Beyond Realms & Reasons

Beyond Realms & Reasons

The following is a short tale comprised of true stories. Enjoy.



One thing that’s haunted me for years is the question of if demons are real.

As an adult, thirty-one years old and delving into the teachings of Kent Hovind, as well as unraveling the Biblical archeological findings and the conspiracies that surround the extra-dimensional science in the world—I can say, the tales of the Bible aren’t as fictional as folks like to think, and there are scientists in the world who know without a doubt that there is more in the universe than just us. Whatever it is that’s out there, however—they can scarcely tell you.

But, these are the tangents I delve into nowadays. Let’s go back in time to when I was just a kid growing up in a dysfunctional Southern Baptist family, attending a church where a large pastor would ramble scriptures half-assedly and recite the same rants every Sunday, never able to answer a complicated question. He went home to commit infidelities in exchange for pain medicine, as did a lot of thieving and lying members of my church. They weren’t Godly people. They were virtue-signalers, and they acted very differently at home than they did at church.

I noticed this hypocritical behavior from a very young age, and that—accompanied by other terrible family events—certainly destroyed my faith. The longer time went on, the dumber the idea seemed. How could there be a God, or angels, or demons? How could school teach me evolution when the church taught me creation? My family wasn’t good to me, and schools weren’t kind to me, either—so I simply stopped listening to everyone. I wandered through life, no beliefs, no certainty, and no care.

Years passed, venturing through different life events and feeling utterly lost, wounded, and infuriated by seemingly everyone. This was a time when I felt furious constantly, and I felt mad urges to simply hurt someone, or destroy something, nearly all the time. Life was wildly unfair, and I just wanted to make it unfair for everyone else, too. At least... sometimes, I did.

Once such instance transpired on a night when I stormed into a Walmart as an early teenager, thoroughly incensed over something my neglectful father had done. This was a common occurrence for me, and yet another drop of fuel to my fire; how could there be a God if my father was allowed to subject us to the abuse of a step mother so regularly?

It ate at me, nonstop, every day and night.

I thundered into the Walmart, suddenly not caring about keeping my behavior in check anymore. I walked past things, slapping items off of aisle shelves, shooting nasty looks at people, and periodically destroying whatever was nearby me. I simply didn’t care anymore.

Then, a plump woman walked away from her checkout line, and she strolled over to me, staring at me with her mouth slightly agape.

I stopped, returning her stare, waiting for her to say whatever it was she wanted to say to me, but she never did. She just stared, ogling me as if she’d never seen anything quite like me before.

I slowly turned away, utterly baffled, and I marched off. I spent the next half an hour or so just wandering aisles, not slapping items off the shelves anymore, just reeling, pondering on the woman and wondering what the hell her problem was.

Then, later, when I was about to make my way out of the store—the woman spotted me and approached me again.

“Hey... sorry,” she said, smiling and making a polite little wave. “I’m sorry I was staring... but I wasn’t staring at you. I was looking at that demon inside you.”

I said nothing, merely returning her stare and feeling vexed to speechlessness.

I thought about that for years.

My mother—a born again Christian during my later high school years—is convinced that demons can possess a person, and they can be brought on by family trends and curses.

And I—like always—scoffed and rolled my eyes at the stupid idea.

During the time of my late high school career, my mother was dating a very devout Christian man from Colombia. This man would frequently fill her head with things that would later cause me strife, at least as I saw it. He was convinced that a green demon stood over my bed at night, keeping me trapped and entangled in some web of torment. I thought this was a bold claim for him to make, since he didn’t know me or know fuck-all about me. Rolled my eyes a lot that year.

It’s also worth mentioning that my mother and I were fighting a lot during this time.

Well... one night, she and I are shouting at each other, and I feel pushed past my limits again.

Somewhere amidst the arguing, she just stopped, and her glare sharpened, staring intently at me like she was looking right through me.

Then, she jabbed a finger at me and started saying things like “And I REPEL you in the name of Jesus! You are NOT welcome here!”

This kind of stuff always seemed ridiculous to me—but this time, my reaction was different. I had no forethought, no snarky or sarcastic way I wanted to react. Instead, I got instantly pissed—the kind of pissed where your mind falls blank and you’re being steered by anger alone, which wasn’t normal for me to do—and I stormed past her, marching into the kitchen and grabbing the freezer handle. I opened and closed the freezer a bunch of times—ripping it open and slamming it shut, shaking things off the top of the refrigerator—just beyond infuriated, and not knowing why. She kept following me, saying the same things over and over again.

I shoved past her and plopped down on the couch, trying my damnedest to wish her away. I just wanted her to quit following me, and saying all that shit to me—and I clasped my skull, stress, and anger, and every hot emotion seeming to flood through my head all at once. It felt as if I was trying to focus all the stress in my body into my head. I don’t know how else to explain it—but I kept doing it until I felt a faint popping in my eyes.

I flew off the couch and stepped into my room.

I then slammed the door shut, fell onto the bed, and laughed.

It wasn’t a normal laugh for me, and nothing funny had happened. I don’t know why I laughed, but it was a weird, low, and cackling sort of laugh, escaping in breathless snickers and muffled into my pillow.

My mind was a total blank, utterly gone—and that wasn’t normal for me, either. I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Having silence in my mind is just not something that ever happens to me.

The laughing in the dark bedroom continued for a few minutes.

Then, through the bedroom door, I heard my mother on the phone with her then boyfriend. She said “Yeah... that’s exactly what happens when you’re possessed. Anger and laughing for no reason.”

Suddenly—it stopped like a switch had been flipped in my head.

Maybe it was fear, or realization, or just not wanting to prove her right—but the cackling stopped, and instantly, my thoughts were back, the same way they always were, no blankness, no anger, and no bizarre sense of absence from my own being.

Eventually, I fell asleep.

The next day, I woke up late for school, and I wandered into the bathroom, brushing my hairs. I didn’t feel too troubled about the previous night, deciding I’d just had an angry episode. I was angry pretty often back then.

But, when I looked into my own eyes in the mirror, it felt slightly more concerning.

Because, as I leaned closer to the reflection, I saw that the whites of my eyes were filled with big splotches of blood. Evidently, a few of the blood vessels in my eyes had exploded.

I never knew how I did that, I’d never done it before, and it never happened again.

Fast-forward to a year or two later, and I set out to live with some roommates.

One of my roommates was a girl named Cori, and she was an emotional type, very much an empath. She and I shared a lot of good memories. In fact, I had good memories with all of my friends there—but one thing that annoyed me a little bit was how they’d try on religions like outfits. They were always trying to find their way, always trying to figure out what they believed in, always looking for guidance. I didn’t want to be bothered by it.

At one point, during the time when they were all Christians, they were all scrambling around the apartment in a panic, looking for a CD that a friend had lent to them. I forget why, but they were convinced that a curse had been put on the CD and it was infecting the home with evil. I remember just standing in the living room that day, watching them tear the house apart looking for this CD, feeling embarrassed to live with them, almost embarrassed to even know them. Once more, I found myself scoffing, rolling my eyes at the ridiculousness of it all.

Sometime later, Cori and I were home alone, and we were just sitting on the couch, talking and laughing. This living room had a large mirror on the wall behind the couch, and we were sitting sideways and facing each other, so we were able to glance to the side and look at our own reflections right next to us.

I remember looking at mine for a second, for no particular reason, and I gazed into my own eyes quietly for a moment during a lull in our conversation.

Then—it changed for a second.

My eye looked bigger and cocked upright, my expression tweaked, yet somehow, vastly changed, warped into a stare I can only describe as silent lunacy, mouth crooked into a bizarre little smile. It was me—but clearly not me—staring back at me through my own eyes.

I blinked and gave the reflection a double-take, and it looked normal again.

I knew for certain that I hadn’t been trying to make a strange face for any reason. Instantly, I figured I’d just imagined it.

But I heard Cori gasp.

I turned to her—and she was staring at the mirror, her eyes widened, and her mouth drifting open. She looked shocked, and her gaze slowly wandered over to me, staring at me incredulously.

“Did you see that?!” she frightfully breathed.

I stared, not replying, but I felt a slow, sinking dread deep inside. I couldn’t have imagined it if she saw it, too—and I sat there, in total silence, my thoughts racing, trying to grasp for any possible explanation, but I never came to one. My head began to ache terribly before long, and the more I thought about it, the worse it hurt.

I knew why; my mind wasn’t able to make logical sense of what just happened, and it was giving me a migraine.

That instance with the mirror was something I included in a horror novel I wrote, a story called Nightingale. I imagine that a lot of my readers wouldn’t believe that the events of that book had some of my real life experiences in them.

I could go on about the instances of divine intervention I’ve experienced since then, and the back-to-make dramatic encounters that have convinced me that something extra-dimensional is targeting me. But... I think I’ve made my point now.

At this time, age thirty-one, I’ve learned the science of where creation meets evolution. I’ve learned that there are at least twelve dimensions beyond ours that scientists are aware of. I’ve learned that archeologists are still finding things from the Bible. I’ve learned that some people believe that schizophrenics hear terrible and negative things because they’re hearing from the dark entities beyond. I’ve learned that the Area 51 whistleblower was trying to warn us about these very beings on the radio before the transmission suddenly lost power in the 1990s. I’ve learned that Alistair Crowley said “Today, we call them demons... and tomorrow, we’ll call them something else.” I’ve learned a lot of bits and pieces of things—and I’ve experienced enough bizarre things—to lead me to one solid conclusion.

There’s more to us than simply us.

There’s more going on that we will ever be able to rationalize or comprehend.

And there’s one definitive rule of the demons beyond our realm.

They do not like us. They do not love us. And they do not want anything good to ever happen for us.

So—maybe there’s a reason to fear the whole ridiculous idea after all.

When you find yourself scoffing, doubting, and rolling your eyes like I have—just ask yourself one thing.

If you believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that there is nothing to our lives except us...

Then ask yourself this.

What if you’re wrong?