In her debut studio album, Billie Eilish wondered When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Some people insist that dreams are just the sludge of the subconscious mind rising to the top while we're sleeping. Maybe so.
But did you ever wonder: What if there’s more going on than that?
I’d like to share two chilling stories that might change the way you look at our slumbering reveries.
The first story dates to 1994, one year after we moved from Pittsburgh. I dreamed I was back in the city, standing south of the Monongahela River and looking out across Mount Washington. I heard a plane flying overhead, but suddenly everything went eerily silent — the plane's engine had stopped. All I heard was the soft whistling of wind. I looked up into the sky, and I saw a stalled plane falling from the air and bursting into flames when it hit the ground northwest of the city.
On Sept. 8, 1994, about a week after I had this dream, USAir Flight 427 crashed in Hopewell Township just northwest of Pittsburgh. Investigators speculate that an out-of-control rudder caused the plane to lose control and spin into the ground, bursting into flames and killing all 132 people on board. The site of the crash and eyewitness descriptions of the plane's abrupt free fall were just as I had seen it in my dream.
Some people have told me that my dream was just a coincidence. Others have said it was a precognitive dream — a premonition of an event that's to come. I’ll leave it for you to ponder which one it was.
And while you’re pondering that, here’s the second story for you — even wilder in the verified accuracy of its precise details.
A friend of mine was plagued with chronic sore throats and laryngitis. When nothing else brought relief, she decided to try a past life regression to get to the root of her ailment. In this guided journey into an alleged past life experience, she saw herself as a young girl walking through the arch of a medieval castle. Inside the arch, she entered a room with a domed ceiling that was painted navy blue with dazzling golden stars and constellations.
The young girl’s mother (who was also my friend's mother in this current life) was furious that the father had painted this ceiling for their daughter. Seething with jealousy, she led the girl up the stairs. When they entered a room on the second floor, the mother closed the door and stabbed her daughter in the throat. The girl fell backwards onto the floor, her blood oozing into the rug where she died.
Okay. Now here’s where it gets REALLY strange.
As the girl and her mother were climbing the stairs to that fatal stabbing, the girl looked down into the courtyard and saw a falconer – whom she recognized as her friend Stephen from this current life. After the past life regression experience, my friend told Stephen about his presence as a falconer. Imagine her shock when he told her he’d recently had a dream where he viewed the exact same sequence of events from his perspective as a falconer in the courtyard. When he saw the young girl being led up the stairs by her mother, he knew she was going to be killed.
But hold on. It gets even stranger.
Stephen later traveled to Germany to visit a friend. During his stay, they happened to visit Trausnitz Castle in Bavaria – which turned out to be a perfect match for what he’d seen in his dream. Hearing about this discovery, my friend and her husband traveled to Bavaria to see it for themselves – and they found that every detail was exactly as she’d seen it in her past life regression. (The original domed ceiling had been covered over, but the tour guide said that it had originally been painted navy blue with stars and constellations.)
As for the second floor room where my friend had seen herself stabbed in the throat: This room was closed to the public. When she asked the tour guide what was in this off-limits room, he said "rugs." When pressed further, he said he’d heard that a girl died in there, and the rug was covered in blood.
Returning to Billie Eilish’s question, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, the answer will always be debated. I'll leave it for you to ponder.
Epilogue: After the past life regression experience, my friend's chronic throat problems disappeared and have not returned.
Photographer's Footnote: The photo above was part of my recent experiments with cross-polarized light.