Dream Cell Phone Contact

I have had many experiences where I communicate with my mother via cell phone in a dream.  I have posted one before, but many of these experiences are brief and I decided to post them together for this reason.

The first time I really talked to my mother following the immediate aftermath of her death it happened via mental telepathy.  This completely freaked me out as I had never experienced it before.  I have since read books about mediumship and learned that this is actually rather common.  I think that during these visits my subconscious mind conjures up the cell phone to pacify my conscious mind, which is usually in mix since I dream lucidly.  The first time this happened is in my post, The Dream Cell Phone – A First Method of Contact.

I also believe this happens more often than I remember when I wake up, unfortunately.  I will be experiencing a completely normal dream when my cell phone rings.  I answer it (in the dream) and it is my mother.  I recognize that this is something special and that I am dreaming.  I stop whatever I am doing, sit down, and talk to her just like I did when she was alive.

On March 8, 2010 this happened and my mother told me not to forget to set my clock ahead for daylight savings time.  This may come across as negative or interfering to some, but when she was alive she always called to remind me, not to be a busybody, but because it was just part of the way she showed she cared.  It was not a long conversation – the cord to the phone kept tangling up and I asked her to hold on while I unplugged it to let it unwind and plugged it back in.  Unfortunately this also ended the call.  I pressed Send to see the number the call came in from.  It was her phone number from the home she lived in almost all of her life.  I tried calling the number back but I got the “this number has been disconnected” message that I would get if I tried the number in waking reality.

Recently I had another rather long and involved cell phone contact dream.  I took, before bed that night, about 1/3 of an African Dream Bean.  It started out as a vivid but  normal dream.  I was lying on a sofa in what looked like my parents’ living room.  It was arranged like it was in the 70’s with the sofa under the big picture window.  But it wasn’t an exact replica of the room either – it just resembled it.  I was taking a nap under a blanket and my son Henry was sitting in front of the fire in the fireplace.  The cell phone rang and I’d answered it.  It was my mother, but I was very tired and not very lucid at first.  I was complaining about my job and about how when I got home I was so tired all I could do was lie here under this blanket.

Then I noticed a bright light outside the window.  I pulled the curtains back.  “Wow!” I told her.   “It’s the moon!  There’s a full moon and it is huge and so bright!”

I got up and went out the kitchen door onto the porch.  The deck was not there yet – just the old slab porch that used to be there.  I was describing the moon and the constellations to her.  “I am looking at Cygna the goose and the Northern Cross,” I said.  “I am not sure why I am seeing these now because they are summer constellations!”  I realized I was dreaming.  I began describing the dream stargazing to her as this is always beautiful and amazing.  The moon in the sky was almost as bright as the sun would be and yet I could see all these vivid constellations with fabulous multicolored stars. 

I went around to the front of the house to see if the Northern constellations were visible but they were covered with clouds. 

“Remember when I got that astronomy book for Christmas?” I asked her.  “I remember studying it that following summer.  I wanted to see Orion the Hunter SO BAD!  But it was summer and those constellations weren’t up in the evening.  I actually got up at 4:00AM just to see Orion the Hunter.” I reminisced.

The clouds were clearing in the North as I checked again.  There was a patch on the ground that was phosphorescent, like the plants in the movie “Avitar”.  It caught my attention for a moment, and then I started telling her about “Avitar”.

The Northern clouds cleared away and I was standing in the front yard talking with her about the North Star and the circumpolar constellations.  The dream totally changed and I found myself walking along a sidewalk still talking with her.  I was now bright and sunny.  At one point I lost the connection but she called me right back.  As we talked I got the distinct feeling that we actually talk more frequently than I remember, and that my problem is more related to mediocre dream recall than lack of contact.

Knowing full well that I was risking ending the dream, I said, “Can I ask kind of a personal question?  I don’t want to offend your or anything.” 

“Sure – go ahead,” she replied.

“Did you really die?  I mean, I don’t think I dreamed that.  I played harp at your funeral.”

There was a slight pause.  “Yes,” she said.  “I did.”

“Then I have to tell you how incredibly, completely grateful I am that I can still talk to you!  I mean – with you just totally GONE it was really awful – unbelievably awful.  In addition to being my mother you were pretty much best friend too.  And I know that we have to get over these things and move on to do the things we are here to do, and let the other person move on to do the things they need to do.  But to be able to talk from time to time is just this huge blessing, and I am really thankful for it.”

I don’t remember exactly what she said, but it was an acknowledgment and an indication that she was happy to talk also, but I got the feeling that I was getting so gushy that I was embarrassing her a little bit.  So I changed the subject.

“So is it fun over there?” I asked.

“Yeah, actually it is!” she said.

And then I woke up.  Definitely thumbs up for the African dream bean!   While talking about it at breakfast my husband was stuck by the fact that we didn’t really talk about everything that has gone on with my Dad lately.  He’d had a heart attack and for a while we didn’t think he was going to recover. 

It’s not that we never talk about dad – but we didn’t that night.   Looking back on the experience  it’s as if I had temporary Alzheimer’s – I could easily remember getting a constellation book for Christmas in 1984, but I couldn’t remember anything about what had happened in the past week.  Maybe this is a protective device that is put on me so that my mother can’t interfere with the life lessons I have to figure out for myself.  The purpose of the contact is to maintain the relationship or just experience each other – not to “help” me by “cheating” and telling me the outcome of my current challenge.  And if I start to get too lucid – and there is a risk that my line of questioning will veer off towards answers she cannot give me for my own good - the contact ends.

Cousin Eugene Explains it All

This post goes hand in hand with my last post, How I Learned to Stop Hating Christmas. I had this dream a year or so before the one where I went back to 1976. I had it at the beginning of The Dreading Time – the couple of years between the decline of my parents’ health and my mother’s death.

I was really suffering over the dead family thing and really dreading losing my parents. I didn’t think there was any way I could face life in a post-parent world. I didn’t think there was anything in my future but becoming a Crazy Cat Lady.

I had a lucid dream where I found myself in a mansion. I’d been to this place before but not for many years. The rooms go on one after another in all directions to infinity. In each of the rooms there are people engaged in a different activity. I was wandering around in this place observing. If the inhabitants noticed me or realized that I was not dead like they were, they didn’t give any indication of it.

After wandering around for a while I found a room where they were playing cards. “Hot damn! The Aunts will be here!” I thought. The room was pretty crowded and I am elbowing my way around looking for my aunts. Then I saw a man sitting at a table like he was waiting for someone. Like maybe me? As soon as I made eye contact with him I knew he was a family member, even though I didn’t recognize him as anyone I knew. I went over and sat down across from him.

“Look, I know it is probably against the rules,” I begged. “But I REALLY need to talk to the aunts! Can you call them here? Even if you can just call Aunt Gerk – can I just talk to Aunt Gerk?”

Editorial comment: they all had weird nicknames. We have Aunt Biggie, Aunt Margie, Aunt Gerk, Aunt Mainie, Aunt Lo Lo, and my mother was Snooks.

This guy looks at me very compassionately and starts to tell me this story about how he was orphaned as a child and grew up in an orphanage. On and on this story went each part being more fantastic than the last … he totally blew my mind. When he finished I was sitting there with my jaw on the table.

Then he asked, “Do you think this would have been any easier to live through if I’d know about it before it all happened?

I shook my head no.

He walks around the table, puts his arm around my shoulders, and says, “It’s not that we don’t love you and care about you. It’s just that if we tell you things, sometimes it just makes it worse. Poverty is better endured in ignorance.”

Then I woke up. I thought what the heck? First thing I did that morning was speed dial my mother (who was at this time still alive). I told her the entire dream.

“Oh!” she said. “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.”

Click. That’s it! That’s the place! She could toss out a Bible verse off the top of her head to explain any paranormal experience.

“And that guy? That’s my cousin Eugene. You never met him. The last time he was in Pennsylvania was in the early 1960’s when he came back here to erect a tombstone on his parents’ grave. All that stuff he told you - he told ME the exact same story over at the Aunt Farm, and I was just as shocked as you were! And it is all true! His parents really did die when he was a child and he did grow up in an orphanage.”

I took several spiritual lessons away from this encounter.
1) Poverty is better endured in ignorance. Generally dead people don’t say a whole lot. But when they do it is usually very profound. I took this statement to mean spiritual poverty – the state we all exist in while living in the material world. Sometimes it does more harm than good to know what is going to happen before it happens. It is bad enough that it happens at all! It can really ruin your ability to deal with the present.

2) Don’t get so hung up pining after that dead that you ignore the living. OK, people die. And then they go back to the other side and they are fine. Our relationships with them don’t end. We are just separated for a while by a barrier that isn’t quite real. But it is still a barrier. Meanwhile there are almost 7 billion souls groping their way around the material plane with us. We’ve got all of eternity to hang around with our dead loved ones, but only a finite amount of time to have experiences with our fellow sojourners on Earth. And the bonus is you get to take these new relationships with you when you depart as well!

Cousin Eugene says: Go find someone who is still alive and pay attention to them today.

How I Learned to Stop Hating Christmas

I will come clean – I have been a Christmas hater for many years. Why? Because almost all of the people I used to spend Christmas with are gone! And the places I used to spend Christmas at are gone! The great die off in my family started in the 1990’s, although my grandparents were all gone by 1984. Once your aunts and uncles start dropping like flies the holidays have a way of becoming about as welcome as … well .. flies!

Every year it would start. I’d think about the Aunt Farm. My mother’s parents had a small farm. When they became unable to take care of themselves, three of my mother’s maiden or widowed sisters moved back in to take care of them. Once they had both died, the sisters found this to be a comfortable living arrangement and over the years you get aunt + farm = Aunt Farm. One of them had a boyfriend who became known as The Advaark. You can see why I miss these people – they were funnier than hell!

The Aunt farm is of course long gone. The house is still there owned by one of my cousin’s adult children. But the place – the endless card game, the bottomless coffee pot, the constant stream of puns and witty jokes – all relegated to the dust bins of history.

The remnant would gather at my parents’ house. No kids, no excitement, a much smaller buffet table. And then someone would remark, “Well, there’s another Christmas over with.” Cheery. Prozac anyone?

And now even that is gone. It is just a few of us huddling around a table in the Chinese restaurant! Last year was particularly horrible. I didn’t even put up a tree. People would ask “what are you doing for Christmas?” I’m pulling down the blinds and sitting in my house with my fingers in my ears, that’s what!

So what happened?

The second year after my mother’s death I realized several things:

1) I was prepared for this. Specifically prepared for this. I found it a cruel joke at the time, but about a week before my mother died I had a lucid dream. I was taken back in time. I was sitting in the sandbox in the back yard of the house across the street, waiting for my friend Lisa to return from the bathroom. It was a sunny summer day in about 1976. Simultaneously I was 100% conscious of both that time and the present. As my 6 year old self and my 39 year old self compared mental notes I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that if I were back there I would miss the people I have now – but did not know yet then – just as much as I now miss the people who I had then and are now dead. I realized that most of my friends were exactly what I was – unknown children growing up in Podunk towns in the middle of nowhere. And just where the heck would you ever find, let alone buy, and antique flute or harp in 1976? I would not be able to do ANY of the things I am now doing in 1976 because there was no internet. No Ebay. No Amazon.com. And I also realized that if I had all of my favorite people all at the same time I wouldn’t have much time to spend with any of them. Maybe it was better than they were spread out over time?

And then I pondered tattling on Lisa’s little brother for throwing sand. After all I was 6.

I woke up from this dream thinking I was nuts for spending all my time filled with dread over my parents getting old and dying. This was a golden age! Both of them were still alive, my son was young and living at home, and my husband is alive. What the heck am I whining about? A week later my mother died. Short golden period, I thought sarcastically. But over time I came to a deeper understanding of it, especially the part about not having time for everyone if you have them all at once.

2) The ADC contact continued and I came to know on a very deep level that these loved ones who have crossed over are FINE. It’s one of those things that you think you know because you’ve been told so (by religious authorities usually) but until you have to walk through that valley and make peace with it yourself, you don’t really KNOW it. Once you do know it at that level your fear of death disappears. As I’ve said before it is not a “get out of jail free” card from grief, but as the grief resolved itself I found myself in a much better place than I was when I was merely dreading my parents’ deaths.

3) I learned to trust the future to deliver more good things. At least a little bit. In the dreading days I felt like my parents would die, my kid would grow up and leave, and then my husband would die and I’d just end up living with hundreds of cats. But now I’ve learned to trust that yes – there are more favorite people out there in the great unknown that I can’t even imagine yet. They will show up in my life, even if it is while I am at the animal shelter adopting cats. After all both my son and my husband were in that great incomprehensible future in 1976, so is it really that hard to believe that there are more of them to come?

So there you have it! This year I surprised myself my discovering that I liked playing harp in front of a Christmas tree. So I put one up in my harp room. And I did not get mean or depressed. I had a good time at the Chinese place with the people who are in my life now. Who knows, next year we might even do something really radical like open presents under the tree on Christmas morning! There will only be three of us. But so what? We are here now and that is what counts. And my mother and the aunts and uncles? Well, I know they are in the “many mansions in My Father’s house” playing cards and having a good time because I’ve seen it with my own eyes (or at least my third eye). My mother said it best when she chewed my ass out two months after she died:

“YOU of all people should know THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM!”