Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,8

acting up again for an hour or so. She even applied pressure to various pressure points she knew about, in the hope that her home remedies would slow down her pulse rate, but to no avail. Since she did not wish to awaken her husband, she was waiting to see whether the condition would abate itself. At that moment Mrs. B. had a most remarkable experience.

“Into my window flew, or glided, a woman. She was large, beautiful, and clothed in a multicolored garment with either arms or wings close to her sides. She stopped and hovered at the foot of my bed to the right and simply stayed there. I was so shocked, and yet I knew that I was seeing her as a physical being. She turned neither to the right nor to the left but remained absolutely stone-faced and said not a word. Then I seemed to become aware of four cherubs playing around and in front of her. Yet I sensed somehow that these were seen with my mind’s eye rather than with the material eyes. I don’t know how to explain from any reasonable standpoint what I said or did; I only knew what happened. I thought, ‘This is the angel of death. My time has come.’ I said audibly, ‘If you are from God, I will go with you.’ As I reached out my hand to her, she simply vanished in midair. Needless to say, the cherubs vanished too. I was stunned, but my heart beat had returned to normal.”

Mrs. L. L. of Michigan dreamed in July 1968 that she and her husband had been killed in an automobile accident. In November of that year, the feeling that death was all around her became stronger. Around the middle of the month, the feeling was so overwhelming she telephoned her husband, who was then on a hunting trip, and informed him of her death fears. She discussed her apprehensions with a neighbor, but nothing helped allay her uneasiness. On December 17, Mrs. L. had still another dream, again about imminent death. In this dream she knew that her husband would die and that she could not save him, no matter what she did. Two days later, Mrs. L. and her husband were indeed in an automobile accident. He was killed, and Mrs. L. nearly died. According to the attending physician, Dr. S., she should have been a dead woman, considering her injuries. But during the stay in the hospital, when she had been given up and was visited by her sister, she spoke freely about a place she was seeing and the dead relatives she was in contact with at the time. Although she was unconscious, she knew that her husband was dead, but she also knew that her time had not come, that she had a purpose to achieve in life and therefore could not stay on the “plane” on which she temporarily was. The sister, who did not understand any of this, asked whether Mrs. L. had seen God and whether she had visited heaven. The unconscious subject replied that she had not seen God nor was she in heaven, but on a certain plane of existence. The sister thought that all this was nonsense and that her dying sister was delirious, and left.

Mrs. L. herself remembers quite clearly how life returned to her after her visit to the other plane. “I felt life coming to my body, from the tip of my toes to the tip of my head. I knew I couldn’t die. Something came back into my body; I think it was my soul. I was at complete peace about everything and could not grieve about the death of my husband. I had complete forgiveness for the man who hit us; I felt no bitterness toward him at all.”

Do some people get an advance glimpse of their own demise? It would be easy to dismiss some of the precognitive or seemingly precognitive dreams as anxiety-caused, perhaps due to the dreamer’s fantasies. However, many of these dreams parallel each other and differ from ordinary anxiety dreams in their intensity and the fact that they are remembered so very clearly upon awakening.

A good case in point is a vivid dream reported to me by Mrs. Peggy C., who lives in a New York suburb. The reason for her contacting me was the fact that she had developed a heart condition and was wondering whether a dream she had had twenty years before was