Stephen interviews Sally Taylor, whose life radically changed after her 17-year old son decided to take his own life, and then changed again when he returned to her.
*The show's host is also the writer/director of the award-winning documentary film LIFE WITH GHOSTS, now streaming at https://www.LifeWithGhosts.com/ for a limited time.
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Listen to the podcast here
Chat with guest Sally Taylor
I am very happy to have you here. We have a special guest. Sally Taylor is with us. Stephen will be interviewing her. I also want to tell you about a wonderful resource for you. It is the Friday Afterlife report put out by Victor and Wendy Zammit. It has wonderful Zoom groups that you can join, including the Afterlife Book Club, which I do once a month. Google Friday Afterlife Report and it will show up free in your inbox every week. With that, I am going to turn it over to Stephen and Sally Taylor.
The first thing I want to do is thank this audience. Our third episode is this. In the first episode, 100 people came on. The Zoom room closed it at 100 people. It was so exciting to see that 100 people showed up. I wasn't expecting that. The second one, which was on August 6th, 2023, 200 people showed up. That was very exciting. Plus, Jennifer, the producer, put our sessions on YouTube and they got 1,500 hits quickly. Our group and our meetings are being seen by a lot of people. Hopefully, that will grow even more from there.
One of the ways it was suggested that I get the word out what's in the film was to do a TED Talk. I've seen TED Talks. They're really cool. For people who aren't familiar with TED Talks, it is an online video platform with a very large audience. People come on with talks that are usually between 9 minutes and 18 minutes. They share interesting stories and information. There are professionals, semi-professionals, and non-professionals who do these talks, but they're usually pretty darn interesting. This is a very strict vetting process that goes through it.
Before this program, I went online and saw that it has 40 million subscribers on YouTube. That's a big platform. It seemed to make sense to try to do a TED Talk and talk about our collective message. The reason why it was important to form a community is because I was selected to do a TED Talk on the topic of after-death communication. I'm a little nervous. Having a community like this, if I feel like it's our message and it's not just my message, it's going to make me less nervous. I want to feel like I have a posse.
I'm going to give you one quote from the TED Talk because I thought it was interesting and it applies to us directly. For anyone who has seen my film, you know that the whole third act pretty much takes place at the University of North Texas. I wanted to pull some research from the University of North Texas for my TED Talk that wasn't in the film. I know that they had some really good numbers that I thought would maybe be lost on a general audience, but it wouldn't be lost on you.
The statistic they gave me for my TED Talk is this. There have been 35 studies published on after-death communication over the years involving 50,000 people and 24 countries. When that data was compiled by one of the grad students at the University of North Texas, she found that 75% of people have one or more after-death communications in the first year following the death. That’s most people. Most people are interacting with deceased loved ones.
So it's a little bit sad that there are still healthcare professionals who will say, “You're in denial. If you're trying to reach out and touch the afterlife, you must be in denial.” When this many people worldwide are having this experience, what's with that? What's going on? It's a little bit annoying. That is what gave me the impetus to make my film what it was.
My film started out to be, for those who don't know, a cute little story between two older women who were neighbors and friends and had very different experiences in grief. That's how it started. One of the characters, who happens to be my mother, was told by her therapist that she was in denial for considering trying to reach out to my father in the afterlife. That put a fire under me that made me think, “This has got to change.”
Hopefully, that will help when I take the TEDx stage. Hopefully, more people come to these meetings and see my film. That will help. Try to talk about it if you can. If there's somebody in your world whom you haven't admitted to that you have correspondence or you're trying to have correspondence with your deceased, then consider putting your toe in the water and seeing what happens. That's my request to you all.
I have a guest who I met through Wendy Zammit's group. Wendy is generous enough to share with me people in her group. Her name is Sally Taylor. In 2012, Sally Taylor was a high school art teacher. She was opening up an art gallery in Syracuse or a town near Syracuse, New York. She had a son named Todd. In 2012, Todd decided to take his own life at seventeen. When I met Sally through Wendy's group and then she came to my first show here, when she spoke about her experience a little bit, it made me want to know more. I'd like to talk to her.
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First of all, Sally, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for being my guest.
Thank you so much for asking me. I'm pleased to be here.
You're welcome. My first question is, take me through that day or that time period. You could go back as far as you want, but take me through where the end of the story ends with early stops where you discovered this happened.
It's not an easy story, but it's one that I have finally gained a level of acceptance for, and that's been part of my journey. My son had finished high school a year early. He had enough credits when we moved to New York that he was able to graduate after his junior year of school. He had a semester off and he was enrolled in college.
Life seemed okay. Life seemed good. Todd was a great kid. He was sweet. He was kind. He would do anything you asked him to do. He was introverted and sometimes a little shy, but not incredibly shy. He interacted well with others. He didn't drink. He didn't smoke. He didn't do drugs. He was an easy kid. He was a good and easy kid.
Anytime that I said that, I was worried about him, like, “Why don't you go out with your friends today?” He would say, “Don't worry.” He would have excuses why he thought it was better to stay home on any given day. He was getting ready to go off to college, so he didn't want to put a lot of time and effort into things he felt like he would be leaving behind. I believed him and would try not to worry. He didn't give me a whole lot to worry about.
I had spent most of the day with him. I left home to run some errands. When I returned a couple of hours later, my husband drove up right behind me. When we came into the house, we found Todd on the floor of his bedroom. When I first saw him, I thought he had fallen and hit his head on the corner of the bed or something. The idea that he might have harmed himself was the last possible thing in my mind, so as we began to understand what was in front of us, it was so surreal that it was like an out-of-body experience for me. My reality completely crumbled. I was in trouble with myself at that point with regard to trying to pick up the pieces.
I don't want to be morbid with this question. I'm distracted by not knowing the answer to this. I assume other people are going to be distracted by not knowing the answer to this question. How did he take his own life? What'd he do?
He used a gun. We had a couple of guns in the house. They were separate from the ammunition that we had for them. He was seventeen. He had taken gun safety classes. He had been hunting with his father. He knew how to use a gun safely. We have them in the house. It was important to us to know that he knew how to use one properly and could be safe with one. He never gave us any reason to anticipate that he would ever do anything other than that.
He did leave a note. I am an open book with this information. It's important to be because there's so much stigma around suicide and it's only because people don't want to tell the story. He had worked out a logic for what he had chosen. As a parent, there is no logic that your mind can wrap around that allows you to accept facing that reality. The very last thing he said was, “I'm not afraid. I'm tired.” I can't tell you all the details of the rest of the letter years later, but that one statement is the one that stuck with me.
There's so much stigma around suicide, and it's only because people don't want to tell the story.
Why that statement?
It was such a struggle to understand what mindset he had that could lead him to that choice. I know he knows how much we loved him. I told him all the time. He told me he loved me all the time. In my mind, we were close. We were together a lot.
A son who's close to his mother will tell his mother or his father that he's contemplating taking his life, you'd think.
That's why it was such a confusing, mind-bending situation because I didn't know. I didn't see it coming. I know that's true for a lot of people who lose someone to suicide. It's because if they're serious about it, they don't want you to know. They are not interested in being prevented.
They have a plan and they don't want anything to scuttle that plan. It's a practical decision.
Exactly. It doesn't make a difference for the people who are left behind, whether they knew someone was struggling or not, to be honest. I know parents who have lost children to suicide who did know that they were struggling and did everything in their power to help them and prevent the transition by suicide but still weren't able to prevent it.
I know parents like me who had no idea. We didn't see it coming. We thought that everything was okay and still lost their child. It really doesn't make a difference whether you knew or you didn't and how deep of an impact it has on you. For me, it was a dark night of the soul. It was ego-dissolving, is almost the way to say it.
All of the labels that I had for myself, which were mother, wife, and teacher, all of those little labels that I had built around myself to give me my identity, suddenly were completely upended. Not only did I have this indescribable grief that I was coping with, but I also had a loss of my sense of self. All of that, both the grief and that ego death, left me in a place where I had to have a better understanding of reality because my reality was gone with my son. It led me in some interesting directions.
Thank you for that. I do want to know a little bit more. I won't stay on this topic too much longer, but it's really important the time you spent in that grieving period, the dark night of the soul as you refer to it. It’s important to elucidate on that a little bit because it's more than just in bed with the covers over you. I talked about this once before in the first session you were in. There's a big, messy bag of emotions that come with suicide in addition to the normal average grief that people have. What does come with suicide that's different?
You said the word. You are right. There is a sense of guilt, especially for a parent, but for any loved one. It could be a spouse, sibling, or whoever. There is guilt that you couldn't protect them. There is guilt that you either did or didn't see it coming and still couldn't protect them. There's all the what-ifs, like, “What if I had done this differently? What if I had done that differently? What did I do wrong?”
This is my temperament and my personality. I tend to take on responsibility for things. It was like, “What did I do that led to this point? Did I parent him improperly? Did I not tell him I loved him enough?” I know that's not the case, but you go through extreme guilt. There's that bit of even shame that's attached because when you lose a child, you end up often interacting with other parents who have lost children in a myriad of different ways.
When you lose a child, you end up often interacting with other parents who have lost children in a myriad of different ways.
Does that help?
Yes and no. Early on, it was really challenging to be in a group of parents who had lost children because most of the children who had transitioned didn't make a choice to go, whereas my son made a choice. It was important for me to find suicide support groups because the complexity of the grief is different. I don't try to compare people's grief. There's no point in trying to compare grief, but suicide has its own specific challenges. Interacting with other people who were experiencing something similar or who had experienced and were further down the path than I was at those early stages was important for both me and my husband to see and interact with.
At some point, something brought you into this space where you are. You didn’t continue in the dark night of the soul. Something happened. Could you tell me when that first happened, what happened when it happened, and how that changed the course of your life?
Sure. The very first thing that happened early on, within a week of Todd's transition, was that I had a dream visit. It was interesting in that it had a component of validation to it that left me going, “What happened?” Let me go ahead and describe that. Approximately a week after Todd transitioned, I was sleeping finally because it took me days to finally sleep. I finally got to a stage where I was able to sleep for at least a few hours.
Todd was suddenly in my dream, standing in front of me. It was very short and brief, but it was vivid. He simply said, “You could not have prevented my death.” It was really unusual because it was emotionally flat. It was almost like there was no emotion attached. He said that one thing and then he was gone. It was over. It was so vivid. I immediately woke up and it stuck in my memory.
The very next day, my older sister, Deborah, came to see me. She also lived in New York State. She lived about an hour away. She said, “I have the strangest thing to tell you. Anabelle had a dream.” Anabelle is her daughter. She said, “She had a dream about two days ago. She said Todd showed up in her dream and said to her, ‘You could not have prevented my death.’ Anabelle said it was really strange because there was no emotion.”
My sister described to me the exact dream that I had had the night before that her daughter had had before I had it in every detail. Its briefness, the message, and the lack of emotion. I needed that little bit of extra validation to go, “That might have been Todd coming to tell me something that he needed to tell me because my niece was able to have the identical experience before me.”
I'm guessing that it helped validate that really was Todd not only because he was saying something that made you feel a lot better, but that is the exact question that you've probably been asking yourself, “Have I done something?”
It didn't prevent me from asking that question again and again, but it was a first step into me going, “It seems like there can be something more that he's not really gone. If he can come back to tell me that, what else is there? How does he exist? What level might he exist on?” It felt like too much of a synchronicity. He did come to me again a couple of months later in a very brief dream with a bit of a missing emotion. It wasn't as extreme as the first time.
The second time, I was on the family farm where our family cemetery is. It is where he's buried. I was sleeping in a cabin on the farm. He suddenly appeared in my dream. He simply said, “I'm sorry for the pain I caused to all the people who love me.” It was as if it was so vivid. I woke up immediately. I can remember it as if it had happened.
Why do you think he had a flat affect?
I don't know. I have asked that question many times. I almost think it might have been necessary in order for him to come through. Even at that stage, a couple of months later, my emotions, in particular, were still very heavy, and they stayed heavy for a long time. Whether it was important for me or whether it was important for him or both of us, I really don't know, but it seemed to be a specific quality of the dream at that time. He has come other times as well in the dream state. The emotion, at least the love, is very much apparent there. At later stages, I could feel that deep emotion, but early on, it was a flat emotional affect.
Let’s talk about the dream for a second. The one profound experience that I've had was in a dream, but I don't like to call it a dream. I know that technically, it's referred to as either a dream after-death communication, a sleep after-death communication, or a lucid dream. I don't like the word dream in there because it felt too different from a dream. It sounds like what you experienced was much different from a dream. You're an artist, so you could probably describe this better than I could. What was it?
The lucidity is really important. In most dreams, you can wake up and ten minutes later, you're like, “What was I dreaming?” You can't hold onto it. You can't remember it. With what I call a dream visitation, although, in reality, you could get rid of the word dream and call it a visitation, it is very easy to remember over a long period of time. It’s impactful in the moment and you're lucid during that visitation. Your body may still be in the sleep state. We know through out-of-body experiences, things like astral projection, that the body can be asleep and the consciousness can be completely awake.
Was it before wakefulness or before sleep when this happened?
I can't tell you only because the event woke me up out of the physically asleep state. I was consciously aware from the visitation through to my body waking up. It's like there was no pause between the two, if that makes sense.
I've been told that a lot of people have these things during that state, which is before sleep or before wakefulness. Gary knows the word. One word is for before sleep and one word is before wake.
Hypnagogic.
Hypnagogic is before sleep and hypnopompic is before wakefulness.
That may be true.
Gary, what’s the difference?
I refer to it as the hypnagogic state. It's that in-between state.
That's a really easy way to get introduced to the metaphysical. You don't have to do anything. You could sleep and let yourself be open and it comes to you.
Many people do have that early on. It's very common for those visitations to happen soon after the transition of the loved one or within the first year. Certainly, those were important to me. I feel like they were important to my son as well because he had something specific to say. The communication is telepathic as opposed to spoken.
He didn't open his mouth?
No. It's very clear information, but it is telepathic.
It was the same with mine. It was very interesting in that way. This is not my dream, but I noticed that it happened at the University of North Texas when people were being administered the IADC therapy. They were having these reunions with their deceased loved ones. They all invariably commented on what the deceased was wearing during the event. They were like, “Why was Bob wearing orange? He never wore orange in life.” I remembered what my father was wearing in my dream. It stuck with me. Was Todd wearing anything unusual?
Not anything unusual. I will be honest. If you asked me the question about what he was wearing, I would say he was wearing what he always wore, which was jeans and a T-shirt. He looked like himself.
You had this dream. I don't know if we want to fast forward because a lot of things happened in between. Could you give me some highlights of what has happened to you that made you the person you are?
Sure. I had a need to know. I had a need to understand if my son continued to exist in any meaningful way that I could communicate with him. I needed to know the nature of my own existence and my own reality. I do find not everybody needs to know, but for those of us who do, it's often either you come at it from a lifelong standpoint or you come at it through a loss or a transition of somebody very dear to you. I have always had a lifelong interest. I had experiences early on that I didn't necessarily have language to describe or explain. I understood them in the context I had at the time.
After Todd's transition, the first thing I started to do was to meditate because I was looking for relief from the grief more than anything. I moved to meditation because I recognized pretty quickly that it helped to calm me. It helped to soothe me. It helped me to get into, at least temporarily, a state where my grief was not so overpowering. However, within that meditative state, things started to happen. I started to experience knowing. I started to experience what felt like conversations in my head. I experienced some actual physical sensations. It was a very physical vibratory state.
I wasn't anticipating any of those things, either. Especially when the information would come and it was later validated in different instances, I began to realize that we are so much more than our bodies and that we have access not only to people without bodies because they are also not the bodies that they once resided in. We had access to fields of information as well.
I studied everything under the sun. I read everything I could find. I read about science. Quantum physics was the one that was most useful to me. I read the mystics and a lot of different mystical traditions. I read the basis of many worldwide religions. I was looking for all the overlap that I could find that would tell me anything about the nature of reality and the nature of consciousness beyond the physical.
We have something in common in that way because, in my film, I looked at the metaphysical. I was also looking at quantum physics. I saw the overlap there, and it seems like you saw that same overlap. The mystics were saying the same thing that the quantum physicists were saying. Maybe there's something to this unseen world that we could know more about.
With all of that, I visited a few mediums, some of which were good and some that were not so good. Mediumship did have an impact on me early on. I began to play with developing my own intuition and my own connection. It was surprising, but it was doable. It was real. I owe that to the fact that it is our inherent human nature to connect, especially to our loved ones.
I found out I can also connect to other people's loved ones, but not everybody's going to do that. Not everybody wants to do that, and that's perfectly fine. That's perfectly acceptable. In these meditative states, I would start getting information about other people's relationships and then have the opportunity to validate them later.
The key to healing my own grief and to weaving the story that I had been given of my son’s suicide transition, the key to all of that was developing a new relationship with him and getting to that knowing state where I no longer doubted that that was real. It was something that I could continue to interact with him and that I could continue to share this love that I had for him that, for a time, felt like it had no place to go. Suddenly, I knew he still could receive it. He still could interact with me and even assist me when I needed it in understanding what time I had left here driving this physical body around.
I'm going to need some answers about something quickly. Don't hesitate. I need to know the how. What did you do? What did you do that seemed effective? What came easy for you? What could you impart to me that would make me feel like, “I could do this too?”
I tend to be a jack of all trades and a master of none, but I dabbled in everything. Meditation was that first early thing, and it was really helpful. It was wonderful. I also read somewhere that tarot cards were useful for tapping into your own intuition, and so I started to learn how to read tarot cards and Oracle cards. Sure enough, you can not only get mostly psychic information that way, but you can also periodically use it to create soul connections as well to assist you in creating those soul connections. I played with things like dowsing and pendulums. Primarily, I took classes from a number of other well-known and established mediums. I did a year-long mentorship with a medium in Colorado. All of that and all the reading that I have done has led me to where I am.
Where is that? Where are you?
I fess up to my own mediumship. For a while, I had a brick-and-mortar storefront in Colorado where I did readings and taught classes. COVID hit and I took care of my mother during her transition, so I shut all that down for a while. I am working with another medium, Sally Stacey, who you do know. With and through her, I have begun developing some spirit art as well as the recognition of imagery that shows up through technology. I'm spending a lot of time on that. My mediumship continues to open up further, but I'm focusing on development at the moment. That's really what I'm doing. I do have a small Facebook group where I share a lot about connecting with your loved ones on the other side.
What's that called?
That is called The Thinning Veil. Everybody's welcome to join me there. I have a few short questions about whether or not you believe that it's possible to communicate with your loved ones and if you can agree to disagree with others. That's about it.
You're not offering private mediumship.
I'm not offering a private mediumship. I still do readings periodically for people who know me, but as this imagery work develops, I know that's going to be offered on a wider scale. I am also getting ready to start teaching through some platforms. I'll probably start to give announcements for that on The Thinning Veil. I also have a Facebook page for my mediumship. I'll post things there. I'm looking for a platform that makes it easiest for people to sign up for it. I've got about half a dozen classes in the bank ready to go.
I'm going to ask you for a special favor on behalf of my audience. Several people received my email about this session. They said, “I don't want to miss this. My child took his own life or her own life like Sally's.” They’re either in the audience or are going to watch us on YouTube at some point or one of the platforms it’s on. If they contact you through your website and say, “I really need to speak to you,” will you give that attention?
I will respond. I always try to respond. Depending on how many, I try to respond within a few days' time. If I start to get behind, I'll at least say, “I'll get back to you soon,” at the very least. I always respond to parents.
I choose my mediums. I do like mediums. I like hanging out with mediums, I have to admit. Since I like your vibe so much, I have to assume that there's a good percentage of people who also like your vibe and will want to talk to you about what's going on with them.
I am always happy to talk to parents. I know the challenge of the grief that goes with the loss of a child, so if I can ever help with that, I'm always happy and willing to do what I can on that front. This imagery work is developing. I will probably be looking for maybe some individuals who would be willing to sit with me across the Zoom platform. That's where they generally show up. A lot of times, I can see them in real time. Even if I don't see them in real time, I can go back into the recording and see them there.
The imagery stuff is a little bit mind-blowing. I consider myself open. You and I are both skeptical by nature, and we're both open. When I first heard about Sally Stacey and what you were doing with the artwork, I felt like I needed to be slowly indoctrinated. You can't bring me into the water all at once. It took me a while to get there. The medium you mentioned, Sally Stacey, gave me a reading. She put my late best friend, Jeffrey, on the screen in front of me. It looked like a photograph, but it wasn't a photograph. It was like an artist's rendition of some kind. I was like, “Jeffrey did that. Jeffrey put his image on the screen like that.”
That's exactly what happens.
It was pretty crazy.
It's amazing.
I don't know if it's too advanced for my audience. Maybe we’ll bring it in slowly.
That's okay. I was very skeptical about it myself initially. It was only finding those images as well myself and understanding the process. I do believe that the spirit world is actively utilizing technology. I have had EVPs and instrumental trans communications pop in crazily enough across Zoom meetings.
I'm hearing about that more and more, the EVP. Explain what that stands for.
EVP simply means Electronic Voice Phenomena. Typically, EVPs are something that you hear in hindsight in a recording. The other word is ITC or Instrumental TransCommunication. It can be imagery. It can be a voice. It can be text messages. I'm finding cell phones are being utilized a lot.
It turns out the dead are very tech-savvy.
They're more tech-savvy than you could possibly imagine. I'm experiencing more and more of it all the time. I am skeptical. I look for logical explanations and physical explanations first, and then I will also tap into my own intuition and be open to the possibilities.
I'm going to have a few more sessions or shows like these. What I'm trying to do is bring people in. I don't think I have announced yet what kind of guests I'm trying to have. I don't want to have all mediums. I want to have professors. I want to have psychologists, therapists, and other healthcare professionals. I want people who know how to tell a good story. I want people who want to talk about after-death communication from all walks of life and all vocations.
They're there.
I want to do it, though, in a logical way. Bringing Sally into this show at this juncture might be a little bit too quick for me. I'll let her be on more of the advanced side of the curriculum.
The experiences I have had myself, I would've thought they were science fiction at one point. The only thing is I've experienced some astounding things. They want to communicate with us as much as they did when they were here because the love is still there. I find that if you have a willingness and an openness, you can develop this natural human capacity. My primary goal is to help other people communicate with their loved ones to know that it's possible and to know that they can do it. That is the most healing thing for grief. It is to know that you can have that relationship in an ongoing way.
The most healing thing for grief is to know that you can have that relationship in an ongoing way.
When you experience anything yourself, that's something that's pretty much unforgettable.
Exactly. The classes that I do plan on teaching in the very near future will very much be about connecting with your own loved ones. You don't need a medium. A medium is nice. If they're good especially, it's great, but you can do it yourself because it is a natural human capacity.
That's how it's easy to know that people like you are for service or want to be of service. It’s not because it's fun or a money maker. It's because you want to be of service.
When you experience a great loss, you also gain deep empathy for others experiencing something similar, so you want to help in any way that you can.
Everyone, we want you to be able to ask a question. Being as we are short on time, we do ask that you keep to one question and keep it a couple of sentences. We're going to start with Robyn.
Thank you very much. Thank you to everyone. Sally, that was wonderful to listen to even though it was painful to listen to. When you had the first visit from your beautiful son, it was without emotion. You would think that would be hard. I was writing it down, trying to work out why there was no emotion from your lovely son.
I came to a bit of a thought that because we live our lives through emotion and we're clairsentient to everything, it rules us, whether we deal with something that might take us years to deal with or if it's a factual thing. It leads us to knowledge, where you learn to have empathy for other people. That non-emotion was able to start you, so it may be quicker to get to a place where you are.
Does what I'm saying make sense, Sally?
It does. It was probably a shorter-term reason, though. It was a state of being that needed to occur in order for him to come through in that particular case because it was still so fresh. I was barely breathing in and out at that stage. That's a lovely consideration that you've stated. It's really interesting. I'll keep thinking about it further. For me, it was a necessary component for him to be able to come through at the time.
That’s exactly what I was trying to say. Thanks, Sally.
No problem.
Thank you. I do want to remind people we've got several questions. We are short on time, so please try and keep it to 1 to 2 sentences for your question. Wendy Jackson, you're next.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Sally, and thank you, everybody, for being on this call. I am curious. I’ve lost a number of loved ones and family members. The dreams I have seem to be my psyche, not visitations. I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit, the difference between a visitation and maybe an ordinary dream.
Typically, a visitation is going to be quite brief. My understanding of it is that it does take a certain amount of energy on their part in order for them to come through in that way. They don't seem to have the length of storyline that a typical dream will have, if that makes sense.
It does, very much. In fact, that's why I haven't asked for very much.
I want to save time here, but if you do go to The Thinning Veil and scroll down early in the development of that group a few years ago, I did speak directly to some techniques for initiating a dream visitation. There may even be a video I've got out that I may have shared. I can't remember. I'll have to go back and double-check. I've taught a class on it as well. Go back and check to see some of those techniques for initiating because you can ask for them. You will successfully have a dream visitation with a little time and patience.
Thank you.
Reaching out to them gets their attention, and they'll reach out to you. Thank you for your question. Janice, go ahead.
Thank you, Sally, for your story and everything. As a medium myself and also losing a close family member, my former husband to suicide, I can completely understand your story outside of having a child be gone to suicide. My question was, I've continued communication with him for the last few years. My former communication with him is not just the dream state but also going into the Clairs. Also, I do automatic writing with him daily. I wanted to know, outside of the dream and outside of the mediumship part of it, if you find yourself going into automatic writing. Are you continually in contact with him?
Yes. I continue to be in contact with them. I'm finding that we're learning to communicate even with new forms. Technology is a thing that is starting to occur. I don't want to go into a long story about that, but ongoing communication. I do automatic writing periodically. That tends to be more with my guides than with my son.
Since I am working on spirit art, not only am I doing the imagery with technology but I'm also doing some pure mental mediumship portraiture. I have guides that work with me for that as well. In a way, that's similar to automatic writing because you are drawing. It's drawing rather than words, but it's a similar process.
Thank you, Janice.
Thank you.
Julie, go ahead.
I wondered if you'd ever had contact directly through any of the people from your own area or from people that you know. Have you ever gotten a calling through music? I tend to get in the car and I'll hear a song.
Music is significant. I don't get a lot of that myself, but I know people who do. It's the nature of how my son and I interact with each other. Different people will get it in different ways. Some people get very drawn to things like license plates. They'll see messages on license plates or hear messages in music. I have received music from other people. I'm probably too open sometimes when this does happen, but I have other people's people pop in on me during the night. They'll bring me music to share as part of the message for their loved ones. I've been able to do that. For whatever reason, my son chooses other ways. Some of it is the talent that they have on that side, getting your attention for specific things. For some, it's music. For others, it's other symbols.
It's that attention that I tend to get that’s calling me to look through other things. All of a sudden, something will pop up and you think, “I've got to do that now.” It connects. Thanks for that.
They play on your strengths of noticing.
Thank you, Julie. Up next, we have R.
Thank you so much, Sally. Thank you for your work. Thanks to everyone being here. I have a two-part question. They are related though. I helped my ex-husband pass away. I was with him during his transition. It was very quick. From diagnosis to death was only six weeks. I remember there were conversations that we were having. It almost felt like they were on a different plane, which now makes sense to me. I was wondering whether or not you have any experience with people on a different astral plane and then it makes sense later. You're like, “That's what that meant. That's one.”
Connected to that is that I have had visitations by him in dreams, but they were always this feeling where he didn't know he was dead and I had to explain it to him. I was wondering if that was a visitation or was that me and my own psyche working through it. Is there anything that you can speak to about both of those things?
I did assist both of my parents through their transitions. My dad was very meaningful to me because he transitioned nine months after my son. Twice, he saw Todd and was able to speak to it before he passed. That was a really important part of my journey and my experience. As people become looser in their bodies, the best way to put it is that they become aware of the greater reality and will have people coming for them. They will have people waiting for them and they become aware of them at the time. That is a very common experience for people who are transitioning but also for the family members or the caretakers who are around them.
With regard to the dream with the unawareness of who they are that they're dead, for your specific case, I'm not tapped open to give you a mediumistic answer, but I will tell you what I think. This is my opinion. There can be some confusion, especially early on, after the transition, about where they are and whether or not they are in the physical 3D world or the next reality.
For a lot of people, the next reality feels as solid and as real as this one feels to us because they are resonant with it. We feel the world is solid around us because we are resonant with it. It feels solid to us. We will be resonant with the next world, if you want to put it that way, we will be resonant with the next world we find ourselves in. I say world. That's a metaphor. It's a symbol for the next reality. It will feel very real to us as well. There can be some confusion about that state. Generally, it does resolve itself within a somewhat short period of time. I speak about time with a grain of salt because it's very different.
It stopped. The visitations that I have are not the same. I thank you for confirming that. Thanks very much.
I would certainly concur with what Sally said. Oftentimes, people don't know that they've transitioned initially. It's a shock.
Gary, I promised Sally that we would wrap it up. We have four more hands raised. I'm not sure if we're going to get to everybody or not.
We'll do the four if they'll keep it short. I do have company still, so we'll get to Beth and then call it a day.
One-sentence questions, everybody.
Go ahead, Sarah.
Thank you so much. I've experienced four dream time experiences. For the first two, I considered visitations. They were with my cousin very soon after she died. They were positive. Since my mother passed, I've had nothing but dreams of her being angry at me. My question is, how do you know when your dream is truly a dream that your brain is creating, or is it a visitation?
For me, go back to those qualities of dream visitation that seem to be most significant. That would be the vividness of it at the moment, the ability to hold it in memory for a long time, and the briefness of it. Typically, there's going to be some sort of message attached to it as well. If you can tick those boxes, it still may be a negative message. We are still who we are after we transition. Not everybody immediately is a nice person when they transition.
You have answered my question. I know which is which. I don't want to take up any more time. I wanted to thank you very much.
You're very welcome. Thank you.
Thank you, Sally. Stephen, over to you.
First of all, thank you so much, Sally, for your time.
You're welcome. Thank you.
That was wonderful. We really appreciate you stopping by and telling us about your life. I can't thank you enough. Thank you so much.
Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
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