I have posted about this before but think it’s worth mentioning here.
My late DP was interested, sceptical and conflicted about “woo” - me, I’ve had plenty of high strangeness in my life which I treat “lightly” as rubber rooms don’t appeal.
So my DP lived as a child on the IOW . He had a vivid memory of being around 7 or 8 and recalled walking up his local high street and being struck by an eccentric looking older teen on the opposite side of the road walking with a group of older friends - this was in the late 70s. The way this teen boy was dressed stuck with him - he was wearing several items of clothing that were quite distinctive.
Fast forward a decade or so, when this had been long forgotten. He is now in his late teens. He’s walking down the High Street with his friends. He’s wearing his alternative style, including two or three signature items he had adopted due to music he was into at the time. (He continued to wear this look until he died in various iterations).
He saw a small boy looking at him from the other side of the road…. and swears it was himself as a young child. Small boy had his bowl haircut, was dressed in an identical typical 70s outfit chosen by his Mum….. it brought back the memory of being his small self and he recalled that as a child, the older teen had looked at him weirdly and seemed slightly “freaked out” as they clocked each other.
As I say, while he was creative and imaginative he was also very conflicted about the paranormal so found this most disconcerting and for him to be so sure about this experience suggests to me it was real and significant to him.
When we got together I had some very vivid dreams, one of which I can remember still in great detail. The recurrent theme was us both being at parties or gatherings and being separated as you do, then me trying to find him.
In one particular dream the venue was a fabulous old world pub / guest house, wood panels and beams, and we were having a wonderful time. Then I was looking for him and someone said he’d gone upstairs.
Upstairs were guest bedrooms and I opened a door to one. He was there, looking asleep and being tucked into a big four poster bed by my late Nana, my late Aunt, and my Mum who was still alive at this point. They didn’t see me initially and were talking amongst themselves which was most peculiar as after my Nana died, the family fell apart (it’s complicated) so there had been no contact between my Mum and my Aunt for years and the resentment ran very deep. The one sentence I heard as they tucked him in was “And she must never know” which jolted me awake. It was utterly bizarre and left me unsettled.
In retrospect I think it was foreshadowing of his untimely and unexpected death because my Mum had died 18 months or so before he did, so by then all three women were “in spirit” if you like. So I like to think it was a sort of message that they were looking after him in the next dimension or whatever happens “next”.
When you consider we are only scratching the surface of how and why we exist and how we operate I think it’s naive to write off weird experiences and immediately ascribe them to mental illness. In fact I think it hinders progress in understanding because there are probably many people who will not relate potentially important experiences because they are afraid of being sectioned or labelled nuts.
As Dirk Gently would say, everything is connected….. 😘