My wife and I believe that she is under psychic attack from my stepmother. This isn't surprising really since A) my stepmother is psychotic and emotionally unstable, B) absolutely despises my wife and believes she is responsible for taking me away from her (my stepmother was very possessive of me), C) really wanted to see me break up with my wife since she viewed her as a threat, and D) is well versed in magick since it was she who introduced me to it. And knowing my stepmother, who is very powerful and very focused, I think that even if she wasn't deliberately malefacting anyone, she could certainly be the source of a lot of psychic negativity and torment, especially when it comes to my wife, whom she blames for the end of my relationship with her. The kind of one-sided negativity she is capable of focusing on someone is just f*cked up.

If you want to avoid reading all the story below, I'll just throw my question out now. How do you defend yourself against someone psychically tormenting you and sending negative energy through dream and dream-walking?

What's been going on are really vivid, frightening and disturbing nightmares (the kind of dreams that aren't dreams if you know what I mean) usually but not always with my stepmother in them, that have been leaving my wife feeling like she is being sucked dry. My wife never used to get nightmares, not like this anyway. The last one involved a child that both my wife and I cared for (which, IMO, undoubtedly symbolized our relationship). My stepmother had been in the dream only moments before a huge dog took our child and tore it into little pieces. My wife, distraught and grief-stricken, tried to pick up the body-parts of our child.

Another dream, the worst of all, involved my wife and I lying down to dream-travel together (in her dream), when some kind of entity grabbed her, pulled her away from me, and dragged her into a hell-realm, which was so terrifying and so vivid, she blocked most of it out upon waking (which she did in the middle of the night, then woke me up and cried for quite a while). Both of us were quite sure the entity was an envoy of my stepmother's, since we had been sensing her anger and negativity psychically directed at us for a while, and still do.

My wife has been setting up the following defenses: she has been regularly calling the angels, asking for and visualizing an angel to spread its protective wings over our property and shielding us from ill-intent and negative energy. The barrier also has a mirror quality to it, reflecting any negativity back and turning it into positive, loving energy. I've also been regularly doing banishing rituals and praying to the Virgin Mary (who I have a deep connection with). Recently, I had the idea of grounding this protective barrier by burying quartz crystals around the house.

However, something occurred to me this morning and made me realize that we'd been perhaps going at this with the wrong angle. I remembered when my stepmother had had a really awful relationship with a person who was also into magick and was also really possessive and wouldn't let my stepmother go when she was trying to break up with her. In this case, the person was actively trying to bind my stepmother to her, and make her obsessed, or create obsession (which worked), by dream-walking. Upon remembering this, I realized that dream is its own passage-way, and while we have been protecting our physical and astral space, my wife's dream-scape is totally unprotected.

So how do you guard yourself from someone using dream to psychically attack you?