a few thoughts about demons
Based on my experience:
Dreams of demons symbolically represent an aspect of life that we are subconsciously but not necessarily consciously aware of. Its like a lot of other dreams in that regard. The 'demon' is a metaphor, an attempt to describe a more subtle truth, and the dream is not an event so much as a representation of an ongoing event. If something is trying to possess you body in the dream, its trying to possess your body while you're awake too, you're just not aware of it that way. I'm not saying the demon is unreal, I'm saying that the reality behind it is more subtle than what is shown in the dream, and its a huge part of your life, not just something that happens occasionally while you sleep. So for instance, when you are angry, this is demon possession in much the same sense that you would experience in a dream.
I don't mean that we're not responsible for our own anger, that its not 'ours'. What I mean is that the 'me' in 'mine' is not strictly personal, there's a collective aspect to it. When we empathize with someone, we are them a little bit, and we affect each other with our passions and our thoughts. We 'possess' each other a little bit, its a part of what we are as humans, even though its not something that can be seen or measured with lab instruments.
Were this not so, we would be entirely contained within our own skulls, and we would be purely individuals, except for affinity based on our similarity with other people. So all 'minds' would be personal minds, in fixed association with particular bodies. But since there is a shared element, identity isn't limited to human personalities like that. Because of the non-local interactions, personality structures naturally arise that encompass aspects of the minds of many people, and change and shift independent of any particular people. These may be conscious and intelligent, but difficult for us to understand since they don't experience the world very much like how we experience it. By 'we' I mean how we think of ourselves when we're dealing with the interrelated patterns encoded in the connections in our brains, unified by memories and thoughts about events that have been recorded through the senses connected to our particular brains. 'We' are those intelligent patterns, but at the same time we are also these other kinds of patterns joined by other types of connections, if we think of ourselves that way. I don't think what I'm trying to say here is ineffable, but its difficult because our language is not designed to describe it. We experience ourselves as individual humans because that's what we're doing when we experience ourselves that way. But this other type of experience is present also, even though its not easy to connect to the human experience, because its a very different way of thinking. Its sort of like looking at a drawing of a cube, where you can see it as convex or concave, but not both at the same time.
People can be hateful, brutal, and ugly, and also loving, compassionate and beautiful. The life where our minds join, interact, and separate similarly exhibits all of those qualities. To varying degrees, people are inclined to divide everyone into categories of 'good people' and 'bad people'. The 'good people' are those we have affinity for and treat as allies or family, and the 'bad people' are those we attack, justly or unjustly, for the benefit of people like ourselves. The reality of course is more complicated. While some people are more loving or fair than others, there is always at least some degree of good and evil on both sides, and often its a lot more evenly distributed than people admit while justifying their own partisan actions. Likewise for the eddies of desire and awareness where our mind join. Though there is good and evil, spirit can not be neatly divided into angel and demon any more than people can be reliably pigeonholed as good guys and bad guys. And just as people suffer as a consequence of unjust categorization, so do our spirits. And as with people, those who would categorize spirits are usually comfortable doing that with meager knowledge of those they would exalt or condemn. My point here is that the God/devil dichotomy that westerners have been working with for centuries is a good thing in that it highlights real moral differences between different qualities of spirit and desire. But it has also been a bad thing in that it oversimplifies and excludes much of life that can't be described very well that way. Its very much an issue of personal freedom, to be who we are, who we want to be, and who we must be, even where that doesn't neatly fit the lines drawn by anyone's theology. And it can also be viewed as a matter of spiritual health, we need that kind of freedom.
