Ways of handling a prospective rough or sleepless night

Introduction

This account started off as part of my page 'Dark force' and entity troubles — The real way to clear them, and I still regard it as being an important appendix to that page, from which I link to this one. I finally gave it separate page status because it actually addresses the majority of people's sleep problems, apart from dealing with genuine medical (i.e., physical) problems that may disrupt one's sleep.

However, even when medical solutions need to be applied for the latter sort of problem, the measures and strategies given here would still generally be very helpful in addition, for always garbage interference (usually covert) and mental / emotional issues of various kinds are part of any sleep deprivation issue. In other words, it's not just a matter of what disturbing influences are affecting you, but also, of how you're responding to them.

It will be seen, therefore, that dealing with sleep disturbance effectively requires a pragmatic and practical multi-prong approach, and there's no single 'magic wand' or 'silver bullet' measure you can take that could reasonably be expected to clear all your sleep difficulties and disruptions in one fell swoop.

A fundamental principle for dealing with sleeplessness

Regardless of the apparent cause(s) of any sleeplessness, one thing to let go of is the notion that you have to try to get to sleep, for if you're doing the latter you're generating and perpetuating stress when you're actually not getting to sleep. The garbage will use that as one of its means to keep you awake and wear you out all the more. So, it's greatly helpful to be very accepting of your disturbances, even while doing what you can to minimize or eliminate them. In other words you do NOT lie in bed trying to get to sleep, but you lie in bed peacefully resting and giving yourself what opportunity you can to sleep, with an open mind, without any preconceptions about what 'should' or 'ought to' happen at that point.

 

Considering the options

A choice of strategies for getting to sleep…

Here's a summary of the available options that come to mind (or at least, my mind!) for dealing with your sleep problems / insomnia. They're NOT all helpful options! Certain of them are relevant only where one is apparently receiving obvious interference / attack from a non-physical source.

• Judiciously use the eight-point eye movements to disrupt and dissolve intruded 'visuals' (hell and other disturbing or distracting images, including apparent spirits, 'entities' or 'aliens' making appearances to you, and also flashbacks associated with post-traumatic stress). The most effective and comfortable way to carry out these movements is to do them from the centre to one extreme, then in a straight line to the opposite extreme and then returning to the centre each time.

  Like this there are just four main lines to 'trace' with your eyes — horizontal, vertical and the two diagonals. The order in which you do them doesn't matter as long as you stick to one sequence so that you're cycling through them and not repeating anything within individual cycles.

  However, with practice you can probably dispense with those eye movements* and simply direct your gaze very purposefully to the inside of your eyelids. This is what I do, and indeed I found that there's a particular direction to point my eyes (as though looking down my nose, but in a relaxed way and not forced, still with the eyes closed), into which the unwanted images simply don't intrude.

  * That is, dispense with the eye movements for that specific purpose, and so reduce your distraction from going to sleep. The eight point eye movements are actually a very beneficial practice to be using anyway, as part of your everyday self-healing / self-actualization process.

  I recommend a session or two of that during the day in addition to any you may have cause to do at night (in day sessions, best when lying on your back on the floor using a suitable reasonably low headrest). They can be incorporated into lie-downs that you may be doing anyway as part of your application of the much recommended Alexander Technique.

  With my eyes pointing there I'm then still aware of the unwanted images doing whatever they will in the periphery of my 'vision', but then it's only vague peripheral vision, like what you see out of the corners of your eyes when looking straight ahead, and, although seeing that things are going on, I'm not actually seeing what is going on, at least in any meaningful way, and so these impressions are no longer significantly disturbing.

  Virtually always, then, the images fade out of my awareness within at most a minute or two. You can experiment and see if the same direction of gaze (with closed eyes), or indeed a different direction, similarly frees you from unwanted visual images.

• Completely disregard any communications that appear to come to you from any apparitions or indeed any non-physical source, or 'just within your head'. If they appear to be benign or indeed beneficial, still completely disregard them, even if they appear to be coming from Jesus, God, an angel, ascended master or purportedly your own 'higher self'. Such manifestations are all bogus — illusions produced within your mindspace by the garbage for the purpose of causing you problems in one way or another.
  

  Indeed, it's crucially important ALWAYS to disregard them, whether by day or night, for otherwise you'd actually be cultivating your own garbage interference, which would lead you into increasingly serious problems further down the line.

• Use the simple Feedback Loop Zapper procedure given in Some potent self-actualization / healing practices. This stalls feedback loops that are part of the mechanism of garbage attacks, emotional stresses and indeed environmental stresses.

• When a specific illusory reality involved in the attack and disturbances has been identified, get up briefly to sit to use the Grounding Point procedure in order to initiate dissolution of that illusory reality.
  Any such illusory reality would be identifiable by any thought or notion that comes up relating to how things are (i.e., how they appear to be) or how they will be or might be in the future. Basically, notice all anxious or negative thoughts or ideas that arise in your mindspace, and pick out the most 'top-level', all-embracing one(s) to 'zap' using Grounding Point.

  It's important to be selective and sparing in your use of Grounding Point, 'zapping' the one to a few highest priority illusory realities; otherwise you could easily get ungrounding your awareness by doing far too many 'zappings' and actually winding yourself up into an additional anxiety state. Therefore at some early point you need to draw a line and take other measures rather than keep on zapping illusory realities.

• Attention to your breathing. Put your attention on your breathing when under attack or experiencing over-excitement of any kind, and gently control your breathing to be at a reasonably slow and steady rate — but let go of any control once your breathing has stabilized in a gentle, peaceful mode. It's important not to habitually have your breathing under conscious control — though of course it's always helpful to keep aware of the manner in which you're breathing.

  For actually helping to induce sleepiness, deliberately start 'sleep breathing', in which the inhalation is reasonably slow, and the exhalation is rather sudden because you suddenly let go so that the chest collapses under its own weight and elasticity. In both cases both inhalation and exhalation are quite small, with only an occasional larger inhalation, as though to 'stretch' just a little.

  When you're doing 'sleep breathing', a further enhancement is to add in a sort of 'visualization of intent', breathing 'sleep' into everything in your mindspace. I don't mean actively focusing it, say, to battle against particular nasty feelings, but rather, in your mind's eye just with a general intent, to disseminate 'sleep' throughout your mindspace, permeating everything, nasty, neutral or 'lovely' that you perceive or are aware of. I've found this often to be a remarkably effective way of enabling myself to get to sleep even with garbage attack, at least up to about 'moderate' level and possibly peaking a bit higher.

  However, I caution that any attempt to specifically target garbage attack feelings would usually be counter-productive because then you'd be in 'battling' mode and the garbage would most likely give you a stressful time through increasing attack intensity, challenging you to keep trying harder to beat it down — but of course as you'd then be getting stressed you'd be getting more susceptible to the attacks, so you'd be caught in a 'vicious circle' and would have a difficult time.

• The 'supportive surroundings' regime. When under significant pressure, to better ground and balance your awareness, you can turn on a light to give yourself a very low level of illumination — such as in an adjoining room, with any connecting doors left open (i.e., so that you get only indirect and quite low level illumination but can feel connected to a brighter illumination), and with some ongoing reasonably peaceful music playing at an extremely low level, so that you can only just hear what it is (and indeed not properly hear any quieter parts of it). I use BBC Radio 3 (mostly classical music) for this purpose; fortunately nowadays it runs all night. I write more about this tactic in the notes further below.

  This would most likely also be the most effective measure for people who have insomnia without being aware of specific disturbing factors that they could address.

• () Arrange with a friend or friends for you to sleep out at their place for a night or so, for the purpose of getting your awareness better grounded. Whether this is a good idea would depend on individual circumstances. Not all friends would respond in such a way, or have such an outlook, that would be really supportive to your getting your awareness better balanced and grounded (regardless of how much you may like them or think you respect them), and, depending on your own outlook and how positively or otherwise you're handling your situation, your contact with them for this particular purpose could be a very unhelpful imposition upon them and an act of self disempowerment for you.

• () Call a support service such as a Crisis Resolution Team, for a chat and ongoing periodic contact during a crisis event, for the purpose of getting your awareness better grounded. Although I always regarded this option as something of a last-resort measure, for use when I was under particularly strong and troublesome garbage attack, it was generally very helpful when I did use it.

  However, caution and clear-mindedness is essential to get the best out of such contacts, because if you're not careful you may find yourself being steered rather forcefully into using actually very harmful medication or/and actually being unnecessarily admitted into a psychiatric hospital, with all the problems that that could create for you. I may have been unusually fortunate in having such a helpful and supportive Crisis Resolution Team at my disposal, so I appreciate that this option may not necessarily be available or at least really helpful for most people.

• () Take a sleeping tablet. These need to be avoided wherever sensibly possible, as I explain in the notes further below, but there can be occasions when a tablet of nothing more harmful than Zopiclone can be the pragmatic best choice on balance, provided that it's used only occasionally (and then, only when things are really difficult) and not as a regular thing. In the notes below I explain something that you need to understand about the effects of such medication if you are to maximize your beneficial effects and minimize the inevitable harmful effects of using it.

  Note that, as already remarked, the whole benzodiazepine () family of sedative and sleep inducing drugs is really too harmful (in terms of subtle long term effects) to be a sensible choice at any time. These include Temazepam (), Diazepam (also known as Valium) (), Lorazepam (also known as Ativan) () and Nitrazepam (also known as Mogadon) (). Barbiturates () are much less helpful and much more harmful even than those, so are a complete no-no.

• Get 'pissed' or 'high' on your favourite tipple or other 'recreational' drug.
  — Oh no, you don't!

  Yes, in the immediate term you may get yourself into some sort of superficially agreeable-feeling stupor or have a comforting and soporific cannabis-sourced 'cocoon' around your awareness, but by taking such an action you're very seriously compounding your problem, and you're being your own most proficient saboteur and indeed enemy by doing such things.

  Alcohol, cannabis, tobacco products and all the other drugs that people take supposedly as some sort of 'recreation', 'socializing facilitation' or 'comforter' muck up the user's non-physical aspects as well as doing considerable long-term physical harm. That means that your non-physical aspects become more weak and distorted so that they're still more open and vulnerable to garbage interference and attacks. Thus tonight's attempt to hide the real problem with a drunken stupor or cannabis 'high' makes serious sleep problems all the more likely tomorrow night, and even more so next week or next month.

  Also, cannabis is one of quite a number of drugs (both 'recreational' and supposedly legitimate psychiatric drugs) that actually open specific awareness pathways in your system — into a particular aspect of the astral non-reality — that enable the garbage to give you severe hell / 'night terrors' attacks.

  In adults these can occur by day as well as night, so that the effect is indeed simply 'hell', and this is what's really happening for the very many unfortunate individuals who, having seriously compromised their 'system' by using the respective drugs, find themselves in psychiatric units, getting (completely unhelpfully) diagnosed as manifesting 'hallucinations', psychosis, or indeed suffering from schizophrenia, and then drugged and even given the extremely harmful ECT then to try to hide the problem in lieu of doing anything actually helpful to resolve the underlying cause*.

  * Means to achieve that are given or pointed to especially in 'Dark force' and entity troubles — The real way to clear them, Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way and Night terrors and hell experiences — Understanding and clearing them — the latter, as its title suggests, also giving a particularly thorough explanation of the hell phenomenon. However, Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way is really one's best starting point for that purpose.

• () Take antipsychotic medication. As I've already noted, to the best of my understanding, ALL antipsychotics are seriously harmful in terms of subtle long-term effects, in addition to shorter term gross harmful effects. This option is thus to be avoided if at all possible.

  However, if you have contacts with the mental healthcare services relating to your garbage interference and attacks, if you're going to call a support service of some kind, it may actually be a good 'political' move, at an appropriate moment, to take a bare minimum dose (such as 0.5mg Risperidone), not so much to try to quell your garbage attack but so that you can tell the particular support service, in answer to the inevitable question, that, yes, you've been a good boy/girl and taken, or are about to take, a dose of Risperidone (or whatever it is), and also that it's your policy to keep it to minimum dose because basically you're using other methods to deal with the situation, and you really want to keep off antipsychotics altogether because they're so harmful.

  If you show just that little flexibility and pragmatism, you're much more likely to get flexible and accommodating responses from the support people, who otherwise might very well really try to press you into thoroughly medicating yourself or even being admitted into psychiatric hospital, because they'd most likely assume that you don't know what's best for you, and would jump in to fill that perceived gap with the ignorance and unawareness of the whole 'mental health' mindset.

• Don't go to bed, or alternatively, get up out of bed when you realize that you can't go to sleep for the moment, and get on with something. I understand that this is a common behaviour of insomniacs, and it's extremely harmful. You really do need that sleep, and at the right time (i.e., at night), and I explain in the notes below how to go about making the best of the night if you've got sleeping difficulties for whatever reason, whether physical or non-physical.

• () Call a doctor. Doing that means that you're treating the problem as a medical issue and you're bound to get a medical response, which generally would be far from what you need. The one exception would be, if you became clear that you needed a Zopiclone (or equivalent) sleeping tablet for the current night, and you didn't have any, and so were calling the doctor just for an emergency supply or prescription for that.

  In such an event you'd need to ensure that you didn't get anything more harmful than Zopiclone prescribed, such as drugs of the very harmful benzodiazepine family. You'd really need to watch that, because doctors generally are particularly predisposed to prescribe them. Indeed, until I heard of Zopiclone and specifically asked for it, all the doctors who I dealt with during my garbage 'troubles' automatically prescribed benzodiazepine drugs (Diazepam, Temazepam and Nitrazepam).

  However, I've found that a significant minority of doctors — even ordinary GPs — nowadays have sufficient awareness and flexibility to seek to accommodate one's wishes if one explains one's situation to them in an articulate and reasoned manner — i.e., not going on at them about the specifics of any non-physical manifestations that one may be experiencing (which would be bound to press 'Uh-uh — mental illness!' buttons), but explaining your understanding of what's really going on, as per the working model that I present on this site, and indeed referring them to the relevant pages here, and telling the doctor what your particular genuine healing requirements are in order to get resolving the situation, i.e., as distinct from just trying to suppress symptoms.

• () Get yourself admitted to a psychiatric hospital. To be avoided if humanly possible, but there can be situations in which, if you're smart and clear-minded in handling the situation, it could be the best option if a garbage / 'entity' attack situation has become really dire (or, if you don't recognise that an actual attack is occurring, you simply feel extremely, disruptively, intimidated by the prospect of the night — which would actually be a manifestation of a garbage attack whether or not you understood that). This option is very unlikely to be needed if you're using the measures listed above with large green ticks against them.

  Caution! If you've had no previous psychiatric hospitalization you need to be aware that this option would be a particularly serious choice to make, because it would leave you with a social stigma for the rest of your life.

  The hospitalization, together with extremely unhelpful 'diagnoses' made by psychiatric doctors there, would be indelibly in your medical record (at least certainly in the UK, where I am), and this could lose you job opportunities and cause insurance problems, and could also be exploited by individuals who for some reason wish to harm your reputation in particular social, professional or other circles. I've had certain individuals do that to me in fact, to try to discredit me and my writings on this website, so I'm well aware that this is much more than just a theoretical possibility.

• Do what some inner 'voice' or 'guidance' is directing or instructing you to do. If you heed and respond AT ALL to any such 'inner' communications, even if they seem to be coming from a 'higher' source, you're giving the garbage a 'handle' that it can use to keep you awake all night doing things at its bidding. And the things that you'd get directed to do, even if they seem benign enough initially, would most likely lead on to highly troublesome things, as I found out the hard way!

  A typical trick that my 'guidance' would play on me would be to claim that I just needed to do xyz and then I could get into bed and have some sleep — but once xyz had been done, it would always come up with something further that it claimed I also had to do first, so that there would be a whole succession of But first there's just one more thing you must do…, and actually I'd get no sleep at all and indeed have an altogether thoroughly exhausting night.

• Pray to 'The Lord' (or any other non-physical being or presence) for deliverance from evil, or indeed for anything else. (!)
  As explained on other pages here*, 'God', 'The Lord', 'The Holy Spirit', and any present-time manifestation of 'Jesus' are all just illusions created in one's mindspace under hijack-control from the garbage, so with such a praying approach you're onto a clear loser. Praying (never mind to who or to what) is intrinsically disempowering, so it's essential to keep any hint of praying right out of any consideration.

  * Particularly in The true nature of 'the forces of darkness' and its interference and attacks.

  In place of any praying that you might have wanted to do otherwise, the need is for setting of clear positive intents and making clear-minded practical choices to clear YOURSELF of the interferences and attacks that you're experiencing. As sweet little Margaret Thatcher used to yell at everyone about her policies when she became British Prime Minister in 1979, THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE!

• Commit suicide (!) Pity about the '' rating, because it's an absolutely 100% effective way of getting rid of sleep problems! Pity that it also gets rid of you (hence that rating)!

  Still, joking aside, it actually makes sense to be aware of suicide as one of your available options — i.e., one of the options that, although available, simply does not make sense, and therefore that you're NOT going to use! That's actually much more empowering than just seeking to blinker yourself to what's unpalatable to you. The garbage would tend to exploit things that you try to hide from yourself…

  Sure, life may feel unbearable at the moment — but with the methods and outlook presented on this site you can make your life not just bearable but actually the positive and joyful experience that it was always meant to be, whereas if you choose to extinguish your life there would be nothing positive to experience — and it would be a particularly perilous thing to do with regard to what happens to you (i.e., your consciousness) beyond your premature death.

  Actually, if you're thinking of suicide or are otherwise really feeling to be in crisis or under great pressure, please see Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way, and work through that slowly and carefully, then following up the various links given there.

  If, however, you really are meaning to end your life, please see How to Die Peacefully and with Dignity, which gives a more balanced view of the subject than you're likely to find elsewhere.

Notes on dealing with actual situations

Noisy neighbours and other 'environmental' disturbances

You may or may not be able to do anything effective about the noisy neighbours, traffic, or whatever else is disturbing you. If it's noisy neighbours, and the disturbance is considerable, really the first need, if at all feasible, is to approach those individuals in a friendly manner, letting them know in a straightforward factual / informative manner (in the manner of helping them to be helpful) rather than getting angry or upset with them, that they're causing you disturbance and making it difficult or impossible for you to sleep.

Most people, once they realize that they've been disturbing a neighbour in such a way, would take reasonable measures to mitigate or altogether eliminate the nuisance, without even any need to directly ask them to take any action. They're perfectly capable of working out that the need is to quieten their stereo system or turn it off, or to do their interior alterations in the daytime rather than the small hours.

However, it always takes two parties for a disturbance to occur, and thus if you're being disturbed you need to look not only to reducing or eliminating the external disturbing factor if possible but also to minimizing your own adverse internal responses to such disturbances. For this reason, the methods that I point to below, particularly for dealing with garbage interferences and attacks, are still highly relevant even if apparently your only issue is Doug and Josie's riotous party next door or the periodic low-flying aircraft or that dratted birds' dawn chorus starting at some very early hour in the morning.

In fact, what keeps one awake when one needs sleep isn't very much the external disturbances themselves at all, but quite a range of emotional issues that one is carrying, and these are all being 'fed' and cranked up by the garbage in situations like these, even though most people would be completely unaware that such interferences underlie the way they feel. They just assume that they're very reasonably and 'rightly' feeling angry or otherwise stressed because the external disturbances are 'bad' and shouldn't be happening.

However, that sort of reactive outlook immediately points to what's really going on. The person is attached to things being a particular way, whether or not they really are that way. Thus, whenever things are not the way that the person is attached to, that person gets stressed and blames the 'disturbance' and the disturbers rather than taking any measures to dissolve and let go of that attachment and his own reactive outlook / responses.

It's amazing what people can sleep through if they just lie down and accept 'What Is' — in other words, things as they really are at the moment, without preconceived notions about how they 'ought to' be. So, the need is to resolve the emotional issues that you're carrying, that are causing your adverse and stress-making responses to the disturbances. Further below I point to what you can do to start bringing that about with regard to the sleep (or otherwise) situation, but also I refer you to the full range of methods that I point to in Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way for resolving the issue(s) more comprehensively.

Even if you do sleep well through all manner of disturbances, however, it's still necessary to minimize them as much as practical, at least in the long term, because even if you sleep right through all of them your system is, at some level, still being disturbed a bit by them, and thus you'd still be adversely affected and your whole being slightly weakened — a problem that would gradually accumulate if you took no remedial action. So, if there's a major disturbing influence that you can do little or nothing about, and you can sleep well despite it, it would still be wise to use Helpfulness Testing periodically to see if the status quo really is your best option, or whether, for example, a move to a quieter or otherwise less disturbed location would be best for you.

If external, physical disturbances appear to be the primary or only cause of your losing sleep, the following notes about garbage attacks ARE still relevant to you, because your most effective way forward is to use the following procedures just as if the external disturbances were garbage attacks. The point here is NOT to go believing that the disturbances are garbage attacks but to simply treat them in much the same way for this purpose, because actually garbage interferences, including attacks, underlie your adverse inner response to the external disturbances. So, all the following notes ARE fully relevant to you, whether or not you're actually thinking about any unseen influence or garbage being involved.

Chirping house crickets and similar disturbances

In 2023 I got disturbance from a new infestation of my flat and presumably the whole block of six flats with crickets, thanks to irresponsible behaviour of a neighbour in the same block who was obtaining quantities of live crickets to feed rescued wild birds she was keeping in her flat. After a couple of increasingly and seriously stressful and sleepless nights of an ensemble of them serenading me in my bedroom I was quite dreading a third night of that, and likely more similar nights before my landlord could get a professional pest removal service to get to work on this issue.

Thinking around possible measures that might be effective, I suddenly remembered the Supportive Surroundings regime, which I'd clean forgotten about as I hadn't had cause to use it for quite some years. It then occurred to me that just to have BBC Radio 3 on (mostly classical music) at a suitably low level could potentially be very effective.

The problem for me with the cricket chirpings at night was that for most of the time those confounded chirpings were the only significant sound I was hearing, so it was all the time drawing my attention to it, and that made any attempt to refocus my attention towards de-stressing thoughts or images to be a real struggle, and impossible to maintain for long.

Now, if I had very low-level music or even sometimes people talking on the radio in my living room, which connects directly to my bedroom, then it should be an easy matter simply to focus on the music (too quiet to get actually involved with it), then the crickets' chirpings would presumably automatically get sidelined and lose their potency as a stressor and sleep-depriver.

That indeed is how it worked out for me that night — though for some reason the crickets performed much less then anyway. But I had at least tested the principle and it clearly worked, so I no longer had any cause to dread further nights of the chirping before the infestation was cleared.

Small and incipient garbage ('dark force') attacks / other disturbances

If at all possible, nip attacks / adverse emotional responses in the bud! That means recognising early signs of such an occurrence beginning, or indeed of when an attack or adverse emotional response is likely to have been initiated — i.e., without even waiting to see if one develops*. This is good policy by night or day. Treat in this manner any even mildly disturbing or compulsively intruding thoughts / ideas / feelings, whatever their cause or source.

• Zap the relevant emotional button-pushing point(s)! Use the aforementioned Feedback Loop Zapper procedure, which does actually achieve that, because its action is actually more focused than just stopping feedback loops; it actually achieves that end by inactivating and initiating healing of the emotional and 'system' button-pushing points that are a key part of the feedback loop process.

  In my experience, applying this procedure to a very 'young' attack usually resulted in that attack not increasing further after perhaps 10 to 15 seconds and tailing off over anything from half a minute to half an hour.

  I give details of the procedure in Some potent self-actualization / healing practices.

• Dissolve the illusory reality! If an attack is building up in spite of the above procedure having been used a few times, then there would almost certainly be a particular illusory reality that needs to be 'zapped' by use of the Grounding Point procedure. You may need to temporarily get out of bed and sit on an upright chair for this. If you're really experienced with Grounding Point you may find that it works sufficiently effectively even when you're still lying in bed. It makes sense to experiment to see what arrangement is most effective for you.

  You may well find, through use of Helpfulness Testing (really necessary for this procedure to work well), that there are additional illusory realities that need to be 'zapped' in that session. These would usually but not always be obviously related to each other.

  However, it's important to use this procedure only with the most important of those illusory realities, because the garbage is very inclined to get a person frantically trying to 'zap' more and more supposed illusory realities (actually not really the priority ones to 'zap' at that point) and getting emotionally wound up and indeed ungrounded and exhausted in the process.

  Generally speaking, I don't recommend 'zapping' more than about three illusory realities in one night (carefully identified top priority ones). If that's still not enough to get you clear of attack, then really you want to move on to the next level of action, which is a matter of using practical means to get your attention out of the feedback loop mechanism of the attack — see the next section.

  I've found it extremely helpful practice to use the Feedback Loop Zapper procedure again, as soon as one has finished a Grounding Point session, or indeed any other self-healing or self-actualization method or practice. These various methods are always liable to free up particular morsels of your 'material' in such a way that you can then be immunized a bit more effectively than previously by using Feedback Loop Zapper again.

• Zap the visuals! The other main nipping-in-the-bud tactic is to stop in their tracks any 'visuals' that you're getting. These may be hell displays or other maelstroms of swirling images, or any sort of weird or disturbing image. Also needing to be similarly terminated are any 'visuals' of demons, dark entities, monsters or indeed supposedly beneficial, divine or indeed simply fascinating beings or entities or indeed any other visual phenomena.

  While you can usually dispel these by turning a light on, it's obviously best if you can achieve the clearance of such visual disturbances without disrupting your rest, so that you can swiftly fall asleep once clear of the disturbance. A usually quite brief use of the eight point eye movements, if carried out carefully according to my instructions, would normally clear such images, and indeed, as already noted, with practice you most likely wouldn't need to carry out the eye movements at all, just directing your gaze to the inside of your eyelids — particularly in a specific direction in which the unwanted images simply don't appear.

  However, if your awareness has got sufficiently weakly grounded that the 'visuals' are still intruding upon you, then again you need to use Feedback Loop Zapper, and then to repeat the eye movements and keep your attention on the inside of your eyelids. Again, if the problem persists or keeps recurring through a number of executions of Feedback Loop Zapper, then see if you can identify an illusory reality that's needing to be 'zapped' by means of the Grounding Point procedure.

  If you still have those visuals and they can't simply be ignored, then you're on to the next level of the available measures, for getting your awareness more grounded and your attention out of any feedback loop mechanism involved in the disturbance.

  In all cases it's very important not to concern yourself with questions as to what any particular visual is supposed to 'mean' or represent. If you do that you'd be handsomely sabotaging your possibility of good, healthy sleep and also you'd be greatly reinforcing the garbage's ability to interfere with you generally.

Stronger or more resilient, sustained garbage ('dark force') attacks / other disturbances

Generally, to get to this point you'd have used (as appropriate) the above three methods first, because they can quite often clear an even quite strong attack with no further measures being necessary. Particularly at this stage, there's no one right answer. This is very much a matter of pragmatically seeking what's going to be the most effective strategy for this specific attack / disturbance situation, this particular night.

So, what are the workable options here? Do I dash to the phone and call some support service? Do I take a sleeping tablet? Do I simply lie here in the dark in bed, in a cold sweat and hoping it will all blow over (and thus I'd most likely have a very rough, stressful and possibly hellish night, with little or no sleep and a considerable further weakening of my non-physical aspects) — or do I lie here seething in exasperation or fury at those inconsiderate neighbours making such a noise at such an 'ungodly' hour? Or, do I commence the 'supportive surroundings' strategy?

Actually the latter option has a lot going for it, even though it's a gamble as to how much really full sleep you'd get. Indeed, if the attack or other disturbance is particularly strong, a practical option may be to combine that strategy with a sleeping tablet — or, if you feel to be under very strong pressure or threat, to call a support service for a brief chat and then get to bed with the 'supportive surroundings' regime. Indeed, actually to tell the support person that you're taking such a measure would itself be reinforcing and grounding for you, and almost certainly the support person would commend your presence of mind in taking such a practical measure — and that would be further reinforcement for your morale.

I myself don't have a clear 'priorities' rule about these options, and have simply 'played it by ear' each affected night, BUT I've done so on the basis of my Helpfulness Testing indications. The only option that I don't accept is to just lie there suffering. Sometimes my Helpfulness Testing would indicate for me to go to bed normally and see if the attack will dissolve without further 'input' from me, and indeed sometimes that's happened. But if the attack wasn't abating after a pretty short time, then my Helpfulness Testing would indicate 'strengthening' for me to get using particular of the various measures that I've already indicated.

Garbage attacks with physical pain

Basically the methods to address garbage attacks with phantom physical pains are just the same as I've given for attacks in general. The only thing is that in my experience these, even more than attacks with trauma emotions, can sometimes make it impossible for a sleeping tablet to work sufficiently, so that you remain awake and in pain. I'm thinking here of the troublesome phantom anus pain that the garbage periodically inflicted upon me. Fortunately this usually didn't come on much during the night, but I used my then prototype version of the Feedback Loop Zapper procedure when I noticed signs of such an attack just starting; the slight pain or weird itching would then usually tail off and leave me in peace again.

On the odd occasions when the pain did sustain itself more, or actually built up during the night, I'd then either take a Zopiclone tablet (which, as I say, didn't always work well when I had really strong anus pain) or adopt the 'Supportive Surroundings' regime, and this latter option greatly helped.

Even when the pain was persisting, it was much more bearable when I wasn't in silent darkness, and a good part of my attention could then be on my supportive and reassuring surroundings and I could be actually enjoying the beauty of the music, albeit without really concentrating on it. I'd also put a little local anaesthetic cream such as Lanacane up my anus, because, although the really troublesome pain was a phantom pain and couldn't be directly affected by the local anaesthetic, it was actually based on real local small discomforts within my anus — the severe anus clenching caused by the garbage, and the haemorrhoids getting aggravated by that clenching.

So, reducing those relatively small discomforts could actually lead to some reduction of the phantom pain that was actually based on them — though for me it was only on some occasions that this seemed to work tolerably.

I haven't had such pains to test out my much more recently developed 'sleep breathing' technique, but I do expect that to be extremely helpful for many pains, particularly phantom, garbage-sourced ones, especially when combined with Supportive Surroundings.

Garbage ('dark force') attacks with sexual arousal

The difference here is that commonly one may not be able to get one's attention sufficiently out of the arousal, so that it persists or indeed continues to increase — though the 'first call' measure is still to use the Feedback Loop Zapper procedure. However, for me and, I think, probably most people, the sexual arousal feedback loop is largely resistant to such a measure owing to its being associated with material in one's 'sticky layer'.

The arousal, therefore, may well continue to build and increasingly preoccupy your mind with lust-arousing images. This is another case where clear-minded pragmatism is called for, and taboos and notions of should or shouldn't are quite out of place. In any case, it's stressful and weakening to your system to be struggling against a persistent sexual arousal rather than clearing the arousal through the natural release of climax, and in men the hormonal imbalance caused by such situations of extended arousal without ejaculation is well-known to increase prostate enlargement and so is definitely for avoiding.

For myself, living on my own, in such situations I'd have no sensible choice but to go ahead and have a solo 'lovemaking' session. Usually I could then get to sleep without recourse to any other measures.

However, on particular (nowadays pretty rare) occasions when for some reason I was a bit more vulnerable to attack, having got rid of an arousal by means of a 'sexual release', I'd find the arousal presently starting to reappear. In situations like this the garbage would try to get me 'doing it' repeatedly through the night. That's a very exhausting and weakening thing to be happening, and I do my best to avoid anything like that.

Depending on my Helpfulness Testing indications, and indeed also depending on what the time is then, I might 'do it' a second time or I might take more decisive action to stop this nonsense in its tracks, such as by taking a Zopiclone tablet (to be avoided if possible) or going into 'supportive surroundings' mode or/and even call the Crisis Team and tell the support person what's going on, to get my attention more out of the distraction.

The 'overactive mind' effect

Regardless of any other garbage interferences or attacks of which one may be aware, one very common type of interference, which may be sourced directly or indirectly from the garbage, is the 'overactive mind' effect that can keep you awake in bed, sometimes even for the whole night, even if nothing else untoward seems to be happening. It's actually not just the 'mind' being overactive, but a type of non-sexual physical arousal, so that even if, like me usually these days, you have a relatively empty mind while lying in bed, it still feels as though your mind is overactive. You may also find yourself getting hotter than usual in bed and needing to push back the bedclothes / duvet a bit.

This state is actually one that to a considerable extent inhibits the sleep processes that could occur if you were lying peacefully with your eyes closed, and so a seemingly sleepless night in this sort of state can leave you feeling quite 'shagged out' throughout the ensuing day, almost as though you'd been literally shagging yourself out! So, although this in itself would subjectively seem much less troublesome than being attacked with nasty feelings or physical pain, it's very much worthwhile recognising it as an attack and thus as highly undesirable, and responding accordingly, using the measures that I've already outlined — starting with using Feedback Loop Zapper, and, if necessary, repeating this once in a while.

If it still hasn't abated after, say, an hour or two, the 'supportive surroundings' approach may well be the measure of choice, or maybe for some reason your Helpfulness Testing might indicate a Zopiclone tablet instead — though I'd generally be much less inclined to use a medication approach for this less serious sort of attack.

There have been the odd occasions when I had this 'overactive mind' state, when my own Helpfulness Testing supported my having a solo 'lovemaking' session there and then, because after climax the 'overactive mind' state would generally be much less marked and I could usually (though not always) get to sleep quite soon then.

I recommend always to use Helpfulness Testing to determine whether that particular course of action would be your most helpful choice at that time, for the garbage would do its damnedest to cultivate a fixation on sexual feelings and sexual activity, and it would be building further problems for you if you were routinely resorting to sexual activity to work around and avoid particular problems. Basically you do need to clear the underlying cause of those problems and not go regularly 'jumping into bed with them' — if you see what I mean!

I understand that it's something of a preoccupation of Satanists and other 'dark' practitioners to regard sexual activity as a sort of 'healing' tool and thus to use it in quite bizarre (and very harmful) ways to convince themselves that they're healing themselves and improving their lives by using it thus, when actually by doing that they're consistently weakening themselves and greatly harming their physical and mental health long-term.

If you're compulsively running things over in your mind, you can quieten things to a certain considerable degree — by focusing on some positive / constructive detail in that stream of thoughts, and just remain focused on it. Even if you don't get to sleep, to keep focused on the one item instead of your mind rabbiting on all over the place would reduce the amount of energy you're using in unhelpful thought processes, and there would be less hindrance of some degree of basic sleep processes (such as re-evaluation) occurring while you're lying in relative peace.

However, potentially most effective would be to put yourself into 'sleep breathing' mode, as previously described, including the addition of deliberately breathing 'sleep' into the whole of your mindspace. Not guaranteed to work on every occasion, but can be very effective indeed if done really well.

Surroundings considerations

A basically harmonious bedroom / sleeping place

For your bedroom to be maximally harmonious, there are some widely recognised requirements.

• Keep it free from work-related items.

• Don't become a bed potato! — I've heard it's becoming fashionable in some quarters actually to do one's day work from bed. If you have any sense at all you'd not even consider doing such a crass thing! Quite apart from your body getting confused signals about whether and when to sleep, you actually NEED to be actively up and about during the day.

  People who work from bed, at least at all regularly, are building up serious health issues for later on in their life, and indeed a significantly shortened life expectancy. It may be viewed as 'cool' to do, but we need to remember that 'cool' usually equates to 'stupid'!

• Mobile phone(s) are best left elsewhere and switched off.

• Have no means there to watch TV or videos.

• No personal stereo unless used for listening to natural soundscapes; get out of any habit of listening to music in bed, except as a faint background as described in the next section, if really needed as part of the 'supportive surroundings' regime.

• If at all workable, have a window at least a little open, both for ventilation and to allow you some environmental sounds (i.e., if the latter themselves aren't significantly inharmonious / stressful for you).

• If there's street lighting outside, it's generally best policy to have closed (reasonably opaque) curtains once you go to bed.

• Bedroom light probably needs to be a bit less bright than in living room — though that depends of course on the lighting level in the latter. I write more about harmonious lighting further below.

• While some people do go to sleep more readily after reading some fiction for a short while after going to bed, it's best overall to keep any pre-sleep reading to before going to bed. In other words, to train yourself to reserve the bed for actually sleeping! If you must have a pre-sleep read, in most cases there probably wouldn't be a problem about doing that in your bedroom, if you can have a suitable chair there for the purpose.

• If there are any pictures on the bedroom wall, they need to be harmonious. Generally people pictures are 'out', even if it's people you like, and scenery / nature subjects are in. Pictures you feel very attached to may well be part of your problem, and may need banishing not only from the bedroom but from your abode.

• No crystals, 'healing stones', talismans or similar items. Indeed, really all such items need jettisoning altogether from your abode; NONE of them genuinely protects one from anything, no matter how many healers and psychics claim they have all sorts of protective qualities, and for 'sensitive' people they can be seriously harmful. Please see 'Dark force' and entity troubles — The real way to clear them.

More on the 'supportive surroundings' regime

This regime is of particular application to disturbance from garbage attacks and emotional upsets and stresses (which actually would involve some garbage attack anyway, whether or not that's recognised), and also environmental disturbances like an infestation of house crickets.

I doubt the wisdom of trying to cocoon yourself in (necessarily rather loud) music of your own choice, for although it might take your attention out of any unwanted noise, it would be ungrounding and limiting your awareness — just what you need not to be doing. Wearing of a genuinely medically approved type of earplug from a highly reputable source is an obvious pragmatic option for very temporary use in extremis, but wearing of earplugs in any ongoing fashion would be quite harmful in itself, very much for the same reason that 'cocooning' yourself in music would be. See also the next section with regard to the problem about trying to inflict actual silence upon yourself.

I used the 'supportive surroundings' regime only once (on a particularly desperate night) during all my really major ordeals from the garbage in the period from late 2003 to early 2007, because at that time I didn't fully understand how extremely valuable it could be, and at that stage, because I was channelling (and so, not Helpfulness Testing) and was thus not getting the accurate sort of information that I really needed, I hadn't got anything like such a full understanding then of the nature of sleep, and what our true sleep needs are.

If I'd used this 'supportive surroundings' regime more during those most difficult times, I could have gone quite a long way towards mitigating and even completely stalling those very troublesome nights of heavy ordeals. Much more recently I started using it when the garbage got regularly attacking me with troublesome phantom pain in the anus, and sometimes sought to use this to deprive me of sleep, and I also used it for a few nights when I had a back injury that for about a week gave me difficulties over sleeping position and was thus keeping me awake.

I have a sliding door connecting my bedroom and living room, and normally I'd have that door fully closed at night, so that I'd not hear various sounds such as my fridge, which are more audible in the living room, into which my kitchen opens. When I'm using this 'supportive surroundings' regime, I have that sliding door half open, and I turn on the particular light in my living room that does not shine directly through the sliding door into my bedroom, so it's only indirect light that comes into the bedroom.

Yet I find it very reassuring at such times to feel that I'm in touch with relatively bright light — even though what I see is actually quite dim — which I could get into at any time if I wanted to do so — so this is NOT the same as having a very low-level light on in my bedroom instead (connecting only to dark areas of my abode).

When I have my radio on for this purpose it's set to play BBC Radio 3 (mostly classical music, and with no commercials) at a very low setting so that it's only just audible. I then check in the bedroom to see if it needs adjusting. If, in the bedroom, I can reasonably easily hear the quiet bits in the music, it's probably rather too loud*, and so I slightly edge the volume down. Similarly, if, in my bedroom, I can reasonably easily recognise what the announcer between the pieces of music is saying, then the volume definitely needs turning down a little.

It really is that quiet. Otherwise, the music is likely to grab my attention more strongly while I'm in bed and be a significant distraction from sleeping. And of course, one great advantage of having the music so quiet is that it's near certain not to disturb any immediate neighbours, never mind what the time of night.

Your optimum choice of volume level for the music may differ from mine — but I'd caution that if you have the music significantly louder, although you may be having it as you subjectively want or 'like' it, you wouldn't necessarily be really helping yourself. The point about this is that this is NOT in itself a music listening exercise, even though at times you may be sort-of listening to the music (actually drifting in and out of it if your balance of attention is well judged).

The aim here is to be maximally in touch with your whole surrounding reassuring 'reality', which isn't just the music, which latter is being used just as a little 'handle' to assist you in being in touch with that safe and reassuring reality, and to make it easier for you to drift off to sleep.

In any case, the use of headphones / earphones would be a complete no-no, because that actually helps separate you from your surroundings, and fills your head with the music to the exclusion of the sounds of your surroundings. That's decidedly UNgrounding, and thus just what you need not to be doing here (nor indeed at all!).

Also, for the same reason, it's better to have the music sound source not close to you, and even in another, connected, room just as I had it when needing to manage particular potentially troublesome nights in this way. If you're in doubt about any of this, or are sure that you want to do things differently from me, I recommend the use of Helpfulness Testing to find out what choices are really in your best interests.

The aim here is NOT to give up on sleep, so it's not equivalent to the classic insomniac's misguided response to sleeplessness in getting up and actually doing things. Instead, as already noted, the aim is to have some reasonably unobtrusive continuing contact with a reassuring 'reality' to help balance and reground your awareness while you lie there in bed, but with minimum intrusion from your surroundings to put you off going to sleep. For this to work well, the right state of mind is important.

The aim here is NOT to try to go to sleep, NOR to give up on sleep, but, in a very open-minded way, simply to give sleep the best possible chance of happening in its own time, and in the meantime to rest and to peacefully enjoy the night. You use this particular regime on occasions when, if you were just lying in the dark and in (relative) silence, your attention would be too much in the particular garbage interference / attack for you to get to sleep at all, and it would be stupidly stressful to remain lying there like that.

The first time or two that you use this regime, the novelty of having some light together with very quiet music may in itself rather keep you awake — BUT after you've got more used to it, you'd most likely find, as I've done, that it becomes increasingly easy to drift off to sleep in this particular setup, albeit very likely sleeping rather fitfully.

It very much helps, also, to intend and understand that even if you get no obvious sleep at all, you're going to enjoy just lying there in bed and resting, without trying to achieve anything. You may still need to punctuate your rest by taking occasional measures to 'zap' some particular emotional feeling / garbage attack that comes up, by using the Feedback Loop Zapper procedure, or/and doing the Grounding Point procedure to 'zap' an illusory reality, but the overall emphasis is on just lying there and being at peace, enjoying the hints of very low-volume music coming from the radio (or whatever).

If you get intruded 'visuals' and can't get rid of them by the means that I've already described, you can at least open your eyes, and with the extra bit of light you'd almost certainly be able to be clear of that disturbance just by having your eyes open for a very short while, also focusing a bit more then on the music — again, with an emphasis on enjoying the moment rather than being pissed off or intimidated by it.

If getting-up time comes and it seems that you didn't get any sleep at all, actually (a) you probably did unawarely get the odd little bits of what we could call 'obvious' sleep, and (b) during all the time that you were lying peacefully, especially with your eyes closed, you were enabling at least a little bit of the normal sleep processes still to occur, even though not to the same extent as if you'd been fully asleep.

In other words, your time has been very well spent by simply resting like that, and it was enormously better than it would have been to just lie there in the dark suffering perhaps hellish experiences as the garbage continued its extremely stressful attacks on you, or getting all stressed up simply because you felt that you couldn't get to sleep and should be doing so.

 

Complete silence as something NOT to aim for!

Sleep and tinnitus — a practical, thought-out approach…

I'd progressively gained more and more (relative) silence in my flat, supposedly to increase my general quality of living and to make it easier for me to sleep. I live in a city centre, so even during hot summer weather I'd have my bedroom windows closed at night, because getting a good night's sleep always seemed to be a problem for me, and having all the city noise in the background appeared to accentuate the problem.

In 2011 my block of flats was radically refurbished, including improved soundproofing and more effective double glazing, so I was then living in a still quieter flat. And then, being bugged by all my computer noise, which did have a certain stressful quality about it, I replaced my computer with a completely silent one (no fans, no hard disk), and also got a quieter fridge-freezer. During the same time, however, I was increasingly being bugged by tinnitus, which had first come to my notice, albeit not so persistently and troublesomely, in 2005, during the height of my garbage shenanigans.

That tinnitus became sufficient nuisance for me in 2012 that I did a little research online and came to the website of the Tinnitus and Hyperacusis Centre, London, UK. Their understanding of tinnitus, thankfully, goes beyond any standard medical approach, and is based on really looking at what's going on to cause tinnitus. Indeed, their insights really 'clicked' with all my own observations, whereas little in the standard medical 'understandings' did so.

Thus, supported also by my use of inner inquiry, I realized that I'd been bringing the tinnitus upon myself by consistently opting for minimizing normal ambient noise, with the result that my own nervous system had got compensating for that lack of external sound by focusing on and greatly amplifying the very low-level and quite inoffensive inner background 'noise' in my hearing 'circuitry', and also I realized that there were simple and easy things I could do to progressively reverse the situation.

I've therefore — no, not bought a noisy computer and fridge-freezer , but started making a point of having at least the window closest to me open, even at night, as long as it's not altogether too cold or windy for me to do that. I also purchased a particular good quality portable player system that I could have on my bedside cabinet and use on nights when conditions make it impractical to have the windows open there*, then continuously playing (quietly, so this isn't about total immersion) a selection of sound file recordings of a variety of natural ambient sounds.

I had these all stored in FLAC format (lossless and thus of highest quality), and they include birdsong choruses, sea sounds, rain, wind, and thunderstorms, also with church and other bells and some of the more natural-sounding wind chimes recordings.

You can buy special bedside sound generators for the same purpose, but the trouble with those is that either they produce synthesized sounds or they play 'looped' (i.e., indefinitely repeated) short sound samples — neither of which sounds genuinely natural, and thus neither of which would be really harmonious for any really aware person — and their sound quality would leave a lot to be desired anyway.

Having taken on the understanding of how I'd been harming myself by protecting myself so much from ambient noise, and having 'zapped' a few relevant illusory realities by use of the Grounding Point procedure, I quickly found that I could sleep after all as well with my bedroom windows open as with them closed! — Actually indeed better than with them closed, because the tinnitus didn't seem so obtrusive.

Not only that, but, with my new understanding I was actually enjoying hearing my background of not-over-loud city noise and could feel how unnatural and really quite unhealthy the place sounded with all windows closed. Although it takes a fair amount of time to get clear of a tinnitus problem altogether (i.e., as an issue that intrudes unhelpfully upon one's awareness), I did find that over even just a few days I was already being less troubled by the tinnitus, even though I was hearing it only a bit less at this early stage.

Please note that I do NOT go along with the Tinnitus and Hyperacusis Centre's recommendation of an (indefinitely) ongoing continuous 'total immersion', day and night, in generated or recorded ambient sound for anyone seeking to address their tinnitus problem. Yes, that regime may be temporarily necessary for rapid reducing severely troublesome tinnitus for some particular individuals, but otherwise it's best seen as over-the-top and indeed harmful.

The most important thing is to make sure that you're not deprived of the actual natural ambient sounds around you — and you need to remember that by immersing yourself in artificial or at least recorded ambient sounds you're significantly cutting yourself off from your actual ambient sounds. It's much better policy to use Helpfulness Testing to establish when and in what manner it would be most beneficial at a particular time for you to play any recorded environmental sounds.

In my case, my own personal indications have been for my quite often playing various CDs that I have of environmental sounds (i.e., normally on my high-grade hi-fi, nowadays with room correction) — but even then to 'revert to natural background' after playing one of those CDs, and in any case 'quite often' would generally not mean more than one or perhaps two in a day unless the tinnitus had come on more strongly / persistently on a particular day.

In choosing one's recorded sounds to assist you against tinnitus, it's important that such sounds, at their played volume level, do NOT greatly mask or hide the tinnitus, for you actually need still to be able to hear it, and also, in some cases you could otherwise be overloading your auditory system and harming your hearing long-term (and indeed causing further progress of any tinnitus).

The name of the game is NOT hiding the tinnitus but rather, retraining your nervous system 'circuitry' to rebalance its response to the ambient sounds or lack of them and not to continue focusing on and amplifying the trivial background 'electronic noise' of your hearing system — which is what happens to produce tinnitus. For that, you do need to be able to hear the tinnitus so that the progressive automatic retraining can take place.

Even if you don't have obvious tinnitus (yet!), it's still best policy to heed the implicit warning here, not to go subjecting yourself to ongoing extended periods of really considerable silence.

If you live in a really soundproofed abode with double glazing, you'd be doing yourself a great favour in having windows open as much as reasonably possible and allowing yourself to awarely connect with the ambient sounds — more particularly the natural ones. In very quiet places a set or two of particular wind chimes can be used (use Helpfulness Testing to choose, because some would be relatively useless for the purpose) — but you do need to be aware that they can be an annoyance for neighbours, who themselves would normally not have your sort of understanding about managing and indeed preventing tinnitus.

This issue is actually not just about tinnitus, because the same 'auditory ungrounding' that leads to tinnitus is also the ungrounding of an important aspect of your awareness, and is making you more vulnerable to upset and stress from seemingly unwanted ambient sounds and also to interference and attacks from the garbage. Thus an aware and healthy anti-tinnitus strategy is also a grounding one that directly makes it easier for you to sleep even if you don't yet have tinnitus, and also significantly reduces your vulnerability to garbage interference and attack, thus also indirectly making it easier for you to sleep.

The need for a maximally harmonious lighting regime at all times of day

I'm pretty sure that one factor that aggravated my own really major period of disruptive troubles from the garbage was my use of good old-fashioned tungsten lamps, against my better judgement. When I first got into spiritual healing, in 1998, I got reading the classic books on spiritual healing by Barbara Brennan, and taking on various of her ideas — then seeing her as a particularly knowledgeable and insightful authority on that subject area.

She cautioned against using fluorescent lights of any kind because of the 'radiation' she reckoned they give off, and because of their poor frequency spectrum as compared with real daylight — and so she recommended ordinary incandescent bulbs instead, which supposedly had a more 'natural' spectrum that would be more harmonious for us.

To a point she was correct about that, but her insights about that were extremely patchy, and she completely missed other important factors. Before I got led way off-track by her alluring siren writings on healing I'd got using more or less daylight-coloured compact fluorescent lights, and had gone particularly for the Biobulb, which was much more energy efficient and gave a much more accurate simulation of daylight than standard 'daylight' fluorescent lights did then. This was still over a decade before LED bulbs started becoming a workable proposition.

So, during the period of 2003 to early 2007, when I most needed a supportive and grounding immediate environment I was misguidedly using tungsten bulbs only, costing a lot to run and giving out a horrible depressing and emotionally debilitating yellow light, in which I went through a horror of tribulations as the garbage dragged me through its unedifying convolutions of horrendous tricks, ordeals and attacks. But then in 2007, once the penny had dropped for me about the true nature of the supposed astral beings attacking me, and I dropped spiritual healing and indeed spirituality like a hot brick, I came to my senses about my lighting regime, and returned to the daylight-colour Biobulbs with one great sigh of relief.

Over the years since I started clearing myself of my garbage shenanigans I continued assuming that only an invigorating daylight-white light was appropriate and helpful in my abode, and that was reflected in what I originally wrote about suitable lighting on this page and elsewhere on this site.

Yet I was also a little unconvinced about this too, because daylight itself is simply not like what you get from any ordinary lamp — even a modern LED one, which, generally speaking, can still give you only a fixed notional average lighting colour for a single 'snapshot' of a featureless, homogenized daylight at one point in time. The pressing need for better grounding, however, caused me to set aside my various reservations, and so I naturally chose daylight-colour compact fluorescent 'bulbs' (viz. the Biobulb), and then switched over to the more efficient and less inharmonious LED bulbs once they'd become sufficiently reliable.

Then about 2017 I got wind that it was now fairly widely considered, supposedly on the basis of various research studies, that in order to sleep readily and well, one needed fairly 'warm' general light colour, at least for a couple of hours before going to bed — and I bought that story, also installing the f.lux program on my computer to slightly 'warm' the colours on my computer screen. However, this was rather conflicting with my understanding that daylight-colour room lighting is the most helpful for one's grounding and indeed neutralizing any SAD ('seasonal affective disorder') tendency.

Now, in early 2020, prompted by a new, 'dissident', research study's results, I looked at the issue again, having a gut feeling that the new study had actually 'got something' that the various other studies had missed. So, armed with that prompt, I did further thinking about the issue, supported by some further inner inquiry. What I came out with generally concurred with the new study's results and interpretation, though adding more because I wasn't constrained by the terms of reference of such a study.

First, the healthiest and most natural room lighting of all would have a diffuse blueish light emanating from the ceiling, and then a more directional light of a sunlight colour temperature (say about 5000K) directed to one's working or eating area — but nothing 'warmer' than that. In the absence of ability to have the two different colour temperatures, generally an 'average daylight' (6500K) is best, even though not fully ideal. The reason is that it appears (to me) that the primary factor in encouraging / discouraging sleep is primarily NOT the colour temperature but the illumination level of one's main lighting.

Indeed, and note this well, if anything, in the bedroom it would be better for the less bright lights there to be more, not less, blue!

Nope, I'm not kidding! — I really do mean that, and for a very good reason. It's a reasonable expectation that we'd normally sleep most readily in the sort of light regime that we'd evolved to respond to, which is primarily what Mother Nature provides. — And what does our daylight do in the evenings as it fades? — Why, it gets progressively bluer, NOT warmer! Sure, during the evening the direct sunlight gets 'warmer' in colour, but the overall ambient light gets bluer — except of course on the rather uncommon situations where a really widespread sunset / post-sunset glow on the clouds gives a pervasive reddish colour that very temporarily drowns out any obvious blue in the light.

I haven't yet been able to find suitable LED bulbs for my bedroom that have a 7000K or even 7500K colour temperature, but to my current understanding those, if only I could get hold of any, would be better and more natural in effect than use of the 6500K ones I'm currently using in that room — though I don't see that as a really significant issue.

Also it's important to keep in mind that a bulb with colour temperature of 6500K looks subjectively brighter than a bulb of the same brightness but lower colour temperature. Therefore you can easily get away with using somewhat less bright bulbs if they're of that proper daylight colour temperature, thus somewhat improving your sleep prospects and saving a little on your electricity bill and your environmental impact at the same time.

Indeed, somewhat to my amazement I've changed ALL my main room lights down to little 5W 470 lumen 6500K LED bulbs, with my bedside lamp now a 4W 400 lumen 6500K 'candle' bulb. In my living room that's a big brightness drop from the 11.5W bulbs I was using there — though at my dining table I supplement that by use of a 2.7W LED reading lamp when I'm sitting there. To me this new regime feels a hell of a lot more natural and healthy than all the 'warm' and 'cosy' lighting, however bright, that I'd been inflicting upon myself because of some apparently flawed previous research findings.

The problem with those earlier research findings wouldn't necessarily have been in the studies themselves but much more likely would have been in their interpretation. In particular, I'm not at all convinced that there's such a strong causal link (if indeed any at all) between one's blood level of melatonin and one's ability to sleep. I don't for a moment dispute that there may be an observed correlation between the two — but of actual causal relationship, I'm not at all so sure — and am pretty sure that other factors are involved anyway, whether or not there is some degree of causal relationship between melatonin level and sleeping ability.

With all the above in mind, if you're to get the optimal lighting regime for yourself, it's no good at all just following sweeping, unaware guidelines that are given to us on the subject from supposedly 'official' sources or even from this Philip Goddard oaf, for they'd be too blunt an instrument and don't recognise individual variations in exact physical and mental requirements, and any particular one, even if seeming to be the most appealing, may be plain wrong for you. In other words, what you need to do is to find out what's exactly right for you personally, and not necessarily what you superficially want or feel most comfortable with.

That means really thinking about your own individual situation and using Helpfulness Testing to establish exactly and in considerable detail what changes you yourself need to make in your own domestic lighting regime in order to get the healthiest colour balance in your lighting. As already intimated, bedroom lighting would need to be of a reasonably minimal brightness. Further, you'd also need to regularly use Helpfulness Testing to review your situation and make further adjustments as and when indicated.

Then finally, there's no point in having a bright light (or indeed a light of any specific brightness) and then hiding most of that light with a shade (waste of electricity!), so, if one really 'must' have a shade at all, I recommend a type of 'shade' that spreads the light around in a way that reduces dazzle when the light is looked at but still allows nearly all the light out into the room. As is the case for all lampshades, it's advisable to use Helpfulness Testing to ascertain that any lampshade isn't causing significant environmental stress itself (most do), or at least to use the Environmental Stress Zapper procedure to minimize any stress from the shade(s).

If you feel you must have dim or/and yellowish lighting generally, it would be helpful to put all your thoughts and beliefs about that to inquiry using The Work, or/and dissolve the relevant troublesome belief / illusory reality by means of the Grounding Point procedure, for you've objectively no need for dim / yellow lighting except possibly briefly for some specific purpose. As I say, general use of dim lighting would tend to aggravate any problem with 'entities' and garbage interferences — with the qualification that with c. 6500K colour temperature lighting, you can use a somewhat dimmer bulb than you'd need with 'warm'-coloured bulbs, and of course bedroom lighting is generally best to be a bit on the dim side anyway.

Understanding what sleep is, and how sleeping tablets can help and harm…

— and how sleep deprivation affects mental health…

Nobody fully understands what sleep is and what functions it serves for us, though of course there are theories and beliefs aplenty about that — generally not too well founded, even though some are part-way 'there' with regard to what we most need to know for practical purposes.

I myself have used inner inquiry, supported by Helpfulness Testing, to get a clearer and, from my own personal perspective, more securely based understanding that I've found extremely helpful even though it must necessarily be seen as somewhat speculative — still a working model rather than something to take on to believe in as supposed objective 'fact'. To have some understanding of how you benefit from sleep, and indeed, to some extent, of how that beneficial function operates, can be very helpful for you in choosing the most helpful options when the garbage or indeed any other influence is denying you sleep or threatens to do so.

There appear to be broadly two types of sleep: deep sleep — which everyone recognises as important — and shallow, 'dreaming' sleep (also called REM sleep on account of the involuntary Rapid Eye Movements that tend to occur in that type of sleep). Typically a night's sleep consists of an alternation (I mean broadly so, not a strict, regular alternation) of the two types of sleep, often with more or less brief wakeful interludes between them — though some of what are subjectively felt to be wakeful spells may in functional terms actually be particularly shallow 'REM' sleep still, provided that the person remains lying peacefully with eyes closed, and doesn't go trying to do things.

The deep sleep is the main rejuvenator of the body, restoring it from its physical fatigue from the previous day — though some of that process would occur anyway if the person simply spends time lying down in a relaxed manner with eyes closed. So, time spent just lying peacefully but without obvious sleep is NOT time wasted, and indeed the stress that's created by feeling that I need to get to sleep — I must try to fall asleep! is a real obstruction to that state of rest being really effective, and more or less always leads to the person feeling really groggy the following day.

The 'dreaming' or 'REM' sleep, on the other hand, is the primary rejuvenator for our emotional and 'mental' aspects, and the primary process involved is an unconscious or 'subconscious' massive sifting through one's memory databanks (masses more than the experiences that we remember in everyday life) and relating every detail of recent experiences to memories of earlier experiences, making connections where they're deemed significant, and discarding what appear to be bits of irrelevant or 'not mine' data (including spurious memories, images and messages that are constantly being covertly fed into one's mindspace by the garbage).

This process actually has two particularly important aspects — evaluation, which really is the overall process, and re-evaluation, which is really a subset of it. These are both basically fully unconscious processes, not directly related to any conscious thinking-through of an issue that you may be doing. Indeed, a wilful conscious thinking-through of issues tends to be a hindrance to the real evaluation process, so it's much better to trust one's deeper aspects to get on with the real work and 'thinking through', and enjoy the conscious 'holiday' of a good night's sleep.

The evaluation process is the basic underlying process of learning. It underlies every scrap of genuine learning that we ever do, whether deliberately or completely unawarely. As far as I can ascertain at the moment, this basic evaluation process goes on apace whenever you're peacefully lying down as though asleep (whether or not actually asleep), so, even more than is the case with physical renewal, you get enormous benefit from lying peacefully, whether or not you're obviously asleep.

On the other hand, re-evaluation is the re-processing of data that couldn't be evaluated before, at least fully, because of an obstruction. It's thus a process of belated learning of what one had previously been unable to learn because of the particular obstruction(s).

The most notable of such obstructions is emotional stress or trauma*, and one big catch is that such stress or trauma need not be one's own in order to have this effect — it could indeed belong to any parasitic lost souls that are attached to one, or/and the garbage could be feeding it in via any primary archetype connections that you have. That means that a considerable proportion of people generally are carrying very much more stress / trauma than they themselves have accrued from situations in their own lives — and all this needs to be cleared if they're to clear out their vulnerability to the garbage and come to live genuine free, happy, self-actualized lives.

Re-evaluation, thus, is a healing process, and occurs when by some means the emotional stress or trauma associated with particular memory data is reduced or altogether dissolved (when latter a full re-evaluation can occur, so resolving or clearing that particular issue altogether). Re-evaluation is much more restricted to REM sleep than is straightforward basic evaluation.

No REM sleep = little or no re-evaluation, and no re-evaluation = no healing or recovering from emotional issues and the rigid patterns of feeling, outlook and behaviour that they cause. So, deprivation of REM sleep prevents healing of emotional and stress related issues (which EVERYBODY has, whether or not they're aware of them), and that means that during a period of deprivation of REM sleep the person would almost certainly be suffering a net accumulation of emotional stress or an acceleration of an already established ongoing accumulation of that.

That in turn means a quite rapid increase in vulnerability to garbage interference and attacks, quite apart from problems resulting directly from accumulation of emotional stress in your system (i.e., a general deterioration in your state of mental and emotional health, which would also progressively impact upon your physical health).

The practical thing we need to understand from this is that both types of sleep are essential for our ongoing well-being.

Now, what happens when you take a 'sleeping' tablet? You took a Zopiclone tablet, sensibly spurning benzodiazepines and indeed barbiturates as too harmful, and, for your troubles, if you were lucky, the prospective night of hellish attack from the garbage seemingly magically gave way to a full night's deep sleep, and so in the morning you breathe a great sigh of relief, that in the event you'd had a full night's really good sleep despite all the initial threats, and are in better shape now.

But is that all there's to it? To what extent are you really in better shape then? Where were your dreams, for example? Not that consciously experienced dreams are important or necessary in themselves, but an absence of them does point to something that could be amiss. You had a good night's deep sleep, but did you get any REM sleep?

— The answer is that you got much less than you needed, or indeed, depending upon the dose, even NONE. And that's the sad and sorry situation with regard to all sleeping medication of which I'm aware — except that some (particularly barbiturates) put you more into a coma sort of unconsciousness rather than true sleep, so they're still worse.

Your Zopiclone ensures that you still miss out on at least a fair amount of the essential REM sleep, and so continual use of even the normal 7.5mg dose of it is actually steadily building up a further level of 'mental health' issue for you, because you've far too little re-evaluation occurring, and so, quite apart from any major stresses, all the normal little stresses of everyday life — most of which you wouldn't be consciously aware of at all — are accumulating in your system and not being cleared by the nightly re-evaluation process in your REM sleep, because you're just not getting enough REM sleep, or indeed even none!

Now, just one night on your Zopiclone (i.e., the normal 7.5mg dose*) doesn't represent too great a problem. But suppose you look like having a rough time from the garbage again on the following night. Now, if your doctor was any good, (s)he would have warned you to try to avoid having a sleeping tablet (whatever type) on more than two consecutive nights — which of course really implies that it's best to avoid having them on even two consecutive nights! The reason generally given is that any regularity of use tends to (a) cause dependency, and (b) cause progressive development of tolerance to the drug (in other words, the particular medication becomes decreasingly effective). I can now tell you why that appears to be the case — and I have no indications yet that this is known at all in the medical profession.

The cause of the apparent dependency and tolerance is one and the same — the user's steadily increasing deficit of REM sleep and thus accumulation in one's 'holding area' of stress-laden memory data awaiting re-evaluation. The 'holding area' becomes increasingly 'bursting at the seams'.

The apparent dependency arises because, after even one night of what I shall call 'Zopiclone sleep' (i.e., only deep sleep), the following night your system is straightaway seeking to catch up on the missed REM sleep, and so, provided you don't 'zap' yourself with Zopiclone again, and the garbage or whatever leaves you alone and you have a theoretically undisturbed night, you'd have a significantly higher proportion of REM sleep that night, and you might indeed notice that you seemed to sleep unsatisfyingly lightly and fitfully, very likely with more dreaming than usual. It would seem unsatisfying — that is, if you didn't understand what was really going on and that you were actually sleeping in just the manner that you most needed to at that time.

However, whether or not you noticed that difference after just one Zopiclone night, this effect becomes progressively stronger for every additional consecutive night that you've been on Zopiclone and have missed out on REM sleep. Thus, when you do have a night without a sleeping tablet after a few consecutive Zopiclone nights, your system will simply not allow you to have deep sleep, because it perceives quite an urgency to catch up on the re-evaluation process by means of grabbing all the REM sleep that can be fitted into your night.

The key, then, to best coping with a situation in which you've Zopicloned yourself several nights in succession and have at last stopped the medication, is to understand that what's happening in your ensuing seemingly disturbed and somewhat sleepless nights is actually what you need then, so a further need is for you to be relaxed about that and indeed glad that you're catching up with your re-evaluation process and so healing yourself and learning what you need to learn from the last several days' experiences.

However, if you consequently have had a succession of nights with more or less no deep sleep and thus are feeling quite a wreck physically, what you can sensibly do as a pragmatic measure is to balance things up a bit by taking Zopiclone again for just one night, so that then you can get a night of deep sleep — but then you'd need to let the REM sleep catch up on subsequent nights. — But there's no need to worry about this, because your system would bring in an increasing proportion of deep sleep on successive nights, as it catches up on the REM sleep and comes towards a really decent satisfying balanced sleep.

In such cases the withdrawal effect can be softened by having your doctor prescribe a few half-dose Zopiclone tablets to use first (i.e., one per night, of course!).

As for the apparent tolerance that develops towards Zopiclone or other sleeping tablet, the primary culprit is again simply the REM sleep deprivation, and your system getting increasingly desperate to restore your balance and mental health by suppressing deep sleep and giving REM sleep a chance. But the trouble is that these sleeping tablets tend actually to suppress REM sleep, so that, very likely, what would happen is that, rather than getting a lot of light, 'dreaming' sleep instead of deep sleep, you'd increasingly get no sleep.

This effect is really not true tolerance to the medication, but rather, a self limiting effect brought about by the body's interaction with the drug. Unfortunately, once you're in that situation you'd very likely have some difficulty with coming off the Zopiclone because your unmedicated nights would initially lack deep sleep while your system works hard to restore your balance and mental state. However, that's actually a situation that will pass soon if you accept it with good grace and allow yourself to enjoy your nightly rest instead of worrying that something has gone wrong and you've lost your ability to sleep 'properly'.

Again, the problem can be ameliorated somewhat by reducing to half-dose tablets before you finally make the complete break.

I hope you now understand just why the use of Zopiclone or other sleeping tablet can very easily lead you into very considerable problems if you don't keep its use to a real bare minimum and seek whenever possible to keep unmedicated altogether, and, when you do choose to use such medication, not to use it on consecutive nights if at all possible, and, if you do feel that you have to use it on consecutive nights, to keep it to no more than two consecutive nights.

I myself did have one occasion when the garbage attacks caused me very reluctantly to take Zopiclone on a third consecutive night. My Helpfulness Testing did actually support my doing that, 'on balance', but at least part of the equation then was the fact that I understood what I was doing and what the effect would be on my subsequent unmedicated nights.

And sure enough, I had a couple of nights then with initially more or less no deep sleep and a lot of apparent wakefulness and drifting into vivid dreams, these often being rather disturbing ones because of garbage interference, so I was repeatedly needing to use my then current early version of the Feedback Loop Zapper procedure to stall the various attacks that started up following the emotional 'button-pushing' of the disturbing elements in those dreams. But at least I understood what was happening, and so I just looked forward to very shortly having my sleep back in balance, as indeed happened reasonably over the next few nights.

Also, experience has shown me that really severe and sustained attacks from the garbage — particularly if they cause a lot of trembling or are causing very significant physical pain — can prevent one from going to sleep even when one has taken a normal-dose sleeping tablet. As already noted, until November 2017 I'd NEVER taken an additional sleeping tablet (i.e., making it a double dose), and I'd seriously warn anyone against doing such a thing, especially after my experience when I did do that in particularly 'difficult' circumstances.

Not only is that harmful in itself, but the state of mind that's willing to do such a thing is liable on another occasion to take three — or maybe four… — You see where that can so easily lead?! You're onto a very slippery slope the moment you choose to take more than the prescribed or medically directed dose — not that all medically directed or 'normal' doses of such drugs are exactly benign or really soundly based to start with!