Dear Soul Arcanum:
My 77-year-old mother has been in the ICU for 10 days following cardiac surgery. It took three days for her to come out of anesthesia. Two days ago, she started to hallucinate. Her fourth floor room looks out onto other buildings on the hospital grounds, but she sees cars in driveways and people going in and out of the houses and other things that no one else can see. The most interesting thing is that she is seeing people in her room: a woman with a plate of scones, a man in the chair and children.
The children are constantly in her room and she reports that they get along very well. The nurses blame the hallucinations on ICU psychosis.
While this explanation sounds plausible, my mother is not the only senior I know who sees people I don’t see. My grandmother often saw departed family members when she was sick, and my mother-in-law saw little people around her a week before she died. My research revealed that many elders see little people
or children.
Could it be coincidental that all these seniors are having the same hallucinations?
Becky
Dear Becky:
People who are in altered states of consciousness all see the same sorts of things because they are seeing into other dimensions. Sometimes this can be sparked by physical trauma or recreational drug use, but it happens naturally just after we’re born and when we’re close to death, for we are then closer to other dimensions of experience.
Further, when we’re really sick or dying, we aren’t locked into rational thought; in fact, when we’re under great stress like this, we often can’t think straight
– we’re highly emotional and perhaps even out of our minds.
When we’re in this primal state of consciousness, we can more readily see beyond the physical dimension.
As for why so many seriously ill and/or elderly people may be seeing what you call children, to me it seems fairly obvious that they are seeing beings in another dimension. While they could be spirits, most likely they are elves, gnomes, fairies, pixies or little people.
It’s believed that these beings exist in dimensions right next to ours, and this is why various people have spotted them throughout history. Little people fill our folklore and fascinate us because we have encountered them many times, though usually not on a conscious level.
The pattern you describe with your mother is actually very common when patients are recovering from surgery or life threatening illnesses or injuries. In fact, as your nurse tried to explain, there is even a term for it: ICU psychosis. However, these people aren’t hallucinating – by which I mean that they aren’t seeing things that aren’t really there – they’re simply tuning in to another dimension because they are in an altered state of consciousness.
Modern medicine attributes this so-called psychotic break to the unusual stressors encountered in the ICU setting. For example, people in the ICU tend to be sleep-deprived and disoriented due to a lack of awareness of the date or time. They are under great stress and are often heavily medicated. In my view, these are indeed the stimuli at work, but that doesn’t mean that what they are perceiving isn’t real
– it’s just not real in this dimension. These stimuli cause an altered state of consciousness and dissociation from the physical, and this is what causes them to see into other dimensions.
There is another related phenomenon known as sundowning
in nursing homes. In addition to being elderly (and relatively close to death), this is most likely caused by irregular sleep patterns, which alter one’s state of consciousness. The only way for me to induce out of body experiences was to get drunk
on sleep. I would sleep a whole night through and then go back to bed and force myself to lie there and try to fall asleep even though I wasn’t tired. In this state, our minds will tend to stay awake even as we force our bodies to rest, and when that happens, we begin to perceive all sorts of stuff we normally can’t. Simply prolonging the state of drowsiness to unusual lengths of time tends to produce similar experiences, and in most nursing homes and ICU’s, the patients spend an unusual amount of time sleeping and lying in bed.
If people experiencing this sort of thing are afraid for one reason or another, they may become very agitated, paranoid or aggressive, for what they tune into will tend to be of a negative nature. If they are in a positive frame of mind and feeling peaceful or generally have a higher vibration, they may see angels, sweet little people, loved ones in Spirit, etc.
The same thing happens with Alzheimer’s patients and those suffering from dementia.
For example, when my brilliant grandfather was quite old and suffering from Alzheimer’s, he would frequently talk about all the things that were happening that none of the rest of us could see. He was quite frustrated because the aliens landing on the roof were perfectly real to him, and when we tried to reassure him that there were no aliens, he just figured we didn’t know what we were talking about. Many Alzheimer’s patients tune in to a dimension we would call the past,
and mentally live in that dimension or skip from one to another.
A week or so before my father died, he began to have similar experiences. He talked in particular about seeing elves or dwarf coming out of the fireplace, which didn’t seem to bother him much, but he also talked about seeing a big black monstrous entity. His eyes would get wild with fear as he asked repeatedly, Who is that big black f-cker in the corner?
or warned the family to Look out for that big black f-cker in the corner!
I presume that he was seeing a demon, for demons are big and black and tend to enter rooms in corners and then hulk or crouch there. (I wasn’t present when these events were occurring, unfortunately, so I couldn’t try to look clairvoyantly for what was going on.)
Not only will great fear attract a demon, but many people believe that demons are like astral vultures in that they will try to feed off of or grab onto the souls of people in weakened or vulnerable states. This is why many people who are near death in some way have reported seeing demon-like entities. People of great faith aren’t spiritually weakened when near death, so they aren’t disturbed by dark forces. When someone who has no strong spiritual beliefs or faith is facing death, they are naturally thrown into great spiritual tumult and can be easy prey for lower astral entities.
I also believe that when we are dying, we attract attention in other dimensions much as the birth of a child attracts attention here. When a baby is born, it’s greeted by loved ones it knew before in its life in the spirit world: its parents died there to be born here before them. It also encounters strange beings wearing masks and gloves who help it transition into this world. When a person dies, the process reverses in that they are greeted on the other side by loved ones who have gone before them along with other helpers who facilitate their transition.
When someone is about to die, I imagine there is just as much interest on the other side as there is interest in a new birth here, so beings are drawn to come and check that person out. It’s also possible that being between life and death places us in a strange twilight zone, and when we show up
in that zone consciously, the beings there naturally show an interest in us.
– Soul Arcanum