In my youth, my parents put a great deal of emphasis on “Spiritual Warfare.” Nobody is purely responsible for their own actions — instead, any form of Sin can be caused by a “Spirit” of that Sin: a Spirit of Lust, a Spirit of Anger, a Spirit of Violence. This is typified in the Frank Peretti novels This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness — huge hits among the Evangelical crowd when I was a kid. (Although my family always placed less of an emphasis on angels as the antithesis to demons.)
Demons were everywhere. I wasn’t allowed to watch The Smurfs as a youngster because Gargamel was a Sorceror and the show might allow a Spirit of Witchcraft into our home. All this reached a fever pitch when Dad ran a youth group in Nashville — we would have regular sessions of “casting out demons” where people would foam at the mouth and curse God’s name and talk in that “Exorcist voice.” I guess it was all a put-on, but I had no way of knowing that at the time.
Anyway, I have recurring dreams of being possessed by Demons. Last night was one of them. As is typical for such a dream, the most obvious evidence of it was my ability to open and lock doors, move small objects, and so forth, just with my mind, or a little hand motion like some kind of Jedi. I also started to hallucinate: I saw weird Greek writing in my RPG rulebooks (actually manuals for Satan) and my friends started taking on distorted features.
I tried to understand what was going on when my Dad rushed up to me and shouted, “Son, it’s because you are possessed by Demons! You and all your friends are!” So I asked him to get rid of them. He laid his hands on me and began to pray. Clouds of black smoke issued forth from my friends’ mouths and resolved themselves into hulking black ghosts with huge upper bodies. They looked kinda like those “haunted memento” ghosts in World of Warcraft. They seemed dejected as they slowly glided out of the room.
Then Dad began to pray more fervently as he tried to cast the demon out of me. It turned out to be some kind of “Demon Lord” called The Maw or something like that — and only Dad had the power to cast him out. I felt like I was disgorging something huge from my mouth… and I opened it, only to have a small worm crawl out. It was like a segmented worm with armor plates and spikes… some kind of Star Trek sci-fi worm or something.
Afterward I felt a great sense of peace — I was free of the Demons — and I could no longer move objects with my mind. Dad stuck around for awhile and started to do some laundry. (Okay, yeah.) For some reason we were in my Granny Mabel’s outside room, where she used to have one of those upright Washer-Dryer Combo Units. As Dad was using it, it started to break and spray water everywhere. He cursed the Demons, and I asked, “Are the little guys harassing you?” and he answered in the affirmative as he almost burst into tears.
Then the dream changed and I was in my “P-Doc’s” office. It turns out all my problems were not caused by Demons, but by Mental Illness. Again I was having the hallucinations and delusions. For some reason, she treated these by having me hold huge gobs of some blue Play-Doh like substance in my mouth. I had flashes of life as another person — some kind of child.
She informed me that I had “R2-D2 Syndrome,” which was where another, smaller, life gets stuck inside your own. She claimed to be an Expert at dealing with it. But, as time went on, the condition got worse and she started to take a lot of documentation and even publish papers on me. Eventually I realized that she was the one who had given me this R2-D2 Syndrome. I confronted her and said, “What are the odds? I come to you with depression, I’ve never heard of R2-D2 Syndrome, you’re an Expert in it, then suddenly I get it!” I completely stopped taking pills and spat the blue goo out of my mouth and went on my merry way, perfectly normal in every respect.
I think the dream went on for awhile longer, but I can’t remember any of it. I’ve probably forgotten some details, too. I haven’t been keeping up my dream journal — usually I have them in the middle of the night and I’m too groggy to fire up the computer and start typing. This means I forget most of them by morning.