Earlier this year, when meditating on my crown chakra, I suddenly remembered a suppressed memory from my childhood and that motivated me to do some deep searching and healing. I had a lot of terrifying experiences during my childhood usually due to typical sleep paralysis episodes and some strange encounters. Anyway, I resolved most of my feelings about them and made some important distinctions: a few of the encounters were with legitimately cruel beings when I was at a very young age. But most of them were actually pretty cool, even though some of the experiences were clouded with fear. So I got to wondering how deep I could go with this ... how many distinctions could I make?

for the first time in years, I had a couple fear episodes at night. As soon as i put my awareness on the fear, it would go away, leaving me confused...the fear came from nowhere. So, I eventually played around with astral sight and saw a higher aspect of myself nearby; it left immediately and I fell asleep. This process repeated a few times: fear wakes me up, astral sight, higher aspect leaves, I fall asleep. Eventually i awake and surrender to whatever is happening to me and I have a brief projection, black out, and when I wake up, i have a stack of parallel memories like I've never had before. upon re-entry, i have memories of my physical body and the sensations, my astral body and it's sensations, my dream mind and the dream ending, keywords and catch phrases to write down, flashes of guided visions during my astral travel, a higher aspect of myself doing energy work in my heart chakra area then brain and crown area, some sort of mind-self that had been contemplating universal concepts.

It was a humbling and mind blowing experience. I wrote it all down and finally got some sleep. I put some thought into this the next day and I was convinced that my higher aspects had been using fear to wake me up and make me participate in their nightly experiences. Now my/our experiences.

These are some reasons why I think fear is a good thing:
It breaks sleep inertia...normally 1-3 hours long, fear reduces it to a few seconds.
it puts us in an ideal state of mind for spiritual work: mentally sharp, focused, with few interrupting thoughts.
It broadly places our awareness on many things simultaneously, like a generic cosmic consciousness experience (definitely not the same thing, but likened to it)

I have since given my other aspects unconditional permission to wake me up as much as they want.