The Spiritual Transformation of a Rational Man

The night of the 18th, my first sensation was the awareness of a force of energy in my bedroom, an enormous feeling of a powerful electricity. The room was charged, literally alive and yet there was Mary Margaret beside me soundly asleep. Somehow she did not perceive this force. The second aspect that was most impressive to me was the vividness of the experience. My friend John was sitting on the end of my bed. John looked exactly like he did in life. There was nothing ephemeral about his appearance. There was a joyfulness about him. He was there and the bedroom was just pulsating with this incredible force. I sensed that the purpose of his visit was to alleviate my grief.

With him he had brought my four-year-old son Ben from his bedroom in the front of the house to our bedroom in the back of the house. John spoke. I sensed that he was telling me that he was all right and that Ben was an example of life renewed. The experience was as real as real. It was certainly more lifelike than any "dream" I ever had in my life. The energy enveloped the room in such a way that "electric" is the only word to describe it. The seemingly real presence of my friend and my son was engulfed by this unnatural energy. They silently sat there as if they would both be waiting for me when I awoke. When the morning came I looked for Ben and expected him to be in our bed. In fact he was asleep in his own bed on the other side of the house. Indeed everything was just the way it was when I had gone to sleep the previous night. Everything was in its place, everything was the same except for me.

I began to wonder, how could John have been here? John was dead but John had been in my room. I was fully convinced that he was there. So the experience was twofold: it was real yet somehow unrealistic. The people were real but the energy was a mystery. Somehow electricity had charged my bedroom during my contact. I was unable to explain to myself what I had experienced the previous night. We all have a map of reality inside our minds, a set of boundaries which explain the way things are. This experience put me outside of my boundaries. I was overwhelmed by what had happened that night. My intellectually comfortable explanations, my rational man’s beliefs were split like an atom. The chain reaction continues to this day.

I either had a truly unforgettable dream, or I’d had a contact with someone no longer alive. Could my mind have created a dream with such force? Did this come out of grief? This was not my first close death, as I had an aunt and two grandmothers, whom I loved with all my heart, die; and those times nothing like this had happened. I was a man grounded in science. How could I explain this to myself?