Ghosts And Dreams
Good day all, Henry here. People historically have always believed in ghosts or spirits. Folklore is full of people meeting ghosts or spirits. Hawthorn’s “Legion Of Sleepy Hollow” is about an encounter with a ghost. All holy books are full of encounters with the spirit world. Ghosts, visions, and dreams fill them.
Someone has said than the spirit world disappeared when electricity was invented. Much of the mystery of life disappeared, because we could, literally, see what was going on, we felt more confident about the things we can never see.
But anyone who has “blissed out” on certain drugs has often encountered the spirit world. Also, many people on waking from a deep sleep encounter a spirit in the room or bed with them which at times feels malicious and other times friendly. Most everyone has had a feeling now and then that there is someone else in the room, someone behind them when no one is there.
I think that most of us feel that we have a friendly spirit hanging around us. Will R. Bird, the writer, certainly felt this way. He was in the first war and in grave danger when he felt his dead brother’s hands in his. His book is entitled: Ghosts Have Warm Hands. It is a book that I reads years ago but has stuck with me.
People who have dreams where they see people who have died often wonder whether it was simply a vision from their unconscious, something that just came from inside their head, or whether it actually was that person talking to them from some other place. People like myself spend a great deal of time interpreting the meaning of people’s dreams, but even so the dream world is still very much a mystery, very different from what happens to us when we’re awake. Considering how little we know about what happens to us when we sleep, perhaps there is no answer to this question, but its one people continue to ask anyway.
April 5th, 2007 at 3:44 am
Hi Henry,
I too have had one of these profound experiences when my grandfather died. I was up in the Arctic on a ship and unable to come home for the funeral. I was grief stricken and heart broken. That night my Grandfather with a “guide” who I could not touch came to visit me as I lay half awake. I and my Grandfather hugged and he said good-bye in an old familiar way that he aways did. Good-bye for now was the impression. I think of him often.
Kevin
April 5th, 2007 at 11:34 am
A very powerful experience! I am sure it was a great comfort. Lawrence Van Der Post tells something very similar. He says that he was on a steamer on his way to his home in South Africa and could not sleep one night. Then Dr. Carl Jung appeared in his room. It was the same night that jung died in Switzerland.
I never have had an exactly similar experience to Van Der Post and Kevin but I have felt a dead loved one very close at times. Their presence and their wisdom felt very present and supportive.
I think such experiences are as old as the human race.