An Uninvited Woman, or Nothing
It was a frantic, disorienting way to wake up. Sleep flew without warning away from danger and abandoned me to the ticklish task of disentangling the space between the reality presented in my dream, and the reality presented by my sentience. In that instant between self awareness and the dreamscape of self examination, I saw her a second time. I cannot impress upon you her image until you grasp the dangerous and frightening aspect of her presence. She hovered above me, right in my face as an unfamiliar – though at the same time an inescapably familiar – specter. She wore a black shawl with frayed wrappings which slithered around her countenance. She had black, wild, hair that appeared to have the texture of straw. She wore a severe, awful, and violent expression. Her face and physique were beautiful, yet all the more repulsive for her beauty. Evil saturated my bedroom. Sweat poured from my body and adrenaline doused every sensation. I was being smothered, I could not move. I felt like I had been screaming at the height of my power to exhaust my breath. I made no sound.
As my sober mind shook off the weight of absolute surrender to sleep I realized there was not really anyone present. I was lying in bed on my back and could feel my buoyant two-year-old son Joseph’s back touching my left arm. I could hear my wife’s shallow breathing. A frenzied inventory of every sensation available to me placed me squarely in the place I loved most, with the persons I loved most – and who belonged – behind locked doors on a quiet night. I considered waking my wife to feel the comfort of her softness. What could I say to her though? What had just happened? I told myself it was of course a dream. Some synapse had fired in my brain involuntarily and created an entity within my mind that did not actually exist. It was just a dream. It was just a dream. I rolled over and abandoned the thoughts I could control to another dream.
But was it just a dream?
Perhaps that answer seems easy. Of course it was a dream. This was not, as I said above, the first time that I encountered this same woman, however. On the night of 7 September, 2006 I was serving as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Just as my companion Elder Robert Clawson and I went to bed, after our prayers, I had an intense and terrifying experience. Rob is one of my dearest friends to this day. He is a brilliant computer programmer, and the best amateur pianist I have ever met. He too, “felt the presence of spirits,” that night (Clawson) . Luckily I kept many journals throughout my mission and, in an entry dated 8 September, 2006, I have found the following account of what happened:
My companion Elder Clawson and I had gone to bed. I had a dream in which I was at my grandmother’s house and we were having a family reunion. My Aunt Cindy asked myself and my cousin Samantha to take two young trees that she intended to plant later to the attic of grandma’s house. In reality, my grandmother’s house has no attic. We picked up the trees, which were planted temporarily in large garbage bags full of loam. As we started to ascend the stairs to the attic I noticed a thick, black, and odorless smoke creeping down the stairs toward us. When the smoke touched my feet the door to the attic flung open and an overwhelming feeling of dark rage engulfed me. I screamed an unnaturally long time at the entirely empty entrance to the attic until I awoke. When I awoke, and I must admit that I only think that I awoke, the terrifying face of a middle-aged, spectral woman was hovering in front of my face. I was paralyzed and could not move.
I cannot put the grotesque speed with which her cruel lips moved out of my mind; they moved faster than the actual words that she spoke. I mean that she seemed to say two things at once. One was audible and groaning and severe, but slow. The other was visible and rapid and senseless, existing only in the motion of her unnatural mouth. I cannot recall what she said. She was clenched tight as the earth beneath Stonehenge with rage that may have been at me, or may have derived from her native, phantasmal, disposition. She was in the air above me as I lay on my back in bed. Several loaded moments passed before I screamed (Barker 123-126)
I immediately interpreted the experience as an encounter with a female demon. One reason is that I called my Mission President, Robert Wright, to tell him about my experience the next morning. He told me I had encountered a demon, which was definitely female, and that female demons are more evil than male demons. These interpretations were given dogmatically, without reasoned explanation, and I accepted them in kind and without question. To add ethos to this interpretation President Wright provided me with the following reference from Elder Bruce R. McConkie 1915-1985 (Elder Bruce R McConkie: "Preacher of Righteousness") , member of The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:
However much it may run counter to the carnal mind to read of men possessed of devils, and of other men who cast them out, such is one of the realities of mortal life. One-third of the hosts of heaven . . . were cast out of heaven for rebellion. As angels of the devil and as sons of him who is Perdition, they stalk the earth, seeking whom they may destroy. Their condemnation: they are denied bodies; for them there is no further progression . . . If, as, and when – subject to the restrictions and laws of our gracious God – they can gain temporary tenancy in a tenement of clay, they take up their habitation in the bodies of others (McConkie 36-37) .
This passage is a concise definition of what the LDS church teaches about demons and demonic possession. I am not certain as to why President Wright provided me with the reference. He intended, perhaps, to teach me what a demon was. Or perhaps he held the opinion that my immobility and speechlessness were evidence that this being possessed me. This idea has troubled me a great deal. The accounts within my own mythos, which is within the Mormon and Christian traditions, do not match my own experience. There is, for instance, the account of Jesus Christ casting a demon out of a child from the New Testament. When that child was ceased by the demon it “taketh him, and he suddenly crieth out; and it teareth him that he foameth again, and bruising him hardly departeth from him” (Luke 9:39) . There also is an account of a man named Newel Knight who was healed from demonic possession by Joseph Smith, the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Knight is described as, “suffering very much in his mind, and his body acted upon in a very strange manner; his visage and limbs distorted and twisted in every shape and appearance possible to imagine; and finally he was caught up off the floor of the apartment, and tossed about most fearfully” (Smith 82) . These accounts do not seem to match the elements of my experience.
The description of a Judeo-Christian demon that is most like my account, though the connection is admittedly tenuous, comes from the Nag Hammadi codex. In The Secret Book of John, the pseudopigraphical author lists many demons and then gives the name of Esthesis-Ouch-Epi-Ptoe “the mother of them all” (The Secret Book of John 124) . Esthesis-Ouch-Epi-Ptoe is an interesting figure in the context of my experiences. She is a specifically identified female demon. She is the evil offspring, depending on which rabbinical tradition one follows, of either Adam and his mistress Lilith, or Eve and her extra-marital lover Sammael (Farrar 685) . Her name, translated from Greek, means “sense perception is not in an excited state” (The Secret Book of John 124) . The name baffles me. It sounds like Thomas Paine advocating empiricism. Esthesis-Ouch-Epi-Ptoe’s name seems to make an argument to trust only what one sees in daylight, only what one’s senses and frank experience verify. Therefore Paine might rename her “Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them” (Paine 657) .Yet it is the name of a demon. The Gnostics may have believed, therefore, in a strictly mystical, unscientific, worldview. This mother of demons may want us to focus empirically on what is patently obvious in daylight so that our guard will be down at night when “there are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare Act I, Scene 5, Lines 164-165) .
This account of Esthesis-Ouch-Epi-Ptoe caused me to look into more mystical, paranormal, sources through which I might gain answers about my experience. One folklore tradition that hit home for me was the myth of the “hag.” A hag is an old witch that “sits or rides on the chest of the victims, rendering them immobile” (Keith) . Persons visited by a hag, “awake to find that they cannot move even though they can see, hear, feel and smell. There is sometimes the feeling of a great weight on the chest and the sense that there is a sinister or evil presence” (Keith) . Certainly there are similarities between that and my experiences. One account of a hag visitation was given at the trial of Bridget Bishop at Salem, Massachusetts. The account is a deposition, given by John Louder, against Bishop on 2 June, 1692: “I goeing well to bed, aboute the dead of night [I] felt a great weight upon my Breast. And awakening [I] looked and, it being bright moonlight, did clearly see said Bridget Bushop or her likeness sitting upon my stomake . . . [I put] my Armes of[f] of the bed to free myselfe from that great oppression, [but] she presently layd hold of my throat and almost Choked mee. And I had noe strenth or power in my hands to resist or help my selfe” (Louder 68) .
As can be seen I have been trying to answer the question as to whether this woman was just an object in a dream, or a paranormal entity for some years now. No figure in my experience stands out with more malicious, aggressive, reality than this woman. In the two moments in which we have met my jaw has clenched, my sweat has poured out of my body, my breath has quickened, and my muscles have contracted. She represents a grotesque mixture of inexplicable, paranormal, wonder and quite physical, empirical, explanation. When I first saw her I quickly placed her in the context of mythos and saw her as positive proof of supernatural realities.
As I have applied a more academic mind to this inquiry, however, I have gained a better understanding of what dreams are, and how my experience fits into dream research. According to NOVA’s What are Dreams, dreams are an essential phenomenon both to our physiological and psychological well being. Our minds produce two separate types of sleep: NREM or non-rapid eye movement and REM or rapid eye movement. NREM is an early stage. MIT scientist Matt Wilson, in his study of the brain wave activity of rats both while sleeping and conscious, has determined that dreams in NREM correspond in flashes to actual events from a subject’s life and experience (qtd. in What are Dreams). It is a replay of former activity during which our brain interprets the past and attempts to relate it to future experience. During REM sleep our brain stem disengages our spinal column and effectively paralyzes us. This may account for the seemingly supernatural paralysis John Louder and I encountered. Brain wave activity is dynamic and constant during REM, or Random Eye Movement, sleep. Wilson has shown that REM dreams are simulations that utilize material observed in NREM sleep and apply it to future possibilities (qtd. in What are Dreams?). Thus dreams are training modules in which our minds and bodies prepare for future crises.
That explanation helps me sleep with better ease at night. That comfort only lasts, however, as long as I am not recalling my twice unwanted visitor. That awful woman, and her floating visage, stands out unanswerably outside of any dream. I have had nightmares as often and as frightening as any person. I cannot categorize her as a nightmare. This was a different, more lucid and active, experience. I have always told the story to others in the context of discussing the paranormal, not in the context of discussing dreams.
There have been two occasions, excluding this essay, on which I have told another person about my initial experience with . . . whatever entity she is. The first occasion was the same night I first saw the hag, I told my companion and my Mission President. The second time was on a beautiful night in 2007 at about 3 a. m. to a group of friends who were with me to watch a meteor shower.
I was in Crouch, Idaho lying on the wood bleachers at Starlight Mountain Theatre. I was with friends, including my Delphic love interest, Rachel, and everything seemed to be just about perfect. The weather was pristine, though a little cold, the sky was clear, and the company was intimate and easy. Starlight Mountain Theatre is a community theatre where amateur actors, usually between 18 and 25 are hired to spend the summer performing musicals. I had been hired by the director Ed Davis to play in that summer season. It was a transitional moment in my life. I had just returned from serving my mission. I was enrolled in the Fall 2007 semester at Boise State University, and I was a tinder box 21-year-old ready to experiment with a life in which my actions were determined by my own choices. My time at Starlight Mountain Theatre was the first in which I could fully make, and could be fully responsible for, my own decisions.
At this precise moment the earth passed through the Aurigid debris trail of the comet Kiess. This happened on 1 September 2007 (Minard) . This was the occasion on which my fellow actors and I stayed up all night, lying out and watching our mundane planet encounter the fantastic possibilities of an infinite universe. It was a moment in which the world I could define met with unapproachable infinity. As the thousands of objects that had traveled light-years unchanged combusted before my eyes, the event touched powerfully on the beauty of scientific inquiry and the attraction of inexplicability.
Stars have always had that effect on mankind. The stars have inspired us to calculate trigonometric relationships and quantify distance. They have inspired us to imagine a pantheon of gods and pretend absolute access to the prediction of the future. Empirical Aristotle and mystical Homer both justified their creeds by appealing to the predictable and unfathomable stars.
It did not seem like the question came out of nowhere, therefore, when my jaunty friend Dugan turned toward me and asked,
“Tanner, do you believe in the paranormal?”
“I’m not quite sure. I don’t think so.” I said. Dugan went on,
“I think I have seen demons before, that is why I was asking.[i] Have you seen anything like that?”
“I suppose I have had an experience with the supernatural as well, it happened while I was on my mission . . .” I went on to tell them my experience on my mission of being visited at night by the demoness.
I concluded my ghost story. No one made any noise. A shooting star flared up, and lasted longer than most, before its trail flashed out above the horizon. I asked myself if I had told the story honestly. I could feel that my narrative had affected everyone present in the way that I intended the story to affect them. They were terrified. I was terrified too, trapped in the furious memory. But were the details in order? Were they embellished? I honestly did not know. One of my dear friends Erin Hannah who was there on the occasion has said to me, “I walked away totally believing that you had experienced something that could not be explained” (Hannah) . This touches and confuses me. Erin is one of those sages all groups need: the Hermione of our clique. I have never known her to be wrong.
For my own inquiry, and my reader’s, this eyewitness testimony is the only evidence I can give that this she-devil was not a formless image in a dream. Convincing as the account is to me and to Erin, eyewitness testimony is not reliable. According to Benjamin Cardozo, founder of The Innocence Project, eyewitness testimony has played, “a role in nearly %75 of convictions overturned by DNA evidence” (Cardozo) . In the Salem Witch Trials, every single innocent soul put to death was convicted based upon “voluntary harmonious confessions, made by intelligent persons of all ages, in sundry towns, at several times” (Mather 329-330) . I even am dependent upon my own confession to recall the details of what happened that first night I saw – her. I had to consult my own journal to reproduce the details. Confession is not more reliable than eyewitness testimony. Cotton Mather said of those sentenced to death in Salem, “more than one and twenty have confessed, that they have signed unto a book, which the devil showed them, and engaged in his hellish design” (329) . Did these self professed witches still affirm their own confession as they dangled angularly by their necks? Again we have the advice of Thomas Paine: “It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at secondhand, either verbally or in writing” (Paine 655) . Had I not so recently seen her malevolence a second time my naturalistic, Esthesis-Ouch-Epi-Ptoe, impulse would disregard every fantastic element of this first experience.
So we come back to this second occurrence, and to the question: was it a dream? We may not know enough about our brains to answer the question sufficiently. The human mind is the least charted realm in the universe. As Victor Hugo said, “There is a spectacle greater than the sea, and that is the sky; there is a spectacle greater than the sky, and that is the human soul” (184) . I assert, though I do it with grave trembling, that she is a facet of my own soul. She derives from my mind. Yesterday I spent some time beneath the stars again. I took in the vastness of that spectacle and had Hugo’s pronouncement on the greatness of the human soul in mind. If I had a vehicle that could engage each sparkle in the cosmos, would I ever find such a being as she? I could not imagine it. Vast as the visible world is, I cannot place her in any inch of it. Yet I could locate her easily, effortlessly in fact, within my own thoughts. Yes, it was a dream. It was a magnified element of my own psyche, not a visitor from another realm.
Another explanation of my experience is that I encountered a hallucination and an evolutionary instinctual reaction in response to a phenomenon called infrasound. According to Vic Tandy, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Coventry University, humans cannot hear large wave, low sounds between 7 and 19 Hz (Tandy) . Some phenomena that produce sound waves at that frequency are tiger’s chuffs, large fans, volcanoes, earthquakes, certain thunder, and gathering storms. Evolution has given us the instinct to sense this frequency of sound, without actually hearing it (Gavreau) . Enormous, dangerous events follow the production of infrasound. Our instinct is to feel fear when it is sensed. This phenomenon can cause one to hallucinate as well.
I cannot in strict honesty come to any conclusion but that I was not visited by a demoness. Defining these experiences as dreams, however, does not make them meaningless. It is a glorious and stimulating conclusion. Nature is so composed that it presented to my mind a formidable enemy I have actually never encountered. What a wonder each one of us is. According to Patrick McNamara, nightmares occur in REM sleep (qtd. in What are Dreams). These are the “simulations” to which Wilson was referring. Though REM sleep is the deepest level of sleep, during it the body is stimulated in every way it can be, short of waking. Our brain waves are at least as active during REM sleep as they are when we are awake. So far as our anatomy is concerned, REM sleep is not rest. We are learning, training, during nightmares. I interpret this to mean that our minds are anticipating future dangers and preparing us for them when we have nightmares. The instincts of a deer are to know the dangers of a mountain lion, but few deer meet one. It is a survival instinct. That is much more stimulating than a ghost story. The glorious and unfathomable faculties of the human mind inspired William James to say, “Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of” (511) . Both times I have seen her it has been directly associated with sleep and immediately after dreams. I have been snapped back into full consciousness and discovered myself to be in bed alone both times. My bedroom is located exactly adjacent to my garage where our furnace, hot water heater, and other heavy machinery run. It is quite likely that some mechanism in that garage is producing infrasound at night. I submit that I simply saw this woman twice as a simulated danger during REM sleep, and that the image over stimulated me and caused me to wake up. She is a life within my own “total soul” about which my mind is warning me.
I mentioned that my then romantic interest, Rachel, was with me that night I watched the meteor shower. She and I never worked out, and I think I am realizing just now why that was. It was because we saw the stars differently. After I had finished my story the silence afterward lasted for several long moments. No one said a word for who knows how long. Rachel was the first person to speak.
“I think that I am going to tell my kids that stars are ‘holes to heaven’ like Jack Johnson does in his song,” her tone was excited, and her brown eyes were wide and bright (Johnson) . It was a strange, almost rude comment to make after such a story had been told. It annoyed me. We all thought about that for a moment. I at first thought it was a beautiful idea. I started to doubt the notion, however, and I could not help but say,
“That’s a lie though. Heaven can’t be anywhere up there. We know what is up there. Heaven must be in a different realm than the physical universe. Stars are physical things. They aren’t holes into anything.”
“I know that of course,” she responded patiently, “but it is just fun. We all know Santa can’t really fit down the chimney, but we tell our kids that he can anyway. It’s just fun.”
“Santa is not real though. Stars are. I believe Heaven is also. It is more than just having fun; it is a distortion of fact.” I did not have to say that. It was the only tense moment in an otherwise completely serene experience. I could feel Rachel’s annoyance with me.
“Why do you always have to explain everything?”
I am not sure why. I cannot explain to you why I cannot just concede that I have experienced the paranormal, or why I always question such experiences in others. I am not dull enough to assert that such a tendency is a virtue. Rachel may have been right about the stars. Each one of the stars shown observably as a real, physical, thing and I regarded each as such. But I was wrong. Many of the stars I was seeing did not exist. I was watching beams that had burned ages ago, many of their sources had faded away. They had burnt out before my ancestor’s ancestor was born. We have all been gazing at phantoms for millennia. Should the wonder with which I view each star be sullied by doubt as to whether I am observing something real? Indeed, “there were so many fewer questions when stars were just holes into heaven” (Johnson) . The certainty with which I have concluded that the woman was just a dream shakes at this notion. If she is a lesson, a simulated future danger concocted by my instinct to survive, could she not be a warning, perhaps from Esthesis-Ouch-Epi-Ptoe herself, against the need to explain, and the distaste for wonder?
Could she not be real?
Works Cited
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Clawson, Robert. Personal Interview Tanner Barker. Nampa, October 2012. Telephone. 12 November 2012.
"Elder Bruce R McConkie: "Preacher of Righteousness"." Ensign Magazine June 1985. Web. 5 December 2012. <https://www.lds.org/ensign/1985/06/elder-bruce-r-mcconkie-preacher-of-righteousness?lang=eng>.
Farrar, Frederic W. The Life of Christ. Third Bookcraft Edition. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1875. Print. 5 December 2012.
Gavreau, Vladimir. "Pneumatic Generators of Intense Ultrasound." The Journal of the Accoustical Society of America 28.4 (1956): 803. Print. 6 December 2012.
Hannah, Erin. Personal Interview Tanner Barker. Nampa, 16 September 2012. Telephone. 12 November 2012.
Hugo, Victor. Les Miserables. Trans. Julie Rose. Modern Library. New York: Random House, Inc., 2008. Print. 9 October 2012.
Jackman, Dugan. Conversation Tanner Barker. Nampa, 16 September 2012. Telephone. 12 November 2012.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Ed. Martin E Marty. Penguin Classics. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902. Print. 1 October 2012.
Johnson, Jack. "Holes to Heaven." On and On. By Jack Johnson. Prod. Robert Carranza. Boston: Bubble Toes Publishing, 2003. Sound Recording. 10 October 2012.
Keith. "Old Hag Syndrone." n.d. Complete Paranormal Services Reaching out to the Otherside. Ed. Keith. Web. 5 December 2012. <http://www.cpsparanormal.com/oldhagsyndrone.htm>.
Louder, John. "Deposition 4: June 2, 1692." Retrieving the American Past. Ed. Sarah Swedberg. Pearson Publishing Custom House and Ohio State University - Department of History, 1999. 68. Print. 6 December 2012.
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What are Dreams. Dir. Charles Coville. Prod. Charles Coville. 2009. Film. 7 October 2012.
[i] Dugan told the following story at this time, I did not include it in the body of my essay, but I thought it was relevant enough to include here:
My friends and myself, we went out on a double date out to a cemetery about 14 miles outside of Burley, just to watch a movie or do something scary. We were driving out to it and the last mile was just this dirt road and as we were going down the road we could see like a campfire going out toward the cemetery. We got out there and we parked in the field next to the cemetery and watched the campfire just like burning out on the other side of the field. My friend and I we drove in the van and we went out to go investigate. We started walking towards the fire and saw two people standing next to it, one dressed in black and one dressed in white. We stopped when we saw them and it looked like they were looking at us. All of a sudden the one dressed in white jumped and started climbing up this tree. The one dressed in black jumped into these bushes. We ran back to the car and the girls had locked it. It really scared them. We were very scared as well and finally got them to unlock it. We got in the van and hooked a “uey” and headed back down the dirt road, going rather fast. We looked out the side of the car and could see a figure running alongside the car probably about 20 feet to the side of the car. He was keeping up with us. Then he just reared off. We were so scared and we kept driving toward the main road. When we stopped we talked about it for awhile. Ben and I [Dugan’s husband] went back there, and that’s one of the first times that I have been back there (Jackman) .
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