SimpleguyJoe
May 24, 2010, 04:02 AM
Well I suppose I will keep it short and sweet and to the point. Scroll down to the ================= separator if you don't care to read the story and you will still get the idea of the question I'm asking. Or if you feel like having the back story I wrote up something quick because I woke up about an hour earlier than usual for work ;P
Also sorry if I'm putting this in the wrong subsection, could go under spirituality maybe? Regardless this looked like the best place for it!
I have never been religious in my life up until a very recent date and even more so I am not openly religious, I suppose I "found god" in an interesting way. I suffered from HORRIBLY bad nightmares for a semi-long period, I'm also not talking about the trying to run upstairs while my legs feel like jello and something is chasing me kind of dreams.
My dreams were usually about random wanderings through what I could only describe as a torture chamber, talking nothing but screams, bloodied corpses walking around and the works, this was accompanied by the weirdest Hallucinatory Sleep Paralysis (HSP) That ALWAYS involved the same "figure" walking up to me and then starting to choke me while asking me the craziest questions I've ever heard, ALWAYS revolving around religion. Things like "do I bow to the son of god" "is god my servant" or sometimes vise versa and sometimes it would just end after that and other times it got a tad messy? This thing would literally make words, signs, dates and such pop up out of nowhere written in blood on my walls, or he would decide to gut me or kill me in some other fashion.
Regardless of anything I left out, this made me more terrified to go to sleep than just about anything. I've suffered from regular Sleep Paralysis all my life and it never bugged me, even had my run in with Hallucinatory Sleep Paralysis several times before this. Let's just say it was on a whole new level, this was happening on a nightly basis. There may be say one night a week where this did not happen for probably a little more than 2 months straight. This was putting me on a bender, I swear I must of looked like a crackhead for how sleep deprived I was. There were times that I didn't sleep for days and the two months this was happening were easily as bad as the first few months after my fathers death.
In my life to date, there has only been 3 times that I have REALLY cried, once when my father passed away, once when my first long term relationship ended, then there was this time. When things were really hitting the fan and all the people that I told about this be it online or close RL friends either thought I had to check into a sleep diagnosis hospital or start praying for my life and hope for a hail marry.
Well I went with option two and started praying my @$$ off and memorized some scripture that I would repeat every time I was "having an episode". About a week after this I had a very realistic, very long, and quite interesting dream. From what I've read in psych books and from a little investigating dreams of this kind are called "epic dreams" I basically had a dream where I had quite the chat with a very benevolent being. A lot more than that went down but that's all I really care to share about it.
I haven't had any of the same elements in my dreams sense, actually I hardly even have nightmares anymore and my SP is back to a kind of once every few months kind of deal. It was kind of weird, everything that just kind of popped out of nowhere, the nightmares the HSP and such that came just randomly and continued nearly every night for over 2 months just stopped out of nowhere and never came back after the dream I mentioned in the above paragraph.
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The whole experience has kind of left me at a crossroads. None of my friends know me as religious, heck even my family doesn't think I have a religious bone in my body. I don't think any of my close friends that aren't already religious would even use my name in the same sentence as religion.
So in essence I feel like a closet christian...
Now I know none of my friends will openly oppose me for being religious but I could see it being the butt end of a few jokes sense I don't think I have more than 2-3 religious friends.
The best way I can describe it is I feel like it's a major shift in my character to be religious and if I can barley understand it I doubt many of my friends would, if any...
So it comes down to should I keep on the road I'm at now and just kind of let it become a part of my life a little more slowly or do I need to totally revamp my life and image?
If you sat through and read the whole story thanks for your time, if not I'd still like some opinions.
Also sorry if I'm putting this in the wrong subsection, could go under spirituality maybe? Regardless this looked like the best place for it!
I have never been religious in my life up until a very recent date and even more so I am not openly religious, I suppose I "found god" in an interesting way. I suffered from HORRIBLY bad nightmares for a semi-long period, I'm also not talking about the trying to run upstairs while my legs feel like jello and something is chasing me kind of dreams.
My dreams were usually about random wanderings through what I could only describe as a torture chamber, talking nothing but screams, bloodied corpses walking around and the works, this was accompanied by the weirdest Hallucinatory Sleep Paralysis (HSP) That ALWAYS involved the same "figure" walking up to me and then starting to choke me while asking me the craziest questions I've ever heard, ALWAYS revolving around religion. Things like "do I bow to the son of god" "is god my servant" or sometimes vise versa and sometimes it would just end after that and other times it got a tad messy? This thing would literally make words, signs, dates and such pop up out of nowhere written in blood on my walls, or he would decide to gut me or kill me in some other fashion.
Regardless of anything I left out, this made me more terrified to go to sleep than just about anything. I've suffered from regular Sleep Paralysis all my life and it never bugged me, even had my run in with Hallucinatory Sleep Paralysis several times before this. Let's just say it was on a whole new level, this was happening on a nightly basis. There may be say one night a week where this did not happen for probably a little more than 2 months straight. This was putting me on a bender, I swear I must of looked like a crackhead for how sleep deprived I was. There were times that I didn't sleep for days and the two months this was happening were easily as bad as the first few months after my fathers death.
In my life to date, there has only been 3 times that I have REALLY cried, once when my father passed away, once when my first long term relationship ended, then there was this time. When things were really hitting the fan and all the people that I told about this be it online or close RL friends either thought I had to check into a sleep diagnosis hospital or start praying for my life and hope for a hail marry.
Well I went with option two and started praying my @$$ off and memorized some scripture that I would repeat every time I was "having an episode". About a week after this I had a very realistic, very long, and quite interesting dream. From what I've read in psych books and from a little investigating dreams of this kind are called "epic dreams" I basically had a dream where I had quite the chat with a very benevolent being. A lot more than that went down but that's all I really care to share about it.
I haven't had any of the same elements in my dreams sense, actually I hardly even have nightmares anymore and my SP is back to a kind of once every few months kind of deal. It was kind of weird, everything that just kind of popped out of nowhere, the nightmares the HSP and such that came just randomly and continued nearly every night for over 2 months just stopped out of nowhere and never came back after the dream I mentioned in the above paragraph.
================================================== ============================================
The whole experience has kind of left me at a crossroads. None of my friends know me as religious, heck even my family doesn't think I have a religious bone in my body. I don't think any of my close friends that aren't already religious would even use my name in the same sentence as religion.
So in essence I feel like a closet christian...
Now I know none of my friends will openly oppose me for being religious but I could see it being the butt end of a few jokes sense I don't think I have more than 2-3 religious friends.
The best way I can describe it is I feel like it's a major shift in my character to be religious and if I can barley understand it I doubt many of my friends would, if any...
So it comes down to should I keep on the road I'm at now and just kind of let it become a part of my life a little more slowly or do I need to totally revamp my life and image?
If you sat through and read the whole story thanks for your time, if not I'd still like some opinions.