Tell us more about this turning point, when you blasted the scary beings away with light. What happened?
I had been practicing making light. My grandmother told me to ‘imagine’ creating light, but because I could see things that other people didn‘t, such as lights around people, I wasn‘t exactly clear on what the words ‘imagine’ or ‘imaginary’ meant to her. To me, at the age of 11, those words had something to do with whatever I could see that other people refused to acknowledge. So I was very determined to create something that seemed quite real to me. It got to the point that whenever I was frightened, I would just automatically start producing this energy.
On the night that I first used the light, I had been hiding in the closet while trying to stay awake. I don‘t remember falling asleep, but I knew that I was sleeping even before the nightmare started. I tried to wake myself up, but couldn‘t do so, and I started to panic. I guess that set off the light.
When the alien things found me in that nightmare, I didn‘t have to think about what to do next, it just happened. They were bombarded with light. It seemed to hurt them a great deal and they went away. I didn‘t have to go with them that time. They couldn‘t take me away. I actually felt safe enough to wake up and leave the closet so I could sleep in my own bed.
Whatever that light is, it has stayed with me all these years. When I have nightmares, it isn‘t unusual for electronic devices to turn on by themselves. When I‘m under a lot of stress in my waking life, sometimes poltergeist activity will occur. But even under normal conditions it isn‘t unusual for small effects to occur. Things sometimes move, but it‘s something you get used to. There is nothing sinister about it.
A lot of lucid dreamers have a hard time with the term ‘lucid nightmare,’ since their lucid dreams routinely feel fun, joyful and amazing. So help us understand what you mean by a lucid nightmare. Can you give an example of one?
I think of lucid nightmares as lucid dreams in which I witness something terrible that I‘m not able to do anything about. One such nightmare occurred when I was 21. A close friend of mine was brutally raped in that nightmare.
I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn‘t do anything to change what was happening. It wasn‘t my reality, it was hers. All I could do was experience it and pray that it wasn‘t real. But the next morning I found out that my friend had been viciously assaulted by a man we both knew.
So sorry to hear that, and I can see why you call that a lucid nightmare. But did you also have numinous, powerful or ecstatic lucid dreams? If you can, please tell us about one of those.
Yes, I have had many positive experiences too.
I had a very significant dream just before waking up on the morning that my friend Bill Roll passed away. Bill was a parapsychological researcher who I had been working with and had become rather fond of. We met in person in April 2010 at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario.
I had had experiences on that visit to Sudbury of what appeared to be Bill OBEing. The first one scared the hell out of me because we were supposed to meet for breakfast and he didn’t show up. I saw what I thought was Bill, who then disappeared into thin air.
So I went and knocked on the door of his hotel room, but there was no answer. It took a number of calls to his room (I was very close to calling hotel security) to finally wake him up. I was very relieved to find out that I did not see his ghost that day.
Sadly, Bill‘s health declined in the year after we met, and he became unable to maintain any kind of correspondence. After our correspondence ended, I started seeing what appeared to be Bill, just showing up out of nowhere. Bill‘s “OBE self” typically smelled of cigarettes, which bothered me. He teased me that second hand smoke from ghost cigarettes wouldn’t hurt me, even if I didn’t like the smell.
During the lucid dream I had on the morning he passed, Bill smelled of roses. I took that to be an attempt at humor on his part, but I was still very sad. I knew it meant he wasn’t just OBEing this time. I knew I was asleep and he wasn’t. I knew he had passed away.
Bill looked very happy in the dream. He said that he had done what he was supposed to do and that he was quite satisfied. Bill talked about the paper written about the work done on our visit to Laurentian University. He told me that it had finally been published. When I woke up, I checked to see if this was true. It had been published online by the journal that very morning.
At the age of 29, you had your third NDE after hitting black ice and colliding with a semi-truck. I can barely imagine the horrible scene. But briefly, what happened in that NDE?
In that NDE, I saw my paternal grandmother, who had passed away just a few years before the accident. I also saw my dog, Cassie, who was in the car and died in the accident with me. It was your typical, blissful, Near-Death Experience.
I remember standing on a balcony with my deceased Grandma watching Cassie playing on the grass just below us. I wanted to go down and join Cassie, but I couldn’t figure out how to get down to where she was. It seemed strange that there was this building in what looked like a wilderness area to me.
I thought it was raining, but I remember being surprised that I wasn’t getting wet. There was this really soft beautiful light that kind of rained down on everything. It seemed so real to me, more real than anything here.
One of the things that really struck me about that NDE was that I seemed to have these two very distinct lines of conscious experience. I have no memory of the accident itself, but I was obviously awake and conscious while driving down that road. But it‘s not unusual for head injuries to wipe out any memories formed about 20-30 minutes prior to the impact.
Some of the initial news reports of the accident seemed to indicate that I may have been awake at the time when the first responders were extricating me from the wreckage. I have no memory of that either, but it‘s perfectly normal for an injured brain to be unable to hold onto new memories. I succumbed to the injuries and lost consciousness for the next few days. At least I lost the sort of consciousness that would have been apparent to anyone seeing me in the hospital at that point in time.
My NDE was so much more vivid than normal consciousness. The memories from my NDE formed at a time when I wasn‘t able to hold onto memories in my waking consciousness. I know that there are people out there who will say that there is no way to know when the actual memories were formed, and suggest that my mind created these memories after the fact. There are reasons why I don‘t believe this is the case.
When I was in the hospital, I went in and out of the NDE state of consciousness. I have vivid memories of when I was in the NDE state, but my memories of normal consciousness were different. Apparently every time I woke up, I had to be told what happened to me, and by the next time I had woken up I would need to have things explained to me all over again.
I wasn‘t able to form memories and retain what I had been told. Everything seemed so blurry and it took days to get to the point where I could remember what they had been explaining to me over and over again. But there was one exception to that memory loss.
Image by AI Leino from Pixabay
The volunteer firemen who rescued me from the accident came to see me in the hospital. There had been concerns that I might lose the sight in one eye because of all the glass that had been imbedded in my face. My eyes were swollen shut from all of the bruising, and there was no way to know if the eye was going to be OK until the swelling had gone down. The firemen had brought me a white teddy bear. They were using it to try to wake me up and get me to open my eyes for the first time.
I remember going from the NDE place to that hospital bed where the firemen were making the teddy bear dance and talk to me in an effort to elicit my attention. The NDE state was so vivid, and being in my body in that hospital bed was blurry and painful.
I thought normal consciousness was the dream, because it lacked the clarity I had gotten used to in the NDE place. Not to mention that the sight of grown men playing with a toy bear seemed a little absurd. When I opened my eyes to look at them, they were so excited. I wasn‘t sure why.
That was very early on in my hospital stay, before I was able to form memories in normal consciousness. I‘ve wondered if that memory may have formed at the boundary between NDE consciousness and normal waking consciousness. I kept that memory because every time I woke up, I saw the teddy bear in bed with me. It reminded me of seeing those firemen when they came to visit. That‘s how I knew it hadn‘t been a dream. And that‘s why I‘m certain that I had formed memories of my NDE before I could form memories in normal consciousness.
How did these NDEs change your view of your life and the nature of this experience we call physical life?
I don‘t ever remember being afraid of death. I‘ve been afraid of lots of other things in life, but I‘ve always felt that dying wasn‘t the end. Having had the first NDE at such a young age, I‘ve just grown up without that particular fear. It seems like we are so much bigger than this one life.
That being said, I still live a very normal life. I‘m not a particularly enlightened soul. I stress out over the normal stuff. I‘m not always as nice as I should be.
