I see dead people (among others)
When my grandfather died, I was 4 and a half. He and my grandmother lived in the shed in the backyard and had all my life. My grandmother then got sent away the same week and I saw her another 4 times over the next 3 years and she was gone too. But they never really went. To start with, my grandfather had two deaths, the real one and the dream world one. Then they kept visiting occassionally over the years… in dreams.
When a friend’s mother came into my dreams to tell me to tell her daughter she loved her, it seemed quite odd but even stranger when I found the was the same time where thousands of miles away, the woman had died. Then she came back to remind me to tell her daughter something else. On phoning, I found it was the anniversary of the woman’s death. So maybe I’ve got some kind of body calendar thing but if so it is unconscious.
When my father died he visited my dreams and told me many things, not verbally, but emotionally about himself, his spiritual troubles. He’d been a man who had never really found a sense of home with his family. Our home was a war zone to say the least. There was violence, alcoholism, excess and insanity. And at work, my father was a workaholic and compulsive womaniser; a comedic man, almost more cartoon than human being, who never seemed to really be at ease. It was as though he was always flighty, restless, no real sense of home and though very popular, I’m uncertain whether he ever really felt he had friends.
In the dreams after he died, he was in the laneway behind his workplace, naked and lost. He told me he felt deep regret and shame, that he had no food, no water, no place to sleep, that he was cold and he was lost and deeply regretful. He showed me the workplace he’d squandered his life in and the home life with my family he’d never been able to really commit to. I told him (non-verbally, emotionally, for virtually nobody talks in my dreams) that he was who he was and that it was ok for him to have been who he was. I awoke and made him a sacred space with a cup of water, a cup of rice, a dish laid with silk and some candles for light and warmth. He visited my dreams becoming less troubled, as he moved eventually into a shed, then finally the shed had become expanded into a luxury apartment. Progressively he seemed to be at ease, at home with himself and this was reflected in him having found somewhere he seemed to feel at home.
I recently passed by his old workplace. It had been a car yard for the 30 years he ran it, then it was still a car yard for 10 years after he died. But this time I was gobsmacked. For there, 14 years after his death, was a luxury block of executive apartments. In the grounds stood a shed, probably that he builders had used in the process of building the apartments. The title on the building read “Urban Soul”, no kidding. And a business was offered there from one of the apartments. It advertised… wait for it and this is no word of a lie… “lifestyle counseling”. I had to wonder if he was in there somewhere, finally having merged work with a comfortable sense home he could actually relax in.
A close friend died and visited me in dreams several times, again, asking me to give messages to her daughter. I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to contact her daughter. It left me feeling I’d let her down.
Another friend died and I met her in a flying dream. She was up in the sky and I noticed how beautiful her eyes were and she told me this was because she was dead now.
But if seeing dead people isn’t challenging enough, there have been a handful of living ones who reappear too. Not just the run of the mill people of the past, but those few people who in life had looked right into your soul and into whose soul you too had ventured. When it happens, as is rare to happen as strongly from two people, this level of sensing, this ’spiritual knowing’ is something almost imprinted on one’s emotional life. And when they are people from the past, especially highly sensing people, it’s unnerving that they appear in one’s dreams. They bring a spooky level to the dream, alluring, challenging to equilibrium, disorienting when one awakens to usual daily life. Makes me feel that some people are ghosts before they leave their bodies in death. And yet, is it that THEY haunt us, or is it that we have mapped their souls and we now haunt ourselves with these spiritual clones?
Ah, for a mundane dream.
Between lucid dreaming and this netherland between dreams and spirituality, do dreams really keep us sane? Or do they sometimes haunt our waking lives with nostalgia and quests leaving us only half awake?
Now I’ll go take some medication 
http://www.donnawilliams.net
author, artist, composer, screenwriter.
Wow. LOL I love the ending. Thank you for sharing so much. Your books and writings have helped me to understand myself and sons better. I was a bit of a selective mute, still a bit of a hermit but can talk to strangers now (beginning about at 22 but not well until after about age 30) 2 of 3 sons pdd but getting better and some may call indigo or crystal childen.
Have myself a couple dreams come true (spooking one person i told it to) after long period of no dreams, but in a spiritual enlightening period of life so to speak. and on and off seeing some spooky stuff awake i would rather not see ghosts as well as my youngest! Nothing like contacts bugging me to give messages you have though (tho my husband gets that too!)
Yes, I’m sure glad it’s only in my dreams!
Although I saw my grandmother once.
It was the wierdest thing, she was standing there watching and waiting for me.
I didn’t recognise her (I’m face blind)
so I looked away (as face blind do because its scary to have seeming strangers stare at you)
and then I felt the feel-speak thing telling me that was my grandmother
and I looked up and she had literally disappeared.
I ran out to find her, desperate, so excited she had come back
but she was nowhere to be found
I was 23
She had died when I was 7.
I also saw my friend’s grandfather waving to her
(only learned this was him after I described this stranger to her and her mum).
She didn’t see him, and in a blink, he was gone
he died, to the surprise of all
3 days later
after that I didn’t want to see any ghosts
and so far I only see them now in my dreams.
glad they’re not queing!
but they’re pretty much only ghosts of people I knew.
And of course certain living highly sensing individuals who spook me in my dreams.
these dreams have the wierdest quality to them.
I’m sure your husband knows what I mean.
They are truly other worldly.
It’s a vacuum kind of thing.
Anyway, for the record I DON’T think I’m psychic.
But I do know such experiences can run in families.
And both my parents have had ghost experiences.
But I think both also likely had bipolar (both were medicated).
So being nuts helps
Donna *)
“So being nuts helps”
You crack me up Donna!
I just love your offbeat sense of humour.
Hi Donna! I have been reading your articles for some time. I found you while searching information on autism because my son has some of it. Anyway, thank you for sharing your dreams of dead people. My mother died almost three years ago and this year she came to me in my dreams with a very important message to me and one my sisters just when I needed to hear it. This makes me more sure that it wasn’t just a dream.
yes better to be haunted in dreams than in waking life.
in waking life I had a few ghost experiences.
I wrote of a few of these encounters in Nobody Nowhere
and Everyday Heaven covered several deaths in quick succession, including my father’s,
and how I handled all that.
I do think spirituality is associated with altered states of consciousness
and that some people with autism have these.
My first ghost experiences I can remember I was 2-3 years old.
I also think these things can run in families.
Question: Are autistic persons capable of what we are not with our closed minds? In the areas of seeing loved ones who have passed?
PS. Others may consider me nuts, due to my, lets say, “experiences with unexplained things”
Who knows….
my view is that those with poor receptive language and poor ability to process what they see, become stronger in the sensory channels which do work. kinesthetic and musical learning bypass visual/verbal processing. with kinesthetic processing, one learns through body and movement. With musical processing, one maps shifts in pattern, theme, feel. The two can combine to deeply physically map the movement and tonal patterns of people, which is a bit like how one stringed instrument can set off the resonance in another one, or how singing can impact the structure of glass… it’s vibratory if you like…. anyway, I have FELT souls all my life. I feel them MUSICALLY and map them PHYSICALLY and when people I’ve known aren’t with me, or die, I can somehow ‘call up’ their particular ‘music of beingness’…. which is a sort of unique vibrational map of each person I’ve got used to physically… it’s like an ‘address’ book of vibrational energy patterns I store in what may be body-mind…. anyway, when someone is gone for one reason or another, I can ‘call them up’ and interact with their pattern within my own energy boundaries…. so after someone close to me has died it’s like they are walking alongside of me, and when I experience things, it’s as though I can feel shifts in their energy too…. sounds wierd, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is ‘ghosts’, but I do feel our ways of mapping and knowing and remembering people are far more diverse that collections of mental pictures… and for me as someone who can’t form cohesive or fluent mental pictures, this is my version… perhaps closer to the reality of those blind from birth…. so hope that helps…. I wrote a lot about this in Autism And Sensing; The Unlost Instinct.
Donna *)
Donna,
Thanks once again.Your explanations are detailed and I can actually understand them. Elis’ dad and (dog of 15yrs) passed away 4 years back. Eli will be sittting quietly, then jump up, run to the front door, open it and greet his dad and dog with hugs and lnvite them in. They sit on his couch and converse in Eli language for about 30 minutes, then he accompanies them to the front door, hugs him and waves goodbye. This began 4 days after the death and continues even now. His wonderful caregivers have accepted these visits and they too will say hi to Ron and pet the dog. When he hears certain songs, he claps and says, its dad! Your explanations are calming, are you sure your not brilliant?
Eli’s experience resonates with my own.
I do not see ghosts (although I have seen 3 over my whole life time)… but those who are dead to visit me in dreams.
I do not hear ghosts (even the three times I saw ghosts I have never auditorily heard them)… but those who are dead speak silently on an emotional level to me in dreams and I wake with a clear sense of what they want from me etc.
I do sense those not physically present.
It’s a physical sensing, not a seeing or hearing.
there is a knowing of their words, but it’s heard emotionally not auditorily.
After my father died he did visit clearly twice whilst I was awake.
Once was during a TV show where they played old 50s rock and roll.
I felt crystal clear in my soul AS IF he were there in the room, I could feel this but not see it.
Then in my soul I FELT (not heard) him say, ‘come on Miss Polly, let’s dance’
and I just cried and cried and yes, I got up and did dance old 50s rock and roll with my father who I felt was there but could neither see nor hear with my eyes nor ears.
It was awesome.
I also sensed him crystal clear on my birthday a few years ago in Adelaide.
I had this nagging sense I had to go to the bead shop I’d been to once years before.
Didn’t know why, just like feeling pushed or pulled there.
I conceded, no idea why I needed to go there.
Inside the shop, I could sense my father there, couldn’t see him, couldn’t auditorily hear him,
but I knew there was something here I had to find.
then this small beaded angel was hanging in the window
and it was like a magnetic pull at my gut
and I FELT my father say, ‘happy birthday Polly’ and this was so strong, it was really moving
of course I cried.
I took the beaded angel to the counter.
When asked about it, I said, my father wants me to have it, from him, on my birthday
and a memory then sprang up from when I was about 4, and my father had given me a similar one he’d found in an old car, so I felt pushed to tell the shop assistant “it’s like the one he gave me when I was 4″.
She said, oh, that’s nice.
And I left with it and I felt as if I could feel his ‘relief’ as though he was now letting me go
having essentially bought me a birthday present.
wild.
I had a similar connection with his father, my grandfather.
I also really strongly had this with one of my cats, Monty.
I wrote of these connections with Monty and my father in Everyday Heaven.
I lost my father, my best friend and my cat all in 1 year.
I was visited in my dreams by my father and my best friend and visited in my waking state by my father and my cat, Monty.
I have heard of clairvoyance, clairaudience and I think what I’m describing has been called clairsentience, but I don’t believe I’m psychic. I prefer to think of this as being ’sensing’ and that we all had this but most people lose it as they gain functional language and move into the realm of mind and consciousness… no longer living in the preconscious state.
Donna *)
I did a thing with my mailing list recently where I had them send me pics. This was because at some of the schools I was consultant, there were photo walls, and I would begin telling the systems of the different children in the pics, their personalities, fears, motivations, etc. To me it was there as clear as music is written on paper. It was in things very very subtle… something in the TONE, the music of beingness captured. Anyway, I wanted to test if it was a fluke because staff would be pretty gobsmacked when I’d start reeling off these summaries and gather and say, what about this one, and this one. So I thought, maybe it’s just co-incidence. But, no, same thing happened when people sent me pics. People were pretty surprised, moved, sometimes really shocked. But to me its just all there, staring at me. So it’s hard to understand this isn’t everyone’s system. Anyway, I think I just see souls. And I think it’s a byproduct of living decades before being able to see bodies, faces as cohesive wholes, so all one can do is map systems, tone, that ‘music’. And also being someone who didn’t identify self with body, I was essentially a ghost with a body, half incarnated in a sense… it was VERY hard to choose life, to choose exposure caused by conscious awareness, acceptance of my own existance, and cognitively I lived in a middle world… I wrote of that in Nobody Nowhere… that I was not quite awake, and not quite asleep either… and I live mostly in that preconscious state…it’s just how my brain works… and it has weaknesses and strengths associated with that. Anyway, I reckon Eli may know what I mean there.
Donna , I am sure Eli knows. If I will ever know is the question. Eli is here right now, and I ask him questions constantly. He only stares blankly somewhere, or grins a little and walks away. His heritage is Cherokee, his dad a half breed, grandmother was the first daughter of the tribes shaman. His great grandelder was also the tribes shaman. I hear him in the front room as I type. He is talking to the old BW lassies videos he watches each day. When I enter the room he is silent.
Donna, if I were to send you a picture of Eli, would you tell me who and where he is?
When I opened the way to receive photos, I ended up inundated. Those whose photos I gave feedback on then sent their friends, their pets, their neighbors….I had to say, thanks folks but lets leave it there
gave me the impression that feeling photographs is a very sought after talent. But from my side it was also like having me so many people in one big rush. It was like my energy was awash with that of so many others I’d feel through the photos…. like being in a crowded party. Wouldn’t want to do that too often. aik.
and re Eli, as you can imagine, that sensing world is very open, and hence busy, the bucket is full so to speak. It is a preconscious ‘being’ world in which the conscious ‘appear’ world is a secondary one. Remember that autism is a fruit salad and those combinations of what talents and associated challenges combine to result in diverted development or developmental breakdown (and vice versa) are different for different people (read The Jumbled Jigsaw to see the range of fruit salad combos which can result in autism)… anyway, two of those pieces of potential autism fruit salad are being too highly sensing, because the down side is that the ‘appear’ world of intellect and consciousness, feels by contrast tiring, too sharp, too harsh, overwhelming in it’s bitty-ness. You can understand this system of sensing through Autism and Sensing; The Unlost Instinct…. but anyway, being highly sensing is one underlying aspect common in those with Exposure Anxiety… which is another piece of fruit salad for a percentage of people with autism (this is in Exposure Anxiety; The Invisible Cage) and in terms of personality, autism puts up the tempo on personality traits. Several traits are quite ‘autistic’ by nature… meaning that when exacerbated the person appears more ‘autistic’ or behaves more ‘autistically’. The vigilant trait and the idiosyncratic traits are two of these. The vigilant trait in the extreme makes one the highly developed systematician, the voyeur, the spy, who observes the world indirectly from the peripheries and then joins in when everyone has physically gone or is at a distance. The idiosyncratic is extremely good at their own world, lacks clearly developed sense of social norms and is extremely fluid, and naturally non-conformist… the extreme of it, Schizotypal Personality Disorder is often mistaken for Schizophrenia, but those with Schizotypal personality disorder often have an overdeveloped spirituality, ‘imaginary’ friends, are drawn to ‘other’ mental and emotional worlds… and yes, 100 years ago they’d have been called Shamans. Today much that was once viewed as shamanic can be called Schizotypal, even ‘autistic’. So it can add to the fruit salad. Selective Mutism is common in Exposure Anxiety and in Avoidant Personality Disorder (the extreme of the Sensitive personality trait) and Semantic Pragmatic Language Disorder (which is part of my fruit salad) will have one speak in stored phrases, echoed speech from times past and immediate and in one’s own idiosyncratic language… I also wrote of Sensing based language which would also fit idiosyncratic language. If one is also relatively face blind, meaning blind, context blind, meaning deaf then it only increases the comparative realness of one’s own world and the hard slog of functioning, communicating and interacting in the external world.
so, now I don’t need to see Eli’s pic
besides, I’ve already seen his pics on your webpages.
Chris showed me.
Donna,
You are unbelievably my personal encyclopedia. My personal goal this year is to read every book you have written. I spent the past 48 hrs with a silent Eli. The usual words, cookie,dog,pop were present. He does his laundry, bathes and watches videos in silence. When we arrived at his apartment, my key would not unlock the door. I said,”lets sit and wait for Crystal(his caregiver). As we sat, I heard a voice say. “Kick the window” I turned towards the voice and it was Eli. He just sat there, silently grinning. He has never made converstion and I was proud. I saw you and Chris wedding photos. Very romantic and I am so happy you have a life after the terrible chidlhood you endured. Love to you and Chris. Donna, are autistic sensitive to electrical inpulse?
yes, sensitivity to electricals runs on my mother’s side. Some members have to wear watches with rubber backs as their own electrical fields interfere with the watch. I learned this in late childhood when the watch I was given went nuts and went around and around like something from a horror film. I screamed like a banshee and my aunt helped me relax by showing me how she wore her watch on a chain and how it had a rubber back and said her father also wore a rubber backed watch. This grandfather had narcolepsi and this aunt had Meniere’s. There’s a 70% cancer rate on that side of the family so something immunological is a bit awry there. Anyway, yes, being around electricals used to make me physically drained and a little ill. But that was when I had two primary immune deficiencies and I’m ok these days.
I don’t wear a watch, I have one on a chain joined to my bag.