How to Time Travel: Going shopping in the 1940’s

I’d never heard of stone henge when I dreamed
of stone circles as a child – it was quite a shock
to find out about it in National Geographic.

I was still a kid when I learned that for people on “the other side”, maintaining an awareness or connection to our reality (Waking Physical Reality, or WPR) is optional. I had some very profound dreams that took place in a cemetery where the tomb stones are arranged in concentric circles. I was in elementary school when these started and had never heard of Stonehenge or stone circles and their relationship to my Celtic ancestry – I was quite surprised to learn about this later on. Another odd quality these dream tomb stones possessed was that if you touched them, you would “know” all about the person connected with it. In one of the dreams I went exploring in the woods behind this cemetery and was quite surprised to find more tomb stones hidden in the underbrush. Those ones were cold – if I touched them I got nothing. In the dream I asked my great-grandmother, Susan Grant Black, about it. She was more or less the grand Poobah of this particular dreamscape. She told me that they “no longer had a connection to this world.” I took this to mean WPR.

I will distill a few decades of dreaming on this into a concise point: in order to manifest in WPR, a spirit (ghost) who is in the light needs two basic things: Intent and a Point of Reference.

Antique Wood Escalator at the old
Kauffmans Department Store in Pittsburgh, PA.
Alas, it is now entombed with drywall.

Not long before Christmas in 2011 I went to Macy’s in Downtown Pittsburgh to pick up a box of fancy candy for someone’s Christmas gift. The building was built between 1885-1887 and used to be Kauffman’s – a name recognizable to pretty much everyone in the Pittsburgh area. This store, along with two others (Horne’s and Gimbel’s) were THE shopping destinations in the early to mid 20th century. From what I remembered the candy department was on the top floor. It has since moved. While searching for it I found something else really interesting though – an antique escalator! As the guts of the elevators are original to the building my best guess is so is this wood and cast iron escalator. As I stood there marveling at the thing something occurred to me. If a spirit can use something like this as a point of reference to come here, then shouldn’t I be able to use it to go there?

I decided to test this theory. During a meditation I sent a message to my family on the other side. “I am going to incubate a lucid dream and I am asking that someone – will leave that choice up to you – will come and take me shopping at Kauffman’s in the 1940’s.” They all know I am enough of a fashion expert to know how to dress, and enough of a historian to know how to act, so as to not draw a lot of attention or embarrass them.

Dad during WW II.

I did this as a WILD (Wake Induced Lucid Dream). I lay in bed and imagined my 1940’s outfit in extreme detail. Shoes, pantyhose with seam up the back, underwear, slip, blouse, suit, hat, white gloves, purse. Check. Ready for liftoff. The dream materialized and I found myself standing in front of the antique escalator. And it was moving! I got on and rode it up one floor, then went around and rode it back down. On the way down I crossed into the 1940’s. And who do you think was waiting for me at the bottom of the elevator? My DAD! Wearing his WWII uniform, looking about 20 years old, smiling and leaning on the base of the escalator, completely at ease.

What surprised me about this situation was that at the time, my father was still alive! He was developing dementia, and I have been told that the more of it they develop the less time they spent in their bodies. This is the first time I’d ever seen it myself, and the first shared dream I had with my father.

We went shopping for a long time. One of the problems with long lucid dreams is that it is hard to remember all the details when you wake up due to a phenomena known as State Specific Memory. If you want to remember something you need to wake up right away. I was in this more to just experience it so I stayed in the dream as long as possible. We browsed a lot and bought some clothes (memory fuzzy) and then he took me to the bakery. All I can say is the quality of baked goods has definitely gone down since the 1940’s. I ate tons of it since you can’t gain weight eating dream food!
Given that my dad usually couldn’t tell you what he ate for lunch on any given day, I didn’t really expect him to remember this dream. I did ask him about it and there was a brief flash of recognition that crossed his face, but he couldn’t remember anything specific. He listened to the dream report intently and was very happy about it. This became the typical reaction I got when I had one of these otherworldly dreams with him.

A Possible Case of Re-in-cat-nation?

In the summer of 2010 I had the following dream. It felt significant but I didn’t know what it meant. At the time we were in the process of selling my parents’ house to the son of the neighbors across the road (Keith).
My brothers and I were standing in the front yard of my parents’ house. It felt like springtime, and the sky was a little overcast as if it might rain.

“Do you think Keith will let us dig some plants out of the back yard?” I asked. “We’ve been so busy cleaning out the house I haven’t had time to do it. But I want to move some of Mom’s garden to my yard.”

“I doubt it,” my brother John said.

“I doubt he would want them, “I said. “He is probably going to mow back there and then the plants will be all gone.”

The dream changed and we were now in my brothers’ old bedroom. This room was right inside the house from where we were standing in the yard. The atmosphere felt heavy and depressing. John leaned against the closet door. “Boy, I don’t feel very good,” he said.

I opened the door and went out into the hallway. It was much brighter out there! I heard my mother’s Siamese cat, Tam, meow. Tam died in about 1988. We had him for a very long time. My mother got him as a kitten for Christmas one year and I think he was 17 years old when he died. He loved all of us but was primarily my mother’s cat. When I heard him, I knew right away that it meant that Tam was with my mother on the other side.
I looked in the doorway to my parents’ bedroom and Pinion, the little orange Hemmingway cat that I had when I was about 10, was curled up taking a nap on the chair next to the desk. She lifted her head and looked at me. I noticed her eyes were orange.

I went back into the bedroom and there was Pinion again lying on the bottom bunk bed. But she wasn’t alone. The silver chinchilla Persian I had about 20 years ago, Mr. Slick, was lying there with her. I was overcome with sadness. I lay down on the bed and was crying and petting these cats. I looked up at Mr. Slick’s face and he too had these vibrant orange eyes. I was lost in those orange eyes! Then I woke up and was confused, because in life, Mr. Slick had green eyes like all silver chinchilla Persians.

A few weeks later I had another dream on that same theme. This time it was set at the Aunt Farm (grandparents’ old house). I had an African Serval cat in the dream. I suspect the connection is that right now in waking reality I have a Savannah cat – a breed developed by crossing domestic cats with an African serval. My dream serval was playing on the floor in the living room. There were some people there – visitors – who were playing a little rough with my cat. I chewed them out and told them that if the cat injured them, not to blame me as they were being way too rough with him. They left, all offended, and I was lying on the floor hugging this cat – he too was orange and I was lying there looking deep into his orange eyes.

I had several other dreams that I don’t remember as well involving orange cats with orange eyes. I was googling all over the internet analyzing dream dictionaries for possible meanings of orange cats with orange eyes. I had a big Word document full of possible interpretations. But I was barking – or in this case meowing – up the wrong tree. I should also mention that I was not in the market for a cat at the time. I already had two – the Savannah cat and also a Bengal cat.

While the whole orange cat with orange eyes thing was going on, my husband’s prodigal son moved back to Pittsburgh. A girlfriend from Colorado followed him here and they got an apartment a few miles away from us. I was not happy about this development because this particular son tends to ruin my husband’s life when he is living nearby. After about a month they broke up and the girlfriend moved back to Colorado. We found out that while she was here she adopted a kitten from somebody she met at work. She left the kitten behind in the apartment. Bill and I had a long discussion about the fact that his son is not responsible enough to care for animals, and regardless of whether we wanted or needed a third cat we had to rescue this kitten. His son did not want the kitten.

So we went and got him – and it turns out to be an orange kitten! Like all kittens he had blue eyes at the time but as he grew his eyes changed to orange. At first I tried to encourage him be my son’s cat but he chose me as his primary companion anyway. I named him Peaches since that is what I think of when I look at his coloring.

That wasn’t the end of synchronicity either! I suspect he has healing abilities – sort of on the order of Reiki. I started a new job a few months after he moved into our home. I’d been off work for some time and it was hard to get used to getting up and commuting again. I came home the second day of the job exhausted with a splitting headache. I took a nap with Peaches and he put his paws on my forehead – in a few minutes my headache was gone. He has done this many times now. Another time I had a dream in the middle of the night – a grief dream – and woke up feeling really awful. The feeling was centered in my solar plexus. Peaches always sleeps on my pillow next to my head. As soon as I woke up he got up also, worked his way under the covers, curled up on my solar plexus, and started to purr. The awful feeling went away. Unfortunately he reserves his healing talents for me. My aspirations as manager for “Peaches the Healing Cat” were short lived.

I have often wondered about the details of the orange cat dreams and what they might reveal about Peaches’ true identity. I have a feeling I’ve had this cat before. I suspect he may be Mr. Slick come back again to lend his support at a difficult time in my life. There are many similarities between them, such as a fondness for hanging out in the bathtub and playing with the drip from the faucet, fearlessness, and being the dominant cat in the household.

I do not have any doubts that animals, just like people, go to the other side upon physical death. Many of my childhood pets visit me occasionally in dreams – an Irish Setter dog named Kelly I once had, the black cat I had when I was a toddler, and Tam – my mother’s Siamese. It is not a very long leap from there to ponder that they could return again as another animal to spend more time with us.

Mom ADC's Begin to Settle Into A Pattern During Year Two

I read somewhere that the first year (approximately) after a person dies is spent getting accustomed to their new state of existence and learning to give up "habits" from Earth life, such as eating and sleeping. I had the most frequent and dramatic contact with my mother during this first year. After that, the contact slowed down but still occured regularly, about once every three or four months. However I was still very much aware of her presence, as her first job in the afterlife seemed to be watching out for my father (see Someone To Watch Over You).

By now Dad was living in an assisted living apartment near us. He gave up driving due to his decline in health and the fact that he was now living where he was not familiar with the roads. Once he moved into this environment with nurses to check on him 7 by 24, my mother's presence seemed to drift a little farther away, as if she knew he had enough care and no longer needed her to watch him like a hawk.

About a year after Dad moved into his new place, I had the following dream.

I was driving out to my parents’ house – it was dark outside (just dusk) but warm and nice. I pulled into my customary spot in front of my Dad’s garage and got out of the car. I wasn’t sure about being back at this place. Honestly I wasn't sure if I ever wanted to see my childhood home again, now that I knew it was gone. Seeing my dad's car parked there and all their stuff on the porch, I realized I was dreaming. So I decided to go in and explore.

When I got up on the porch I noticed that the front door was open. There was a light airy curtain in the screen door window that was blowing gently in the wind. I went into the house. My brother John and his wife Elivra were laying on the floor watching TV with the big pillows. Dad was in his recliner in front of his desk. Everything was just as it had been before my mother died. They all said hello and Dad tried to give me a check.

"Thanks for coming out," he said.

But I refused it. "Honestly Dad, it is OK. I don't need it, and I don't want you to run out of money." It was comforting to be back in the emotional space of knowing my parents would give me money if I ever needed it, but the part of my awareness that knew he was now living on a fixed income and might require expensive medical care nagged at the back of my mind. And I also know there is no way - at least that I know of - to take a check back to waking physical reality.

They were watching “The Waltons” on TV. The actors from the show were having a reunion and we talked about how much they've changed. I said there were two things different about the place with Mom gone – there were crumbs on the living room floor and the front door was open. They laughed.
Just then, Mom came downstairs in one of her ubiquitous house coats and went into the kitchen. She opened the cupboard door above the stove where the cookies were kept. Her favorite part of the day was coming home and putting on her nightgown and housecoat. In the evenings she would lay in bed and read, occasionally coming downstairs to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and maybe a snack of cookies or nuts.

I felt the familiar rush of adrenaline from realizing again that I was in a dream, and there she is! It's an ADC dream! Although I was enjoying the visit with the dream characters of my living relatives, I thought, I’m not missing out on this opportunity! I went into the kitchen and started talking to her. We went back upstairs to the bedroom and hung out talking on the bed like we always did. I know we talked about “The Waltons” but other than that it was just normal BS. One of the problems with deciding to remain in a lucid dream for a long time is you often cannot remember all of the details as vividly.

When I did wake up, I realized that the purpose and nature of the ADC's was changing. No longer was it about big worldview changing communications - it was becoming routine, with the purpose being no more than continuing the relationship. I'd adapted to the new order of things, with her being there while I was stil here.

Bill Gets A Butterfly

Throughout all of these experiences of contact with my mother, my husband Bill kept asking the same question: Why doesn’t she send me a message?  Didn’t she like me?  He also felt angry because he wanted her to help him plan the landscaping for the yard, and instead she chose to cross over.  I’m sure she would’ve loved that if her health had stayed longer.  And I’m also sure she can still help him if he learns to open himself up to this kind of input, which is entirely possible for him as he already has very accurate intuitive hunches.

 Around the time of the first anniversary of her death, Bill got what he asked for.

He went outside one day and noticed a blue butterfly in front of him as he stood on the back sidewalk.  He thought this was kind of strange because we do not have any butterfly bushes planted yet and it is rare to see them in the yard.  The sight of the blue one freaked him out – he remembered my blue butterfly stories and how they were confirmed by Denise Lescano during my reading.

The butterfly flew away towards the driveway.  My mother’s car – the car that she died in – was parked there as by this time my father had moved to an assisted living apartment near our home.

He followed the butterfly around my mother’s car and it vanished by the passenger side door (the seat she was sitting in when she died).

You Need To Heal Your Relationship With Death

The evening of May 22, 2011 found me lying lathargically in the bathtub, mind wandering, nothing thinking about much of anything. This is a mental state not far from meditation. Perhaps it allowed me to connect with my mother even though I was awake, because a thought entered my head out of nowhere and snapped me to full attention: How long ago was it, exactly, that John told you Sherise was pregnant?


My neice, Sherise, married a year or so before. I knew they were anxious to start a family. John told me she was expecting ... I searched through my memory banks ... sometime in the fall? He was very hush hush about it. Only a few weeks along, so nothing is certain yet. I counted the months on my fingers. Holy crap, she should be due any day now! I should email John and find out when the baby is due, I thought.

But I never got the chance because the next morning an email was already there announcing the birth of my new great-neice, Elin. Somehow I just knew my mother was involved. I wasn't the only one who came to that conclusion. My sister-in-law posted the same thought on her Facebook page that morning.



A few weeks later, on June 4, 2011, I had another dream visit from my mother.

I was back at my parents' house, helping to clean up after a big family get-together like we used to have for holidays. Most of the guests were already gone. The only people left were immediate family. I was putting chairs away. I wasn't quite sure where some of them went. Deciding I'd better ask somebody first, I sat down on one of the homeless chairs in my parents' living room. Moments later my mother came out of the kitchen in her blue nightgowns and sat down in the rocking chair, across the room from where I was sitting. This was a common occurence back in the day. After cooking some huge meal and ending up with piles and piles of dishes, she would go upstairs and change into her nightgown. Then she would come back to the kitchen, kick my dad out (who was always trying to help, but ended up getting in her way) and clean up.

"Boy am I tired" she said. "I need an asprin."

I started to snigger to myself. It was the way she always said "asprin" - it always sounded like "ass burn". I realized I was dreaming and stifled the laught. Another visit from my mother from beyond! It seemed taboo to tease a dead woman about needing an "ass burn".

She mentioned that the lady next door (Regina) had died. This evolved into conversation about death.  During this entire exchange the rest of the family bustled about, as if they were completely unaware that we were there.

She looked at me pointedly. "You need to heal your relationship with death."

"Well I'm talking to a dead person, so that must be a start," was my wise-ass reply. Truth is, I was finding it hard to forget about the "ass burn".

My statement about her - present condition - triggered all the other dream figures of living family members to become lucid. They mobbed her with sighs and excited chatter.

But the one who stood out was Sherise, who knelt down beside her, hugged her, and said, "Grandma, you're the ONLY dead person I ever want to talk to!"

I woke up.

 Now I was really sure that somehow my mother was very involved with this new baby. Has she reincarnated? Or was she Elin's spirit guide? I am still not sure. However my dream log reveals that after Elin's birth, contact with my mother declined significantly. Whatever the connection is, it is keeping her busy.

The Elephant in the Room: Talking about the Suicide

One of the strange things I noticed, as time went on, was how my mother seemed to not like it when I talked about her being dead. And if I actually mentioned the suicide? Poof! Gone.

According to my dream log, I'd taken a Galantamine a few hours before I had this one. I'd been awake once already, talked to Bill about having breakfast, and then fallen back asleep. This lucid dream, if you want to get technical, began as a false awakening because I really thought I'd gotten up and went to my sewing room to sew.

My husband opened up the door and said “Your mother is here!” I thought, wait a minute! I'm still asleep!

I hurried over and looked out the door. There's Mom, coming up the stairs with a bunch of stuff in a plastic Giant Eagle bag, just like she always did.

I gave her a hug. “Wow! I can’t believe you’re here! I am obviously still asleep. I hope it isn’t 9:00 yet. I was planning to get up at 9:00 and sew. I'm supposed to go downstairs and have breakfast. If I sleep in Bill will be pissed." She laughed.

For a long time we hung out and talked about how I just remodeled my sewing room. I showed her my new storage containers. She asked how it was working out having three cats in there – was it too many? I explained how I take them in the bedroom individually sometimes for some alone time, and that I wished I could let them out all of the time but Bill is upset because they scratch his stuff.

I asked her if she sent me the dream earlier in the night about the orange cat. She said she didn’t, but pointed out that she also isn’t the only one over there who sends me messages.

Then the dream changed. We were laying on her bed talking like we always used to when she was alive. I told her about how my sister had given me a bunch of stuff from her suicide survivor group and I was reading it.

"I just can't relate to this stuff," I said. "It goes on and on about "irretrievable loss" and "permanent separation". But for God's sake I'm sitting here talking to you about it!

I explained how I’d tried going to a bereavement group at a local church and ended up feeling like an outcast. One time only, I'd ventured to share a story - as vague and benign one as I could think of - about how I can still communicate with her. They stared at me light deer caught in the headlights!

"I just can’t talk about this with other people, because they either don’t believe me or get uncomfortable with it."

She looked at me sheepishly. “You know I had to have counseling for that.”

I was stunned - it was the first time she'd volunteered any information about how her manner of death played out in the afterlife. I got the distinct feeling that was as far as she was comfortable going, so I decided not to push my luck.

I changed the subject and we talked about cleaning up the house and other silly everyday stuff like we used to when she was alive. Then I woke up and while I wasn’t entirely ready for the visit to end, I was OK with it.

Now certain I was awake I went down to breakfast. My husband confirmed that the entire dream took about 45 minutes, based on the time when he left me in the bedroom and when I came downstairs.

The Hazards of Negative Energy

When I last left off from Mom’s story, I’d been having a lot of contact and dream visitations, and had by this time been to THREE different professional psychics (more on that later) all of whom independently confirmed the validity of the information I was getting.  I believed in it enough to begin to wonder if this sudden increase in psychic abilities and activity meant something for my life other than just getting over the passing of my mother.  Should I be using this somehow?

At first I did the only two things I knew to do:

1)      I read many books on the subject, and related subjects: After Death Communication, books written by mediums (biographical and instructional), lucid dreaming, reincarnation, psychic development, meditation, astral projection, ghosts – anything that seemed relevant and had credentials like good reviews, authors with good reputations, etc.  At this point I wasn’t necessarily ready to just swallow all of this stuff hook line and sinker, but I thought that reading many different viewpoints would help sort things out.  If practically every authority was giving the same information about some topics, then that information has a higher probability of being accurate, I reasoned.

2)      I started meditating again.  Back when I was a young teenager and psychic stuff was happening to me I had a few books on meditation, chakras, etc and I got pretty good at it!  I could actually leave my body, float up the ceiling, turn over, and look down at myself on the bed.  Being a kid I’d never had anyone tell me that this was usual or difficult to achieve so I never questioned it.  As an adult it isn’t so easy to trust like that!  Nevertheless, I started meditation again, just simple breath meditation, chakra cleansing, white light, etc.  I also started practicing yoga as it is the only form of exercise I’ve found that I don’t hate. 

I realized I needed to get really serious about learning to develop and control these abilities in the spring of 2010.  I had a really big fight with my husband – one of those emotional but (thankfully) rare arguments about a subject that pushed both of our buttons.  When I’d had enough I went into the master bathroom and slammed the door!  I heard a loud crack and turned to see that I’d slammed it hard enough to crack the mirror on the back of the door.  Geez!  Time to get a hold of the temper … temper … I’d been kind of prone to outbursts of temper since my mother died.  She chewed me out for that in a dream once.  A friend of mine, who was widowed young and is therefore considered an expert on the subject of grief, told me that flying off the handle over dumb things is a grief symptom and it would go away in time.  It was already happening less frequently when this fight happened, but it was another six months before I was back to normal.

The master bathroom is right off of the master bedroom, and the door and mirror in question are right next to my husband’s side of the bed.  As it is a cheap crappy mirror he wasn’t particularly angry about it, and we talked about replacing it with a nicer one up in the attic.  Fortunately I don’t believe all that BS about 7 years of bad luck.  It’s been a year already and I have not had any bad luck!

Bad luck aside there were some unforeseen consequences to this little temper tantrum.  A few weeks later we were lying in bed in the middle of the night and for some reason we were both awake.

“Do you hear that?” he whispered.

“Hear what?” I asked.  “I don’t have my hearing aids in.”

“Well put them in!  The bathroom door is moving!  It’s creaking back and forth.  I can hear it, and I can just barely see it in the moonlight.  Sometimes I hear other things like someone is back in the cubbyhole behind the bathroom – knocks, stuff moving around.  This has been happening for weeks.  Are we haunted?”

I put my hearing aids in and yes – I could hear it too.  I was perplexed – I didn’t sense anything weird in the house, and I’d talked to a professional medium a few weeks before who confirmed that the house was clear.  We hadn’t been any places where you would be at risk for picking up stray ghosts.  So what was it?

And then it dawned on me.  “Did this start before or after we had that fight and I slammed the door and broke that mirror?”

“Come to think of it, it started right after that.”

I now had a theory.  Given that I was experiencing all this psychic awakening and meditating, which in the past increased the psychic phenomena, could it be that *I* was responsible for the energy making all the noise in the bathroom?  I’d read about poltergeists, and how at least some of them have been attributed to psychokinesis originating from a living member of the household.  After all, I was really angry when I slammed the door, and my anger manifested physically as a crack in the mirror – maybe it hung around afterwards in the environment, like a residual haunting?

“I have an idea,” I told him.  “Just lie there and be quiet for a while.  I am going to meditate and try something.”

So I went into a deep meditation and white lighted the bathroom door.  And the bathroom, and the crawl space behind the bathroom, and might as well do the bedroom, the whole house, and the yard.  You just can’t be too careful with this sort of thing.

I waited about a week and then checked in with him.  “Did the noises stop after I did that white light meditation?”

“Yeah!  That was amazing!  I haven’t heard a thing since.”

I had further confirmation when I was telling this story to by step daughter, who was staying with us at the time in a bedroom across the hallway.  She heard the noises too, and noticed when they suddenly stopped.

That is when I realized I needed to be more serious about all this and take some real classes.  When you start scaring people you are in over your head.  Overall my husband is pretty good at putting up with my crazy stuff, but things moving around by themselves and unexplainable noises are beyond his tolerance level.

A Bit About Reincarnation

I was asked about this recently so I decided to do a post about it.  This was not a topic that resonated with me at first.  It was frowned on in most church circles where I travelled in my younger days.  However I had many family members who believed in it, one being my Tibetan Buddhist sister, who used to tease me about being buried twice in the same grave!

At this point I am back to believing in it again as it is the only explanation I’ve found for many of my own experiences and the experiences of many other people I’ve known.  My mother believed that I was reincarnated from her sister, Emily, who died in 1938.  This story came to me by way of my sister, who has it further documented in letters our mother sent to her in the 1970’s and 80’s.

Emily, was 12 years older than my mother.  From what Mom told me she spent a lot of time with Emily while she was growing up.  Emily got married in about 1937 and shortly thereafter became pregnant with her first child.  Early on in the pregnancy she developed a complication called hyperemesis gravidarum.  This condition is basically morning sickness on steroids – you are so sick you can’t eat anything for months on end.  As this was 1938 there were not many options for treating this condition.  The treatment now involves a lot of IV’s and drugs that can suppress the problem with varying degrees of efficiency and risk.  But back then?  They tried a lot of things but by the 7^th month of the pregnancy Emily contracted pneumonia and died.  There were ideas back then about a “good death”.  When the doctors decided that Emily would most likely die they started bringing in this endless parade of family members and friends, including my mother who was eight years old at the time.  Mom told me (while alive) that she was taken to visit Emily the night before she died.  She said Emily was on a feeding tube and couldn’t talk, and looked absolutely terrified.  When they took my mother away Emily looked at her a certain way, and this image of the last time she saw her sister stayed with her vividly for the rest of her life. 

They buried Emily in the family plot.  That is burial #1.

Fast forward another thirty or so years to the day I was born.  The doctor held me up in the delivery room and I looked at her the exact same way.  And she knew from that moment on that I was Emily.  There were other confirmations – things I would say to her when I was little.  I don’t remember most of the details but my sister still has the freaked out letters from my mother insisting “nobody but my sister could possibly know that!”  I have read some very good books about past life memories and small children that confirmed this pattern as common, primarily Children's Past Lives: How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child and Return From Heaven: Beloved Relatives Reincarnated Within Your Family, both by Carol Bowman.  Both of these books explain it very well and give many fascinating case histories.

The past life memories I have that could be attributed to Emily are kind of vague and center around old kitchen appliances and wallpaper.  I also have memories that I suspect are of Emily’s funeral which would suggest I was hanging around in a discarnate state, or I received the memories telepathically from my mother (as if that explanation is any easier to believe).  What I remember clearly from the ages of 2-5 is feeling very shocked at how old everyone was!  Crap – three out of four grandparents were already gone!  And two out of three siblings were grown and off at college!  WTF?  I missed everything!  I was born at the wrong time!  I spent a lot of time pretending it was 10 years earlier and watching TV shows that were from 10 years earlier in a vain attempt to recover this time.

Fast forward another 10 years.  When I was 12 a series of synchronicities began that opened up a channel with my grandmother – my mother’s mother.  Who, if you are keeping track of this, was once my mother, if I was Emily.  In the first dream she authenticated herself by giving me a piece of information that I didn’t know but was guaranteed to get everyone’s attention.  She took me into my parents’ bedroom (in the dream) and opened in the closet.  In the closet was a baby lying in a coffin!

So I wake up from this dream, stagger down to the breakfast table and present it for interpretation.  I get back stony poker faces.  Nobody would say a word.  I knew there was something they weren’t telling me!  This happened around Memorial Day and that year we went to the cemetery with The Aunts to plant flowers on the graves in the family plots.  I could not stop crying at the cemetery but I didn’t know why.  When we got back to the house I was alone with the Aunts in the kitchen and Aunt Gerk said something about “the baby.”  Huh?  What baby?!  Aunt Gerk was confused – wasn’t that what I was bawling about?  Uh – maybe.  So she filled me in.  In 1956 my mother had a stillborn baby girl.

When I confronted my parents about this they reluctantly admitted it was true and told me to never mention it again.  My brothers and sister remembered playing in the front yard one day, and Dad coming out on the porch and telling them the baby died.  And after that it was never mentioned again.  My sister, who by this point had done a lot of psychic training, told me that she felt this baby was me, and that is why I always thought I was born at the wrong time.

They buried the baby in the same vault with Emily.  There’s burial # 2.  So from then on when she came home for holidays I got teased, “Ha ha!  You’re the only person I know who was buried twice in the same grave!”

Fast forward another 15 years.  When I had my son, I had the exact same pregnancy complication and the exact same disease progression that Emily did.  Only when I got pneumonia at 7 months, I was living in a time period when antibiotics were available, so I (obviously) didn’t die.  I can’t imagine what re-living that drama must have been like for my mother.  She didn’t talk about it much at the time.  I was as sick as a dog so I wouldn’t have been much help anyway.  I felt like the grim reaper was following me around constantly.  Sure some of this could be blamed on genetics but it is still a strange set of coincidences.

I decided to dream on this one recently.  I asked for information about past lives before I went to bed.  I had a disturbing dream that began with a piece of old wallpaper attached to a board above the cabinets in my parent’s basement.  In waking reality I saw this wallpaper as a small child and I was told that it was in my brother John’s nursery when he was a baby.  It was blue striped wallpaper with little Donald Duck characters.  The dream started out with an image of this wallpaper and this space the wallpaper was inside (I think the wallpaper was attached to a board that was recycled into the cabinet).  The space changed into a dark cave that was full of water, and my aunt was trapped in there and was going to drown.  I woke up from this dream feeling kind of upset and not really understanding it, so I went back in and tried to send a scuba diver in to rescue my aunt.  She politely declined and explained that this was supposed to happen and she was in constant contact with family outside of the cave, so I should stop worrying about it.  Once I was wide awake this all resonated strongly with the story I related above.  I can only assume that if I had been born 2 years after John (instead of 16) I would have been put in the same nursery with that wallpaper.  Does this prove it is true?  No.  But until science comes up with a way to attach a radioactive tag to someone’s soul to track it from body to body, there isn’t going to be any proof.  This is the best I can do.

I will finish off with Mom’s own re-incarnation story.  She told me this while she was still alive.  Mom said that her earliest memories are of looking at people and being shocked at how “white” they were.  She felt that she didn’t belong here and she should find a way to get back to “her own people”.  She hated wearing clothes and took them all off at every available opportunity.  When she was about three she was down in the creek (naked) making clay pots.  She decided she was going to fire her clay pots and was in the process of assembling the materials to do this when her father came after her.  She was nervous because she knew she probably wasn’t allowed to light a fire, and she did her best to act innocent.  But little did she know that he had figured her out.

“You can’t go back to your people,” he told her.  “They’re all dead. “

 She stared at him in shock.  “All of them?”

“The white men gave them blankets infected with smallpox.  They got sick and died.  I’m very sorry, but you’re going to have to get used to being one of us now.”  Then he left her to fire her pots in peace.  After that she accepted being part of the family and life went on.  Did she have a past life as a Native American?  Or is there some other explanation?  As this happened in about 1933 I think it is safe to assume she didn’t see it on TV.

I found it fascinating that in that distant generation (grandpa Anderson was born in 1884) people in our family were aware of reincarnation and figured out what was going on, either by observing my mother’s behavior, or via clairvoyance, or some combination thereof.  Acknowledging the child’s past life memory,  re-assuring them that it is over, and encouraging them to live life in the present is exactly the advice given to parents in Carol Bowman’s books.  But this happened decades before books like these were written.  How did he know?  I guess I should dream on that sometime!

Grandma Crosses Over

With all of the reading I’ve been doing lately about dreams, synchronicity, and shared dreaming I thought I would write the story of Grandma Mason’s passing.  This happened in 1984 when I was fourteen years old.  I was in about ... eighth grade.  It is hard to remember exactly what grade I was in but I definitely remember what book we were reading in English class: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.  Unlike everyone else in the class I loved reading this stuff.  The teacher would assign chapter one and I would get so wrapped up in the book I’d read the entire thing the first night.  Then I’d have to go back and read it again with the class so I could remember which chapters where which!

At this time my dad’s mother – Grandma Mason – had just been admitted to a personal care home.  She was 89 years old and had been having problems living alone for the past year.  The place was not nearby and I’d only been there once or twice.  The visit just after New Year’s I remember vividly.  I went with my brothers, Bob and John, in John’s truck.  A few days before he’d gotten sick while he was out somewhere and barfed on the side of his truck.  It was January in Pittsburgh so the barf froze before he could clean it all off and as a result, the inside of the truck absolutely reeked.  This is the kind of stuff that is hard to forget even if you try really hard.  But it makes a great peg to hang other, more memorable, memories upon.

I should also point out that Grandma Mason was (is) extremely psychic.  She could see ghosts and told lots of great ghost stories.  She also had a lot of precognitive dreams.  Her abilities co-existed peacefully with her religiousness.  She was the most genuine Christian I've ever known.  I wish I'd thought to ask her more about that, but at the time I was just interested in bugging her with questions about ghosts and dreams.

This dream occured in early February, soon after I arrived home from school.  I was reading Great Expectations in bed and fell asleep, most likely because I’d stayed up late the night before reading the entire book.  I was wandering around in a big red brick hospital I’d never seen before when I realized I was dreaming.  I didn’t know why I was there or what I was looking for.  But something did strike me as odd.  On all the bulletin boards and pasted here and there on the walls were construction paper hearts, some of them pasted on top of lace paper doilies.

Eventually I wandered past a waiting room and spotted Grandma Mason!  She was sitting in one of the ugly 1970’s colored vinyl chairs wearing what appeared to be a very old wedding dress and was holding a bouquet of flowers that were brown, shriveled, and dead.  I went over and sat down beside her.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I’m waiting.  I have to go soon.”

“What do you mean?  Go where?”

“I have to go.”

Yes it sounds like an inane conversation, but when she repeated this phrase I immediately understood what she meant.

“You can’t go!” I insisted.  “I’m not ready for this!  You’re the only grandparent I have left!”

She patted my leg.  “Please don’t be upset.  You have to understand,  I’ve waited for this a very LONG time.  But I can’t stay anymore.  I stayed as long as I could.”

Then a door opened up and an extremely bright light shone through it.  It was so bright I couldn’t see anything in the room, just the bright white light.

“That’s it!” she said, growing excited.  “I have to go now.  But don’t worry – you’re going to be fine.  It’s just something that everybody has to go through.  And don’t worry about me.  I’ll be fine.  I’m looking forward to this, as difficult as that is to understand for someone your age.”

She stood up and walked into this light.  I didn’t think I could even stand to watch.  But at the last minute my curiosity got the best of me and I looked up.  She was in the white light now and was completely transformed.  She was young!  The dress looked brand new and the flowers were white and fresh.  She smiled at me, waved, and tossed the bouquet.  I caught it.  I looked down and saw that the bouquet was made from three white Easter lilies.  They were so real I could smell them!  The pollen from the stamens in the center came off on my fingers, powdery yellow.

I then I woke up with Great Expectations jabbing me in the back.  Like most people would I attributed the dream to what I was reading.

Fast forward a couple weeks.  I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of the phone ringing.  The phone ringing in the middle of the night could  only mean one thing – somebody was dead.  And I knew who.  But I didn’t get up because I couldn’t deal with it.

The next morning I got up for school and got dressed.  I sat in front of my dressing table and did my best to suck up so I could go down stairs and have my parents tell me my grandmother was dead.  I could’ve milked it for a day off school but I decided not to.  I was going to go and act normal.   She told me not to worry about it.  So suck up!  Right?

I went downstairs to breakfast and Dad told me she died during the night.  He said she started to hemorrhage late at night and they’d taken her by ambulance to West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh.  She died at West Penn.   Why is this detail important?  Because a couple of years later my mother got a job at West Penn.  She took me there one day to show me and imagine my shock when I recognized it as the hospital from this dream!

Then I remembered something!  It was Valentine’s Day!  And I understood that part of the dream.  What I didn’t get was if she was already dead and came back in time to warn me, if she was somehow sharing my dream two weeks before she died, or if my subconscious mind knew when and where she was going to die and created this elaborate dream to pass the information through.  To this day I honestly don’t know.  But the interaction felt genuine.  It felt like she was really there, rather than it just being a dream image of her.

“What time did she die?” I asked.

“A little while after midnight,” he said.  “About 12:30.”

“Then she really did die on Valentine’s Day,” I said.

“You’re right!  I didn’t realize it.  She always said people in her family died on holidays.”

And then, as if to further underscore her message that everything was fine and I shouldn’t worry, the synchronicities began.  The weather did a full U turn – it was the middle of February and suddenly it was 75 degrees outside!  It stayed warm like that for the entire duration of the funeral.  It smelled like Easter.  Odd references to Easter kept popping up and white lilies or images of white lilies seemed to be everywhere.

I was 14 years old and I’d never heard of any white light before, or had any idea of what it was for or where it lead.  I had a vague idea that my Grandmother went to heaven because, well, she was the most religious person I’d ever met so where else would she go?  I suspect, looking back, that when she tossed me that bouquet she was passing something on to me, because after that I began to get a real education about what happens to people after they die, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairgustience and all sorts of other things with no vocabulary in 1984, but they were going on all around me anyway!

Going Home

We were sitting in what appeared to be a church basement.  There was a stage with metal folding chairs setup.  It was sunny outside.  We were sitting on two adjacent chairs in the first row while my son Henry was playing on the floor nearby.  He appeared to be about three years old (in waking reality he is 12).

We were talking about nothing in particular.  My attention was immediately drawn to what she was wearing.  At home she almost always wore a “house coat”.  This particular one she had for a number of years during my childhood and seeing her wearing it, I could remember it quite well.  A few days before this experience, I found some fabric from this house coat in one of the quit bags and although I recognized it, I wasn’t sure where from.  I thought maybe it was one of my old dresses.  But seeing her wearing this garment, the memory came back with utter clarity.

Then I noticed her face, her skin, her hair – all of it is such perfect detail!  Far more detail than I could remember in waking reality.  It totally blew my mind. 

So finally I said, “You know, I guess I just really don’t understand enough about how this whole being dead thing works.”

“Oh!” she said.  “Well, I can go home as often as I want!  And I can also help people!  I can draw off their negative energy – emotions and all that – and take it upon myself.  Then I can connect to a positive source and clear it away.  And I can merge my energy with that of an animal and communicate with it.”

Right then the 3 year old image of my son butted in.  He pushed between us and held his arms up, as if he wanted my mother to pick him up.  I picked him up instead.

“Henry,” I explained.  “Grandma died.  She doesn’t have a body anymore so she can’t hold you.  But I can hold you on my lap and you can talk to her.”

He leaned over and whispered something in her ear.  She smiled and whispered something back.   Then I woke up.

A few days later I got a phone call from my friend Lisa, who grew up across the street from me.  Her brother Keith bought my parents’ house after my mother died.  He moved in with his girlfriend and had been living in the house for several months by this time.

“My mom made me swear not to tell you this,” she said, “but I feel like I have to.  Kayla [Keith’s girlfriend] was talking about the ghost in the house!  She told us SHE is friendly.  She is never afraid of HER.  We never told Kayla anything about what happened in the house.  My brother was afraid she would refuse to move in with him if we did.  But now Kayla says she can hear footsteps in the house when nobody is home.”

“Well, I have to tell ya, I just talked to my mother a few days ago and she told me she can go home as often as she wants.  And that is a direct quote.”

Lisa was quite freaked out.  “Kayla says there are several of them though!”

“Remember – my mother hangs around with her sisters.  It wouldn’t surprise me if The Aunt Farm Aunts are going back there with her.”

I also reassured her that my mother was in the light, and being visited by dead people who are in the light is a very different thing than being visited by earthbound dead people, which is why Kayla is comforted by the presence rather than feeling creeped out or afraid.

I also began to notice my mother “helping” me in the way she described.  I was angry one evening (I can’t remember why) so I went to my sewing studio alone to sew.  It was very late but I was too ticked off to sleep.  After a while I started to notice the anger draining away, and I felt my mother’s presence.  My skittish cat was suddenly all over me wanting petted.

That was my first clue that I needed to develop psychically for my own good – it isn’t really fair to expect my mother to absorb my bad moods, especially since she has to experience them to do this.  I felt kind of guilty afterwards for putting her through that.  As I was soon to learn, my mother and I were not the only ones adversely affected by my bad moods, making it even more imperative that I learn to control my “gift”.