Dealing with Malicious Ghosts

Dream-lessons about fear. Also: I made something for you!

Photo by Yener Ozturk on Unsplash

One night nearly three years ago, I had the following dream:

We were at a house by the sea, and it was haunted by a malicious ghost. I didn’t know this at first, but one of us was a ghost hunter who had purposely come here in search of the ghost, whose name was Saul. At night I heard Saul’s voice in the stairwell: “I’m going to kill the kids.” (Which, I felt, included me.) I wanted to run, but this felt like something that you couldn’t hide from. The ghost hunter sat eagerly waiting for Saul. He thought Saul could do nothing to hurt him, but I knew: Saul could drive a person mad. There were strange photographs in that house, faces that shifted. I wanted to go down to the sea but it felt dangerous, everything did. Eventually Saul came for me, I was trapped, paralyzed, trying to scream—and I woke up, trying to awaken enough that I wouldn’t return to that place, but I fell back into the same dream.

This time I learned that after Saul died he underwent a vicious reprogramming that happened after people were killed: an evil spirit would torture all the goodness out of them and give them the anger and energy to haunt the living.

And oh, did Saul haunt us. He came to our apartment. Played a piano. In fact he had a job playing piano somewhere, and had left his paycheck on the counter. I was going to cash it so we could pay our rent, but he made me spill water on it so the signature washed away and it was useless. Saul thought this was hilarious. I was so frustrated I broke an internal window/cabinet thing in the kitchen, and all the glass looked like sharp little jewels, and he was playing the piano again, but then I saw the shadow of a monstrous bunny on the wall and knew that the rest of his “friends” were coming for us, the piano was just a distraction, and I filled my pockets with broken glass so that I’d have something to throw at them, and all the while he just laughed at me.

They tracked us down. Two giant giraffe-like creatures towered over me, growling and gnashing their teeth, and I was terrified and wanted to lash out at them—but at the last second I changed my mind. I surrendered. Just lay there, staring them down. And since I didn’t fight back, which was the energy they wanted—they feasted on conflict—everything changed quite suddenly. I watched as the giraffes transformed into the child ghosts they actually were. Saul, too, was just a child, and he transformed along with them, and off they all walked, no longer terrifying, finally set free, finally able to move on and cross over.

I’ve been thinking about this dream a lot recently. The mood of it, the pervasive fear, the sense of being trapped. I wanted to run, but this felt like something that you couldn’t hide from.

When I had this dream, I knew exactly what it meant. There was a specific inner ghost that was begging for my attention. It will continue haunting you until you face it, the dream said in its dream-way. And perhaps when you do, it will lose its power over you. I revisited this dream often as I was gathering courage to face that ghost. The giraffe teeth gnashing. Their hot breath as they closed in. The realization that my fear was the fuel they needed to continue their reign of terror, for underneath their monster-suits were scared children who could not escape the cycle until someone refused to feed into it—and in so doing, actually see them for what they really were. Their masks falling away. The situation immediately losing its charge and resulting in a profound transformation.

It was a transformative dream for me, too. Anxiety has been a lifelong pal of mine, so fear has always been there, walking alongside me, often guiding my choices. And I’ll give it some credit: it has often served as a worthwhile protector. But it also has closed me off from life in some ways. This dream showed me a different way to deal with it. Not by resisting and fighting, but by facing it head-on and consciously choosing to break the cycle. It was still many months before I had the courage to face the issue that this dream was urging me to deal with, but once I did, the inner freedom I gained was nothing short of life-changing.

Of course, not all demons are so easily vanquished. The forces wielding power in our current time are feeding insatiably on the ample fear and attention and outrage of the masses. Yet this fear exists for good reason. Many of us are facing very real threats to our families, our livelihoods, our safety, our very existence. Staring down those fears on an individual level will not remove these threats.

But even if these large-scale trends are beyond our control, facing our fears can remove fuel from those eager to feast upon it. This can also help us maintain our intrinsic power, which cannot be taken away by anyone or anything. This power is deeper and wider than our physical bodies. It is luminous and eternal. It is subtle and can take many forms, some of which might not even look like what we typically think of as “power.” It can also be very hard to access in a world that gives us ample reasons to deny its existence.

Though I know this power exists within us all, the feeling of powerlessness is real, and bubbles up frequently for me these days. All I can do is remind myself that we don’t always have control over what happens to us in life. But we can control how we choose to respond.

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It is a physiological truth that when our bodies are in a fear response, we simply do not have access to compassion, empathy, and critical reasoning—qualities that give us a wider perspective on a situation and allow us to act in a way that is not focused solely on self-protection. When we are in fear, we are in it. And because it is so pervasive and normalized, it has a sneaky way of making us feel like we are being rational even when our actions run counter to the things we say we value.

While it’s true that fear can give us helpful information that can help us survive a dangerous situation, living in a chronic state of fear wears us down and can cause us to give into our worst instincts. To heed the voices of our inner tyrants—which all of us have—as they begin to whisper more insistently in our ears: I am better than those people, more righteous than they’ll ever be. I deserve so much more than they do. How sweet that narrative can be when you feel afraid and powerless. The delicious lure of superiority and righteousness cannot be overstated.

And we are all susceptible to it. Every one of us.

Because fear has a way of distorting things. It is willing to bulldoze anyone or anything that gets in the way of what it wants: certainty, control, the absence of pain. It puts up walls, limiting our view, sealing off access to our wise hearts and insightful minds. It also renders us susceptible to manipulation and intimidation.

It seems to me that many people are so stuck in fear (fear that, again, is totally justified) that they act in ways that seem contradictory and illogical to outsiders. It’s not that they are idiots who refuse to listen to reason. They are just humans who are trying to survive in an increasingly hostile socioeconomic environment, and their fear-walls have grown so huge that it is nearly impossible to see anything beyond their own immediate situation.

I’m not trying to point fingers at “those people”—in fact, there have been times in my life when I was that very person. What I’m getting at is this: in our current world, it takes a certain amount of stability and safety and conscious intention to not be stuck in a constant fear response. It’s a kind of privilege to have access to qualities like compassion and insight. As such, if we have this privilege—even if only intermittently—we have a responsibility to use it whenever and however we can.

What if, instead of getting caught up in endless ideological arguments or moralizing about what other people should be doing, we widened our gaze to look deeper? Past the intimidating guises and gnashing teeth to the scared children inside who just want to be seen and held. Just by doing that, we might find a few fear-walls crumbling in front of us.

Or not. The outcome is not the point—we’re not talking about saving the world here. It’s just about doing what we can to shift things within our immediate circles. This is how we begin to break cycles, how we tend our luminous inner power and refuse to let our sparks go out. Not through grand gestures, but through the small choices we make every day.

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I Made Something for You!

Since I know I’m susceptible to falling into fear’s clutches, I have made it a focus this year to put the techniques I’ve been collecting into practice. I am constantly coming across wonderful ideas, but so rarely actually doing them! So, I decided to make a card deck and pick a daily practice at random. And I thought some of you might also find this useful, so I turned them into a printable. (You may recognize a few of these from the Forest Journey we went on during the fall.)

Feel free to share! My hope is that they can serve as both a soothing balm and a tool that strengthens your capacity to face this time with courage.