It was after 2am, and my mind just wouldn’t shut off.

I scrolled through my phone, but each Reddit post and cat photo only made me more awake, dreading the next day.

I don’t get insomnia very often, but when I do, it always wakes me up at about 3am, my mind spinning, and the more I try to go back to sleep, the less I am able to.

One night, I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

A shadow, a ghost… I pushed the thought away.

I decided to journal about it…

It’s 3 am and my mind is circling, my head is swimming

in the space between awake and dreaming.

In this twilight world, nightmares and memories

I can’t tell what’s real.

Ghosts kiss my feet, hungry shadows, haunting me.

Carl Jung wrote that what we perceive as ghosts or haunting figures might be parts of ourselves—the “ghosts” of our own inner lives that we suppress or ignore.

These hidden aspects, or shadows, don’t disappear; instead, they linger, emerging in subtle, unsettling ways.

As Jung says, “Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face….”

When we repress certain parts of ourselves, we might project them outward, seeing them as external threats or hauntings.

Maybe those restless nights, those shadows in the corner of my eye, were just unacknowledged parts of me, surfacing in the quiet, dark hours when my mind wasn’t crowded with distractions.

Around 2 and 3 am—the hours I’d lay awake—were once called the “witching hour.” And creatives, mystics, writers, did their best work at that time.

In the book Waking Up to the Dark, Clark Strand describes this time as the “Hour of God,” a period when darkness provides a deeper connection to our inner selves and the unknown.

“After about 4 hours of sleep,” he writes, “priests, rabbis, imams, and lamas would awaken to perform devotions, during which their minds occupied a space that wasn’t quite waking, or dreaming either, but had qualities of both. It was a visionary state, a time of deep tranquility.”

Strand goes on to explain that modern research supports the idea that, rather than fighting it, embracing nighttime wakefulness as a natural, ancestral rhythm may be a powerful way to combat insomnia.

It reflects a time before artificial light, when waking up in the dark allowed for a special, receptive state of mind.

So now, I’m learning to embrace this liminal space, where things get stripped away, and what’s left might seem scary but also connects me to the deeper aspects of life: The ideas, the shadow, the bones, the connections to the dead. The mystery.

In these hours, when ghosts—whether real or imagined—seem to drift through, I find myself open to new layers of inspiration.

These moments have become fuel for my creativity, a source of energy that feeds into healing, or my music and writing, guiding me into unexplored territories of myself.

This darkness can be a companion, revealing truths I couldn’t hear in the daylight.

In embracing the night and its hauntings, I find both the courage and the calm to face the hidden parts of myself.

Happy Halloween!

Some halloween treats for you….

Watch “You Set me On Fire” Music video for witches, filmed at a 400 year old castle in France:

WATCH HERE

Listen to Ghosts, a song for your 3am hauntings:

LISTEN HERE