Listen dear Jacqui - What people call spirits is something they do not have any other word for.
When people in the past said you must not get near dead bodies because spirits would posses you it was because they knew that people often died of awful diseases and if you got near them you could be possessed by spirits - what we now call viruses of germs.
The people you are meeting do not understand in any other way because they have no knowledge of the new finding about what moves people. Namely the following:
In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as dreams, in our breathing and heartbeat – our life. This I have given the description as the Life Will.
While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis
This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind; ESP in Dreams.
For simplicity I have called this experience, of what is actually waking lucid dreaming, ‘LifeStream’. It would take us too far out of looking at dreams to explore it, but it can be studied within these features: LifeStream-People’s Experience of LifeStream- Life’s Little Secrets - Arm Circling Meditation
This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We experience it as spontaneous movement - as we do when breathing and our heart beating. It is what keeps us alive - and when we relax our hold as you did when allowing spontaneous movement it is simply your life will acting upon you. It is like dreaming while awake, and like any dream your identity is taken over by the Life Will. But because of the belief system of these people, which is exactly like spiritualism, they use different symbols - the spirits and different characters, exactly as we do in our dreams. See
http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/water-wonderland/Tony