by Jim Harold
At that point, the knowledge that I had to pick what I wanted to be in my next life was revealed to me. I was going to be reincarnated, I guessed. I was still in shock because of the whole process.
I asked him, "Is man dying and reincarnating forever?" Then, and this was the only time he answered me, I was told that there's not much more time left for man.
Suddenly, I felt an urge to pick what I wanted to be in my next life. I was shown the concept of different careers in general terms—what it is to be a doctor, or a fireman, etc. For example, I was shown what it was like to play guitar, and I loved it. So I asked, "Can I learn how to play guitar?" And, I was given that information, that knowledge—how to play guitar. I explained that I was not ready to be a priest or anything like that, but that I would like to be, at least, a good person. He didn't answer, but I was filled with information, with knowledge. I just felt it was telepathic. Then, I saw what it was like to draw and paint. I loved it. So I asked again, "Can I learn how to do those things?" And again I was imparted those skills. After saying I wanted to know how to play guitar and how to draw, this holographic screen popped up again in front of me. As I was looking at it, I could see that these talents were going to be a large part of my future life. Since I was a kid, I've been a natural talent at playing guitar—nobody taught me.
I also saw that I was going to learn English. I knew that I was going to live in a foreign country other than Spain where I was born. I'm here now in the States. I saw many different things. I saw old buildings, which I later recognized when I drove around Austin after moving here. I recognized the architecture.
Here's what changed my mind on telling people about my experience: I kept seeing different visions, but one of the most disturbing was when I reached my 30s. I was shown that I would develop some kind of pain in my legs and my arms. At that point, I received the knowledge, automatically, that this was the beginning of my end for me. I got concerned, so I asked, "Can you remove this from my fate? You know, get rid of it?" and then he looked away and I saw a negation. He just looked away, meaning that it was indeed going to be my fate. As we went on, I saw a preview of myself telling my sister and my mother and my father in this life about my pre-life experience, and it was made clear it would be at Christmastime.
I have had a strong validation of the vision. This very thing happened in real life. I went back to Spain this past Christmas season and told my family about this memory. Until recently, I have always assumed this "experience" was just a dream, so it's not a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I'm sure some people will say. A year ago, I started getting tremors in my arms, and then that developed into pain that I still have today. Right then, I thought, Wow, hold on a second. I'm in my 30s, and I have this kind of pain in my legs and my arms...
I've seen doctors for the condition, and that's something I asked Jesus about as well. I asked, "Can doctors help me?" He looked away again, saying no, telepathically. After that I asked him, "Could you please give me a wife who can help me through the process and be of support?" Right then, I saw my wife, exactly what she would look like. I immediately knew it was her. She's from America, but we met in Spain. I said, "She's beautiful, Father, thank you." She is helping me through my situation today, just as I had asked.
So, here I am, with this condition and this experience. What can I do with this information? People might think I'm crazy but I've decided to tell my story, because it has some very interesting things in it. I thought the story should be told and that it might help others.
-Francis, Texas
44. The Dream of a Funeral
Before I start, I have to say that I'm a big skeptic. I don't believe in stuff easily, and I only believe in this premonition because of how it happened. Otherwise, I wouldn't have believed it at all.
Six years ago, I lived near my grandma, and one weekend we planned a trip for Sunday. I wanted to go to a nice little town, but the day before we planned to go, I had a really weird dream. I dreamed of a burial. I didn't know who it was. In the dream, I was just crying and crying. There was a casket in the middle, but I didn't know who it was. I woke up in tears, and I said, "Oh, what a weird dream!" I didn't even think that it could have been a premonition.
We went on the trip, and when my dad was taking a turn in the car, it kind of fishtailed, and we crashed straight into a police truck.
My grandma died that night. It was a long time ago. I told my family a year afterward that I had had a premonition, and my mom said, "Come on, you should have told me! I believe in that!" I said, "I usually don't." But you know, thinking about it, I really believe in premonitions now. I think that there has to be some kind of connection. Some people will have a premonition, and then what they saw happens a month or a week after that, so it was freaky that this happened the day after my dream.
-Carlos, Colombia
45. A Poem From Beyond
Today is the four-year anniversary of my grandfather's death, so I thought it would be appropriate to share the story of what I believe was him communicating with me from beyond the grave.
This happened when I was about 16 years old. My grandfather was dying of cancer, and we knew it was going to happen pretty soon. At the time I was a very, very hardcore atheist. I was miserable because I didn't believe in anything, and I had no comfort whatsoever that he was going to be in a better place; I couldn't take the same kind of comfort in religion that my family seemed to be able to take. At the time, I was just kind of a depressed teenager; the only love of my life was my American Literature class in 11th grade. I loved this class, I loved my teacher...I loved everything about the class. It was one of the only classes I liked—I was close to flunking everything else. Anyhow, one of the poems—and this is going to be important, so bear with me—one of the poems we read was Thanatopsis by the American poet William Cullen Bryant. What made this poem so special was that it was one of the first and only poems written to comfort people about death, but with no mention of religion—no mention of heaven or spirituality or any of those popular Christian virtues.
This was a very controversial poem at the time, and it stated things like, "Don't be afraid of death, because you're going to where William Shakespeare and Julius Caesar are." Instead of "to where Jesus is," you know? Things like that. At the time I read the poem I thought, That's nice, but I don't believe in anything either way. I don't believe in an afterlife either way, and wherever my grandfather is going he's just going to disappear and we're never going to see him again. It was very difficult.
So, after he passed away, about a month later at Thanksgiving, my grandmother, his widow, was visiting my mother. My mother loves old, antique books, so my grandmother had brought over a bunch of old books that my grandfather had—and he had a lot of books. She just picked a random handful of books to bring and give to my mom. So my mom invited me to come into her room and take a look at the books. There were a couple of piles of them, and the jackets were missing, so there was no writing on the covers or on the spine, so I didn't know what they were.
I reached into one of the random piles, I pulled out a random book, I turned to a random page in the book, and there was the poem Thanatopsis, the first page of it, by William Cullen Bryant. And, you know, to a skeptic this might be kind of anticlimactic, but to me at the time, when I didn't believe in anything, and the only way anyone could get me to express any interest in life or anything was through this literature class that I was obsessed with, you know, that was the only way that someone could have spoken to me. Of all the books that my grandmother could have brought, then out of all the books in that pile, then out of all the pages I could have turned to...you know? It was Thanatopsis! So, to this day, I strongly, strongly believe that this was my grandfather trying to contact me in the only way that he knew how to reach me, through this poem.
Everything's changed since then. It wasn't just that one event, although I think that event may have opened me up, made me think twice. But since then, as an adult now, I'm a very spiritual person
, a very, very highly spiritual person. That was one of the first events to kind of trigger that transformation for me, so I'm very grateful to my grandfather for that.
-Caity, New Mexico
46. Goodbye Sunny
This was another one of those events that brought about my shift in spirituality, if you will, and this happened when I was 18, when I was leaving for college. My beloved Labrador Sunny was very sick. I had grown up with him; we had gotten him when I was 4. Now he was very sick, and we knew he had to be put down. I told my dad, "When I go to college, do what you've got to do, and don't tell me. I'll come home over Thanksgiving break and I'll know that the dog is gone, and that'll be that." I just couldn't handle the heartache.
So, I went to college. I didn't even make it to the first day of classes. The college was out of state, nine hours away, and I hated it and wanted to come home. I called my mom, and I was like, "Please come get me! I want to come home; I've got to get out of here." My mom and my stepdad came and picked me up, and I was so happy because I was thinking, "Oh, good! I can go home and see my dog again, and I get more time with him." When I called my dad to let him know I was coming home, he said, "You told me to just do what I have to do, so the day after you left I put Sunny to sleep."
My heart was just broken. I think above all, it was that I didn't get to say goodbye, really. I didn't get any closure, and that's why it was so hard to deal with.
That night, my mom and my stepdad and I were at a hotel, getting ready to head back home the next day. I fell asleep and had a dream that was very different from the way I normally dream. It was more lucid, more vivid, and it was just strangely real. In this dream, I'm back in my childhood home, in the home where my dog Sunny grew up, and where I grew up. In the dream he is outside barking to come in. And I recognize his bark and I think, Oh, gosh, how can this possibly be you? You're not supposed to be here anymore; you're supposed to be somewhere else.
But anyway, I let him in. And he comes in and again I'm almost scolding him, Sunny, you're not supposed to be here anymore; you passed away, remember? He looks at me, and without speaking or using any language it was sort of like...telepathic, but there were still no words used. It was just...I knew what he was trying to say. It was just a "Well, I thought you wanted to say goodbye and I wanted to say goodbye to you too, so let's just say goodbye and spend a couple more minutes together."
My heart just melted, so I sit down and he rolls over as usual, and I start rubbing his belly. And then, you know, I was thinking, Okay, Sunny, it was really great to see you, but I feel like you really shouldn't be here. Something feels wrong about you being here. Just as I'm thinking that, there is this incredibly loud crashing sound—my mom and my stepdad both heard it, too; we all woke up with a jolt. To this day we have no idea what it was. It was about 4 o'clock in the morning, and it woke all of us up. In that moment I heard this...almost like a faint suction sound. And I felt that there was something that had been right next to me, and it was lifted and gone. And so I definitely feel that was my dog coming back to say goodbye to me. And it's amazing, to this day I have no explanation for that.
-Caity, New Mexico
47. Nana at Night
When I heard your podcast, the one called "Called From the Grave," with the girl's grandfather, I had this really strong compulsion to talk about it, because I definitely identified with what she felt, so...
Alright, well, just to give you some background information, my family and I grew up in an all-wooden two-story house in an old town in Florida. The only way to get to the bottom floor was through a wooden spiral staircase. Growing up, no one went to the bottom floor of the house, because the atmosphere was just really thick and heavy, and as a kid I was terrified. I would never go down there. I even remember my sister sleeping upstairs on the couch. And when we entered the house, we would only enter directly onto the second floor. So, later, growing up, I learned that there had been a lot of abuse going on, and a lot of it in my sister's bedroom, so I don't know if that had something to do with not wanting to be down there. I've recently learned that if there's a lot of trauma going on with children, sometimes that can manifest things. But I don't know.
Anyway, during that time, my parents were going through a divorce, so I was spending a lot of time with my grandmother. And when I was a kid, I would feel like I was there for months, but it could have been weeks. I was very, very close with her.
I knew that she had been ill while on her vacation, and that my mom had gone to see her, and I slept upstairs. I fell asleep on this green, Victorian couch, and I had a dream. My grandmother came to me in my dream and she said, "Sarah, come here, I have something for you."
And she led me to the top of the spiral staircase, and at that time I was really scared that she was going to ask me to go downstairs. As I got to the staircase, she leaned out and touched my hand. And when she touched my hand, it was like an electric shock, and I immediately woke up. When I woke up, I was sitting straight up on the couch, and I was really confused and really scared, and my father asked me what was going on. So I explained to him that I saw my Nana, and she told me that she had something for me, and she touched me, and then I had woken up. He soon informed me that she had passed away, and perhaps this was her way of saying goodbye to me. But I was really, really scared by it. To this day, my family has a running joke with me, which is, "Don't talk about Nana at night," because it scared me so badly. With the fear I also had a tremendous amount of guilt, because as much as it scared me, I didn't want her to think that I didn't love her, or that I didn't appreciate her coming to me. It was just something that I couldn't handle.
This followed me through college, and Nana would often appear in my dreams. She always had the same introduction: "Sarah, I'm going to come to you now, okay? Don't be scared." And there would be times when I'd be like, "Oh no, Nana, please don't come see me tonight, I'm really scared." And there would be other times I'd be like "Oh, okay," you know? Once I got past the initial vision of seeing her, it was okay, but it was just that anticipation of her coming, and me knowing what that experience was going to be, that I couldn't handle.
I didn't necessarily believe in a god, and I don't necessarily believe in one now, but praying was the only thing I could do to stop the experience. During my high school years I'd sit there in bed, asking, "God, please don't let me see anything tonight. Don't let anybody talk to me. I just want to go to bed." It was all I could really do to try to avoid those kinds of experiences. When she came to me, she didn't seem to have a significant message. She would just say, "I'm going to come see you now; don't be scared." So, I don't know. It's just my experience.
I haven't seen her in my dreams in a really long time. I will say that my husband has been fighting some of his own personal demons, and there was a time that it was getting really hard. I was cooking dinner in the kitchen and he was outside, and I smelled roses. It was what my grandmother always smelled like. I booked it out of the kitchen as fast as I could, and I pulled my husband in and asked, "Do you smell that?" He couldn't pinpoint it. So, for me, it wasn't really validated, but that was the first thing that I had possibly experienced from her in a really long time.
This kind of phenomenon is sort of like the deep ocean, to me. I know it exists; I know it's there. Here and there I'm interested to learn more about it, but I have a respect for it. It's an entire world on its own; I don't belong there, and I am okay with that. I'm okay with keeping my distance, and a part of me is really envious of people who can sleep in a dark room night after night, and not ever feel uncomfortable, you know?
I appreciate it that she chose to come to me, but the whole thing kind of confuses me. Like I said, I never felt that she had a significant message, and I don't know why, when she came to me in the first place, she said, "Sarah, come here, I have something for you." I don't know why she didn't just say, "I'm saying goodbye." All of it was kind of confusing.
-Sarah, Florida
48. Uncle Ted's Bed
This haunted bed has been in our family for a few generations. It was my Great Uncle Ted's when he was a child, and, unfortunately, he committed suicide, I think in the 1940s. It was at my great-grandmother's house until she was too old to really take care of the house, and then it was passed down to my parents and became kind of like a guest bed. About five years ago when I was visiting them, they assigned me to sleep in it.
I hadn't heard that it was his, or the history behind it; it was just always there in the house. It's an old wooden bed.
So I went to bed as usual, and that night I had this really wild dream that I was driving on the highway in Buffalo, where we lived, on the skyway—a highway bridge that follows the beachfront of Lake Erie. I was looking out the window of the passenger side in the dream, and my mother was driving. It was really windy up there. I was looking out the window, and I kept seeing ghost faces touching their faces against the window and tapping on the window. I was really freaked out by this dream, and I remember waking up and the bed was shaking as if it was your car on this kind of bridge highway, shaking because it's so high up in the wind. There was tapping as if the ghost faces were tapping on the passenger side window. I had woken up, but the bed was still shaking and there was still tapping, you know? And I was terrified.
