Comfort.

I have no doubt that there’s an “other side” when it comes to what happens when we die. I believe that we see only a small portion of the total picture of the Universe, that there are many stages of life, even before we are born and after we die, and this knowledge gives me peace. When it’s my time, I won’t be afraid.

Some religions want us to believe that there is judgement and that if we screw up our life we are sent to eternal damnation in hell and we are surrounded by flames and torture and screaming and the like. It’s hot. Eternity is a long time. Why would an all loving Deity do that to one of his creations? No, that sort of hell is a human construct perpetuated to keep us in line and to control our thinking. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box.

I remember asking my mom in the late 1970s about hell and her thoughts on the subject. She said that she thinks we don’t get damned to eternal torture but that maybe we come back and learn again. I asked her if that meant this was hell and she said, “maybe”. But it was a learning place, not a mean place.

Last night I had a family reunion in my sleep. A dream, a premonition, contact with the other side, I don’t know. My gut says it was more than a dream. Perhaps my dreams are just quite organized. But many of my relatives that have passed on were there and lending their comfort and support to address some things that have been bothering me of late. Now, I’m not troubled nor unhappy (quite the contrary), but my analytical ways have had me in hyper-evaluation mode over the past few days, especially surrounding my pilot career. This has happened once before, where I felt a little down about flying and the circumstances surrounding being able to fly as frequently as I’d like to. Like the last time, my Dad, a private pilot that passed away nearly six years ago in a crash of his second home built, came to me in a dream and gave me a pep talk. Last night the whole family was there. He said he liked flying “low and slow”. I asked him why he didn’t like flying the Tomahawk back in the day, he said it didn’t give him enough view and “it could be slippery”. “You need to fly the airplane you want to fly.” I asked him if he’d fly in the right seat in “the Cherokee” if I flew as PIC (Pilot In Command). In the dream or the vision or the premonition I had last night, he said “absolutely. Go buy one.” We talked about some other things that are too personal to share in a public forum. They were all right on the money. Things started making sense.

My godmother was also there. She told me she’d break the alarm clock so we could talk. We talked about some spiritual stuff and about some of the other things that have been bothering me a little bit and she said I needed to calm down. Stop analyzing. Get out of my head. “You have a good head on your shoulders, you’ll know when you’re really in trouble. Stop worrying.” Have fun. Enjoy life. Again, we talked about more personal things.

Dream? More? All I know is that it felt incredibly real and that I feel amazing this morning. My head feels clear. And when I awoke, my Amazon Echo Dot, which I use as my alarm clock, was flashing but not making any noise. Normally it’d be playing some soothing sounds to awake me, but not so much as a peep this morning. It was 6:17 and my alarm had been flashing for 17 minutes.

Those 17 minutes were worth it.