Meeting a family in the afterlife

I woke in the middle of the night after a relaxing, meditative evening, and out of habit I focused on falling back to sleep with full waking awareness. Deep in that slumber, unusual sounds began: loud banging, vibrating, people speaking. If I focused on them too keenly they disappeared, so I let them be, and naturally they grew until they had consumed my full awareness.

In the same way, a convulsion rose from my stomach and began to engulf my body. I vibrated intensely, with the sensation of falling or flying. Colors swirled into my vision, struggling to form an image, and as I focused on them I found myself emerging into a scene. I felt groggy, as if I had just woken up, but I knew at once that I was somewhere else, out of my body.

The grey stairway

I was sitting in a meditative lotus position in the middle of a stairway in a large building, like a fire-exit stairwell, grey and dull. Beside me sat a man. He felt familiar; a part of me recognized him as a friend, though not someone I know in waking life. We talked for a while, and I remember only the end. “We will go up the stairs together,” he said. A woman I hadn’t noticed stood in front of me and said abruptly, “We would expect you to go higher.”

Above her head appeared two small spheres, one above the other, joined by a cord, each with an image inside. I focused on the top one and began to zoom into it, and the stairway began to fade. For an instant I held on to the man’s arm to stay grounded, and I was back in my bed. I realized I shouldn’t have held on. Whenever there is an energetic shift like that, we should surrender to it. I relaxed, and soon fell asleep again.

It took me years to understand what that grey stairway was. It was the region where the recently dead arrive, an Earth-like level of waiting, and I had been met there and told plainly that I was not to stay at that level, not to rise above anyone, but to go further along my own road.

Waking up in the car park

Soon I was in what seemed to be a dream, standing in an outdoor car park about a hundred feet from where I was sleeping, under one of the most beautiful multicolored masses of cloud I had ever seen. A black UFO, shaped like the two spheres joined by a cord, flew across the sky trailing enormous clouds of color. Thunder cracked, it crashed in the distance and exploded, and in fear I took out my phone to call a relative and tell them I loved them.

Something in me woke up before I did. I did the hold-nose reality check: I could breathe through my nose while holding my nostrils shut. I studied my hands to attain full waking consciousness, and as my mind gained clarity I watched the dream’s projections dissolve before my eyes. My perception became crisp, awake and untainted. I was on the main road around the corner from where my body was sleeping.

A street full of people

It was an almost perfect replica of the physical road: the shops, the lamp posts, the markings on the road. Only two things were different. There were far more people than that quiet road ever held, and there was an overly friendly, community atmosphere I had never sensed there. The sky was dusky and slightly purple. There was something special and enlightened about this place. Everybody seemed awake, and conscious that this was the afterlife.

When I started to walk, it was a challenge, as if I had new legs, and I laughed at what I must have looked like. The more I got the hang of it, the stronger I felt. I had to make a conscious effort to contain myself, so I remembered my intent for out-of-body experiences: to understand the worlds that exist beyond the physical.

“Yes, we know”

I greeted a family of five: a mother, a father, a daughter, a son, and a grandfather in a wheelchair. This was a non-physical world, and he chose to travel around in a wheelchair. “Do you know that you’re dead?” I asked. They were all grinning. “Yes,” they replied. “Sorry, I was just curious. I’m alive, and I…” “Yes, we know,” they interrupted.

They somehow knew that my body was asleep in the physical world. And when I wondered about the wheelchair, the grandfather caught the thought as plainly as if I had said it, and put his hand to his face, laughing that I didn’t get it. The son stayed with me for a few minutes and told me about his family. I remember only the end. “Were you all happy to know that you could still spend time together after you died?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, uninterested, as he watched his family walk on.

Then I noticed I was losing feeling on the left side of my face. I tried to speak, and could only utter gibberish. I was new to this practice, and my strength to remain conscious in that dimension had reached its limit. The next thing I knew, I was lying in my bed.

What I took from it

My intuition was that the family were together on purpose, to experience the family time they had missed in the physical world, perhaps because one or more of them died unexpectedly.

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