Last week’s testimony from a reader who’s experienced strange nocturnal visions drew overwhelming comment. Based on the flood of responses, it appears that Millennials’ spiritual affliction may be a real phenomenon that bears more investigation.
The following are samples of reports from the comments and from X.
I used to get the sleep-paralysis version. Half-awake, half-asleep, couldn’t move or breathe, could never *see* the darn things, but they radiated malevolence. Ran across a recommendation on crossing yourself when your hands aren’t free (in context it was about when you’re occupied holding the kids or something): use your eyes to look in the directions of the cross. So I tried that the next time, and lo, it worked! They can’t take it. They go away and I wake up. Three or four go-rounds after that, and they haven’t been back. They gave up. That was many years ago now.
The possibility that just looking at the cross can mitigate or end these attacks is a potentially valuable insight. Keep that one in mind.
I can relate. When I had just starting college, over the span of a week, I was visited by various things. The first night, I woke up and saw an (female) angel in the corner of my room looking out a widow. Problem was, the only window in my room was directly behind the headboard of my bed. She didn’t look at me, she was just intently gazing out the window at the moon in the sky. I felt at peace and privileged to see such a graceful creature. I think she may have been a reminder she was watching over me for what was to come.
The next night, I woke up and saw the silhouette of a cobra in my bed. In that moment, I felt like Goku with instant transmission because I just remember throwing back my covers and found myself immediately hitting the light switch, heart about to pound out of my chest.
The next night was a giant silhouette of a spider descending from the ceiling above my face. I had a similar reaction as the night before.
The night after was the first time I felt any kind of physical paralysis. I woke up and the silhouette of an old lady was sitting next to my bed. I thought it was my grandma at first (she would stay with us during the weekends) but after a few seconds of starting at the lady, I remembered my grandmother wasn’t with us that night. I didn’t sense any malice from her and after a while of just staring at her, I went back to sleep. Looking back, I chuckle at this incident because, while I couldn’t move or speak, my mind just smugly asked “I’ve been visited by so many other things this week, what do you want?”
The last thing I saw was waking up and seeing the ornaments on my bed post had changed from a wooden ball to a wooden block. I started to see wood shavings peel off the center of up to eventually reveal a mouse was eating its way from it. You can imagine, I jumped out of bed immediately in fright.
I know these weren’t dreams because I didn’t feel like I was dreaming but more importantly in each incident I counted from 1 to 3 which normally in a dream is mentally straining enough to break the dream. No such awakening happened when I did that.
Since then I occasionally see things in the dark, it’s not fun, but I try to pray my heart rate down and go to sleep. The other solution is staring into the darkness until my vision adjusts and the shades disappear.
NB: The cobra may not necessarily be as sinister an apparition as it first seems. The ancient Egyptians saw cobras as guardians and purifiers of holy places. And Old Testament authors associate them with the seraphim, who serve a similar role in God’s throne room.
I’m too desensitized by Millennial horror to be frightened by monsters, so my attacks are less obnoxious.
One example: Opening a shower curtain in a dark bathroom in a dream. Seeing a darkness inside that complete enshrouds me—and then, seeing two pairs of pin-sized, red-glowing eyes waltz over to me from ahead.
My heart becomes tachycardic each time one of them enters me. I don’t realize what happens until I miss my window to speak up—and then, I wake up.
It’s also good to know that desensitization is possible.
My youngest daughter was born during Lent last year. I had one of those dreams that’s different somehow; more detailed, more real, makes more real-life sense. I’m not a stranger to them.
In the dream, it was very early morning, maybe 2 or 3 am, and I was in my kitchen washing up a round of bottles. That was something I did for real enough times, it was a boring enough start. But then, a thick darkness began to descend on the house. When facing the kitchen sink, your view is the living room (open concept), and the whole area just got darker and darker. It was perhaps darker at the edges, or maybe that was just my vision. Whispers began to emanate from those black edges.
I put down the bottles, backed up a step, and with great difficulty croaked out the Saint Michael prayer as best as I could, finding it strangely hard to make a noise. My throat loosened up as I continued, and though I don’t remember for sure, I think the whispers stopped and the darkness receded, but I also woke up right as I finished the prayer, so the ending is quite muddy in my memory.
Though not a common thing for me, that was not the first time, nor do I expect it will be the last. It’s never quite the same, but I don’t see creatures or anything of that sort. It’s usually darkness or shadows, sometimes over a wide area, sometimes in a specific spot; sometimes, I only sense the presence of darkness without seeing anything unusual.
And now, a selection from X:
My wife used to get the sleep paralysis & physically abused by demons prior to our marriage. She’d wake up with bruises on her chest & the insides of her thighs. We were not Catholic at the time.
She was so scared, I actually started sleeping at her apartment on the couch. I could feel it when they showed up. One time I walked into her bathroom & a black & white snake materialized out of the wall & wrapped itself around my leg. This was in the middle of the day. Not while sleeping.
I started praying the St. Michael prayer whenever I’d feel them show up. Sometimes for a couple of hours. Eventually they’d leave. Then angels started showing up & I could see them two. She had 4 that would come stand at the 4 corners of her bed.
She used to sell really high end art & had some pieces in her apartment. I did a lot of research & came to the conclusion there was likely a demon attached to some piece of art she had. She threw it all in the dumpster & they left for good.
She still has prophetic dreams though.
Taken together, these various reports display some unsettling commonalities.
As mentioned before, I’ve been studying paranormal phenomena for decades.
Besides perennial night hag visitations and dreams about not getting on planes that end up crashing, I never came across anything like these accounts until a few years ago.
Nor did reports of these specific kinds get any coverage to speak of on shows like In Search Of or Unsolved Mysteries.
At one reader’s suggestion, I looked up US baptism rates.
Sure enough, the number of kids receiving baptism – and being raised by parents in sacramental marriages – declined in the postwar years.
But in keeping with the death of religion being a psyop, baptism has made a comeback of late.
And consistent with the corrected dating of the Millennial generation as those born between 1990 and 2010, we see that infant baptisms saw a pronounced dip (no pun intended) in 1989 and started recovering ten years later.
So perhaps Millennials have been subject to particular spiritual affliction.
But, God only allows an evil provided it will pave the way for even greater good. Millennials’ spiritual affliction seems to have scared parents straight, perhaps leading to more infant baptisms.
If you wanted a sign, that’s a pretty good one.
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Millennials grew up primarily in the ’00s and early ’10s, the most virulently anti-religious period in recent memory. It doesn’t surprise me those soaked in that sewage would have the hardest time understanding spiritual issues that might afflict them.
Whereas Gen Y is just careless about this kind of thing, Millennials honestly do not seem to understand this at all, and if they experience it they simply have no idea where to even begin addressing the problem. Any spiritual views they have are a mishmash of bad television and too many pills. I do think the reason Millennials are so bad off is because they simply do not have the tools needed, and don’t even know where the toolshed is–if they even know there is a shed at all.
Zoomers, by contrast, are either religious or actively dealing in witchery. Very few are strictly non-spiritual.
Funny how much has changed in such a short time, but even more proof that generational differences have accelerated even faster.
I will corroborate. Simply knowing that demons are more than creepypasta characters or that they can only harm me to the extent that God permits them to liberates me.
If St. Padre Pio can cope with getting dragged out of bed and wounded by Satan himself, then I can, too—although it helps to not invite them in the first place.
As you’ve alluded to before, the decline goes like this …
>Boomers: “All you need is Jesus in your heart!” (Ignores explicit Gospel message “He who loves me keeps my Commandments.”)
>Gen X: “I grew out of that kid stuff back in college. The only three persons I put faith in are me, myself, and I.”
>Gen Y: “Yeah, I went to Sunday school or whatever. Stopped attending church with Mom a year or two after she left dad, y’know?”
>Millennials: “I’ve never been that religious. Then I started dreaming of this deer that walks on 2 legs and talked in my GF’s voice. Burnt sage like they said to on /x/. It worked for about a month, but now I’m seeing shadows peeking around corners. Should I smudge the whole house?”
>Zoomers: “BLOOD AND SOULS FOR MOLOCH!” / “DEUS VULT!”
What is with the creepy deer phenomena? Is it related to Pan and the satyrs of myth? Or some other kegen I am missing?
A bunch of modern horror fiction has deer creatures, and the wendigo recently gained deer antlers in fiction. Plus weird nature spirits like in SCP have deer antlers and hooves.
But the deer isn’t ruler of the forest. The lion is. The wolf, the bear, the tiger… The apex predators rule the forest, not the stupid deer. Why is everyone picturing deer creatures?
It’s bizarre. The only less menacing creepypasta villain would be a basselope.
My theory is that every generation after X has been so cut off from nature, the mere thought of it is terrifying. Some Millennial and Zoomer urban hivedwellers have said outright that being out in the country gives them panic attacks.
Can confirm. I remember going on camping trips and loving it. Younger generations won’t even entertain the idea of doing such. They need to stay connected at all times.
Hate to go all PopCult – never mind referencing the worst of the OK Treks – but hey, Ys gonna Y.
Millennials and Zoomers innawoods = 7 of 9 that one time she had to stay awake while the rest of the crew went into cryosleep, and she started going psychotic from loneliness.
You’d be amazed how quickly that zoomer “blood and souls” demon-curious thing flips around to “HOLY CRAP THEY’RE F*****G REAL, F*** F*** F***!” … and that’s when they show up at at our parish (and I assume Catholic parishes too– afaict they’re not sure what they need, but they’re pretty sure help looks like a dude in a cassock with a big hand-cross because that’s how it is in the movies).
Looks like they’re essentially atheists out the starting gate, and all that occult stuff is just edgy window-dressing. They don’t think it can hurt them because they don’t think any of it’s real. It’s just the thrills-n-chills of telling ghost stories around a campfire, same as 90s evangelicals getting into all the rapture stuff. Everybody wants a nice safe thrill because their lives are very boring otherwise. It’s a radical failure of churches that people can grow up ‘Christian’ and have no concept at all of the drama in which they are participating… so they have to go scrape up outside drama. Another rant for another day though.
On the plus side, they’re nice kids once they calm down a little. And they treat catechesis like they’re gonna have to pass a bar exam at the end.
From my experience, it’s that they see the occult and the supernatural as a silly thing like the creepypasta, SCP, and fake videotape, trends. Since they had no framing from Christianity to tell them that the supernatural is very real, dangerous, and needs to be taken seriously, they just stumble into it without any understanding or means of defense.
I used to wonder why so many people would choose to interact with a ghost on the surface of it. You can’t even touch them, and yet you want to get in contact with them? Are you insane? Even worse when you have people deliberately creating parties to go out and contact them for “advice” and the like. It’s all just so foreign to me.
That was before I realize one of the purposes of religion is to help tether your relationship with the supernatural on solid ground and make sure you don’t lose yourself to it. Otherwise, superstition and natural human curiosity will steer you into a spiritual minefield.
Without it, you get this mess.
Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft put it best when he attributed about 1/4 of haunting reports to souls from Hell and remarked “The mere possibility should be enough to discourage anyone from attempting contact.”
Think about it, well, future generations (I don’t even know which letter they are, X, Z, or other) are being prepared for life in a completely different world. See, e.g., this (obviously deeply related to the very meaning of faith).
A unique perspective on Tucker’s interview with Putin, the essence of which no one understood. (backed up with all the necessary sources). I mean, there really is nowhere else to meet it, backed up by the necessary factual justification. In case you are interested in more details, scroll down and review the next comments of the same person. This, for example (recommend). And I argue that this is exactly the actual reason for the interview (review, open the links and review more if you wish).
Explanatory context, concerning the above.
(I have no idea exactly what this site is and I don’t care; I visited it for the first time the day I made the comment. It is enough for me that it is a “site that allows my comments”.)
I’ve also had dreams in which I seem to be facing something very dangerous, so praying is obviously the right thing to do, but in which just saying the name of Jesus, or the Lord’s Prayer, or making the Sign of the Cross, or singing a worship song is somehow incredibly difficult. These do not happen regularly, but I have had them enough to remember that “croaking out a prayer with great difficulty” feeling. It bugs me how difficult it was to call for God’s help in those dreams.
That sleep paralysis comment was me– I’m not a millenial fwiw, born solidly a decade earlier at the tail end of genX. But I try to share about making the sign of the cross, whenever sleep paralysis/hagging comes up, because that s**t plagued me all my childhood years and it was fracking awful. I hope it can help someone else. When I can’t move, can’t talk, and can hardly breathe, I can still move my eyes– up, down, one side, other side, and call out to Christ and His mother for help, from my heart.
Dunno that it’s a uniquely millenial thing. Relationships in my childhood home were… emotionally strained. I think it left us vulnerable to the sort of petty spiritual parasites that feed on fear and anxiety. Must be the bodiless equivalent of ticks and leeches. But, you know… if we were *that* vulnerable, even with two married parents, church twice a week, siblings who looked out for us, and no abuse (benign neglect, perhaps– siblings and I joke amongst ourselves that we raised each other, we have always been each others’ backstop and remain close), where does that leave the younger cohorts, raised by single parents, electronics, and the internet, in smaller families with fewer siblings? Might as well be chumming the waters for sharks.