The Gate of No Return

Recently, I was listening to an episode on The Castle of Spirits. I usually just put the podcast on as a playlist so it runs in the background, and I don't know which episode it was but It was about someone who heard panting under their bed.

It was a super creepy story, which inspired me to write my first submission to the Castle of Spirits about my first paranormal experience - The Growl and the Rasp.

This person also mentioned that they would see scary faces floating around them when they closed their eyes, but only in their parent's bedroom. They had asked if anyone else had experienced anything like this or knew anything about it.

I felt a sense of kinship with this person when I heard the story and I wanted to mention that ever since I can remember, I periodically see images of things when I close my eyes. This can happen when I'm trying to fall asleep, when I'm waking up, or when I'm meditating. Sometimes, it can happen in the space of a blink when I'm in mid-conversation with someone.

It doesn't happen all of the time, but it happens enough and with enough variance that I am aware that there are different types of images we can see in our minds. I am also aware that sometimes it's just static or visual 'noise' our brain creates as we are winding down towards sleep or waking up from sleep. However, I am also aware that sometimes these images or visions come with intention and are a form of communication. I have learned this through the process of documenting the visions and finding out that some of them are precognitive, and some of them form a kind of repetitive symbolic vocabulary my subconscious mind uses to actually help me figure things out. The images are another way that information and intention can be communicated via energy that comes in clairvoyantly.

I think that clairvoyance is a bit more common than we realize, but for most of us who are that way, we grew up thinking that everyone sees things when they close their eyes sometimes lol. Either that or it was discredited by others that we just learn to bypass and ignore it. I actually had to remember this ability because I had so deeply suppressed it that it would go on in the background and I didn't notice it. It wasn't until I became interested in studying psychic phenomena that I realized this happened to me.

The thing to note is that if our subconscious can use images to speak to us, so can anything or anyone else who understands how to:

#1. Transmit information or intention in this way or:
#2 has a strong enough energy and skill to broadcast its energy to any sensitive person within its influence.

One thing to note is that sometimes a person may have a slight sensitivity to clairvoyance, but they can only receive visions when in the presence of someone or something that knows how to transmit. Like, they have the ability but it's not developed enough to happen without some help from a source that does or, again, simply has powerful enough energy that the person sensing the energy 'picks up' on it.

For myself, I have experienced this type of phenomenon as flashes of images as if I were switching channels on a TV. The images may or may not be in color, may or may not move or be still, and may or may not seem related. The images can range from faces of people I know or don't know, to trees, a table, a clock, or an image of a woman doing laundry by hand somewhere in India. It can seem pretty random sometimes.

But, other times, rather than flashes, the images form slowly out of light and often a preceding sensation in my body. The images seem to move across my vision and form into shapes as they move. It reminds me of the way that energy can and often does manifest as a type of mist that then takes the shape of a person and then vanishes. I’ve noticed this type of thing in many paranormal ghost encounters. It's the same experience, but it happens only in your field of vision when your eyes are closed.

This type of experience sounded similar to what this person who saw the floating faces had experienced. I have definitely seen faces like the ones they described before. I have also experienced certain types of images being localized to specific locations. For instance, I didn't realize this until I went to Hawaii. I visited in 2021 and again in 2022. The first time I was there I was doing a group meditation with my friends and I began to have flashes of totem faces. I hadn't even been there long enough to have seen any of these totem gods, and I was really surprised when I started to see them in my mind. I had never had visions of anything like that before, and it only seemed to happen when I was in Hawaii.

I mentioned that I had to remember this ability to accept that it was there that's because the reality is that this ability can something be terrifying, especially if you don't know what I know at this point. Even so, it can be very scary. I think that one thing we do especially as kids, is try to pretend the scary things that happen to us didn't actually happen. I think a lot of time it's because we know that no one will believe us anyway and we will be told it's not real.

So, when we have no support or context for these frightening paranormal events, we learn to shut them out and even forget about them sometimes. My experience with catching myself doing this as an adult was one of the most horrific and disturbing psychic experiences of my life. I didn't want to acknowledge what I was seeing because it was awful, but once I got beyond the fear I realized what was happening was also incredible. Someone or something wanted me to see something specific and I realized I had the ability to receive information clairvoyantly.

I was lying in bed one night in my mid-thirties. I hadn't watched anything or read anything related to the theme of the images I began to see. I began to see flashing, in-color, repetitive images of African slaves and their experiences on the ships or a ship that carried them to South America (I assume). I saw images of the Africans and the focus was on the brutality and immense suffering that they endured on these journeys. I would see close-up images of infections on body parts due to the horrible living conditions, I saw the African people in chains, being abused and dying with immense suffering in the cargo holds of the ships.

It was devastating and horrifying and I was overwhelmed by the disturbing nature of these images and they just would not stop coming. Once I accepted what was happening, I began to work on not just being frightened by it. I focused slowly on calming myself and asking if the images were coming from me. I knew they were not my images and so I began to focus more and more on what felt like ‘me’ and what did not. The more I focused on my own energy and on being calm, the less and less aggressively the images came. They began to fade into the background. I also made a point to acknowledge the images and the story I was being shown, realizing that possibly something wanted me to see and acknowledge this very sad and very terrible story. I did my best to do that and send love and acknowledgment.

The weird thing about this story that didn’t occur to me at all at the time, is that when I was nineteen years old, I had lived in West Africa in Benin for three months. I had been living and working on a hospital ship that provided medical services for the local villagers.

During my off time, I would travel with my friend Josh to different places in the country. One day he took me to a place called Ouida. Not only was Benin said to be the birthplace of the Voo Doo Religion, but it was also home to a historical beach that slavers had used to transport Africans who had been kidnapped both by slavers and other waring African tribes onto the transport ships. I still have a photo of myself standing under a towering archway that had been made as a memorial to this terrible time in history. Carved on the top pillar of the archway was a line on either side of people in chains walking towards a ship at the center of the archway. I had also completely forgotten about this photo until I wrote this story to you right now. The archway is called ‘The gate of no return’.

I am getting the chills….

Even though it was at least fifteen years before that experience of the visions, it was the only thing I could think of that made it make any sense. I still don’t fully understand why I had that experience when I did, but it did teach me that it’s very important to document these kinds of experiences so you can have a better opportunity to learn from them and not just be freaked out by them. I think that time doesn’t work the same way in the world of energy and this is why a lot of psychic experiences can be really confusing.

But it does make me wonder about how all of these ghost stories that we simply find to be spooky and mysterious don’t have some kind of backstory with depth and maybe even tragedy attached to them. Either way, I try my best to learn from them.