr. E (who in fact posted above!). Hey, Mr. E!).

Being that it's such a small university, I hesitate to say ... but what the heck, I will anyway: The University of Texas - Pan American in Edinburg, Texas. This began in 1989.

I've searched the net a few times, but haven't found any other references to odd things at the university. However, if most people are like me, they may not want to say the name of the University.

I mean, if you go to a big university, it's easier to talk about that university and remain completely anonymous. Talking about a smaller, local university is something.

I had one of my 'special' dreams just last week, in fact. That makes it 18 years of bad dreams over something that wasn't scary or traumatic in the first place: although some of the things that happened later, cumulatively became traumatizing.

As for the dead birds, many people have pointed out that what we saw could have been insect predation on dead birds. There had been rumors that the university might have been secretly poisoning the birds to control the population. Some people have mentioned that insects, ants for example, might be able to strip a carcass pretty efficiently: strip the head and feet and then go inside, leaving the body skin and feathers mostly intact, and that this might give the impression of the skinned head and feet. I'm not so sure about that, but I can see that it would be a good possible explanation, and much more likely than some weirdo taking the time to skin bird heads.

I'll be the first to admit that some of the things I experienced there were prime examples of mass hysteria. Sometimes I think that a group of people all thinking the same thing can sort of feed negative energies. Some things are best ignored.

Rather than add to what I wrote, I'll start a new paragraph. Dingo, I enjoyed the story of Phillip. It goes along with a theory of the paranormal ... a couple in fact.

One is that paranormal phenomena DOES exist, and that all paranormal phenomena from fairies, to ghosts, to Big Foot, to aliens are all just different manifestations of the same energy. This energy is earthbound and sentient, but lacks an individual identity. It's like the folklore monster called 'IT', that has no shape of it's own, but looks different to each person who sees it (See, An Encyclopedia of Fairies by Katherine Briggs). According to this theory, the 'monster' takes its shape from the subconscious: it becomes whatever you're thinking of (I wonder if it can become the Staypufft Marshmallow Man?) The mass unconscious, pop culture, or whatever, gives it shape and identity. John Keel, in the Mothman Prophecies (and those who read my posts are saying, "There he goes again"), believes this is why there are similarities and correlations in methods and behaviors between dissimilar manifestations.

There's another, similar theory, that paranormal phenomena does NOT exist, and that it's just a form of mass hysteria born from pop culture and the unconscious.

And then there's my theory that it both exists and does not exist, depending on which world you're in!

What's interesting is I read a story of an author who experienced the manifestation of a character they were writing a story about.

There's a similar correlation in that, even into the early 19th century, many religious and church leaders regarded ghosts, not as spirits of the dead, but as demons who had come to lead people astray. This can been seen in the famous frontispiece to the book Pandaemonium, or The Devil's Cloyster, by Richard Bovet (1684) in which the supposed ghost being raised by a witch has a cloven hoof poking from beneath the shroud (I learned of this from the Encyclopedia of Fairies as well). I mentioned this because it goes back to the idea that the 'ghost' is not the person who died, but something else that's using that identity to manifest itself.

http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/images/exhibi...ned/dapand2.gif

Oh boy.. this thread is good... and it's a way to discuss stuff like this away from the alien and ufo forum... I notice it seems easier this way because people don't have a need to get as defensive to try to 'protect' their experience(s) when they are posted up in the paranormal section. It goes back to what I said before I think... that it's more socially accepted that one's experience is seen in the light as being paranormal in nature rather that alien in nature.

I'd like to make a few more comments about what you posted above but won't have the time til next week... Plus I need 'thinking' time if you know what I mean.. I'm also even thinking of posting up my own 'Philip' experiment I did when alone away from the group I tried it in initially... Took me months but I got some very interesting results to the extent that the ex ended up asking me to send away my 'ghosts' because they were rattling about too much at night and interefering in his sleep.

Now he's quite a a sceptic and his pychology behind being one is rather an interesting one to me because he reckons that often it's the sceptic who fears that this ghost, entity, alien phenomena could possibly be 'real', as in there could be something in it. Thus with some people by being brazenly and very verbally sceptical, you 'protect' yourself from 'fear' in a weird way... He also suffers from sleep paralysis (night terrors) and boy were they bad to what I saw...

In his case he used to scream and moan and sounded like he was being tortured in his sleep so badly that it was frightening to listen to. In his case it's not alien like creatures he encounters... it's witches (prolly was thinking of me at the time lol) and he reckons he know what pure evil feels like... He says it's a feeling uncomparable to anything else he has ever felt... I see him over the weekend (we parted best of mates) and might just ask him if he still experiences that as much as he used to. ec..

So there you go...

Dingo
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It's a strange thing: I had TWO dreams last week. That's very rare, considering I often have only two or three of these dreams a year.

For those just tuning in I dream every night, but I've been having a very weird kind of dream since the incident described in the first post (for those who don't know, I originally posted under the name mr-e, but changed my name to avoid being confused with another poster with a similar name).

Like I described before, in my 'howling dreams', there's someone malevolent that I cannot see, but I know that they're there. When they move, I can see a kind of clear blur, and they always move very fast. The person is always male, but I don't know how I would know this. Sometimes the howling dreams involve something I can see, but it's always something ... disturbing. In the first dream, it was a rotting corpse that glowed green. In another dream it was two men, one very fat and the other skeletally thin. In another (also described above) it was an evil old woman (a hag, which in itself is unusual because the thing that's haunting my dreams is male, but I think it had to do with the fact that it was impersonating my mother).

It's difficult to describe, but the dreams feel different than other, normal dreams. My state of consciousness is different.

I'm assuming I had two dreams because of stress. I should note that nightmares are not unusual for me, and they don't really bother me. These howling dreams unnerve me. They have most of the hallmarks of night-terrors.

What I don't understand is that these nightmares have been going on for more than 18 years now. I just don't understand how I can still be affected this much by something that happened so long ago when the original event, though unusual, wasn't scary.

Kirin posts: Like I described before, in my 'howling dreams', there's someone malevolent that I cannot see, but I know that they're there.
===========================
For many years I had dreams of confronting an invisible malevolent entity; it was a type of confrontation that provoked much fear and it ended with me finally facing the entity in ‘battle’.
I had actually prepared myself as best I could over time for this confrontation. I was tired of being afraid of this ‘evil’.

The ‘battle’ finally took place wherein I was able to confront this malevolence with confidence in my dream state and with very little trepidation.

The results? This malevolence cannot be destroyed by me but it also cannot control my life… Unless I let it, through fear, etc.

All in all… Quite an exciting experience and an ‘eye opening’ one too!!! Lol ~rore