Hollywood versions of the afterlife

 

Hollywood has given us some very interesting versions of what may go on after death and how the living and the deceased interact. The  film Hereafter, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Matt Damon, explores patterns of connection between living people and those on the Other Side: the gift (or curse) of a natural psychic medium; a twin's abiding link with the brother who died; the familiarity of a near-death survivor with other realms.

Home base, in Hereafter, is this world rather than the Other Side. Depictions of the afterlife that intrigue me most are those that take us deeper into Otherworld geography, especially those in which the Otherworld is home base. Here are notes on a few of my favorite Hollywood visions of the afterlife in classic movies, and conversation themes they suggest. . 

1. Dreaming is the best and easiest way to talk to the departed. The vital importance of dream communication with the departed is brought home by the movie The Sixth Sense.  A psychic boy meets the Bruce Willis character, a man who had recently died but is foggy about his situation and distraught because he can no longer touch or talk to his wife. When he tries to speak to her she can’t hear him. The boy tells the dead guy how to proceed: "Speak to her in her dreams, only then will she hear you".
2. Why the departed stay earthbound or feel obliged to play tricks. The wonderful movie Ghost is quite instructive on how the Departed can stay earthbound through addictions and desires (witness the smoker on the subway, desperate for a last drag), and how and why the Departed may feel compelled to produce physical effects to get attention from survivors
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3. The afterlife journey (like this one) is all about love and courage. The hilarious Albert Brooks comedy Defending Your Life gives a quite plausible version of a process of afterlife review and assessment, and makes the vital point that our courage – or lack of it – and our ability to love, and express that love, may be central to our progression in any world.
4. In the reality we inhabit after death, thoughts are things. The movie What Dreams May Come dramatizes the fact that on the imaginal plane – which we enter in dreams and journeys, and where the Departed may find or build their homes, at least for a time – “thoughts are things”. This is a real world, but it is a world whose substance is ideoplastic; in other words, it will take on the shapes of our strongest thoughts and desires. To do well here, on either side of death, it is necessary to train the imagination

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Movie stars can get to know a few things about the afterlife from sources other than movie scripts. According to Dan Aykroyd (the star of Ghostbusters), John Belushi reached out to living people after his death, desperate for help to get to a better life situation than the one he found himself in after he checked out through a dug overdose. Aykroyd said on the Larry King Show back in 2004 that a mutual friend called Isaac had a dream encounter in which Belushi asked for help in order to go into the Light. The reality of this contact seemed to be confirmed by the fact that Belushi used a personal name for his grandmother (“Nana”) that the dreamer did not recognize, but was known to Belushi’s widow. “So Isaac did a meditation with this woman that he worked with her inLos Angeles, and they had a vision of John, you know, extricating himself from bad circumstance, call it Limbo or the Bardo region, Purgatory. And they were able to cross him over into the light.”

This is a very old note awaiting update. I am interested in seeing recommendations and mini-reviews from others.

 

Talk to the dead: they are alive and available

Many of us yearn for contact with departed loved ones. We miss them; we ache for forgiveness or closure; we yearn for confirmation that there is life beyond physical death. This is one of the main reasons why people go to psychic readers.

      Here’s an open secret: we don’t need a go-between to talk to the deceased. We can have direct communication with our departed, in timely and helpful ways, especially if we are willing to pay attention to our dreams and learn the arts of active and conscious dreaming.

Sometimes we sense the presence of a deceased person we have loved. Sometimes this is accompanied by physical signs, little anomalies that suggest that something is moving through the veil of our routine perception and our consensual reality. Full-fledged visitations often take place in the spacious reality of dreams and liminal states of consciousness, quite often in the hypnagogic zone.
     In whatever ways they can find to get through to us, our departed come to visit for all sorts of reasons. They come to offer us guidance or assurance of life beyond death; sometimes they need help from us because they are lost or confused, or need forgiveness and closure. Encounters with the deceased are generally our best way of gaining  first-hand knowledge of what happens after physical death.

     One of the cruelest things that mainstream Western culture has done is to suggest that communication with the departed is either impossible or unnatural.  There is nothing spooky or “supernatural” involved, though these experiences take us into realms beyond physical reality.

     The easiest way for the departed to communicate with the living is through dreams -though sometimes the departed, as well as the living, fail to realize this. In the movie The Sixth Sense a psychically gifted young boy can see and speak with the departed. He plays counselor to a man who has died, is initially confused about his situation, and then dismayed that he cannot talk to his wife. The boy instructs the dead man, "Speak to her in her dreams, only then will she hear you". As the film suggests, sometimes the living are required to play guides for the deceased.

     In most dreams, the departed appear to be living, and very often the dreamer is unaware that the person he or she encounters is “dead” until after waking. The reason is that the departed are indeed alive, though no longer in the physical realm.

     The deceased may appear as the dreamer remembers them from their last days of physical life, especially in the first dream encounters. But over time, it is quite common for the departed to alter their appearance, to shrug off signs of age and bodily ailments, and to present themselves as healthy and attractive. People who died in later years frequently reappear looking around 30 years old.

      After my father’s death in 1987, he appeared repeatedly in my dreams to offer counsel to the family, bringing specific and practical information to which I did not have access in waking life. For example, he gave me the name of the realtor on the other side of the Pacific – someone otherwise unknown to me – who moved with great speed and humanity (once we contacted him because of the dream) to help my mother sell her home and resettle in a community where she spent some of the happiest years of her life. My father also made a happy dream visit to one of my daughters, who bitterly regretted never having known him in physical life; he showed himself as a handsome horseman, about 30 years old, and took her riding.
      Through many dream encounters with my father, I was vividly reminded that a departed loved one can truly play “family angel”. After he made certain life choices on the Other Side - which he explained to me - he was no longer available in the way he had been for several years after his death. However, he surprised me by dropping in last year to give me an important personal health advisory on which I took immediate action.

     After his death, my favorite professor from my undergraduate days in Australia began to appear in my dreams as a different kind of history teacher, instructing me that each of us belongs to a family of personalities in different times and dimensions whose dramas are being played out now.

     From my early childhood, when I gained first-hand knowledge of the other side when I died and came back (in what are now described as near-death experiences) I have had had frequent contact with people who are living on the other side.I have worked with thousands of dreams and other experiences of encounters with the departed that have been shared with me by others. While the deceased person in some of these dreams may be an aspect of the dreamer’s own personality or genetic inheritance – or a mask for a messenger from the deeper Self – the great majority of these dreams involve transpersonal encounters.

     When you become an active dreamer, able to shift consciousness and travel to other realities at will, you'll know that you don't have to go to sleep in order to dream. You can make conscious journeys to the Other Side for timely and helpful communication with the departed, learning about their current environments and transitions. You can invite a loved one to have chat with you over tea or a glass of wine. You can entertain friendly spirits in the liminal space of sleep and awake, and will want to learn the arts of discernment and psychic screening to make sure that you don't invite any unwanted guests.
     Let's notice that among your friends on the Other Side are beloved animals who shared your life and can prove to be impeccable allies. 

Further Reading

Chapter 7, "Dreaming with the Departed", in my book Conscious Dreaming.

Part III, "A Little Manual for the Psychopomp" in Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death

The Dreamer's Book of the Dead

Photo: A boy psychic guides a dead man played by Bruce Willis in the movie "The Sixth Sense".