Elizabeth did not just get struck by lightning, talk to God, and come back to dream the future. She also came back to dream this book.
The evening after we completed the manuscript, Elizabeth went to bed and dreamed another dream that was not a dream. She awoke, tapped out another email on her iPhone, and sent it to me at 1:01 a.m. on April 25, 2017. It reads thus:
Hi Jeff.
Holy shit. I had a dream just now that I was talking to a man named Corny (??? Must be a nickname) Last name was not Kripal. I think it started with a “W” or a “U.” You were there too. This man is no longer living, but was a close relative of yours. I think he died on December 10, but I don’t know what year. He told me he died the same date as my grandmother (Dec 10th), but that my grandmother died the same year as his wife … 14 or 15 years before him I think. We were standing in front of a movie theater at the corner of Lincoln and 5th, but I don’t know what city. Looked like a small town. Theater name started with an “M.”
Did you also have this dream? It was very vivid to me. There were lots more details, but I want to know if you were part of the conversation also.
Elizabeth
Sent from my iPhone
When I got up and found the email waiting for me, I did some simple searching for obituaries on the internet, since I knew the general facts but not the specific dates of the deaths of my maternal grandparents. I also knew that the address of the theater of my hometown was very close to what Elizabeth had in the dream, but I wanted to see how close. All of these details were easily found online within a few minutes (in the absence of trust, the stratagem of fraud or conscious deceit can easily be invoked here). Here is what I wrote back, at 6:07 a.m.:
Elizabeth,
Holy shit is right. Here are the exact details, all of which you hit.
My maternal grandfather’s name was/is Cornelius. People called him “Cornie.” A nickname.
His last name was/is Wiedel.
He died on December 10, 2010.
Here he is: https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=62910410
His wife, Wilma, died in 1997, two months short of 14 years before him. Here she is:
https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=115822137
The movie theater in my hometown of Hebron is called “Majestic,” and it is on Lincoln Ave. and 5th Street.
Here it is: http://hebronmajestic.com/
I do not recall any dream, Elizabeth, alas.
very, very impressed (as usual),
Jeff
Other details would emerge as we spoke on the phone that morning (“the dream follows the mouth”). Although I had no personal awareness or memory of visiting Elizabeth in her dream, she was completely convinced that I was “totally out of the body” and had done exactly this. She is not the first to claim this, by the way. Other friends, colleagues, and readers have reported similar anomalies around the reading of my books, including a close colleague who works in ancient Neoplatonism and claims that I visited him in my “shining light body” (augoeides) in a dream to help him solve a particular problem with which he was struggling for an academic essay.115 Still, I have no memory of any of this. In my own understanding, I am a dullard. I am a Muggle stumbling through a banal world just to the side of the fantastic world in which people like Elizabeth live and see.
On the phone now, Elizabeth told me that Grandpa spoke of not being able to find his glasses as he approached death, how his vision became very clear right before he died, and that now he very much wanted “to see a movie.” That, I assumed, was why we were standing in front of my hometown movie theater, where my family has watched countless movies over four or five generations.
As I have tried to explain above, I think that significant dreams like this one are often a mixture of “empirical” and “symbolic” material, which the dreams mix in imperceptible ways so that it is difficult for the untrained eye to distinguish between them. Since I know all of the empirical references of this dream as well as its lived context on the night it was dreamed (the night after our book submission), I believe that I also know precisely where these lines between the empirical and the symbolic can be drawn and how this particular dream is a near-perfect case of such a mixing.
The empirical details are obvious and very impressive for anyone who trusts Elizabeth’s integrity: the date of Grandpa’s death and the street address of the theater are precise, and the beginning letter of the name of the theater is obviously partial but equally precise. On the phone, Elizabeth also told me that she knew the theater was red because of the “M,” since the dream was synesthetic and her synesthesia codes the letter “M” as red. Which leaves begging the question: Why does the actual theater “cooperate with” her synesthesia coding? The actual building is red brick. Or is this synesthetic link what drew her to this building in the dream in the first place? Other details are displayed in the dream in the approximate ways that are very familiar to students of paranormal cognition: one is given an option (fourteen or fifteen years, a “W” or a “U”), and one of the options is the correct one. It is also striking how the dream works in an associative way, linking the years and dates of death to loved ones in a kind of free associative but nevertheless accurate manner.
The rest of the dream is different. I do not believe, for example, that the alleged deathbed scene of the lost glasses or the dream scene itself with Grandpa wanting to see a movie are reflections of any historical reality. I believe rather that they are symbolic. That is, I do not think that it matters whether Grandpa lost his glasses or not at the end of his life. (I have asked my mom and aunt, and the matter remains inconclusive.) Nor do I think it is necessary that we assume that Elizabeth was actually talking to Grandpa in the afterlife (recall that she herself did not think that she was speaking to her own grandfather in the Garden, even though she was hearing his voice). I think that these two scenes are expressing truths of which they otherwise cannot speak in literal ways and that need our own interpretations to draw them out and make them clear.
More specifically, I think that these two scenes speak directly to this book (which, please remember, we had just submitted a few hours before the dream) and my central thesis that the near-death landscape is a kind of superreal virtual movie that we are all creating through our cultures and religious beliefs over the generations. When Grandpa appeared in the dream and told Elizabeth and me that he “wanted to see a movie,” what he was saying was, in effect, “I want to have a positive afterlife experience.” The lost glasses scene communicates something like, “But I could not understand any of this while I was alive. My sight became clear only when I approached death and died.”
Any skilled dream interpreter will ask why it was my grandfather who appeared in the dream and not someone else.116 I will be intimate and vulnerable here, as is necessary for any adequate dream interpretation. If you are going to understand such a dream, you’d better be honest to the point of discomfort, or no real understanding will follow.
So here goes.
Grandpa was the unquestioned elder and patriarch of our family on my mother’s side. He held and continues to hold immense family meaning and cultural weight, a weight to which even his nickname alludes. “Cornie” was affectionate and related to his birth name, of course, but it also obviously alludes to the staple of Nebraska agriculture—corn. He was a very successful farmer. A very big part of his legacy in our family has to do with the farms he left his four children and their families. He was—also, I think, significantly—the last family member to pass as of the date of Elizabeth’s dream.
Grandpa’s central presence in the dream is no accident then, and suggests, to me anyway, that the dream was quite genuine and not made up by Elizabeth in any fraudulent or deceitful way. I could have well spoken to Elizabeth about Grandpa, although I do not have any clear or certain memory of this. Elizabeth has met my parents (while they were visiting us in Houston) but none of my other family, so it is possible that she would have picked up some family details from Mom, but certainly not something like the street address of the town theater. In any case, no other deceased figure could have more powerfully signaled “the family” on my mother’s side and in my own rural home culture.
What I think that Elizabeth was reading was my own mind and, more specifically, my own mind’s feelings about this book. For example, I take Grandpa’s description of “not being able to see” as ironically comforting, since it represents quite accurately the general attitude of most people to the basic ideas of this book. They cannot “see” what we are trying to tell them here about the afterlife, namely: that we do not really die; that consciousness is not finally a function of the mortal brain and body; that we ourselves are projecting, like a movie, the visionary landscapes reported in near-death experiences; that we “come back”; and that none of our specific religious identities should be taken as absolute or final. Grandpa’s unseeing is a very apt stand-in for the general culture of our families and the broader society in which we happen to live. As a scholar of comparative religion, I constantly feel that “no one sees me,” that is, that no one really understands what I am saying. I feel very much alone.
This, then, is how I would translate in my own words what Elizabeth’s dream is “saying” to us, and particularly to me: “We cannot see what you are trying to tell us, Elizabeth and Jeff, not at least before we die. But we will all see very clearly and soon enough. And, oh by the way, you are on the right track with that movie analogy. We want to see a (better) movie now. That is why the book you just submitted is so important.”
Please note that none of this speaks to how my or Elizabeth’s family members, living or dead, actually feel or think about any of this. I am not speaking for any of my family members, much less am I claiming anything about how my deceased Grandpa feels or thinks. I am speaking only about and for myself. In the end, I think Elizabeth was reading my mind, not theirs. And she was reading it in an uncannily accurate and insightful way.
But how did Elizabeth get all of those historical details exactly right? These were no metaphors or dream symbols. Nor did they speak to any anxieties on my or her part. These were precisely correct.
I had a hunch about this right away, drawn mostly from my reading of my colleague Eric Wargo, whom I discussed earlier and whose recent work on precognition sets a new standard as it reorients us around an established but largely forgotten model of the brain precognizing its own future state.117 Having corresponded with Eric previously, I suspected that Elizabeth got all of those details right because she had “read” or heard them all from my email and phone response to her dream in the future and so “just knew” these same details in the past (that is, the present of the dream). In short, I think she got them from her reading and speaking to me the next day, very much like her precognitive perceptions of the near-future plane crashes that she would see in the media the next day. I do not think she was really talking to Grandpa. I think she was talking to me in the future. So she received the details in her dream from my email about the same dream in the future—another perfect time loop.
As we have seen, Eric Wargo has written extensively of these time loops and the manner in which information does indeed appear to flow from the future back into the present, that is, its own past. I sent Eric Elizabeth’s dream email and my response to it and asked him if my time-loop reading of it would be his as well.
It was.
Actually, I had recently sent him the entire book manuscript well before this exchange about Elizabeth’s psychic dream. He wrote back the next day. His email is reproduced below. The only details I probably need to provide the reader for context involve the “X” of which he writes.
In the summer of 2006, just after watching the third X-Men film, X-Men: The Last Stand, I entered a kind of manic creative fury in the theater (there is the science fiction movie motif again). I walked out of the theater and noticed something glimmering in the sun in the parking lot. I picked up what I thought was a gold Christian cross, lying just under my minivan door, as if it had been placed right there and right then for me. It was not a cross. It was an “X.” I have since written quite a bit about this magical moment and its symbolic transformation from a Christian cross into a mutant X. The important point here is that this X was found in a parking lot, and that it fundamentally changed the shape and direction of my life and writing career.
With that explained, here is Eric’s email. You should probably sit down and, if you already are, take a deep breath.
Jeff, I’m about 1/3 of the way through the book. Maybe what I’m about to suggest is roughly where you are going with it, or maybe not, but … Has it occurred to you that you yourself had a major hand in shaping Elizabeth’s experiences, even as far back as her lightning strike?
I’m reading her story and it’s almost as if she is a fictional character you would have created if you were a fiction writer (and everyone tells you [that] you should write fiction). Think about it: Given whatever is going on in her brain, she is much more responsive than most of us to what happens in her future. This includes not just the occasional air crash dream—those vivid experiences are likely the tip of a largely unconscious iceberg.
What if she is literally in some sense your creation, her experiences during and since the lightning strike framed and shaped through a three-decade premonition of her collaboration with you, the world expert on zapping and mutation? It seems clear from what I’ve read so far that this collaboration with you has been “super” important in her life, helping transform her curse into a superpower. I really, literally think that as far back as 1988 her story was being shaped by this framing you would ultimately provide, well in her future at that point.
This struck me all of a sudden when I read your passage about lending her Eliade’s novel [Youth Without Youth]. I haven’t read that (I need to), but one of the recurring themes in what I’m writing are the time loops between friends, between colleagues, between spouses, between doctors and patients, that center on books and book-lending, sharings and convergences that are precognized and therefore that much more powerful because of it (I think there’s a possible model of religious conversion in this notion of coming to a book or idea we’ve dimly precognized). These moments get called “synchronicity” (or Koestler’s “library angel”) but that term obfuscates more than it reveals. I think you and Elizabeth are an outrageously clear example of this.
And another thing—you call yourself a Muggle—but don’t you think your whole paranormal oeuvre since encountering an X in a parking lot (a little bit like being struck by lightning) has been precognitive of Elizabeth’s “case”? I mean, the whole thing is uncanny—I think you say she was struck in a parking lot just a couple blocks from your work (?). This collaboration is a precognized convergence from both sides.
And it’s super powerful.
Eric
What Eric is describing here is not quite as outrageous as it might at first sound. It actually fits into a much larger and hauntingly consistent pattern. I opened my recent memoir-manifesto, Secret Body, which describes how readers of my books routinely write to me and report various bizarre occurrences around the reading of my books, as if these books were tapped into something, as if these pages express some superpower, as if the words themselves can invoke or conjure that which they are about.
I am beginning to believe that. Still, Eric’s musings above are the most extreme example of this that I have ever heard, much less considered. I cannot also help but observe that his thoughts are not at all foreign to Elizabeth’s own self-understanding. She has her own way of speaking of this same self-fashioning from the future, this same time loop. As we were writing the book, she once wondered out loud whether the point or purpose of the lightning strike and NDE was this book. She wondered whether that was all “for” this. She is also convinced that the two of us were destined to write this book, that it was written before it was written, as it were.
We can flip this thought, reverse its direction in time, and ask the same question in a different way. Or in both ways. Perhaps, as Elizabeth intuits, the lightning strike occurred so that she could cowrite this book. But perhaps this book has also occurred so that she could be struck by lightning. Certainly the past event resulted in the present book, as we normally assume. But perhaps the present book also somehow produced the past set of events, as only a figure like Eric Wargo can presently imagine. Perhaps time flows both ways at once, as a kind of snake biting its own tail, in a constant return, in a loop of mind and matter that none of us quite understands yet but in which all of us are caught all the time.
What does it feel like to finish a lightning bolt that cracked forward in time to become a book? What does it feel like to finish a book that reached back in time to become a lightning bolt?