A haunted place is usually a house or location where residual energy remains of the people who lived there or of the events that occurred there. But can this residual energy exist in some other form? Can there, perhaps, be something that occurs on the same day, in the same location, with the same person, that other people tune into as they enter the place?
I drove back to Orlando with Megan so that our dog and I could surprise Rob when he returned from Minneapolis. Megan and I got there early Monday afternoon and she had dogs to walk. So we unloaded our stuff, got Noah and Nika, her dog, into the house, then she left to tend to her dog clients and I walked over to the Panera Bread to get us some lunch.
The walk is pleasant, along two cobblestone roads, through a charming Orlando neighborhood shaded with trees and lined with older homes. The weather was perfect – high 70s, not much humidity, and I was in a great mood.
Panera is something of an anomaly in my book – a fast-food place that features fresh, delicious meals. I nearly always order the same thing – You Pick 2, $6.99, a bowl of broccoli cheddar soup and the Greek salad.
When I got there that afternoon the lunch crowd had come and gone. It was probably around 2:30. One man was in front of me. I usually scan the menu on the wall just in case something new and delectable has been added to the choices, but decided to buy my usual. Megan’s usual is the broccoli cheddar soup in a bread bowl. So I get to the cashier, a cute little thing with a big smile.
“So what would you like?” she asked.
“The You Pick 2.” And right then before I ordered the soup, I experienced a distinct clicking sound in my head. It’s the only way I can describe it. I felt as if I had dived head first through that opening in the wave at the top of the post and into another dimension or level of reality. I blurted, “Chocolate cheddar soup…”
The cashier’s eyes widened with surprise. “Oh my God,” she murmured. “I can’t believe you said that.”
Yeah, well, I couldn’t believe it, either. I mean, c’mon. Chocolate cheddar soup?
“You’re like the fourteenth person who has said that to me today,” she went on. “How weird is that, right?”
You have no idea just how weird, I thought, and walked back to Megan’s place with our lunch order, puzzling over what had happened.
So you’re a cashier at Panera Bread who, during the course of your shift, wait on scores of customers. But during your shift, fourteen people make the same mistake when referring to broccoli cheddar soup and call it chocolate cheddar soup. Maybe you don’t really take notice until it happens three or four times – a cluster – and now you’re keeping track, as this cashier did.
Later that evening, Rob, Megan and I walked to a place downtown for a bite to eat and started talking, as we often do, about the weird stuff that we’d experienced in the last few days. My Panera Bread experience seemed pretty lame in light of their stories – which I’ll try to explain in subsequent posts. But I think that Megan nailed it when she said, “Wow, Mom, so you walked into that chocolate cheddar soup vibration, picked up on it, and ordered it.”
Residual energy, like a haunted house, I thought.
The clincher for me was when Megan asked if I’d seen the wave painting she’d done recently and had put up on her bedroom wall. I had seen it on Facebook, but not in person, and hurried into her bedroom. The second I saw that wave, I knew I now had a visual depiction of what I’d experienced at Panera Bread. That hole in the wave was my multidimensional portal.
Or brain wave technology being tested there.
Interesting possibility!
Correction: Dr. ******* died on June 16, 2013, not JULY 16. He appeared in my dream on June 22, 2013, six days later. The secretary in the LOWE’S funeral home offered to send me his obituary, and I was so grateful. I sent a letter of condolence to his family, and one of his sons graciously responded. (Of course, I did not tell the family how I had learned of his death.) I had humbly requested a photograph in my condolence letter, if the family felt they would be comfortable sending me one, and a few weeks later, an envelope arrived in my snail-mail mailbox with two photos of him! I have one of them propped up under a lamp right beside my chair in my Egyptian room, and I know he is very often with me.
Actually the last time he and I were in contact with each other in life was back in the 1960s. We had a very close, intimate, albeit non-sexual, relationship. He was my physician. In mid-June of 2013, he appeared to me in a sleeping dream and told me that he had crossed to the Other Side. The dream startled me, considering that the connection between us had been so many years in the past. But, I researched his name using PeopleFinders, located him in a tiny South GA town, phoned the newspaper there to see if he was in their obituary archives. The editor needed a date of death, which I didn’t have, and she suggested I phone the funeral home there and gave me that phone number. I called the funeral home….LOWE’S Funeral Home….asked if my friend was in their system, and without a moment’s pause, the secretary told me immediately that YES, Dr. ***** ****** had indeed died a mere six days previously! He had died on June 16, 2013; he had come to me in my dream on July 22! There are two mind-bending synchros among many here: When my husband and I had gone to see a movie at the elite LOWE’S Grand Theater in Atlanta, on the corner of Sycamore and Peachtree Streets, as we were walking up the plush red carpet to go into the darkened theater, we passed my physician and his wife coming OUT of the theater! And, his medical office was located on Sycamore Street in Decatur, GA….a suburb of Atlanta.
So, the LOWE’S Theater and the SYCAMORE STREET were definitive synchros! Since the initial dream when he came to tell me he had left this life, he has been in steady, continual communication with me. I now have a deep drawer in my session room with no less than twenty-seven….yes, twenty-seven….legal pads filled with the dialogues that he and I have shared since June 22, 2013. The “book” is writing itself. I continue to be astounded by this unprecedented situation and by the messages he shares with me from his dimension. In many of these sleeping dreams, we “meet” in a beautiful, small park surrounding a little lake, and we sit together on a blanket near a curved stone bridge, underneath weeping willow trees, and we softly converse about so very many things. (In life, although I went to the little park by myself quite frequently, he and I never went there together. But now, in my dreams, it is where we often are.) I don’t know WHY he has come into my space….but he has enriched my life beyond description, and the book is being penned. There has been a singular experience shared with him that has completely altered my perceptions of Life after Life here. I have no explanation. Just the experience and its awareness that our Souls, and the dimensions where our Souls reside when discarnate, are beyond the comprehension of our finite minds. I apologize for the length of this comment. There was no way to make it brief.
OOPS! My computer “jumped” on me. I had intended to delete that last paragraph and didn’t finish it, so please ignore!
Due to a recent otherworldly. life-altering experience for which I have no explanation, I have acquired a sense that, while wide awake and involved in the mundane activities of mundane life, we may somehow “cross a threshold”, or inadvertently “stumble” through a portal or vortex into some other dimension, where high weirdness, inexplicable incidents occur. I question my mental stability when it happens, wondering if I’m hallucinating or if my imagination has created the event. So reading Trish’s experience at Panera, and DJan’s comment, I feel less crazy. It seems to me that even when we are in full beta consciousness, performing routine tasks that allow our minds to meander, focusing on nothing in particular, we are simply “open” to potential parallel or other dimensions. These experiences, although apparently extremely rare, occur. The painting above is spectacular…I notice there are “orbs” within the curved wave. Mind-bending and beautiful!
Recently I found myself in such a circumstance: wide awake, not day-dreaming or drowsy or otherwise in an altered state, I was quite suddenly “Somewhere” with a much-loved man from my distant past who is now deceased. Wherever that dimension was, both he and I were completely corporeal, completely tangible
I think that may be a novel, Connie, that you should write.
This is so interesting! I think it was extra strong because the cashier was also elevating the energy in a type of anticipation.
I think you’re right about the cashier!
Fascinating, Trish. Yes, there must be such portals and you walked right into one. You open my eyes to so many possibilities around me all the time. 🙂
You walk into those portals on your hikes, DJan. I’m sure of it!