NigHtmares THat Transcend Time, Space, and DeatH
Have you ever had a nightmare that came true? Have you ever received a communication from a person or animal in a dream, and woken up to discover that the information you received is correct? Have you ever been frightened by the sensation of shooting or floating out of your physical body? Did a deceased loved one ever show up in a dream to warn you of imminent danger? Perhaps a small percentage of you have even had a near-death experience, where you physically died (or nearly died) and experienced visions such as a tunnel of light or a life review, but then you came back to life again?
This chapter may bend your mind a little. For the most part, we still lack an effective scientific method for verifying the types of experiences that we’ll touch on here. It’s also hard to know how many people actually experience these things, as there are few statistics available for most of them. All I know is that I hear from plenty of people in my workshops and retreats and through my website who report “psi” dreams that appear to predict the future or involve telepathic communication, visitation dreams from people who have died, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), and near-death experiences (NDEs). So I figured this book needs a chapter that addresses the scary side of these experiences. We’ll also look at suicide nightmares.
Dreams and nightmares that seem to involve extrasensory perception, where the mind appears to extend beyond its perceived boundaries to pick up information about the future or receive communications about simultaneously occurring events via telepathy, may be more common than we think. Certainly, there is a large number of anecdotal reports about these kinds of phenomena and some interesting literature on the subject, as well as some studies that test the existence of psi dreams, including the work of Stanley Krippner, PhD, and Montague Ullman, MD.47
Dream telepathy, precognitive dreams, near-death experiences, and the like may appear threatening to those who believe they know for a fact that time is linear, consciousness ends at the moment of death, brains are the generators of consciousness, and people’s minds are separate from each other and entirely nonporous. What do you think? Do you think that when we die, we cease to exist, or do you feel that consciousness continues after death? Do you believe that we are separate from other people, or that our minds are intimately interconnected to one another? How do your basic beliefs impact the way you interact in the world and the way you lead your life?
We need to continue studying every area of conscious experience with an open mind in order to gain a deep understanding of the big questions: What is consciousness? What happens when we die? Why are we here? Here’s hoping there will be many more scientific studies focusing on all of the types of experiences detailed in this chapter. The scientific method of enquiry is a wonderful way of exploring the world, and scientists tend to have bright and curious minds. It’s worth remembering that the scientific worldview (as with any worldview) is also a belief system. We have to be careful not to swallow any belief whole. Practice 39: Question Your Beliefs, Assumptions, and Expectations later in this chapter encourages you to take a moment to consider your cherished beliefs about the nature of reality.
It’s good to take a close and objective look at our beliefs and be willing to change our mind according to the weight of the evidence. This works both ways—before we accept the existence of telepathic dreams, for example, it’s wise to inform ourselves about all of the possibilities, as well as experiment for ourselves. In terms of a scientific worldview, scepticism is important, but if we allow it to prevent further enquiry for fear of shaking the bedrock of our prior conclusions about the world, we may unwittingly skate over the mystery that lies at the heart of consciousness.
It’s beyond the scope of this book to go deeply into the heart of precognitive and telepathic nightmares and the other experiences that appear in this chapter, but the resources section and bibliography contain books that explore in detail psi dreams, OBEs, NDEs, and other topics touched on here.
Since this is a nightmare book designed to examine scary nocturnal experiences and offer relief through practical techniques, I’ll focus here on the most fearful scenarios and how to handle them. However, let’s keep at the forefront of our minds that many of the types of experiences covered in this chapter can quite simply be amazing, life-enhancing, and joyous events! They can extend and sharpen our consciousness and may increase our understanding of the malleable and nonlinear nature of time and space. Out-of-body experiences can be as delightful, soulful, and liberating as our most treasured dreams.48 The majority of near-death experiences are also characterised as overwhelmingly positive events that lead to a renewed love of life, freedom from the fear of death, and a certitude of one’s purpose in life.49
We’ll see in this chapter that even an apparently worrying nightmare about suicide can become an inspiration and a true gift. It’s good to bear in mind from the outset that telepathic dreams do not always transmit dire tidings; they may also convey reassuring information, such as the return to health of a sick person. Precognitive dreams of the future are not always portents of doom and grief, but can be glorious with promise—what about that dream of acing your exam results that came true?
Nightmares That Predict the Future
Have you ever had a scary dream that came true? What is that? Coincidence? A fluke? Intuition? Or the mind reaching out through time and space to show you a possible future? Dreams that show us glimpses of events that then actually manifest in waking life are known as precognitive dreams. Such dreams can be very trivial. For several years, I wore a silver star nose stud without incident, then one night I dreamed I lost it down the plughole of the bathroom sink while washing my face. In the dream, it skittered away from me too fast for me to catch it. Infuriatingly, I then did lose it down the plughole while washing my face that morning, despite recalling that dream!
People with high dream recall often report a high frequency of low-significance precognitive dreams, such as dreaming that a letter arrives with the address handwritten in green ink … and finding such a letter in their mailbox later that morning, as once happened to me. I wasn’t expecting a letter and didn’t know the sender. It makes dream journaling even more fun when we spot these little synchronicities and occasional glimpses into the future, and it can bring us a deeper feeling of connection with the world when we sense the way our mind expands into the past, present, and future in our dreams.
Dreams of the future can also be deeply significant and rich with promise, such as the story Linda Davison tells in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and Premonitions. She tried for a baby for five years, lost hope, then dreamed she saw an eagle’s nest with four eggs that hatched as she watched. The mother eagle spread its wings protectively over the babies and gazed right into the dreamer’s eyes. Linda knew this was not just a dream, but a promise, and awoke feeling awed and grateful, knowing that she would have four children. Within a month, she was pregnant, and she had four babies over the next four years.50
However, precognitive dreams can also be terrifying, appearing to announce forthcoming calamities, accidents, losses, natural disasters, or acts of terrorism. It’s important to work with these nightmares on the personal level before assuming they will come true on the world stage. The practices in chapter 2 are a good place to start. An interesting thing to remember when working with precognitive dreams is that they may seem to reveal possible future events or warn us of events that we can change to avoid an accident; that is to say, nothing seems absolutely set in stone. Here are three striking examples of precognitive nightmares that warned the dreamers to take action in order to avoid an undesirable outcome. Each example is from a wonderful book of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Dreams That Change Our Lives.51
Psychologist and academic Marcia Emery dreamed she had a car accident when her brakes failed. A week later, her brakes did fail, and although luckily she was unharmed, her car was totaled. And now for the part where it gets super weird: a week later, and now in possession of a new car, Marcia had another driving dream:
I put my foot on the brake, and it goes right down to the floor. I hear a ping noise. I see a policeman coming towards me and notice a no parking sign.
Marcia laughed this dream off, sure that her new car wouldn’t have brake trouble. A few days later, driving along in her new car, she braked, her foot went right to the floor, there was a ping … and she saw a policeman approaching and also noticed a no parking sign. She observes: “I remembered the dream and guided the car to the curb. How could real life imitate the dream? I later found out that the brake cable had snapped in my brand-new car.”
So the moral of that tale is: if you dream your brakes fail, get them checked! Although this type of dream is often a metaphor for rushing too much through life and not taking time to slow down or driving ourselves so hard that we can’t stop, or a reference to failing physical health, dreams can sometimes be extremely literal. Marcia’s dream is striking because very specific details, such as the pinging noise, the policeman, and the no parking sign, were all reproduced at the time of the brake failure. Have you ever experienced déjà vu, when you feel strongly that you have lived a particular moment before in perfect detail and are now reliving it? This feeling may well be linked to having previously dreamed that moment.
Another precognitive nightmare that contains startling and surprising details that then come true was shared by David Cielak, who dreamed he was running along a peaceful road when suddenly …
I see a horned black bull and a herd of five cows in a field. As I approach they break the fence and come charging down the road at me!
In the dream, the bull runs straight at the dreamer and tosses him on his horns. Later that afternoon, while running, David saw cows and a horned black bull, and recalled his dream.
As I ran, the black horned bull broke through the barbed wire fence and, followed by the herd of cows, was running straight at me! I was shocked to see this! Just as in the dream! I thought, “I’m a goner.”
Luckily, a car came along and David hid behind it as the bull and cows thundered past him before crashing through a fence into another field.
Sometimes other people have precognitive nightmares that feature us, and although it can be difficult to tell which dreams point to a possible future event and which are focused on our individual psychology, sometimes this kind of nightmare can even save lives.
Janice Baylis received a phone call from her carpool partner, telling Janice to meet her around the corner from their usual meeting place. While they were meeting around the corner, a small airplane crashed right in the spot where they normally would have met at that time. As they drove past the wreck, Janice asked her friend how on earth she had known to switch the meeting place. The friend told her she’d had the following dream, but hadn’t wanted to mention it in case Janice thought her silly:
I dream an airplane will crash at the place and time we are to meet, and we will be under it when it crashes.
These examples show how accurate dreams can be about future events, and that we can change the “possible futures” they feature. But let’s not forget that it can be hard to distinguish a precognitive dream from a regular one, and even if the nightmare is super vivid and accompanied by feelings of urgency, this is certainly not always a reliable indicator that it will “come true.” There must surely be a great number of dreams initially thought to be precognitive that then did not manifest in waking life, only these don’t get reported. The more familiar we become with our own dreaming style and the more diligently we journal our dreams, the more likely it is that we will be able to distinguish precognitive nightmares from purely personal ones. Let’s take a look now at another fascinating area of dreaming: telepathic nightmares.
Telepathic Nightmares
People write to me sharing their telepathic experiences in this area, and of course I hear the most disturbing cases, because it is traumatising to have a nightmare that your loved one is in a bad car crash and then later receive a phone call telling you that this actually happened. People ask how it can be possible that they “knew” this before even hearing about it. “How did the dream know?” they ask. Or they ask, “Am I going mad?” Such an experience can shake up our worldview.
A very proficient lucid dreamer, Natalie, went out with friends one evening and later had a lucid dream in which she saw one of those friends:
I saw F in a coffin. She told me she was dead. I told her she couldn’t be, as I had seen her only hours ago. She said she was sorry but that she was dead. I woke from this in shock and I knew it was real. I ran to my housemate and told him. I found out the next day that F had committed suicide the night I’d had the lucid dream. Her poor mother had found her dead.
This is a tragic worst-case scenario and understandably a horrifying and very sad experience for everyone affected. We must always consider that in many cases, such nightmares are not announcing or predicting the actual death of someone. Death dreams may simply mean that we need to face our own future death and the mortality of those around us. Death in dreams can be a wake-up call to say goodbye to old behaviours and seize life by the horns, or it can herald major change. As we’ve seen in this book, death in dreams is usually symbolic rather than literal, so before we spread panic by calling people up to warn them that they died a terrible death in our dream, it’s wise to consider personal associations with the dream and work to unwrap it using techniques such as those in Chapter 2.
Do you think that minds can become more porous during dreams and thus more able to communicate with other minds? I never seriously entertained this possibility until, out of curiosity, I entered a dream telepathy contest at an IASD conference in Copenhagen in 2004.52 Contestants try to tune into the telepathy target image via their dreams. That night, sceptical but curious, I focused on the telepathic sender, Dr. Beverly D’Urso, and had the following lucid dream.
In a spacious park full of big, old trees, I hear a woman’s voice shouting, “Tree! Tree!” as if she has discovered the answer to some fundamental question.
Then I’m at the dream conference, discussing the telepathy contest. I see Beverly and figure she must be having a sleepless night trying to transmit the image.
“How are you feeling?” I ask her.
She flings out her arms and says, “I’ve just been shouting the word inside my head!”
“That’s funny,” I say, “because in my last dream, people were shouting about trees.”
I want to ask Beverly if tree is the image she’s projecting—but, get this—I think this might be cheating! So I don’t ask her. Instead, we talk about the qualities of the colour green. Then I’m standing before a huge, leafy tree. I focus on it intently and slowly wake up.
The next morning, I entered the contest but had to fly home that day, so I missed the awards ceremony. As it turned out, the target image was indeed a tree. The judges informed me that I had won first prize in the contest, with the most direct hit they’d ever had. The image looked exactly like the tree I’d seen in my lucid dream. My dream had also accurately reflected the ways the sender had tried to transmit the image: she had flung out her arms like tree boughs, pictured parks in her mind, focused on the colour green … and shouted the word tree inside her head.
It’s a very odd feeling when something like this happens, because it seems to go beyond what we can comfortably brush off as a coincidence, a fluke, a setup, or wishful thinking. It’s easy enough to dismiss other people’s “telepathic” experiences, but your own? Although I was in an academic mindset at that time, I began to wonder whether dreams were more than purely subjective phenomena. How had I heard Beverly shouting the word tree inside her head? How had I seen the target photograph in my lucid dream? Had our minds connected and exchanged information in some way? It seemed so. I was already highly interested in consciousness and the big questions of life, and after this experience I questioned everything more intensively. Practice 39: Question Your Beliefs, Assumptions, and Expectations is great if you are a deep thinker (or hope to become one!) and wish to uncover more of life’s beautiful mysteries.
Another interesting thing to do is to notice more when we experience moments of intuitive knowing, or when we experience synchronicities, such as starting to hum a particular song at the exact same moment our friend does. When we travel with someone or spend a lot of time with them, we often “tune into” each other and come out with the same thought simultaneously. This seems very natural and common, but it’s good to heighten our awareness of it if we’re interested in lowering the barriers between our mind and others’. It seems that in some cases, the barriers between individual minds can become more porous, especially in cases where danger is present. Nightmares are a perfect conduit for this porous information exchange, because our critical mind is mostly dormant during dreaming. Let’s look at one such account.
Telepathic nightmares may occur when a loved one is in pain or danger, suffering severe emotional distress, or close to death. In Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and Premonitions, D. L Teamor shares a nightmare where she tuned into her tiny son’s health predicament.53 Born after only five months in the womb, her little boy wasn’t expected to live at first. But he survived and was into his second month in an incubator when his mother dreamed that she was searching everywhere for her baby, saying, “I have to find him, he can’t breathe.” In the dream, she ran through an abandoned school building until she found his incubator in a classroom. He was breathing again, but she noticed that it was extremely cold in the classroom.
As soon as she woke up, she called the hospital and was told that her baby’s lung had ripped when a doctor decided to see if he could breathe unaided. Once at the hospital, she found her baby terribly weak but breathing through a tube. However, she then noticed his body temperature was very low, and when she inspected the incubator, she found the rear window had been left open, so the temperature within was frigid. Her dream had been correct about two key details—respiratory distress and the coldness—and coincided with the time of these events. Fortunately, her tiny boy survived and thrived! He grew into adulthood with healthy lungs.
Let’s take a look now at nightmares in which deceased loved ones come to warn us about hidden disease or danger.
Warnings from the Dead
There are many accounts of people receiving messages from deceased loved ones during dreams. These include information about the future, health advice, or warnings of mortal danger. Vehement, super-real nightmares leave such a strong impression on the dreamer that they often prompt a radical change in behaviour, actions, and thought processes. It is natural for the dreamer to feel that this was an actual visitation from a deceased loved one who has their best interests at heart.
Some warning dreams are impossible to ignore. Wanda Burch is the author of She Who Dreams: A Journey into Healing through Dreamwork. Her dead father shouted at her in a dream, “You have breast cancer!” He was panicked in the dream because she wasn’t “getting it,” and it was time for her to react. She then had a follow-up dream about exactly where the cancer was. She went to the doctor and he couldn’t find any cancer. But then Wanda put a dot over the exact spot she had seen in her dream, far below her breast, to show him where to put the biopsy needle. He found a lump. The biopsy showed that Wanda had a particularly aggressive and fast-moving cancer. The cancer cells were not amassing in such a way as to be visible on a regular mammogram. If Wanda hadn’t paid attention to her dreams, she might not have discovered the cancer in time. As it was, they were able to respond quickly to intervene with the cancer’s progress.
Dreams effortlessly transcend time and space and provide us with a world where our thoughts and feelings co-create events and telepathy is commonplace. (We often “just know” things while dreaming, and when we pay attention, dream people can often be observed “speaking” without visibly moving their lips.) We are naturally endowed with superpowers in the dreamworld, such as flying and the ability to turn invisible or shapeshift into an animal. Our psychic powers are naturally sky-high in dreamland. I have dreamed many times of levitating objects with the power of the mind, and of being able to skip ahead in time and see the future unfolding in a series of vivid images, like photographs. I have met wise beings and dissolved into blissful white light.
We can do such things in the flexible dreamworld, where the laws of physics exist as firm constructs only in our mind and can easily be transcended. Might it also be possible to receive communications via dreams from people who have transitioned into the death state? There is so much we still don’t know about death and what happens beyond that veil. Studies into near-death experiences where people have been pronounced clinically dead yet somehow come back to life show that death does not happen from one second to the next: it can be a lengthier process than we assume, and sometimes it can be reversed.54 Fear of the unknown often blocks us from keeping an open mind. I find it healthier to admit that we don’t know everything and science cannot explain everything. It seems more “scientific” to observe and discover with an open mind as we go through life.
A man I know who has been a psychiatric nurse for over thirty years sent me the following two warning nightmares with the permission of his patients. Personal data has been changed to protect the dreamers.
A twenty-five-year-old man had suffered severely at the hands of his violent parents. He was beaten, verbally and physically attacked, and put under pressure. For a time, he was violent himself, but then he stopped of his own accord. His uncle was murdered by his partner by poisoning when the patient was six years old, and his cousin died in strange, unclear circumstances when the patient was seventeen years old. On the night of the death of his cousin, the patient had the following dream:
My cousin, who died that night, sits upright in his grave and is buried only up to his stomach; his torso and head and arms are alive, and he tells me vehemently, “Disappear from here. Get out of this family. You are in great danger.”
This dream was very shocking for the dreamer, and he took the warning very seriously. He soon moved from his parents’ home to another region and was able to build a new, nonviolent life.
A thirty-five-year-old married man had this dream shortly after the suicide of his wife, who had suffered from depression for a long time:
My recently deceased wife appears to me in a dream, marked by the traces that the suicide left on her body. She tells me with great urgency, “Don’t do it. Don’t commit suicide. You will regret it, as I deeply regret it. I have not solved any of my problems through suicide; I have taken them all with me. What’s more, I cannot return to my previous life and rectify the mistake of committing suicide. Don’t do it!”
The patient himself suffered from depression and, after his wife’s suicide, had played with the idea of taking his own life “to be with her again in the afterlife.” The dream greatly helped to dissuade him from this idea, and for years now he hasn’t had any plans to die by suicide.
Let’s now consider nightmares where people in the dream actually kill themselves or dream of their own death.
Suicide Nightmares
There are two main types of suicide nightmares: those of people who are actually suicidal, and those of being dead or killing oneself that are purely symbolic and usually refer to the need for major change in the dreamer’s life. Robert Litman, MD, discusses the nightmares of suicidal people in the chapter “The Dream in the Suicidal Situation” in the book The Dream in Clinical Practice. One symbolic example he cites is that of a woman who dreamed she was dead in a coffin, but when the dream was worked with, it turned out to be symbolic of the “death” of sexuality in her marriage rather than a reflection of a suicide wish.55
Litman describes suicide wishes as the desire to escape from intolerable pain, and points out that suicide is often rehearsed in fantasy before an actual attempt is made. This rehearsal can emerge in very anxious and depressive dreams and nightmares that often have themes of destruction, being killed, or killing oneself or others. However, when a person is close to making an actual suicide attempt, their dreams may change to reflect an attitude of surrender or giving up, or they may dream of peacefully departing from life. For example, one month before a woman took a fatal overdose, she reported, “I dreamed something wonderful: war had broken out, I was to go into the field. I said goodbye to everyone with the joyous expectation that I was soon to die.” 56
Occasionally, people write to me saying their nightmares are so relentless that they are contemplating suicide. Psychologist and professor of psychiatry Dr. Tore Nielsen, who directs the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory in Montreal, shared with me his advice for those in this extreme situation.
Seek professional help right away, preferably a psychologist open to working with dreams. Research shows that having nightmares is a predictor of suicidal thoughts and attempts, so acting early on such symptoms could help prevent their thoughts from getting worse. As we learn more about the links between nightmares and suicide, the content of the nightmares might provide clues to the nature of the suffering and could be used as entry points for therapy; I would look closely at the nature of the interpersonal relationships in the nightmares.
Dreams and nightmares are emotional barometers; when we pay attention to them, they can reveal our state of mind. In this sense, listening to the dreams and nightmares of people in our lives who are suicidally depressed can help us to react quickly by getting medical help or calling a suicide hotline if it seems a dream is indicating an imminent suicide attempt. Practice 7: The Nightmare Reflection Technique shows how to listen when someone shares a nightmare and how to help them gently unpack its meaning. Practice 2: Keep a Nightmare Journal helps us to spot any worrying patterns in the nightmare content and identify recurring themes that may help us understand the larger picture behind the suicidal thoughts of ourselves or others. If you feel suicidal, or if your friend or loved one does, please do not hesitate to reach out immediately for professional help by seeing a doctor and calling a suicide hotline.
In his 2020 presentation for the 37th annual dream conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, nightmare researcher and clinical psychologist Dr. Michael Nadorff explained that in nightmare sufferers, the main factor for suicide is not the intensity of nightmares, but their frequency. If someone is having a high frequency of nightmares (several times a week or nightly), seek help. In a study involving placebos, Dr. Nadorff said that the placebo worked better with nightmare sufferers than a drug, which shows that simply feeling less hopeless about nightmares is very powerful: the belief in relief can already help a nightmare sufferer.57
Let’s look now at the symbolic type of suicide dreams. Kim, an artist, shared that at a time when she felt traumatised by the death of her father and had numerous rejections as an artist, she experienced a nightmare that weighed on her, as it seemed to be a very clear suicide dream:
I am standing in the library on the ledge that has no railing and am looking to my left at my mom. I am wearing a purple winter coat my mom had made me as a child. My arms are outstretched to each side, and I have many plastic shopping bags hanging from each arm. I step off the ledge to my certain death.
Kim then attended a conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and in a morning dream circle, author Jeremy Taylor asked if anyone had a dream to work on. Kim recounts what happened:
My hand shot up with my suicide dream. I thought he was crazy to pick my dream, but hey, what did I know? His first question, once we got started, was “Were the bags full?” Well, actually, no, they were empty. I was sure of that, because as I fell, I had heard the sound of empty shopping bags flapping in the wind. All I can remember from that day (now well over ten years ago) is the idea that if the bags were empty, then they were not weighing me down, but rather were full of potential. That blew my mind. I have learned that suicide dreams do not mean we are about to actually play out in real life the drama of our dreams, but rather that suicide means that a part of me had to die for me to move forward. That if I could truly let go, then I could use my wings and fly. … Wow, this was groundbreaking for me!
This dream I had thought to be a trauma or acting out of a very negative time of my life—rejection as an artist, death of my dad and other family members—was actually a gift I was giving myself. Understanding this dream on that day changed my life’s direction, and I have not looked back. My arms are spread wide and I leap at all kinds of opportunities and possibilities that I may not have in the past. This dream is a gift I will treasure for my lifetime, of that I am sure.
Death in dreams and nightmares is often a powerful metaphor for change: we must die in order to be reborn. This is why we need to be super careful not to “judge a dream by its cover,” and instead take time and care to unwrap it. A nightmare about someone we love dying very likely does not mean that they are actually about to die; it is much more likely to be symbolic of our own inner change, a change in our relationship with the person, or the act of letting go in some respect. The best way to find out is to work with the dream. As Kim’s dream so beautifully shows, sometimes what first appears to be a worrisome nightmare can turn out to be a blessing and a release, and the beginning of a marvellous new way of being in the world.
question your beliefs,
assumptions, and expectations
It can be fascinating to check in with ourselves about our basic stance on the nature of reality, consciousness, dreams, physics, and death. Try mulling over these questions for starters, and add more of your own, to come up with your current worldview. There’s no need to judge your responses: everyone is different, so just go with whatever feels right for you. You may notice that your deepest beliefs were formed in childhood, or you might realise how much your worldview has changed over the course of your life. Skip the questions you feel are too much to focus on for now—there are some very deep ones. Many people barely consider these questions as they move through life, so well done if you actually sit down and give this practice some serious thought!
1. Do my waking thoughts, beliefs, and intentions have an impact on the physical universe? In what way? And how about my dream thoughts and the actions I take in my dreams—do these also impact the physical universe in some way?
2. Which beliefs do I hold about consciousness? What is it and where does it come from? How did human consciousness begin?
3. Is my brain the creator of consciousness, or does it mediate consciousness, a bit like a radio receiver that receives waves and decodes them into sounds?
4. Where does the “real me” reside (my “self”)? In my physical body? Why? What about when I dream? Where am “I” then? Who is the dreamer of my dreams?
5. Does time move only in one direction: forward, in linear style? Or might it move seamlessly between past, present, and future?
6. How separate am I from other people? Are thought transference and telepathic communication possible in the waking state?
7. Are dreams “all in my head,” or might there be a vaster dream matrix where it is possible to connect with other minds?
8. Do I believe that the laws of physics as we know them today are absolute?
9. What do I believe happens when we die? Does consciousness continue after death? If I view this as impossible, why is that? How do I know for sure?
10. How certain am I that my current worldview is correct? Would I feel threatened if something occurred that radically altered my worldview, or do I feel open to learning more as I go through life?
Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs)
At ages seven and eight, I used to have recurring lucid nightmares where I’d be lying on a beautiful green and sunny hill, then suddenly thick, black, buzzing power lines would begin to crisscross the sky, darkening it to blackness and building into a massive electrical hum that shook the whole hill and terrified me. Even though I was aware in those nightmares, I was unable to control my fear and would wake myself up by screaming. It’s possible that these nightmares were actually the onset of out-of-body experiences. Some OBEs begin with buzzing noises and strong vibrations, shaking, and the sense of being lifted up by a force greater than oneself. It can be a horrifying experience if we aren’t ready for it. Some people think they are dying!
But we are not dying. We are fully alive and consciously aware of a natural transition out of the physical body and into what we might think of as an energy body. However, no “body” needs to be present at all; we are just all so attached to the body concept that we tend to experience ourselves as being in one in most states of consciousness. (We’ll touch on bodiless OBEs at the end of this section.)
Maybe the concept of an out-of-body experience seems weird or disturbing if you believe that the centre of consciousness—the “self”—resides uniquely within the physical body. But think about it: we all “leave our body” every night when we transition into a dream body. How else do we fly over dream mountains, transform into a gazelle and run with the herd, or reach out and pick up a melon in a dream supermarket? In that sense, the OBE is no more of an esoteric experience than is ordinary sleep. It may occur rarely in most people, but it’s a state of consciousness experienced by healthy people.58 Here’s my definition of the out-of-body experience and how it arises:
The OBE is a state in which self-perception (perceived sensory input, self-location, and self-identification) seems external to and independent from the physical body; a state that may be entered spontaneously, involuntarily, and abruptly from diverse waking and sleeping states of consciousness. In terms of onset, the OBE differs from lucid dreams in that an OBE might arise from the waking state, trauma, meditation, fainting, or in the midst of great physical danger. But an OBE can also arise from sleep states such as hypnagogia, sleep paralysis, non-lucid dreaming, and lucid dreaming.
The numerous entries into the OBE state seem non-exclusive in terms of reported onset phenomena: a lucid dreamer may experience either earthquake-like shaking at the onset of a lucid dream-induced OBE, or a gentle transition. A meditator may suddenly find herself floating above her body, or she may experience diverse kinaesthetic and auditory sensations (such as vibrations and buzzing) before the experience of being “out of body” seems complete.59
Unlike lucid dreams, OBEs can occur in a deeply relaxed waking state. British consciousness researcher Sue Blackmore explains that “many OBEs take place when the person is wide awake, and physiological studies using EEG, heart rate and other measures show that experimental OBEs occur in a relaxed waking state similar to drowsiness.” 60 OBEs are not dreams, but for sure when an OBE begins from within the dream state, there can be plenty of overlap between these states. Neuroscientific studies show that the area of the brain supposedly activated during OBEs is the temporoparietal junction. Such studies indicate that OBEs can occur when sensory input and the body image are disrupted. Dr. Bigna Lenggenhager led an experiment in 2007 using virtual technology to induce “full body illusions” in the lab. Subjects were shown a film of themselves viewed from behind, then their backs were stroked to trigger a perceptual leap into the virtual body that they could see being stroked before them.61
Commonly reported sensations linked to out-of-body experiences are vibrations that move throughout the whole body, an invisible hand grasping you to help you out of your body, rushing or buzzing noises, sensations of shaking, and a whooshing “liftoff” feeling as you shoot out. People may see their prone body as they hover above it. Others report seeing a silver cord linking them to their physical body. However, often none of these sensations or visions occur; sometimes we just find ourselves floating in midair, with no discernible exit. Seeing your physical body does not mean you are dead, and not seeing a silver cord doesn’t either! Just relax and enjoy exploring.
We can use the OBE state to overcome fears, just as we can in nightmare work. A number of the transformative nightmare practices in this book are helpful for any kind of frightening nocturnal experience, including scary OBE experiences. Practice 40: How to Release Fear During an OBE may come in handy if anything about OBEs frightens you, as will Practice 1: How to Release Fear and Become Calm. If you feel yourself shooting out of your physical body, relax and enjoy the ride! You’re not going to die. William Buhlman, author of the fascinating book Adventures Beyond the Body, reports on a terrifying personal OBE in which he stands firm, confronts his fear, and experiences profound change. To induce this particular OBE, he continually repeated while falling asleep, “Now I’m out of body,” and soon found himself floating just above his body. He then called out, “Clarity now!” to raise his awareness, and found himself staring down into a dark basement, where he saw …
A huge hairy creature, a giant sloth, standing nine feet high; it has a bear’s head and the face of a dog. My entire being is paralyzed with fear. I desperately want to run, but I hold my position … [It] climbs the stairs and wraps its huge hairy arms around me. All I can think is, This thing can snap my neck in a heartbeat.
Suddenly the creature gives me a warm hug and licks my face like a dog. All my fear dissipates as I realize that this ugly creature is powerless to harm me. An intense feeling of empowerment and joy explodes through me; I feel completely free from my fear and limits. The creature looks directly into my eyes, smiles, and disappears. A surge of energy flows through me as I recognize a new form of freedom—an absolute freedom from fear.” 62
Following this transformative experience, William reports knowing for certain that he could achieve anything he desired. He understood that he could overcome his biggest enemy—his own fears. It seems clear that frightening OBEs can be approached in much the same way as any other high-awareness sleep-induced experience, from sleep paralysis to lucid nightmares. We find ourselves highly aware in a thought-responsive environment, able to respond consciously to whatever we encounter. In such a state, we can recall that it can be transformative and healing to face scary manifestations and discover what they want from us, and this gifts us with the courage to stand our ground or react in helpful ways, rather than panicking, fleeing, or desperately trying to wake up.
When we release fear in any state of consciousness and instead adopt an attitude of wonder, we open the door to fabulous adventures, healing gifts, and states of unimaginable bliss. It’s possible that I had my first OBEs when I was seven, but looking back through so many years I can’t say for sure if they were lucid flying dreams or OBEs. I remember that magical feeling of flying up out of my bedroom into the cool night air, and gazing with wonder over the fields and hedges that were our back garden. (We lived on a 300-year-old converted farm among the rolling hills of Devon, England.) I also recall knowing with glee that I was doing “that special flying thing” again.
During these regular flying trips, which happened intensely for at least a year or so, I would also meet beings who hid in the hedgerow and never showed themselves. They would giggle cheekily and rustle the leaves around. What they did show me almost every time I went out to them was an ancient book filled with handwritten symbols and magic, something I thought of as a “spell book.” They would turn the crackling pages and show me different things. I remember returning to that hedge next to the sandpit in daylight and searching in vain for those elusive beings and their book!
Years later, in my early twenties, I had hundreds of full-blown out-of-body experiences, sometimes starting from sleep paralysis, other times from lucid dreams, the void, and the waking state. Although at first I had plenty of scary OBEs where I felt out of control and uncertain of “the rules” of this state, when I worked with my fear, I quickly began to love them. I began to have what I’ve termed bodiless lucid experiences, 63 where I would become a speck of conscious awareness and fly, or expand into blissful oneness. I began to discover the Lucid Light, which will be explored more in the final chapter. Here’s one of these beautiful experiences:
I hover up, vibrating, and fly again. I’m in whitish space, endless neutral light. I try flying as fast as I can and it’s so quick it’s impossible to describe—I could go around the circumference of the world in a second at this speed. There’s enough room in this white space for absolutely anything and I’m alight with exhilaration. It strikes me that in experiences like this there can be no doubt that we are more than just a physical body. We are physics itself; gravitational pull and light particles and the energy-force that pulls everything together … There’s something so harmonious and natural about flying so fast, as if I become the energy of the air itself. There’s no resistance and with wonder I think to myself: “This is soul-flying.” 64
The following practice shows how to react in order to reduce fear during an OBE so that we can enjoy this potentially wonderful experience.65
how to release fear during an obe
1. Relax. Panicking is possibly the worst thing a person can do during an OBE. I cannot overstress the importance of relaxing and breathing calmly when the freight train version of an OBE entry runs you over. It’s remarkable how simply accepting the experience can transform it fairly quickly into a calm, beautiful event. Practising yoga and meditation is an excellent way of learning to connect with the peaceful centre we all have somewhere inside us. Once the “Breathe–Grow calm–Relax” structure has been strengthened (and it takes only minutes of regular practice), it becomes second nature to turn to the breath in any state of consciousness as a way to calm emotions and release fear. Yes, in bodiless lucid experiences we have no sense of inhabiting a body, but even in this state, the decision to calm down and relax will trigger an automatic response. Combine it with an affirmation, such as “I am safe,” and it will be even more effective.
2. Visualise. Another useful practice is that of visualisation. If we visualise ourselves moving easily away from our physical body towards a beautiful landscape or safe place, the thought-responsive environment generally tends to react by materialising that place. Feeling and projecting love is also a very good way of dissolving fear and fearful visions or sensations: when we explore lucid states with love in our heart, the lucid environment responds warmly. Summoning a feeling of love can be done by imagining warmth or colour emanating from the chest, breathing freely, and smiling.
3. Be curious. Adopting an attitude of curiosity when observing strange visions or scenes that arise during an OBE is an effective way of gaining perspective and clarity. If you’re in search of creative inspiration for a painting or story, these visions are imbued with creative potential, so try to notice everything about them: watch them like a film. Remind yourself that after all this, you will find yourself safely in your bed. Don’t forget your ability to fly in the OBE state; kick out a little or wriggle upwards like a mermaid. If you are truly desperate to escape the OBE experience and return to your body, try wiggling your toes, which brings your attention to your physical body, or hold your breath for as long as you can. This second technique can shock the body into returning to regular waking consciousness.
4. Daydream. If you have had a previous scary OBE, instead of wishing it will never happen to you again, it’s far less psychologically stressful to think of something fun to try out in case it does happen again. Relax and have a little daydream about how your ideal OBE might go—would you fly over mountains, experiment with putting your hand through a wall, or enjoy the sensory explosion of doing floating somersaults? Once we open ourselves to the creative possibilities of OBEs, we soon find ourselves hankering after more experiences and working on inducing them. Personally, I’ve found that curiosity burns stronger than fear. If we get curious about OBEs, any fear rapidly diminishes. Reading widely on the subject and talking to experienced practitioners is also helpful, as the experience will seem less foreign.
5. Balance the seesaw. The golden rule of fearlessness in OBEs can be visualised as a seesaw, because it’s all about balance and reciprocity. If you tip too far down into fear, the fear factor of the experience rises in response. If you are relaxed and calm while out of body and feel balanced within yourself, your OBE is far more likely to be a relaxed and calm one.
Now let’s pay a brief visit to an experience that breaks through sleeping and waking realities and touches what lies beyond both: the near-death experience, or NDE.
Distressing Near-Death Experiences
Near-death experiences, or NDEs, occur when we almost die due to physical trauma or when we are actually pronounced clinically dead by doctors due to lack of a heartbeat, breathing, brain activity, and other vital signs. Studies have found that even in the latter cases, remarkably cogent experiences were reported once the patient was resuscitated. Dr. Penny Sartori remarks, “People were reporting clear, lucid, conscious experiences at a time when their brains had ceased to function or were not functioning optimally.” 66
You may have heard about typical NDE visions, such as a tunnel of light, a meeting with a deity, or an encounter with blissful, mystical light. Sometimes a life review is experienced, where people are shown their lives, their actions, and the effects these had on others. At times, a choice seems possible: to stay in this afterlife or return to the body. Other times, no choice is given: the experiencer is told to return or simply finds themselves being sucked back into their body. People often return from a positive NDE transformed. They find a deeper meaning in their lives, have more clarity about their life purpose, and feel more joyful and compassionate, understanding the interconnectedness of all lives and knowing that death is not the end of everything but merely a spiritual transition.
However, NDEs are not always glorious, soul-enhancing events. Since this is a nightmare book, I’ll focus on distressing NDEs. Studies show that around 15 percent of NDEs are distressing.67 These are rarely talked about, yet they can leave the experiencer with lasting fears about death and dying or a sense of their own failure as a human being. Some people who had negative NDEs where they were approached by demons return feeling they are unworthy people who will not make it to heaven. This can have the positive effect of transforming their waking behaviour as they strive to become more compassionate to others, but these people could also benefit from knowing that distressing NDEs can be worked with and processed in a similar way to nightmares.
Let’s look at an example of a negative NDE from Dr. Rajiv Parti, a former chief of anaesthesiology. He was in intensive care with sepsis following surgery when he had an NDE that changed his life. Dr. Penny Sartori recounts his experience in The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences.
He was taken to a place that he believed to be hell … He encountered grotesque entities and could smell burning meat. He witnessed the suffering of others and was himself subjected to tortures such as being stabbed with needles and made to lie on a bed of nails and blood oozed from wounds on his body. The experience of hell came with a revelation about his life which he described as being one of materialism and a selfish attitude of putting himself before others. He realized his life had been lived without being loving, kind and compassionate … He was deeply remorseful … As soon as he realized this … his father and grandfather appeared at his side and guided him towards a tunnel with a bright light. Dr. Parti then went on to experience a very deep NDE where he believed he went to what could be described as heaven.68
For those of you who have had a negative NDE, you might like to try working with it as if it were a nightmare. Practical dreamworking tools such as the ones given in this book could be very beneficial in helping you to make sense of your experience and resolve any trauma it may have caused. Practice 13: The Lucid Imaging Nightmare Solution (LINS) in particular can be easily modified to enable an NDE reentry in which the experiencer can ask questions, interact fearlessly with the imagery, and emerge with greater understanding, a sense of resolution, or deep healing. One book I know of on the subject of distressing NDEs is Dancing Past the Dark by Nancy Bush. More general books about NDEs are listed in the bibliography.
Reducing fear of death following a distressing NDE can be even more challenging than reducing fear of death in the average person. For this reason, it is good to work with the fear rather than turn our back on it. Many of the practices in this book help us to work with fear in any area of our lives. When we transcend the most crippling fears we carry with us, we free ourselves to live larger, brighter, more compassionate and energised lives. We empower ourselves to make bold and graceful moves into the life we have always wanted to live, the life we can be proud of at all moments, including that most transformative of moments when we must leave our family, our job, our body, and our material wealth and possessions and journey onward with conscious awareness into whatever death may hold.
Fear of death is basically fear of separation, yet ironically our fear causes an even greater separation between ourselves and the heart of life. When we die, all we can take with us is our conscious awareness, so surely it makes sense to work on raising our level of consciousness, living compassionately, and helping others around us as we all navigate the ups and downs of this rich and precious life.
Here’s a beautiful practice in which we can familiarise ourselves with liminal states and raise our consciousness.
yoga nidra: balance between the worlds
Yoga nidra is the ancient tantric practice of conscious deep sleep. It is rooted in the yoga tradition and was first referenced in the Upanishads. A profound form of meditation, this alert, deeply relaxed state helps us to balance between the worlds of wake and sleep, just as one day we will balance between life and death. It’s an excellent practice for maintaining lucid awareness in the face of shifting levels of consciousness so that we become more adept at exploring liminal states. It’s also a very natural practice, and easier for most than sitting meditation: our body falls asleep every night, so we are deeply familiar with this process. In yoga nidra, the body sleeps (rests in deep relaxation) while the mind remains effortlessly aware.
Yoga nidra is more than just lying down and chilling out. It can help us heal on many levels. Physiologically, yoga nidra is known to cause blood pressure and cortisol levels to drop, while the heart rate slows. The health benefits it offers are many: when my private clients or workshop participants begin a daily yoga nidra practice, they often refer to it as life-changing—their anxiety levels drop, their depression is alleviated, their emotions feel more balanced, and those who suffer from intense anxiety dreams find that their dream life becomes calmer and their sleep more restful. People with insomnia find it a helpful and soothing practice to guide them back into sleep. Wannabe lucid dreamers find that with the right affirmations and guidance, yoga nidra can become a wonderful way of remaining consciously aware while falling asleep, so that they immediately enter a lucid dream. It is a fantastic way of surfing hypnagogic imagery and learning to navigate liminal spaces such as the lucid void and sleep paralysis with equanimity. It’s a beautiful tool for exploring consciousness.
Yoga nidra can be practised at any time of the day or night; it’s there for you whenever you need it. I have developed audio yoga nidra visualisations for various aspects of sleeping and dreaming, from releasing fear in liminal states to invoking lucid dreaming. Some people prefer to be guided by a voice, but you can also practise yoga nidra on your own.
1. Lie down comfortably on your back. If you’re someone who falls asleep quickly, lie on a yoga mat rather than in bed. Close your eyes.
2. Relax with some regular, deep breaths. Feel your body grow heavy. If you like, you can do a body scan, bringing your attention to each of the different parts of your body and consciously relaxing them. With every exhalation, you release any tension and allow your thoughts to slow.
3. Notice your mind beginning to drift slightly. You may become aware of light forms advancing and receding, or geometric shapes. Strange, vivid imagery may appear, such as bizarre faces, intricate machinery, or random visions. Stay aware; observe any imagery as if it’s a surrealist movie, without getting attached to it. You may experience sensations of floating or falling, or hear random noises or voices. These images and sensations are all a natural part of the hypnagogic state: relax and observe with detachment. Notice as your body awareness shifts: at some point, when you become deeply relaxed, you will be unable to feel it unless you try to.
4. The moment when you can’t feel where your body begins and ends signals a golden threshold: you are floating on the very cusp of sleep, so stay alert and don’t allow yourself to be sucked in by beguiling dreamlike imagery. Stay present to this threshold state; stay lucidly aware.
5. Stay present in this floating, bodiless state for as long as you like. While here, you might wish to ask for healing or knowledge, or ask to be shown your life purpose or the nature of the universe. You might conjure the face of a deceased loved one and speak words of love or forgiveness. You may wish to focus on a luminous dream you had, or do some deep nightmare work. You may prefer not to “do” anything in this golden state, but just float in liminality, enjoying the sensation of having no body. You may spontaneously experience the Lucid Light. You may decide to move consciously into the dream state—effectively remaining conscious throughout the process of falling asleep—and have a lucid dream.
6. When you are ready, come out of the experience by taking a few deep breaths and bringing your attention to your body. Wriggle your fingers and toes, turn your head from side to side, open your eyes, and smile.
In this chapter, we’ve looked at precognitive and telepathic nightmares, OBEs, and NDEs, and considered the big questions of consciousness, life, death, and the afterlife. We’ve considered nightmares that form a bridge between us and deceased loved ones, the different types and meanings of suicide dreams, and how death can be a metaphor for change. We’ve seen that some of the techniques in this book can be used to work with psi nightmares, out-of-body experiences, and even distressing NDEs.
In the final chapter, we’ll look at spiritual nightmares, the wonders and terrors of the lucid void, and dying as a spiritual transition. We’ll also encounter the golden oneness of the Lucid Light.
47. Ullman and Krippner, Dream Telepathy.
48. Johnson, Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Lucid Dreaming.
49. Sartori, The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences.
50. Newmark and Sullivan Walden, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and Premonitions, 340.
51. Hoss and Gongloff, Dreams That Change Our Lives. Quotes taken from pages 282, 288, and 286.
52. The full version of the telepathy contest experience is shared in chapter 19 of Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Lucid Dreaming.
53. Newmark and Sullivan Walden, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and Premonitions, 142–143.
54. Parnia et al., “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation.”
55. Litman, “The Dream in the Suicidal Situation,” in The Dream in Clinical Practice, edited by J. Natterson, 293.
56. Ibid., 295.
57. Nadorff, ”Bad Dreams and Nightmares.”
58. Levitan and LaBerge, “Other Worlds: Out-of-Body Experiences and Lucid Dreams.”
59. Johnson, “Surfing the Rainbow: Fearless and Creative Out-of-Body Experiences,” 130–131.
60. Blackmore, Consciousness: An Introduction, 406.
61. Lenggenhager et al., “Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness.”
62. Buhlman, Adventures Beyond the Body, 249–250.
63. Johnson, “Surfing the Rainbow: Fearless and Creative Out-of-Body Experiences.”
64. Ibid.
65. This practice first appeared in Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Lucid Dreaming, 319.
66. Sartori, The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences, 177.
67. Atwater, Beyond The Light: Near-Death Experiences.
68. Sartori, The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences, 22.