Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Dreams are funny things. We go to bed, get all comfy in our sheets and quilts and pillows, and the moment we shut our eyes, our brains go to work, sorting and analyzing  events of the day, week, month. But at some point, that process stops and dreams provide us with the raw material of the future.

Sometimes, these dreams are so literal you know what’s headed your way. Two weeks before my mother passed on, I had an early morning dream where I was at a writers’ conference (and had, in real life, just returned from such a conference)   when someone handed me a post-it with this message: Your mother has died. When I headed out to breakfast that morning and related the dream to Rob and my dad,   who was living with us at the time, my dad said, “I dreamed that she died, too.”

Right then, we both knew her death was imminent.

Since then, I pay attention to these early morning dreams, which seem to deliver clues about what’s coming up in my life. On August 1, I had one of those early morning dreams and it bolted me into full wakefulness. I glanced around the room, taking stock, taking inventory.

Thanks to the night light in a nearby bathroom, I could see Noah snoozing on a quilt next to his crate, the place Nika occupied when she lived here. Simba, our five-year-old orange tabby featured  in the photo above,  was stretched out alongside me. As usual, Rob was hogging the pillows. I flipped over onto my back and Simba climbed on top of me and as I shut my eyes, I remembered my dream:

I hurry up the hallway from the bedroom and encounter Simba. He has been dismembered by a dog – his body literally cut in half, and is somehow still alive. I’m freaking out, shrieking for Rob, screaming that we need to get Simba to a vet.  Simba, like our other two cats, came to us through our daughter, Megan. She chose him, he’s our only male cat, and for a long time, he used to sleep with her.

In the dream, my dad suddenly materializes. “He’s in pain, Trish,” he says (or something like that), and pulls out a puny .22 pistol and shoots Simba, ending his misery.

In real life, my dad never shot anything. He owned a .38 because in his later years he became paranoid about robbers, break-ins, etc. So now I’m beginning to think that dream was a hint  about what was coming up for Megan’s pet (Simba in the dream, Nika in waking life): A dog (pitt bull) attack in the neck, which necessitated drainage tubes in her neck.  I also think it’s a synchronicity in terms of after life communication; my dad often appears in my dreams to deliver messages, warnings, affirmations.

If I had been paying closer attention, I might have been able to warn Megan to be vigilant about  Nika when it came to other dogs. But, frankly, this option never occurred to me.

And that’s the challenge with precog dreams, at least for me. The interpretation. I know I drove Simba crazy, checking on  him every hours of the day. But…

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The update on Nika: the tube in her neck has been removed, she’s her usual bouncy, joyful self. Today, Megan presented the owner of the pitt with the vet bill for Nika – $1300 and loose change. The woman promised she and her boyfriend  would pay by next Friday. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll be knocking at their door on Saturday. I’m a pretty laid back person until an injustice hits someone I love.  And then it’s not a pretty sight.

Lori McDermott, who co-authored this book with her husband, Brian, sent me a copy in July. I’m squeezed for time, but felt it’s an important book about afterlife communication  and coping with tragic loss, so I asked mathaddict to read it and write a review.  She loved it. Here’s why:

Learning to Dance in the Rain,  by Lori and Brian McDermott,  came to me as an unexpected and welcome surprise.

Anyone who is a parent with older teenage and young adult children who have spread their wings and have begun to flee the nest, understand the innate concerns that accompany their children’s ‘coming of age’. We continue to carry the parental concerns, all the while understanding that we must allow them to go; allow them to fly, without clipping their wings and restricting their flights.

And there is, always, the hope that our children will be safe and happy and will chase their own dreams to fruition. We pray that life will treat them kindly and that their falls, their scrapes and bruises, will be few and far between because Mom and Dad are no longer close-by to kiss the hurt away.

When a knock comes at the door in the middle of the night, I believe we instinctively know, before we open the door, that whoever is standing outside isn’t bringing good news. And that is how it began for Lori and Brian: that knock on the front door in the middle of the night. Their beloved, precocious daughter Maia, barely 21 years old, had been killed in an automobile accident.

I was pulled into their lives as I read the preface, before I had even turned to the first chapter. As I continued to turn the pages, I felt as though I was there with them, and that they were here with me. The story of Lori’s and Brian’s moment-by-moment journey through the valley of the shadow of Maia’s transition into the realm of The Other Side reached out to me and wrapped me up in a cocoon of their emotions; of their memories of their daughter; of their struggle to cope with her physical demise, and of the staggering awareness that they would never see her physical presence again in this life.

Theirs is a story that doesn’t censor its devastating tears or its magnificent joys. I didn’t weep until I reached the epilogue, and at that point, my own tears joined theirs in a river of hope; of appreciation for the years shared with Maia: and most of all, of unconditional love for a child and for all that her physical death and on-going spiritual presence taught them and continues to teach them. Maia bequeathed a legacy of her personality; of music and poetry and sparkling, occasionally acerbic, wit.

I didn’t find the book to be depressing. It is filled with uplifting synchronicity after synchronicity; with the undeniable Essence of Maia, who manages to find both subtle and screaming ways of letting her family and friends know she is HERE with them; that she is well and happy; that she hasn’t left and doesn’t leave them.

Lori and Brian use every modality available to them to learn to cope with the loss of Maia’s physical presence. They they take each step of their healing with tears of joy and tears of sorrow, because the two cannot be separated.

The loss of one’s child is, for me, an unthinkable circumstance. For me, there would be no greater challenge and I cannot even begin to imagine such tragedy, or how I would cope with it.

But Maia’s mantra was, and is, “SEIZE THE DAY”. One of her favorite sayings was, “When it storms, learn to dance in the rain!” And that is what her family and friends are doing, and what they are sharing in this book. Each of them is Seizing The Day, and Learning To Dance In The Rain.

I felt embraced and warmed by the messages in Maia’s story, and in the journey her family and friends are taking in the wake of her whirlwind life. She is gone too soon, yet isn’t gone at all.

Read the book. Have a box of tissues handy, but your tears will be tears of joy as well as of pain and empathy, and learn to Seize The Day and Dance In The Rain. It lessened my burdens and left me feeling as if this big bad world is a much better place because Maia spent a little bit of time here.

Golden Gate Bridge

This synchro is from a friend who works in a creative field but wishes to remain anonymous. It’s one of those powerful synchros that hits you smack in the face because of the odds involved,   life-affirming,  synchronicity on steroids. I have just one question about the story, which was pointed out by Bernard Beitman, who has a similar followup story. Can the Golden Gate Bridge be seen fro Golden Gate Park?

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My husband told me a synchronicity story this evening. He works with a man – let’s call him Jake – whose wife, Isabel,  had a brain tumor 10 years ago and had it surgically removed in San Francisco. Isabel was told she wouldn’t live to see her daughter walk.  It’s been ten years, and she has had to have the surgery a second time, and MRI’s every 3 months, but she’s still alive.

Jake and Isabel live where we do, in southern California, but went up to San Francisco for the weekend and decided to have a picnic at the Golden Gate Park.  They noticed a man there who was looking at the Golden Gate Bridge  and suddenly started crying. He looked harmless, but distressed, and Jake and Isabel  decided to try and talk to him.

The crying man, let’s call him Pete,  told Jake and Isabel that  his wife was in the hospital with a brain tumor. She was going to have an operation but Pete  didn’t think she was going to live.  Pete’s wife, Diane, had the SAME kind of tumor and the SAME doctor was going to operate on her who operated on Isabel, at the SAME hospital. Isabel told Pete that she lived through the surgery and was still kicking – and to have hope.  He felt very comforted by that chance encounter.

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I sent the synchro to Bernard Beitman,  a visiting professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. He’s writing a book on coincidences and I was curious to hear what he thought of this story. He sent me the following story, which he’s using in his book, in a chapter on health and coincidences. There are striking similarities:

A patient of mine, learning of my interest, described a very meaningful, coincidental encounter.

When 7 years old my son Peter became critically I’ll , and was diagnosed with leukemia. The onset was sudden, and it was quite a terrifying experience. 3 years later, just after my son had completed his treatments and declared healthy, I was back at the hospital, in the blood collection center to donate platelets….something I began doing regularly after Peter’s diagnosis. As I waited for an elevator, I overheard a woman close by down the corridor, who was clearly extremely distressed, talking on the phone. I heard her saying (to her husband?) that “they were running more tests”, and how brave “he” was being, and how frightened she was. She said “they are sure it’s leukemia” at which point she broke down in tears.

My elevator arrived, the door opened, and I walked in. As the door shut, I realized i had to go back …that I had to offer that woman some support. I knew I had heard enough to understand that she was feeling the same type of fear, helplessness , and despair I had experienced a few years back.  I went  to her. I realized that I was meant to  be at that place and at that time. I was meant to hear her, and meant to reach out.  Comforting that woman by sharing my experience was healing for each of us. I needed her just as much as she needed me. She needed another Mother…that had “been there”, to comfort her.  We connected, and I helped her through her difficult journey. She helped me  to establish a better sense of balance and fulfillment created by the opportunity help and to give back.

Dream #1, (Rob’s Dreams)

My attention was riveted to a luminous, circular object swirling down from the night sky. I held out my palms as the object descended in slow motion, and settled into my hands. I heard someone speaking in a firm voice. “The door to your future.”

I looked down at the circular object. It was a pie. I stuck my finger in it, tasted it. The voice spoke again: “The door to your future.” I accepted it. It made sense.

A loud buzzing sound pulled me from the dream back into my room. I patted the table twice before I found my travel alarm clock and stopped the buzzing. As I rubbed my eyes, the diaphanous filament connecting me with the dream faded. Before it was too late, I tugged on the thread of the memory. But now it didn’t make any sense. How is a pie the door to my future?

Dream #2

I’m working on a car. I’ve removed the frame and am studying the chassis. I see what’s wrong. I need a small washer-like part for one wheel. I call over a friend and ask him to help me put the frame back on. I tell him about the part I need. He says, “You need to go to the Reality Store. That’s where you’ll find it.”

“The Reality Store, where’s that?”

He gives me directions, mentioning three main roads to get there. I’m confused. I’ve never heard of any of them. The first one is Minority Way. I forget the second one, but the last one is Universe Drive.

Someone else approaches and tells me: “That part you need is going to be hard to find. Look in Division C of the Reality Store.”

Off I go in search of the Reality Store, but wake up before I arrive.

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The first dream is from a novel I wrote in 1987 called The Smoking Mirror. I wrote  it shortly before I was assigned to write I.J. & the Last Crusade for LucasFilm.  The second is a recent dream that seems quite metaphorical. The Reality Store was a very big place right over on Universe Drive. I guess you can find anything you desire there, if you know where to look. You might have to ask for help, for guidance.

‘Please don’t trade me for a microwave oven.’

You’ve heard of stupid dog tricks, right? Like the meditating pooch above. Well, there are also stupid synchro tricks, it seems. I had one happen to me recently. I glanced at a headline that said something about a microwave oven and a dog. The article was by a regular columnist in our daily paper. After reading the first paragraph, it occurred to me that I could’ve had the same thing happen to me.

It began with an ad from the Royal Palm Beach (FL) online Craigslist:

I need a Microwave, so will trade a Chihauhua mix puppy for one. Must be working and not too old!! 

Trading a puppy for a microwave? The columnist thought this was unusual, but when he investigated, he found out that the practice isn’t unusual. He noted that someone had recently traded a pet for patio work and that Craigslist was the place to trade your pet for household goods.

Did we try this trick? NO. But here’s the stupid synchro trick. Our twice-a-month housekeeper asked me the other day if I was interested in another dog. Her boyfriend, who has moved in with her, has a little dog that doesn’t get along with her dog. I said no thanks. We’re fine with Noah and occasionally with Nika joining us. But no more dogs.

Later, as she was working, she mentioned her college-aged daughter needed a microwave oven for her apartment. So she was going to look for a used one. As it turned out, we had Megan’s old microwave from college sitting out in the garage and in perfect condition. I told Nuvia that it was hers, and she didn’t even have to give me that dog for it!

So when I saw this headline a couple of days later: ‘Bowwow! Local pet-for-product swaps trendy,’ it caught my attention as a stupid synchro, a harmless trickster trick.

Fair warning: no synchro in this post. Well, maybe there is, buried somewhere.

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Our animal companions occupy a special place in our lives. They love us unconditionally, trust that we will love them back in kind and take care of their needs. In September 2011,  our daughter, Megan was living at home, and asked if she could adopt a puppy from a dog rescue organization in our area.  The puppy she settled on was a border collie/lab mix (we think) whom she named Nika.

Our golden retriever, Noah,  took to her instantly. They played together, slept together, and until she was big enough to stand up to bullies at the dog park, Noah defended her. A deep bond developed between them.

When Megan moved to Orlando for her Disney internship, we kept Nika because she was living in a high rise in downtown Orlando and working 8-10 hours a day. During our frequent visits, it was always obvious that Nika regarded Megan as her human. She loved us and Noah, no question, but when Megan walked into the house, Nika went nuts. And when Megan left again or we drove back home after a visit, Nika seemed out of sorts.

This little bundle of joy burrowed her way into my heart. Everything for Nika is about curiosity, joy, exploration. She doesn’t run, she hops. She doesn’t just race into the dog park to greet her friends, she tears in there, her tail whipping from side to side. And when she encounters a dog who is not so friendly, she instantly falls to the ground, rolls onto her back, and offers up her belly as if to say, Hey, dude, be my friend, okay? And she’s like that with humans, too. She loves everyone.

In June, when Megan’s Disney internship ended, she decided to start a dog walking business.  Her area is perfect for it – lots of high rises inhabited by young professionals who all have dogs that spend eight hours alone while their humans work. Nika went to live with Megan and Ollie, her roommate’s dachshund.

Noah’s world suddenly shrank.  He sort of moped around the house, didn’t run and play at the dog park, and was certainly less active than when Nika had been around. I’m convinced that Noah sank into a kind of depression. Whenever the two of them got together after a separation, their love for each was palpable. One time, Nika literally jumped out of window of Megan’s car to get to Noah.

All day today (August 3), I’ve been feeling out of sorts without knowing quite why – one of those days when you feel antsy, restless, for no apparent reason. So tonight we’re at dinner with friends, talking about an app we hope to develop, and get a call from Megan. Nika has been attacked by a pitt bull, in the elevator of the building where Megan lives.

Megan is totally freaked out, Nika is covered in blood, and the elevator and hallway are saturated in so much blood, she says, that it looks like the scene of a murder. I tell her to get Nika into the  shower so she can see where she’s injured.  After numerous phone calls, Megan says that Nika has a deep puncture wound in her neck and she and a friend are rushing her to an emergency veterinary clinic.

The upshot of all this? Nika went into surgery for the wound in her neck, the parents of the young woman who owns the pitt bull marched down to the concierge desk and insisted on  knowing who the “other dog” was, because that dog (Nika) was at  fault.  The concierge refused to give them Megan’s name; she was standing right there as the parents went on about this.

Megan blurted, “I own the other dog and she would never hurt anything or anyone.”

Matt, the concierge, said, “You need to see the security video,” and played it for them. It clearly showed the pitt bull lunging for Nika, grabbing her at the throat. The father said they would “help pay for Nika’s vet bill.”

$1200 and change.  Really? Think again, my friend.You’re going to be footing the entire bill.

The pitt is being taken away tomorrow by the county’s animal control shelter. Any time a police report is filed about a pitt bull, this is what happens.  I have to say that I feel bad for the pitt. This species fills animal care facilities all over Florida. Most of them are euthanized. As our friends said tonight after Megan’s call, “They are lovable dogs. But they can turn on you in a flash and when they do that, they are wild, uncontainable.”

Please keep Nika in your thoughts.

a santero’s altar

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Iowa Republican Steven King (no relation to the novelist King!)  penned a bill called the “English Language Unity Act,” which would declare English as the official language of the United States.  This guy also defends dog fighting, okay?

So the bill was taken up in a subcommittee hearing in Congress today – August 2. To make his opposition clear, Michigan Democrat John Conyers delivered his speech on the subject – in Spanish.

This evening on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC, this bill was the lead story, with  the words TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS  in the background.

The word trabajos  literally translates as jobs. The Republicans are always talking about creating jobs and about how ending the Bush tax cuts on the top one percent would be a job killer, as though extreme wealth is synonymous with job creation. The facts say otherwise.  According to Bloomberg,  “fewer than 1 percent of the U.S. population have annual income of more than $1 million. In the top two tax brackets, slightly more than one-third — 35.5 percent — were employers receiving business income, according to 2007 figures from the Treasury Department.”

Now, among a certain faction of Cubans – and here’s the trickster synchro –  the word trabajos means something else entirely. A trabajo is a ritual that a santero – a practitioner of Santeria, a Cuban mystical religion – performs for a specific purpose. The santero or santera usually goes into trance to perform a trabajo and his or her spirit guides are the ones who actually tackle the problem.

In Santeria, everything is believed to be the result of spiritual forces, and saints or orishas whom the santero calls upon for help are really the guys in charge.  So when a santero’s spirit guides go to work (trabajar) on the spirits that are causing your problems,  it’s as if your body and soul become a spiritual battleground. As the santero’s spirit guides intervene with these malign forces, anything can be mitigated: health problems, love and romance issues, career and financial challenges, karma, even spirit attachment and possession.

When we saw those words on Rachel’s show – TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS, TRABAJOS – we burst out laughing.  It was as if she were saying that the Republican party is badly in need of the kind of spiritual intervention that only a santero can perform, and  santeros are, oops, usually Latinos, who under King’s bill would be required to learn English before they could do anything in this country. It’s as if the Republican Party is possessed by some sort of malign spirit that screams for domination and control.

“They need Ruben to intervene,” Rob said.

“Or Nelly.”

Ruben and Nelly, a Cuban santero and a santera whom we got to know during our early years as freelance magazine writers, are a post for another day. But the trickster is definitely busy during this election season in the U.S.

Before they were called flying saucers or UFOs, they were known as ‘ghost rockets.’ At least, that was the name one type of mysterious flying object was called when they were seen by thousands in northern Europe in the mid-1940s.

The term has not been in common use for decades, so when I heard ‘ghost rockets’ mentioned recently during an e-mail exchange with a former employee of AUTEC, the secret navy base in the Bahamas, I had to Google it to find out more.

About 2,000 sightings were logged between May and December 1946, with peaks on 9 and 11 August 1946. Two hundred sightings were verified with radar returns, and authorities recovered physical fragments which were attributed to ghost rockets.  Cameras weren’t prevalent as today, so that the above photo is the only known one of a ghost rocket.

At the time the ghost rockets were attributed either to meteor showers or long-range tests by the Russians of captured German V-1 or V-2 missiles. However, some investigators for the Swedish military apparently believed the objects could not be conventionally explained, and instead hypothesized an extraterrestrial origin.

Here’s a part of a formerly top secret USAFE (United States Air Force Europe) document from November 4, 1948.

“For some time we have been concerned by the recurring reports on flying saucers. They periodically continue to pop up; during the last week, one was observed hovering over Neubiberg Air Base for about thirty minutes. They have been reported by so many sources and from such a variety of places that we are convinced that they cannot be disregarded and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking.

“When officers of this Directorate recently visited the Swedish Air Intelligence Service, this question was put to the Swedes. Their answer was that some reliable and fully technically qualified people have reached the conclusion that ‘these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth’. They are therefore assuming that these objects originate from some previously unknown or unidentified technology, possibly outside the earth.”

The document ended with the statement that “we are inclined not to discredit entirely this somewhat spectacular theory [extraterrestrial origins], meantime keeping an open mind on the subject.”

 Notice that the date of the document is 1948 and of American origin. As a result, the term flying saucer was used instead of ghost rocket. That’s because on June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold  reported a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects soaring past Mount Rainer at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour. Arnold’s description of saucer-like objects led to the coining of the new term–flying saucer. His report is usually referred to as the first modern era UFO sightings, and was followed by numerous reported sightings over the next two to three weeks.

While ghost rockets were a WWII-era term, Curt Rowlett, the former AUTEC employee mentioned above, used it to describe a sighting. Here is what he had to say:

“On one voyage on an AUTEC vessel in the summer of 1985, we were underway in the channel between the north end of Andros Island and Grand Bahama Island, bound for a port in West Palm Beach, Florida.

“During the midnight to four o’clock a.m. watch, my watch partner and I sighted what I would later describe in a Strange Magazine article as two “ghost rockets” that flew side by side over our ship on a west to east trajectory.  These “rockets” were highly unusual as neither made any sound, were traveling at an oddly slow rate of speed, and left behind contrails that glowed brightly and which were “multi-colored,” in that the contrail smoke changed from white to green to blue to pink and then disappeared completely after about ten minutes.  (I estimate that they passed over us at an altitude of about 500 to 1000 feet; both rockets were white-colored and perhaps 50 to 100 feet in length).

“I never have been able to determine with 100% certainty whether or not those rockets were a part of some sort of secret Navy submarine or destroyer test being conducted in the area; I have always assumed that they were not and for good reason. As an AUTEC vessel, we would definitely have been informed that such a test was being undertaken and subsequently, warned to stay out of the area.  This had always been the Navy’s practice during similar rocket firing tests that I witnessed while working at sea in the same area.

“After returning from the voyage, I asked a friend at the AUTEC base who worked as a sort of “air and ocean traffic controller” about the incident.  He told me that he had no knowledge of any sort of test-firing of rockets on that night and due to the sensitive nature of his job, he certainly would have been in a position to know.  (And as a very close friend of mine, he would have told me even if it was supposed to be top secret.)

“Again, I have never heard any satisfactory explanation as to exactly what it was we saw that night.  I have also never heard of rockets that travel in such close proximity to each other, i.e., the side by side flight that we witnessed, or at such an unusually slow speed.  Students of Fortean subject matter will of course remember that there is a known history of so-called ghost rocket sightings in other parts of the world.”

Finally, ghost rockets live on into the late ’90s as the name of a New Jersey bluegrass band.