I was in a hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee and I woke up with an intense fear not from this world; it was as if the life was being sucked out of me. I looked to my right, and in the left-hand corner of the hotel room, I saw an entity; it was a hooded, black figure, and it was sucking the life out of me. I don’t remember if I could or couldn’t move. I may not have been moving because I didn’t want to. Either way, I stayed completely still, most likely because of fear. I felt that if I didn’t do something, if I allowed the entity to stay, I would die. I believe it would have sucked the life right out of me. So, I said, “In the name of Jesus Christ, you can’t do this! Leave!” And as soon as I said that, it left.

At this point, I was able to move. I got up, walked into the other room, and grabbed my Bible. The air was still dirtied from what happened, so I read Psalm 91 out loud. As soon as I finished reading the chapter, the room immediately cleared. Now the air felt clean, and peace and rest came into my heart. I instantly got tired, and I was able to go back to bed and get full night’s rest. The next morning came and I didn’t tell anyone about it, because I thought they would call me crazy. But this experience was the catalyst for leading me back to Messiah in a huge way.

One of my SP episodes started out as a vivid dream. The dream went from color to grayscale, which, I’ve since learned, indicates an evil attack coming. It got dark, as though the room was decayed. I was lying down and, what at first appeared to be a person, was lying to my right. This “person” suddenly turned evil and started to smirk—literally from ear to ear. It had many, small sharp teeth—it was a demon. It grabbed my right arm, holding it down. As it grabbed me, I was taken from my dream and “woke up in the spirit” in my bed; this was a fluid change. The demon then changed into a featureless form. It was small. It hovered next to the bed on my right side, looking straight in my face, still holding my arm. It was not black, but more like a dark, dingy yellow that flickered to a dark gray or black, like the static on the old TV sets. It was moving in lightning-fast motions, back and forth, in a glitchy type of way; and every time it strobed, I could feel surges in my body as if I were being electrocuted.

I tried to move my arm but I was unable to, so I finally gave up and relaxed it. In my head I was saying, “Jesus help me,” and I was trying to yell, but I could not. So, in my head, I started to command it to leave and to get off me in the name of Jesus. It finally released me, and I woke up.

When I was about twenty-five, I laid down for an afternoon nap with my baby. I had a dream that a man with long hair was holding me down. There was an overly dramatic, vivid, stormy sky above us (think Gone With the Wind) and the sun was beginning to set. The man was on top of me, pinning me down, and screaming in my face. I could not move my body, but I was able to move my head. I turned my head, and I could see wide-open, double doors. Beyond the doors it was calm and beautiful, the grass was very green, and the sky a clear blue. The colors were all filtered in a brilliant technicolor, unlike any colors in the real world. I could see my sister-in-law sitting at a picnic table, happily playing with my two boys, totally unaware of what was happening to me on the other side of the doors. I was screaming and moaning and making all sorts of noises trying to wake myself up. I felt impending doom. I kept trying to scream to my kids beyond the doors, but they couldn’t hear me. Finally, someone in my house woke me up. I had been so loud that everyone in the house was aware of my nightmare, but they were only mocking me. I know that the place I was at was not a dream. It felt like I had stepped into another world.

A year and a half after I had the Gone With the Wind encounter (it was 1993 and I was twenty-seven years old), I was wide awake, driving down an isolated, rural, back road. A pickup truck with its high beams on came up behind me. It scared me because the truck matched the description of the truck in my recurring dream—a white truck with maroon interior. The truck hit the gas and screamed up beside me and began to drive parallel with me on the road. The driver then turned his interior cab light on. He turned and looked me in the eyes and contorted his face and began to shake his head with his tongue out, wagging at me in a grotesque sort of way. This, in and of itself was off-putting, but what terrified me even more was the driver looked exactly like the long-haired man in the Gone With the Wind dream. I really don’t have any logical explanation for any of this.

I began to experience sleep paralysis about the age of thirteen. My mother and my father were from an LDS background. My mother's genealogy contains direct links to the royal families of numerous countries. My father became a staunch New Ager, studied Transcendental Meditation in France for years, and he taught me and my sister about mantras and meditation when we were about nine years old. My mother often told me that she believed she was from a family of witchcraft (divination, sixth sense, etc.).

As a teen, I dabbled in drugs, including marijuana, alcohol, and magic mushrooms. I constantly sought new methods of divorcing myself from the realities of my life, which included an alcoholic mother and an abusive stepfather.

I experienced terrible bouts of sleep paralysis between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four, the worst of which occurred after my divorce from my first husband.

I experienced a great deal of not only terror, but shame, as these visitations were not invited, nor could they be explained. The only thing that seemed to help in these instances was literally crying out to Jesus for help...which often wakes me up from these states to stop these demonic assaults. SP episodes have rarely assailed me in the past twenty years since I have been deeper in the Lord and His Word. I have begun to understand the demonic causes of these SP episodes.

I awakened feeling fear again, but I was unable to move my body or speak at all. I was facing a wall and I knew something was behind me. There was no sound, but I knew something was there. In my mind, I cried out to the Lord. I do not know how long it was but, little by little, I was able to speak, albeit through a very tight jaw and gritted teeth.

Unlike the other times I had experienced SP, instead of being terrified, this time I was angry. And I resolved in that moment to never be intimidated by these entities or these episodes ever again.

Slowly, I regained my ability to move my head. I looked over my shoulder, and I saw it. It was a figure sitting in some sort of wooden rocking chair, but it was not rocking. It sat completely still and never once looked in my direction. I could not tell if it was male or female, but it was very, very old; think old witch with a huge, ugly nose. At no point during the incident did it ever look in my direction or utter a single word. Finally, through gritted teeth, I said, “You have no right to be here. I am a child of God. In the name of Jesus, GO! And do not return!” In a split second, it was gone, and it has not happened since.