I’ve talked about dreamwalking, but I’ve rarely discuss the price I pay for being able to bilocate while I sleep. On the nights when I do bilocate, I end up waking up exhausted – after all, I haven’t really been sleeping.

On some of the nights that I don’t dreamwalk, however, I have violent dreams. To the point that I struggle hard to fall asleep and struggle from insomnia because falling asleep for me has negative connotations. Unless I sleep in daylight hours, I am guaranteed to have violent dreams or nightmares.

So yeah, there’s a part of me that’s afraid of my dreams. Not the dreamwalking – while that can certainly get violent, that is generally within my control. I’m talking about the type of nightmares that leave you shaken for days afterwards because they seem so damn real why they are happening.

I had one that woke me up this morning, which is why I’m sitting here writing before 7 am and feeling a little cranky (as I went to bed at 1 am). At least I got six hours of sleep, I guess.

Anyway, in my dream/nightmare or whatever you want to call it, I had a friend over at my house. In particular, I had my friend over who is in a wheelchair, so this dream was very inaccurate. I don’t usually have people over (I live over 15 miles from town, so it’s easier for me to go to other people) and my house isn’t wheelchair accessible at all. Yet somehow she was over and while she was there, she arranged a date with a guy.

She gave directions to the house, and the guy came and picked her up and everything seemed normal, but when she left, I had this pit feeling in my stomach, and I locked two locks on the front door (there’s only one on my actual door). When I lay down to sleep (yay, dream within dreams. I fucking hate them), I was woken up by a phone call from her cell, and I picked up and assumed I was talking to her because I was still asleep. Then I realized I was actually talking to a nurse at a hospital, and I found out that my friend had been badly beaten.

I got up and got dressed to go to the hospital, but something didn’t sit right with me, so I grabbed my escrima sticks and cautiously approached the front door. Outside the glass panel on my door, I could see a brown rustic panwagon, which I knew was the truck the guy drove. And through my curtain, I could see his silhouette and the outline of a weapon – I knew he was there to attack me.

If I were someone else, this would probably be the part of the dream where I did something smart, like…I dunno, call the cops. But being who I am, I nudged the door open and got ready to attack him to see who would come out on top. He didn’t swing when he realized I had a weapon, and he actually had two baseball bats in hand. When he saw me, he laughed, and then offered me one of the bats. I don’t think he was really prepared for what happened next because I wasn’t either.

When I have dreams within dreams, they feel terrifyingly real, so my instinct upon seeing him was to call upon Odin. Since I’ve never been in any situations like that before, it was weird because I was able to call the berserker rage into me. Yeah, in my sleep. That’s actually what allowed me to wake up because I could feel my blood boiling. Needless to say, I kicked the guy’s ass before I woke up, but experiencing that kind of intensity in my sleep was a little weird.

Even though the dream was violent near the end, I also learned that I am capable of calling the rage. I’ve never needed to call upon it at all in my waking life, and I wasn’t sure I had the talent for it. Even though Odin came to me and chose me, I guess there was a part of me that still doubted whether He actually wanted me because, despite appearances, I do struggle with self-doubt and self-esteem. I think, to some degree, we all do. Being able to access that rage put an end to those doubts, however. And it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt in my life.

I’ve read some information about berserkers and how that rage affects people today, and there’s always a lack of control indicated by it. Perhaps it’s because I’m used to invoking certain entities (and yes, I do mean invoking, as in horsing/housing) that I didn’t experience a lack of control. Instead, what I experienced was a form of pure rage that coursed through my blood and made my blood feel like it was liquid lava. I never lost control of myself, but I can see that it would be easy to lose control of that type of power if you lost sight, for one second, of the reason for invoking the rage.

The truth is, my talent in the world of magic is so strong that it scares me, and I use it despite that. I know that I can access worlds most people can’t see, and I know that there are people out there who wish they could do what I  can. And even though my strength sometimes scares me because I’ve read over and over again that people can’t have the types of skills I do without having been properly taught, it’s like those rules don’t apply to me. I can’t find a proper teacher because all the people I’ve met who teach any type of magic aren’t strong enough.

And I’m aware that that could sound arrogant – it’s not meant to. It’s more frustration than anything else. I’ve learned more about my magic from the entities that I have contracts with and from the gods than I ever have from other people. In most magic circles, the fact that I can naturally invoke deities without ever having been properly trained to do it would be cause for alarm. It isn’t alarming to me. Annoying and exhausting sometimes, but not alarming.

The truth is, even though people complain about the use of the term, I have all the abilities of the shamans of old. I was born with spirit contracts already in place. I dreamwalk without effort, and I can invoke entities and spirits without having had the training. Perhaps it is blood-based, as I was born into a family where I was trained as an empath. Which isn’t exactly the same as a shaman, since empaths usually don’t deal with other planes of existence.

Yet there are people out there who say that it’s impossible to be born with magic, just a talent for it. I was world walking before I knew what world walking was by the time I was five years old. Mirrors still freak me out to some degree because I know that they can be used to access other planes – I walked through one when I was a child, and that’s how I came to be aware of the spirit contracts I carried over from a past life into this one.

And I would love to find a proper teacher, but so far, all I’ve managed to find are people who don’t think being born with magic is actually possible and people who aren’t nearly as strong as they think they are. I’m frustrated and scared because I need someone to teach me – instead of settling down as I get older, it’s like my powers keep getting stronger. And I don’t know how long I will be able to handle them on my own.

In general, people in the pagan community say that magic is supposed to take time to work. That sometimes you need to do repeated rituals in order to see progress. I wouldn’t know because I don’t need rituals. As an example, when you cleanse a gemstone of negative energy after using it to store the negative energy around it, most people will do some sort of cleansing ritual that lasts overnight in order to cleanse the stone.

I had a friend whose protective amulet was near to breaking because she hadn’t cleansed it in almost two months. I asked her to let me cleanse it for her, as it doesn’t take me more than a few seconds to do a cleansing. When I gave it back to her, she was surprised because the gemstone had dulled from the bright orange that it was (the sign it was near breaking). I didn’t actually notice that the color had changed and was afraid that the cleansing hadn’t held when she pointed out the change.  That’s what I mean by strength. The only things I was ever taught growing up were the simplest things an empath needs to know – how to center, how to ground, how to shield, and how to cleanse. Those four methods make up the cornerstone of my this-world magic, and I’ve honed all of those techniques, especially shielding. I have to do protective magic every night to keep certain entities out because I attract things without intention.

But I can’t really properly talk about my experiences with others, not even those in the pagan community. There are too many people out there who insist that there are no harmful entities lurking in the shadows to understand what it means to live a life knowing that they are always there. I envy those who can’t sense it, but I’m always aware of that weight. Especially because I have spirit contracts with very different entities, two of which would be considered demons by today’s terms, another that is a demi-goddess, and others that are spirits. From what I understand from the conversations I’ve held with them, I’ve had these contracts for millions of years over countless reincarnations.

I don’t know what those contracts mean for me overall, but I do know that I end up getting pulled into the other worlds to deal with some of the major things that happen there. I’ve had to help disentangle friends who have found themselves caught in a demon’s snare over vast distances. I have yet to find an actual distance limitation on my power, and that is also somewhat terrifying.

And the power isn’t scary because it’s so vast – it’s scary because of how much responsibility it means I have. I’m sure everyone has heard the quote “With great power comes great responsibility” and that is especially true in magic. The things I know, the deeper stuff, I’m not allowed to teach to other people. Even though I would if I could, the universe feels wrong when I consider sharing that…like somehow there are secrets that are too powerful for everyone to know. What I can share, I do so willingly. It’s just weird, seeing how close some people get to the things that I’ve been taught by the Gods and other entities and also seeing how far away they always are from the complete truth of a particular mystery.

I don’t really know what the point of writing this was, except perhaps to acknowledge that I now have another power I need to be careful of using with the berserker rage. I won’t ever turn away from magic because I am a born shaman, and I have things I have to do in this world and others that defy logical comprehension (which honestly frustrates me because I don’t like not being able to explain things with logic). That drive never goes away, and I think my magic is the reason that Odin and the others were drawn to me.

Part of me thinks that everything I write sounds insane, but I know that part of that is the fact I grew up in a culture that idealizes science and logic and tends to reject the things that can’t be explained away using those processes. I sometimes feel like I walk a tightrope between being stable and being insane, and I think that is just another part of the price I pay.