Dreaming of demons: what it means, what traditions say, and what to do

The violinist who sold his soul to the devil in a dream

One night in 1713, the Italian violinist Giuseppe Tartini dreamed that he made a pact with the devil. In the dream, the demon became his servant and fulfilled his every wish. To test him, Tartini gave him his violin and asked him to play. What he heard was, as he recounted years later, the most beautiful music he had ever heard in his life, of a perfection he did not believe possible. He woke up breathless, grabbed his violin, and tried to play what he had just heard.

From that came one of the most famous and difficult pieces in the violin repertoire: the sonata *The Devil's Trill*. Tartini told the French astronomer Jérôme Lalande, in his old age, that it was the best thing he had ever composed and that it did not come anywhere close to what the devil had played.

The story shows something that anyone who has dreamed of a demon knows: those dreams are not forgotten. They stick with you for days, and almost always leave the same question: was it just a dream, or was it something more?

First, why the brain manufactures demons

Nightmares are born mostly in the REM stage of sleep, when the brain is almost as active as when awake and the area that processes fear is working at full capacity. If during the day you carried anguish, guilt, a loss, or a threat you cannot resolve, at night the brain puts a face on it. And the oldest and most universal face of danger is that of a demon.

Nightmares appear more when:

- You are under a lot of stress, anxiety, or going through a loss. - You sleep little or with altered schedules. - You ate a heavy meal, drank alcohol, or suddenly stopped a medication. - You watched something scary before going to sleep. - You have a fever or are sick.

If the nightmares are almost daily, you are afraid to fall asleep, or they ruin your day, consult a doctor or a psychologist: very effective treatments exist. Ruling out the physical takes nothing away from the spiritual. It lets you see clearly what remains.

When the dream comes with weight on the chest

There is a type of "dreaming with demons" that is not a dream: you wake up, you are conscious, you cannot move, and you feel or see someone in the room, sometimes on top of you. It is sleep paralysis, and it is the experience that gave rise to an entire family of demons around the world: the Mara in northern Europe, the incubus and succubus in medieval Europe, the Pisadeira in Brazil, the dead person who "climbs on top of you" in Latin America.

This experience can be so intense that in the 1980s, in the United States, it was studied seriously. Dozens of young, healthy men from the Hmong community, refugees who had escaped the war in Laos, died while sleeping with no apparent medical cause. The Hmong had a name for the spirit that oppresses the chest of those who sleep: *dab tsog*. Researchers like the anthropologist Shelley Adler concluded that the terror of that spirit, added to trauma, displacement, and a cardiac predisposition, could play a role in those deaths. For the Hmong there was no doubt: the *dab tsog* had found them even though they had crossed half the world.

What it means according to the dream

These are the readings that are most repeated in popular tradition. They are not rules: they are the way generations of people have interpreted these dreams.

- **A demon chasing you:** something you are avoiding facing. The more you run away in the dream, the bigger it gets. - **A demon attacking or hurting you:** a situation or a person that is truly wearing you down. - **Fighting a demon and winning:** the best of all. It is read as inner strength: you are overcoming what was weighing on you. - **A demon entering your body:** the feeling of losing control of something: an addiction, a relationship, an impulse. - **Praying or asking for help and the demon fleeing:** in the Christian tradition, a sign of protection. - **A demon seducing you:** medieval Europe had a name for that: incubus and succubus. - **Making a deal with a demon:** like Tartini. It is interpreted as the temptation to get something through a path you know is not right.

The shadow: the demon you carry inside

For Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who studied dreams the most, the monsters that chase us at night are often parts of ourselves that we do not want to see: the anger we never express, the desire we repress, the fear we deny. Jung called that the *shadow*. According to him, running away from the shadow in dreams makes it stronger, and looking at it head-on is the first step so that it stops chasing us. From this perspective, the demon of the dream does not come from the outside: it comes to show you something.

What religions say

In Islam, a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad teaches that good dreams come from God and bad ones from the devil. Anyone who has a nightmare is advised to seek refuge in God, spit softly three times to the left, change sides, and not tell the dream to anyone, so that it does not harm them.

In the Christian tradition, dreams with demons are read as temptations or spiritual attacks, and the classic response is prayer before going to sleep. The desert monks, in the early centuries, already warned that the devil took advantage of the night to attack those he could not touch during the day.

What Viresh Kartik says

In his *Energy Protection Manual*, Viresh explains why the night is the moment of greatest exposure: when you fall asleep you change planes, and if you are not protected, it is easier for something to approach you. That is why his basic practice, the shield, is done every night before going to sleep.

He also warns that there should be no mirrors in the bedroom, and much less one looking at you while you sleep, because mirrors are entry portals.

And he leaves a clear rule: do not get paranoid over a single sign. What matters is the whole. Nightmares are one of the signs that something is affecting you, but they only carry weight if they come with others: hearing noises or footsteps, feeling a presence, entering your room and feeling bad for no reason, waking up more tired than when you went to bed, feeling that everything is going wrong for you.

What to do

**1. Before sleeping, the shield.** Every night, the three shields: Clipeum, Clipeum, Clipeum.

**2. The bedroom.** Remove or energetically close any mirror facing the bed, and perform smoke cleansing in the room with sage, rosemary, and rue, especially in the corners.

**3. Lower the day's load.** No horror or screens right before sleeping, a light dinner, and consistent schedules.

**4. Do not run away from the dream.** If it repeats, upon waking write down what was happening and what you felt. Many times the demon points to something concrete in your life.

**5. If you feel a presence upon waking,** ask three times, naturally and without fear: "Who are you and what do you want?". According to Viresh, usually the entity withdraws.

**6. If it repeats and other signs appear,** the emergency protocol from the book, step by step.

How to make the shield, how to close a mirror, and the complete emergency protocol are in the *Manual of Energy Protection and Entity Attacks*.