A spirit lives in our house: Krohn excerpt #14

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: There is a spirit who lives in my house. I can sense her, and sometimes I see her. She hovers on the second floor, floating from room to room. She does not interact with us or even seem to notice us, nor does she intentionally make herself known in any way. Our dog McKinley used to sense her presence and bark as she looked up toward our second floor. Several times I heard her bark when I was in another room. I’d come into the den that opens up to the second floor to find McKinley barking at the figure that I could see, as well.

I kept the information about the floating woman to myself until Andy was in high school. He came downstairs one morning to ask if I had been upstairs, as he thought he had seen, or sensed, someone in his bedroom. And then he thought he may have sensed a woman standing behind him as he was looking into his bathroom mirror. When I asked him to describe what he had seen, he hemmed and hawed and then said only half-jokingly, “I may have imagined the whole thing. Maybe it was a ghost.”

He said that the apparition was not terribly frightening to him. He sensed no ill will from it. He told me it was a young woman and proceeded to describe her clothing, exactly as I had seen it. Andy was somewhat amused that, in addition to his mom, only he and our dog McKinley had seen the woman. If he ever saw her again, he never spoke about it.

Eventually, I decided to tell Matt about our additional resident. He has never seen her but was very entertained whenever the dog or I did. Before she passed away in 2015, McKinley used to sit at my feet when Matt and I would watch television at night. Occasionally, something would catch my eye, and McKinley and I would look upstairs at the open balcony at the same moment. McKinley would whimper or bark, clearly seeing the apparition, just as I did. McKinley would not look away until the woman had floated out of our view.

To my knowledge, the only other person who has seen the spirit was a friend of Mallory’s. When Mallory was fourteen or fifteen, she had a group of five or six friends over to our house one Saturday night. They were all crammed together on our couch watching a movie when suddenly one of the teenage boys screamed, “What is that!?” He was looking upstairs at the balcony, pointing and screaming. None of the other kids saw anything. He was truly terrified, though, as evidenced by the fact that he wet his pants and went running and shrieking from our house. Although he and Mallory remained friends, he would never set foot in our home again. It was after that episode that I decided to fill Mallory and Jeremy in on the fact that someone, or something, was living upstairs with them. They were fine with it, though, to my knowledge, they have never seen her.

My sense of the spirit upstairs is that she is seeking something. She reminds me of myself just after I was struck by lightning, when I was “hovering” until Jeremy and Andy were safely inside the synagogue. My hovering, I believe, ceased when I understood that I was dead and knew that my children were safe and in the hands of people who loved them. Knowing that, I could get on with being dead, and that’s when I went to the Garden. Because of the way she acts, I sense that she is caught somewhere between realms. Her marginal status is what may explain her movement from place to place. I think it is also why she does not appear to direct her movements with any purpose. She doesn’t appear to see us, nor does she attempt to interact with our household in any way.

I think it is significant that the woman never comes downstairs. We built our current house in 2003, higher off the ground than our previous house that sat in the same spot in order to now be up out of the flood zone that too frequently ravages Houston neighborhoods. Before the new house was built, we never sensed or saw any apparitions. Perhaps the woman is a leftover remnant of energy, a scrap of charged matter, the residue of some memory encoded into the space where the upper part of our house now sits. I don’t know.

 

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.

Phone call from the dead: Krohn excerpt #13

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: Many strange things have happened to me since my near-death experience. One of the earliest and strangest took place in the spring of 1990, a year and a half after the lightning strike.

I had recently found out I was pregnant with my daughter. Barry and I were sound asleep in bed, and I received a stunningly obvious after-death communication.

"It was about 3:30 a.m. when the phone on my side of the bed rang. This was back when people only had land lines plugged into the wall. I think we are all conditioned to expect the worst when the phone rings in the middle of the night. It is usually news that is urgent, important, and bad. No one calls at 3:30 a.m. to give you good news.

I love my sleep, and at the beginning of my third pregnancy, after chasing two active boys around every day, I relished it. So I didn’t really wake up when the phone rang on my side of the bed. It was Barry’s shaking me and telling me to get the phone that finally roused me out of a deep slumber. I hesitated to answer because I feared it would be something terrible. That is not exactly how it played out, though. My hesitant “hello” into the phone was answered with the soft French accented voice of my dead grandfather. “Hello, darling,” he said, using the affectionate nickname he’d always called me in his life but that I hadn’t heard in far too long.

Stunned, I asked why he was calling me. Barry, who was now wide awake, kept asking who it was. I shushed him. I didn’t want to give Barry any indication of who I was on the phone with, as I knew it wouldn’t sit well with him. I asked my grandfather where he was. The conversation went something like this:

“You know where I am. You’ve been here and seen it.”

“But why are you calling me?” I asked.

“I need you to tell your mother something for me.”

”Then why are you calling me? Why not just call her? Umm, I can give you her number if you need it.”

“I’ve tried contacting her, but she can’t hear me. But since you were struck by the lightning, you can. Contacting you takes a terrific amount of energy, and I don’t have long to talk. There is something that I want you to tell her for me.”

“Of course I’ll tell her.”

He then relayed what was to me a mundane bit of family information that he felt my mom needed to know.

By now, Barry and I were both sitting straight up in bed, wide-awake. Barry was still pestering me to tell him who was on the phone. I was still ignoring him.

“Did Grandma find you?” I asked my grandfather.

“Who the hell are you talking to?” Barry demanded. I ignored him.

Grandpa answered: “Yes. She is fine. We are together. All is well. She is whole again.”

I was so happy to hear this. Grandma had had dementia when she died, and the woman she had once been had gotten lost. At the end, her life was a ride on a bridge that crumbled as she crossed. She couldn’t look back and see her history. So hearing that she and my beloved grandfather were together and her memories were intact was healing for me.

“I have to tell you something,” I said.

“I already know. You’re pregnant. And it’s a girl, just as you were told it would be.” His voice became weaker, fainter.

“I can’t hear you well,” I said.

“I have to go. This is taking a terrific amount of energy. I can’t do this often, but I will call you again. Please remember to call your mother and tell her what I said.”

“I will, but please don’t hang up,” I pleaded.

“I will talk to you again. I just can’t do it right now. You need to remember—remember when you were here, the feeling of unconditional love. Never forget that.” This was the message, of course, that I had also been told when I was in the Garden. I begged him not to go.

“Remember the unconditional love. You will have this feeling again soon.” And with that, the connection faded away.

As I reluctantly, tearfully hung up the phone, our bedroom immediately filled with an odorless vapor, as if we were in a dense cloud. In any other situation, of course, if our bedroom filled up with smoke, both of us would be running to get the boys and get out of the house. But the situation was anything but normal. Inexplicably, while we were both sitting in this thick mist, or whatever it was, neither of us acted in fear. And neither of us spoke.

At the far end of the long hallway that extended toward the children’s bedrooms from ours, I saw a bright red light shining through the fog. Like a laser pointer, it pierced through the mist. When I saw that light, I was immediately overcome with the same palpable sense of unconditional love I had experienced in the Garden and had been told moments before to never forget. This must be what he meant when he said “You will have this feeling again soon.” Somehow, the light carried the love. 

 

Suddenly, the light and fog vanished in an instant. It was all just gone, as if nothing had happened.

Barry turned to me and now calmly asked who had called. “My grandfather.” I replied.

“Which one?” he asked.

I told him. I then asked him, “Did you see anything?” He replied: “What smoke? I’m going to sleep.”

He had seen what I had seen but would not talk about it.

After that exchange in 1990, Barry and I never talked about it again until 2011, almost twenty-one years after it happened. By then, we had divorced, had both remarried, and had traveled independently to Jerusalem to attend the rabbinical ordination of our son Andy. By this time, I had begun to tell my now adult children about some of the extraordinary things that were routinely happening to me. Andy in particular has always taken a very special interest in my experiences. Jeremy and my daughter Mallory have as well, but I often wonder if Andy’s proximity to me at the time of the strike somehow affected him spiritually. He grew up to become an Orthodox rabbi.

On the night of his rabbinic ordination, at a dinner celebration in his honor, Andy casually asked Barry if he remembered the night when I was pregnant with Mallory and the phone had rung. My ears perked up and tuned into their conversation across the dinner table.

“You mean the call from her grandfather? Yes, I remember.”

Of all the cynics and doubters of my experiences whom I have encountered through the years, none have matched Barry. This was especially true during our bitterly contested, quite ugly divorce. As Andy asked him about the call, I listened, slack jawed, as Barry recounted it just as it had happened, having remembered all the details as if it were yesterday. Like so many others, he hesitates to make the jump to any conclusion about whether or not I was really talking to my deceased grandfather. But the fact that Barry admits to having heard the phone ring, hearing my half of the conversation, and seeing the smoke and its instantaneous disappearance is enough for me.

I called my mom the day after the phone call in 1990 to share that bit of family information that my grandfather had told me. She asked me how I knew that and I recounted my experience of the night before. Our short conversation ended with Mom in tears. “I know he has tried to talk to me. I try so hard to hear him, and I just can’t.”

I find it puzzling how different we all are. On one side is Barry, who actually witnessed this communion across two worlds and yet cannot allow himself to fully believe what I suspect he knows to be true. On the other is my mom, who fully believes in these exchanges between the two realms but cannot bring the experience upon herself, no matter how much she may want to do so. I should add here that, as time has marched on and life has dealt Barry some pretty swift blows, he has become more spiritual and less cynical in recent years.

 

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.

Radio receiver to the cosmos: Krohn except #12

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: "One particular precognitive plane crash nightmare is different from my usual ones. I have never published this story because I feel it infringes on the privacy of those involved. For that reason, in the following recounting of this nightmare, I have changed identifying information, such as names, dates, physical characteristics, and locations, to protect the identities of the victims’ family members.

"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.

Dreams of airplane crashes: Krohn excerpt #11

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: The first plane crash nightmare I had was on July 16, 1996, about eight years after my near-death experience. It rocked me badly. In the nightmare I could see “WA” on the wreckage and thought it was a World Airways flight. I knew there were 230 people on board, none of whom survived. I knew it crashed in water, and I knew it was flight number 800. I called my mom and told her about my nightmare on the morning of July 17, 1996. The next morning, July 18, 1996, Mom called me to tell me to turn on the news, quickly. There it was: TWA Flight 800 had crashed in the Atlantic Ocean with 230 people on board. No survivors.  This particular nightmare really upset me because it was eerily accurate down to so many specific details.

I shared the information with Barry because I was so shaken, even though I knew it would be more than he could handle. He moved out of the house within ten days. Our divorce was final a year later. This particular nightmare did not cause the demise of our marriage, but it sure didn’t help. We divorced in 1997, almost nine years after my NDE.

I had not asked for any of this. The depth of my discomfort with this new precognitive ability cannot be overstated. The internet was not nearly as accessible as it is today, and I didn’t really have a good way to research what was happening to me. Local libraries were very limited in their material on subjects I needed to research, and with three young children at home, I had no time for research, anyway. The ingrained skeptic in me kept trying to diminish what I knew was actually happening, and the internal battle was fierce. I was struggling daily to remind myself that I was sane and that those nightmares were accurate.

I needed two things. I needed an answer to the lingering question of why this was happening to me, and I needed a way to document the veracity (or inaccuracy) of my dreams. Mostly, this was for my own sake—so I would have proof of my sanity to counter the voice of my old inner skeptic. It was not until 2008 that it dawned on me to email brief recounts of the nightmares to myself right after they occurred so that they were date and time stamped. I never imagined that anyone else would look at these. I wrote the emails to convince myself that my mental faculties were intact.

One of the earliest nightmare-documenting emails was in January 2009. My second husband Matt and I were vacationing in Jerusalem. We had spent the morning of January 15 walking up and down the cobbled streets of the Old City. I remember eating lunch that day in a restaurant right across the street from our hotel just off Ben Yehuda Street. There was a palpable energy I felt during lunch that I had come to recognize was a precursor to my precognitive nightmares.

After our lunch, we decided to go back to our hotel and take a nap. Matt immediately fell asleep. I was also tired, but the real reason I had wanted to go back to the hotel was that I felt a precognition might be coming on. I wanted to be near our laptop in case I was right. I stretched out on the bed and dozed off. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes before I was awake again and typing myself an email describing the vision I had just had. Awoken by the tapping on my keyboard, Matt asked me what I was doing. I explained that I had had a plane crash nightmare and emailed myself about it.

“OK. What did you see?” Matt asked.

“It’s really weird,” I said. “I saw this plane, and it was sitting, kind of floating, on water, and there were people standing on the wings of the plane.”

“The physics of that are impossible,” Matt assured me. “Planes float like a rock. Don’t worry about it, it can’t happen. I’m going back to sleep.” Matt rolled over and, true to his word, fell back asleep immediately.

I knew the scene I had envisioned was more than implausible...it was far-fetched. Yet, my inner conviction of the reality of this event carried more weight in my mind than my rational understanding and honest doubts. At 2:57 p.m. Israel Standard Time in Jerusalem, which was 7:57 a.m. Eastern Standard Time in New York, I sent myself the following email:

Mid-size commercial passenger jet (80-150 people) crashes in NYC. Maybe in river. Not Continental Airlines. Not American Airlines. It is an American carrier like Southwest or US Airways.

The following morning, Matt was facing the TV while we were eating breakfast at our hotel. “Oh my God!” he shouted. “Look!” I turned and saw my vision of the day before captured for the world to see: an airplane bobbing on the Hudson River, with people standing on the plane’s wings waiting to be rescued.

At 3:31 p.m. New York time, US Airways Flight 1549 piloted by Captain “Sully” Sullenberger had landed on the Hudson River after plowing into a flock of geese shortly after takeoff. This was about seven and a half hours after I sent myself the email. Miraculously, there were no fatalities among the 155 people onboard.

 

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.  

Dreams of a stranger's death: Krohn excerpt #10

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: "One of the first things that struck me within the near-death experience itself was the shift from black and white to an otherworldly vision of brilliant, vibrant, living colors. This was not just a visual change; it was also a symbolic one. The Garden was suffused with astonishing light and color. It was alive, and such a contrast to the grays and grease of the parking lot I had just seen.

"The living colors were just the beginning. The new convictions and new capacities I had acquired in the Garden began to show themselves in other ways, ways that frankly shocked me. Indeed, it was so strange at first that I honestly believed I was losing my mind.

 

"Three months after my near-death experience, I had a dream that a woman whom I knew of, but had never personally met, had just died. I simply knew that this soul had transitioned out of this world and into the next. I awoke with a single question for which I had no answer. I had no connection to this person. 'Why tell me?' I asked the Universe. The answer came quickly. The point of knowing was not the content of the knowledge. The point of knowing was to show me that I could know. But there was more. The point of knowing was also to show me that I could know such things before they happened. My engrained stubborn skepticism forced the Universe to amplify its efforts to see to it that I believed in my new abilities and remembered the lessons of the Garden.

 

"The morning after the dream, I had to find out if it was accurate. A strong feeling led me for some unknown reason to go see a pharmacist acquaintance where he worked. I just knew that he was connected to the woman from my dream. I drove over to the pharmacy but hesitated before I went in. I was torn. I wanted my precognition to be accurate because I wanted to prove to myself that I actually had this ability. Yet I also wanted it to be a fluke; I wanted some way to justify going back to my much simpler existence. I wanted to pretend that nothing had really happened and that I was the same person I had always been.

 

"I walked up to the pharmacy counter where this acquaintance was filling a prescription. He looked up and, after a few brief pleasantries, told me that a longtime customer of his had died early that morning. He always cared about his customers and took it to heart if anything happened to them. I heard the emotion in his voice as he spoke. I was deeply shaken, too, if for different reasons. I expressed my sympathies and rushed back to my car. Somehow I had been shown knowledge of this woman’s passing that turned out to be true, and this despite the fact that I had never even met her. I was not just confused, I was frightened.

 

"The dream of the woman’s passing was just the beginning. My burned feet had kept me in bed for long spells over the previous few months, but they were now healed, and I was able to get around. I had slept a lot. My sleeping had been filled with dreams and nightmares, some of which I remembered when I awoke. This already was a bit strange because, up until this point in my life, I had never had any great ability to recall a dream, even if I had just awakened from it. I would wake up, and the dream would slip away like sand through my fingers. Now, suddenly, I could remember some of them.

 

"At this early stage in my new life, it had not yet occurred to me to document the timing of my dreams or the incidences they appeared to relay. Occasionally, I would tell Barry or my mom about them when I had these dreams or nightmares. It made Barry uncomfortable to hear the tales of my nightmares that appeared to predict tragic events, so I didn’t tell him about all of them. My mom, on the other hand, was interested, and we would discuss it. It was after my first plane crash nightmare that I realized I needed to find some way to document these precognitions. And yet I still didn’t know how to do that."

 

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.

Seeing visions and auras: Krohn excerpt #9

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: "I had just had two traumas befall me. The first was the actual lightning strike itself, a physical trauma to my body that came with the bonus of spending time in the Garden at the side of God. The second trauma was finding myself back in my body with knowledge and insight that made me a woman whom neither I nor my family knew any longer.

The experience of being struck by lightning and the immediate effects that it had on me both in the Garden and afterwards—the differences in perceiving color and sound, the new knowledge, and the new understanding of time—were just precursors of the ways in which I was about to change. Something in me had opened. I now thought differently. I was much more comfortable now with ambiguity and complexity, less infatuated with black-and-white judging. It was clear to me that the definite separations and the clear either-or thinking that had defined so much of my life were simply not the way things really are. I had not been living in the actual world prior to my NDE. I had been living in an illusory world of my own judgments and learned responses. I had been wrong, and I felt no shame in admitting that to myself throughout the near- death experience, or since.

Shortly after my NDE, I began being bombarded with new abilities that varied in intensity. The one thing they all had in common was how foreign and new they were to me. I had no prior conception of precognition or reincarnation. I don’t remember having ever even thought about those topics. However, since my NDE, I found that I would sometimes dream about events before they happened. I would have precognitive nightmares about plane crashes or earthquakes. I received a phone call from a dead person. I became aware of a spirit living in my house. I realized that a necklace I owned was haunted. I could see auras around people, plants, and animals. I had all sorts of effects on anything electrical. And I developed something called synesthesia.

Who exactly had I become?

 

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.

Back but no longer me: Krohn excerpt #8

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: "I woke up in the rain on the wet asphalt of the synagogue parking lot. I gasped for air. (How long had I gone without it?) It filled my lungs and revived every cell in my body, though “revive” is sort of a funny word for it, because I felt groggy and was in pain. I was badly burned, terribly sore from hitting the concrete, and my left arm and hand were immobile—frozen, paralyzed into the same posture and grip as when I had been holding the umbrella. 

"My body had not moved at all from the position it was in when I was struck and fell into a heap on the pavement. My once beautiful new suit, enjoyed in its glory for barely a few fateful moments, was now permanently gray, and the soles of my beloved new pumps, still on my feet, were gone. They had taken the force of the electrical current as it grounded out through me and then through them.

"As I opened my eyes, I saw people moving toward me from the synagogue. Initially, I was confused as it dawned on me that while I had been somewhere else for what I experienced as two weeks, here on the parking lot pavement it was likely not more than a couple of minutes. I couldn’t understand how I had received so much information and had been so completely transformed in such a short time. It was jarring and bewildering.

"Serendipitously, one of the many physicians at services that night had extensive experience treating victims of lightning strikes and electrocution. He was a white-water rafter hobbyist and had helped several people who had been struck by lightning while rafting. Apparently, this is not an uncommon experience for white-water rafters. And, it is not uncommon for the Universe to provide exactly the person you need, with exactly the skills you need that person to have, exactly where and when your need arises.

"Doctors concluded that the relatively modest injuries from my lightning encounter were probably due to how I was struck and the nature of lightning itself. Lightning transmits its force downward, as it seeks the earth to ground out. From the top of my umbrella, the electricity flowed through the frame of the umbrella to the place on the metal shaft above the wooden handle where my wedding ring had been in contact with it. Had the lightning hit directly on my body, say, on my head, or if more of my hand had been in direct contact with the metal of the umbrella when it took the jolt, my experience would likely have been a permanent death experience rather than a near-death experience.

"When I awoke, it was still raining, but not storming as it had been minutes earlier. I have vague memories of being helped into the synagogue and onto the couch in the rabbi’s study. I was in and out of awareness, and really very tired. Several people were there, including the doctor who was a specialist in electrocution. I recall him telling me repeatedly to open my eyes. I was able to open them, but I could keep them open for only a few seconds, maybe up to a minute at a time. I was so tired, exhausted really. After examining me, the doctor concluded that I had a mild lightning injury, an MLI. He felt that I didn’t need to be hospitalized at that point.

"The doctor listened to my heart with his stethoscope and said it sounded fine. I was concerned that I couldn’t move my left arm and hand, but he explained that I had keraunoparalysis (lightning paralysis) that would be temporary. He said I would be able to move my hand and arm when the paralysis wore off in several hours. The paralysis lasted for about six hours before it subsided. He also encouraged me to have the burns on my feet and left hand checked and treated the next day. He explained that I’d have to stay off my feet, which meant bed rest, until the burns on my feet healed enough to be able to get around.

"So, I was back to my world. But I was soon to discover that I was no longer me."

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.