Encounter With a "Demon"

I've told this story before, but I think it bears repeating.

When I was about 13 I had an encounter with a psychic being that wasn't benign and wasn't entirely human.  At the time, I called it The Driver.  Yes, it really did try to set up permanent residence in my mind, and I had to go to some effort to get rid of it.  I suppose it fits some of the definitions of a "demon", though I'd like to know what religion would own up to it.

It was on a school night, and I was up in my bedroom, plodding through my homework and avoiding my parents who were fighting again downstairs.  It was late, I'd zipped through the English assignment and was dreading the Math portion, when I heard another voice in my head.  At first it was just a buzzing presence that sounded and felt like nothing I'd ever encountered, but after awhile it began coming up with coherent concepts if not words -- and what it wanted was a task.  Apparently it had been attracted by the sound of my mind grinding through the homework;  what it wanted was data to process, and I'd just been absorbing a lot of that.  It nagged in a near-mechanical voice, and it would not shut up. 

As it kept yattering I got a clearer impression of its mind, and what I saw was incomplete, nearly mechanical, lacking a good 90% of the "feel" of other people or animals.  It wanted to attach to another mind so as to get data to process, and it didn't seem to care about anything -- anything -- else.  If a computer could have awareness, it would feel like this. 

I cautiously asked it what kind of data it wanted, and it replied "no preference" -- as if it were hungry for data and didn't care what it ate.  I could also feel that when it came to processing the data, The Driver would do a very competent job.

"Oh, cool," I decided.  "Then do my Math homework."  And I opened my Math workbook and turned to the first page. 

With a buzz of satisfaction, The Driver absorbed the figures through my eyes and began churning out solutions, which I then wrote down.  I soon saw that none of the figures -- or the process of adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing them -- went through my own mind.  I wasn't practicing the Math;  I was only observing somebody else do it.  I wasn't really learning anything.  The homework got done in record time, and when I checked a few of the exercises I found that they were all correct.  I hated Math, so that was fine with me.

The Driver, however, wasn't satisfied.  The moment the last exercise was finished, it started nagging for more work.  Well, all right;  I still had the History homework to read, so I opened my textbook and started reading the assigned chapter.  The Driver eagerly absorbed the words through my eyes, but it didn't seem to know what to do with them except to store them away in its memory -- a memory, I saw, that was enormous -- but wasn't going to be shared.  This annoyed me, because I liked History and had wanted to store that information in my own memory, thank you, and do some thinking about it myself.  I deliberately slowed my reading down so that I could see and memorize the concepts in the sentences, but this annoyed The Driver, which just wanted more and more words as fast as it could get them.  In effect, I had to read everything twice -- once, quickly, for The Driver, and a second time, slower, for me.  By the time I finished the chapter I was growing annoyed with my uninvited psychic guest.  I was also tired and wanted to get to sleep.

But now another annoyance appeared;  The Driver simply would not shut up.  It kept nattering, nagging, wanting more data, more data.  I knew I couldn't sleep with that noise going on, That meant that I had to somehow get rid of my unwelcome guest.  But how?  Ignoring it didn't work, and trying to flood it out with my own thoughts didn't work either.  In fact, The Driver didn't even seem to notice that I was trying to throw it out;  it just kept demanding a mental task to perform.  It was only a fragment of a personality, not a whole mind.   

At that point I realized that The Driver had no natural instincts: not even a sense of self-preservation.

So I asked it flat out: "How do I get rid of you?"

The Driver treated that like any other intellectual problem, and gave me an answer: "Overload."

That was all I needed.  "Okay," I said, "I have a task for you.  Determine the nature and purpose of the entire universe.  Correlate all data, starting now."

I could hear/feel the "working" hum of The Driver starting its task, and as I felt it processing all its data, I heard the tone of the hum rising steadily.  Guessing that I'd better be thoroughly out of the way when that humming reached its climax, I got into my pajamas and then into bed, pulled up the blankets and blanked my mind, and did my best to go to sleep.  The last thing I remembered before sleep closed in was the rising hum of The Driver processing all that data.  I was thoroughly asleep before my unwelcome visitor overloaded itself and tore loose.

I woke up late the next morning and had to scramble to get dressed in time for the schoolbus, but I remembered all that had happened the night before -- and I readily saw that The Driver was gone.  My mind was entirely my own again.  Nobody was talking there but me.

And the thing never came back.   

I thought about that all the rest of the day, wondering about the nature of The Driver.  It was a totally psychic being, and not much of one: just a fragment of a mind that had somehow torn loose from its original personality, taking that mind's psychic ability with it, that had gone searching for another mind to attach itself to and ever-more data to feed on.. I wondered how many minds, before me, the thing had traveled through -- how much data it had gathered from them, and how those other people had gotten rid of the thing.  I never came up with any answers, but the incident gave me a whole new perspective on the old story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

All I got out of that incident was some understanding of just what a "demon" is, and how to get rid of them without benefit of clergy.  Of course I have no proof for any of this, since the entire incident played out inside my own skull, but the ideas are intriguing.  Anybody who wants to is free to take and run with them.   

--Leslie <;)))><  )O(