Are you interested in angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, influence, and how to protect against the unknown? If so, then welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
K-A-L-S-H-I. Calci. Trade what's next? $18 plus only. Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Event contract trading involves risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Kelche products are not available in all jurisdictions. Prices, values, and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information, see Kelchi.com slash regulatory.
In one of his most well-known stories at the mountains of madness, HP Lovecraft wrote, It is absolutely necessary for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of Earth's dark, dead corners and unplumed depths be let alone, lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black layers to newer and wider conquests.
This quotation has aged very well, considering the occasional news story that pops up every once in a while, not to mention horror movies, concerning thinning ice caps, unleashing long dormant viruses and bacteria. But that's not what he was talking about, nor is it what I want to focus on for today's topic. I've spoken about this in a few venues, most recently in season 5, episode 13, the season finale, with Father Birdsong and our talk about generational curses. For my entire life, I have suffered from horrendous nightmares.
I've even gone into depth on that in my episode The Dangers of Dreaming Demonic, where I recounted a trinity of dreams about the infernal that actually inflicted bodily pain. Not that I expect anyone to pay attention to release dates around particular episodes. I mean, I barely do myself, and I exude blood, sweat, and tears on this podcast. But that one came out about a year ago. And until two weeks ago, I can claim for the first time in my life that I had been nightmare free. The important words in that sentence are had been.
Hello all, and welcome to season six, episode five of the Southern Demonology Podcast. As always, I am your friendly neighborhood ancient demonologist JJ. Let me give you a very brief recap of events. After my three demonic dreams that I had in the course of three and a half days, I just so happened to be the guest on the Nikolayan TV YouTube channel, and I asked the bishop about them. And he was generous enough to provide me with a blessed medallion of Saint Benedict. Father Birdsong gave me another.
Then after purchasing a very cheap chain on Amazon, I am not a jewelry person by any stretch of the imagination, as you can probably tell by looking at me, I proceeded to wear both of them continuously. It took me a while to notice, considering that I'm not the most observant individual on the planet, but I realized on one day that I hadn't had a nightmare in several months. And to be honest, I was simply amazed. Now, when I went to Japan for a week back in February, I did remove the medallions as they don't mix well with metal detectors.
And unfortunately, my fat fingers, as you can see here, similarly don't mix well with tiny chain clasps. So I kept them off, but still near my person, and as an experiment, I placed them gingerly on my nightstand right next to the bed to see if they would still continue to protect me. And that they did. I even purchased an extra large Saint Benedict medallion from Deacon Josh's Etsy shop and gave it to my mom as she suffers from the same. Can you imagine suffering from something for so long only to be liberated by it?
To not wake up gasping in the middle of the night, but rather awaken refreshed in the morning? Now to be clear, my dreams changed a bit, but not nearly as much as you might imagine. I've always dreamt of extremely large labyrinthine structures. I would find myself in a school, a hotel, a mansion, a mall, or even a house. And strangely enough, even after waking up, I could still chart my way around these large structures. Thank God I have an excellent sense of direction.
If you've ever seen any of the fabulous backrooms videos or are familiar with the Forever IKEA store from SCP lore, then that is exactly the scale of the structures that I'm speaking. By the way, did you know that A24 is currently producing a backrooms movie? Sorry for the random interjection, but I am really excited about this. If you've never heard of the backrooms, I'll post a playlist in the show notes so you can check it out for yourself. It's all on YouTube.
But now that my dreams have been stripped of their nightmare elements, rather than getting chased or having horrible surprises thrown my way, the dreams became much more repetitive in nature. I would even classify them as boring. Now, there were still some interesting ones here and there, but they were the exception and definitely not the rule. Emmanuel Kant, before he wrote his critiques, had pinned the treatise entitled On the Aesthetics of the Beautiful and the Sublime.
And except the fourth and final section of that book, which is all about applying his theory to the different nationalities of Europe, which is just as subjective and stereotypical as you might imagine. The work is really amazing. It even earned Borin Old Kant a nomination to the Professorship of Poetics, if you can believe that. And if you would indulge me just for a moment, I want you to consider that. Emmanuel Kant was a prolific philosopher and thinker. Absolutely. But artistic he was not. He was a man of rigid precision.
They say that the outlook who governed the clock tower in his hometown would set the clock by his five o'clock constitutionals. And when he came down with an illness for a week and was bedridden, that disrupted the timekeeping of the entire town of Knigsberg. And if you've ever attempted to struggle against his impenetrable long sentences found in his critiques, then you may come to get a glimpse at the man's precision, to put it as politely as possible. In fact, there's a quality I have found in most Kantian scholars up to the present day.
Now, some may call them boring, but let's stick with the less pejorative term of precise. Sorry for the introductions, but I am coming to a point here, I promise you. Kant in his work acknowledges two different categories that comprise the aesthetically pleasing, the beautiful and the sublime. Think of beauty as a valley filled with flowers and deers grazing. It fills the heart with warmth and light. On the other hand, think of sublimity as a mountain with a thunderstorm over its peak, lightning raining down its slopes. It's a magnificent sight, absolutely.
However, rather than warmth, it inspires awe and even fear. Now I don't know why, but I fall much more into the sublimity camp than anywhere else. I prefer gothic to the Renaissance, overcast days to sunny ones. Maybe it's because I grew up drawing monsters for fun, drinking in the copious ghost stories from where I happened to live, or that I was raised on a steady diet of hellfire and brimstone sermons from the Baptist church right down the road. Whatever environmental factors were were the cause. I love the horrible and the terrifying. I actually wouldn't be doing this podcast if I didn't.
And in a weird way, my nightmares were my constant companion for my entire life. Don't get me wrong. Yes, they scared the ever living bejesus out of me, especially when they started causing me physical pain. But after they went away, I find myself also strangely missing them. I kind of felt like Saint Augustine, minus the holiness, when he said his infamous phrase, save me, Lord, but not yet. And then I got a dose of what I used to deal with. Two weeks ago, I had a dream. And of course, it featured demons. Worse, it also had friends and family in it.
I was attending college with in a massive city enshrouded in twilight. And as luck would have it, I ran into the sister of one of my real life best friends and found out that she was attending the same college and in fact lived in the massive skyscraper that we were currently standing in front of. I told her how happy that we were all attending the same school, and we made plans for us to catch up later that night.
However, my perspective shifted, and suddenly I was looking at two shadowy figures with glowing red eyes, also standing at the base of the building, and they proceeded to run up the side of it and then phase into her floor. The last thing in my mind's eye that I saw was the pair summoning forth a legion of other entities before they all marched into her apartment. Fortunately, I did not see what happened next, but I did hear the scream of sheer terror that echoed throughout the hallways.
My friend and I arrived later at her door only to see the aftermath of that encounter. Then that scene shifted, and I was back at my mom's house. But something was very wrong. It was night there as well, and a large part of my family was sitting around the kitchen table discussing how we were to survive the night, considering that these infernal entities were seen stalking the property. My uncle Ernest, who passed away a few years ago, was there leading the hushed and harried impromptu strategy session.
This nightmare was more than jarring, not only considering the people involved, but also from just the lack of such night terrors. Needless to say, I slept no more that night. Did you know, at least where I'm from, you're not allowed to tell someone of your nightmares until you've had breakfast, or otherwise you invite the visions to become reality? It might be superstition, but it's one that my family lives by to this day. And so do I. Now, the second dream, which occurred a week ago, was even more horrific. So much so that my mind refuses to remember all of it. I was once again in college.
Man, my dreams are like starting to sound a lot like anime's obsession with high schools. And I was living in a huge campus. I decided to take an advanced film course, something that I've never done in real life, that happened to be taught by the dean of the school. And he held it in his house, which was, of course, conveniently right next door to the main campus. His residence was really more of a mansion. But as I was taking the course with a female friend, the long walks to and from class were pleasant.
We were the only two in that course, and the entire class involved us watching three movies. Unfortunately, each of these films were a horror movie, and they somehow had the ability to physically affect us, the viewers. Think of it as extreme class participation, if you will. I remember each of the films being very in-depth with entire horrific plot lines, and that my mind refuses to remember no matter how much poking and prodding I do to recall them. But what I do remember vividly are the effects of the films.
While I would remain unscathed, my female colleague would either be put into horrible situations or physically transformed into something related to the film. For example, the second one involved a demon worshipping cult, and suddenly these tall robed figures surrounded her and encased her in some type of metal contraption. All I could see was her face, which was suddenly covered in blood. And I kept screaming at the professor to stop this at once, but all he did was sit in the corner and giggle at himself, delighted at what he was witnessing. After that second class, I never saw her again.
I remember attempting to navigate my way through this mansion to talk to the dean and try to find out what happened to her. But after each film, different hallways would be blocked off or opened up, just like in a video game. And each time it was a tour to find where your destination was. Now eventually on that third class, I did find it, and I was forced to watch the third film as I too was transformed into something. And that is when I woke up. I'm going to be honest with you. I don't think that telling you my dreams makes for the best content.
Furthermore, I don't use them as easy sources of content, like dried-up ghost storytellers once again opening up Reddit to share other people's stories. In fact, nothing pisses me off more than that. Further, I find it highly embarrassing to open up to thousands about what happens in my mind during unconsciousness. Yet I am the one who opened this door of documenting the strange journey of a land suddenly without nightmares. And I feel I would be doing a disservice if I didn't document the bumps in the road I've encountered on the way. Of course, it's not like I'm selling magic metals.
I'm not selling anything at all beyond a Patreon membership. And I'm too embarrassed to talk about that for most of the damn time. But at the end of the day, I don't want to promote something and give someone else hope without acknowledging honestly how my own experiences in life is going. I don't know why I suddenly started having nightmares again. Work has been a tad more stressful than normal, but not extraordinarily so. There's no obvious smoking gun that I can point to and confidently say, you are the reason for this vile influence. Trust me, I wish that I could.
In fact, the only thing that I can possibly think of is something that the bishop from Nicolayan TV said was that during the time of Lent, the veils between the spiritual and this world are much thinner than normal. Maybe that's it. I don't know. But at the end of the day, I still consider myself extremely fortunate. Two nightmares in one year is vastly improved over nightly night terrors. Going back to the quotation I said at the beginning of the show, I am overjoyed that I can leave the dark parts of my mind far more often than I ever could before.
Now, before I wrap things up, I want to cover a very, very important topic. On April 21st, we lost a true servant of God, Pope Francis. The man preached the word of Christ, and I feel that he truly moved the needle that towards love and acceptance for all. And for that alone, I honor his legacy. Now the Catholic Church has a new Pope, Pope Leo the Fourteenth. In an address, he stated that he chose that name to honor his predecessor who existed during the Industrial Revolution and he advocated for workers' rights and fair wages, amongst many other things.
Pope Leo the Fourteenth stated that he sees himself at a similar junction with the rise of AI, and I pray that he is able to further the church during this time. Now, none of what I just said should be controversial, especially if you are Catholic or Catholic adjacent. Yet strangely enough, it is. And I have been and continue to be shocked and horrified at such a viewpoint. You know, I wasn't the biggest fan of Pope Benedict. But you know what I didn't do? I never claimed that he was a heretic, I never claimed that he was the Antichrist.
You can disagree with policies all you want, but to immediately leap to demonize that I do not and never will condone. In this life, we have entirely too many stumbling blocks in our path. There will always be those who point out differences and attempt to convince someone else to hate or to ostracize. Hell, that seems to be all this current political climate is geared towards doing. Demonize this group, hate this other group, and I am sick of it. I am not claiming to be a good person. I most definitely am not better than anyone else.
Hell, I am known for having very strong opinions on the most inconsequential of things, such as horror movies or actors. I do not claim moral superiority, but I also do not think that it's hypocritical of me to state beyond a shadow of a doubt that religion should not use its holy text as a justification to hate. Why am I saying all this? I don't know. I'm not big enough to have any meaningful impact, and these simple words will not change hearts. I guess I wanted my position to be clear. If there's a line, then I come down on the side that advocates for love and acceptance.
As we say in Japanese, Ijo. That's all. As always. My friends, please stay safe out there. Thank you for listening to Southern Demonology. Find us online at Southern Demonology.com, which offers links to all of our social media and episodes. Southern Demonology is solely owned, produced, and edited by myself, and the intro and outro music are composed by me as well. If you have a moment, please rate, like, and share this podcast, as it is the best way to help support my work. As always, I am JJ, and it has been a pleasure to speak to you today.