Touching Heaven: True stories of spiritual experiences

After her physical body died, one woman saw her mother in the waiting room at the hospital and noticed that she was wearing slippers on her feet instead of outdoor shoes. When the doctors managed to get the daughter’s heart beating again and she was a little better, she remembered seeing her mum wearing the slippers at the hospital and asked her about it. Her mum was stunned. Her daughter had died, revived and then been unconscious for hours afterwards, so there was no way she could have known this. What happened apparently was that she had rushed to the hospital to be at her seriously ill daughter’s bedside and hadn’t even had time to put her shoes on. In the rush she had left the house wearing exactly what she had on!

I know other people have seen the ‘tunnel’ and had various paranormal experiences during dental visits like I did, but whether it was because they were near to death or simply that the gas mimics the phenomenon is hard to tell. When, as a child, my next dental treatment was due I was excited to see the tunnel of light again, but the dentist seemed less keen to administer the gas. As I was so frightened of the treatment we persuaded him to give it another go, but this time my experience was not so good. I still found myself in the tunnel, and the light was still there at the end, and like many near to death I found I wanted to go towards it. Surely going to the light means death, but the light was very seductive and at first I felt the same great sense of peace and one-ness. This time, though, a large monster-like creature was barring the way. It was standing right in front of the light and I found myself desperately trying to pull away from it and get back into my body.

All too soon the familiar calling of my mother’s voice brought me out of my stupor, but the excitement of my first experience hadn’t been repeated! For some reason my dentist refused to use nitrous oxide on me again … but you know what? I didn’t want it anyway. Had something happened to me physically during my treatment? If it had, they never said. I know they found it less challenging to wake me this second time. Yet in a way I felt tricked by the light. I always felt that the monster was no dream and that someone somewhere had placed the creature in the tunnel to stop me floating too far away from my body.

Many years later, when a teenager, I read the book Life After Life by Dr Raymond A. Moody. Dr Moody recorded many experiences of near death and the phenomena people described. It was here that I first read about the tunnel of light seen during near-death experiences, and I compared the incident I’d had as a child. Now I was hooked, and although I was unable to find further reading material at that time, as an adult I picked up the thread and carried on studying. This time, I was the one collecting stories and I was the one writing the books about them.

So many people around the world believe that life ends when the physical body passes away. Over many, many years of research I’ve investigated literally thousands of stories of our continuing existence and I’ve made it my mission to share the best of these with you. I select from hundreds and thousands of case studies on file. Some get chosen for the books, and others get rejected not because the phenomenon is any less interesting, but because so many people have similar encounters.

Where do we go when we pass through the light? What happens next? Heidi was one of many who shared her experience with me. She lost her mother about four years ago (at the time she wrote to me). She said it had been a very long journey and life-changing in so many ways. Her mum had been one of the strongest and most amazing women she had ever known. She showed Heidi so much love in life, and apparently this has continued in death.

Heidi explained that a couple of years ago an aunt contacted her. The aunt hadn’t been especially close to her mother but she telephoned ‘out of the blue’ to share a dream with Heidi. The aunt explained that she’d had the dream a couple of weeks earlier but at first had chosen not to say anything about it. She then explained: ‘That was until your mum started to bug me every night since.’ Heidi’s mum had appeared after death, explaining that she wanted a message to be passed along to her daughter.

Heidi’s mum was determined that her afterlife contact should be shared with her loved one. She’d tried reaching out to her daughter personally but explained that Heidi ‘hadn’t been listening’. Heidi believes this was because she was having a difficult time with her mother’s death; she was more closed down and most nights would simply cry herself to sleep. Maybe the spirit was unable to get through due to Heidi’s grief, or it might have been that she tried to reach out to her daughter when she was asleep (or at a certain time in her sleep cycle) and wasn’t able to because when she tried Heidi was restless and awake.

Her aunt confessed that she really did not know why Heidi’s mum had chosen to come to her with the message, but she knew she had no choice but to pass it on. Her mum had stated that Heidi kept locking herself in the bathroom and sobbing over the loss of her mother, saying how much she missed her. She had been trying to comfort her daughter, but Heidi herself had not recognised that the spirit of her mother was there by her side. Next in the aunt’s dream a light appeared, a light more beautiful than anything she had ever seen in her life. The aunt began to describe the colours she saw and said they were ones she had never seen or known to exist on earth. I’ve commented previously about the vibrant colours people see during near death or contact with those who have passed over. It is one way that we know this is no ordinary dream!

Heidi could tell by her aunt’s voice that this experience had truly touched her. The aunt continued relating her dream by saying that out of the magnificent light she recognised the voice telling her to please let her daughter know that she was okay and that she didn’t want her to grieve any more. She wanted Heidi to know that she loved her so much and that she knew she was loved in return. She said she had been trying to pass the message on herself, but the grief was not allowing Heidi to hear her. One day, she explained, they would be together again, and finally she said she wanted Heidi to please be happy.

I love that! What an important message for us all. Wouldn’t we want to say the same thing if we were the ones who had passed on? We’d want those who were left behind to live a good life and be happy. Heidi told me, ‘I know my aunt felt the same as me – why in the world would my mum come to her in a dream out of everyone she could have chosen? Then it hit me: she came to my aunt because she knew that she was the one person I would never have expected to hear that from.’

One thing I have learnt is that the deceased will reach out to the living if they possibly can. They will try to contact us first of all. Then, if that doesn’t work, they will try someone close to us. This contact was especially clever. Given that the relative wasn’t particularly close, by their own admission, there was no reason why Heidi’s aunt would have made up the message just to comfort her niece. She only passed on the dream visit because it was so clear and powerful she felt she had no choice. It was almost as if the spirit would have visited over and over until her mission had been completed – and actually, it looks like this is exactly what she was doing. Love is a powerful thing. It shows how strong the bond is, even in death. This clever woman wasn’t going to let a little thing like death stop her daughter knowing she was loved!

Over the years I’ve worked with many health-care workers, doctors and nurses. Those who work with the dying and the deceased will tell me how this kind of afterlife contact comforts the living. After death, many spirits stay close to the earth planes, watching their loved ones, trying to comfort them and even witnessing their own funerals. They are barely out of the living world, simply shedding their body and moving into their new plane. The fine fabric of the spirit is (usually) not visible to the human eye, although we often experience their presence.

The spirit seems to be able to manipulate minor things in the world around us: flickering lights, moving things around, bringing scents and small touches. They can interact with us a little, but I imagine it’s a frustrating exercise. Imagine putting your arms around someone who can’t feel your touch. Imagine speaking to someone who can’t hear your words … This is where a dream visit is so helpful. When our own bodies are in an altered state of consciousness (for example, dreaming, meditating, unconscious …), contact can be made more easily between the spirit and our own soul. Once our daily awareness is out of the way it makes it easier for spirits to reach us and communicate. These afterlife interactions bring us a wealth of experience and knowledge about what it’s like in the heaven side of life. In this instance the aunt was able to share the small glimpse of it that she’d seen during her dream-visitation contact. In this illustration she was able to see the beautiful light, which is common in many heavenly encounters, and the vibrant and unusual colours.

Heidi’s aunt is not the only one, though. Natisha also saw colours during a near-death experience. She told me that when she was twenty-one she had a major car accident; it was, in her own words, very nasty. It was the most traumatic event of her life, but she always maintained a positive attitude. The consequences of the accident were that she had been left with internal bleeding, punctured and collapsed lungs and much more. The doctors had called Natisha’s parents to tell them of the accident and had warned them that she was not expected to survive the night. I can’t imagine a more shocking thing for a loving parent to hear than that their child is about to die.

That was twenty-five years ago and I’m pleased to say that Natisha is still here. The experience, though, has never been forgotten. At the time of the accident doctors put her in an induced coma and she lay in the intensive-care unit for a long time. Even though she was paralysed and could not move, she felt her arms reaching out to touch her parents. In some way she connected with the warmth of their hands and recalls that they were touching her back in this altered state of consciousness. Although in this case Natisha didn’t die, she was unable to open her eyes because of the coma, and yet she was still aware of everything that was going on around her. She recalls hearing the nurses and doctors talking to each other around the bed – they were discussing her and her case.

One night, when Natisha’s family was by her side, she remembers trying to explain to her mum about all the rich, pretty colours she could see; it was, she says, as if she was yelling the information. Yet at the same time she was still in the coma. She wanted her mum to experience it too, to see what she could see. She recalls a stream of brightly enhanced lines towering above her, and when she reached an arm out to grab them, they began to jump around. (People have spoken to me about seeing these same lines during meditation experiences; they describe it as a holographic grid.)

‘What happened next was amazing,’ she told me. ‘I could feel myself turning my head to the left and all of a sudden four angels with bright-white feathered wings just floated by my bedside.’ Natisha turned her head to the other side and four more beautiful and awe-inspiring angels floated towards her. They were all smiling and had their hands out in greeting. At this point she told me that she felt like she was in a sauna; the room became very warm and she was overwhelmed with a feeling of love and purity.

Her grandmother had died six years earlier and Natisha told me that they’d been very close. It was at this point that she looked up and saw her grandma standing at the foot of the bed. The woman spoke and said, ‘You are all right. It is not your time yet; go back.’

Natisha felt confused. But her grandma wasn’t there to take her to heaven as she’d first thought. Natisha explained that she was more than willing to go, but then the woman disappeared and the angels floated away from her.

Next, a movie screen appeared. It had pictures of a secluded beach containing many large boulders and rocks, both big and small. Natisha was confused. What did it mean? Was her grandmother trying to tell her she had a long, rocky recovery ahead? Twenty years later, and Natisha has been with her partner for eleven years. That exact beach is right down the end of the street where they live, just one minute away. It was almost as if she had been given a glimpse of the future, even though at the time she didn’t understand. All these years later, it proves to her that the vision she had when she was in a coma was not a random, meaningless dream. Her grandma is still around and continues to make appearances from time to time. Natisha says she feels very blessed indeed.

This is another dream experience from Heidi, whom I spoke about earlier. She confided that her mother had been diagnosed with cancer back in 2009 and was getting sicker by the day. She felt so helpless watching the woman who gave birth to her slip away a little more each day. Heidi had been caring for her when, one night, she had an unusual dream. Her husband, their two boys, herself and her mother were all standing on a sort of dock or bridge, staring at a huge wall. The wall had tons of people trying to climb it and get over the top, Heidi recalls. Then she was aware of helping her mother to climb, eventually getting her to the top and over to the other side to be with the other people.