God, angels and demons only visit when you are in bed

In 1990, I attended a men’s camp up north at Lifeway’s Ministries. The man in charge of Lifeway’s was a guy called Trevor Yaxley, a very inspiring evangelist. He led the men’s group and at the time, I thought it was an amazing camp. Yaxley had a lot of remarkable testimonies, one of them about having visited Heaven and seeing his dead son there. Obviously outrageous stuff, but things I believed without question at the time, no doubt because I really wanted to believe that the supernatural was real and there really was a God and a Heaven. 

Trevor told us a story about how Satan had tried to intimidate him one night. He awoke to see a presence in his bedroom putting on some kind of laser light show for him. According to Trevor, it was the devil.

‘So, I just laughed, rolled over and went back to sleep.’

This story was told to illustrate that the Devil had no power over you unless you let him. I say the Devil has no power over you unless you believe in him! Have you noticed that only people who believe in the devil have problems with him? Only people who believe in demons ever get possessed by them?

At the time I heard Trevor's story, I bought it hook line and sinker, but now when I think about it, it irritates me so much that I could have taken this story seriously. For one thing, it shows the egotistical nature of such evangelists who believe that the devil, if he was real, see them as a threat. It shows the fantasy world they live in that they believe a fallen angel could visit any Christian they wanted to at any time, even though that angel isn’t omniscient or omnipresent.

But why do supernatural visitations only seem to happen at night, when you’re lying in your bed? Could it be that these experiences are nothing more than dreams? Surely, that’s all they are as dreams are nothing more than your own sub-conscious conjuring up your darkest fears, strongest desires and pretty much anything that your conscious mind has been dwelling.  Why is it that these Christians who experience so-called supernatural visitations at night never just put it down to dreams? Are they that desperate to be able to say they were visited by supernatural entities?

A few years after this camp I had one of the scariest dreams of my life. I dreamt I was being chased by the devil and then suddenly I woke up. I was lying in my bed and there was no devil. Just as I was about to relax, suddenly something grabbed my foot. I looked down to see the devil down there with an evil gleam in his eyes. He tried to drag me towards him, but then suddenly. I kicked and screamed in terror, but then suddenly woke up for real. I was sweating and my heart was beating furiously, but I realised it was a dream within a dream.

If I had been an irrational person, I might have claimed that was the devil attacking me and used it as a testimony, but I knew it wasn’t. It was nothing more than a silly nightmare.

In my 40s, I encountered a new problem and that was dreams while I was a wake. These were something that no doubt many Christians mistake for real attacks or visitations because they were technically awake at the time. It would happen to me just as I was about to drift off to sleep or just in the process of waking up. I even had them to a certain extent at work, where I would start to enter a dream state, but then be shaken awake by a noise before I could actually fall asleep. I’m figuring it’s something that comes with age, which is why I never experienced these when I was younger.

The worst of these awake-dreams happen when coming out of sleep. There is a period of several seconds where you’re not quite asleep yet not fully awake. The first time this happened to me, I saw a very clear, but shadowy figure of a man looming over my bed. My first instinct was to take a swing at the man, but of course, my fist passed right through and it just clipped my bedroom window behind my bed. All I heard was a little clink as my knuckle just touched it and then I realised there was nobody there.

I knew it was a dream at that point, but it did freak me out a little that I could see something like that while I was awake. I rolled over to go back to sleep, but figured I’d better get up and check if the window was ok. When I turned on the light, I discovered there was blood streaming down my hand. When I checked the window, it had completely shattered. The next door neighbour was out there calling to me if everything was all right. I had shattered the window completely, but because I was still close to a sleep state when it happened, I didn’t hear it properly.  It was scary to think that a dream could fool me in that way, but I wasn’t going to resort to wallowing in ignorance and call it a spiritual attack.

It wasn’t the last time it happened either. Regularly it would occur where I’d wake up and see a shadowy figure beside me and would instinctively take a swing. Fortunately, I didn’t break the window again. I even moved my bed after several of those incidents, just to ensure I never did.

For a number of years I had similar awake-dreams on a regular basis and sometimes the figures seem very vivid, not just shadowy. I have even conditioned myself not to swing at them and just realise right away it’s only a dream. It is very irritating though because it initially gave me a fright until I realised it was only my subconscious playing tricks on me yet again. I believe they might have started because my house had been burgled a couple of times before I started having them.

I have now gone for more than 10 years without these dreams of shadowy figures at the foot of my bed.

It just shows me how easy it is to confuse what are actually dreams, with the supernatural. Superstition really seems to get a strong hold over ignorant people. Whenever anyone says they experience stuff at night, while in their bed, I have no doubts they just dreamed it. It really is that simple for me now. Guys like Trevor Yaxley , I see are people who want to believe they are somehow special, so they take those dreams, which seem very real and vivid to them, and convince themselves they are real.