Touching Heaven: True stories of spiritual experiences. Jacky Newcomb

body and moving into their new plane. The fine fabric of the spirit is (usually) not visible to the human eye, although we often experience their presence.

      The spirit seems to be able to manipulate minor things in the world around us: flickering lights, moving things around, bringing scents and small touches. They can interact with us a little, but I imagine it’s a frustrating exercise. Imagine putting your arms around someone who can’t feel your touch. Imagine speaking to someone who can’t hear your words … This is where a dream visit is so helpful. When our own bodies are in an altered state of consciousness (for example, dreaming, meditating, unconscious …), contact can be made more easily between the spirit and our own soul. Once our daily awareness is out of the way it makes it easier for spirits to reach us and communicate. These afterlife interactions bring us a wealth of experience and knowledge about what it’s like in the heaven side of life. In this instance the aunt was able to share the small glimpse of it that she’d seen during her dream-visitation contact. In this illustration she was able to see the beautiful light, which is common in many heavenly encounters, and the vibrant and unusual colours.

      Heidi’s aunt is not the only one, though. Natisha also saw colours during a near-death experience. She told me that when she was twenty-one she had a major car accident; it was, in her own words, very nasty. It was the most traumatic event of her life, but she always maintained a positive attitude. The consequences of the accident were that she had been left with internal bleeding, punctured and collapsed lungs and much more. The doctors had called Natisha’s parents to tell them of the accident and had warned them that she was not expected to survive the night. I can’t imagine a more shocking thing for a loving parent to hear than that their child is about to die.

      That was twenty-five years ago and I’m pleased to say that Natisha is still here. The experience, though, has never been forgotten. At the time of the accident doctors put her in an induced coma and she lay in the intensive-care unit for a long time. Even though she was paralysed and could not move, she felt her arms reaching out to touch her parents. In some way she connected with the warmth of their hands and recalls that they were touching her back in this altered state of consciousness. Although in this case Natisha didn’t die, she was unable to open her eyes because of the coma, and yet she was still aware of everything that was going on around her. She recalls hearing the nurses and doctors talking to each other around the bed – they were discussing her and her case.

      One night, when Natisha’s family was by her side, she remembers trying to explain to her mum about all the rich, pretty colours she could see; it was, she says, as if she was yelling the information. Yet at the same time she was still in the coma. She wanted her mum to experience it too, to see what she could see. She recalls a stream of brightly enhanced lines towering above her, and when she reached an arm out to grab them, they began to jump around. (People have spoken to me about seeing these same lines during meditation experiences; they describe it as a holographic grid.)

      ‘What happened next was amazing,’ she told me. ‘I could feel myself turning my head to the left and all of a sudden four angels with bright-white feathered wings just floated by my bedside.’ Natisha turned her head to the other side and four more beautiful and awe-inspiring angels floated towards her. They were all smiling and had their hands out in greeting. At this point she told me that she felt like she was in a sauna; the room became very warm and she was overwhelmed with a feeling of love and purity.

      Her grandmother had died six years earlier and Natisha told me that they’d been very close. It was at this point that she looked up and saw her grandma standing at the foot of the bed. The woman spoke and said, ‘You are all right. It is not your time yet; go back.’

      Natisha felt confused. But her grandma wasn’t there to take her to heaven as she’d first thought. Natisha explained that she was more than willing to go, but then the woman disappeared and the angels floated away from her.

      Next, a movie screen appeared. It had pictures of a secluded beach containing many large boulders and rocks, both big and small. Natisha was confused. What did it mean? Was her grandmother trying to tell her she had a long, rocky recovery ahead? Twenty years later, and Natisha has been with her partner for eleven years. That exact beach is right down the end of the street where they live, just one minute away. It was almost as if she had been given a glimpse of the future, even though at the time she didn’t understand. All these years later, it proves to her that the vision she had when she was in a coma was not a random, meaningless dream. Her grandma is still around and continues to make appearances from time to time. Natisha says she feels very blessed indeed.

      This is another dream experience from Heidi, whom I spoke about earlier. She confided that her mother had been diagnosed with cancer back in 2009 and was getting sicker by the day. She felt so helpless watching the woman who gave birth to her slip away a little more each day. Heidi had been caring for her when, one night, she had an unusual dream. Her husband, their two boys, herself and her mother were all standing on a sort of dock or bridge, staring at a huge wall. The wall had tons of people trying to climb it and get over the top, Heidi recalls. Then she was aware of helping her mother to climb, eventually getting her to the top and over to the other side to be with the other people.