Have you ever had those dreams at night seeing yourself levitating away from your physical body? That one dream which you thought you were awake, the things inside the room strangely the same and as real as it was before you slept and yet you feel this floating sensation, almost like you were flying away from your body; that so-called astral projection? Have you? I have had so many times.

It started when I resided with my husband in their house in a quiet neighborhood called St. Jude Acres. Though my husband had forewarned me about the paranormal occurrences in the area and particularly within the premises of their own abode. He had confirmed sightings of unknown hideous creatures lurking in the dark. Walking corpses in the middle of the night heading nowhere lined up in neat march towards what he presumes to be their final destination.  He claimed to have seen them as he peeped into one of the windows in their bedroom. Ghostly apparitions had transposed before him and yet he does not fear it.  Since early childhood, he had recurrent sightings of these creatures, which he regarded as lost souls, not knowing what inevitably will satisfy their unearthly thirsts.

Had he prayed for them?  That I am not certain, but I know for a fact that their presence would invoke a sense of alarm in him. Not fear of the supernatural, but fear that I might be consumed by the thoughts and sulk in so much panic and terror. And yet in my own silence I may have my little familiarity with the creatures not of our kind.

It started with a dream that seemed to have become a nightmare. I see myself lying in bed; my husband sleeping beside me and then to my right side was the door to our room. It felt as if there was a foggy manifestation that had gone inside the room and drawing my spirit outside of my body and into it, and I saw myself ascend from my body. I started to moan out but I could not hear myself speak, nor hear the sound of my voice. None of it has come out from my mouth. Was I mute? Afraid so yes. But I knew it at that moment it was a dream. I felt my heart beating terribly in my dreams and I felt the compulsion to awaken my sleeping husband beside me. He could not hear me!  To my fright and despair, my mere movements could not even awaken him! So I terribly shook myself and steadied the descend of my "soul" back into my body, as I prayed the Lord's Prayer and mumbled the words with such difficulty that my jaws almost soared by every word I uttered. The next time my eyes fluttered open, I was already lying on my bed, literally, this time, and my husband sleeping soundly beside me. I woke him up and he was surprised to see my in such fear of dying.  I could have possibly died in my dreams if I hadn't woken up. I could have breathed my last breath if I hadn't recited the Lord's Prayer. I know then I could have.

That was neither the first nor the last of my incident. It seemed to have followed me when we moved to our second apartment. The house as it seems is a quaint, quietly peaceful inside and out. Little did we know that some unfamiliar being might have been residing in the house long before we have moved into it. We were not certain about this until we hear the dogs howl at wee hours and even in daylight. Then we saw the markings in our room that bedazzled us.     

I was just done from showering when I sat on our bed situated right next to our drawer with a huge mirror on it. The reflection of the ceiling light from the mirror caught my eye and the pair of balls on my head riveted to what appeared to be a pair of palm prints on the mirror. Only they were no ordinary palm prints of a man who could have stood in front of the mirror and steadied himself by pressing his palms against it. It had appeared to be upside down!

As I neared myself to the glass with the fathomable prints, I discovered they had been fresh and oily. They had just been imparted on the mirror! I checked my hands for the size of the palms and I did so with my husband's but none of us seem to fit it well. The first palm to the left, which could have been the left palm, appeared to be stout but broad, with fat fingers and wider palm than my husband's or mine. The second one seemed a little lanky and slim, and yet longer than my husband's, and surely it didn't fit mine! Terror marked my face when I realized this must have been somebody else's hand on our mirror. Not ours.

This is a most unlikely situation because we are the only ones residing in that house. It has been like that for months now. And soon after this or was it before this occurrence that my dreams had recurred. The same fleeting of my spiritual body from my physical body, a scream could neither awaken me nor my husband sleeping soundly beside me.  It must be pretty weird that after I changed the position of my bed inside the room, the dreams had immediately disappeared. I finally decided it must have been something to do with that. Feng shui? Probably. Who knows?

But then again, it had not stopped for the house at all. One night, my niece in law was staying with us for the weekend when we let her sleep in our room alone while we stayed in the sofa bed in our living room. The following morning she had asked me if there was a resident ghost in the house we had not told her about. It bewildered me because we never spoke of anything to her about the house.  Yet she had told us that she's been dreaming about levitating from the bed with all the things around as they are and she had screamed but no one could hear. She awoke from the first one, but when she fell asleep again, she had the same dream only this time her uncle and I were there and we explained to her in her dream that the ghost will not harm her. Amazing isn't it?

And so it came to pass that we lived in silence and harmony inside that humble abode. We grow to appreciate the warmth of the interior along with the different colors we had painted out of it almost a year ago. It was an October weekend when we had worked with our painters to make sure we get all walls painted with different colors- pale orange for the living room, light banana yellow for the dining, powder blue for the bedroom, sky blue for the restroom and white for the stock room.  We wanted it as richly vibrant yet warm as possibly to compliment the surrounding natural beauty of the gardens and back lawn filled with fruit-bearing trees.  For some time now, we have called this our home, small and yet big enough for the two of us. It may not be ours for a lifetime and we may only be transients to that dwelling, we still consider it as part of us in a way and part of that mysterious spirit that resides in it. As long as we do no harm to him and to his home, we feel that we are still at the comforts of that domicile we call home.