Dear Julia:

Sometimes when I'm falling asleep, I hear voices. Sometimes I hear praying, sometimes questions, sometimes many things all at once, and I fight to wake up because I'm scared. When I finally wake up, I feel like I've been through a battle: my body is tired and limp and sometimes paralyzed or numb. Once I was being choked from behind and I woke up out of breath and with pain in my neck that lasted all day. The woman that I am now seeing has felt a presence in my home. I never believed in these things but now we both hear and feel the same things. She has experienced feelings of being stuck in her dreams. She keeps telling me these things are real and I think they are crazy. My young daughter told me months ago of something she saw and felt in her sleep. My girlfriend later said she felt the same thing, and I had never told her of my daughter's identical experience. I'm confused and a little worried, and my girlfriend is so freaked out she doesn't want to sleep in my house. What do you think is going on?
- Karlita

Dear Karlita:

You're not crazy and you're not imagining things. It only makes sense that if you are all experiencing the same phenomena without knowing about each others' experiences first, something real is going on. Further, what you're describing has been experienced by many people in various cultures throughout history.

What concerns me most is the choking incident and the fact that your neck was sore the next day. It's rare for non-physical entities to be able to affect the physical. That event makes this a serious situation.

What you're experiencing is typically labeled sleep paralysis. Scientists will tell you that it's caused by a chemical that your brain releases while you sleep that prevents you from moving around and acting out your dreams. They dismiss sufferers' endless identical reports of unseen presences as hallucinations.

I have experienced this myself and I know better. If you sense a presence weighing you down, trust your perceptions. Telling yourself that you're crazy won't help - it will disempower you and make you more vulnerable to psychic attack. The more you let this continue and the more freaked out you all become, the worse things will tend to get.

You're hearing these voices because you're in a state of consciousness in which you have dual awareness of this dimension and another plane of existence. These are the voices of non-physical entities. Many people in this state report that everything they look at has a strange glow around it; this is because they're viewing the etheric or astral plane.

The universe is full of entities all trying to get their needs met. As a result, there are hunters and the hunted. Also, just as there are living people who may try to take advantage of you in some way, there are moochers in the non-physical. When we are in a weakened, vulnerable state, we become targets for lower astral entities who are hungry for energy.

This explains why being sick or exhausted is the most common cause of sleep paralysis, for then our auras are greatly weakened. I experienced sleep paralysis after the birth of my first child when I was getting up every two hours to nurse him. So NOT sleeping because you're afraid is not a good idea.

Also, sleep paralysis tends to happen to people who are naturally psychic because they have thin auric barriers. If you're sensitive and you don't believe in any of this stuff, it's like living in a big city and not believing that criminals exist: you're naive and vulnerable. Further, people who are naturally psychic and have a low vibration due to fear or depression are prime candidates for psychic attack. Since lower astral entities feed on negative emotional energy, it's like these people are walking through that inner city wearing tons of really expensive stuff with a wad of cash poking out of their back pocket.

It helps to know that the reason sleep paralysis feels so terrifying is because these entities will purposefully scare us so they can feed off our fear. Most of this fear is artificial. I know this is true because it's possible to lose the fear and lose the entities in the process. When we can confront a dark entity with a high vibration, it's like turning our pockets inside out and showing a mugger we have no cash. They move on.

With this in mind, you must ditch your fear by raising your vibration and cultivating faith. Before bed each night, get into a very positive, spiritual state of mind. Read spiritual books, meditate, pray, etc. Sleeping with a light on can also dispel astral shadows.

To lose this entity, you need to raise your vibration so there is nothing for it to feed on. To do this, you must become stronger than it is in terms of your own willpower. When your faith in yourself and God or Spirit is stronger than this entity's energy, you'll be able to reclaim dominion over your own course of experience.

You can also call on your spirit guides and angels to help and protect you. This may sound lame but you must remember that unless you ASK for help, angels can't step in. This alone can make all the difference in the world.

I have a friend who astral projects and has strong relationships with friends and guides in Spirit. He was awakened once by the very clear voice of a guide saying, "There is something evil in the room." He awoke to sleep paralysis and perceived a dark entity crouching at the foot of his bed, projecting pure evil at him. He asked for the help of the guide, and the entity vanished.

Think about it: if you can be affected by evil entities, you can ALSO be affected by good ones, so call on beings of love and light for help, and surround yourself with white light. This frustrates dark entities and they immediately leave.

The most powerful thing you can do, however, is to think to yourself how sad it would be to be an ugly, malevolent entity and live in a dark, evil world. If you can summon compassion for whatever is feeding off your aura, it will be gone in an instant and most likely NEVER return. Pure love is to evil entities as pure evil is to us: they want NOTHING to do with it because it is totally counter to their nature. Even more important, when we're in a very high vibration, we naturally attract higher entities and experiences.

Since everyone at your house is experiencing this, it sounds like the entity is attached to the place as opposed to a particular person. There must be a portal there for this sort of thing to happen. That portal needs to be closed to all but welcomed spiritual guests, so set up a border patrol by asking your guides and angels to remove any entities of a malevolent nature and allow through only beings of love and light in the future. You can also cleanse your house and burn sage or incense while you imagine the space filling with divine love and light.

Finally, because this does seem to be a serious situation, I urge you to find someone experienced in spirit releasement therapy. They may either be an intuitive like a Spiritualist who handles this directly, or a counselor who helps you via hypnotherapy to access a state of awareness where you can dialogue with this entity and guide it to move on.

The main thing is to make sure that the spirit not only leaves you but moves on to the next step in its own evolutionary journey. This will prevent other people from being attacked, and it will prevent it from returning to you in the future should you become vulnerable again for some reason.

You're in my prayers!

- Julia