Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The First Nights
I was born into a family rooted in faith, an Otjiherero family that believed in God, in prayer, and in the quiet strength that comes from trusting something greater than yourself. Christianity was not just something we practiced on Sundays—it was woven into the rhythm of our lives, in the way we spoke, the way we greeted elders, the way we understood right and wrong. But even within that foundation, there were whispers—stories that lingered at the edges of conversation. I grew up hearing about distant relatives, people whose names I could never quite remember, spoken of in lowered voices. They were said to practice witchcraft, things not spoken about openly. As a child, I didn’t fully understand what it meant. But even if I forgot the names, something about those conversations stayed with me, like a shadow that had no clear shape.
What I did understand, even before I had the language for it, was fear. A deep, unexplainable fear that came with the night.
It started when I was very young—so young that I don't think I had learned how to read yet, so young that I should have been untouched by the kind of sexual awareness that would later define my childhood. Bedtime was not something I looked forward to. It was something I dreaded with a quiet, growing panic that I didn’t know how to explain to anyone. There were nights I would cry, not always loudly, but with a kind of desperation that came from knowing what waited for me once I layed down to sleep, it would start before I even fell asleep at times. I didn’t have the words for it then. I couldn’t explain what I was experiencing, couldn’t tell anyone in a way that would make sense. But I knew, with the certainty only a child can have, that something was wrong.
Sleep, for me, was not rest. It was an encounter.
There was a presence—unseen, but deeply felt. It brought with it a heaviness, a sense of being overwhelmed, of being trapped in something I could not escape. I later came to understand that some people call these experiences night terrors, others call them spiritual attacks, and some refer to them as incubus encounters (for men it's secubus). At the time, I only knew that it felt like something was happening to me that I did not choose, could not control, and did not understand. It was my first exposure to something that resembled intimacy, but stripped of all innocence, all safety, all understanding. It came before knowledge, before maturity, before I even knew what such things meant. That is what made it so terrifying—it arrived before I had the tools to process it.
What made it even harder, even more isolating, was that I was not alone in the room—but I was alone in the experience.
My sister would be right there beside me, sleeping peacefully. Her breathing steady, her face calm, untouched by whatever storm I was facing just inches away from her. I would sometimes look at her, wondering how it was possible that we could exist in the same space, under the same roof and yet live completely different realities in the same moment. She rested. I endured. She dreamed. I feared closing my eyes.
That contrast stayed with me. It planted questions in my heart that I could not answer as a child. Why me? Why was I the one going through this while everything around me seemed normal? Why did the night feel like a place of safety for others, but a place of dread for me?
Those nights shaped my childhood in ways I am still uncovering. They took something that should have been simple—sleep, rest, peace—and turned it into something I resisted with everything in me. And yet, every night came. Every night, I had to face it again.
This is where my story begins—not in understanding, not in strength, but in confusion, fear, and a child’s silent endurance of something far too heavy for her to carry.
