Night Terrors and Hell Experiences — Understanding and Clearing Them — Part 1

Until I got the beginnings of an explanation in August 2005, I'd had no idea that the extremely troublesome and disturbing nocturnal experiences that I'd had in my early childhood were what were generally known as 'night terrors'. That gap in my knowledge had always kept me feeling particularly isolated and 'haunted', for it seemed that there was some 'dark shadow' over me, which was unique to me, and which nobody would or could understand.

Indeed, I was correct on the latter, even though what I'd experienced was a quite widespread phenomenon, because apparently nobody on the planet properly understood 'night terrors', and, at least in the West, 'night terrors' are most often regarded as a medical issue, which is the worst possible 'understanding' of them. Giving an issue a name does NOT signify any understanding of that issue! Thank goodness my 'night terrors' were never 'diagnosed' (and then 'treated')!

Now, for a little 'treat' (this being your lucky day!), just try a little 'thought experiment' right now, if you would, and put yourself into my 'shoes'. …However, not the actual shoes of myself at the time of your reading this, but the figurative shoes of myself in 1944 (initially) — when I came up to the princely age of two. Yes, two! So, let's pause a moment while you focus your awareness and put yourself 'in my shoes' right back then, and let yourself be likewise just two years old. …Now, are you lying comfortably in your cot, …and has Mummy turned the light out now? — Then your torments will begin. (They're all waiting for you, as they always are — every night, without fail….)

You're still too young to have any concepts with which to describe in your mind what's beginning to happen, but as soon as your eyes are closed, instead of at once drifting off to a happy and contented sleep as you'd been doing previously, you're immersed in a chaotic yet also somehow purposeful visual maelstrom of moving images, often swirling or writhing, some moving with quivering and twitchings, also some kinds of things or images rotating or gyrating — all menacing or sometimes repugnant and revolting, and you're filled with the most intense feelings of fear, anxiety, panic and terror, or sometimes the most intense revulsion and loathing — and intense nausea may at times accompany either, albeit not usually with actual vomiting.

Unlike in a nightmare, for the most part you remain submerged in this hell — particularly because when you did cry out for help, Mummy and Daddy just sought to see that you were physically comfortable, verbally reassured you that everything was all right (except it was no reassurance because everything was not all right), and shrugged their shoulders and left you to 'it' again — in the dark again…

This is bound to have been impacting on your waking life experience, because you quickly develop a chronic sleep deprivation, which steadily gets worse, because closing your eyes to go to sleep has been becoming an increasingly intimidating prospect. Additionally, you've been becoming increasingly frightened of the dark.

However, that's only the beginning of the mischief, for by the age of about three, by which time you're seeing the maelstroms of visuals much more clearly, you've done a very smart thing. You've discovered that you can direct your awareness in a particular way that doesn't completely 'wake you up' (though actually you're not really asleep either) but opens into some different level or aspect of your awareness where those completely unremitting hells aren't running. — Bravo! Clever boy (or girl)!

— Except. Something has been waiting for you there. You feel a sinking in your tummy as you're faced with one of a whole range of types of sprose (looking like a violin case, with narrow end uppermost), and it comes menacingly towards you, making a slight humming and ticking sound. In extreme terror, lest it 'get' you, you try to escape.

You do somehow escape, whether by running or flying*, or going down or up in a 'thunder hole' (like a lift shaft), or by simply finding that you're suddenly somewhere else. You're now on your travels, but unfortunately your location and your direction and mode of travel** are directed by something other than your ordinary, conscious mind.

The sense of extreme personal isolation is overpowering, and you're constantly seeking somewhere that might be safe for you, and even where you could find a friend / companion who would 'save' you. There's a twilight quality about everything, as in the maelstrom-type hells, but here that 'twilight' has a drab, cheerless quality, and a tendency for a drab and chill slightly bluish green tinge in its greyness (note the background colour of this panel — though for readability this has to be rather lighter than what you're experiencing in your little 'entertainment' here).

Once in a very long while (not on most nights) you actually see somebody in the distance who seems meaningful to you — but the person disappears down some side street long before you've been able to get there, and you're searching in vain for him. — But it's not long before you're in a room and you turn on the light switch because it's dark (though you can still sort-of see). The room light flickers menacingly, and then slowly starts lowering itself on its cord, hissing at you. It's a doot*, and it's coming down to 'get' you. HELP! — Except that there's no help to cry out for! You're gripped by an electrifying terror and panic, for there seems to be no escape.

Also, in that small space with the doot coming down for you, you have to keep your back to the wall, because something might 'get' you from behind. It seems like 'this is it' and something unspeakably frightful is happening and going to happen to you — but then in a moment you've dropped down a thunder hole. Frantically, you travel down and up in that lift-shaft-like vertical shaft through all of existence, wondering, with a combination of desperation and foreboding, which landing or doorway or hole you may find yourself coming to rest on or in. You see that some of them have sproses or sprouses just waiting there for you, while others have nothing obvious there but are dingy-dark and menacing. What's worse — the nasty things you can see or the nasty things you can't yet see — the half hidden menace?

Maybe in a moment you're in a house and being menaced and chased by further sproses or sprouses*, or maybe it will be another doot, or maybe a billow* will come after you — or maybe you will be outside again in that drab greenish-grey tinged twilight landscape, on your never-ending lone quest for warmth and closeness, and for a person who really understands you…

Another possibility that may happen (it does once in a while, though you can never make it happen; it happens simply when it happens) is that you find yourself with the Talking Sprose*, which speaks to you in an apparently friendly voice and is apparently totally safe to be with. Indeed, you feel safe from everything as long as you're with Talking Sprose — BUT of course it's never long before you find yourself somewhere else, or Talking Sprose is no longer there and something 'nasty' is after you again.

There's another, and on the face (sic) of it extremely puzzling, aspect of this tormented 'world'. You're apparently not a human being! — Why do I say this? — Well, does a human being have a longish rather pointed muzzle like that of a dog or wolf? — No? — But you do!

Every single moment you're in this tormented world you have this muzzle. You can see it clearly (albeit blurred of course because it's so close to your eyes), just like what you can see of your nose in waking life, but it's longer, furry and greyish — and sometimes you're aware of your mouth being similarly the mouth of a dog- or wolf-like animal. However, you're never on all fours, so there's a weird ambiguity here about what you really are.

A bit of the stuff generally suppressed from waking memory…

Now let's look a bit more at the underlying 'base layer' or hardcore hell / 'night terror' experience — the stuff that you've been turning your nose up at in favour of the electrifying terror of being chased by sproses, sprouses and all sorts of other 'nasty' things…

There are actually two particular types of base layer or hardcore night hell that you remember experiencing*, and those two seem to be pretty well mutually exclusive, so at any one time you have just one or the other, though possibly with the odd minor overlaps. One I will call here the 'revulsion' or 'disgusting' type, and the other is the terror type.

The 'revulsion' hell

The 'revulsion' type sees you submerged in mostly poorly differentiated images all suggestive of putrefaction and degeneration. There always seems to be very shallow water trickling over ill-defined objects and lumpy substrates*, the objects and lumps, and even the water itself, tending to be quivering as though it all were still somehow alive — and you're absolutely in the midst of this. Not a lot seems to happen here, apart from sometimes there being the odd quivering, twitching insects** crawling over some of the objects and lumps, and parts of that substrate seem to be in the process of getting detached — moving irregularly to and fro in the disgusting water in such a way as to be the focus of particularly intense feelings of revulsion and wanting to get away from it all (but of course you can't).

Also often in that disgusting stuff is an impression of it being crawling with maggots — though you seem not actually to see any. On the other hand you sometimes get the impression of a particular disturbing quiet sound* emitting transiently from the maggots, which seems to be an embodiment of absolute revulsion. The mess also often seems to be greasy too — like some of the most disgustingly filthy washing-up water you could possibly imagine — and it's often rather milky too.

There's always a general feeling of dread that this stuff might be getting onto you and contaminating you — a possibility that seems 'unspeakably frightful'. This comes especially from those bits and pieces of the substrate that are almost broken off and are moving menacingly to and fro in the disgusting watery liquid that's trickling over them. It's as though at any time one or more of those loose bits would break off completely and get onto you, making you contaminated by something just so unthinkably awful that you'd just have to die — and it would be a death of unspeakable, unthinkable frightfulness.

Because of the paucity of detail that you remember from your great amount of time spent in this particular type of hell, it's highly likely that you've suppressed your memory of at least a good part of it.

The 'terror' hell

In this particular case I can guide you through an actual, delectable sequence. In fact this particular sequence appears to pass into a 'straight' nightmare (actually something quite distinct from the night hell phenomenon), which is actually why the confusion of images fades out and leaves you in an actual scene, and also why you wake up out of it crying and screaming for help…

But that in itself is instructive, so, let's turn the light out again and leave you to your delectable 'entertainment'…

It's in the middle of the night and you're three. You're submerged in an immense, overwhelming maelstrom of squirming, writhing humanoid figures, some of them broken up or breaking up as they writhe and squirm, and it's all full of Satanistic sexual connotations (though of course at that age you don't know anything about sexual activity, Satanism or indeed occultism of any sort), and you're feeling a seemingly unending intense anxiety and foreboding, often mixed with other fear-related emotions.

Among all that orgiastic sexual writhing there are various ejaculations of vomit and disgusting stuff that fills you with revulsion* (including semen — though of course at that age your ordinary, conscious mind doesn't have even a concept of that), and you're terrified that some of that stuff might get onto you and contaminate you, while you're also continuing to experience the unbearable-feeling anxiety and fear.

Periodically a quiet inner voice, which sounds like a man's, and is completely emotionally detached from the proceedings, draws your attention to certain things that are going on, and in particular, indicates to you when something particularly tremendous is supposedly going to happen — so helping to build up your climaxes of fear and apprehension. Generally nothing 'tremendous' actually does happen, but you're totally at the mercy of what's going on and what you're being told.

At one point in the proceedings an enormously magnified image of a live human sperm (as seen through an optical microscope)* swims its way through all this confusion, burrowing from bottom to top through a broken-up human form.

At another point in all the orgiastic writhings your attention is drawn to something that's going to be one of those 'tremendous' happenings, which, it's intimated, may make you be violently sick. Some space clears around a central confused figure that you sense is a woman, and a sort of gyration at her bottom end indicates that she's masturbating (though again your ordinary, conscious mind doesn't know what the hell (sic) is going on). A flow of fine sand is issuing from the figure's bottom end, building up a little pile under it, as though this figure were part of an hourglass. Again nothing 'tremendous' actually happens, but you've been further wound up a treat.

Presently the confusions of writhings give way to a very slow and twitchy procession from left to right of troupes of successive types of the most weird and grotesque 'things', generally with insect-like qualities — especially their twitchiness. One 'regiment' of these that passes by has their eyes on very long stalks, a bit like snails' eyes, but the eyes themselves are bulging and gloating. They seem to be gloating over what's going to happen to you — for, after all, what else would there be for them to be gloating about at this time?

That troupe is closely followed by a troupe of weird figures that are a bit like 'matchstick men'*, but very insect-like in their twitchiness, and each with a fixed grin — a gloating grin. They're surely going to 'get' somebody. Although just at the moment they're just passing by and seem not to be noticing you at all, who else apart from you would they be going to 'get'?

The sense of menace and foreboding has been increasing, and now a quite different sense of 'this is it!' is emerging as all the moving figures fade out in the increasing darkness. You now see pitch-black silhouettes against a very dusky sky, of some conifer trees (shaped like some sort of spruce) looming up in front of you, and the whole atmosphere is of the utmost, unspeakable menace, foreboding and awfulness. Words can't describe that awfulness!*

Among those trees — or rather just in front of them, and most likely close enough to 'get' you — is a cabin-like wooden house, which is also a pitch-black silhouette except that there's a light on in at least one window, so you know there are people in it.

How could a house 'get' you? — In this 'world' potentially anything could! But just look at this house! Look how it menacingly moves to and fro in an erratic, unstable sort of way*, as though at any moment it would move out that bit further and 'get' you! …And now look what's happening! LOOK!

With a sort of quivering added to that menacing to-and-fro movement, almost as though it's alive in some malevolent way, its whole right-hand side (i.e., to your right) is starting to force itself towards the left, compressing the house (and, you remember, there seem to be people in there!). That side progressively tilts to the left as it compresses in more, so that the whole house is increasingly shearing to upper left as it continues to compress. And now, LOOK! — LOOK!

At top left, with a sense of great violence, black-silhouetted rectangles are starting to fly up into the air in a continuous volley, away from you till they've gone out of sight. More and more of those black-silhouetted rectangles are all doing that. At your age you don't recognise them as roof slates, which presumably they're supposed to be. As the house continues to compress and shear up to top left, it's progressively converting at that top left position into those black-silhouetted rectangles, which all, with a sense of an intense violence, are similarly flying away up into the air till they've gone — till eventually there's nothing left of that house, and the scene is now somewhat lighter.

So, you're now facing that shocking, absolutely unspeakable emptiness where that house had been, out of which any further such happening — perhaps even more unimaginably frightful — could emerge or erupt at any time, any moment. You're absolutely beside yourself with anguish and horror, and you break out into the real, physical world (in the dark of course, still), desperately crying out for help. No, don't be silly — not crying out for Mummy and Daddy! You already know what they'll do, don't you! You're crying out for help — and that's most certainly not Mummy nor Daddy nor the two of them!

And, sure enough, one of them comes into the room, shushes you up with all your screaming and crying, keeping on saying in an anxiously coaxing voice that everything's all right and there's nothing to be frightened of, and, after a few minutes, going out of the room again — and of course turning the light off again…

…And so it is, that despite every night's hell and your related intense fear of the dark, even when you're old enough to be able to talk about what you're going through, you don't do so. Indeed, you pretty speedily 'forget' the sequence described above, and have certainly forgotten details of just about everything in those 'base layer' or 'hardcore' torments, apart from a general impression that there was an extremely nasty sort of background to your night experiences. What you remember much more is the 'second level' torments, in which all sorts of things are 'after' you.

Your apparent release from the nightly hells comes sometime when you're six. The Eagle comic makes its first appearance, and once you've read the second edition of it you have a night with seemingly little sleep because you're full of fantasies about your being Dan Dare and travelling in spaceships and all that — and you will never experience a night hell again, because at last that aspect of your awareness that had so readily been opening to the astral non-reality has become sufficiently grounded for it not to go opening up that way significantly any more. (That is, of course, provided that nothing happens later on to cause that part of your awareness to get less grounded again…)

Meanwhile, you're left with a very considerable fear of the dark, a morbid dread of 'the occult' or anything to do with 'the dark side' or 'dark forces', and feelings of revulsion and dread towards ichneumon wasps and masses of writhing maggots, even though, as a nature lover and naturalist, you see also much physical beauty about adult ichneumons.

Taking a step back now to look at it…

Okay, you can come out of my infant 'shoes' now, and I hope and trust you enjoyed that little 'treat'! I think I must have shown you just enough to get a slight taste of what some hells, including 'night terrors', are like, and also the difference between a night hell and a nightmare. Nightmares are extremely distressing, BUT they wake you up and don't — can't — go on and on because they have a definite 'story' to them and they're true dreams, albeit distorted ones. One always wakes from dreams when they become too disturbing. In fact it's possible that the above-related nightmare (i.e., the scene with the cabin-house among the trees) has been the only true nightmare in my whole life so far.

Hell imagery in art and artwork

Actually, even if you haven't experienced hells yourself you've most likely seen static reproductions of some hell images, for they can be found on a high proportion of people who have their bodies extensively tattooed (at least those I've seen), and there are all sorts of fantasy cults that reproduce major elements of such material in their artwork. Some of those people even believe that what they're doing is 'spiritual' (i.e., supposedly 'good' and 'positive'), while others are more clear that their interests are in some degree 'on the dark side'. Here is one example (click to get detailed views):

As far as I've been able to ascertain so far, the hell imagery portrayed in body tattooing is remarkably similar from widely different cultures and geographical locations. For example, I've seen Maori tattooing from New Zealand that isn't materially different from that illustrated above.

One place where you can see what looks like a formalized version of what you could see in a 'terror'-type hell is in certain of the masterful mosaics of Maurits Escher, including the Circle Limit series, where stylized animal or angel and demon forms are interlocked in the most fantastic ways. In hells, however, everything is in constant motion, and you'd never get anything presented in such beautiful symmetry, except for perhaps the odd transient instant, which latter would at once make the whole show seem all the more bizarre and disturbing.

Another artistic parallel of hell experience is in certain of the paintings of Heironymus Bosch — but in a real hell you'd get no sense of space or perspective — just an overwhelming visual tumult or maelstrom of moving and typically writhing or/and rotating figures, and there would be a sort of twilight quality about everything.

Another well known painter who appears to have represented some elements of hell experiences in a particularly masterful manner (though suggestive of an uneasy 'halfway house' between first and second level hells) is Salvador Dalí. Indeed, in his reasonably mature works he conveys the sheer awfulness (often with a sort of distorted beauty) of many hell visuals with a most compelling and disturbing immediacy. No wonder his paintings always used to frighten and often sicken me!

Hell portrayals in music

I haven't been able yet to pinpoint definite musical parallels of basic-level hells, at least in any major way, though of course there's some music that comes across as frightening and even reflecting Satanistic practices, such as Prokofiev's Third Symphony and his opera The Fiery Angel, but I've fairly securely identified works of three Western composers of classical music that appear to be reflections of particular second-level hell experiences.

Three or perhaps four such works are actually ones of my own, though I had no idea of the origin of their content when I composed them. Two definite ones are my Third Symphony and the second movement (only) of my Sixth Symphony. They both in their different ways portray an intensely lonely tormented state of seeking something that can never be found — and in the Third Symphony there are also passages strongly suggestive of brief incursions into Satanism or indeed possibly basic level terror hell.

The final movement of my Fourth Symphony appears also to reflect such second-level hell experiences, but in that case the situation is less clear-cut because that particular origin looks to be mixed in with a different sort of origin, though the latter in its own way is still very powerful and intense (memories stored in ghosts out in the wilds).

In those three works of mine the apparent hell portrayals are what I'd describe as 'intrinsic', in that I wasn't seeking to portray hell experiences but they just came out anyway. On the other hand, the fourth work of mine relevant here is my orchestral / choral symphonic poem Tears of Avalokiteshvara, in which there's a section in which I quite deliberately portray a base-level hell of the religion-distorted 'fire and brimstone' type.

That's a hair-raisingly, beautifully vivid portrayal, of the terror and both the physical and mental suffering in that religious vision of 'hell'. It differs from any real hell, however, because it contains a multitude of 'souls' in agony (challenging for the choir to portray really well!), whereas, to the best of my understanding, ALL real hells are oppressively SOLO experiences.

The other composers who I'm aware of who've vividly reproduced second-level hell experiences are:

• the Danish Vagn Holmboe — much of his mature work, but, of those works of his that I've heard, particularly Symphonies 6 to 9, his various 'symphonic metamorphoses' and a short orchestral suite (really a mini-symphony) called Tempo Variabile.
  

  The terror element seems to be lacking in all I've heard, but the tormented loneliness and urgent and even desperate seeking is pervasive, together with a particular modal colouring which, at least for me, very much resonates with the distorted version of birth trauma that was an intrinsic element of my own second-level hell experience.

• the Finnish Kalevi Aho — including his Symphonies 1 and 4 and some other works of his whose titles I don't now remember. Other symphonies of his also show at least elements of this underlying source — but I find his music so troublesome to listen to (even though fascinating and in places awe-inspiring) that I'm not researching his music further.
  

  Aho's music tends to have a very 'dark' and often brooding quality about it. Whereas generally the dark, brooding quality in Sibelius' music generally seems to be healthily reflecting Nature, that of Aho always has a seriously tormented quality, sometimes with a brutal sense of personal devastation and loss, such as in the first movement of his Fourth Symphony.

Both those composers portray that tell-tale extremely intense and tormented sense of loneliness, disconnectedness and a pervasive sense of some very deep and devastating personal tragedy underlying the musical content, and of forever seeking some sort of comforting 'reality' that can never be found.

This intensity and tormented quality has a much more 'elemental' quality, and is sourced from much deeper levels of consciousness, than ordinary emotionally tormented music such as, say, Mahler or Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich came out with.

Actually, there is a rather attenuated second-level hell portrayal in one of Shostakovich's works — his Fourth Symphony (i.e., the whole symphony) — and that accounts for its unique character in his whole oeuvre, which has had so many people mystified as to its inspiration and what sort of very intense and labyrinthine personal experience it seemed to be portraying — something that goes beyond his normal emotional expression and, again, embodies a sense of forever seeking something 'beyond', which can never be found.

Hell imagery in literature

Many of us of course know of the Faust legend — a religious-moralistic-distorted picture of a man being led by the garbage into doing what will then supposedly get him 'damned' by 'God' and thrown into hell.

Many of the works of Franz Kafka appear to reflect certain elements of particularly second-level hells, with a pervasive element of 'disconnection' and the related distorted 'birth trauma' experience that the garbage uses in attacks. Metamorphosis, The Castle and The Trial are great examples of this, even though in this case many people wouldn't recognise the experiences as 'hellish', because of their own limited understanding of what hells really are.

I'm relatively poorly read in the literary world, and, apart from the above, can't pinpoint specific instances of a genuine hell experience, though there must be many — except that I've noticed such occurrences in the odd places in my own literary works. I note further below a few instances of second-level hell experiences in my early poetry, but here I draw attention to an exquisitely excruciating hell in my second novel, Dead Pigs.

The hell is depicted in the final chapter, though the fullness of its awfulness couldn't be appreciated without reading the whole novel. I myself haven't experienced that particular sort of hell. However, with my personal experience of such a range of hells I can say with some confidence that a fair number of people through human history would have had very similar experiences to that one, albeit with one particular difference that I'm not mentioning here as I don't want to give away any more details of the ending of that novel.

Note that, in the Dead Pigs example, although it looks as though the particular character is being punished for dreadful things he's done, the reality in any such situation (including the Faust legend and all its variants) would be that the garbage is running the proceedings, systematically destroying the person — both driving the person into seriously adverse behaviours and then giving him the impression that he's being punished by 'karma' or simply 'God' for what he's done. That isn't at all how genuine karma operates, and as far as I can ascertain, there's no higher being or power that could or would punish us.

Just where the HELL…?

Now, surely, don't you feel just a little bit shocked that anyone at the age of three or so could experience such things as I've related further above, which represent genuine hells or so-called night terrors? And let's just suppose that your response is to shrug your shoulders and say something about all those experiences just being signs of a mental illness (which needs 'treating', of course!). In that case you'd be like a doctor who diagnoses a person as mentally ill just because she has troublesome and noisy neighbours, and gets her 'treated' with antipsychotics in an attempt to reduce her awareness of the ongoing problem.

And you'd be begging the real mega-question: "Just where the HELL (sic) has all that stuff come from?"

Just passing it off as creations of one's own sick mind (of a three-year-old, really?) tells no-one anything apart from your own unwillingness even slightly to begin to look at what's really going on. The words 'ill' and 'sick' to describe a person's mind may be convenient labels to use as fig leaves to cover up what you don't want to countenance, but the reality is that those two words are completely out of place except when referring to the state of one's physical body — and even in that case, for many purposes it would be more helpful and constructive to leave those words out of it and actually attend to what is actually going on in the particular situations.

Let's give another close analogy. If somebody bashes you hard on the head and you immediately see a bright flash and lights, which are not in the physical world, would you say that your seeing the bright flash and the lights means that you have a mental illness, or that the flash and lights were caused by somebody bashing you on the head and causing a certain (hopefully temporary) change of function in your brain that gave the illusion of those lights? It's just the same issue with hells — with one practical difference: the interfering influence is invisible and indeed non-physical, and, to a fair extent, can control what you experience.

Consciousness isn't ill or sick (such expressions are actually meaningless relating to consciousness), but as consciousness manifests in each one of us, that manifestation process has some distortions — but again the distortions in your own consciousness are not there because something is wrong or perverse about you or about consciousness itself but because something has caused those distortions in the manifestation of consciousness, or indeed is actively causing them in 'real time'. A little further below I shall explain about what that 'something' is, and, as far as I can ascertain, how it gives rise to the tremendous experience of hells and thus causes so much torment, confusion and suffering.

But first I have a bit more to say about the actual content of hells as I've experienced them. If you were sharp you may have noticed that I recounted in some detail a particular hell sequence, which drifted into a nightmare, despite my having just a little previously said that I'd forgotten nearly all the detailed content of my early childhood night hells (and indeed that nightmare!). A little bit contradictory, huh?! — Well, please read on, and some way further below you will find out how I came to recover my memory of some of those experiences…

Hell periphery experiences

As I've already intimated, when I was six, at last the hells stopped dead for me, because the relevant part of my awareness had got sufficiently grounded. As far as I can ascertain, I never really got in touch again with that sort of phenomenon until into my adult life*, and then when it did appear (as quite a rarity) it was for a long time only in an apparently innocuous form**, which I didn't recognise as having anything to do with the early childhood hells.

It was from the early 1970s* (i.e., the age of about 30) that these hell periphery experiences very occasionally came to me. For me they were harmless — but that was because I didn't dwell on them and I let them fade away as I brought my attention back into the physical world.

These visuals were initially almost stationary large simple geometric forms, and subsequently were some sort of display of slightly illuminated gracefully swirling forms, without any obvious unpleasant emotional feelings that would associate them in my mind with hells as normally understood. On two occasions, once during a hike and once after a hike when I had a very long hitch-hiking wait in the dark, I saw a continuously writhing mass of what seemed almost to be dancing spirits in the lower part of my field of view, but when I focused on them they had no identities and were more like writhing snake-like flames.

All these hell periphery manifestations had a disturbingly impersonal and 'inhuman' feel about them, and felt like a place where I didn't want to be — though the 'writhing flames' visual did have an almost joyful and hypnotic quality about it, reflecting my state of exhilaration from the hike, and thus was potentially quite dangerous in that I could feel a pull to keep watching it on that occasion when I was some three hours waiting in the dark at an unlit junction during my return hitch-hike.

In 2015, belatedly I recognised another type of visual manifestation that I sometimes experienced as being a particular category of hell periphery experience. Sometimes, when my awareness was a bit more weakly grounded than usual, particularly when still affected by some bit of stress earlier that day, once I was in bed and beginning to drift off, initially, instead of the usual vague dream images that would start coming up I'd get various vivid and more attention-grabbing images appear, usually of sort-of humanoid forms, oppressively large, but with no signs that they were genuinely human-like beings at all.

Again, as with the other hell periphery experiences, these seemed disturbingly impersonal and 'inhuman', like human bodies lacking a brain altogether, and even lacking faces as far as I could tell. These displays may well have included buildings or parts thereof, but again without any proper character, and they would have been moving much as the humanoid figures were.

Generally I experienced such disturbances only when dozing off — not upon awakening as was usually the case with the other types of hell periphery experience. However, I can't be very specific about the appearance of the humanoid figures, because they tended to be pushing in from the periphery of my field of vision, and they felt so disturbing that I made a point of not looking at them directly, and keeping them thus at the periphery, and applying my standard simple measures for dissolving such displays.

Hell visuals in my adult life

Eventually there did come a time when I saw real hell visuals again, but this was in a remarkably different situation. For a start I was adult and also by then I was enlightened, so it was possible to watch the visuals in a detached sort of way, and with a level of understanding of what was happening that wouldn't be possible for most people who experience these things even as adults.

Also, I wasn't immersed in them in the same way that I was as a young child, but was shown them more as a sort of 'movie', and was actually pre-warned that I was going to be shown that sequence, so it was very easy to remain relatively detached from whatever I was shown — and indeed to watch with a certain interested exhilaration, keen to learn what I could about the phenomenon (i.e., for healing purposes rather than out of an idle or compulsive fascination).

The first occasion when this happened was during the tremendous sequence of severe ordeals that the garbage was dragging me through in late November / early December 2004, which led to my second hospitalization. These ordeals were all being presented to me by my 'guidance' (actually the garbage pretending to be my own 'higher consciousness') as supposed self-healing that I had to go through in order to heal an alleged absolutely massive trauma that I was carrying relating to my early childhood torments*. Typical of the garbage, I was being given extremely harsh and in themselves traumatic 'healing methods' that I was told I'd got to use, and intensively so, day and night (i.e., 24/7, with no opportunity for sleep!) over an indefinite period**.

Anyway, the point here is that one time during those ordeals, while I was in bed I was actually shown a re-run of the hell and then nightmare sequence that I've related further above, and I recognised it as very much authentic, for it brought back (evidently weakly) suppressed memories of all that. I can't vouch for the hell sequence leading into that particular nightmare as having been portrayed accurately in every detail, but that doesn't matter, because hell visuals are by their very nature quite chaotic.

So I regard the re-run that I was shown as being fully authentic even if not 100% verbatim historically for one specific occasion — for any differences between that and the original could well have come from my hells on other nights or even at some other time on the same night.

Then in a quite spectacular and potentially life threatening crisis event that the garbage staged upon me in early September 2006, the relevant part of my awareness had evidently got distinctly more ungrounded, and I was shown many greatly diverse hell visuals, which were most likely ones that I myself hadn't experienced before. They were very instructive for me, for I thus got a much better idea of the variety of imagery used in hells — with pointers to possible origins and purpose of it all.

Among the different and sometimes awesomely grotesque material that was shown to me on that occasion was a whole subcategory of images that were an array of what looked like twelve or so animated children's drawings on a page in a child's drawing book, often actually drawing themselves (sequentially) in a rather menacing, nervous, twitchy manner as I watched (indeed, the manner of movement of the 'invisible pen' was suggestive of many types of ichneumon wasp).

Even though I could see nothing particularly meaningful to trouble me in those 'drawings', they had about them an immensely troubling feeling of wrongness and their being about to display something desperately harrowing — the inner 'thought voice' also telling me that those drawings were about to display something that would be extremely troublesome for me to countenance, but of course nothing obviously special actually appeared or happened.

I was also shown a sequence containing spectacularly exaggerated flowing images of masses of ichneumon — or perhaps tachinid fly — maggots bursting out of caterpillars (something that has always horrified me in everyday life), seen against a cloudless blue sky, and this was made to feel as though it was the most virulent night terror material I'd ever seen.

Other types of hell image that have been shown to me at various times include grotesquely 'impossible' buildings and building-like structures, some of them having a sort-of 'Cubist' appearance, but tending to look extremely disorienting and menacing, and they'd move themselves in even more menacing ways as though they would close around and engulf one just as an amoeba would engulf food particles. Also, jumbled angular shapes and constructions, which may include the sorts of 'buildings' just referred to, tended to have grotesque faces shaped into various of the angular parts — of course, apparently staring out at you, usually with some sort of gloating expression if not too bizarre altogether for any expression to be categorized at all.

Since 2006 it seemed to become easier and easier for hell visuals to manifest when I'd got to bed — BUT since I started using really powerful self-actualization methods in mid 2007 I developed a simple way of stopping such visuals in their tracks, by effectively grounding my visual awareness — so actually they've become less and less of an issue for me since then. However, in February 2007, before I gained those methods, I experienced a tremendous all-night spectacular ordeal that was based on hell visuals, which latter were all tied up in an involved fiction that I was being given by the garbage — see the relevant section in Psychiatry: my personal experience — Gaining fundamental insights.

Additional types of hell that I recognised belatedly

'Databank' hells

Sometimes I've experienced an additional category of extremely disturbing visual displays, which are quite different, and I'm not sure whether I ever had those in my childhood hells, though I assume that they could be part of some people's childhood night hell 'repertoire', though most likely only as an occasional element in rather specific circumstances. Consistently, I've experienced this type of troublesome visual in only one specific type of situation, and only since I'd unwittingly got myself well opened to the garbage since 2003.

For me it's occurred only immediately upon waking from a disturbing dream (which in my case has usually been disturbing only to a slight degree). The dream itself was always true dreaming, and definitely not part of any hell process, and it needed only the slightest disturbing component to be able to lead on to this particular type of disturbing visual upon waking; I've never had this in the period before going to sleep.

These visuals are vivid, generally more or less light or moderately bright (but not brilliant or dazzling), flat and two-dimensional, completely lacking in the 'twilight' quality of standard night terror visuals, and having all details extremely clear-cut and sharp-edged, and with very clear and easily remembered colours, which are usually all even, block colours with no gradations between one colour and the next. The actual content is generally ordered arrays of simple geometric shapes, straight or angled lines, letters, numbers or other symbols, or even representations of DNA or other molecules interacting.

Nothing flows smoothly or writhes as in standard hell visuals. Instead, any movements consist of parts of arrays or patterns breaking up in a brittle way, and often rearranging themselves. Some or all of them may repeatedly flash on and off — or/and they're sometimes juddering (which latter for me tends to be associated with a feeling of nausea). It all seems 'hard', 'brittle', and 'digital' (in the sense of there being no gradation between anything), and very disturbingly impersonal and alien. This is light years away from the clearly 'demonic' or 'dark' quality of standard hell visuals.

Every time I woke up from a dream and was faced with one of these vivid displays I'd open my eyes and ground my awareness to rapidly shake off the visual, but by the time I'd got rid of it (well within half a minute), I'd be aware of a significant attack from the garbage starting, with extremely nasty feelings. Only from July 2008 have I experienced those weird visuals without them leading on to a really noticeable garbage attack — but by this stage I'd been getting quite proficient at nipping incipient attacks in the bud, and so I'd generally be clear of attack within a few minutes or, at most, half-an-hour.

My current 'reading' from my own inner inquiry is that the content of these displays is actually taken from the person's memory databanks (though, as presented, they're no doubt distorted by the garbage in order to be more disturbing in effect). By this, I mean that what the person is shown is NOT memories of experiences but instead is some of the stored raw 'digital' or at least 'semi-digital' data that underlies his experiences. This is in much the same way that you can have pictures or music stored on your computer and can read them EITHER as pictures / music OR directly as digital data (which is meaningless gibberish to ordinary people).

It appears to me that this type of visual can be inflicted upon a person only in a particular awareness state that occurs upon waking from a dream with some disturbing component, and it's used by the garbage because that display directs the person's attention into that aspect of his awareness, which also opens up or reinforces energy pathways that the garbage can use in an attack with trauma energies. Hence the ensuing attack.

On just one occasion I awoke from a slightly disturbing dream to be shown something that was intermediate between the above-described type of display and standard hells. On that occasion in the middle of my field of view (while my eyes were still closed) was a three-dimensional object of imprecise and irregular shape, though overall rather like a slightly bent and very squat phallus of the most unspeakable and menacing ugliness reaching out of the darkness and rotating on its long axis.

Its surface was very irregular and looked to be on the verge of erupting into all manner of even greater uglinesses almost anywhere on it — and, completely unlike anything in standard hell visuals, it was coloured in a variety of bright and saturated colours, as though a child had been let loose on it with luminous poster colours. The colours didn't obviously grade into each other, and that again marked this out from an ordinary hell visual.

My careful inner inquiry in 2012 concerning just why the databank hells are hells at all — in other words, just why seeing such visuals is so deeply disturbing — is that the garbage is using them to confront particular individuals with some degree of what I refer to as the proto-archetype. That is, they're being confronted in a very sneaky way by the 'ultimate horror of VOID' archetype. The extremely impersonal nature of the visuals, together with their not being three-dimensional, pushes buttons in a way that actually gives one the impression of contemplating some sort of void (in this case, lack of any sense of humanity or any 'living' quality about what one is seeing), and the garbage can thus create within one's mindspace a feedback loop of restimulation of the truly hellish feelings built into that archetype.

Disconnectedness / isolation hells

It wasn't till October 2010 that I finally recognised this particular hell category, and I assume that it would almost always be difficult or impossible to establish to what extent this type has figured in any particular person's childhood night hells, because there's so little about it to remember, and it's so undramatic emotionally.

I finally recognised this particular hell phenomenon when I carried out a little inner inquiry concerning my ongoing puzzlement at a disturbing inner impression and emotional effect that I had when I looked at the fascinating and actually quite beautiful chaotic patchy variegations on a polished sphere of chrysocolla that I'd had since about 2002 (it was a quite beautiful ornament), and indeed, for a number of years had been using it, with a specific placement, as a very helpful neutralizer of certain environmental stresses in my flat).

I'd also had a similar rather disturbing impression from some other sharply variegated polished types of stone in my possession, including various types of marble, red jasper and sodalite.

In 2003, when I'd just started channelling (and thus was just beginning to drop myself right in it 'Big Time' with the garbage), I asked my 'guidance' (actually the garbage of course, though I didn't realize that then) about this strange and disturbing impression I got from that chrysocolla sphere, and the story that I got then was that those particular variegations were reminding me of something from the bizarre experiments that were purportedly being carried out in the purported Atlantis civilization*. At that time I didn't know better than to provisionally accept that explanation.

Very early on when I'd started channelling (in October 2003), my 'guidance' — at that time posing as an alleged ascended master called Ahn — guided me through a series of sessions of supposed self-healing for particular past life traumas and clearances of particular bits of alleged karma from alleged previous misdeeds of mine (generally in purported past lives). For each of these sessions I had to have my pendulum swinging and to have my eyes closed so that I could be shown certain things (i.e., in my inner vision).

Although the odd session gave me vivid and dramatic visuals (notably one in which I was in the middle of a battle scene in a confusion of armoured knights on horses and with immense, gut-hammering bangs of cannon fire), during most of those sessions the visuals were tantalizingly diffuse and vague, yet seemed to have some special significance.

In each of the scenes presented to me in most of those sessions I'd be seemingly immersed in a completely unpopulated landscape (indeed, with no sign of life of any sort), in which there were no clear details — just very blurred patches of different shades of the rather nondescript, usually dull rather greenish-grey colour — and there was, each time, a sense of the whole landscape very, very slowly rotating in a manner that seemed immensely meaningful, but I had no means of grasping any inkling of what that meaning was.

I was given the impression of my being sort-of suspended in the middle of that over aeon upon aeon, with that sense of a gradual rotation simply emphasizing the passing of aeons. Emotionally, the feeling was undramatic, but there was nonetheless a deep sadness and sense of an immense, monumental loss pervading the whole scene, and a sense of the rest of 'reality' just passing me by, for 'eternity'.

At the time my 'guidance' claimed that what I was seeing in those sessions related to an extremely ancient severe emotional trauma that I'd allegedly gained early in the history of the Earth, before humans or even animal life had colonized it. Allegedly, as one of the earliest souls to appear, I'd experimentally tried to incarnate in a crystal, of all things!

Having succeeded in doing that, I'd then found that I couldn't extricate myself from that situation, and was thus stuck there as a consciousness in that crystal for aeons until early humans were on the planet, when one of those, who happened, allegedly, to be an early incarnation of a musician for whom, in this lifetime, I wrote one of my music compositions, noticed the crystal, recognised that it had a consciousness trapped in it and then used some psychic procedure to release that consciousness so that it could 'go home' and then reincarnate in a healthy way.

A touching story, but of course as bogus as anything that comes from the garbage! However, like garbage-sourced stories in general, this would have been based on something historical and thus would have been major distortion of something real rather than complete invention.

My understanding now, as from October 2010, is that those strange disembodied experiences were actually a type of hell. In other words, they were really of the same underlying nature and modus operandi as the terror and revulsion hells. It would appear that the elements that make up this particular type of hell experience are:

• A distortion of the birth trauma experience — the new-born having initially only poorly developed vision, seeing just meaningless very blurred shapes and patches of light and dark, mostly in a dreary bluish-greenish grey, and of course having a temporary sense of disconnection from warmth and supportiveness — all the more so as so few mothers have any real idea how to quickly restore some sense of warmth and closeness that's really meaningful to the new-born baby.

• People's visualizations of conditions on planets that are without life on them, including the pre-life (or at least pre-advanced-life) stages of basically life-supporting planets.

• An attack with emotional material part-derived from (distorted) birth trauma and also part-derived from certain particular types of severe separation and isolation trauma that some adults can experience. This would generally be derived from particular primary archetypes rather than any specific people's experiences.

In some cases the visuals would be sharply defined, not blurred, and they'd be derived from the view of the surface of a particular planet or moon (not necessarily in this solar system nor indeed necessarily this particular universe, and sometimes as viewed from space). It's apparently a memory of that subtype of hell visual that I get reminded of when I look at that chrysocolla sphere illustrated further above.

It might thus, for example, be derived from a planet or moon covered with liquid / solid methane, in which there is convective activity moving material around to produce the chaos of differently coloured patches and lines. It's very stressful emotionally to be stuck there in such surroundings where all you see seems disturbingly impersonal and seemingly with meaning, but whose meaning you're completely unable to grasp. And, as I say, one is simultaneously under continuous attack with a deep sadness and sense of immense loss, and of being stuck in that situation for eternity and being completely unable to do anything about it.

My inner inquiry results are suggestive that this type of hell experience is widespread, but almost nobody knows about it because of its unmemorable and totally undramatic character. It would, however, be having the sought-for effect upon its victims, in accumulating for them a hidden disconnectedness / isolation trauma and pattern, which would make them much more keen than otherwise to get into attached relationships with people, so that they'd effectively have additional 'programming' to keep them pointed away from genuine self-actualization and thus to keep themselves captive to their attachments and thus to the garbage, which is cultivating those attachments.

For some people the long-term consequence of this type of hell would go the other way, so that, rather than simply getting stuck into attached relationships to hide oneself from that inner feeling of immense loss and isolation that's carried in the resultant emotional trauma, the person would be chronically unable to interact in any close and satisfying way with anyone, and so may be a very unhappy compulsive loner or one of those who people would tend to regard as 'psychopaths', absorbed in seriously distorted desires towards particular individuals or categories of people, and acting out those desires without regard for the free choice and well-being of the target people.

Thus, the disconnectedness / isolation hell, although at a glance undramatic and unmemorable, is far from benign, and indeed may quite possibly be more inclined than the other types to leave the affected person carrying a related illusory reality so that it's as if part of the person remains covertly within that hell for his/her whole life.

An extension of the isolation / disconnectedness hell
In late 2013 a troublesome stomach / gut infection caused me a particular temporary weakening that allowed the garbage to repeatedly intrude upon me an additional hell type of experience at night, which I then recognised from my very early years. In this there was still the sense of being a totally isolated / disconnected spectator, with that dreadful sense of being completely bypassed by anything with meaning, and stuck like that for an apparent eternity.

However, the difference this time was that there was something specific to observe. Generally it would be the most hideous, unspeakably grotesque 'things' — usually more or less just one at any time, but usually impossible to describe as living or non-living. They'd tend to move themselves slowly in particular disturbingly meaningless ways (generally non-locomotory), and to be in a continual state of metamorphosis, which generally occurred slowly, quite unlike the hectic maelstrom of the classic 'terror' type of hell.

Sometimes I'd be presented with what looked superficially to be beautiful countryside landscapes — but I sensed that they had a hideous 'cardboard cut-out' sort of quality and would quickly develop into very nasty visuals, so I always shook those off. On the other hand, I did allow myself to watch one short sequence before I finally stopped it, so I recount it here as an example.

On a number of other occasions I was presented with variants of a very sharply defined image of really hideous grotesqueness — a monstrously huge 'thing', so big in fact that I saw only part of it. It looked almost as though it was some sort of construction in metal, but was of a sort of buff-yellow colour, which seemed to be cut into longitudinal strips, each of which had a regular row of round protuberances on it. But the thing was making slow movements as though it was alive, and in each case it was becoming ever larger and more grotesque. I didn't wait to see how those very disturbing images would develop.