CHAPTER 8, PART 1

If you do not believe in an afterlife, you might skip this chapter of the book.

My dear friend, who lost her son to a drug overdose about six months before my son died, called me and we met for dinner. She knew that we could talk together and console each other. She also told me what to expect as to feelings, and one incident she related was this dream. After her son died and she was in the throes of grief, her son came to her in a reassuring dream. He appeared as absolutely real, and what he told her was in essence, “Mom, I’m alright. You don’t have to worry.” These types of dreams are often referred to as lucid dreams.

CHAPTER 8, PART 2

I experienced two lucid dreams, back-to-back, and I feel I should explain what I mean by “real.” Usually when I dream, even if the situation seems real, I have awareness in my consciousness that “this is a dream.” In this first dream, despite the surreal nature of it, I felt as though it were real. Logan pulled on his neck and his life force effortlessly came out, but not gruesomely, and I frantically told him, “You’re dead, Logan. You can’t be here.” He told me in this dream that they can do a lot we do not know about.

I went to school the next morning, literally trying to keep from shaking because the reality of the dream seemed so concrete. I felt as though I’d received another major aftershock, the reverse of finding out about his death: that of seeing him alive. The next night in a dream he came to me again, and told me, “Don’t worry, Mommy. I’m fiiiiiiiine,” drawing out the word “fine” in that long, joking intonation he sometimes used. That time, instead of being emotionally jarred, I felt comforted and felt as though he were with me.

CHAPTER 8, PART 3

I, as many people probably would, assumed this was how our brains dealt with the reality of death, by having the person come alive in our minds again and reassure us they were fine so that we could process the death more quickly. It seems a reasonable explanation. However, a strictly scientific explanation involving what we generally consider reality does not explain the next story. I know the woman it happened to, so I can’t pass it off as an urban legend. I will call her Jane.

Jane’s son had committed suicide. Jane became very, very angry, a totally natural reaction to his action, but she did not experience a supernatural dream. However, one night a few weeks (or maybe a month) after his death Jane was at the hospital with her other son, we’ll call him Jack, for a totally unrelated reason. She noticed the wallpaper of the room in which she was waiting had her late son’s name on it.

A nurse entered the room and asked Jane, “Did you lose another child?”

CHAPTER 8, part 4

Jane replied that she had, and the nurse, to whom I give much credit for putting her job and self on the line, told her, “I am psychic, and your late son has been trying to come to you to tell you that he is so sorry to have hurt you, but your anger has kept him from telling you.” The nurse did not know Jane, her late son, or anything about the situation. The nurse simply entered the room and started talking.

Other mothers have had their own, unique, supernatural encounters. When I asked Hazel, the elderly woman who lost her son forty years earlier, about supernatural dreams, she said, “No, I didn’t have any dream.” But when I asked her if she had any other surreal experience, she told me of hearing him knock on her bedroom door and clearly calling out to her, “Hey, Mother.” She got up out of bed and opened the door and no one was there. Three nights before her son died, her husband told her that she had sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night and called out, “Peter’s in danger.” She had no memory of doing this herself.

CHAPTER 8, part 5

Hazel has had many non-supernatural dreams of him over the years, mostly of saving him from crocodiles and other things. Once she dreamed that she, Peter and her other son, Jay, were walking down the street and she reached over and hugged Peter and told him, “I never hugged you enough when you were alive,” as they were not a physically demonstrative family. Peter said in his joking way, “Now, that’s enough of that.”

Doreen, another mother, who lost a baby within twenty-four hours of birth, was holding her four-month-old granddaughter about 40 years after the death, when she looked down and saw her own newborn son in her arms. Doreen stated he looked up at her trying to tell her it was okay, but then she was back to holding her granddaughter. Although surreal to others, the sensation of holding her son for that few moments felt real to her.

CHAPTER 8, part 6

For whatever reasons, many people experience a feeling of the lost one’s presence after death. This book will not delve into the psychic or religious aspects of these events. These experiences can be quite disturbing or reassuring. Sometimes it’s disturbing because it induces the real presence of your child and you feel the loss acutely. For others, it brings great comfort.

With the exception of the two vivid dreams shortly after Logan’s death, I have dreamt of him only twice. The first was a background dream about eight months ago, but in last night’s dream we both acknowledged he was in a place I couldn’t reach, but it felt comforting to talk to him.

CHAPTER 8, part 7

ACTIVITY

I am writing now from a position probably six months after the last paragraph and if I had not written it down, I would not remember the last dream, so I suggest that you might want to list your experiences because you might want to remember something later, and death has a way of producing forgetfulness. Writing helps with this, as well as helping to express your inner feelings. Use your journal to list any unusual experiences like this.