Tucker Carlson says he was attacked by a demon—and as a dream researcher I believe him

Journalist and TV personality Tucker Carlson recently shared that he was attacked by an unseen force while sleeping in his bed.

I encourage you watch the video clip, because I think it convincingly shows that Carlson truly believes he had this experience. He says he still does not understand to this day what happened to him. And he considers it to be both spiritual and transformative.

Here’s the clip here, it’s about four minutes long.

Trigger warning: Tucker Carlson is in this video.

This interview is what is called, in the Christian fundamentalist culture, giving testimony. But when prompted by his Christian fundamentalist interviewer who suggests his experience of evil was “a spiritual attack by a demon,” Carlson seems uncomfortable, and says, “Yeah by a demon, or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides… and they’re still there.”

We can break down the components of Tucker’s experience as:

1. Asleep in bed – he shares a bed with spouse and four dogs
2. “I woke up and I couldn’t breathe and thought I was going to suffocate.”
3. Went for a walk to calm down,
4. Came back inside, family still asleep, and noticed four bleeding claw marks on either side, under his arms on his left shoulder.

And the components of his paradigm of reality:

• His interpretation: “I knew it was spiritual immediately”
• Cultural framework:  Not religious, skeptical of religious leaders. “I’ve never hears anyone say anything like this in my whole life.”
• Long term effects: “I was seized with this very intense desire to read the Bible.”

For many readers, myself included, the authenticity of this experience becomes difficult to take at face value when Carlson details that he had four claw marks on either side of his body. Even Carlson seems uncomfortable with his disclosure. “I sleep on my side so I wasn’t clawing myself I don’t have long nails um and they didn’t fit my hands anyway.”

Notice how immediately, the rational mind begins to explain the claw marks. He probably scratched himself, I heard myself think.  Or the dogs did it.

Also: Four dogs in the bed, really?

This on-the-spot interpretation is a sure sign that your personal boggle threshold has been reached. Coined by paranormal researcher Renée Haynes, the boggle threshold is the line beyond which we shake our heads and can’t accept an event as told may be real. This happened to me in the story I recently described in my article about my seemingly paranormal vision right before finding the unmarked cemetery in the pines (and maybe it happened to you when you read that piece too).

Ultimately, I believe Carlson. I don’t agree with his own interpretation of what happened to him, and I’m certain the timing of his disclosure on the eve of the presidential election was not accidental. He’s got his own agenda and this narrative serves that. But I do not think Carlson is lying or being disingenuous.

My etic perspective, as a dream researcher and a cataloguer of extraordinary experiences:

Carlson experienced a sleep paralysis-nightmare, or what has been noted around the world, cross-culturally and historically, as supernatural assault. Sleep paralysis is defined by the experience of waking up, feeling like you cannot breathe or are being suffocated by an unseen evil force. This is textbook isolated sleep paralysis, which is currently classified as a sleep-related parasomnia. It’s a REM sleep phenomenon but feels as real as waking life due to high levels of metacognition and emotional salience. I think of sleep paralysis as a vision state—it is a profoundly disturbing experience that often transforms people’s worldview forever.

As for his bleeding scratches? I admit, my boggle threshold has not budged since I’ve been chewing on this story for a week now. Nocturnal self-scratching is also a known, and fairly common, parasomnia. Under laboratory conditions, people are known to scratch themselves in a number of sleep contexts, non-REM and REM sleep. While not ultimately dangerous, it could be something to watch out for if it happens again, as it may be a sign of REM behavior disorder, an anxiety-related sleeping issue, or a symptom of substance abuse.

I’m not a sleep doctor, and nobody can really be diagnosed publicly anyways, but the fundamentalist preacher that Tucker reaches out to is correct; from an experiential perspective, this stuff happens. “People are attacked in their bed by demons.”

If it were my visionary experience, I would ask, what was happening in my life when I woke up with bloody scratches and a sense of being visited by something evil?

Let’s remember the big anthropogenic picture here: that we are hominids living under various levels of eco-social stress. When our collective stress begins to boil (such as when wealth inequality hits the sweet spot of the French Revolution), dreamers and visionaries come out of the woodwork.  It’s the dreamers who capture the zeitgeist, motivate followers, and organize the resistance.

I wrote about the creative side of this in my article Doom Dreaming, but there’s a  more insidious side to this visionary capability. Dreams and visions fuse powerful emotions with visual symbolic thinking, creating powerful memes that percolate through all levels of society, including the halls of power. Apocalyptic dreaming is a powerful way of knowing, yes, but it’s morally ambivalent, and can be hitched to literally any social movement.

Dream-visions have inspired mutinies, revolutions and new power structures in hundreds of documented historic cases: by indigenous survivors of colonization, by Civil rights activists… as well as by the Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials.

So yeah, I believe Tucker Carlson when he says he had a confrontation of unknown evil in bed one night 18 months ago and he’s never been the same since. Again, I don’t agree with his interpretation of said nocturnal assault, but that doesn’t matter. His case has the ring of authenticity, not just for me, but for his massive audience which is now openly courting the fundamentalist crowd despite the fact that Carlson himself has, in his own words, “very low levels of trust for Christian pastors.”

More importantly, Carlson’s experience transformed his view of the cosmos. He says he has read the Bible, again and again, for the last year and half since the encounter. And now he’s talking about the experience publicly, despite his obvious discomfort in the disclosure (watch how many times he scratches his ear while speaking; the man does seem to scratch when he’s nervous).

What the history of dreaming shows us is that our nightmares are not just pointing out the threats in our lives, but also suggesting new possibilities and new realities. These new realities can be healthy and ethical, or not. And visionary movements can protect our most vulnerable, or cause more suffering.

If we, as dreamers and visionaries, want to use the integrative genius of dreaming for the good of the planet, and for the good of humanity, then we need to acknowledge the ambiguity of visionary experiences. My eyes were opened a decade ago when Gawker hacked the email of mass murderer (and still incarcerated) Jared Loughner, including his correspondence with me about lucid dreaming.

We need to not be naïve about the ways that dreaming can be applied by murderers and co-opted by unsavory and downright fascist social movements. So we need to become better dreamers ourselves, and make sure that others aren’t doing the dreaming for us.

That’s the dreamwork.