An Angel Saved My Life: And Other True Stories of the Afterlife. Jacky Newcomb

up to me outside the playgroup to see if I was okay. I’d been crying for several hours and my make up couldn’t hide it any longer. She walked back home with me for coffee and it was the first time I was able to talk about how I was feeling.

      I realized that something serious was wrong and finally made a trip to the doctor. The doctor placed me on antidepressant tablets. The tablets made me feel like I was living in a fog, but they did help a little. The psychic experiences had gone (probably as a result of the antidepressants) but I still felt unable to do anything other than the bare minimum of work in the home. Everything we ate came straight out of the freezer. I didn’t cook – I just warmed things up. I felt numb and only half on the planet.

      I remember feeling as if I had a ball and chain around my ankle. I couldn’t manage even the simplest of tasks. I spent hours sitting on the sofa watching television and when John came home at night he would often enquire politely about my day. I would make something up because I couldn’t remember doing anything at all. What did I do? I day-dreamed my life away…

      Later, I began working as a temp and did occasional work as a personal assistant or receptionist in many of the large companies in our local brewing town. I was able to cope with the short-term jobs and it was great to get out of the house again. As soon as a job became a little longer, though, I started to get into difficulties. I just couldn’t manage, even though I was offered permanent positions constantly. I knew that I would not be able to keep it together for more than a few days a week.

      At one time I had a trainee nanny from the local college to help me for a few days each week, and my youngest daughter went to a nursery one day a week and a childminder another. I finally had some time to myself but it was getting too complicated and when my mother offered to have the children whilst I worked I immediately said yes. The car I had bought with the insurance money from the burglary gave me a great deal of freedom and with a little money in my pocket I was able to take my mum out shopping on the days I was not working. We helped each other and I felt a lot better.

      In time, I found that the antidepressant tablets were holding me back, and I knew I had to stop taking them. The doctor had warned me not to stop taking the tablets in one go but I did it anyway. I literally took the tablets one day and stopped the next. The fog cleared almost immediately and I was fine for a while. I’d missed the psychic experiences even though I feared them and whilst I was taking the tablets I seemed unable to feel the unseen spiritual help and guidance which was my birthright. Guardian angels were with me – but I’d been unable to ‘feel’ anything when I had been depressed. I lost them, and they lost me.

      I still spent a lot of time in front of the television. One day I was watching the daytime television show This Morning, which was focusing on angels. It reminded me of the experience I’d had as a child where I’d felt I’d been saved by angels and I began to investigate the whole angel phenomenon in depth. My life suddenly had new meaning. I wanted to find out more about angels.

      By this time we had a computer and it gave me the perfect opportunity to learn how to use it. Amazing things were beginning to appear on the internet and at last I was able to do the research that I’d longed to do in the years before. Now I could type any paranormal word into a search engine and the internet would open up the whole world to psychic investigation. It was very exciting.

      The week after I’d watched the angel programme my youngest daughter had an upset stomach. I quickly ran out of sheets and towels so I made her up a bed on the bathroom floor and laid her down to sleep on some towels. She called me steadily throughout the day, which was exhausting. After she called me for the twentieth time that day I called out to the universe for ‘someone’ to come and help me with her as I was now so tired, and again found myself unable to cope.

      Much to my confusion, as I walked into the bathroom, the sound of a celestial choir filled the room. I searched the house looking for the source of that sound, and even stuck my head outside the window but I realized that angels (or some other helpful spirits) were showing me they were around and watching over us. Angels were with me, and at last I was able to feel them around me again.

      More and more spontaneous paranormal experiences were occurring. Less than a year later I had another ‘out-of-body experience’ like I’d had as a young child on holiday. I was suffering from a sore throat and was taking antibiotics. One night, and after my husband had gone to bed I decided to get myself a hot chocolate before retiring. As I opened the fridge I spotted the remains of an open bottle of wine in the bottom of the door. I’d opened it a couple of days before. ‘Why not?’ I thought to myself. This was exactly what I needed to cheer myself up so I decided to pour myself a glass, which I drank quickly before switching off the lights to go to bed. I thought no more about it.

      Whether it was the mixture of the wine with the antibiotics, or just tiredness, I was never too sure but as I started to walk upstairs I found myself becoming ‘taller and taller’. By the time I reached the top step I was well aware that something was not right. Our house was an older property and our bedroom was part of a new extension. To get the ceiling height in the bedroom, there was a step down into it, so the floor in our bedroom was slightly lower than the other upstairs rooms. As I stood on this top step of the bedroom this particular night, it felt as if the step had been raised somehow.

      ‘What have you done to the step?’ I asked John who was drifting off to sleep.

      My spiritual body had slipped out of the top of my head somehow, and I was now ‘looking down’ upon myself in the mirrored wardrobe door. My logical brain was still trying to explain what had happened and I was aggressively questioning my husband, and trying to work out if he’d had someone raise the entire bedroom floor just to trick me! As if! I was standing level with the mirrored wardrobe door yet at the same time I was almost up on the ceiling. How could this be happening?

      I took off my jacket and opened the sliding wardrobe door to hang it up on the rail, but instead of my eye line being half way between the two clothes rails as usual, I could now see over the top rail and was amazed to discover dust, which would normally be out of sight!

      I figured that my spiritual body had ‘slipped’ about a head-height above my normal level. All the while this bizarre experience was happening I was actually able to talk in a normal way, explaining what I was experiencing as it happened. How strange is that?

      I hung on tightly to the wall as I made my way into the en-suite bathroom but as I walked back into the room my body and spirit had come back into alignment! I was able to see normally. It was over almost as soon as it had happened. I’d had a waking out-of-body experience and then within minutes I had plopped back into my body again. Weird – but also kind of fun!

      Over the next few days I told everyone who would listen about what had happened to me and even found someone who’d had the same experience. It wasn’t long before I found myself back on the internet and was pleased to discover a lot of websites where people shared their own out-of-body experiences. I found an internet forum and spent many hours talking to other people, before discovering that there were many people who had learnt how to recreate the out-of-body experiences on purpose. This was something I HAD to do! I wanted to do this again and I just had to learn how.

       CHAPTER 2 Taking Control

      Come to the edge.

      We might fall.

      Come to the edge.

      It’s too high!

      Come to the edge.

      And they came,

      and we pushed,

      and they flew.

       Christopher Logue (1968)

      This chapter is where it starts to get a little crazy. Bear in mind I was trying to develop my psychic ability and tune into my angels and the higher realms. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, I just knew that I wanted to do this.

      Mostly I was reading about psychic development