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".

How she made death a birthday party in the room next door

Artist, dream teacher and hospice volunteer Valerie McCarney helps the dying to prepare for the journey into the next life by remembering and sharing their dreams. I asked her to write a guest blog about her moving experience of helping an elderly woman in hospice care to follow the road of dreams to a birthday celebration in a "room next door".

Guest blog by Valerie McCarney

As a hospice volunteer, I have been blessed to be there when people transition from this world to the next.

     Such is the case of a wonderful woman who died last week. I will call her B.  She was 94 and sharp as a tack with a great sense of humor and a love of laughter. We had the most wonderful conversations over these past months.

     Her daughter usually went south for the winter but did not want to go this year because her mom was so sick. But B would not let her stay. I will be fine, she said. I have plenty of other people caring for me. Her daughter called her every day. B was happy that her daughter was off having fun and living her life.

     Her daughter came back two weeks ago. I thought when I went to see B, she would be ecstatic because her daughter was home. That was not the case. She was very anxious. I asked her why and she said, "I prayed every day that I would not die until she came home. Now she is home and I am going to die. I lie in bed and wait for my heart to stop." So we talked and she eventually calmed down. Then she started to talk of the dreams.

     She was having many dreams that frightened her.  I told her about others who have had similar dreams and how they were gifts. I told B, "The people that love you are here and will help you make the journey."
     The hospice chaplain visited her and reconfirmed how common these dreams were for people. I knew her faith was strong because of the worn Bible next to her bed.  I think the chaplain’s reconfirmation of the importance of these dreams helped her open up. She said, "I pray for contentment to meet what is happening without fear."

     Over the last two weeks of her life, we talked about her dreams. She told me of being in rooms with people she had known in may periods of her life. She was surprised to find that now they were all in the same room. She walked around looking at them. She noticed they were all surrounded by shimmering light.
    She saw her husband and her parents. Their appearance had changed. They all looked to be the same age, and they all looked good. She was really enjoying her dreams. She started to say "I think dying must be like going into another room.  You are still there, only people can’t see you!" Another time she said, "Maybe death  is like a boat going over the horizon."

   She said that sometimes in dreams she was holding a rope and knew that when she dropped it she would die. I suggested that she might fly up like a balloon when she let go. She liked that. 

     Then one day she saw someone very special. He was floating and looked like a tiny angel without wings. It was her firstborn son, who only lived four hours.  This dream helped her the most. She had never forgotten him and remembered his birthday every year. Had he lived, he would have been 72 on May 9.  She announced, "I think this year I will celebrate his birthday with him for the first time."
    She did exactly what she said she would do.,  B died on May 9.

    I think when she opened the door to her dreams and allowed herself to step in all her fears left. She found peace and contentment.

    I came home filled with thoughts of her and all we talked about over the past weeks. I went directly to my studio to work out my own grief.  I do a technique I call Expressive art, where I pick two colors, put on music and with each hand scribble on a huge sheet of paper hung on a wall.  I scribble with my eyes closed until it feels right to stop. Then as a child would do looking at the clouds, I pick out the images I see.
    B’s face was right there so I darkened those lines, a man in a boat, the sea, a Cheshire cat with a fish in its mouth, her son swimming towards her and a bird.  From our conversations I knew each image was there because we had talked of them. I used metallic paint for the shimmering light she described.

    I sat back after I was finished and could almost see the boatman bringing her home. I wrote this poem.

You knew this would happen once she came home

You waited for her even though the dream people were reaching out

Nervously, you read “ the bird is not anxious, he trusts in the lord”

Listening for your heart to stop

You pray for contentment.

Peace arrives in the hands of your infant son

As your body like a clock winds down

You step onto the boat

The boat that is waiting to take you home.

Text and art (c) Valerie McCarney

To practice death is to practice freedom

We do not know where death awaits us, so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

This wisdom comes from the great French essayist, Montaigne, and I count it as one of the essential rules for living.

    To live today to the fullest, we want to be ready to die. When we approach life in the knowledge that Death is at our left shoulder, we find courage and clarity that may otherwise fail us.

.    I have known this since I was a child, when I died and came back, as the Melbourne doctors put it, not yet possessing the term “near-death experience”. In my books and workshops, I encourage people to make Death their ally rather than their dread, and to be ready to meet him on any day, on any corner.

     What does it mean, to “practice death”?

     An art of dying adequate to our needs and yearnings today must address at least these five key areas:

1.   Practice in dream travel and journeying beyond the body. By practicing the projection of consciousness beyond the physical plane, we settle any personal doubts about the soul’s survival of physical death. This is not really an exotic or esoteric assignment. Every night, in your dreams, you travel beyond the body quite naturally and spontaneously; it’s a matter of waking up to what is going on and learning to use your natural gifts as a dreamer,

2.      Developing a personal geography of the afterlife. Through conscious dream journeys, we can visit the deceased — and their teachers — in their own environments. We can explore a variety of transit areas and reception centers, adapted to the expectations and comfort levels of different types of people, where the recently departed are helped to adapt to their new circumstances. We can tour the “collective belief territories,” some established centuries or millennia ago, where ex-physicals participate ins hared activities and religious practices. We can examine processes of life review, reeducation, and judgment and follow the transition of spirits between different after-death states. We can also study the different fates of different vehicles of consciousness after physical death.

3.      Helping the dying. We can use dreamwork and the techniques of Active Dreaming – including vision transfer, which means growing a dream or a journey map for someone who needs one – to help the dying through what some hospice nurses describe as the “nearing death experience.”In many of our hospitals (where most Westerners die) death is treated as a failure, or merely the loss of vital signs, followed by a pulled-out plug, a disconnected respirator, and the disposal of the remains. As we recover the art of dying, many of us in all walks of life — not only ministers and health care professionals and hospice volunteers — will be able to play the role of companion on the deathwalk, helping the dying to approach the next life with grace and courage and to make the last seasons of this life a period of personal growth. The skills required in this area include the ability to communicate on a soul level with patients who are unable to speak or reason clearly. A vital aspect of this work is facilitating or mediating contact between the dying and helpers on the other side — especially departed loved ones — who can give assistance through the transition. Dream sharing and dream transfer are invaluable tools in helping the dying to prepare for the conditions of life beyond the body.

4.      Helping the departed. We pray for our dead in our churches and temples, and no good intention is ever wasted. However, you may have a hard time finding a priest who is willing to take on the role of psychopomp, or guide of souls, and provide personal escort service to spirits of the departed who have lost their way and gotten stuck between the worlds, causing pain and confusion to themselves and sometimes to their survivors. Yet the living have a crucial role to play in helping to release earthbound or troubled spirits. For one thing, some of these “ex-physicals” seem to trust people who have physical bodies more than entities that do not, because there is comfort in the familiar, because they did not believe in an afterlife before passing on — or quite simply because they do not know they are dead. Sometimes our deceased need help from us in dealing with unfinished business, passing on messages to survivors, and getting their story straight. I have become convinced that an essential stage in the afterlife transit is the effort by the departed to understand the full story of the life that has just passed, in order to be ready to choose the next life experience.

5.      Making death your ally. Finally, we are challenged to reach into the place of our deepest fears and master them: to face our own death on its own ground and re-value our lives and our purpose from this perspective. When we “brave up” enough to confront our personal Death and receive its teaching, we forge an alliance that is a source of power and healing in every aspect of life.

My books that explore these themes in greatest depth are Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death (New World Library), The Dreamer's Book of the Dead (Destiny Books) and The Boy Who Died and Came Back (New World Library).

Photo: Nurse stump at Mosswood Hollow (c) Robert Moss. The dead tree giving life nutrients to a new one is a great metaphor for death and rebirth. 

Time travel with Ben Franklin in France

I spent the night with Ben Franklin during his nine-year mission to France, traveling back and forth from his home in Passy, charming the French ladies and intellos, warding off the jealousies and surviving the tedium of rival American envoys, constantly improvising to seduce a monarchy to support a revolution whose success would inspire its own subjects to rise against it. This is the second night running that my dream self has been with Ben in France, and each night seemed to encompass years of his amazing mission. 

Feelings: Just so, that I traveled in time and was actually there. 
Reality: I read a little about Ben Franklin in France when I was writing my historical novel Fire Along the Sky, which contains a funny scene of Franklin investigating Herr Mesmer and being praised for his "electric wand". And I am now teaching and traveling in Paris. 
Action: read Stacy Schiff's book about Franklin in France, A Great Improvisation, which I bought when it came out but did not read at the time. I have already pulled down from my shelves.

Madame Helvétius

First discoveries: I open Schiff's book at random and find myself reading about Ben Franklin's ardent pursuit of his beautiful and gusting neighbor, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius, nicknamed Minette. The widow of the wealthy and controversial philosopher Helvétius, she kept one of the most renowned salons in France and counted Voltaire among her regulars. At her country villa in Auteuil, down the road from Ben's house in Passy,  visitors contended for space with 18 very spoiled cats, assorted lapdogs, and canaries. Abigail Adams was appalled by Madame Helvétius; she thought she showed too much ankle and flaunted herself like a tart.
     Come 1780, when Franklin was a mere 74 years old, he pressed his suit for Madame Helvétius with even more than his customary ardor, apparently eager to live one of the deceased philosopher's maxims: "It is worth being wise only so long as one can also be foolhardy." Franklin declared to Minette that since he and her dead husband had so much in common, they ought to share her as well. He invited her to become the second Mrs Franklin. Madame Helvétius responded that she intended to remain faithful to her great husband's memories, denying the American envoy more than the customary bisous.   
     Franklin's response was to dash off one of the comic pieces he called his Bagatelles. In this one, titled "The Elysian Fields", he reports to Madame Helvétius that

Saddened by your barbarous resolution, stated so positively last night, to remain single the rest of your life, in honor of your dear husband, I went home, fell on my bed, believing myself dead, and found myself in the Elysian Fields.

In the afterworld of his dream, he seeks out Helvétius. The dead philosopher wants an update on how things were going in the mortal world - the war, the French government, whose books were selling - but at no point mentions his widow.    
     Franklin tells Helvétius he was with Minette "not an hour before". Isn't the philosopher interested in news of her? Not a bit. Helvétius explains that he has a new woman, full of spirit, engaged at that moment in gathering the finest nectar and ambrosia for his table. Ben complains that the widow was more faithful than the dead husband, batting away a long line of suitors. The story becomes very French. The dead philosopher suggests a ruse by which Franklin may turn the head of the widow. Then Helvétius' new wife appears, and she is Ben's dead common-law wife Debbie, who makes it plain - when he tries to claim her - that she has had quite enough of him.

I was entertained by this account of Ben Franklin's variable amours among the ladies of France, and the literary romp inspired by his rejection. The passage to which I had opened the book at random had deeper meaning for me.  There was fine foxy synchronicity at play with a man the French called the American Fox. A  book on which I am currently working describes what happens after we die, so I was delighted to have been conducted right after my dream into Ben Franklin's dream of an afterlife encounter. And to be reminded that some themes are too serious to be tackled without humor.
    

Charles Brothers "The Reception of Benjamin Franklin in France".