Some years ago I was booked for a minor-day case-out patient operation after which I was to leave the hospital on the same day. Shortly before my appointment my dear little dog Jac passed on in my arms after 10 years of her wonderful love and company. They age too rapidly and I was broken hearted. From day one I had had experiences of her so I knew she was just outside my normal reach.
Friends, Jenny and Dave came to stay. The day after they were due to leave I was to travel to hospital for this minor medical procedure. On Jenny’s last night at our home I had a dream which I can only describe was not a dream to me but a choice to live or die, similar to that that many near death experiencers have.
Interestingly I know a person who collapsed and had the experience that they were swimming out to sea with dolphins not to return to the shore. When they collapsed a week later and passed on I presumed they had swam out to sea and this time did not return, others I have learned through my research into ndes, do not always go to the next realm through a tunnel.
My choice to live or die (to make my transition) took the form of a strange vision, I was in a small deserted train station standing on the platform at dusk. After a short while the train arrived and the doors slid open both Tony my husband and Jenny waived good bye to me as I walked away and was about to step onto my waiting train.
Just as I put one foot onto the train I was made telepathically totally aware that I would not be coming back if I got on. This train was my train and it had come for me alone. It was my journey, and I realised we each have a solitary journey no-one else can take for us. I do not recall hearing a voice out loud, it was knowledge that just seemed to arrive in my head from another –external source-akin to telepathy. I also gained the strong impression that we all have an individualised, indeosyncratic journey to make on our own when the time was right or of our choosing. This was a one way single ticket!
This information made me halt – the thought that I would be leaving Tony made me quickly halt just in time as the train doors shut-and the insensitive engine enlivened and it moved off. If Tony or the communicator had not been there I believe I would have just boarded my train, the train for which we had been waiting . I found myself back in bed and was deeply shaken realising that the telepathic communication meant that the train was taking me to my death and I chose not to go!
I woke Tony and I was very upset. The next day I told Jenny and Dave of my experience and later they bid us their ‘earthly’ farewells. I attended an appointment booked many weeks before at Paignton Spiritualist Church in Devon with a medium named Margaret Pearson. I have over 20 years of taped interviews with mediums as I have been researching mediumship and shamanism for over two decades. At the end of my sitting I told Margaret that I had met her over 10 years before and that she had been very accurate in her descriptions of relatives that appear to be in the next dimension of existence but also that she had supplied me with predictions possibly sourced by those she contacted and that they had been most accurate. She had been accurate on many things that came to pass soon after that first sitting. One example was to do with the dog I was in the process of getting at the time named Jac, other life changes which did occur soon afterwards such as marriage, job changes and home changes at some considerable distance to where I lived at the time of the reading. As I left I made a brief comment about the forthcoming operation and she spontaneously said; “but your body cannot take that!!” I thanked her but it was booked.
We travelled to see the doctor for the operation. After seeing the doctor he advised he would postpone the appointment for a day. I suggested to Tony that we go as day visitors to the nearby Arthur Findlay College. I used to go for weeks every year for many years and study with Gordon Higginson he gave details of how a person had passed to spirit, what they looked like, often what their name was and also even where they lived and then moved onto the apparent message from that person. He was trained this way by his mother from the age of three who was a great medium before him so that he gave the best evidence of survival that he could. He had gone into trance and demonstrated physical phenomena when I had seen him last before his passing.
As day visitors at the Arthur Findlay College we met the medium Mallorie Stendall raising psychic awareness using aura soma bottles. I had been on one of her courses there before, the bottles had many uses. Today she was raising people’s awareness where a bottle would be picked and it was used like a Crystal Ball or Tarot Cards as the reader read for their partner. To demonstrate she picked me and I randomly picked and shook a bottle each contained a thick oily viscous liquid. Mallory told me she saw inside my body and blood but assured me everything would be alright. I bought a little angel in the gift shop and decided to wear that from that time on.
That night I was overwhelmed with an incredible sense of foreboding, literally as though I was going to the guillotine in the morning. Reason prevailed and I tried to shrug it off as just hospital phobia. Tony calmed me by telling me that these exceedingly minor operations are carried out all day every day and they are not very invasive at all. The next morning I packed my toothbrush and other toiletries as on some level I did not believe that I would be leaving the hospital that evening. I asked for an anaesthetic not a local as I did not want my fearful emotions to adversely affect the operation.
The moment the nurse touched my cheek to wake me up I awoke to agony.The anaesthetist rushed over and gave me an injection of pain killers. I was in excruciating pain still and they gave me more pain killing tablets as they wheeled me to the departure room and I was reunited with Tony who had been waiting at my bed since I had left. Nurses were saying perhaps I was allergic to the anaesthetic. Tony recalls my head just rolled back, he found all my vital signs had ceased and being himself a doctor he ran to get blood transfusion equipment as he diagnosed that I was haemorrhaging. He called the nurses over who were serving teas and sandwiches in preparation for the patients’ departures and alerted them that I was haemorrhaging with no vital signs!!
The body has approximately 8 units of blood -I needed 6 units of blood -I had a gusher. Jac my dog who had recently passed on was lying across my right calf on the bed, the warmth of her fur was deeply comforting. A couple more nights passed as I passed in and out of consciousness. By the third night I had stabilised a little more but in the night I found it difficult to breathe. I still could not move without passing out due to pain due to the huge haemorrhage of blood causing incredible pressure and pain inside my rib cage up to my shoulders. It felt like I had been kicked over and over by a bull and everything inside was broken. A calm male voice spoke to me saying ‘try to sit up, fluid is going on your lung, sitting up will help it clear.’ Jac was again lying on my right calf. I whispered to Tony sleeping on his camp bed (with Sioux our dog) in the hospital room what had just occurred. The next day it became clear blood clots from the huge haemorrhage were breaking off and going onto my lung. The calming spirit voice had said ‘fluid’ not blood so as not to alarm me, had told me what to do and Jac was deeply healing. I refused an operation to drain the haemorrhage as I knew I would not survive that.
Some time later Tony wheeled me out of the hospital and we took the journey home to Devon in stages. On my first night back I insisted I wanted to go home not hospital as I was allergic to everything the hospital gave me anyway! In the night I tried to sit up without hearing the voice as I knew what to do now when I got spasms when I could not breathe. I must have fallen asleep again. All I remember was ‘hurriedly driving in my car as fast as possible to a lady who is a medium named Sally in Paignton – for her to help me. I opened my car door for air but could not breathe as no air was coming in’. I had not seen Sally for months. When the lack of breathing got worse ‘in my car’ I began in my mind repeatedly shouting “Tony, Tony” as I was also strangely aware that I had to wake Tony up immediately. He awoke telling me later he heard my telepathic shouting of his name!! He found me not breathing unconscious in bed at his side and I had obviously not been physically shouting!! Resuscitating me he rushed me to Torquay hospital. They found that the clots had cleared in that incident. I had again fought death off. They found due to hospitalisation and the medical procedure I had had I was starting to get a deep vein thrombosis in my right calf just where Jac had been lying so often!
Consequently, while I had stopped breathing, I had found myself this time sitting behind the driving wheel of my car travelling to a medium named Sally in Torquay for help, in my case to be able to breathe again, when the car door would not open to let in air to breathe it seemed like an eternity that I shouted for Tony.
Some months and several hospital stays later Judith Seaman a medium visiting Paignton Spiritualist Church gave me a message from the platform and told me that she was being told by spirit that I had been near to death and that I had had many experiences of spirit and that they had not been in my imagination. I thanked her for the confirmation but knew they were not imagination. She told me spirit simply wanted to give me further evidence. This was useful confirmation for my research into mediumship.
Months later I met Sally and learned that the Wednesday night that I was ‘going to her in my car’ when I could not breathe was the night she ran a healing circle. I had never known that she ran a healing circle. Was I aware of a light or energy at Sally’s and I was pursuing it in that strange non-breathing deathly state? This might explain why I was so desperate to get to Sally of all people and mediums I knew. I have been to rescue circles and found apparent discarnate people seem to be aware that the healing energy of the group is where they need to be before they get redirected to the light and leave the limbo state that they have found themself in. Did I know of Sally’s circle when I was not breathing yet I had never been told of this?
Since the experience I seem to have more precognitive dreams, cannot eat a number of foods, cannot touch alcohol, and have had more psychic experiences, including getting glimpses around the house of the dog Jac who had passed on before the event.
If I had got on the train then I believe I would not have fought death off in the hospital or afterwards. I believe I was given a choice to leave this physical life or to stay, that was what shook me so profoundly when I had the vision this was akin to the choice nders have. My nde research proved to me that many nders do not perceive a tunnel, also many nders only have one or two of the core components of the nde not all 5 of them. Ndes in earlier times were called death bed visions. My experience interacted with me if I had wanted to go I would have gone for good so I was glad when I knew I would not come back as this halted me getting on the train. Regarding the train and the car and not an experience of a tunnel I would like to add that psychic experiences are malleable and fluid this is known as ideoplasticity. Angels are perceived as what a person expects them to be, with or without wings, as a man, as a woman, as a child, whatever is needed at the time. I used to use trains alot and also drive miles every week in my car all over the United Kingdom so I believe for me they were the least threatening, most personally comforting modes of departure from this life.
