I’ve heard of supernatural experiences from friends before. I always discounted those, by taking my friends’ words with a grain of salt. I imagined there might be another explanation for what they saw that differed from their assessment of the facts they told me. Because that’s how I was I believe most people who have never seen something that is undeniably supernatural will take the same position I used to take.
I have verbally told parts of this story to others. But I never wrote it down to post before today. And I never told the whole story, or even as much of it as I write now. There’s just too much to tell. How do you describe every detail of an experience? You just don’t. So why do I post my experience now? Because a commenter on another website asked to hear about it. So I decided to tell her and post that comment here also.
In writing to me on that other site she said:
Now, I can look back to when I was 11 and I spoke to Jesus from my heart, and I heard him answer me. I also felt a tingling rush and much love sweep over me. I have always kept that treasured in my heart and only just started sharing it very recently. (I’m 60 now.) ….
It was almost immediately after that experience when I was 11, that JWs began studying with my family. It was a good thing for me. It may have saved my life, even. So I have no regrets about becoming JW. Do you experience Spirit this way? I would love to hear more about your own experiences.
I responded to her request with this:
My first wife died on July 26, 2009, one day before my birthday. She suffered a stroke and died while a patient in a hospital. She was the nicest person I have ever known, not because she was my wife, but factually she was the nicest. She was a lot nicer than me.
About five years before she died I had a dream. It was different than other dreams of mine, because it’s the only one I ever let affect a decision of mine. Even though reading this article that decision will seem insignificant to you, to me, at the time, it wasn’t. Even though the decision was just to choose what interior color our new house would be painted. It meant something to me. More than just a wall color.
When I had the dream I didn’t believe God contacted people in our day. I believed what Watchtower taught us, that he doesn’t. Yet this dream scared me; I didn’t want it to come true. And I thought it just might be different from other nightmares and really happen (even though at that time I didn’t think such things happened). But I thought I might be able to stop it from happening if I changed something in my life that I foresaw in that dream. It was a just in case thought you know. Because me, I didn’t believe in real premonitions. Not in our day.
Our History
We were married for 32 years when she died. Other than going to restaurants and Jehovah’s Witness conventions, or to vacation spots in San Diego, our favorite hobby was buying newly constructed houses and fixing them up. But about ten years before her death we lost our money due to our failing business. And so we moved from a very affluent part of CA to a part that is primarily a middle class area in CA. It is about 100 miles away from South Orange County, and our old neighborhood in Laguna Niguel.
We kept the business going for a couple years from there but then shut it down. I was already 49 years old. She was 48. Since we’d essentially lost everything of material value I needed another source of income. My wife had only worked part time in our own business since we married. So after closing the business neither of us had a source of income. I decided to become an attorney or public school music teacher. I eventually chose teacher because I assumed it would cost less than becoming an attorney. I knew I would be well into my 50s when I finished college to enter into either profession.
So I entered a junior college. And I got a job as a security guard. When I applied for it I asked the company’s owner if I could do my homework on the job, and he said yes. I worked nights and weekends and went to school during the day. Because the job didn’t pay much my wife got a job at K-Mart. Together we made enough to get by. At the time we were both faithful Jehovah’s Witnesses. My wife remained one until she died. I still believed in Watchtower then too. But I began to view it differently several years later. I guess it started about three years after her death.
The First Contact
But about five years before she died I had a dream. The dream was of me in a house that we would have built some time later, a few years or so later. I know she lived in the home we had built for three years before she died. The dream started with me standing next to a bed, in a bedroom, inside a house I had never been in. The bed was a high one, and the framing on it with its headboard was dark brown wood. (For years as we’d furnish new homes my wife and I always picked out more modern looking furniture, and we always chose light woods like white ash). But this wood was very dark, and the style was not modern. I looked at the room and there was sunlight coming through its two windows. There was a tall armoire against the wall opposite the bed, and it was made of dark brown wood also. I walked out of the bedroom which opened to an alcove that gave way to a living room on the right a dining room on the left. Both those rooms were separated by a walkway leading to a kitchen.
But instead of going directly to the kitchen I went over to a wall on the far side of the living room, and I began to stare up at something on that wall. The only thing I could never remember about this dream is what I was staring up at. But as I was a color superimposed itself on the wall, but just around the object I was staring at. The color was a very light grey with just a hint of bluish green in it.
And that’s what caused me to let this dream affect a decision I made in real life. You see, when we finally had a house built we chose the interior color that we saw inside the model home of our contractor. But then later my wife said, “let’s change the color.” I said no. You see I thought she might pick that light grey that I saw in the dream. Even though in the dream the color only appeared around the object I was gazing at, I assumed it might indicate the interior color of the house in that dream. And I didn’t want it to come true. I thought if I could change that I could change the dream’s outcome, if it proved to be a premonition.
As I walked through the living room/dining room area I noticed both those rooms were only partially furnished, and I consciously thought to myself, “There isn’t a lot of furniture in these two rooms.” (Remember my wife and I used to buy new houses and decorate them-so this lack of furniture got my attention; because in the dream I was living in this house). I then walked into the kitchen. The kitchen and another eating area were together as one big room. Half the room was a large kitchen, and half was another large eating area, as large as the formal dining room. This eating area was on the left, the kitchen on the right. But the room itself was just one big room. So I walked past the table in that eating area, walked over to the window, and looked out at the view. I could see most of the desert valley from there.
One of my sons was either washing his dish or preparing a meal on the kitchen island, and he said, “Hi daddy.” I answered back, “Hi Scott.” Then I looked down a hallway that exited the kitchen, on the opposite side from where I’d entered it. As I looked down that dark hallway the purpose of the dream became clear. For the first time an extremely strong emotion overwhelmed me. It was sadness as I thought, “Some of our children live in the bedrooms down that hallway, but my wife is not with us.” And I thought, “None of us are with her. And she’s not coming back.”
The next thing I knew I was outside in the yard, right outside the bedroom that I was in when the dream started. It was our bedroom. I reached down and turned on the water to an irrigation drip line. I looked down at the view of the whole valley. I cut a couple weeds with a hoe as I looked at the front yard. And the dream was over.
Why do I believe the dream is significant?
Before we ever had our house built I felt it was a strange dream. At that time I didn’t believe God contacts people today. After we moved in our new home I saw it was the home in that dream. I told my family I had a dream I was living in this house years before it was built. I told that to my mother, and also I told her my wife wasn’t with us. The layout and interior of our new home matched that of the dream home exactly. And it’s design and floorplan is extremely unique. My wife and I used to run through every model and construction site in our old neighborhood in South Orange County, both of track and custom homes. But we never saw a home’s interior that looked anything like this one.
And once my wife died our house was furnished just like the house in that dream. I picked our bed. But she picked that armoire and brought it home without me seeing it before she brought it home. Both objects were exactly like in the dream, and we placed both in our bedroom in the same places. We never owned an armoire before that. About a month before she died we took almost all the furniture out of the dining room. You see we had furniture on lay away for the living room. And we had the dining room furnished really nicely. But the wood in the dining room would have been a shade or two darker than the living room furniture we were going to receive. So I told her, “Why don’t we move that into the kitchen area, and then put new furniture on lay away for the dining room, to better match the wood colors. ” That we did. That left both rooms scarcely furnished one month before she died. And just a month after she died both were fully furnished.
So many things I had no control over matched exactly, that water spigot outside the wall of our bedroom, in the exact same location; the view was the same also; the timing, because our house only had sparse furnishings in both living and dining rooms for just a month before she died. That’s the only time they were furnished like that. A week or two after she died my sister went to K-Mart where my wife worked. My sister brought sympathy cards saying a lot of nice things about her. K Mart employees also sent my family over two hundred dollars, and they sent the statue of an angel that was light grey with a hint of blue-green, the exact color I saw superimposed on part of the living room wall in that dream. I wasn’t thinking about that then, but when my sister gave me the statue I put it on a table, up against that wall I stared at when I saw that color superimposing itself on that part of the wall. And today that angel sits atop a piece of furniture, in the spot I was looking up at in the dream.
She Dies
She had high blood pressure as long as I’d known her. But she was on medication for it. However, she developed a hoarseness because of one medication, so her doctor prescribed a new one. It didn’t work. My wife didn’t communicate that to me, and I didn’t find out until at least a year later. All that time her pressure was dangerously high (over 200).
I ended up taking her to doctors with the final result being her admission into a hospital. I remember when we decided she would go in, she told me, “I’m afraid.” And I said, “What are you afraid of?” She said, “I don’t want to die.” Then I answered, “You’re not going to die.” But then, for the first time I did tell her she wasn’t with me in that dream I had, and why I didn’t want to change the interior color of our home. Still I didn’t believe it was going to happen, even though almost everything else I had seen in the dream had already come true. Everything except the fact that she was gone. And that color superimposing itself on the living room wall.
She was in the hospital for two days. They brought her blood pressure down upon admission. The second day she had a stroke that killed her. After she died I knew the dream couldn’t have been coincidental. There were just too many details in it that came true. And not one detail in it failed to come true. Even that statue showing up that I randomly placed against the same wall that its color superimposed itself on in that dream. To me, logically, the amount of details that I saw come true were beyond chance. I couldn’t reconcile that it was coincidental.
That’s when I knew I was contacted by someone that lives in the future, not just could see the future but lives there. To me that could be the only answer, because how else could he have told me such minute details about my life, including almost the exact day of my wife’s death, five years or more before it happened? I know I could not foresee the future. It was shown to me by someone else.
Later I reasoned out why this first dream was shown to me. It’s because I’m a skeptic. After my wife died I asked God to show her to me in my dreams. And being a skeptic, if I didn’t have proof that he did that, I would have believed I just had those dreams all on my own, even though I asked for them in prayer. So God showed me details leading to her death, and after the final dream he showed me a vision of something representing himself, while I was awake. And the object that I saw looked as solid as anything else I’d ever seen. But it could float and go through walls.
More Dreams/ One Vision While Awake
In the days after she died, before I went to sleep, I’d pray to God to see her in a dream. About five times I did that, and it happened four times. The first time she and I were in what looked like a park, and there were other people enjoying themselves in it. The third time we were in a large parking lot that was empty with a couple people going into a large building with no name. We talked. I wanted to know what it was like being dead, because I had no recollection of me dying. So I asked her saying, “But you were dead?” Then she just looked puzzled, as if she couldn’t say anything about the experience.
Then we walked into that large building. There was a smaller room in the front, with a lady behind an ice cream counter. We told her what we wanted. She gave it to us. But we were not charged. It was free. And we seemed to know it would be free. We both knew we were in the New World that scriptures speak of. And I knew she had come back to life. But there was no pain attached to the thought of her death anymore. Not like there still is. No pain at all. In the dream I just thought of it as an experience, her death. In those dreams I had after her death, up to this point, the over riding emotional feeling I had was contentment. There was nothing to worry about there. And there was no pain when thinking about bad things from the past.
I’ll describe the last dream now. The last dream was different than these others. All the other dreams began with me on the earth, even though I was in the New World. In the last dream I was standing up in the air, while I was floating down to earth. I wasn’t very high off the ground. I wasn’t moving my legs at all, but my whole body was floating down at an angle, and moving fairly quickly. I was coming down into that park that I mentioned above, and my wife was standing up on the ground looking at me approach her. As I looked down at her I experienced fear. I was thinking this I thought to myself as I looked at her, “You are dead, I’m not suppose to talk to dead people.” So I got scared and yelled Jehovah really loud. As soon as I did I was pulled backwards, back up towards the sky at the same angle I was descending in. I never reached the ground before I was pulled back. And I was jerked really fast. Right after I was snatched back I woke.
As soon as I woke I saw an object hovering over my chest. And as soon as I saw it, it moved from over me and hovered in the air about 7 feet from me. As it did I thought, “You are the one that’s been putting those dreams in my mind.” It seemed to hover there so that I would contemplate that thought. It stayed there about ten seconds as I looked at it and had that thought. It seemed to be reading my mind, knowing what I was thinking. In that way I believe it was delivering its final message. The message of YES.
It looked kind of like a thick banner made of wool about 4 feet wide and 3 feet tall made to hang on a wall, that my wife owned. It was the same size and color of that banner, when the length of the wall banner is doubled over to hang on a curtain rod. My wife used to sometimes cover herself with it when she’d lay down. Her mom had given her this piece from New York City. It has Jehovah’s name written all over it many times, with many additional names attached to Jehovah in Hebrew along with their English translations, like Jehovah Nissi-God my Banner; Jehovah Shammah-God Is Present; Jehovah Raphe-God Heals. Those are just some of the names, there are many more. But every name starts with Jehovah.
This object that I saw looked just as solid as everything else in the room. It looked like that wall banner, but it didn’t have any writing on it. It sort of looked like a thick curtain with slight pleats, smooth rolling ones, no creases. And parts of it glowed a reddish orange glow. But the light coming from it didn’t light the room. After about ten seconds of what seemed to be a telepathic reading of my mind it vanished up through the ceiling. While it hovered I just kept thinking, you are the one that gave me those dreams. When it moved it did so really fast, split second fast.
What does it mean? Why did it happen?
At first I didn’t know. I wondered, why would God contact me? Who am I for him to contact? I knew that part of the reason for the contact was to comfort me, to let me know everything will eventually be alright. But in time I knew that wasn’t the main reason. The main reason is that God was telling me that I’m his chosen son. And because I am his chosen son everything will be alright because he will make it that way, for me. And so he showed me coming down from heaven and pulled me back up when I got scared and called him.
“….but you received the Spirit of sonship, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. And if we are children, then we are heirs: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him…” Romans 8:15-17
“‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; Acts 2:17