Episode 217: Consciousness Does Not Die!

On each episode, discuss the reasons we now know that our loved ones have survived physical debt and so will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. It is with sadness today that I report that psychiatrist doctor Peter Fenwick has recently moved into the world of spirit and today I want to dedicate this episode to him. Doctor Fenwick passed peacefully in his home at the age of eighty nine,

surrounded by his family. He was a British neuropsychiatrist, neurophysiologist, and parapsychologist who studied near death experiences and was convinced that our consciousness is freed after death. His interest in near death experiences was piqued when he read doctor Raymond Moody's book Life After Life. He was initially skeptical of Moody's evidence, but he reassessed his opinion about these experiences after one of his own patients described a near death

experience very similar to that of doctor Moody's work. After that, he collected and analyzed over three hundred and fifty examples of near death experiences. Doctor Fenwick has had a long standing interest in brain function and the problem of consciousness in where it is located, and has published a large number of research papers related to altered states of consciousness, abnormalities of consciousness and behavior, MDes, and end of life experiences,

some of which you'll hear on this episode today. In nineteen seventy seven, doctor Fenwick joined the Scientific and Medical Network became president of it in two thousand and one and President emeritus in twenty twenty.

Scientific and Medical dot net. Doctor Fenwick and his wife Elizabeth gave so much of themselves to this network, and they wrote several books, including the Art of Dying, The Truth in the Light, which is an investigation of over three hundred near death experiences, shining light on transcendence, The Unconventional Journey of a Neuroscientist, and The Hidden Door Understanding

and Controlling Dreams. Today, I want to present to you part of a lecture that doctor Fenwick gave to a group of psychiatrists on the topic of experiences surrounding near death and dying. I found this talk fascinating and I believe you'll enjoy it too. And we hear at Shades of the Afterlife. Well, we're going to do our part to make sure doctor Peter Fenwick's work stay relevant and gets to the most amount of people. Doctor Fenwick was not afraid to die, and today you'll find out why.

Meet doctor Peter Fenwick.

ending at the brain. So I thought that what I needed to do is to look further into other models, which we could aide if you like, with the sand

mechanical model. So today we'll set out the problems. I'm going to look at cardiac arrest, NDEs, end of life experience, and I'll occasionally drop the word ELI and that end of life experience, contribution of these to models of our understanding of consciousness and some sort of conclusion I hope, and for this talk, mind equals consciousness, because I'm not going to get into the debate. So that's the position I'm coming from. Okay, the problem, really it can be said.

It's quite simply the sound in paradigm states that brain processes and only brain processes are responsible for the generation experience of consciousness. The transmission theory, our constructs of the world are in part the transmission of the absolute nature of reality and part brain processes. So there's the two sides that I'm going to look at. Now. If you're going to ask the question what is the relationship between brain and mind? Then I have worked the whole time

with the cats can fMRIs, magneto and cephilography EEG. And there's no consciousnessness there. There are magnetic fields, they're electrical fields. There is the transmission of information, but there's no consciousness. So that's not going to help me. So I think you've got to look for art lives. And are there situations where mind and brain are not the same. Yes, when there is no brain function but experiences reported e g. Cardiac arrest NDEs and these thus represent non brain experience,

and I'll support the later. And are there any other artlowers? Yes? Are the situations when consciousness starts to loosen from the brain and finally separates and disintegrates. Well, yes, during the process of death. So subjective experiences of the dying should show similarities to that of the nd So if there is a transcendent reality. We'll see it in the nd we'll pick it up as people slowly attenuate their normal

structures consciousness. So let's look at near death experiences. These are very familiar to you all, so I'm not going to go into it. This is just a summary of NDE paypos by Rousseau, and it's a nice summary. What I want to draw your attention to is this when it's being dead is one and out body experiences is another. You see they color up nicely and bright light. I want to draw your attention to. That's seventy two percent.

of body experience in a new material plane. Thirty five percent have out of body experiences or vertical experiences. These are the ones that they float above their body and can see people working on them in the operating room.

Thirty four percent have vivid sensory experiences. Thirty one percent experience esp or telepathy, thirty nine percent feel a dark space, then a bright tunnel, Seventy two percent experience the bright light, twenty four percent beautiful music, forty three percent experience a being of light or a guide and deep knowledge and

wisdom and love. Thirty eight percent experience another realm, which may be a beautiful country guard, and forty one percent experience their dead relatives and friends and other spiritual beings. Eighteen percent have a panoramic life review.

look at cardiac arrest NDEs. When we got over two thousand letters from our first film on NDEs, and what became quite apparent to me was that if you want to ask serious questions about the end in terms of its own provenance, what generates it, you can't use an ordinary nd because you don't know what the brain state is. There's one thing where you do know the brain state, and that is during cardiac arrest NDEs. If they came during the cardiac arrest, well, the incidents during cardiac arrests

varies from about ten to twenty percent. But the main thing that I want to say is that the phenomena of the arrest endes are the same as the phenomena of the non arrest NDEs, which is interesting. So I can argue from the arrest NDEs to the non arrest endes, and also that the depth of them varies according to the closeness to death. This is evidence the non local

functioning of mind during a cardiac arrest. The outer body experience is ridical remote viewing bright light, which is transcendental experience of other realms and relatives, friends and spiritual beings, So keep those categories in mind, out of body, remote viewing,

bright light, experience of other realms, and transcendence. And this is the standard thing that you walking along, your heart stops, your consciousness goes down, it restarts, and you have a confusional arousal, and the NDE is thought to occur at that time little bit of neurology for you. When the heart stops, the brain stem goes down, so you have no heartbeat controlled from the brainstem, no respiration controlled from the brain stem, and you have no consciousness also controlled

from the brain stem. So in fact, the brain is dead. Now people who don't really understand brain functional saying this is just a little bit of brain functioning rubbish. Either

isn't to be. If there is, it's not going to support consciousness, and it's not going to support clear consciousness of the sort that occurs in the nd because you see, there has to be the whole of this sort of mechanism which is initiated from the brain stem, which keeps the cortex working, and it's not there because the brain stem is done. So cardiac arrest and electrical silence indicate that the brain stem and cortex are inactive, so you

can't go along any of those lines. So then what is the evidence that during that phase you can intact experience things. They are over a hundred anecdote with ridical OBE cases and those during cardiac arrests and the subject leaves his body and sees the resuscitation, usually from above. If you're going to test the ritical nature of the ND, you want a cardiac arrest and an OBE group, an out of body experience group.

Peter Fenwick. And as we continue in this episode, you'll hear more about near death experiences and those extraordinary experiences that many people have seeing loved ones, etc. Just before we pass, just to recap what he said before we took the break, basically is that consciousness, if it solely lives in the brain, cannot exist when the heart stops and our brain stem goes down. In that case, he says,

the brain is dead. It is in these moments that the extraordinary out of body and near death experience occurs. So let's continue.

for that. Cardiac arrests and no other body experiences, because people are going to say, if you ask them after the arrest what happened during it, We've all seen television programs and so on. So he says, well, of course they know. Well. In fact, Penny Sartori, who did her PhD on NDEs, guided them up into those who said they could see what was happening and those who said they couldn't, and then looked at their accounts, and the accounts of the people who said they could see what

was happening much more accurate than those who couldn't. So it's just another piece of information. Okay, So what we're dealing with this fifty year old man not healing well. Going to hospital. They see that he's got a cardiac problem, taking up the cardiac cathlab. So this guy's in the cath lab and he goes into ventri kilar fibrillation. His heart obviously has stopped. He's unconscious, so he's unconscious on the table. Everybody sees it. The next thing that happens

is he says he leaves his body. Okay. They put on something which is called an aed an Automatic external defibrillator, and this has a protocol with it, so you put the electrodes on and it measures the heart and sees whether it's in normalism or not. If it's not in normal rhythm, it will advise a shark. So that's what happened. So they give him a shark and there's no response. In other words, he remains in ventriction fibrillation, deeply unconscious, and they have to do a full round of CPR.

Other words, they have to pummel his chest, et cetera. That goes on for three or four minutes. This guy's unconscious there and then they put it on again and the machine says advise sharks. So he's still in ventrically fibrillations throughout this time, and then his heart starts, so we've got a clear, clear period of unconsciousness, no cardiac output. It's absolutely solid, and he's unconscious. There's no little bit of consciousness there. The guys out and we know that

he's unconscious from three to five minutes. But he was aware during this time. He saw himself leave his body at the beginning, went up into a corner of the room, looked back. There was a woman he saw, who he then later classified as an angel, who said to him when he was lying on the bed, come up, come up, and he thought that'd be ridiculous. Next thing he knew he was up there, and then he looked back and

he had both that and sol the resuscitation process. So he has clear consciousness during the time of his arrest, which is monitored. I mean, it's about the best case you can get. The guy's aye, but he's unconscious, he's got no consciousness, so it's a really nice solid case. This case suggests that he was dead to the medical team. The patient claims to be conscious, so brain and mind

are separated during ventricular fibrillation. So that's really quite a powerful statement to be able to make okay, so we can talk about now. Happily, the brain and mind are separated during the nd so what about the mental states the dying? Can we gain information as the brain fail? I got this nice quotes from Stafford Bessie because it is really good in terms of just setting the feelings

for it. Whether dying persons are telling us of glimpses of the next world or conversing with people we can't see, we should consider ourselves immensely blessed when it happens. If we don't make the mistake of assuming get confused, we're likely to feel some of the excitement they convey for your witnessing the momentary merging of two worlds that at all other times remain tightly compartmentalized and mutually inaccessible. The merging is what I mean by the spirituality of death.

So I want you to get this feeling of two worlds slowly starting to merge as the dying process continues. Let's look at the death process. What is it? How does it occur? There are lessons for you guys here. All of you must die, So we're going to look at the dissolution of consciousness. We have done a lot of work on this retrospective studies. Prospective studies. We've done it in England and in Holland. We've got over fifteen hundred emails of stories and so we've interviewed doctors, nurses,

auxiliary staff, chaplin, volunteers, et cetera, et cetera. So it built up a lot of information about the dying process. We gave every a questionnaire looking at deathbed visions, deathbed coincidence, light surrounding the body, shape, scene, leaving the body, transiting to new reality and so on. So that's our database and these are the conclusions really. So first of all, when we went into this, this just about two thousand and four, and we couldn't say that they actually occurred

because there wasn't a consensus in the literature. So we started from the grants then that they may not occur. And if they did occur, what were they like or were they just simply fantasis of the dying nan The present consensus is that over fifty percent of those dying consciously will have end of life experiences. So please all of you die consciously, then you get the fireworks and if you see somebody coming up to you with a syringe full of madesil Lamb saying have this because you're

obviously in distress. Say no, no, no, no, no, no no no. I want to watch this whole process, and it's very important. Otherwise you won't get some of the things we're talking about. So this is the formulation of the dying process. And the life experiences may start with premonitions of own death or another's death. The reason I say that is from the results of our studies and emails which are sent in. So premonitions are right at the beginning. There the dial Alama says two years before

you may get information about death. I assume that's corrected in this book. And if you look at the stories, they're not usually that long, and the stories sometimes relate to promontory visit by dead relatives. So dead relatives come. I want you just to think about this. My mother was in the hospital after a fam that fractures her ribs. One day she saw my dead brother at the door of her room. She said it made her very happy

to see him. So it's really interesting. There's a changing consciousness that these things have a different meaning to the person who receives the vision. I joked that he had come to take her on to the next world, and we laughed about it, and two weeks later she died unexpectedly. So there's a promontory visit. This one is a very sad one. The mother learns about the fact that her

child is going to die. My third daughter, Roberta, was just seventy years old on May the seventeenth, nineteen eighty nine, when I woke up in the morning totally upset and in mourning over her death. I was so surprised and confused to see her lying next to me that I actually gently nudged her to see if she was alive. So this was a really powerful experience. She apparently had gotten up during the night and climbed in next to me. When she moved, I cried uncontrollably with relief that she

was not dead and hugged her. She did not seem to mind or make any fasts. Perhaps she knew why I felt relief. I did not tell her I thought she was dead. Could not remember any dream, so it's not a dream. But the feelings were so strong and real, exactly as they were two days later, when she was the victim of a hit and run accident, so very clear premonition of what was going to occur. So this can be the start of the dead process. I say can be because not everybody has has it. The next

stage our deathbed visions. This is some of our data really just to show you how common these are in the retrospective studies between sixteen seventy percent and the prospect his studies it's about sixty percent approximately, So they're common much than people are prepared to say. In fact, there's a split medical people say it doesn't happen the nurse who say it that the nurses of the patients, they

hear the stories. So who do the dying see? Now, keep in mind that we're thinking about near death experiences the same time, the parents are the most common. Persons unknown or the next ones generally defined as spiritual beings. A lot of people can't speak at that point, but you can greet somebody joyfully, houses and siblings, but the same in our sample, we see very few angels. Pity and liked an angel. Well maybe I'll get an angel, like don't they sometimes your NDC friends? And we only

have two examples of dogs and cats. Really sorry about the dog and cat lovers mainly going to be humans who come to see you. So compared to NDEs, dead roads, his friends' spiritual beings appearing forty one percent of those so very similar transiting to a new realm. This is the next phase. This is enormously interesting. The work in Zeric on this is really important. They've just brought out a paper which shows that these are people who are dying of cancer in the last fortnight of their life.

Over fifty percent in fact, transit to the new realm. Well, you know what it's going to be, light, don't you? An area very like that the nd beautiful region where they meet other people, spiritual beings there to help them,

dead relatives. Some describe it as a waiting place. So we now have a match between the experience of the NDEs and as consciousness slowly slowly disappears, because it's only in the last few weeks before death, then you go into this other realm, you come back, go into the other realm, come back again, etc. Suddenly she seemed to stare intently at the window. She turned to me and said, please, Pauline, don't ever be afraid of dying. I've seen a beautiful

light and I was going towards it. I wanted to go into that light. It was so peaceful. I really had to fight to come back. Sadly, she died the next morning. I knew she had seen something that day which gave her comfort and peace when she knew she'd only have to live. So again, a very good match between the ND.

the age of eighty nine. From all the interviews I've heard, he was not afraid to die. In fact, he was a proponent that we all die consciously so we can experience, as he said, the fireworks. Let's continue with more stories from the deathbed and his views on consciousness living outside of the brain.

a very good match between the nd. There's the data the English prospective from the Dutch prospective running at about fifty percent of the carers had seen these experiences, so compared to the end where it's thirty eight percent of people have these experiences. Now the next thing is then you come up to death itself. Now, death is absolutely fascinating. It's not just a turning off. There are a whole

set of phenomena which you occur, mainly non local. The first st one is radiant light in the room of the dying light which is everywhere in the room. It can be specifically things, it can be spiritual globules of light which have seen in the room at that time. And of course the light with the dying is very like the light the nd deep knowledge, wisdom and love. If you are in it, that wisdom and love and knowledge can transform the person who's dying. And you talk

about transformation and transcendence. Here a couple of light stories. I took them because they're nice and ple ones. This is a chaplain. Sometimes I've seen the light which is in a corner like candlelight. It's a golden light. It's not electric light, and it's not one of the hospice lights just appears, sometimes goes when they die, they take their last breaths, everything settles down, the light goes out. Another one when her mother was dying, this amazing light

appeared in the room. The whole room was filled with this amazing light, and her mother died. So there is this phenomena of light which is part of dying. Now, I want to go onto the other thing, which happens at the time of death, and the evidence points to it all being within a few moments of death, because we've got a lot of accounts with times, and that

is deathbed coincidences, and they occur like this. You're in Florida and you have a son who's in the UK, and you pick up the fact that he's dying and there's a connection between the two of you. So what is this connection and how does it work? Well, it's fascinating. First of all, they're very common. That's sixty percent of carers had heard stories about it. In all the emails we've got, a large proportion were devoted to deathbed coincidences. From that, we can say a number of things. First

of all, they're driven by the person who's dying. They select who it's going to be. How do we know that If you have a broken couple, for example, where the man goes off somewhere and the woman doesn't care that he's gone, but he in fact still devoted to his wife and he dies, he will visit the wife, so it's driven by him. It's those people with strong emotional attachments. We've got a number of stories of people who said, my son wasn't there, that's why she came

to visit me when his mother died. So the deathbak coincitances are fascinating. The form the visit takes depends on the mental state of the person who's receiving the visit. If they're awake, it's a feeling, it's a compulsion that something has happened to this person. You have to garn ring them up, you have to find out what's happened. If they're asleep, it's quite different. It's narrative dream in which the dying come and they do two things. They first of all, come to be with the person. Then

they give them a message. The messages I'm okay, don't worry. And quite often the dream ends with them going into the light. So again similar sorts of things to the NDE. Now this is also a time of huge parapsychological activity. We've talked about the light, We've talked about the visits of the distance. But you get connections with clocks. We've got many clock stopping stories. Do you all know My grandfather's clock stopped dead, never to go again when the

old man died. And here's a nice story, because is it only mechanical clocks? They are the only ones that stopped? What about electric clocks? So I got you this story. My father died at three point fifteen am. At about eight thirty am, I went to tell my uncle Archie, who had been close to Dad. Noe. The emotional relationship is always an emotional relationship. His uncle Archie opened the door. It was clear he was distressed, and as I began to tell him, he interrupted me and said he already knew.

He said no one had telephoned him. So it's a bit of a deathbed coincidence here too. But told me to look at the clock on the mantelpiece that was stopped at three fifteen, as was indeed his own wrist, rocher's bedside clock, and all other clocks in the house. Was even an led display on the flashing three point fifteen. It's really good. So electronic clock stopped too. It's completely taken aback. But Artie seemed comfortable with the phenomenon, was

just concerned losing someone close to him. So we got lots and lots of clock stories. Got also a lot of animal stories, dogs which howl in different places and so on. So what I want you to think of it as is, dying is not just a simple turning off. There are all these parapsychological effects which occur at the end of life. And don't forget that we are, in fact in the transition to this other realm Okay, so what's the meaning? The cares are very clear, They're all

trons personal I just put into John Eccles. I mean he has to be aired, doesn't he, because of his dualistic stance. He puts it nicely. I maintained that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claims in promissory materialism to account eventually for all spiritual world in terms of the pattern of neuronal activity. I mean, it clearly has to be wrong. This belief must be classed with a superstition. I rather like that, But this

one I take much more seriously. Do you all know? Penfield, the neurosurgeon in Canada, spent his life with electrodes in the brain, taking out various bits of people's brain. This is his book, The Mystery of the Mind myself after professional lifetime spent in trying to discover how the brain accounts to the mind. It comes as a surprise now to discover, during this final examination of the evidence, that the dualist hypothesis separation of mind and brain seems the

more reasonable of the two possible explanations. Now, he's coming from a very wide base of cerebral function. Mind comes into action and goes out of action with the highest brain mechanisms. It's true, but the mind has energy. The form of that energy is different from that of neurinal potentials of travel the external pathways. So he argues for mind and brain being separate. You've probably seen this new

transmission theory by Lanza. He says that we carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells, meaning that when the shell comes off space and time, we still exist. It's a nice concept about the limitation of the body. The theory implies that death of consciousness simply does not exist. It only exists as a thought because people identify themselves with their body. And he is the guy who did a lot of the work on genetics, so he's got a very high scientific profile. So let's

summarize everything using the death data. How can we conceive the world. What sort of pattern would it have? Well, this is the pattern of the dying process as I see it. Premonitions, deathbed visions. You can negotiate with your visions. Do remember that when your aunt comes to tell you, probably your mum actually comes to tell you that she's going to come back and pick you up, you can

say not this week. You can't say because it's a great party in the hospice where you won't be taking part in this anyway, but you can say, because my son is coming, they wait for that. And we've got lovely accounts of negotiation with the deathbed visions. It brings hope and joy. Then you come to this new reality,

total lucidity I haven't talked about, although that's fascinating. And then you come to actual death itself, deathbed coincidences, and then all these parapsychological things like clocks, animals, light bells, And this is a fascinating one. That's shape seen leaving the body. They're very clear when people see them. They're described as whist bike or smoke, and sometimes they're more solid and they come out usually from the top of the head, sometimes from the chest. We've had one or

two that have come out of the feet. With them, there is a presence in the room as the shape is leaving. We're part of the five dimensional manifold. Why do I like that theory? Bernard Carr really likes this, the idea of the brain, which is the four dimensional world and the fifth dimension behind it, and he talks about Clusi cline and the fifth dimension. Why am I attracted to that. I'm attracted to it because of the idea of what people report when they're out of their

bodies during a cardiac arrest. They can remotely view so space is contained. They can in fact see all round objects, they can see the bottom, they can see the top, etc. So again it suggests a different form of reality at that time. I quite like the idea of a fifth dimension. We've got to have something like that which will explain the data. Five dimensions will explain that's noo and and

we find in dying. So you can, if you like, take the idea that you lose the limitation of the four dimensions and the fifth dimension is the one which comes to the four. David Lawton, who I do like he's worked a lot with near death experiences, argues for a five dimensional structure for NDEs and argues that death is simply the withdrawal of the four D part being the five D intact. So it's an interesting idea again. Or you can have consciousness part of a non local

informational field, no space and no time. And person who likes that is Stephen Schwartz.

Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain and you're listening to the words of the late and great doctor Peter Fenwick. Just a reminder of some of his book titles. One is called Past Lives, an investigation into reincarnation memories, also shining light on transcendence, an unconventional journey of a neuroscientist, The Hidden Door, Understanding and Controlling Dreams, The True Truth in the Light, an investigation of over three hundred near

death experiences, and the art of Dying. These stories of people being there to greet us when we migrate to the other side are so comforting to me, and I love thinking that we live now in a four dimensional universe, but there really is five dimensions, and when our bodies die, we get to tap into everything that exists. We do

live in an intelligent universe. To think that we are living and breathing with consciousness, just to add a little food and water and sunlight and exercise, and look at the great things that human beings have done over the course of the many years on this earth. With so much intelligence, why wouldn't there be an intelligence in dying. Let's continue with a few more words from doctor pa Fenwick.

in Neuroquontology. I don't know whether it makes a coherent story or not, but it's a model of non local consciousness with no space and no time, and the required features for that model is an intention or directed attention, emotional linking, terribly important transition of consciousness which you get, and an entrance into a newminal reality which you suddenly get in that as well.

People who have talked to about the life review sometimes they will say I had this fantastic life review, but when you question them on it, they no, it wasn't. It's just specific things which have come up. Other people

have a panoramic life review, and they really do. And as soon as you get that sort of experience, it raises questions about the nature of memory and whether memory is in fact all in the brain, or whether in fact you have to think in terms of external storage of the memory in some sort of way, particularly of course in the near death experience, when we arguing there

is some proper brain function anyway. But I haven't seen a full analysis done of the cardiac arrest ND life reviews that would be where we could start actually to understand these more So, I don't think the data is all there yet?

deeply chermatosed and then he suddenly alerts. The other point is that when they alert, it's usually just before death. It's called ternal lucidity. And so what happens is you go unconscious, then you alert, greet your relatives living, greet

your relatives dead, then fall back and die. Well, that's interesting enough, but they're much more interested to it, and that is that we've got accounts from people in nursing homes when the dying had profound Alzheimer's and haven't recognized their family, and yet when they come out of lucid interval or tone, luciviy or other, they in fact recognize

the family. The other thing that they do is their bodies are totally paralyzed from strokes, but yet they sit up and hold out hands which they haven't used before. So there are a lot of interesting scientific things about that. But as to measuring the actual level, no, we haven't really got far enough with that yet. But what I would like from you are a whole lot of high practitioners who are happy for us to examine them when

they die. So let's end with the great inventor Edison, just hours before his death, emerged from a coma, opened his eyes, looked upwards and said, it's very beautiful over there. Now we've got lots of those stories. We've also got stories in which the dying say, or the people who are next to the dying report that the dying say just before they die. Particularly the non believers that the last of life. I was quite wrong. It's quite different from what I thought. So you got a lot of

those stories. We've got a lot of stories too of people who don't know that a relative has died and the relative comes in the deathbed vision and they say to them they behave as you would do to a relative who you don't know has died. Hi, nice to see. What are you doing here? So you've got a number of those stories too, which again sort of goes in with these models which we're putting forward. And finally you all know this one. Steve Jobs said wow, wow, wow,

as he died, and so you should. If you're going into that reality, that's exactly what you'll do. It's very positive, very very of farming. So with thanks to my colleagues, don't forget I like stories, so we have a huge bank of stories. Matt, thanks very much.

Just before my mom died, she had Alzheimer's disease, and she had not spoken a word in five years and had to be turned in her bed. She suddenly turned on her own and looked up towards where the ceiling meets the wall and made the wow with her mouth. She didn't speak in words, but had a look of amazement and joy. It was really wonderful to see that happen. Another My eighty seven year old grandmother was speaking and laughing at the ceiling for three days. My grandfather said

thought she had lost her marbles. My aunt, which was her daughter, was the only one who believed my grandmother when she said, it's my mom and all the others they're telling me they're getting things ready for me. She then passed peacefully. Here's another. A few days before my father passed away, I had an unusually vivid dream. My father's deceased brother visited me. I was so happy to see my uncle. He put his arm around my shoulder and turned me where he showed me a bright, beautiful

tunnel of light. Then I saw my father walking into the tunnel. I looked at my uncle and he was smiling and so happy and comforting. My father passed away two days later. Another says, my grandma has never acted crazy in her life. She was very down to earth, and right before she fell asleep for the last time, she said that my grandpa had come to get her, and he told her it's time to go home and stop talking about being an old lady. Another says, my dad said he could see the light and feel the

love coming for him. He was lucid until the end. And another my mother was dying and my brother and sister were traveling across three states to get to the hospital. My sister got to the hospital and then my brother arrived. My mom had been sleeping all day, but then she sat up and said, good, you're all here. Then she smiled, laid her head back on the pillow, and died. Here's another. When my ninety three year old grandmother was dying, my mother visited her. Bertha said to my mom, Betty, you

should have been here. An amazing cat was here and looking at me. He was so beautiful. The next day she died. Then many years later I went to see my father in a nursing home. He said, you just missed the most amazing thing. A huge and beautiful cat was here and gazing at me. And two days later he died. Apparently, in my family you get to see the cat. And one more, my grandpa saw his brother who had passed away twenty years prior, which of course

made him so happy. From his side of the conversation, they were going fishing, which was their favorite activity when they were both alive. Grandpa died just a few days later. It's not easy for us human beings, is it. There's a lot of worry in our life, a lot of fear, there's guilt. What I recommend for all of us is spend time listening to these kinds of stories, reading good books, but most importantly, talking to our loved ones, keeping them

part of our lives and included in our lives. The day will come and we'll be able to see that fifth dimension and realize they've been a part of our lives all along. Slow down, talk to them and trust those loving feelings are coming from them. I want to remind you to come visit me at We Don'tdie dot com. Come to one of our free Sunday gatherings with medium demonstration included. Come about fifteen minutes early and you can say hello, I would love to meet you. I'm Sandra Champlain.

Thank you so much for listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal podcast Network.