The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant.
—Joseph Campbell
The precognitive dreams, the phone call from the dead, and the woman (not) upstairs—these things do not exhaust the portfolio of strange occurrences that is now my life. Sometimes, for example, I feel that inanimate objects have a unique “vibe” to them. It is not an aura that I can see exactly. It is more that I can sense certain energies around or within the object. Even though I understand that they are not living beings, I cannot deny that I sense at times that a nonliving object possesses a certain living energy. Such was the case with my necklace.
In 2005, I had planned to meet a friend for lunch in Rice Village, a shopping district in Houston near Rice University. I was running early, and she typically runs late, so I knew I had some time to shop before lunch. I walked into a women’s boutique, just planning to browse for a few minutes. This was not a store where I often bought clothing, and in fact I do not really care for their clothing. But something drew me in there that day. I quickly lost interest in browsing the clothing and made my way over to the accessories.
This particular boutique carries a fairly wide selection of costume jewelry under its own label. Even though it is costume jewelry, it is rather expensive and very well made. Each piece of this store’s clothing, accessories, or jewelry has the name of the boutique somewhere on the item. In the case of their jewelry, the store name is stamped onto a tiny oval metal tag that hangs from the clasp.
Almost immediately, my eye was drawn to a gorgeous necklace unlike any of the store’s other jewelry. Most of the store’s necklaces are heavy metallic pieces, silver, gold, or bronze in color, but this one was different. On a bronze-link chain, about eighteen inches long, hung the most eye-catching, multicolored stone I’d ever seen. The stone itself was oval in shape, about three inches tall and two inches wide. Something about the colors in the stone—vibrant gemstone hues that changed color, depending on the angle from which one was viewing it—reminded me of the Garden. Sapphire blue, ruby red, emerald green, amethyst purple, vibrant rose-quartz pink, and velvety tourmaline yellow all worked together to make the object almost come alive. I reached out and picked it up.
As soon as I touched it, I knew it would be mine. Holding the necklace, I suddenly felt as if I were a little girl again, sitting in my grandmother’s musty attic going through the trunk of old dresses she had brought with her from Europe when she immigrated to the United States as a young teen. I was transported to another place and time. Oddly, though, this particular necklace had no price tag on it. Every single accessory had a price tag, except for this one necklace. I also noted that it did not have the signature metal tag hanging from the clasp.
I carried it to the register and set it down in front of the woman tending the counter, whose nametag indicated that she was the store manager. She was quite perplexed that there was no price on the necklace. “Oh! This is beautiful. I’ve never seen it before. Where did you find it?” I pointed out to her where I had found the necklace, among all the other jewelry that looked nothing like it. She pulled out a gigantic binder of computer printout paper that was supposedly a complete inventory price list of every item the store carried. But, just as I suspected, no necklace matching the description of the one lying before us on the counter was listed.
After spending a solid fifteen minutes looking through the inventory binder, she walked over to the accessories area of the store, where she held and looked at some of the other necklaces, trying to gauge the price of the one I wanted. She returned to the register and again looked through the inventory binder, still to no avail. Finally she told me she just could not sell it to me. She didn’t think it was from their store, and she had no idea how to price it. I was clearly upset by this. I told her I just had to have it, at any price. She suggested that I go to lunch and come back after I ate. She would keep looking for the price and see what she could do.
I knew, though, that if I left the store without the necklace, I would never get it. So I insisted that she name a price and let me buy it. Finally, I wore her down, and she agreed. We arrived at a price that was in line with the other necklaces. I walked out $140 lighter, but with a necklace I really loved and couldn’t wait to wear.
The first time I wore the necklace was to work. Due to the vivid and varied colors of the stone, I could only wear it with a few solid-color outfits. At the time, I was working for a homebuilder selling custom homes. I had a beautiful office and an assistant who had a good eye for nice things. “That necklace is gorgeous,” she gushed. “Where did you get it?”
I told her where I bought it, and we chatted for a few minutes until I headed back to my office to start the day. A couple of hours later she came back to my office visibly upset. She told me that a young person to whom she was very close had just unexpectedly died (her sister, I believe), and she needed to leave. I felt terrible for her. She was out for several days.
The second time I wore the necklace another person’s death, quite unexpected, was announced to someone I was with. Again, it wasn’t someone I personally knew, but the news certainly affected me. It did occur to me that the same thing had happened the first time I had worn the necklace, but I did not think too much of it. It was just an odd coincidence, I reassured myself.
Until, that is, it happened again two weeks later the third time I wore the necklace. I was talking to a prospective buyer about building a new home when he got a phone call. He needed to leave immediately, as someone had died, again unexpectedly. I immediately took the necklace off and knew that I would never wear it again.
But here was the odd thing (or another odd thing). As I held it in my hand, I realized that, just like the first time I touched it in the store, every time I touched this necklace I was immediately transported back to my grandmother’s musty attic and her trunk of old clothes. This was not a fearful thing. It was in fact a wonderful memory for me. As a child, I used to love going up into Grandma’s attic with her. There were so many treasures up there. She and I enjoyed going up there, especially if it was raining. It felt very cozy when we could hear the rain on the roof above us while we talked and I played in the attic. I would dress up in her old clothes, and she would regale me with stories.
Happy memories or no, this necklace was clearly cursed, or haunted, or something. I decided I had to rid myself of it. The coincidental deaths or the juju that emanated from it were just too much. But how exactly was I to dispose of it? I could hardly give it to someone: its evil vibrations would simply attach themselves to the recipient. This is why I also felt that I could not simply return it to the store or, for that matter, place it somewhere that it could wind up around the neck of an unsuspecting woman. I realized that the last woman who had it had most likely left it in the store intentionally to get rid of it. I also knew that there would be some very bad karma if I threw it away.
So I took the cursed thing home and put it in a small, airtight plastic container that I then sealed with duct tape. “Sealed” is probably an understatement here. I wound the tape over and over around the plastic container so that it would be very difficult to ever open it again. But that was not enough. I did not want to keep it in the house, but I also did not want to curse anyone else’s property with it. So I carried it outside to the farthest back corner of our backyard and placed it on the ground behind some shrubs against the fence. Eventually, though, I concluded that was not enough. I began to worry that someone, the yardman perhaps, might find it. The dark feeling the necklace gave me motivated me to do a better job hiding it. So a month after I set it out against the back fence, I decided to bury it. When I went out to the backyard with a shovel, however, the container was no longer there. It was nowhere to be found. I felt really bad about this, but what could I do? I hoped that an animal rather than a person had found it.
About a week later, I opened the front door one morning to get the newspaper. There was the little plastic container, still tightly sealed with duct tape, sitting on my doormat. I absolutely freaked out. Crying and shaking, I immediately got the shovel, dug a hole in the back corner of the yard, dropped the plastic container in the ground, covered it with dirt, and firmly tamped it down. Finally, I thought, I could breathe easy. That sucker was buried. I preferred not to think about how it had gotten to my front doormat.
Three years passed, and my daughter Mallory was about to get a new car. We were going to give her old car to her brother Andy. Jeremy, Mallory, and I spent about an hour cleaning out the car. As is typical with a teenager’s car, bits of trash and various abandoned objects had accumulated over the years in the trunk, under the seats, in the console, and in the glove box. We got it all cleaned out. I decided to make one final pass through the car. I checked the trunk, the glove box, the console, and under the back seats. Then I stuck my head down on the front floor under the steering wheel to check that nothing was left under the driver’s seat. A glint of something caught my eye. I reached under and pulled out the necklace. It was not in the plastic container, but it was covered in moist, freshly dug dirt! I dropped it like a hot potato and started screaming at Mallory, “Where did you get this?!?! What are you doing with it?!?!” Clearly, it had been dug up, recently. Mallory had no idea what it was or how it had gotten in her car.
I was really upset. I took the necklace home and just left it outside, loose on the ground in a corner of the front porch. The next day it was gone, and I haven’t seen it since. It could have been picked up by the mailman, the yardman, or even an animal. I have no idea. It has been more than nine years now. God help me if I ever see it again. I don’t know that I could take it.
What does the haunted necklace have to do with the lightning strike and near-death experience? I’m not sure. Two things occur to me, though. First, before the lightning strike of 1988 I don’t know if I would have realized the connection between my wearing the necklace and people dying. Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps more substantially, I am fairly certain that I would not have been capable of experiencing the wonderful flashbacks of time spent with my grandmother whenever I touched the necklace. But what do these happy memories have to do with these sad deaths? Again, I simply don’t know.
One positive thing did come out of this otherwise quite dark series of events. My experience with the necklace inspired me to read about objects that are believed to be imbued with some kind of supernatural power. Through my research I came upon the name of Bruce Greyson, MD, who was at that time a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, and who has focused his distinguished career on the very topic of near-death experiences. Though he was not able to advance my understanding of the strange events associated with the necklace, he was all ears about the lightning strike and the changes in me that resulted from my near-death experience. We have carried on a series of very constructive conversations ever since.
I do not understand the connection between all of the phenomena I have experienced since September 2, 1988. They appear to be related, but how? Clearly, the near-death experience has changed my life, and the paranormal currents that emanate or radiate from this original explosion continue to change me almost daily. It is as if the voltage I received when that tiny finger of electricity touched me charged me with an energy that pulses through everything. It is as if the energy of that lightning was somehow alive and has somehow made me more alive, more sensitive to my surroundings. I can see this energy now. I can also feel it. This is not a question of faith or belief. It is all about sensing new dimensions of the world. To see and palpably feel the energy is proof to me that my experiences are real. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is my ability to see and sense “auras.”
Put most simply, an aura is a field of light generated by an energy-producing entity. That entity can be anything from the sun, whose aura gives life and light to our world, to a light bulb, whose filament brightens when fed electricity. But here is the thing. I also see auras as the vibrancy emanating from living things—plants, animals, and humans. Unlike the auras from a light source like the sun or a light bulb, auras of living beings, in my own experience at least, are delicate, evasive, and always changing.
In order to see these auras I have to unfocus my eyes. A white background aids me in detecting them, although that is not always necessary. For this reason, I have to ascribe some external visual stimulus, some objectivity, to them. Otherwise, what difference would the change in background make to an image of a person surrounded by light and color, if this is all only in my mind? No, I really see these energy fields. They are there. But they are not exactly simple electromagnetic phenomena, like the light of a light bulb. I also believe, for example, that a blind person is capable of feeling auras instead of seeing them visually. If I close my eyes and put my hand into someone’s energy field, the color and texture of the aura are something I can usually, but not always, sense. They are not just “light” or “energy” then. They are also something more.
A good way to practice seeing auras is to look at the old Magic Eye books. Those picture books have fuzzy patterns that, if you stare at them long enough, will focus into clear, three-dimensional pictures. The trick is to unfocus your eyes and look through the patterns. Once you get the hang of that, the three-dimensional images almost jump off the page at you. Auras work the same way for me. I can look at a person, a tree, or a dog, for example, and unfocus my eyes to look through the living being. When I do that, the outline of an aura just pops out at me.
The auras are different colors and textures, depending on the health and emotional state of the being. Accordingly, the colors and textures of the auras around people are continually in flux. One day I may see a steady, solid, blue aura around someone, and the next day I might see the same person surrounded by a wavy green aura. Sometimes the auras shimmer and sparkle. I have never studied what the different colors and textures mean, but I definitely see them. The only one I know the probable meaning of with any degree of certainty is a black aura, which I have only seen once, and which evoked a feeling of dread. My sense is that a black aura bodes ill for the person generating it. I do not know if what causes it is physical (say, an illness) or what such an aura might signal or represent: a comment on the mental status of the person (i.e., depression), an indicator of the remaining duration of this person’s life, or perhaps a corrupt moral character.
The one and only time I recall seeing a black aura was in 1992, and it was around someone I knew. In fact, it was someone to whom I was related (but whose identity I will not reveal for the sake of the family’s privacy). I was driving and had stopped in the left lane at a red light. I looked over to my right. In the car stopped next to me was a close relative of mine. He looked at me but didn’t smile or acknowledge me at all. I said out loud to Mallory (who was only a little over a year old at the time) strapped in her car seat behind me, “Look at that! ‘Joe Smith’ has a black aura! I’ve never seen one of those before!” I had no idea what that indicated but thought it was strange that he didn’t respond to my smile and wave.
Four hours later he had a massive heart attack and died. This was a young man, and it was as devastating as it was surprising. No one in the family suspected that he may have been sick. And given how young he was, a heart attack was totally unexpected. Except that his aura was projecting something negative that I saw clearly. Had I understood then what a black aura might indicate, perhaps I could have intervened and gotten him to a doctor. But this was very early in my post-NDE life, and I had no idea what auras meant or how to interpret them. All I knew was that I could see them, whereas prior to 1988 I could not.
The ability to see auras is something I acquired from my lightning strike and subsequent near-death experience. But this capacity is quite different from the precognitive dreams in the sense that it is much trickier to demonstrate. It is as if I were suddenly gifted with a visual system that can perceive along a wider spectrum of visible light. Most people can’t see the particular frequencies of this light spectrum, so they don’t believe me when I tell them that they are there. But they are there.
As I explained earlier, as the changes in both my perception and the ways in which I perceive have changed, I began several years ago to document those things that I think are to take place in the next (future) manifestation of this eternal present (more on that latter idea later). Put more simply, I began to intuit or see future events in my dreams (nightmares, actually) and, eventually, in my waking life. But this ability can be observed empirically—and it is extremely convincing to anyone who witnesses it up close, like Matt. This is because these historical events have a proof point in them, that is, an objective reality that others can see for themselves and acknowledge as part of our world. What happens is that a vision that has come to me previously in a nightmare will subsequently appear on television, on the internet, or in an article in the newspaper. That’s the proof point. I know what these visions mean to me when they occur, but reading about them or seeing them on a screen is proof that I did in fact precognize them, and that I am not crazy.
With auras, though, there are no proof points. I can’t produce a photo from the media or a news report proving that “Joe Smith” had a black aura and then died of a heart attack a few hours later. You either believe me, or you don’t. And I understand why you may not believe me—because you don’t see auras. But is this really a valid reason to tell me that I am not seeing what I’m clearly seeing? I see auras, but I have no idea what they mean, which implies, of course, that I think they mean something. I do think that auras carry information, that they can speak to us, as it were. I don’t have any idea if other people that see auras would see the same colors and textures that I see around living beings at any given time. Jeff’s opinion is that they probably wouldn’t. What I do know is that when I returned from my near-death experience I found that I had this new ability to see, sense, and interact with energy. Whatever these auras are, my own capacity to see them has something to do with the lightning strike and near-death experience. Of that I am certain.
Another odd result of my near-death experience is that I now have what neuroscientists call synesthesia. Actually, I don’t know if the synesthesia is a result of the near-death experience itself or is a function of being electrocuted. Either way, I never had it before September 2, 1988, and it wasn’t until decades after my trip to the Garden that I first heard the word, much less understood what it meant.
Jeff tells me that the word combines the Greek prefix syn-, which means “together” or “with,” and (a)esthesia, which indicates the capacity for sensation or feeling, hence our English word “aesthetic.” The word, then, signals a sensation or feeling that combines or puts together sensory modes that are not ordinarily linked. Synesthesia is essentially a neurological phenomenon in which the senses crisscross or fuse so that an individual might “hear” colors, “see” music, “taste” shapes, and so on. It sounds unbelievable, but it is actually much more common than people might think.
Let me pause here to make another observation. I often go back to my two weeks in the Garden to find an explanation for some of the strange aptitudes I have developed since I was struck by lightning. I don’t know if this return to the Garden and the understanding it generates are plausible explanations or comprehensible to anyone else, but they seem to work for me. This process is closer to groping than it is to a logical search. It’s more like working with a puzzle. I have something odd occur to me, or all of a sudden I recognize a new sense to my being. I go back to the Garden in my mind, searching through my memories of my time there until I find how this new anomaly might fit with what I experienced when I was there. I try to make it less strange, to fit it in somewhere. In essence, the Garden is my way of arranging and coordinating the portfolio of strange things that always seem to be happening in and around me. The Garden is my way of making sense of what does not seem to make sense.
I believe that the influx of information and new teachings that were instantly “downloaded” into my consciousness when I was in the Garden occurred at the same time that I was being mesmerized by the sights, sounds, and colors of my surroundings. I was being subjected to all of these things at once. I believe that the stimulus of everything that I was experiencing and learning became conflated or—and this is harder to understand—somehow the sensory beauty and the information were the same thing. Somehow what I was sensing was also what I was learning. There was information or knowledge in the colors and sounds. There were teachings in the images. Jeff calls this the “symbolic function” of the Garden, but I will let him explain that. What I can say for certain is that I was overwhelmed by the stimuli to my senses.
I think the Garden experience flowed out of the near-death experience and into my daily life, partly through all of the weird stories I am telling you, but also through a new set of abilities to sense things through multiple and unexpected senses: in short, through synesthesia.
Shortly after my sojourn there, I was lying in bed with burned and bandaged feet. Perhaps this made me more attuned to the nuances of my perceptions. In any case, I began to realize that, whenever I heard a day of the week mentioned, I immediately and distinctly associated that day with a color. If Jeremy mentioned that he wanted a friend to come over on Tuesday, I would see blue. If Barry said he wanted to take the boys to the zoo on Saturday, I would see orange. The specific colors associated with the days never varied. Monday was and still is always red, Tuesday is blue, Wednesday is yellow, Thursday is green, Friday is yellow, Saturday is orange, and Sunday is brown.
This is not to say that, because I know Monday as a red day, all people with synesthesia see Monday as red. All I am saying is that the colors I associate with the days never vary for me. They probably will vary from person to person, but not within a specific person. The same is true for the months of the year. For example, August is orange. Odd. Maybe it was the time I spent in the Garden immersed in meaning, knowledge, and sensual stimuli all at once that did this to me. Maybe it was the lightning strike that rearranged some synapses or “rewired” my brain. I do not know, and it really doesn’t matter to me. This is my experience and world now.
It was not long after I acknowledged to myself my newfound way of seeing the calendar as colorful that I realized I was doing the same thing with numbers. The digits from zero to nine all evoked a sensation of color within me. Zero was and still is white, one is orange, two is blue, three is yellow, four is blue, five is red, six is purple, seven is yellow, eight is green, and nine is orange.
At different times in my life, particularly in childhood, I have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Synesthesia is an OCD sufferer’s nightmare. This is how it works with synesthesia. The confluence of colors matters a great deal. I don’t know whether to thank my OCD or my synesthesia when, in a moment of serendipity, August 9 falls on a Saturday and I am eating an orange, or to curse them if my birthday, which is a yellow date in a yellow month, falls on a Monday, which is red. Some people consider it a good day if their hair looks good and cooperates that day. For them, a good hair day makes for a good day. I consider it a good day if the eighth of May falls on a Thursday and I am eating broccoli—all green. I’m not completely over the sense that synesthesia is weird, especially with stuff like this. In the words of one of my heroes, Kermit the Frog, “It’s not easy being green.”
Occasionally, the outfit I choose to wear for the day has to do with the color of the clothing and the day of the week. What I choose to eat occasionally is an intentional choice based on the time of day and the color of the food. If I am hungry for a snack at 3:00 p.m., especially on a Wednesday, I likely will reach for a banana rather than an orange. I like oranges much better than bananas, but odds are I would save the orange for Saturday at 1:00 p.m. I am not nearly as rigid as that sounds, but given the choice, the colors of the numbers and days do enter my mind. And sometimes they do color (pun intended) my choices of what I eat and when I eat it, and, of course, what outfit I may wear on any given day. If my OCD were very severe, which thankfully it is not at this point in my life, it is easy to see how synesthesia could wreak havoc. Having said all that, though, the OCD does wax and wane according to the level of stress I am experiencing, so at times the synesthesia does figure more prominently in my decision-making processes than at others.
Synesthesia is apparently fairly common. There are more than twenty different types of synesthesia; I have a version called Grapheme-color synesthesia, the most common variety of the condition. A person who experiences Grapheme-color synesthesia will involuntarily associate letters, numbers, or even words with specific colors.
One interesting theory about synesthesia is that it may be genetic in some cases. My parents don’t have it, nor do my sisters. However, my daughter, Mallory, has it to a mild degree, as do my aunt and my oldest son, Jeremy. The fact that I didn’t have it until after I was struck by lightning leads me to believe that in my case it was either not genetic, or that the necessary genes were there but were dormant until the lightning strike activated them. The lightning strike might also explain the fact that Mallory experiences synesthesia as well. After all, I conceived her following my contact with lightning, which may have activated that particular gene expression. Again, I don’t know. I am certainly no geneticist. I do wish someone would study these things, though.
As I already mentioned, my son Jeremy, who was conceived and born before the lightning strike, also has synesthesia, and to about the same degree as I have. It is really difficult to try to differentiate the synesthesia from OCD. One manifestation for Jeremy is the ability to count the letters in a sentence almost instantaneously. By the time the sentence is spoken by someone challenging Jeremy, he can easily report the number of letters in the sentence. By way of example, I can say: “Jeremy, have you seen the car keys I left on the table?” He would instantly say, “forty-two,” just as the word “table” came out of my mouth. I have never known him to be wrong. He even had a brief brush with fame via David Letterman’s “Stupid Human Tricks,” thanks to this ability. How odd that someone named Letterman would be interested in interviewing someone who is literally a “letter man”! Jeremy didn’t make it onto the show because the producers felt that there was no way to prove to viewers that it wasn’t a setup where he had been given the sentences earlier. He came very close. But all he got was a T-shirt.
I think Jeff would jump in here and say something like, “Isn’t it ironic how, in this case, because something can be faked the real thing gets suppressed?”
Does Jeremy’s ability to count letters fall under the category of OCD, synesthesia, or a simple party trick? Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder. Synesthesia is not. Therefore, it would make sense that, if it were OCD-driven, it would change in intensity as Jeremy’s anxiety levels changed. But his ability to accurately count letters never changes. This leads me to think that it may be a form of synesthesia.
Jeremy first recalls counting letters from a very young age. He reports that as he was learning to read, he saw each word associated with the number of letters in that word. He learned to read the word “house” and pictured the number five. Taking that one step further, he sees the number five as red, as do I. It’s not much of a stretch then to believe that he can rapidly add up the letters as a person is speaking. The only time he is wrong is when he mentally misspells a word, which of course messes up the count. In any case, numbers have never been difficult for Jeremy. He earned a perfect score on the math portion of the SAT. So there are some strange connections to mathematics here, too—more things we don’t understand.
I often wonder if the color associations I make with my synesthesia have any bearing on the colors of the auras I see around people. What I am learning but still am unable to interpret is that, while the color of a person’s aura may change, the colors for a number or day of the week are fixed for me. For example, I can look at Mallory and see a green aura in the morning and a blue one in the afternoon. However, when I hear or see the number five, it is always red. The synesthesia colors are constant and unchanging. Aural colors are never constant and can turn on a dime. Still, I do think these two abilities are connected somehow. I personally believe that whatever internal capacity compels me to associate color with certain things can also somehow make allowances for the moods, feelings, and health that affect humans. And yet, that same capacity within me knows that five is ever five and Monday is always Monday. Both are red to me and immutable in the quantity they represent and their unchanging place on the calendar.
The synesthesia has begun to latch onto other qualities in my sphere. It now actually reaches further than letters, numbers, and days of the week. Recently, for example, I found that when I hear the names of different subjects in school, I associate them with color. Math is red, history is blue, science is green, and so forth. I’m not sure whether the synesthesia is reaching deeper into me, or whether I’m just becoming more aware of its reach. Has it always been stable since I developed it, or is it intensifying? I don’t know. In any case, the colors are not nearly as spectacular as the otherworldly colors of the Garden, but they do saturate the palette of my life. No more simple and sharp black and white for this girl. Hues flow together for me like watercolors now. Regardless of their intensity, this ability allows me to see my world awash in a glorious rainbow of colors.