I think you can find out a lot from your dreams, sometimes I enjoy having nightmares because it can reveal if you need to change something. I kind of think of all dreams as movies, there's always a message in them that can unclot your mind. It's like a recount of your recent memories, I think the two are very simillar.
see, I've had fucking terrifying nightmares nonstop since I was a child. There's only the nightmares, I don't think I ever had a really pleasant dream. Sometimes my mind wags something pleasant in front of my eyes just to have me experience another fucking nightmare. I'm usually chased by something, or following someone who I loved, who is now gone. Those are the worst dreams, because they're actually "beautiful". Once I wake up and realize I can never see or speak to her again, that's worse than every nightmare, no matter how terrifying.
Scariest dream I had was when I took a lot of tabs and thought they were duds, turns out that half of them were either spoiled or dosed extremely low. So after like 2 hours of waiting I went to bed and had one of the most vivid dreams I've had (not gonna go into details) but when I woke up I got super shook when I couldn't speak and after looking around a bit I saw that sleep paralysis shadow, it was the first time it ever happened too.
I'm not that sure, but I think those Native Shamans used perform their rituals for that exact reason tho. Like that pipe smoking thing, which is the only one I know a lil about so far. I read a book about the history of such things but they didn't really go in depth about each individual spirit. There's this book about 'Black Hawk' the spirit which many Voodoos and Indians held in high regard, that is said to go more in depth about those kind of things. If I find it's name i'll post it but I remember looking for it ages ago and finding nadda.
At the risk of sounding crazy: Paganism is still very big here, and the Romans never fully took it from us, because of our strong traditions. My great-grandmother was known as a witch in her village, and she mixed potions and did readings, etc, so I'm not a stranger to 'spirituality'. Aaanyways, my aunt pretty much follows in her footsteps, and she did a reading with me and insists I'm experiencing a past life or something, that my death in a past life was excruciating, so it still haunts me.
Everything always has a rational explanation, like when people say they can predict weather, it's actually just them feeling discomfort in their bones or something (It happens to me from time to time when a sudden change in temperature happens, mostly before it rains or smthn but that's from slight nerve damage) or that thing about people puking frogs in New Orleans, most of the time it was just someone placing larvae/tadpols in unattended food. I believe that trying to understand it more spiritually can have a greater impact tho because of all religion that was present during human evolution.
I am religious, but only in an oldschool Pagan way.
Dead on, that's why Voodoo makes the most sense to me, not only because you can pick and choose what you believe but because those 'spirits' represent the fundamentals of personality and desire. A lot of witch doctors and priestesses were frauds and some never even tried to hide it. It's great therapy too in some places, I saw some vids of people getting beat out of alcoholism by a priestess who channeled a spirit and I see how that can have huge impact on those who were brought up fearing these boogey-men. If I had to choose between AA meetings and that, I'd choose them in a heartbeat, don't ever have plans to tho, I love my drink.
I respect religious people.
Magic is a great example of that too, people are afraid of what they don't understand, and was used a lot to make others fear and respect you. They turned people into Zombies to achieve that, what would happen is that a Shaman would poison an unsuspecting person with a specific type of herb that slowed down your heart and put you in a coma, after the burial he would pop the lid and reverse the effects making them wake up and lose their mind thinking they got turned into a Zombie. They actually shake up coffins at funerals for that exact reason, to make the 'corpse/spirit' dizzy and prevent it from coming back to town lol.
