How Premonitions of Death, Shared Dying Experiences and After-Death Communications Can Help to Heal Grief
I am a Pediatrician who has studied near death experiences for 15 years.
I have learned that they teach us that there are an entire range of
visions associated with death and dying which can help to heal grief.
A woman once came to visit me from New York. I was amazed to see her as
I live in Seattle. I asked her how I could help her, and she replied
"it has been 1041 days since my son died. I have not slept more than
four hours a night since then". I felt a horrible pit of despair in my
stomach. I could only think about my own five healthy children, and I
felt like a fraud even pretending that I had anything to offer this
woman.
I asked her to tell me more about her son and she gave me his picture.
Suddenly, I was called to the hospital, which is next door to my office
to resuscitate a critically ill newborn. I excused myself, and ran to
the hospital. When I got there, the baby was already better and I
actually had little to do.
While charting my notes, one of the nurses came up to me and asked, "who
was that who came over with you? Is he a student?" I asked "what are
you talking about". I was trying to find a pen, and took the picture
out of my pocket. The nurse said: "that' him. He kept trying to get
your attention".
I returned to my office and asked the mother if she had ever been
contacted by her son. She said, "oh yes, after he died, for several
nights he would stand at the foot of my bed and tell me he was alright,
and that I should stop crying. But that was only a crazy dream, it was
just something I wanted to believe. It seemed real, but it couldn't
have been real".
I felt too embarrassed to share with this mother what happened to me at
the hospital. Instead, I told her that before she went to bed, she
should do some simple relaxation techniques and turn off her internal
narrator, that constantly chattering internal voice that can often drown
out other communications. I gave her a technique of tensing and
relaxing one's muscles, starting at the top of the head, working down to
the toes, and then returning to the head. There are many such
techniques, and all equally effective.
She should then ask her son for help in healing her grief. I asked her
to get a journal and write down everything she dreamed about each night,
and her first thoughts on awakening. I asked her to take her journal to
a grief counselor in her hometown.
The mother wrote to me later, and told me that that night was the first
night she had slept well since her son died. After years of going to
various grief workshops and psychics and mediums, she learned that the
seeds of her own healing right were at the foot of her bed.
This Mom had an after-death communication from her son. It is one of
the most common spiritual experiences that we have. Medical research
shows that 25-50% of grieving spouses or parents have some sort of
visitation. Unfortunately, like the Mother who visited me, most people
trivialize or dismiss the experiences as grief induced hallucinations,
and cut themselves off from their potential to heal.
There are three broad categories of healing spiritual visions
surrounding death and dying; premonitions of death, shared dying
experiences, and after death visitations. Recent new evidence in near
death research strongly suggests that such experiences are real and an
important part of understanding death.
It is common to have intense feelings or even visions that someone you
love will die. With one of the nation's largest organizations devoted
to Sudden Infant Death research, we studied parents who had premonitions
that their infant would die. We used two control groups of parents who
did not have infants die, to understand what normal fears and
premonitions about death were.
We learned that nearly 25% of the time, parents had distinct and vivid
perceptions which were not seen in our control patients. Often they
would write these in a journal, or tell their doctor about them.
A patient in my practice told me: When I was seven months pregnant, I
was resting in bed. Suddenly, I found myself floating out of my body,
looking down at myself. A lady was next to me. She glowed with a white
light. "You know", she said with great care and compassion, "she can't
keep the baby".
"I mourn terribly for my baby, but I am not angry. I felt great love
and compassion from when she told me that, as if my baby's death was a
part of a greater purpose and plan."
It is clear that the purpose of these premonitions is to explain death
and to help parents cope. They do not, in my experience, result in any
way of preventing the event. Many parents took their infants to doctors
or emergency rooms, and the SIDS event not prevented.
One of my patients had a vivid dream that her son would be horribly
injured in a car accident. No details which could have led to her
preventing the accident were given. Indeed, she was ultimately the
driver in the wreck, and it was her fault.
She told me that the meaning of her dream to her was that her mother,
who had given her the news in her dream, was her guardian angel and
watched over her. She said: "Without that dream, I could never have
kept my family together, been a wife, and a mother to my other children,
because I felt so guilty and depressed over what I did. Yet I always
knew that even though it was my fault, somehow it was meant to be, and
my mother would always be there for me.
Another type of death related vision are shared dying experiences. For
example, a mother in my practice told me about sitting with her sister,
at their dying mother's bedside. They both fell asleep. She dreamed
that she was walking down a path towards a brightly lit garden path with
her sister and mother. Her mother paused at the light, and turned and
said, "I must go now." She had incredible love for both of them, and
seemed to indicate that she was sorry, but only she could go further.
When she woke up, her mother had died. Her sister had had the same
dream, with the exception that she thought they were walking along a
sandy path., towards a gate and a light behind it.
Finally, there are after death visions. These often come as simple
messages that someone has died and everything is alright. The night
that my father died, I had turned off all the phones in my house as I
had been working hard and needed rest. This was very irresponsible of
me, as I was on call for the Infant Intensive Care Unit. I cannot
explain why I did it, I just remember telling my wife that I was so
tired, I couldn't possible take any phone calls, that I had to sleep.
My father came to me in a dream. I dreamed I was awake, and he was
standing at the foot of my bed. He said: "Melvin, call your answering
service". I woke up, did so, and learned my father died.
Sometimes after death communications are quite complex. I know a young
man whose mother's fiance was killed in a car accident. The step-father
to be often contacts the young man and they talk, usually about
woodworking projects.
I recognize that our society often trivializes and dismisses these
experiences as not being "real" but figments of a grieving mind. It
could be argued that everyone has vague fears about their baby dying,
and then when it actually happens, parents embellish or invent soothing
premonitions to explain the event. That is why we had two control
groups on our study, to learn what normal premonitions are like. They
were nothing like the vividly real premonitions that came true. For
example, frequently the parents who had the premonitions that came true,
brought their child to the doctor or emergency rooms on the strength of
them or wrote them down in a journal. None of the control patients did
that after their vague premonitions.
Furthermore, recent scientific advances strongly suggest that these
experiences in fact are real, based on my analysis of their similarities
with near death experiences. Near death research has documented that
when we die, we are conscious and aware of our surroundings, even if we
seem to be comatose. We often perceive other realities, and meet the
same sort of "glowing ladies" that we heard about in our SIDS
study.
Theoretical physics and recent advances in mathematics describe at least
two other realities, at least in theory. Mathematician Michio Kaku, in
his book Hyperspace, states that it is not hard to scientifically
describe other realities. He feels the problem is in understanding how
we access or communicate with them. Physicists at Princeton University
are currently working on proving the existence of as many as 10
dimensions.
Recent medical research indicates that we are all born with a "sixth
sense", localized in our right temporal lobe, which allows us to
perceive spiritual realities. Furthermore, electromagnetic sensing
organs of unknown use have also been discovered in our brains. Our
temporal lobe might even be able to access universal memories stored in
nature, not the brain.
I am not suggesting that mainstream medicine currently accepts all of
this. These are my own speculations based on my own analysis of the
scientific literature. I am stating that our ability to understand and
study the human ability to have spiritual visions has rapidly progressed
from pseudoscience to science in the past ten years. Studies from such
seemingly unrelated areas as the National Warfare Institute, and the
Brain Surgery Research Group at the University of California in San
Diego have all contributed pieces of my theory that humans beings are
genetically programmed to see and interact with other realities using
our right temporal lobe.
My theory that the spiritual visions surrounding death represent nothing
less than the normal function of our right temporal lobe is backed up by
100 years of research on brain function, including studies of the
effects of damage to the temporal lobes, electrical stimulation studies,
studies of temporal lobe epileptics, and clinical case reports I have
presented in the medical literature.
It is essential to understand that there is no modern theory of how
memory functions in the brain. There is also no modern theory of how
brain activity accounts for consciousness.
If you think my ideas are speculative, read what Nobel Prize winner
Francis Crick wrote in the Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific
Search for a Soul: "The speculations (his theory that consciousness
is the result of neuronal networks) contained in this book are not a
fully worked out coherent set of ideas. Rather, they constitute work in
progress. I believe that the correct way to conceptualize consciousness
has not yet been discovered."
Ultimately, spiritual visions contain their own truths, and do not need
validation by science. Yet again and again, I encounter people who have
powerful visions and intuitions, and they ignore or dismiss them as
being unreal. I was the same way, I could hardly believe my father came
to me when I died, and I didn't even tell my family about the experience
for many years.
There are four tasks of mourning: 1)Accepting the reality of the loss.
2) Adapting to a new environment without whoever has died.
3)Reinvesting emotional energy in new areas, and 4)Rediscovering meaning
in life. I find, in my work with grieving parents, that spiritual
visions play an important role in every step of healthy grieving.
For example, premonitions can give insight that there is a pattern and
meaning to life, even if that pattern is excruciatingly painful. A
parent's life is destroyed when a child dies. The universe suddenly
seems unfair and irrational. This often triggers a pathological search
of meaning rooted in our own fears and guilty secrets. Premonitions of
death remind us that there is a hope that there is a pattern to life
beyond our comprehension. This can help to reestablish meaning to
life.
One of my professors at Johns Hopkins Medical School, Frank Oski, wrote
of a spiritual vision he had as a medical student. He was deeply
troubled that one of his young patients had died of a congenital heart
defect, and he felt it was unfair that she died so young. That night,
he suddenly woke up, as his room was lit with a bright light. A woman
stood at the foot of his bed.
She told him that children who die at an early age know secrets about
living that we will never know. She said that every life is important,
and that it stretches our sense of humanity to care for such children
who are less than perfect. She told him that every life has meaning and
purpose.
Dr. Oski did not ask us to believe his story. He said that he would
not believe such a story if he heard it from someone else. Instead, he
asked that we simply keep our mind open to the everyday miracles in
ordinary life. I was quite puzzled at this, as a woman in white at the
foot of the bed didn't seem like an ordinary miracle to me.
After years of studying and listening the visions surrounding death and
dying, I have finally learned what he meant. I have found that the
seeds of healing grief are often overlooked, trivialized, or dismissed
as being too ordinary. Things happen to us all that seem too trivial or
coincidental to be important, or too fantastic to be real.These are the
miracles that Dr. Oski was speaking of. It is nice that science is
getting around to proving their worth, but they do not need the
validation of science. They contain their own truths.
If such experiences have happened to you, please contact me.
Melvin Morse MD