by Gloria | Jan 15, 2014 | Dreams, Mystories
Two and a half years after my husband’s death I woke during the night with an impression of him having been present. The way I recorded it in my dream journal was:
Not sure if this was a dream or a visitation. Roger appeared and gave me a message which I can’t remember clearly but it was as though he thought his mother hadn’t let go of him and he wanted me to see if I could do something about it.
This was not a welcome message for several reasons. Firstly, in spite of the many unusual experiences I’d been having which were pushing me into an awareness of a realm beyond the physical, I was in no way convinced that they had an actual reality beyond my own imaginative faculties. Secondly the relationship with my mother in law was strained at the best of times and I was most reluctant to deliver a message that I myself was unsure of. Most of all though, with my psychoanalytical reasoning, I had to wonder if it was really meant for me and not his mother and worried that I was inadvertently holding him back, even though I didn’t really understand what that even meant.
Later that day I had another one of those synchronistic events that often accompany significant dreams. I bumped into a friend and when I asked how she was, she said she was feeling sad because it was the 7th anniversary of the death of her son, who had died tragically in a workplace accident. We sat down and chatted and I asked her if she thought she had let go of him and she said she didn’t think she had. I told her about the dream/visit, half hoping, I think, that I was going to get rid of the problem that way. When I got home, no sooner had I got in the door than my mother in law rang, so without saying anything about the incident I tried to gauge how she was dealing with her son’s death. She seemed to be doing fine but she wasn’t one to show any sign of not coping, so it was hard to tell. I was happy to have a reason to let the incident go but unfortunately it wouldn’t let me go and I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be able to forget it unless I told her.
After several days of arguing with myself, I finally gathered the courage to ring her. To my surprise and relief she was not fazed at all about the possibility of a visit from her deceased son. She insisted that she didn’t have a problem but then in the next breath said that whenever she thinks of him, she is telling him off! I suggested that perhaps that was the problem and again to my surprise she didn’t argue the point. We chatted on a bit and then just as we were about to hang up, she suddenly burst out, quite vehemently, ‘well, that’s typical, isn’t it, they can’t tell you themselves, they have to tell someone else and then let that person tell you!’
When I put the phone down, I just sat staring at it with her words replaying in my head, hardly able to believe the conversation I’d just had. Suddenly another voice, in my head but not my thoughts, said ‘I’ve tried to but she won’t let me in.’ Rather sheepishly and thinking it can’t get any weirder, I said ‘is that you Roger?’ With that I felt a very strong tingling sensation in the top of my head that hovered there for a few seconds, then it whooshed all the way down through my body to my feet, followed by a sensation in the room like a change in air pressure. A voice in my head is one thing but like the meditation experience three years earlier, these kinds of physical sensations are hard to ignore. What to do now? In light of her earlier openness, I thought it best to call back and tell her what I had just experienced. Again she was receptive, taking what I told her quite seriously and after discussing options, said she would lie quietly when she went to bed and ask ‘what do you want to tell me?’
I had many mixed emotions on hanging up the phone, among them surprise at what had transpired and relief that I had delivered the message. I was also relieved that the original experience had been validated and that the message did appear to be for my mother in law and not me. On the other hand it raised a lot of questions in my mind about the nature of the non-physical realm, which I now could no longer ignore or doubt the existence of. One thing that puzzled me for some time after this event was that it didn’t seem to conform to a typical ADC (After Death Communication) in that frequently the deceased person appears to reassure those left behind that they are okay. This seemed to be the opposite but eventually I came to the conclusion that each experience is unique and tailor made to the individuals involved. Apart from convincing me of the reality of ADCs, even if it did open up more questions than it answered, it certainly convinced me that our relationships do not end with death and that the potential for healing unfinished business is a very real possibility if we only take advantage of it. Dreams are a most effective avenue for healing all kinds of relationships and not just with those who have passed over.
I spoke to my mother in law a couple of weeks after the phone call and she said there was nothing to report. I asked her from time to time afterwards but the answer was always the same and eventually the subject was dropped. A couple of years after this she moved to Sydney to be near her daughter and eventually our sparse communication ground to a halt. She is now living out her days unhappily in a nursing home, so I can only assume that she was never able to make peace with life’s disappointments.
Roger’s visit was certainly the most dramatic experience I have ever had in terms of appearances, although I have personally had a lot of what I can only describe as interference, especially objects disappearing and reappearing and interference with electrical and electronic equipment. These physical happenings are hard to ignore and I have heard too many stories from others to believe that they are all the results of my own fertile imagination. Who or what is responsible is anybody’s guess but that they are real events is unquestionable to me.
by Gloria | Dec 31, 2013 | Mystories
When my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he took up meditation in an attempt to find peace with the situation and I joined him as moral support and in the hope that it would also help me cope better than I had been doing. He had brought home a tape from the Cancer Care Centre and it was basically a guided visualisation of going down in a lift, seeing the numbers of each floor in the mind’s eye and on reaching zero seeing the zero expand, imagine walking through it and visualising being in a tranquil scene. The tape would then go silent for a period of time and the voice would count up again.
At first I struggled mightily just to stay awake but after about six weeks the persistence paid off and I was able to relax and found the sessions quite enjoyable. One day I was in a relaxed state when I had a vision of my mother. Her face appeared to me as though it was above and outside of me and she looked very sad. She communicated telepathically to me ‘you don’t need to be here, Gloria. You’re needed back there.’ With that something relaxed even more deeply in me and I felt an incredible sense of peace such that when the tape finished I didn’t want to move. Roger had been on his stool in front of the lounge where I was sitting and after a while he stirred and glanced over at me. I smiled at him and he came and sat alongside me and we held hands with neither of us saying a word for a long time.
At the time I wasn’t coping very well and though I knew I wouldn’t do anything while Roger was alive, I wasn’t so sure about the future. I had always had a tenuous hold on life, even at the best of times and simply couldn’t imagine what I was going to do without him. I had no belief in anyone surviving death in any way, shape or form at the time and had no knowledge of altered states of consciousness and their effects. I presumed the vision was a kind of waking dream but the sense of peace it evoked had a profound effect on me in many ways. The suicidal thoughts abated and I eventually sought out a counsellor.
Roger’s impending death had brought up memories of my mother’s death and I realised I had never grieved for her when she died 12 years before because it had coincided with a very difficult and demanding period of our life. Eventually I was able to visit her grave for the first time and come to terms with much that had not been dealt with.
As far as what the vision meant, it didn’t change my belief that death meant anything more than peaceful oblivion and had no concept of it being anything other than an artefact of my imagination. The only explanation I needed was that it was like a waking dream and was happy to leave it at that – until the next meditation experience Dream, Vision or… What? Part Two really shook up my simplistic viewpoint.
by Gloria | Dec 30, 2013 | Dreams
This dream was relayed to me by a friend soon after my husband Roger died, although it would be many years before I would view it as I do now, that is as a spirit visit dream.
The background to the dream was that this friend and Roger had a discussion one day about the possibility of life continuing on after death. Roger was like me at the time, a confirmed atheist and had no prior belief in life after death, although he must have begun to wonder to even broach the subject. Our friend said that he doubted it because both his mother and his sister, who had died a short space apart, had been devout spiritualists all their lives and he felt if there was any ongoing existence he would have heard from them and he hadn’t. Roger said to him ‘well, if I survive I will find a way of getting through to you.’ They both had a chuckle and nothing more was said.
One day soon after Roger’s death this friend came up with his wife and his wife nudged him into telling me about a dream he’d had. This is what he told me:
In the dream I was lying in bed and Roger came through the wall behind the bedhead. I said to him ‘hey, Roger, you said you were going to let me know if you survived your death.’ Roger replied, ‘this is how it’s done – in dreams.’
I didn’t know what to make of it at the time but I remembered the conversation they’d had and I didn’t think it could be just a random coincidence. Some time later I brought it up with my friend and he had completely forgotten it, not even remembering it when I retold what I remembered. His amnesia was even more astonishing to me than the original dream although I have since had that exact same reaction from others when they have told me about a certain dream and I’ve brought it up in later conversation. In most cases though a memory will be jogged by providing details.
The dream brings up interesting questions – what exactly is the nature of the figures in our dreams, what is the purpose of such a dream as this, why did my friend have the dream and not me and why did he not remember the dream even when I reminded him of it? Some of these questions will be explored in these pages but I don’t pretend to have definitive answers to any of them. I have since had many of my own spirit visit dreams from various deceased people and will no doubt write about them as the blog develops.
I eventually came across a book about after death communications, called Hello From Heaven. It had coincidentally been published a few months before Roger’s death, although I didn’t read it until many years down the track. Since that time this particular field of investigation has blossomed along with studies of other related phenomena.
I really don’t know what I thought about the dream at the time but so many odd things had been happening and I had enough on my plate to deal with at the time anyway that I doubt I came to any conclusions about it other than to wonder what was going on. I don’t recall Roger ever talking about having dreams so it wasn’t as though there was any precedent for his statement that contact is made through dreams. Two and a half years later I had a visitation of my own from him, which was vastly different and somewhat disquieting but also convinced me of the reality of the continuation of life after death.
Eventually I learned, from study and experience, that dreams are not the only way we get communications from the non-physical realm but I have to wonder if the seed that had been planted regarding my encounter with the dream life was being nurtured along by hearing about this dream from another person.
