A real life ghost story
I hadn’t intended to talk about my many dreams of ghosts in this SubStack. However, they are an important piece of the overall puzzle. At the heart of everything spiritual is the existence of spirit. This was a critical element of my willingness to accept that God is real. First, I had to know I had a soul, as does everyone else. My atheistic upbringing did not allow that idea to coexist with what I had been taught. It took a long time to break down that barrier, and it happened because of my dreams of ghosts.
“Ghosts” as I define them describe a specific type of spirit. They are associated with a known or unknown previously or currently living person. Including living persons might surprise some readers, but other people have seen me while I was dreaming of them, so I don’t see any reason to think it can’t happen with others as well. The reason they must be “associated with” a person, known or not, that was or is living, is to distinguish them from spirits that seem to have no earthly connections at all. I dream about those also.
In my dreams of ghosts, some of which I’ve been able to verify, they have a few types of concerns they want to tell me about. They fall into the following categories:
They want to show me how they died. I don’t know why this is, but it happens fairly often. In this connection, they may also show me fatal wounds associated with their death. Usually, the deaths are the result of an accident of some kind: drowning, car accident, hiking mishap, things like that. Some are from violence. Either the ghost was a criminal, was associated with them, or was the victim of a criminal. I can’t think of any natural deaths in this category.
They want me to pass on a message to a loved one. For instance, a young girl in Holland gave me her street address so I could tell her greiving mother that she was okay (I didn’t remember the house number, but it was a real street). In another, a deceased parent wanted to tell her daughter where to find part of her inheritance. I passed on the dream. About six months later, the missing items were found, right where the ghost told me they would be.
They are confused and I am asked by another spirit, not a ghost, to help them. In one such dream, the deceased man had owned a bar. After he died, he saw that his habit of pushing extra drinks on his customers had encouraged drunkenness. This had affected them badly and he felt great remorse for his actions, taken so that he could make more money. I advised him to find as many alcoholics as he could and counsel them to stop drinking. He didn’t think it would work because they couldn’t hear him as a ghost. I told him that they would feel his thoughts at a deeper level and that he could do some good this way. He accepted the assignment and was relieved.
I have been advised in some dreams to ignore the ghosts. The reason is that if I pay attention, they will seek me out to communicate with others and could be overwhelming. I do my best to follow that advice, even in my dreams. Regardless, they slip through now and then.
This article is about a ghost dream from the “confused” category. It concerns someone I mentioned today in a different SubStack, which got me thinking about this dream. I didn’t know the man it concerned, but knew of him through my wife.
From the journal, 10/20/2011:
A man wants to introduce me and Kitty to someone. It is Jay Kennedy! I am amazed because I heard that he had died. Figuring that maybe he wasn’t the same Jay Kennedy, I started a conversation. It went like this:
AP: Are you Jay Kennedy, the comics editor?
JK: Yes.
AP: But I heard you died.
JK: So did I, it was really strange.
AP: But how could anyone make that kind of mistake?
JK: I don’t know.
AP: Maybe it was a different Jay Kennedy?
JK: That’s what I was thinking.
AP: I read that you were swimming or something.
JK: That’s the weird thing. I was at the ocean and I was swimming—and that’s when they said I died.
He gets thoughtful here, thinking about it, as do I. He says he was replaced by someone else and gives the man’s name, but doesn’t seem bothered.
AP: You know, Kitty is right over there. Do you remember her?
JK: Oh yes.
AP: You sent her some encouraging feedback on her comic strips.
JK: Yes.
AP: I’m sure she would love to talk with you.
JK: No problem.
Then I see one of his contacts doing standup comedy in a number of small venues. Throughout, Jay seems distracted, wondering about something. He doesn’t seem to realize he has died. He looks in excellent health and a bit younger than he was when he died, as is typical for ghosts.
Second entry, email to friend, 10/20/2011
Last night I dreamed of a ghost that I've only seen once before. Unfortunately, in the dream I was just as confused as he seemed to be about his state. It went like this:
AP: "You're not the Jay we know are you?"
JK: Yes, it's me.
AP: But that's so strange. We'd heard you died.
JK: Yeah, I noticed the same thing.
AP: I mean, it was in the news when you died.
JK: Yes, I saw it.
AP: It said you died while diving or swimming in the ocean somewhere, but here you are. So it was some other guy with your name?
JK: That's the weird thing. I was swimming in the very same place and at the same time as they said in the stories that came out.
AP: I wonder who the other JK was?
JK: I've been thinking about that a lot too. Strange thing is that at about the same time I was replaced at work by this other guy [gives name.]
AP: But it is you, and you look terrific!
JK: It's all very strange, I admit...
AP: Kitty's right over there. If you don't mind, I'm sure she'd love to talk to you...
[Here he starts going through some kind of visual database of everyone he knows. I see an image I recognize of someone named HK]
AP: Hey! That's HK! Do you know HK also?
JK: Yes.
AP: So do we. We don't like him very much though...
And then the dream stopped. I think he was there for Kitty, but that I hijacked it. I looked up the man's photo on the Internet and it was a spitting image. That is, a photo from 1987 when he was younger was the spitting image of the guy from my dream.
Best regards,
AP
Additional, unrecorded details
As we discussed the death of “the other man” that Jay saw, I could see it happening. The other man was Jay. He didn’t recognize his own body. He was replaced at work because he had died. I saw him go to his office, thinking he was alive, but no one paid any attention to him. He thought it was because the other man had replaced him, so no one had to acknowledge him. He knew that people thought he was dead, but figured that by the time he got back to the office, they’d replaced him because the work had to be done and they thought he was dead. After he came back, Jay figured, they already had a contract with the new guy, so it was easier to let things stay that way. That was how Jay rationalized it.
Jay’s impression was that another diver who resembled him had died in the same place, but was wrongly identified as Jay. He wasn’t able to explain the mistake, possibly due to a language barrier (he died in Costa Rica), but more likely because he was a ghost.