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Tuesday May 13,2008

The healing power of spiritual visions

Continued

or parents have some sort of visitation. Unfortunately, like the Mother who visited me, most people trivialize or dismiss the experiences as grief induced hallucinations, and cut themselves off from their potential to heal.

There are three broad categories of healing spiritual visions surrounding death and dying; premonitions of death, shared dying experiences, and after death visitations. Recent new evidence in near death research strongly suggests that such experiences are real and an important part of understanding death.

It is common to have intense feelings or even visions that someone you love will die. With one of the nation's largest organizations devotes to Sudden Infant Death Research, I studied parents who had premonitions that their infant would die. We used two control groups of parents who did not have infants die, to understand what normal fears and premonitions about death were.

We learned that nearly 25% of the time, parents have distinct and vivid perceptions which were not seen in our control patients. Often they would write these in a journal, or tell their doctor about them.

One woman told us: When I was seven months pregnant, I was resting in bed. Suddenly, I found myself floating out of my body, looking down at myself. A lady was next to me. She glowed with a white light. "You know", she said with great care and compassion, "she can't keep the baby".

I mourn terribly for my baby, but I am not angry. I felt great love and compassion from when she told me that, as if my baby's death was a part of a greater purpose and plan."

It is clear that the purpose of these premonitions is to explain death and to help parents cope. They do not, in my experience, result in any way of preventing the event. Many parents took their infants to doctors or emergency rooms, and the SIDS event not prevented. One of my patients had a vivid dream that her son would be horribly injured in a car accident. No details which could have led to her preventing the accident were given. Indeed, she was ultimately the driver in the wreck, and it was her fault.

She told me that the meaning of her dream to her was that her mother, who had given her the news in her dream, was her guardian angel and watched over her. She said: "Without that dream, I could never have kept my family together, been a wife, and a mother to my other children, because I felt so guilty and depressed over what I did. Yet I always knew that even though it was my fault, somehow it was meant to be, and my mother would always be there for me.

Another death related vision are shared dying experiences. For example, a mother in my practice told me about sitting with her sister, at their dying mother's bedside. They both fell asleep. She dreamed that she was walking down a path towards a brightly lit garden path with her sister and mother. Her mother paused at the light, and turned and said, I must go now. She had incredible love for both of them, and seemed to indicate that she was sorry, but only she could go further.

When she woke up, her mother had died. Her sister had had the same dream, with the exception that she thought they were walking along a sandy path., towards a gate and a light behind it.

Finally, there are after death visions. These often come as simple messages that someone has died and everything is alright. The night that my father died, I had turned off all the phones in my house as I had been working hard and needed rest. My father came to me in the dream, and said "Melvin, call your answering service". I woke up, did so, and learned my father died.

Sometimes they are quite complex. I know a young man whose mother's fiance was killed in a car accident. The step-father to be often contacts the young man and they talk, usually