The Violet End

Category: Paranormal Experiences

  • Identical Twin, Different Generation

    I had already primed myself for uncontrollable gushes of happy tears when I learned about the lesbian hippie commune magazine Country Women.

    Reading its stories, which often doubled as its members’ daily diaries, sent me into the kind of wistful whirlwind that lingers for days after seeing pictures of Woodstock — leaving me a hair-triggered mess that starts crying at the smallest reminders of the happiest times of my youth.

    When you’re pushing 70 like I am, the depth of first-hand historical experience that age gives a person endows the bearer with the ability to explain across three generations what made things the way that they are today. It also burdens the bearer with the sadness of bereavement over the beautiful things of the past that appear to have passed away.

    But nothing prepared me to meet my identical twin.

    A Looking Glass That Transcends Time

    Pictured on page 25 of Issue 7 is a member of the commune who looks exactly like me. Exactly. Right down to the unequal lengths of the long hair that drape from each side of my shell-shocked head, a distinctively individual quirk that I keep on purpose for the purpose of proclaiming to the world, “I am unique.”

    Left: My twin. Right: Me at age 68, being peacekeeper at a No Kings march.

    Look at my picture on this site. We look exactly alike. Same build. Everything.

    Her story begins, “I was working naked in the garden.” I loved to work naked in the garden. Hell, I did my entire rear landscaping nude, right down to installing the sprinkler system, and I was approximately her age when I did it.

    There she is. My identical twin. From a different generation.

    Metaphysical and Paranormal Ramifications

    While she was an adult living the most perfect existence imaginable to humankind, I was a child who dreamed and longed to live a utopian existence exactly like hers.

    Can the same person exist in two places at once, spanning different times? The field of the paranormal opens into a vast meadow of unbounded speculation and conjecture.

    Classical reincarnation postulates that an individual’s nonphysical being experiences rebirth as a new being or in a new body after biological death. But nothing prohibits reincarnation from taking place within overlapping time frames of temporal existence.

    My own view of reincarnation is less confined by the concept of discrete souls that can occupy only one body at a time. I envision reincarnation that permits a spiritual essence to experience the temporal realm through more than one window, i.e. biological body, at a time. One essence, more than one body at the same time.

    Or, perhaps, it’s just one incredible coincidence. But it’s a coincidence that breathes into me new life.

    Transformation, Again

    It is said that having goals and purpose in life is a key to living long. I hope that is true, because I now feel an impossible longing to experience everything that can make me into a broader person than I was before. “Everything” is an awful lot of lived experience to be had, and experiencing it is going to require an awful lot of time.

    I want this. I want this hippie commune experience so intensely. If I can’t experience everything that is exciting and broadening, I at least want this.

    I am feeling the longing drive of my mid-20s. Again.

  • The Email from the Other Side

    Back in 2008, when the Bakersfield Californian had online reader blogs at their website, I started to become friends with a fellow blogger lady named Nancy G. We emailed back and forth for quite some time, and started to become friends. The friendship didn’t last, as our personalities proved to be incompatible, so we stopped emailing one another and never exchanged emails again.

    Years later, in 2014, I woke up to the news that Nancy G had been killed in an automobile accident. A Kern Sheriff’s deputy flew through an intersection at high speed, no lights, no siren, and smashed right into Nancy as she was driving. She had been to a Dodgers game earlier that evening.

    A few minutes after learning the news, after all these years, an email unexpectedly arrived in my inbox.

    It was from Nancy G.

    It read, “Heading home now.”

    Back in the day, an email would occasionally get delayed in transit at a particular server, and would continue on its way some time in the future. She sent it as she was leaving the Dodger Game. It got stuck in transit, and arrived only after I had read the news.

    I received an email … from the other side.

  • An Incredible Case of Clairvoyance and Premonition

    One night in 1986, while living in Los Angeles, I had a dream in which I was riding down the freeway in the passenger seat of a car. As we emerged from beneath an overpass, I looked up and to the left, and watched a small private aircraft approach a silver and red commercial airliner from visually above-right, the one o’clock direction from my point of view.

    The two collided, and the airliner took a rapid arc downward and crashed behind a tree-lined skyline into a residential neighborhood. Little did I know that my dream was in fact a premonition.

    My dream makes the news

    The next day, I turned on the television to see the news dominated by coverage of a passenger airliner crash. One news broadcast showed an animation of a small aircraft, colliding in mid-air with a red and silver Aeromexico airliner. The direction from which the small craft approached was exactly as in my dream, as was the diving path taken by the airliner afterward. I was watching my own damned dream, being played back on the evening news. I felt chills all over.

    I was, indeed, an eyewitness to the Cerritos air crash. The night before. In my dream. A real premonition of a deadly disaster.

    But if this sounds like a “routine” case of a dream predicting the future, the dream itself is the lesser part of my experience. The real blow-away chapter of the story follows.

    The utterly chilling confirmation

    Three years later, a coworker, with whom we usually ate lunch, needed cash, so we took a long detour to his bank in Whittier. On the way back, we headed south on the 605 freeway. I had never, ever been on the 605 freeway before. I lived in the San Fernando Valley at the time.

    I began feeling a tingling sensation and began looking around. “This place looks familiar,” I thought to myself.

    Within a minute, my skin really began to prickle as I began to recognize where I was, its hauntingly familiar skyline awakening dormant memories. When my friend drove under the next overpass, that’s when the significance of the scene truly hit me like a blast of cold water. “Oh, my God, this is it!” I recognized where I was. It was the exact vantage point from which I foresaw the Cerritos air crash in my dream, from the passenger seat of a car emerging from an under an overpass.

    I didn’t say anything at the time, but my heart was racing. When we returned to the office, however, I asked my coworker who was driving if we were anywhere near where the Cerritos air crash happened. He took a sheet of paper, penciled a rough map of the area freeways and drew an “X” at the site of the crash, and everything matched. The distance, the angle of sight from that location, everything fit.

    I had passed through, and recognized, a place and a scene that I had seen years before only in a dream. What I had seen in my dream is exactly what I would have seen from that spot, had I been there in person. The fact that I recognized the vantage point three years later, and remembered what I had seen there, even though I never had physically been there before, gave me all the proof that I needed that it wasn’t merely a horrible coincidence, but a real premonition.

    The emotion still comes over me when I recall passing over the spot. It’s an experience that will stay with me forever.