Paul F.

I was lying in bed in my dorm room, alone, after having walked home during half time from a basketball game. I felt strange and had a severe, pounding headache.

As I lay on my bed, a shining white mountain appeared over the top of my head. I got up, leaving my body on the bed. I climbed several steps to a plateau of the mountain. At the plateau, I confronted an extremely bright white light on my right, while on my left appeared a huge white screen that looked rather like a movie screen in a theater. The screen was opaque from my side, but it was shining and very white. There were beings on the other side of the screen that I couldn’t see, but I could tell they were whispering or softly talking about me, but not TO me. I asked the white light and the screen whether my girlfriend and I would break up. A disembodied voice told me that, no, we would be together all our lives.

Then I asked what it was like in the spiritual area in which I was. A voice told me that a good analogy would be a jellyfish. From the top of the water, it just looks like a small, inflated blob, but under the water, it has threads or feelers that reach deeply a long way into the water. Our life on earth was just like the top of the jellyfish, but our life in this dimension had the feelings and depth of the long, trailing threads of the jellyfish. The analogy meant that life on earth was just a very small part of what we would experience in this place. All the threads and strands of the jellyfish on the other side of the screen were animated with deep feelings, and over there we perceived reality in a much more profound way.

I retreated to my body and realized again that I had a terrible headache, which I hadn’t felt up on the plateau. I tried to sleep. Then my girlfriend’s brother, who was staying in my room with me, approached me with a thermometer. I had a fever of 104 degrees. I went to the school’s health center, where it appeared I was delirious and not making any sense. I was diagnosed with severe tonsillitis, put to bed, and given a series of antibiotic shots over the next several days. My girlfriend and I have now been married for 44 years. We have a wonderful relationship and two grown daughters.