Ghosts Among Us - James Van Praagh [67]
If you want to contact family members in a very safe and easy way, ask your loved ones to appear in your dreams just before going to sleep. In a few days, or maybe a week, you will see them. I recommend that you also keep a dream journal next to your bed so that you can quickly write down your experience in the dream state. The more time that passes after the dream, the more likely you will start forgetting it.
If you want to know your spirit guide, ask him or her to appear in your dreams and tell you what type of guide he or she is and what his or her work entails. Believe me, it works.
I incorporate a technique on one of my meditation CDs that helps students get to know their guides. I cannot tell you how many e-mails people send me to say that, not only were they able to see their guides, but sometimes they were surprised at who showed up.
One lady felt somewhat exasperated by the exercise. She said that she played the CD every night before going to bed, and every morning she would wake up dreaming about her dead dog.
She was shocked when I told her, “Your dog is probably one of your guides.”
“For what?” she asked. “How can a dog be a guide?”
“Well, think about it,” I replied. “One of the most endearing characteristics of a dog is protection. Your dog is protecting you from the other side.”
When the woman realized that her beloved pet was still watching over her, she felt a sense of relief to know that she was never alone.
MEDIUMSHIP
A medium is an individual who is able to contact the spirit world through psychic phenomena that are either physical or mental in nature. As a mental medium, I have various abilities to communicate with the world beyond, including:
Clairvoyance: Commonly known as “second sight,” clairvoyance is the means by which a medium can visually see ghosts, pictures, symbols, or images in his or her mind’s eye.
Clairaudience: Using this form of mediumship, a medium can hear spirit voices as sounds or read a spirit’s thoughts that come into his or her mind.
Clairsentience: This is the most common form of mental mediumship. A medium can sense and feel a spirit’s energy as well as its emotional state and personality.
The other type of mediumship is physical. A medium with this ability is harder to find nowadays. It is a phenomenal gift with the following attributes:
Transfiguration: A spirit superimposes its face on the medium’s face, and those in the room can see the visible characteristics of a deceased person’s face.
Apports: Completely solid objects can materialize out of thin air through a physical medium. Often ghosts will make coins, flowers, keys, or stones appear.
Automatic writing: A physical medium can write messages under the influence of a ghost. Depending on the amount of blending of ghost with medium, many times the ghost’s own penmanship style will appear.
Trance or trance channel: The medium falls into a trance, allowing a spirit to take control of his or her body. There are many degrees of trance, from deep to light. Deep trance is the optimal way for a spirit to come through completely.
Materialization: Under the right conditions, a spirit draws an ethereal substance known as ectoplasm out of the medium, and others around him, and manipulates this ectoplasm so that the spirit takes on physical form.
Direct voice: Here again, a spirit draws out ectoplasm from a medium and creates an artificial voice box. The spirit concentrates its energies through this voice box and speaks in an earthly voice.
THE PHYSICAL MEDIUM LESLIE FLYNT
When I was developing my mediumship abilities, I had the wonderful experience of sitting with a very kind soul. Brian E. Hurst was the first one to discover my abilities. Every summer Brian would host Leslie Flynt, the physical medium I spoke about earlier in the book. Leslie was in his late seventies and would rarely sit for people, but