For some time now, at least a couple of months, I've frequently found myself on the verge of saying or doing something that simply isn't me, if you know what I mean. I almost always stifle it before I can say or do whatever it is, and the few times I haven't been able to, it hasn't had serious consequences. But sometimes it could have had very serious consequences, and that scares me. It's like something is trying to put words in my mouth, or take over my behavior and use me to do something truly evil.

In fact, some of it has gone back to when I was about 2 or 3 years old. I've always been able to keep myself from doing the worst of it, which has included things like harming my pets and that sort of thing, even when I was a small child. But some aspects of it have intensified in the last few weeks, including impulses having to do with saying or doing things I really don't want to do. I honestly think that becoming ill in the last few days has had more to do with my soul's way of protecting itself from being taken over by whatever it is than anything else, though stress, fatigue, and that sort of thing have also contributed their fair share to it. I don't think it will succeed in possessing me, but it's wearing me out and making me ill and at my age and in my state of health, this isn't good. Above all, I have to do all the heavy lifting involved with getting rid of the furniture I have to for Housing Authority, unless I can sell a couple of pieces of it, and this is slowing me way down. The next inspection is in early May, about 2 and a half weeks from now, and it's critically important I get that done. But there's more.

When I was about 7, something suddenly landed on me one night, invisible and "all in the mind," but very, very real, and started yelling at me in a voiceless voice, the way it happens in dreams, "Sell your soul to the Devil! Sell your soul to the Devil!" Now, I wasn't raised in any religion, and while I'd seen the phrase in books and had a general idea of what was meant by it, it wasn't anything that had any personal meaning for me. So I knew that that demand was totally off the wall, and I would not give in to it -- I had no idea what it would have had me do -- not even to say "Yes," and I had to endure it for hours. And when I got sleepy, it started in with, "If you fall asleep now, that means you sold your soul to me, so you can't win." I knew that was utter BS, and finally I drifted off to sleep. I was washed out the next day from lack of enough sleep, but my schoolwork didn't suffer from it -- I was way ahead of the class on everything, and kept up with it all easily. Then, that night, I went to bed, and the same thing happened. First the demand to sell my soul, then the claim that if I fell asleep, that meant I'd sold my soul, etc. etc. I did my best to ignore it, and finally fell asleep. Okay, this went on and on for a year and a half. Finally, it stopped happening. But by then I was so sleep-deprived that it was hard to keep up with anything, school or otherwise. And I already had the beginnings of the insomnia attacks that have made my life a living hell ever since. I never dared to tell anyone about those attacks, which made no noise, alerted no one -- I knew that they'd just use it as an excuse to put me in a madhouse. So I never tried to reach out for help from the thing.

When I was not quite 14, my adoptive father died, on Pearl Harbor day 1958. Beginning right after his funeral, I started to have three night-terrors every single night. Night-terrors, also called pavor nocturnes, aren't mere nightmares, which are just unpleasant. Night-terrors are states in which something is out to get you, and you know, with absolute certainty, that if you do not wake up right now, it will get you and then it will only make you wish you were dead. That sort of dream. It's a lucid dream, in which you are aware you are dreaming, and find you can do things in that state which have real effects in the waking world, but more properly called a lucid nightmare. And all you can do in that state is fight to wake up -- whatever Magick is being done in them is all done by whatever creature or creatures are pursuing you. To you, if you don't wake up.

I had one of those when I was five, and it was horrifying. I was standing in the sun-room of our house, a made-over porch with windows on the southern and eastern sides, a bar in the northeast corner, a fireplace on the west, large doorways into the living-room (west) and dining room (north), and a set of two couches made of bamboo wicker (soft cushions with it) and a bamboo table between them that stood in front of the fireplace. Both couches were oriented east-west. The Sun was out, and it was around noon or 1 p.m., so the light coming in through the eastern and southern windows should have been bright, filling the room with radiance. But the light was somehow curdled and dim, the way it is when there are thin, high clouds it comes through, and contributed to a gloomy, doomy aura of the room. That light seemed sick, the victim of some ghastly wasting illness, and it sickened me to my very soul.

On each end of each couch stood a gigantic flame, that nevertheless did not burn the cushion it stood on. That's all, just those four flames. They had no faces, no features, just giant flames. And each one was aware of me, and it was gloating at me. In the dream, I was standing between the eastern wall of the room and the eastern side of that table, maybe 10 feet east of the table, and it was like looking straight into an opening into Hell itself. I don't mean with flames or anything, no demons, nothing like that, but in the dream that whole area was somehow infernal, the way you know things in dreams. I knew also that I had to fight to wake up or . . . I had no idea what, just that it was horrible. So I fought my way out of that "dream," screaming -- and what I got for that was getting royally chewed out by my adoptive parents, because I woke them up as a result of my screaming.

Okay, the dreams I started having right after my adoptive father's death were all at least that bad, or much, much worse, and I had </i>three</i> of them every single night, with very few exceptions. It went on and on for a year and a half, until I was totally worn out by them, and it got so that if I didn't have one on any particular night, I was bored. And after one abortive attempt to reach out to my adoptive mother for help, I never tried to tell anyone about them again until I was on my own -- she wanted to have me put away on the basis of one of those night-terrors.

Years later, living in downtown Santa Barbara, one night a bodiless midnight-black presence manifested itself about 10 feet outside my kitchen window, which faced west. I could feel its presence, which radiated pure evil like you wouldn't believe, a sort of gloating glee mixed with an intention to do as terrible harm to me and everyone else, to the whole world, as it could. Mind, I couldn't see it at all with my physical eyes; in that sense it was perfectly transparent. But there was an aura, and on the Inner Planes, it was dead black, a sort of radiant black, evil star, a hole in our universe opening on Hell itself, and this whatever-it-was had just emerged from Hell and put itself in front of my kitchen window. I was two stories up, so this wasn't due to somebody on the ground, nor to any birds flying by, and as it was completely invisible, only its psychic presence manifest, I'm not sure what it actually was. There was nothing moving that I could see anywhere outside that window, either. The only other thing I remember about that evening was that Pinatubo, a huge volcano in the Philippines, had recently undergone a massive eruption, and the dust it had thrown up tinged sunset skies all over the world with a lovely violet wash, had been doing that for a few weeks, and continued to do it for several months more. The days were cooler than normal worldwide because of it, too. But that had nothing to do with that thing outside my window, save for the timing of it, somewhere in 1974 or 1975. Anyway, I let out a scream, made sure the window was closed (it was, because it was so cold that evening), and called up someone I knew to tell her about it. She said something like that had appeared outside her window at the same time. She may have been lying for the fun of it -- later, she turned out to be a sociopath, so you know how trustworthy her claims were. But anyway, after talking to her, I went back into the kitchen to see if the thing was gone, and it was. (I knew someone once who'd been born and grew up in Santa Barbara, CA, named Jim Taggart. He had an experience once as a boy when, walking in downtown Santa Barbara, he suddenly felt the blackest, most terrible presence he'd ever known. It only lasted a few seconds, he said, but it was pure evil, something beyond anyone's ability to describe coherently. He had no idea what, if anything, it wanted of him. It vanished, and he never experienced it again. I've heard other stories from people who have lived there, and read some collected into books, about truly evil beings, ghosts, non-corporeal presences, spooks, haunts, you name it, that literally infest that entire area, from the coast to the mountains above the city and the rest of Santa Barbara County, and they're enough to scare the liver out of you! Some people even claim that some of the many violent crimes that have occurred there over the years were carried out by either those whatever-they-ares or people possessed by them, and it could be true. The Manson family lived in the foothills there for some time before moving on and committing those murders they finally were arrested for and tried and convicted of. It's considered to be a sort of world capital of occultism -- anyone and everyone at all interested in the occult usually ends up at least drifting through there before moving on to other places, or actually settling there for years or life. Santa Barbara is a physically beautiful area, but it often has horrifying effects on those who live or move there, such as the world-famous academicians who are invited by faculty at the University of California at Santa Barbara to visit there and give a guest lecture, fall in love with the place, move there, settle down -- and for then years, produce nothing. No books, no major papers, nothing of any note. Then they move away -- and suddenly they're writing book after book, paper after paper, one novel or whatever after another. Why?)

I've had things like that happen all the time to me, beginning in early childhood. Ditto my night-terrors. Whatever is causing them is back again, this time to try to make me lose my Housing Authority aid -- or sell my soul to it to keep my lease. I don't know what it is, but it's dangerous and mean. I'd literally rather die than give in to it -- I know what Devil's bargains are like: any you make always backfire in the most terrible ways. So this one may end up killing me, because I will not give it what it wants. Unless it can be chased away somehow.