The Hazards of Negative Energy

When I last left off from Mom’s story, I’d been having a lot of contact and dream visitations, and had by this time been to THREE different professional psychics (more on that later) all of whom independently confirmed the validity of the information I was getting.  I believed in it enough to begin to wonder if this sudden increase in psychic abilities and activity meant something for my life other than just getting over the passing of my mother.  Should I be using this somehow?

At first I did the only two things I knew to do:

1)      I read many books on the subject, and related subjects: After Death Communication, books written by mediums (biographical and instructional), lucid dreaming, reincarnation, psychic development, meditation, astral projection, ghosts – anything that seemed relevant and had credentials like good reviews, authors with good reputations, etc.  At this point I wasn’t necessarily ready to just swallow all of this stuff hook line and sinker, but I thought that reading many different viewpoints would help sort things out.  If practically every authority was giving the same information about some topics, then that information has a higher probability of being accurate, I reasoned.

2)      I started meditating again.  Back when I was a young teenager and psychic stuff was happening to me I had a few books on meditation, chakras, etc and I got pretty good at it!  I could actually leave my body, float up the ceiling, turn over, and look down at myself on the bed.  Being a kid I’d never had anyone tell me that this was usual or difficult to achieve so I never questioned it.  As an adult it isn’t so easy to trust like that!  Nevertheless, I started meditation again, just simple breath meditation, chakra cleansing, white light, etc.  I also started practicing yoga as it is the only form of exercise I’ve found that I don’t hate. 

I realized I needed to get really serious about learning to develop and control these abilities in the spring of 2010.  I had a really big fight with my husband – one of those emotional but (thankfully) rare arguments about a subject that pushed both of our buttons.  When I’d had enough I went into the master bathroom and slammed the door!  I heard a loud crack and turned to see that I’d slammed it hard enough to crack the mirror on the back of the door.  Geez!  Time to get a hold of the temper … temper … I’d been kind of prone to outbursts of temper since my mother died.  She chewed me out for that in a dream once.  A friend of mine, who was widowed young and is therefore considered an expert on the subject of grief, told me that flying off the handle over dumb things is a grief symptom and it would go away in time.  It was already happening less frequently when this fight happened, but it was another six months before I was back to normal.

The master bathroom is right off of the master bedroom, and the door and mirror in question are right next to my husband’s side of the bed.  As it is a cheap crappy mirror he wasn’t particularly angry about it, and we talked about replacing it with a nicer one up in the attic.  Fortunately I don’t believe all that BS about 7 years of bad luck.  It’s been a year already and I have not had any bad luck!

Bad luck aside there were some unforeseen consequences to this little temper tantrum.  A few weeks later we were lying in bed in the middle of the night and for some reason we were both awake.

“Do you hear that?” he whispered.

“Hear what?” I asked.  “I don’t have my hearing aids in.”

“Well put them in!  The bathroom door is moving!  It’s creaking back and forth.  I can hear it, and I can just barely see it in the moonlight.  Sometimes I hear other things like someone is back in the cubbyhole behind the bathroom – knocks, stuff moving around.  This has been happening for weeks.  Are we haunted?”

I put my hearing aids in and yes – I could hear it too.  I was perplexed – I didn’t sense anything weird in the house, and I’d talked to a professional medium a few weeks before who confirmed that the house was clear.  We hadn’t been any places where you would be at risk for picking up stray ghosts.  So what was it?

And then it dawned on me.  “Did this start before or after we had that fight and I slammed the door and broke that mirror?”

“Come to think of it, it started right after that.”

I now had a theory.  Given that I was experiencing all this psychic awakening and meditating, which in the past increased the psychic phenomena, could it be that *I* was responsible for the energy making all the noise in the bathroom?  I’d read about poltergeists, and how at least some of them have been attributed to psychokinesis originating from a living member of the household.  After all, I was really angry when I slammed the door, and my anger manifested physically as a crack in the mirror – maybe it hung around afterwards in the environment, like a residual haunting?

“I have an idea,” I told him.  “Just lie there and be quiet for a while.  I am going to meditate and try something.”

So I went into a deep meditation and white lighted the bathroom door.  And the bathroom, and the crawl space behind the bathroom, and might as well do the bedroom, the whole house, and the yard.  You just can’t be too careful with this sort of thing.

I waited about a week and then checked in with him.  “Did the noises stop after I did that white light meditation?”

“Yeah!  That was amazing!  I haven’t heard a thing since.”

I had further confirmation when I was telling this story to by step daughter, who was staying with us at the time in a bedroom across the hallway.  She heard the noises too, and noticed when they suddenly stopped.

That is when I realized I needed to be more serious about all this and take some real classes.  When you start scaring people you are in over your head.  Overall my husband is pretty good at putting up with my crazy stuff, but things moving around by themselves and unexplainable noises are beyond his tolerance level.

A Bit About Reincarnation

I was asked about this recently so I decided to do a post about it.  This was not a topic that resonated with me at first.  It was frowned on in most church circles where I travelled in my younger days.  However I had many family members who believed in it, one being my Tibetan Buddhist sister, who used to tease me about being buried twice in the same grave!

At this point I am back to believing in it again as it is the only explanation I’ve found for many of my own experiences and the experiences of many other people I’ve known.  My mother believed that I was reincarnated from her sister, Emily, who died in 1938.  This story came to me by way of my sister, who has it further documented in letters our mother sent to her in the 1970’s and 80’s.

Emily, was 12 years older than my mother.  From what Mom told me she spent a lot of time with Emily while she was growing up.  Emily got married in about 1937 and shortly thereafter became pregnant with her first child.  Early on in the pregnancy she developed a complication called hyperemesis gravidarum.  This condition is basically morning sickness on steroids – you are so sick you can’t eat anything for months on end.  As this was 1938 there were not many options for treating this condition.  The treatment now involves a lot of IV’s and drugs that can suppress the problem with varying degrees of efficiency and risk.  But back then?  They tried a lot of things but by the 7^th month of the pregnancy Emily contracted pneumonia and died.  There were ideas back then about a “good death”.  When the doctors decided that Emily would most likely die they started bringing in this endless parade of family members and friends, including my mother who was eight years old at the time.  Mom told me (while alive) that she was taken to visit Emily the night before she died.  She said Emily was on a feeding tube and couldn’t talk, and looked absolutely terrified.  When they took my mother away Emily looked at her a certain way, and this image of the last time she saw her sister stayed with her vividly for the rest of her life. 

They buried Emily in the family plot.  That is burial #1.

Fast forward another thirty or so years to the day I was born.  The doctor held me up in the delivery room and I looked at her the exact same way.  And she knew from that moment on that I was Emily.  There were other confirmations – things I would say to her when I was little.  I don’t remember most of the details but my sister still has the freaked out letters from my mother insisting “nobody but my sister could possibly know that!”  I have read some very good books about past life memories and small children that confirmed this pattern as common, primarily Children's Past Lives: How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child and Return From Heaven: Beloved Relatives Reincarnated Within Your Family, both by Carol Bowman.  Both of these books explain it very well and give many fascinating case histories.

The past life memories I have that could be attributed to Emily are kind of vague and center around old kitchen appliances and wallpaper.  I also have memories that I suspect are of Emily’s funeral which would suggest I was hanging around in a discarnate state, or I received the memories telepathically from my mother (as if that explanation is any easier to believe).  What I remember clearly from the ages of 2-5 is feeling very shocked at how old everyone was!  Crap – three out of four grandparents were already gone!  And two out of three siblings were grown and off at college!  WTF?  I missed everything!  I was born at the wrong time!  I spent a lot of time pretending it was 10 years earlier and watching TV shows that were from 10 years earlier in a vain attempt to recover this time.

Fast forward another 10 years.  When I was 12 a series of synchronicities began that opened up a channel with my grandmother – my mother’s mother.  Who, if you are keeping track of this, was once my mother, if I was Emily.  In the first dream she authenticated herself by giving me a piece of information that I didn’t know but was guaranteed to get everyone’s attention.  She took me into my parents’ bedroom (in the dream) and opened in the closet.  In the closet was a baby lying in a coffin!

So I wake up from this dream, stagger down to the breakfast table and present it for interpretation.  I get back stony poker faces.  Nobody would say a word.  I knew there was something they weren’t telling me!  This happened around Memorial Day and that year we went to the cemetery with The Aunts to plant flowers on the graves in the family plots.  I could not stop crying at the cemetery but I didn’t know why.  When we got back to the house I was alone with the Aunts in the kitchen and Aunt Gerk said something about “the baby.”  Huh?  What baby?!  Aunt Gerk was confused – wasn’t that what I was bawling about?  Uh – maybe.  So she filled me in.  In 1956 my mother had a stillborn baby girl.

When I confronted my parents about this they reluctantly admitted it was true and told me to never mention it again.  My brothers and sister remembered playing in the front yard one day, and Dad coming out on the porch and telling them the baby died.  And after that it was never mentioned again.  My sister, who by this point had done a lot of psychic training, told me that she felt this baby was me, and that is why I always thought I was born at the wrong time.

They buried the baby in the same vault with Emily.  There’s burial # 2.  So from then on when she came home for holidays I got teased, “Ha ha!  You’re the only person I know who was buried twice in the same grave!”

Fast forward another 15 years.  When I had my son, I had the exact same pregnancy complication and the exact same disease progression that Emily did.  Only when I got pneumonia at 7 months, I was living in a time period when antibiotics were available, so I (obviously) didn’t die.  I can’t imagine what re-living that drama must have been like for my mother.  She didn’t talk about it much at the time.  I was as sick as a dog so I wouldn’t have been much help anyway.  I felt like the grim reaper was following me around constantly.  Sure some of this could be blamed on genetics but it is still a strange set of coincidences.

I decided to dream on this one recently.  I asked for information about past lives before I went to bed.  I had a disturbing dream that began with a piece of old wallpaper attached to a board above the cabinets in my parent’s basement.  In waking reality I saw this wallpaper as a small child and I was told that it was in my brother John’s nursery when he was a baby.  It was blue striped wallpaper with little Donald Duck characters.  The dream started out with an image of this wallpaper and this space the wallpaper was inside (I think the wallpaper was attached to a board that was recycled into the cabinet).  The space changed into a dark cave that was full of water, and my aunt was trapped in there and was going to drown.  I woke up from this dream feeling kind of upset and not really understanding it, so I went back in and tried to send a scuba diver in to rescue my aunt.  She politely declined and explained that this was supposed to happen and she was in constant contact with family outside of the cave, so I should stop worrying about it.  Once I was wide awake this all resonated strongly with the story I related above.  I can only assume that if I had been born 2 years after John (instead of 16) I would have been put in the same nursery with that wallpaper.  Does this prove it is true?  No.  But until science comes up with a way to attach a radioactive tag to someone’s soul to track it from body to body, there isn’t going to be any proof.  This is the best I can do.

I will finish off with Mom’s own re-incarnation story.  She told me this while she was still alive.  Mom said that her earliest memories are of looking at people and being shocked at how “white” they were.  She felt that she didn’t belong here and she should find a way to get back to “her own people”.  She hated wearing clothes and took them all off at every available opportunity.  When she was about three she was down in the creek (naked) making clay pots.  She decided she was going to fire her clay pots and was in the process of assembling the materials to do this when her father came after her.  She was nervous because she knew she probably wasn’t allowed to light a fire, and she did her best to act innocent.  But little did she know that he had figured her out.

“You can’t go back to your people,” he told her.  “They’re all dead. “

 She stared at him in shock.  “All of them?”

“The white men gave them blankets infected with smallpox.  They got sick and died.  I’m very sorry, but you’re going to have to get used to being one of us now.”  Then he left her to fire her pots in peace.  After that she accepted being part of the family and life went on.  Did she have a past life as a Native American?  Or is there some other explanation?  As this happened in about 1933 I think it is safe to assume she didn’t see it on TV.

I found it fascinating that in that distant generation (grandpa Anderson was born in 1884) people in our family were aware of reincarnation and figured out what was going on, either by observing my mother’s behavior, or via clairvoyance, or some combination thereof.  Acknowledging the child’s past life memory,  re-assuring them that it is over, and encouraging them to live life in the present is exactly the advice given to parents in Carol Bowman’s books.  But this happened decades before books like these were written.  How did he know?  I guess I should dream on that sometime!

Grandma Crosses Over

With all of the reading I’ve been doing lately about dreams, synchronicity, and shared dreaming I thought I would write the story of Grandma Mason’s passing.  This happened in 1984 when I was fourteen years old.  I was in about ... eighth grade.  It is hard to remember exactly what grade I was in but I definitely remember what book we were reading in English class: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.  Unlike everyone else in the class I loved reading this stuff.  The teacher would assign chapter one and I would get so wrapped up in the book I’d read the entire thing the first night.  Then I’d have to go back and read it again with the class so I could remember which chapters where which!

At this time my dad’s mother – Grandma Mason – had just been admitted to a personal care home.  She was 89 years old and had been having problems living alone for the past year.  The place was not nearby and I’d only been there once or twice.  The visit just after New Year’s I remember vividly.  I went with my brothers, Bob and John, in John’s truck.  A few days before he’d gotten sick while he was out somewhere and barfed on the side of his truck.  It was January in Pittsburgh so the barf froze before he could clean it all off and as a result, the inside of the truck absolutely reeked.  This is the kind of stuff that is hard to forget even if you try really hard.  But it makes a great peg to hang other, more memorable, memories upon.

I should also point out that Grandma Mason was (is) extremely psychic.  She could see ghosts and told lots of great ghost stories.  She also had a lot of precognitive dreams.  Her abilities co-existed peacefully with her religiousness.  She was the most genuine Christian I've ever known.  I wish I'd thought to ask her more about that, but at the time I was just interested in bugging her with questions about ghosts and dreams.

This dream occured in early February, soon after I arrived home from school.  I was reading Great Expectations in bed and fell asleep, most likely because I’d stayed up late the night before reading the entire book.  I was wandering around in a big red brick hospital I’d never seen before when I realized I was dreaming.  I didn’t know why I was there or what I was looking for.  But something did strike me as odd.  On all the bulletin boards and pasted here and there on the walls were construction paper hearts, some of them pasted on top of lace paper doilies.

Eventually I wandered past a waiting room and spotted Grandma Mason!  She was sitting in one of the ugly 1970’s colored vinyl chairs wearing what appeared to be a very old wedding dress and was holding a bouquet of flowers that were brown, shriveled, and dead.  I went over and sat down beside her.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I’m waiting.  I have to go soon.”

“What do you mean?  Go where?”

“I have to go.”

Yes it sounds like an inane conversation, but when she repeated this phrase I immediately understood what she meant.

“You can’t go!” I insisted.  “I’m not ready for this!  You’re the only grandparent I have left!”

She patted my leg.  “Please don’t be upset.  You have to understand,  I’ve waited for this a very LONG time.  But I can’t stay anymore.  I stayed as long as I could.”

Then a door opened up and an extremely bright light shone through it.  It was so bright I couldn’t see anything in the room, just the bright white light.

“That’s it!” she said, growing excited.  “I have to go now.  But don’t worry – you’re going to be fine.  It’s just something that everybody has to go through.  And don’t worry about me.  I’ll be fine.  I’m looking forward to this, as difficult as that is to understand for someone your age.”

She stood up and walked into this light.  I didn’t think I could even stand to watch.  But at the last minute my curiosity got the best of me and I looked up.  She was in the white light now and was completely transformed.  She was young!  The dress looked brand new and the flowers were white and fresh.  She smiled at me, waved, and tossed the bouquet.  I caught it.  I looked down and saw that the bouquet was made from three white Easter lilies.  They were so real I could smell them!  The pollen from the stamens in the center came off on my fingers, powdery yellow.

I then I woke up with Great Expectations jabbing me in the back.  Like most people would I attributed the dream to what I was reading.

Fast forward a couple weeks.  I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of the phone ringing.  The phone ringing in the middle of the night could  only mean one thing – somebody was dead.  And I knew who.  But I didn’t get up because I couldn’t deal with it.

The next morning I got up for school and got dressed.  I sat in front of my dressing table and did my best to suck up so I could go down stairs and have my parents tell me my grandmother was dead.  I could’ve milked it for a day off school but I decided not to.  I was going to go and act normal.   She told me not to worry about it.  So suck up!  Right?

I went downstairs to breakfast and Dad told me she died during the night.  He said she started to hemorrhage late at night and they’d taken her by ambulance to West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh.  She died at West Penn.   Why is this detail important?  Because a couple of years later my mother got a job at West Penn.  She took me there one day to show me and imagine my shock when I recognized it as the hospital from this dream!

Then I remembered something!  It was Valentine’s Day!  And I understood that part of the dream.  What I didn’t get was if she was already dead and came back in time to warn me, if she was somehow sharing my dream two weeks before she died, or if my subconscious mind knew when and where she was going to die and created this elaborate dream to pass the information through.  To this day I honestly don’t know.  But the interaction felt genuine.  It felt like she was really there, rather than it just being a dream image of her.

“What time did she die?” I asked.

“A little while after midnight,” he said.  “About 12:30.”

“Then she really did die on Valentine’s Day,” I said.

“You’re right!  I didn’t realize it.  She always said people in her family died on holidays.”

And then, as if to further underscore her message that everything was fine and I shouldn’t worry, the synchronicities began.  The weather did a full U turn – it was the middle of February and suddenly it was 75 degrees outside!  It stayed warm like that for the entire duration of the funeral.  It smelled like Easter.  Odd references to Easter kept popping up and white lilies or images of white lilies seemed to be everywhere.

I was 14 years old and I’d never heard of any white light before, or had any idea of what it was for or where it lead.  I had a vague idea that my Grandmother went to heaven because, well, she was the most religious person I’d ever met so where else would she go?  I suspect, looking back, that when she tossed me that bouquet she was passing something on to me, because after that I began to get a real education about what happens to people after they die, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairgustience and all sorts of other things with no vocabulary in 1984, but they were going on all around me anyway!