Dreams of the deceased: Rawlette excerpt #7

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — Dreams are a very common means by which people believe themselves to have contact with their departed loved ones. The wishful thinking hypothesis can be hard to dismiss with regard to most dreams, but some do contain elements that can be independently verified, as we are about to see.

I’ll first point out that many of those who believe they’ve had contact with their deceased loved ones in dreams remember these encounters as being much more vivid than an ordinary dream, to the point where they often don’t think they should be called “dreams” at all. “I was asleep,” says one such experiencer, “but I was not dreaming.” This man says he encountered his deceased daughter in a place “beyond” dreaming and that leaving it felt like the opposite of waking from a dream. The realm where they met “was like being in the middle of eternity.” This feeling of a hyper-real dream is not in itself proof of anything, but it is one small piece of evidence that the process that creates these dreams of after-death contact may not be entirely the same as the process that creates our normal experiences during sleep.

As with apparitions, stronger evidence for survival is offered by dreams that happen before the death is known, provide information the dreamer wouldn’t otherwise have had, and/or happen to more than one person at a time. Let’s look at some examples that fit both of these last two categories.

A month or two after his father’s death, Robert Waggoner had multiple dreams in which his father was showing him a suit in his (the father’s) closet, apparently wanting Robert to get something important out of the pocket. Waggoner didn’t want to bother his mourning mother about the matter, but when he heard from his niece that she had also had a dream about his father wanting her to get something out of the closet, he decided to investigate. Even though much of his father’s clothing had already been donated to charity, there were one or two suits left, and in one of their pockets was discovered a whole set of cherished family photos.

In a case collected by Dianne Arcangel, two people who had never met both had repeated dreams of the same deceased person, a man named Murphy who had owned a vacuum cleaner shop. He had been a mentor to one of them and a father or stepfather to the other. Both of them described the same setting in their repeated dreams: a house in oddly vivid/fluorescent colors with a picket fence and a sign in the yard that read, “At Peace with Jesus.” Furthermore, they both saw Murphy standing on the sidewalk with the sign to his left. The dreamer who’d been mentored by Murphy, a man by the name of Charles Vance, says that Murphy repeatedly asked him to tell his widow to look at a specific location in their house—“in the hall, at the dead end, just south of the bedroom to the right of the light socket”—because he’d left something inside the wall there. When Vance finally got up the courage to share this message with Murphy’s widow, she opened the wall in that location and discovered a stash of thousands of dollars that no one knew Murphy had ever had. Besides being a tandem dream that provides new information, this dream also comes to a bystander, someone who was not a family member of the deceased and was not the primary intended recipient of the information communicated.

There are even tandem dreams that demonstrate some level of interactivity and the evolution of the deceased’s consciousness through time. In another case collected by Arcangel, the deceased demonstrated evolution of consciousness by the adoption of a new strategy in pursuit of his goal. A woman named Debra dreamed of her deceased stepfather coming to say goodbye. When she told her mom about the dream, her mom “became very pale, saying, ‘I dreamed about him too, but I told him I was afraid. I said, ‘Go tell Debbie.’”

Interactivity and the adoption of a new strategy by the deceased is also evident in the following case collected by David Ryback and described in his book Dreams That Come True. A single mother and her two children (one of whom was Ryback’s informant for this case) were all ill and needed the help of the mother’s parents to move to a warmer climate. However, the mother and her father were in one of their frequent periods of not speaking to each other, and so she refused to ask him for help. Then one night she dreamt that her deceased grandmother came to her door and said, “Bill [the father] will help, if you just let him know. Call him.” The young woman refused, insisting her father would have to make the first move. She woke up thinking how weird it was that her grandmother had referred to her dad as “Bill” instead of “Wilbur,” the name she’d always called him while she was alive.

A couple days later, she got a letter from her dad, asking her to call. They patched up their relationship, and both the woman’s parents came to help her move. On the road to their new home, she asked her mom whether her grandmother had ever used the name “Bill” to refer to her father and learned that she had started calling him this about three months before she died. The young woman then decided to tell her mother about her dream. When she did, she discovered that, on the same night, her father had also had a dream visit from her grandmother, where she told him it was urgent he contact his daughter and said it was up to him to make the first move, because his daughter wouldn’t do it. That’s when he got up to write the letter his daughter soon received.

One final point with regard to dreams: as with living people who remember appearing to others during out-of-body experiences, there are living people who remember appearing to others in dreams and whose appearances have been confirmed by the dreamers in question. For example, dream researcher Fariba Bogzaran reports that she intentionally set out to dream of visiting an old friend who lived in another country and whom she hadn’t seen in almost 20 years. She succeeded in dreaming about the old neighborhood where they’d grown up together, and then she decided to try making her way to her friend’s new house, which she’d never visited in waking life. “I find the street where she lives and walk towards her house,” says Bogazaran. “The color of the door is pale blue. I ring the bell and she opens the door. I am overjoyed to see her. We cry and hug each other with overwhelming emotion. Embracing her feels absolutely real. The intensity of the experience wakes me up.” The next morning, Bogzaran wrote a letter to her friend with a detailed description of the dream. On the same day, her friend wrote her own letter, describing her own dream that included greeting Bogzaran at the front door.

Dreams like the above show that it’s possible to interact with other people’s consciousness through dreams and make it all the more plausible that dreams of the deceased are sometimes genuine communications.

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Perceiving OBE apparitions: Rawlette excerpt #6

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — let’s look at apparitions of living people—people who are not near death but nevertheless have “out-of-body” experiences (OBEs) in which other people perceive them at a remote location.

One especially detailed case comes from a late-19th-century volume of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. In October 1863, a man by the name of S. R. Wilmot was sailing from Liverpool to New York when his ship encountered a lengthy storm. After eight days, the weather abated, and Wilmot was finally able to have a restful night of sleep. He recounts,

Toward morning I dreamed that I saw my wife, whom I had left in the United States, come to the door of my state-room, clad in her nightdress. At the door she seemed to discover that I was not the only occupant of the room, hesitated a little, then advanced to my side, stooped down and kissed me, and after gently caressing me for a few moments, quietly withdrew.

Upon waking I was surprised to see my fellow passenger, whose berth was above mine, but not directly over it—owing to the fact that our room was at the stern of the vessel—leaning upon his elbow, and looking fixedly at me. ‘You’re a pretty fellow,’ said he at length, ‘to have a lady come and visit you in this way.’ I pressed him for an explanation, which he at first declined to give, but at length related what he had seen while wide awake, lying in his berth. It exactly corresponded with my dream. ...

The day after landing I went by rail to Watertown, Conn., where my children and my wife had been for some time, visiting her parents. Almost her first question, when we were alone together, was, ‘Did you receive a visit from me a week ago Tuesday?’ ...

My wife then told me that...[on] the same night when, as mentioned above, the storm had just begun to abate, she had lain awake for a long time thinking of me, and about four o’clock in the morning it seemed to her that she went out to seek me. Crossing the wide and stormy sea, she came at length to a low, black steamship, whose side she went up, and then descending into the cabin, passed through it to the stern until she came to my state-room. ‘Tell me,’ said she, ‘do they ever have state-rooms like the one I saw, where the upper berth extends further back than the under one? A man was in the upper berth, looking right at me, and for a moment I was afraid to go in, but soon I went up to the side of your berth, bent down and kissed you, and embraced you, and then went away.’

The description given by my wife of the steamship was correct in all particulars, though she had never seen it.

In this case, not only does the person who appears in a remote location experience traveling to that place, but she ends up being perceived there by two separate people, including someone to whom she has no emotional connection. Clearly, she is not just a dream in her husband’s mind. She’s an actual figure in the room, perceived from multiple angles doing exactly the things she remembers.

This account is consistent with more recent reports of out-of-body experiences. For instance, Loyd Auerbach relates having a “very vivid dream” in which he went to visit the house of a friend named Danita. She told him a couple days later that, at the same time as his dream, she saw him in her home and touched him. Her dog also appeared to react to his presence. Two weeks later, a similar episode occurred, this time while Auerbach was in a waking state:

I was at another friend’s bachelor party, becoming very bored.... I stood in the kitchen, fixing a drink and feeling a bit strange. Having felt the same way before when I had a few other experiences (my best psychic state appears to be boredom), I suddenly had the sensation of being in two places at once. I was in Mike’s kitchen and I was also standing in my friend Danita’s living room.... We had a short conversation, partly about the bachelor party, partly about other things, and I recall her saying she knew I was having an OBE and was only “dropping in.” I mentioned that I’d write down a few notes when I “got back” to Mike’s, and said good-bye. I found paper and pen, wrote a few notes (time, conversation details, etc.), which coincide with what Danita remembered about the situation.”

Another case of apparent physical contact during an OBE comes from the classic 1886 volume Phantasms of the Living, in which the Rev. P. H. Newnham reported a very clear and vivid dream in which he visited his fiancée’s family and put his arms around his fiancée’s waist, at the top of the staircase just as she was going to bed. He woke from the dream just before his clock struck 10pm. The next morning, he wrote a letter to his fiancée with a detailed account of his dream. The same morning, she wrote him her own letter, in which she asked, “Were you thinking about me, very specially, last night, just about 10 o’clock? For, as I was going upstairs to bed, I distinctly heard your footsteps on the stairs, and felt you put your arms round my waist.”

In 1956, Hornell Hart and his collaborators published a study in which they compared apparitions of the deceased to apparitions of living OBErs. After comparing the rates of incidence of 23 basic traits in living-person OBE apparitions to their rates of incidence in apparitions of the deceased, they concluded that the evidence pointed to these two types of apparitions’ being the same phenomenon.

So, not only do reciprocal apparitions of OBErs demonstrate that, during our lives, we have a degree of consciousness that’s not limited to the physical location of our body, but they also support the view that apparitions of those who have died—which show the same characteristics—are expressions of that same non-local consciousness, unlimited by the death of the body with which it was previously associated.

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Apparition communication: Rawlette excerpt #5

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — It’s true that apparitions are frequently quite brief, often amounting to little more than a prolonged look before the apparition disappears. In fact, in half of the accounts collected by Haraldsson, the experience lasted no more than a few seconds. However, there are also many cases of much longer apparitions, some of which hold conversations and interact in other complex ways that would seem to require that they be more than a mere freeze-frame of some aspect of the person’s pre-death consciousness.

In one case, a woman named Shirley was struggling to figure out how to get the pension money she was owed after her husband died suddenly of a heart attack. Her husband appeared to her, and she heard him speak, although she didn’t see his mouth moving. Over several minutes, he took her step by step through the pension paperwork, and her check was subsequently processed without a problem.

Johann Kuld’s deceased wife came to him in their bedroom, opening the door as she entered. She told him not to be scared, and he held her hand, which he said had a normal, warm temperature. He asked her where she’d been. “Soon after I died in the hospital they let me stay there to look after a woman who was very ill,” she said. “Since then I have been to many places. Now this time is over, I am leaving. I have come to say goodbye.” They lay down in the bed together, and she stroked his cheek and whispered to him. He eventually fell asleep, and when he woke up, she was gone.

Dr. Melvin Morse reports in his book Parting Visions a case of an interactive apparition that occurred before it was known that the person appearing was dead. A man was out fishing when he noticed his brother-in-law walking down the path toward him. They conversed for several minutes, and then the brother-in-law said he had to go and walked into the woods. Some minutes later, it occurred to the man that his brother-in-law couldn’t have actually been there. When he got home, he discovered that, while he’d been out fishing, his brother-in-law had died in a car accident. And that wasn’t the only time this deceased man visited his family. “He was a carpenter by trade,” says Morse, “and visits his wife’s son frequently with helpful suggestions about woodworking projects.”

The longest interaction with an apparition I’ve found in the literature was investigated in the 1980s by Loyd Auerbach, the same parapsychologist who smelled the anomalous cigar smoke after his friend’s death. In this case, a family purchased a home after the death of a woman, Lois, who had lived there her entire life since birth. Soon after the new owners moved in, four different members of the family began seeing the apparition of an elderly woman in the house. But it quickly became clear that the 11-year-old son, Chris, was having the most frequent and extended encounters. He told his parents that Lois had been appearing to him every day, telling him the history of the furniture in the house (some of which they had purchased along with their home) as well as helping him with his homework. (When he got older, she even gave him advice about girls.)

When Auerbach arrived at the house to investigate, the apparitions had been going on for well over a year, and Lois seemed to be present throughout Auerbach’s visit, though visible only to Chris. The family, along with Auerbach and “Lois,” all sat down in the living room, and everyone proceeded to ask Lois questions about herself, with Chris informing them of her answers. Auerbach recorded all of the information and subsequently verified with a surviving relative the accuracy of the details pertaining to her former life. Auerbach says this experience was a turning point for him. He concluded that it made much more sense to believe that the deceased Lois was actually there communicating with Chris than that Chris was some kind of super-psychic who only got information about this one dead woman, while also occasionally managing to make her visible to his family members.

In another, older interactive case, an elderly woman named Anne Simson in Perth, Scotland, was visited over and over by the apparition of a woman whom she recognized as someone who used to do business at the barracks near her house. The apparition said she was indebted to someone for three and tenpence and to find a Catholic priest, because he would pay the debt for her. Simson finally tracked down a priest named Charles McKay and asked him to take care of the matter. After making some inquiries, McKay found a grocer who told him that the deceased woman in question did indeed owe him a debt. When McKay asked him the amount, the man replied that it was three and tenpence, which the priest immediately gave him. A few days later, Simson came to McKay’s house to tell him that she had seen the apparition again, but that this time the woman said she was at peace. This incident apparently impressed Simson so much that she decided to convert to Catholicism.

It’s actually not unusual for an apparition to express a goal and take steps toward achieving it. In fact, a 1944 study by E. P. Gibson found that the deceased generally have more apparent motivation to manifest in apparitional form than the experiencers of the apparitions have motivation to perceive them. We’ll see another excellent example of goal-directed apparitional behavior at the end of the section on mental mediumship.

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Verifying apparitions: Rawlette excerpt #4

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — "As we’ve seen, one type of new, verifiable information that can be provided by an apparition is that the person appearing is recently deceased, as well as the manner in which they died. But sometimes the information provided is about someone other than the one doing the appearing. For instance, a widower named Gary confided in researcher Dianne Arcangel that he was starting to have a lot of vivid after-death encounters. He was puzzled in particular by something that had happened while he was washing his car in preparation for trading it in. He told Arcangel, 'I saw my wife standing there as plain as day. She said, Don’t bother. Just enjoy your family and friends because you’ll be with me soon. Gary was in great health and actually starting to enjoy life again, so he didn’t know what to make of his wife’s comment. Nevertheless, only hours after Gary told her this story, Arcangel got a call from Gary’s work informing her he’d just been killed in a car accident.

"In another case, a woman named Lois Miller had gotten up to go to the bathroom during the night, and when she returned to bed, she suddenly saw her deceased mother near her, surrounded in light. 'She was facing toward my father’s bedroom,' says Miller, 'and she was motioning to him to come with her.' Miller’s father died unexpectedly two days later, while taking a nap in his recliner.

Non-Survival Hypotheses That Could Explain Apparitions

"While hallucination induced by grief and/or wishful thinking is not a sufficient explanation for the above types of apparitions, that doesn’t mean that survival of death is the only remaining option. Some parapsychologists have suggested that apparitions could be a sort of telepathic projection that the dying person produced before they were dead. That is, even when the apparition is experienced hours or days later, the leave-taking message could have been generated by the dying person’s consciousness while they were still alive and not made its way into the receiving person’s conscious awareness until sometime later.

"However, this is not a good explanation for apparitions with multiple simultaneous percipients, as it seems unlikely that all of the persons involved would have had their internal blocks to receiving the telepathic message removed at exactly the same time. It also seems unlikely that a dying person would have sent telepathic messages specifically to the people or animals who would happen to be bystanders when the person they were emotionally connected to received their delayed telepathic communication. Furthermore, the telepathic residue hypothesis has difficulty explaining apparitions that come to people who never knew the deceased, or who hadn’t even been born by the time the deceased died. And the telepathic residue hypothesis is stretched to the breaking point when it comes to the great number of apparitions that occur many years after the associated death. For example, half of the apparitions in Haraldsson’s collection occurred more than a year after death, and 18% occurred more than ten years later.

"To account for these sorts of cases, we might formulate a new hypothesis. Let’s call it the 'hologram hypothesis. On this hypothesis, what the dying person creates in their last moments is not a telepathic message to specific loved ones but rather a semi-physical object of some kind that can later appear at a particular place and pass on a message by looking/sounding like the deceased person. This would be something like a psychic hologram of the person that would outlast the death of their physical body. The hologram’s objective rather than telepathic nature would explain why it is sometimes perceived by bystanders and why apparitions sometimes happen long after the death of the person involved.

"One problem with the hologram hypothesis is the fact that, as we’ve seen, apparitions sometimes provide new information that was not only unavailable to the experiencer of the apparition but also unavailable to the deceased person while they were dying. But perhaps an even bigger problem is that the hologram hypothesis can’t explain the many apparitions that are actually interactive."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Multiple apparition witnesses: Rawlette excerpt #3

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — "More evidence that apparitions cannot all be explained merely as hallucinations induced by grief or wishful thinking comes from cases where the apparition appears to multiple people, as in the Captain Wheatcroft example cited above. In the 89 apparition cases that Erlendur Haraldsson collected in his book The Departed Among the Living, in which an additional living person was in a physical position from which they should have been able to see it, 41 of them did—almost half. Also, when multiple people see an apparition, they report perceiving it from varying angles, as though the apparition were a true three-dimensional object. This suggests that at least some apparitions may be objectively located in space but that not all people are equally capable of detecting them.

Apparitions to Bystanders, Including Animals

"In fact, while some people have never experienced an apparition, others report seeing them frequently, even when the people appearing have little or no connection to them. Haraldsson quotes a man who says he frequently sees the deceased and mentions one time waking up in the night to see his wife’s mother’s stepfather standing by his wife’s side of the bed. His wife’s mother’s stepfather had been dead many years, and they’d never met in life. It seems he was probably present out of some concern or attachment to the wife, and the husband just happened to perceive him. Such apparitions to bystanders are another strike against the wishful thinking hypothesis, as a “bystander” in this case is someone with no real emotional connection to the deceased and presumably no particular desire to encounter them.

"Consider another case from Haraldsson’s book. A young man named Gisli Frimannsson was staying at Hjorsey in Iceland when one night he woke up to see “an elderly man from the district...standing on the middle of the floor.” The apparition stayed for some time before “disintegrating” and disappearing. The next evening, Frimannsson got word this man had died. When he spoke to the man’s widow, she said she had a dream right after her husband’s death where he said to her, “I have already been to Hjorsey, but no one was aware of me there except Gisli.”

"Sometimes the bystanders who experience an apparition are animals. In another case of Haraldsson’s, a woman was trying to herd her sheep into a particular pen, but they refused to go in. “They just shied away,” she says, “so I went to find out what was wrong. And there he [her brother Erik, who had died at 16] stood in the doorway of the sheep shed. I told him sharply to go to God and stop wandering about here on earth. Then he left and the sheep entered the pen.”

"Anecdotes about cats and dogs reacting to apparitions abound. Bill and Judy Guggenheim’s 1995 book Hello from Heaven! contains the account of a woman named Tina whose brother Rudy had died a year previously. Tina recounted, “I was in the kitchen doing my housecleaning. All of a sudden, our cat shot out of the family room! Her hair was standing on end and she was hissing. ... At the same time, our little dog was backing out of the family room, barking and growling with his hair standing up! They prompted me to look, and when I did, I saw my brother, Rudy, sitting in the rocking chair!” Tina notes that she would have thought she was hallucinating if she hadn’t also seen the reactions of the animals.

Apparitions to Multiple People in Different Locations Unaware of Each Other’s Experience

"Although we do have to consider the possibility of collective hallucination, this explanation seems particularly unlikely in cases where an apparition is perceived by multiple people who are in different physical locations and unaware of each other’s experiences as they are happening. The Captain Wheatcroft case gives us one example of this, and we find another such case in Joyce and Barry Vissell’s book Meant to Be, where Myrna L. Smith gives a detailed account of the way in which her deceased husband appeared separately to her and each of her two sons on the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Smith saw her husband by the Christmas tree in the living room, and each of her boys saw their father in their own bedroom. Each boy mentioned the event before they knew of anyone else’s experience, and two of the apparitions were noted as happening around 3am.

"In another case, the “apparition” was olfactory rather than visual. Parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach was one of three men who at the same time all inexplicably smelled cigar smoke and connected it to their mutual friend Martin Caidin, recently deceased and a big smoker of cigars. At the time of the anomalous smell, Auerbach was in his car, his friend Bob was flying in a Cessna three time zones away in New Jersey, and the third man was flying in a plane over Florida."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Apparitions: Rawlette excerpt #2

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — "Let’s start with one of the most common types of ostensible after-death communication: apparitions. The late Icelandic psychologist Erlendur Haraldsson, one of the preeminent investigators of after-death communication in the last few decades, reported that visual experiences of the deceased constituted 67% of the cases he collected of apparent contact with the dead while in a waking state. But apparitions aren’t only a visual phenomenon. Many apparitions are heard to speak, and others actually touch the perceiver. According to one of Haraldsson’s informants, the apparition “held out her hand, grasped my fingers hard and said: ‘Hello there.’ ... I had seen spirits before, [but] I had never seen the like of this and never touched one, not one which seemed to be of flesh and blood.” While such lifelike apparitions could conceivably be very vivid hallucinations, several pieces of evidence count in favor of at least some apparitions’ being genuine contacts with the consciousness of the deceased.

Apparitions Occurring Before Knowledge of the Death

"One of the strongest pieces of evidence that apparitions are not mere hallucinations induced by grief or wishful thinking is the fact that people often see an apparition before they were even informed of the death of the person involved.

"Cases like this go all the way back to the earliest years of parapsychological research. For instance, in 1860, Robert Dale Owen published his personal investigation of the case of a British military captain, Captain Wheatcroft. Wheatcroft was stationed in India, but on the night of November 14-15, 1857, he apparently appeared to his wife beside her bed back in Cambridge, England. She said that she saw him bent forward, as if suffering, and that he appeared to be trying to speak but no sound came out. After a minute or so, he vanished. This experience led the captain’s wife to suspect he’d been killed or badly wounded, but it wasn’t until the following month that she got word her husband had died on November 15. When she heard this, however, she felt sure that the date she was given was wrong and that her husband must have died the previous day, November 14, before she saw him appear. Wheatcroft’s lawyer also subsequently discovered that another woman of his acquaintance had experienced an apparition of a man corresponding to the captain’s description, bent over in pain, and that this apparition had happened around 9pm on November 14. This, too, seemed to support the idea that there was a problem with the reported date of death. Indeed, a few months later, a man who was an eye- witness to Wheatcroft’s death confirmed that he had in fact died on November 14. This was the date inscribed on his grave in India, and the British War Office records were subsequently corrected to reflect this.

"Here’s another carefully investigated case in which an apparition provided otherwise unknown information about the death of the person involved. A 17-year-old girl named Minnie Wilson was living at a convent in Belgium when she received an unexpected visit from her godfather. He came up to her while she was kneeling at prayer in a chapel (and possibly in a trance-like state). “I thought something was wrong as he had such a pained expression,” Minnie recounted in her written statement. “[H]e took my hand and said he had done something very wrong and that it would help him a great deal to have me to pray for him; then he told me he had been refused by the woman he loved and that he had shot himself in his despair.” In fact, Minnie’s godfather had died three days before in London, in precisely the way his apparition described. Minnie had not yet been informed of the death, as the convent in which she lived did not allow newspapers, and her mother did not write to her about it until three days after the apparition. Even then, her mother did not tell her the circumstances of her godfather’s death. It was Minnie herself who, on her next visit home to England, insisted that her mother tell her whether her godfather had taken his own life because a woman wouldn’t love him. Her mother then confirmed this was true.

"While these cases are somewhat exceptional in the amount of detail relayed by the apparitions, experiencing an apparition before being informed of a death is itself very common. Haraldsson reports that, of the 449 cases of apparent encounters with the dead that he collected, one out of every nine happened within 24 hours of the death, and in 86% of those cases, the person having the experience did not yet know that the death had occurred."

  

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Evidence for Survival of Human Consciousness

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay,  Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — "In 1984, the NORC General Social Survey* found that, among Americans who had suffered the death of a spouse, 53% reported experiencing some kind of after-death contact. Results were much the same in Britain. In Wales, 47% of interviewees reported seeing, hearing, and/or feeling their departed spouse (though only a quarter of them ever told anyone else about the experience), and a survey of widows in London reported that 46% of them believed they’d had after-death contact with their deceased husband. If we look beyond those who have lost spouses, surveys show that somewhere between 36-42% of the American public feel they’ve “really been in touch with” someone who has died.

Clearly, the question is not whether people have experiences that seem to be contact from the deceased. They obviously do. It is rather whether these experiences offer any indication of being genuine evidence for the survival of human consciousness beyond the death of the body, or whether they can all be satisfactorily explained in some other way.

In our examination of this third-person evidence for survival, we will look at six main types of apparent after-death contact and the evidential support that each of them gives to the survival hypothesis. We will begin with an in-depth examination of after-death apparitions and then move on to dreams, mental mediumship, physical mediumship and poltergeists, phantom phone calls, and finally conclude with a discussion of meaningful coincidence or “synchronicity.” 

For each of these phenomena, we’ll look at a range of evidential characteristics they present, including occurring before the experiencer has been informed of the death, being observed by multiple people and by those with no emotional connection to the deceased (“bystanders”), showing goal-directed behavior, exhibiting interactivity, providing verifiable new information, and showing continuity with the way these phenomena have been used for psychic communication by living people. We’ll also look at the strengths and weaknesses of some of the alternative hypotheses used to explain apparent contacts with the dead. 

*A project of the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, with principal funding from the National Science Foundation.

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.