Roberta Grimes

Our growing understanding of how reality is structured makes us realize how near the dead are to us. They are right here! We now know that there are approximately eight levels of energy-based reality, separated from one another by their rates of vibration, and all of them are exactly where we are. But far from making communication easier, the fact that reality is an energy spectrum all located in a single place makes unaided communication from there to here seem impossible. Think of your Channel Five weatherman and your Channel Seven newsman trying to chat with one another while both are on air, and without a phone. The fact that communication between levels through mediums has become a well-documented phenomenon is a wonder! But what if we never consult a medium? How else can our loved ones signal their survival?

It seems that over the millennia the dead have wrestled with this problem. They are more aware of us than we are of them, and as they transition and adjust to their new surroundings they are anxious to get word to us of their survival. We are coming to understand that even long before there were earth-based scientists, there were clever and dedicated teams of dead researchers trying to understand what they were dealing with and puzzling out how to deliver signs to us that they lived on.

It is from this perspective of ancient experimentation that we must look at the kinds of signs that come to us from those we love in the period soon after their deaths. Many are natural objects like feathers and stones, or growing things like flowers or insects; and some involve what seems to be the manipulation of the minds of animals and people. Some of the objects – and even the insects – are likely apports. They are objects materialized here from there, in a process never studied and not well understood. There are hints that apports may be removed from this material level at some other point in time and deposited back here, often materializing in air, so a decades-old newspaper (for example) could plop on a table looking fresh from the press.

So what are some of the physical signs that our dead loved ones can send to us, perhaps only days or weeks after their deaths?

1) Coins. People start finding coins in the same denomination – pennies mostly – or they find clusters of the same set of coins. The coins sent as signs will sometimes bear a significant date, such as a birth or death year or a wedding year.

2) Feathers. Some of the dead have made feathers their specialty! Of course, finding a feather loose beside your feather pillow isn’t going to mean much. But repeatedly finding feathers of all kinds on the ground, in drawers, even in your pocket can mean that someone you love is thinking of you.

3) Dragonflies and Butterflies. Beautiful insects are such a common sign! It may be that bees and ants can also be used, but nobody takes much notice of them; however, a big dragonfly that comes to sit on your hand or a butterfly that dances in front of you is hard to miss. One spectacular insect sign happened soon after a teacher’ death. Her replacement reported that on the first school morning after her death, a yellow butterfly flew in through an open window and went up and down the rows, lighting briefly on the head of each wondering child, and then flitted out again.

4) Electrical Manipulation. You can imagine the joy in heaven when we started electrifying our homes! Since our beloved dead are energy beings, messing with electricity is easier for them, and just within the past century or so they have learned to do it very well. They blink lights, turn televisions on and off, and even sometimes put messages on computer screens. They can extinguish streetlights as we pass beneath them, cause cellphones to ring, and even (rarely) dial us up to have a chat.

5) Scents. Whiffs of cigarette smoke or perfume or perhaps the smell of lilacs or cooking: the dead seem to be surprisingly able to make us experience familiar scents. As someone who has enjoyed this phenomenon – my first scent, long ago, was of my grandmother’s perfume – I have wondered whether the scent is out there in the room. Could others standing nearby smell it too? I have come to think not. I have come to believe that the dead are able to impress the scent directly on our minds, but whether that is true is anybody’s guess!

6) Physical Impressions. This kind of sign seems to be less common, but some of the dead will create phenomena which make it seem as if they were physically present. A surviving spouse might feel and see the other side of the mattress compress, or a spouse or parent might feel a physical hug. Or someone who lost a beloved pet might feel and see the indenting of the coverlets by his feet, where that pet always slept.

7) Birds and Small Animals. The most common small-creature signs are birds swooping in front of our windshields. Or sometimes a kind of bird will be reported to be far outside its range, like the Florida crane that graced a Long Island gravesite several days in a row. Freakishly unafraid squirrels that have approached and seemed to know us have been reported, too. Our loved ones might be impressing their own minds onto the minds of these creatures to make them behave this way, although no one knows for sure.

8) Coincidences. I have read communications from upper-level beings which insisted that there are no coincidences, and every seeming coincidence is in fact the work of Spirit. I don’t know about that. But I do know that the chances that some of the stranger coincidences we see could occur at random are much less than we suppose, so it is important to pay attention. When my mother died recently, a relative sent me calla lilies, never realizing the importance that flower had in my mother’s life; and someone else sent a sympathy card which featured chickadees (Mother’s favorite bird) perched in lilacs (Mother’s favorite flower) oddly out of season. I assume that those were signs from my mother, but won’t know for sure until I contact a medium.

9) License Plates. To be thinking of a loved one and at the same time see a license plate with his name or with some other significant term on it really brings you up short! Yet it happens. We have no idea how the dead are able to pull off this trick.

10) Songs. This is in the category of: We really have no idea how they do it! But they do. And often. A widow of someone recently dead will turn on a car radio or enter a store, and there will be playing the very song that the couple danced to at their wedding.

Don’t assume that everything that happens is a sign, but pay attention in the months after a death. When you spot a possible sign, be sure to thank your loved ones since if they think that they are being ignored they will generally give up.

How do we know that the dead send these signs? Because they tell us, over and over again. There are teams which help the newly dead to orient themselves to their new lives, and one of the things they offer to do is to teach new arrivals how to produce signs for their loved ones. Some of the dead become good at it, and a few are still delivering signs decades later. But for most of the dead, signs are given within the first year or two after their deaths, and once they can see that we are past our worst grief they generally seem to abandon the practice. They know that we are fine. And they have lots to do!