College Fantasy Turned Nightmare

You all know the story - Loner guy falls in love with a popular girl, and eventually she realises that she shares feelings for him and they all live happily ever after. Classic teen romance story stuff, right? Well it would be, if the girl in question wasn't an illusion produced by a sex demon trying to consume the unfortunate boy's soul. Strap in and strap-on, because this is a succubus story!

## Brandon and the Beauty

Although you might think that the mythological succubus has faded away in this modern age, perhaps to be replaced with tales of sleep paralysis or even alien abduction, this is alarmingly not true - at least if the story told by a young man named Brandon is to be believed.

Brandon (location unfortunately unknown due to lack of specification in the source) had always been utterly besotted with a certain girl that he had met in college - but he knew that she was highly unlikely to ever feel the same about him. She was dating a football player, and Brandon acknowledged that they '*came from very different worlds*' and had very different interests. Thus, Brandon never even considered asking her out on so much as a date. However, '*almost seven years*' after leaving college, he suddenly started having dreams about this girl.

The dreams started off fairly innocently. He would meet the girl in question thanks to random chance, and the unlikely couple would hit it off. They would talk or perhaps go out for a meal. However, just like a gateway drug, these romantic fantasies would soon lead Brandon into something more intense - eventually becoming '*outright sexual*'. He hadn't had such intensely-sexual dreams since he was a teenager, and these subconscious erotic interludes of imaginary intercourse were starting to have effects that were leaking over into Brandon's waking life.

At the time, Brandon was working for a financial firm - putting in long hours in an attempt to progress up the corporate ladder. However, as the dreams progressed he started to feel exhausted, and began to need numerous cups of coffee just to get himself up in the mornings. His perpetual fatigue only got worse from then on out, and he was soon constantly imbibing caffeine throughout the day just to stay active.

On one evening in particular, Brandon got home from a long day's work and collapsed into his living room chair - whereupon he fell asleep immediately. The dreams started up soon after that, with him and his college sweetheart making passionate love on the chair in which he had fallen asleep. While he was in the midst of getting frisky on the furniture, he was jolted awake by a sharp pounding on his front door. Opening it with what was presumably a groggy sense of dread, he was greeted by a neighbour of his - who had come to get him because his car alarm was going off for some nebulous reason. The neighbour was clearly not only worried about the state of Brandon's car - and made a comment about how terrible he looked, and how he should probably see a doctor. Brandon brushed this off, saying that he was '*just tired*'.

The thought that there might be something wrong had now been planted in his head, however, and it would soon grow into a mighty tree of certainty when he went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. His face was deathly pale, and there were large, dark circles around his eyes - making it look as if he '*had been punched*'. He was sweating so much that his hair was wet, and he quickly realised that he hadn't eaten dinner. The realisation suddenly came to him that he had actually been eating very little for quite a while now.

Worried, he soon visited a doctor - who told him that his adrenals were '*in terrible condition*', and repeatedly questioned him as to if he was using any illicit drugs. He was, by the way, not. He went on to describe what he had been going through during the nights to the doctor, who then decided that he must be suffering from sleep paralysis. Brandon also mentioned how he had recently started waking up from the dreams to be greeted with the feeling that there was someone in his bedroom with him. At first, it would be the impression that the woman was there - but it would turn to the niggling sensation that there was something '*creepy*' present instead when he woke up enough for his logical brain to tell him that the woman was certainly not there.

Seriously concerned about the rapid deterioration of his health, Brandon decided to contact a local alternative healer in order to try a spiritual approach to his problem as opposed to the seemingly-useless medical option. Apparently the healer knew exactly what the matter with him was before he had even finished his story, and she instructed him to cleanse his living space and banish '*whatever was in there*'. Brandon was puzzled by the healer's assertion that there was the spirit of someone who had died involved in his situation. The healer told him that he needed to accept that the unknown person in question had passed on, and that once he had done that the attacks would apparently stop.

It took him three weeks to get back to feeling like himself again - but one night he suddenly woke and found that '*the feeling was back*'. Worried that he would once again be harassed by the nocturnal entity - despite the fleeting nature of the ominous feeling - Brandon got up early that day and went to a nearby cafe to work at his laptop. Surprisingly enough, he ran into an old friend from college that he '*hadn't seen in years*'. The pair sat down and caught up over coffee - talking for a few hours, and at one point even discussing the girl on which Brandon used to have a crush on. The unnamed friend remarked about how tragic what had happened to the girl in question was - to which Brandon understandably admitted that he didn't know what his friend was talking about. His friend divulged that the woman that Brandon had been '*so enamoured with*' had died in a drunk-driving accident.

Stunned and obviously twinged with grief, Brandon realised that the pieces had just fallen together - completing the picture that the healer had painted for him. He visited her grave to pay his respects, and perhaps it finally dawned on him that it was certainly not her visiting him at night - and thus the nocturnal apparitions ceased permanently.

## Some Info About Succubi

It may be kind of morbid, but medieval scholars speculated that perhaps the Devil would use the flesh of corpses to copulate with humans at night in the forms of succubi and incubu (sex demons). Perhaps there was some degree of truth in this ancient observation, seeing as the entity in this case visited Brandon in the form of a woman who had previously passed away. Also - although succubi are traditionally thought to be Christian demons, there are figures just like them all throughout world culture, and it seems that any number of spiritual defences can work against them - just as long as the person wielding this method of defence believes that it will work.