"Matt and I went out to dinner with friends on June 29, 2011. The following day, June 30, I was feeling sick nearly all day, I thought maybe from food poisoning. By early evening, though I was feeling better, I was still weak and exhausted and went to bed early.
"At a point during my sleep, I was in one of my plane crash nightmares. As usual, I was completely aware of the fact that I was dreaming. This one was different, however. Before this incident, my vision of what was to happen had always appeared to me like a photograph that I was viewing as an outsider. That snapshot is what would appear on the news after the event. So it was all the more startling in my dream that night when I was on the plane that was destined to crash.
"Another element that set this nightmare apart from the others is that I found out the following day that the events had been happening as I was dreaming about them. This crash didn’t happen a day or two after my nightmare—it happened during the nightmare, which was unusually long. It just kept going on for far longer than I was comfortable. In the other nightmares, as soon as I saw whatever image depicted the given event, I was released to wake up by whatever force was holding me there. This however, was not a single image. It was a movie, and I was in it, bound to endure every minute until the plot ended. It was about to become very unpleasant.
"It was nighttime on the flight, dark and quiet, and many of the passengers were sleeping. I could hear some flight attendants speaking in a foreign language nearby in the galley. I looked at a paper napkin that was embossed with the name of a major foreign airline whose nationality matched the language the flight attendants were speaking.
"I was seated on the tray table (not a seat with a tray table—on the tray table itself) of a woman who was buckled into her seat. We were very close to each other, face to face. In the seat next to her was a little boy playing with an electronic toy.
"The young woman, who was remarkably pretty with shoulder-length dark hair, could see me and was talking to me. She told me her name was Monique Frankel. It was as if we were at some kind of social function, introducing ourselves and making small talk.
"She introduced me to her son Thomas and told me that he was seven years old. Thomas spoke to me, too, but not in English. Monique was speaking to me in accented English. I don't remember asking her anything. I just remember her telling me things about herself and her family. She told me that she also had a daughter, and that her daughter was with her husband on a different flight because they thought it was a bad idea to all fly together. I somehow knew that this was a flight from Buenos Aires to Barcelona, and that they were going home from vacation.
"Without warning or a hint of turbulence, the plane banked sharply to the left. It began rocking violently back and forth, and I was being thrust toward Monique’s seat as if the nose of the plane were up. There was a terrible sensation of falling. People were now awake and screaming. Monique had a panicked look in her eyes. She and I both knew that I could leave the plane before it crashed. All I had to do was open my eyes and the nightmare would end. But I could not open them. Monique had grabbed on to my forearms and was screaming in my face. Screaming, in a panicked and primal way. Everyone else on the plane was screaming, too, and the passenger cabin was bedlam. Amid all the noise, items were flying through the cabin, including people who had not been belted into their seats. At the top of her lungs, Monique was pleading with me to take Thomas with me when I left the plane. She was begging, wailing, “I know you can leave! Take Thomas! His father is George Frankel! Find him and get Thomas to him! Take Thomas! Please!”
"I knew I couldn’t take Thomas or anyone else off that plane with me. I also knew opening my eyes and waking up were becoming more and more urgent. But as long as Monique had a grip on my arms, I was stuck on that plane. Finally, mercifully, there was a jolt, and she let go. My eyes ripped open, and I was safe in my bed. Crying, gasping, but safe. Immediately I sent myself an email with the details of what had just happened.
"The email I sent myself was time-stamped at 11:38 p.m., and the plane crashed at 4:40 a.m. in a time zone that was five hours ahead of mine. I was dreaming about the crash as it was happening. Matt was surprised when I showed him the email, particularly because it had people’s names in it. So far, that has been the only time I have received such detailed information.
"As it was a jumbo jet crash with hundreds of people on board, no survivors, the tragedy was major news all over the world. Three days after the crash, the passenger manifest was printed in the local newspaper, along with the ages and nationalities of everyone on board. There I saw it:
"Monique Frankel, age 38,
Netherlands
Thomas Frankel, age 7, Netherlands, son of Monique Frankel
"I did a little research over the next few weeks and found a human interest piece from a Dutch newspaper. The article was about victims of the plane crash, and it highlighted Monique and Thomas. It said that Monique’s husband George and their daughter had been on another flight. They had interviewed George, who explained that the family never flew together in case something like this were to happen, just as Monique had explained it to me on the doomed plane. The article also had photos of the family from their recent vacation in Buenos Aires. The photos clearly depicted the woman and child whom I had met in my dream. Seeing the photos took my breath away.
"Years later, as Jeff Kripal and I were working on Changed in a Flash, I decided to try to find George Frankel. I wanted this story to be in the book, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to upset anyone by publishing it. After all, he and his daughter are also victims.
"I found George on Facebook. He was about to get remarried and looked very happy. His daughter is beautiful, and she seemed happy and loved. I did not disturb his contentment by contacting him. I figured it was best to just let him move forward with his life. For that reason, Jeff and I did not put this story in the book.
"So, why am I telling it now?
"Shortly after finding George on Facebook, I was fortunate to be invited to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. It was there that I was introduced to Whitley Strieber. Whitley has written numerous books and hosts several podcasts, my favorite being Dreamland, on the topic of UFOs and similar phenomena. He and I became friends while we were at Esalen, and I told him about this particular nightmare because it upset me more than any of the others. Whitley responded with something that changed my entire attitude toward how I can approach nightmares such as this one.
"Whitley said, 'Elizabeth, you told me you learned in your NDE that time is simultaneous, right?'
“'Yes. Time is not linear,' I replied.
“'Well,' Whitley said, 'If that is the case, then that plane crash happened, but it will happen again, and again. Right?'
“'Yes. That’s awful. So?' I asked.
“'So, learn how to go back there, he suggested. 'Go there again, and perhaps you can offer some comfort to Monique. Comfort her with the knowledge that death is not the end of her life. Give her comfort that some part of her lives on.'
"It was like a light bulb going on. Of course, Whitley is correct. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to get back to that crash. But if I could, it might possibly bring some reassurance to Monique, or other such people I might meet in similar future encounters.
"A mom to two young boys when all this started, I was busy all day every day. I didn’t approach any of this curious change as some kind of scientific experiment or academic case study. It was not intellectual for me, but rather emotional, and the emotion I most felt was anger. I had no desire to become some radio receiver to the cosmos. I didn’t want the moral burden of any of this. But the premonitions continued to plague me, every one of them made of the same stuff—that undeniable knowledge that these tragedies were perfectly true. I had no idea what to do with this unsolicited information. I was frustrated, angry, and determined to get answers. And while I have learned a great deal since these visions of the future started, there is still so much I don’t understand.
"It has never stopped. Thirty-three years after the lightning strike, these incidents continue, occasionally even when I am wide awake. One day in February of 2003, Matt and I were driving to meet some friends for dinner. I turned to him, grabbed his arm, and said: 'Earthquake, an area in western China.' That was on a Sunday evening in Houston. In the early morning hours on Monday, the earthquake hit China. It happened too late for the Monday papers in the United States and was in too distant a rural area to attract media attention, at least as far as we knew. But in the Tuesday paper, there was a brief on the international page about a severe earthquake that had taken place in western China at approximately the same time that I had grabbed Matt’s arm and told him it was happening.
Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.
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