Touching Heaven: True stories of spiritual experiences. Jacky Newcomb

the spirit can usually take these experiences back with them. They recall what happened upon waking and stun everyone with their psychic out-of-body adventures. Being able to describe what they saw afterwards in some way proves that these experiences are real. The spirit clearly has left the physical body and separated in some way. If you can tell your friend, ‘At ten past three, when I died, I saw you reading the paper in your garden,’ and that was exactly what was happening, then you have to assume that the spirit has separated and become distinct from the physical body. In other words, this stuff is real!

      This sets up more questions than answers, really, and I remember questioning this phenomenon after having my own out-of-body experiences when I was a young woman (and also as a child). I had a spooky realisation, which went something like this: if my spirit is leaving my body at this moment and the ‘real me’ is the one that has the consciousness now in this ‘spirit body’ then it means I am not my body. If I am a spirit, it means I have come from someone before I appeared or took over this physical body. It also means that when my physical body dies, I continue to live and go on, or perhaps go back to somewhere … Heaven, maybe? (You can see why I have dedicated so many years of my life to studying this awesome subject!)

      After her physical body died, one woman saw her mother in the waiting room at the hospital and noticed that she was wearing slippers on her feet instead of outdoor shoes. When the doctors managed to get the daughter’s heart beating again and she was a little better, she remembered seeing her mum wearing the slippers at the hospital and asked her about it. Her mum was stunned. Her daughter had died, revived and then been unconscious for hours afterwards, so there was no way she could have known this. What happened apparently was that she had rushed to the hospital to be at her seriously ill daughter’s bedside and hadn’t even had time to put her shoes on. In the rush she had left the house wearing exactly what she had on!

      I know other people have seen the ‘tunnel’ and had various paranormal experiences during dental visits like I did, but whether it was because they were near to death or simply that the gas mimics the phenomenon is hard to tell. When, as a child, my next dental treatment was due I was excited to see the tunnel of light again, but the dentist seemed less keen to administer the gas. As I was so frightened of the treatment we persuaded him to give it another go, but this time my experience was not so good. I still found myself in the tunnel, and the light was still there at the end, and like many near to death I found I wanted to go towards it. Surely going to the light means death, but the light was very seductive and at first I felt the same great sense of peace and one-ness. This time, though, a large monster-like creature was barring the way. It was standing right in front of the light and I found myself desperately trying to pull away from it and get back into my body.

      All too soon the familiar calling of my mother’s voice brought me out of my stupor, but the excitement of my first experience hadn’t been repeated! For some reason my dentist refused to use nitrous oxide on me again … but you know what? I didn’t want it anyway. Had something happened to me physically during my treatment? If it had, they never said. I know they found it less challenging to wake me this second time. Yet in a way I felt tricked by the light. I always felt that the monster was no dream and that someone somewhere had placed the creature in the tunnel to stop me floating too far away from my body.

      Many years later, when a teenager, I read the book Life After Life by Dr Raymond A. Moody. Dr Moody recorded many experiences of near death and the phenomena people described. It was here that I first read about the tunnel of light seen during near-death experiences, and I compared the incident I’d had as a child. Now I was hooked, and although I was unable to find further reading material at that time, as an adult I picked up the thread and carried on studying. This time, I was the one collecting stories and I was the one writing the books about them.

      So many people around the world believe that life ends when the physical body passes away. Over many, many years of research I’ve investigated literally thousands of stories of our continuing existence and I’ve made it my mission to share the best of these with you. I select from hundreds and thousands of case studies on file. Some get chosen for the books, and others get rejected not because the phenomenon is any less interesting, but because so many people have similar encounters.

      Where do we go when we pass through the light? What happens next? Heidi was one of many who shared her experience with me. She lost her mother about four years ago (at the time she wrote to me). She said it had been a very long journey and life-changing in so many ways. Her mum had been one of the strongest and most amazing women she had ever known. She showed Heidi so much love in life, and apparently this has continued in death.

      Heidi explained that a couple of years ago an aunt contacted her. The aunt hadn’t been especially close to her mother but she telephoned ‘out of the blue’ to share a dream with Heidi. The aunt explained that she’d had the dream a couple of weeks earlier but at first had chosen not to say anything about it. She then explained: ‘That was until your mum started to bug me every night since.’ Heidi’s mum had appeared after death, explaining that she wanted a message to be passed along to her daughter.

      Heidi’s mum was determined that her afterlife contact should be shared with her loved one. She’d tried reaching out to her daughter personally but explained that Heidi ‘hadn’t been listening’. Heidi believes this was because she was having a difficult time with her mother’s death; she was more closed down and most nights would simply cry herself to sleep. Maybe the spirit was unable to get through due to Heidi’s grief, or it might have been that she tried to reach out to her daughter when she was asleep (or at a certain time in her sleep cycle) and wasn’t able to because when she tried Heidi was restless and awake.

      Her aunt confessed that she really did not know why Heidi’s mum had chosen to come to her with the message, but she knew she had no choice but to pass it on. Her mum had stated that Heidi kept locking herself in the bathroom and sobbing over the loss of her mother, saying how much she missed her. She had been trying to comfort her daughter, but Heidi herself had not recognised that the spirit of her mother was there by her side. Next in the aunt’s dream a light appeared, a light more beautiful than anything she had ever seen in her life. The aunt began to describe the colours she saw and said they were ones she had never seen or known to exist on earth. I’ve commented previously about the vibrant colours people see during near death or contact with those who have passed over. It is one way that we know this is no ordinary dream!

      Heidi could tell by her aunt’s voice that this experience had truly touched her. The aunt continued relating her dream by saying that out of the magnificent light she recognised the voice telling her to please let her daughter know that she was okay and that she didn’t want her to grieve any more. She wanted Heidi to know that she loved her so much and that she knew she was loved in return. She said she had been trying to pass the message on herself, but the grief was not allowing Heidi to hear her. One day, she explained, they would be together again, and finally she said she wanted Heidi to please be happy.

      I love that! What an important message for us all. Wouldn’t we want to say the same thing if we were the ones who had passed on? We’d want those who were left behind to live a good life and be happy. Heidi told me, ‘I know my aunt felt the same as me – why in the world would my mum come to her in a dream out of everyone she could have chosen? Then it hit me: she came to my aunt because she knew that she was the one person I would never have expected to hear that from.’

      One thing I have learnt is that the deceased will reach out to the living if they possibly can. They will try to contact us first of all. Then, if that doesn’t work, they will try someone close to us. This contact was especially clever. Given that the relative wasn’t particularly close, by their own admission, there was no reason why Heidi’s aunt would have made up the message just to comfort her niece. She only passed on the dream visit because it was so clear and powerful she felt she had no choice. It was almost as if the spirit would have visited over and over until her mission had been completed – and actually, it looks like this is exactly what she was doing. Love is a powerful thing. It shows how strong the bond is, even in death. This clever woman wasn’t going to let a little thing like death stop her daughter knowing she was loved!

      Over the years I’ve worked with many health-care workers, doctors