"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy."
Well, I clearly shouldn't have started reading this thread at work!
Those of you who experience night terrors: I can clearly see the relationship to the legends of incubi and succubi, and also to testimony that was occasionally given in trials for witchcraft, where witnesses claimed that the "shape" of the accused came and sat on their chests in bed at night.
I can't say that I, personally, have had any experiences such as I have read here, though the "pet experiences" remind me of what is, in fact, my earliest childhood memory. This was probably just a dream, because of my odd changes in perspective, but here goes. At the time I was so young that I was still sleeping in a crib. One night I felt that I could "see" a cat--or, more exactly, the shadow of a cat--walking straight up the back wall of our house and coming in through my bedroom window. It then climbed up and sat in an old armchair that was in the room, wrapped it's tail around itself, and just looked at me. I don't know why this terrified me, but it clearly did, as the next thing I knew/the next thing I remember, I was holding onto the railing of my crib, jumping up and down and screaming for my mother. When Mother came into my room, I remember pointing to the chair, and to this day I haven't forgotten how shocked I was when I turned to look at the chair, and there was nothing there. By the way, we didn't have a cat. My father hates cats.
My mother actually had more stories. When she and her siblings were still children, they had a cousin who died at a young age of some disorder that was untreatable in the 1930s. Mother told me that the night their cousin died, her sister (my aunt), who was standing at the top of the staircase in the house where they lived, clearly saw the cousin coming up the stairs toward her. He vanished when my aunt screamed.
Mother's most relevant experience actually involved my father. Daddy had a heart attack and subsequently a quintuple bypass in 1992. After he was home from the hospital, one night, Mother told me, she woke up and clearly saw her eldest brother, my uncle (who had died when I was still in high school), and her mother, my grandmother, who had died in 1980, standing by the bed. Mother said they didn't say anything, but that she just "knew" that they had come for my father. Mother said that she said to them, "No, it's not his time," and they vanished.
