River 7
Cheryl
Stop Crying, I'm Ok 1984

~~~~~~dream~~~~~~

Suddenly I was sitting at a wooden table which was round, and there were four wooden chairs. I felt I was enclosed but there were no walls, just all this white light. Out of the light Leon appeared. He walked towards me and all I recall is his blue eyes. I said ‘Leon, what are you doing here? You’re meant to be dead.’

‘I’ve just come to tell you I’m OK,’ he replied.

‘Are you sure you’re alright?’, I asked.

‘Cheryl, I’m fine, I’m laughing whilst everyone else is crying about me.’

I still wasn’t convinced. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Cheryl, I’m fine. As long as I’m back by the time I died I’ll be OK.’

I was sort of convinced then. He sounded and looked OK and seemed determined he was OK.

With that he just vanished. I sat bolt upright in bed, looked at the clock and it was 12.05. I then spent the rest of the night well hidden under the blankets!

~~~~~~

(Note: In waking life, Leon had died about six weeks previously, and had been pronounced dead at 12.05.)

When I was seventeen I was involved in a car accident in Queensland. Bill, the love of my life at the time, was killed: an event he’d actually told me on several occasions would happen. There was no funeral. His mother was very poor and couldn’t afford to get his body sent back home. The state disposed of his body as I had no money either and all my possessions were ruined in the accident, clothes included.

I spent months regaining my health and eventually went back home to the Blue Mountains where I got my old job back and caught up with old school friends. It was good to feel safe again and back on familiar ground.

Within a span of about six months I lost at least six friends in car accidents. It was getting to the stage where I never knew who was going to be next. A guy who I’d known from school was one among many.

It was Christmas Eve and there were parties to attend. Christmas Day bore the news that Leon had been killed at 12.05 am. I was quite shocked by it. Apparently he was riding his bike and was involved in a head-on collision with a car. I was told his neck was broken. I attended his funeral and for weeks I couldn’t remember much. I couldn’t understand my grief as we hadn’t been that close. We got on like a house on fire but my grief seemed to go, further. Was it because I’d had no grieving period for Bill when he’d died? I couldn’t stop crying and every day I’d go to the cemetery and just sit by Leon’s grave.

I then went on a cruise with some friends and when I got back at the end of January I picked up some photos I’d taken around Christmas. Leon’s brother was in some of them and in one particular photo, which was taken at around 9pm on Christmas Eve, an image had appeared. To me, and to others, a terrified face could be distinctly seen. The eyes and mouth were wide open, one hand was trying to cover the forehead and the other was coming up across the bottom of the face. The hands appeared large and thick, like bike gloves. I was stunned. I checked the walls, checked for grease marks, checked the angle for reflections – nothing. The night I picked the photos up I went to sleep and had the dream.

As Cheryl recounted, at the start of her story, she spent the rest of the night well hidden under the blankets after she awoke to find the time was exactly 12.05 am, being both the time of morning that Leon had been pronounced dead and the time, in the dream, he said he had to be ‘back’ by.

I tried hard the next day to remember exactly what colour eyes he had, but I couldn’t. I’d seen him so many times but not once had I noticed the colour of his eyes. Not long after, his girlfriend came into my work with an envelope which she gave to me, saying ‘These are for you’. I opened the envelope; she’d got photos of Leon done for me. I was stunned: here were the same blue eyes I’d seen in my dream’.

I had two or three more dreams about Leon after this. Every time I saw him he was in white light. Then the dreams stopped. Oddly enough my distress over this death stopped also.

His best friend was also killed in a bike accident not long after. Leon’s mother took her own life, and his stepfather told me of things that were happening around their house that convinced him, and me, that Leon was still around.

It took me a while before I realised that Leon had actually spoken to me and that it was no dream. It would appear now that I was holding him back because of my distress. Strange things had happened when Bill had died, all of which I clearly remember, but at the time I didn’t pay that much attention to them. With Leon’s death I was forced to sit up and pay attention.

My encounters with Leon changed my life because I truly realised that there is no death as I had perceived it.

Good Advice 1993

~~~~~~dream~~~~~~

I was in a room. Three men were seated behind a desk and I was standing in front of them. I had the feeling I was in trouble. The man to my left was a guy I had known at school who died in a car accident about eight or nine years ago. He looked as I imagine he would now (about 30-35). The man in the middle was John Lennon. His hair was longer than when he died but it was him. The man to my right had dark curly hair but I have no idea who he was. They all had long coats on and Lennon wore round dark glasses and he had a file in front of him. He opened it and after reading its contents, he looked up at me in a serious but kind and loving manner and said, in his full English accent, ‘Peace will come but you must be quiet!’

~~~~~~

I had just finished reading Lennon’s biography. Through my reading of all sorts of books, I had made connections with current world events, the Bible and prophets, and I was talking to my friends quite openly about my realizations. I was also finally truly understanding Lennon’s music. It was all so amazing I couldn’t be quiet because I felt it was so important. I was writing a lot of poetry, which was designed to ‘wake people up’. Some of it was published.

The dream wasn’t just another ‘dream’. It wasn’t hazy: it was a definite instruction. I hope you don’t think I’m mad, but it happened. It was as real as sitting here writing about it. It gave me a sense of being rapped over the knuckles and of having to pay more attention to my mouth. Its message was clear: each person realises things when they are meant to. It wasn’t up to me to tell everyone, so I decided I had to keep quiet.

Anyway, I listened to the dream and I kept my own counsel a lot more. I decided not to say anything unless I was asked and I have felt good about the change.

I did tell my daughter, Kathleen, who was four at the time, about the dream. ‘Yeah’, she said knowingly, ‘They’re the three wise men’. Well, it was Christmas!

Jane’s Interpretation

People respond in different ways to dreams of the recently departed returning with special personal messages. Some, like Cheryl, spend time in the dream cross-questioning the messenger, remembering that they have died and often being confused as to how they can apparently be alive again. Others enjoy being reunited with a loved and are devastated on waking to remember that they actually died some time ago. Cheryl’s reaction to noticing the correspondence of the time of death mentioned in the dream to the time on her alarm clock caused a fear/shock reaction that is often a natural consequence of this kind of dream experience.

I believe that we dream of those who have died for a number of reasons. Some are dreams in which the dreamer is coming to terms with the death, the loss of a loved one, facing unresolved business with them, or generally working out their understanding of life and death.

We can learn to cultivate or ‘induce’ dreams of being with those we have lost, or with those we are still grieving for, to enjoy togetherness and bathe in the peace and comfort of the dream reunion. We can bring the departed into our dreams to express farewells in a realistic setting, to forgive, to extend love, to thank and so on. Many people have perfected the art of dreaming of a deceased partner specifically to ask their advice on a matter. In many of those instances, we are making peace within ourselves, consulting the memory of our loved ones, or extrapolating our memory of the relationship as if it were continuing, taking it forward so that we can heal, build and progress beyond the point where death interrupted the relationship. Some might suggest the dreamers are being escapist, or lingering in the past, but I feel strongly that continuing a relationship after death through dreams is a natural part of the grieving process and should not be denied. When the time is right, the dreamer will move on.

Those who have died may appear in our dreams to symbolise an aspect of ourselves in exactly the same way as do people from our present life or those from long ago. The fact that they are deceased is mere detail.

Cheryl’s dream, I feel, is in a different category from the above. Dreams are an altered state of consciousness, and while we may spend most of our dream time wandering about sampling the views of our unconscious in order to improve our emotional and psychological wellbeing, we also have the ability to become conscious of other dimensions. We can march across time, see the future, make contact with other people in present time (telepathy), share dreams, tune into what someone else is doing while we are dreaming (with an ability to prove accuracy afterwards by comparing notes), and we can communicate with the deceased, as I believe Cheryl has done.

In Cheryl’s dream she perceived herself as ‘feeling enclosed but with no walls’, just as we may feel enclosed in our physical body until we realise that there are no walls: that we can cross barriers and communicate with the deceased because the barriers don’t really exist in the first place.

Cheryl awoke to see the time on her alarm clock matched the time of Leon’s death. I have seen many dreams in which people know the time and then awaken to find the same time on their clock. I believe we do have an ‘eye’ on time while we sleep, and this clock-sense can impinge into our dream awareness.

Cheryl’s dream visitor brought life-changing material, as she expresses in her story. There are cases where the information brought by the deceased through a dream was previously unknown by the dreamer and later verified. A commonly documented experience is to dream of someone coming to say ‘goodbye’, wake up and check the time on the clock, and then to discover the following day that the person did indeed die at that exact time (often unexpectedly).

Undoubtedly we can and do communicate with the deceased through our dreams, but it is always worth examining such dreams for meaningful symbolism, since I suspect that the greater proportion of our dream encounters with the deceased are of the symbolic variety.