I had died after the end of a fairly long illness. My spirit was up and walking freely about, and I was seeing all the various people I had known in my life who had been important to me. Their lives were continuing on in the usual, expected ways. I witnessed some grief and sadness over my loss, but not excessive, which pleased me since I did not feel unhappy or sad to have passed on.
At some point I think I saw my body. I thought it was odd how it looked; not like me at all any more. I was curious about it, but only slightly. I knew that there were people in charge of taking care of it, and I knew they would handle it the way it needed to be handled. I found that if I approached people and came close to them, I could speak to them. They didn't necessarily understand every word I was saying to them, but they could feel emotions. So what I spoke to them, I comforted them by telling them I was OK and everything was all right, and I was looking forward to moving on, and that seemed to help give people peace.
One of the last people I spoke to in this way was the wife of [an attorney I work with who is a devout Catholic]. I watched a kind of light or sparkle enter her eyes when I spoke to her this way, like she felt lightened and relieved. There were some tears in her eyes, but I could tell they were tears of happiness. She gave me an orange, and said this was a gift for me, something to eat as I was passing through the veil.
I began walking on down a path that led through some darkness. I was grateful for the orange, and I thought I would very much like to eat it. I began peeling it and as I did, it looked muddy to me, like it was rotten or dirty. I was thinking of discarding it, but I thought of [the attorney's wife] and how kind she had been in giving it to me, and that I ought to at least try it before throwing it away. So I gradually found a way to open the orange up and pull off one of the slices (it was difficult because it was a bit squishy) and I ate it. It didn't taste bad to me; it had all the sweetness and tanginess of a good, fresh orange. I chewed it and enjoyed the taste of the juice and swallowed it, and continued to peel off slices and eat them. Finally I arrived in a place full of light, and I looked at the orange and saw that in fact it was not dark or muddy or rotten at all, it was fresh and good, and I ate the whole thing and just discarded the peel when I was done.
I was at the edge of a huge highway, and was met there by my spouse. We were old, two old people. And we got into a car and started driving. It was an old car, some model from the sixties, faded aquamarine in color. My spouse was at the wheel. As we drove, I saw that we were heading right into the heart of a storm. I said to my spouse we ought to drive carefully, as the storm looked like it was getting worse, and I wasn't sure how safe it would be to drive through it. There were many other cars on the highway and they were all driving in the same direction, toward some large, magnificent looking city.
As the storm began to increase in intensity and furor, I saw things flying in the air over us. I realized that it was debris from highway lights that were towering over us. The storm was so fierce, it was causing the lights to break into pieces, and the pieces were being caught in the wind of the storm and flying overhead, carried on by the wind. Gradually, some of the pieces were hitting other cars, and causing the drivers to lose control and crash. I said to my spouse that perhaps we ought to pull over and wait for the storm to subside, but he pointed out that it wouldn't matter, because the only place to pull over would be a narrow highway shoulder where we might be hit by oncoming traffic, and where we still wouldn't be safe from the flying debris. It was best to keep going and hope for the best, so that's what we did.
We saw one final piece of debris that was flying straight for us, and I thought for sure this was going to fly right through our windshield and it was going to be over. But somehow my spouse managed to speed up to avoid it.
We found ourselves in an enormous factory. There were lots of people there, men and women, all helping in one final task of helping to sort broken glass from the storm. There were matching glass sets of dishes: big dishes, small dishes, bowls, tumblers, stemware, and so on. Each set was a different color (every color and shade of the rainbow), so that's how we knew which broken pieces to sort together. Pieces that were intact were being stacked neatly on top of each other, and then the broken pieces and bits of shattered glass were being piled on top, into machines that looked like dishwashers; except that I knew they were going to melt the glass and reform it into new sets. I was fascinated by the process.*****
I awoke from this dream with very positive, pleasant feelings. There was my sense of acceptance of the ultimate unknown (death), to the extent of being able to comfort others. There was the gift from the Catholic Attorney's Wife, food for the journey that proved nourishing in unexpected ways. There was the reunion with my husband, and our ability to maintain our composure even as we passed through a terrifying test, and then our arrival at the Magnificent City (Heaven?), where we were involved in a work of recycling, creating new order and beauty from the detritus of the old.
