by Salicrow
Kaolin had a deep connection to my father, which had to be karmic, because my father had never seen or spoken to either of my children. My son often asked me questions about his grandfather, saying, “How come I can’t know your dad?” I tried to explain that my dad was an alcoholic and we didn’t have a relationship anymore. This answer would satisfy him for short spells, and then he would ask again, and again, and again. The questioning did get to me. I had sorrow in my body around my father, but I was still unable to read it or the emotions and sickness that came with it.
Kaolin triggered a lot else. After having him, my ability to remember past lives became more pronounced. I started remembering different lives from the ones I had remembered in my childhood and youth—lives in which I did things with energy, magic, and my psychic gifts. These memories came to me in the form of lucid dreams. They were probably withheld by the encryption of higher intelligence until I was ready for them. I was able to look at details in these dreams and think about what I was experiencing as I experienced it.
In one cluster of lucid dreams I was in a house I recognized as my own, only it didn’t look like any house I had lived in. I saw people I knew there from time to time. The house was always the same, and it was quite an amazing place, filled with secret doorways, narrow halls that I had to squeeze through, and little spaces I had to crawl into. I felt acute anxiety at times as I squirmed and maneuvered through serpentine passages, a bit like Alice in Wonderland. There was often a room I couldn’t cross or a door I couldn’t squeeze through. I would come back to these places over and over again, wanting to figure out the puzzle and be able to pass. Each time I did, my mind expanded, and my abilities in the waking world became more and more awake. These were more than just dream displacements or relocations from other knowings and lives; I was maneuvering an actual higher-dimensional series of gateways that manifested through a labyrinth of lucidly dreamed déjà vus and roomlike façades. Complexity that is too great to manifest in three dimensions, even in a dream, distorts the imagery while transmitting its wisdom subliminally through the dream state.
This process went on for years, and I could expect a dream like this at least every other week. I began to encounter threats in some of the rooms of the house; in fact, an entire wing of my spirit house was haunted. Upon entering the eerie wing you walked into a room with a sunken floor, like the living room of the Brady Bunch house on TV. Whenever I entered that room, I knew I was at the end of the safe zone. To walk down the hall on the opposite side of that living room meant going into the area where demons lived, the evil things that I feared.
Yet as my dreams progressed, I started venturing down that hall more often. I always had a dream reason or excuse; for instance, the rest of the house felt crowded and I needed more room, or I was going to have a guest and I had to prepare their room. I remember opening a tabooed room that had a personal connection to me within the greater house of my mind. Inside the room was an invisible being. I knew it was there the moment I entered because I could feel its presence. An image for its invisible body began to appear.
Then the force attacked me, throwing me toward the bedroom wall. Just as I was about to hit the wall, I felt my higher self step in, the same self I first encountered when I nearly drowned in the river, the self that rewound a car accident and could halt time itself. With a flash of my mind I stopped myself from hitting the wall, and I turned to face the being. I was already battling it on an energetic level. In my physical body, I felt pressure similar to that of deep concentration. In this lucid experience, I was being fundamentally challenged. At that moment I stopped feeling afraid and opened myself up to Source: God/Goddess. I became filled with white light and felt the invulnerability and healing compassion of a phoenix, an illuminated being surrounded by the nimbus of the sun. The energy I exuded caused the force to dissipate. I sanctified the room, using symbols I did not recognize.
After that dream, I understood that the house was my subconscious, and the rooms were pieces of my mind and aura that needed exploring. The rooms that contained puzzles or energetic beings held personal wisdom for me as well as profound healing. Conquering each obstacle opened me more and more to my gifts. The house was also the house of my mind in which my higher intelligence had placed lessons for me to work through—lessons I would continue working at throughout my life.
Dreams can be symbolic and subconscious on many levels simultaneously. On one level, dreams represent our life, our experiences, our traumas, and our accomplishments. On another level they represent the greater riddles and mysteries of our soul. There is no contradiction, for each lifetime with its mundane issues is a reflection of the soul, which binds the lifetimes together in a single grail and journey. There are mysteries and paradoxes for all of us in the compartments of our mind. My experience with Source in my dream—the dream embodiment of a phoenix filled with the power of the sun—taught me how fear can render a person powerless, and how powerful surrender to a higher power can be.
The experience in my dream house was more than just a dream. It was a teaching conducted on the astral plane in the domain of dreams. The experience was real, and the lessons I learned were transferable to the waking world. In a sense I was cleaning out the rooms of the house—the ones filled with demons—so I could make space for healthier things. I also needed room for guests, for I am a professional medium, a channel, and my mind needs space for visitors to stop by and share their stories.
28
Visits from the Dead
My dream world became a regular center of learning after the birth of my son, partially because of an agreement he and I had made before birth. He stepped in when I needed him most. When I needed a boost to heal myself and become all that I planned to be in this lifetime, Kaolin arrived on schedule. His past-life connections to me, and to my father, made him an ideal catalyst for my healing.
As Noel put it, I had my kids early so we could get the whole baby part out of our way. I was a dedicated mother who considered her first priority to be raising her children, but I knew I would never be satisfied with motherhood being my sole contribution to society. I came into this life with work to do, and I had to figure out what it was. Tarot and Wicca were a start. I had an insatiable appetite for learning about metaphysical techniques and communicating with other realities because I knew that the dream world, the astral plane, and the dimension of spirit were as real as the world we called reality.
Around this time spirits began to visit me in my dreams, and John was one of the first ones to come. Each time he visited I recognized it as a John visitation quicker and quicker. I remember his visits vividly. The first time he appeared, I was shopping in a mini-mart in my dream. I don’t remember what I was looking for; I just remember I was searching for something elusive. He came up to me in an aisle and gave me a hug. I could palpably feel it. In that moment, I became lucid. As soon as I felt him hugging me, I awoke inside my dream. He looked me straight in the eye, and I saw that his eyes were strange; they had a blackness over them. Something about this strange blackness made me realize that he was truly present in my dream.
“But you’re dead,” I protested. “What are you doing here?”
He replied that he was indeed dead and that he was in my dream because it was an easy place for him to get through to me. He explained that while dreaming we get out of our own way. Because we believe that anything can happen in a dream, we excise our mind’s desire to hold onto the concept of reality and what is impossible.
I was so overjoyed to see him that I started crying in my dream. It was not only the impact of seeing him; it was knowing that his spirit was able to make contact with me. We talked briefly, and then he asked me to go visit his friend Rob. He said that Rob had really been struggling since his death and had developed a major drug problem. He said to tell him that John had been to see me and was concerned that he was doing too many drugs.
I explained how ridiculous this would sound. I hadn’t seen Rob in several years, and
I could imagine the look on his face when I tracked him down to tell him his dead friend had come to warn me about his drug issues!
The dreams went on weekly for about a month. Each time it started the same. I would be in some nondescript locale, searching for something, and then John would show up. He was what I was searching for. Each time he approached me, I became lucid and would point out that he was dead. After the third time, I realized the absurdity of this almost immediately. In the mere act of making eye contact with him—truly looking at him—I recognized he was dead.
I eventually convinced him that it wasn’t right for me to go see Rob on his behalf; it wasn’t right to go up to a virtual stranger and tell him his dead friend wanted me to pass on a message. That would be a violation of cosmic hygiene. Barriers and rules exist for a reason. Whenever I’m asked how a spirit can get their living to communicate with me, I say they must convince their living to call me. I’m not going to violate protocol.
John was not my only spirit visitor at this time. Grammy Brown also started visiting. She had long realized how hard it was for her to get through to me. My strong childhood emotions regarding her formed a parapet around me, making it nearly impossible for her to communicate with me. She got creative; she started sending messages via scent before trying to make contact. For about three days before I would dream of her, I smelled her around me, like a combination of Miss Breck hairspray, cigarettes, and baby oil. I loved that smell. When it occurred numinously, clairsentiently, it was like having her energy sitting with mine, a gentle reminder that she was around.
The sense of smell is one of the most common clairsentient methods that spirits use to communicate with the ones they love. Our sense of smell is ancient and reptilian, preceding human encryption. We do not question it. Smell has an almost magical ability to transport us back in time and connect us to memories. In this manner certain smells become sacred, taking us into the past to moments that vibrate with significance. Our sense of smell is so deeply connected to memory that we can be driving down the road on a spring day with the windows down and promptly be taken back to our youth and the memory of another spring day. In this way, our olfactory receptors are easily triggered by the presence of spirits.
Often when the snow and ice are melting and the days are warming, an odor in the air transports me back to being sixteen years old. I’m driving around back roads, listening to Fleetwood Mac and smoking cigarettes. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t smoked in years and that the back roads in Vermont are far muddier than those in New Hampshire. For that brief moment, I am there on those roads, smoking and singing along. Yes, it is an ordinary experience of memory, but it is also an indication that the universe does not obliterate states of beingness or past times. It resurrects them in the aura, and they are just as real—or unreal, for that matter—as they ever were.
This is what we experience when a spirit uses scent to say hello. We may find ourselves randomly experiencing the smell of doughnuts cooking and find ourselves drawn to our mother’s kitchen. The memory is like a trigger that reconnects us to our beloved dead in that moment—in the greater soul reality of their aura and our aura. The smell of Miss Breck hairspray mixed with cigarettes and baby oil were tendrils instantaneously connecting me to my grandmother.
John’s arrival in my dreams had already prepared me for communication with Grammy Brown. When I began smelling her, I started calling to her, asking her to come to me while I slept. But when she did, I didn’t like everything she had to say.
My grandfather, her son Neil, was sick. He had been diabetic for more than twenty years, but now he was really sick. Grammy came to tell me that while I was wrapped up in my own life, dealing with my postpartum illness and taking care of two toddlers, my grandfather was dying. In the dream I was with her in front of her house on South Whitefield Road. We were standing in the rose garden. I always loved it there, even if it did mean digging tiny thorns out of my hand. In the dream I told her how amazing it was that I didn’t have any thorns in my fingers when I became lucid. I looked up and saw Grammy standing on the steps of her porch. I began to cry. I sobbed and sobbed. I must have been whimpering in my sleep, because the next morning Noel said I was making noises and asked me what I’d been dreaming about.
In the dream, when I was finally able to collect myself, Grammy hugged me and told me my grandfather needed to know she was waiting for him. I told her we knew he was dying, but she just looked at me and said it again: “He is dying, and he needs to know I am waiting for him.” She clarified that she meant before the month was out. His time of passing was upon him.
When I went to see my grandfather a few days later, I brought along the book The Hobbit. I decided I was going to talk to him about death and prepare him for his journey by sharing the adventures of Bilbo Baggins with him and making it a grand adventure. That seemed so much more exciting than death as the end.
When I visited my grandfather I found it surprisingly easy to speak to him of Grammy Brown’s dream appearance. I should have expected him to understand it on some level; after all, she was his mother, and she had been a medium and psychic in her life. He must have had some experience with her abilities. He told me that he knew his time was near; his cancer diagnosis was terminal. He had been flying around Whitefield in his sleep, following the routes he had driven so many times working for the town road crew. I told him about my OBE after giving birth to Levi and how it had confirmed for me that our soul was separate from our body.
My grandfather had always been good to me, but he had never been a person to talk about deep matters, preferring listening over speaking. The discussion I had with him about his death and the nature of the soul was the most remarkable conversation he and I ever had. In the rawness of death, he was stripped of all his doubts and illusions, and we sat talking as two souls on a deep voyage through life. Thank you, Grammy Brown, for that gift!
I left with a better understanding of the nature of death. I saw that it could be beautiful, that it could be wise and profound. I saw that it brought people back to their basic ingredients, washed away the need for appearances, and helped us focus on what was real. I was excited to return to my grandfather in a few days and continue reading him the story of Bilbo’s great adventure.
As the days passed and the time of my next visit grew closer, I found myself becoming agitated because I was convinced that he was going to die while I was there with him. I was only twenty-four years old, and I didn’t feel ready to handle death alone.
The thought that I was to be the one sitting with him when he died became a tangible thing that took up space in my mind like a fact. I began to reach out to God/Goddess, my dead grandmother, even the higher self of my grandfather. I begged and pleaded, confessing that I was not ready for this. I was not ready to have someone die on me, not yet. Even in saying it, I knew that by using the word “yet” I was acknowledging that I would someday be ready to experience someone dying in my presence—and that I would have that experience.
My phone rang early Saturday morning, shortly after I had gotten out of bed. My coffee was still hot, and I was feeding my starving toddlers before they entered meltdown phase. Noel handed me the phone, saying it was my aunt on the line. I knew before I took the receiver that she was calling to say my grandfather had passed. I was thankful; I thanked his spirit and that of Grammy Brown. I thanked the God and the Goddess. I knew he had timed his passing to spare me the experience of death until I was ready to handle it.
I believe I was right in the assessment of my capacity. I was just beginning my path of personal healing, and I didn’t have full possession of my strengths. I still carried bags of personal garbage that needed sorting before I would be ready for such a sacred act.
The process I underwent surrounding my grandfather’s death—communicating with Grammy Brown and reaching out to the spirits to tell them my needs—were key points in developing my relationship with the spirit world. I learned a thing so obvious and important that I had ove
rlooked it entirely. Necromancy did not just mean seeing the dead, feeling them, or even having conversations with them. It was the process of death itself.
My grandfather’s death took away cancer’s power of fear over me. As I sat by his bedside while his body wasted away, we had time for deep conversations that wouldn’t have happened if he had not been terminally bedridden. A slow death has its blessings. It gives families time to say goodbye, something that Grammy’s death had denied me. With my grandfather and the gift of cancer, we were all given that time.
As a medium, I connect with people around death all the time. I experience spirits who have passed due to accident, people who never got to say goodbye to anyone, spirits whose death came in the form of a sudden heart attack, leaving their family shocked and unbalanced in the wake of their passing. The only good way to die seems to be at the age of ninety, surrounded by family, after a short illness. But the reality is that this happens to very few people. So I have learned to see the beauty in death in all its forms. Death, like birth, is always painful; but also like birth, it is essential, for it carries us like a bridge from one existence to the next.
My grandfather’s passing led to a big piece of my own healing. It helped me realize that my interaction with the spirit world is not that different from my interaction with the living world. I can ask for help when I need it. I am also not required to do all that the dead ask of me. Our relationship is one of mutual obligation and respect.
I have great respect for and humility toward my ancestors and the spirit world in general, but my grandfather’s passing helped me understand that the ancestors and the dead need us too. Grammy Brown could not get my grandfather to hear her; she had to enlist me to pass the message along for her. This understanding leveled the playing field a bit and sparked in me a desire for more. I wanted to have more communication, more interaction. I wanted to be connected to death and the true dimensions of the universe on a deeper level.