How Did I End Up in a Documentary About Consciousness?

Part 2: The World Started Getting Stranger

When I began my healing journey, I wasn’t looking for mystical experiences.

I wasn’t trying to become more spiritual.

I wasn’t trying to communicate with guides, channel information or explore altered states of consciousness.

I was trying to heal.

That’s it.

At the time, I was dealing with the emotional residue of a lifetime of experiences I hadn’t fully processed. Childhood wounds. A difficult first marriage. The death of my son. Years of stress. Years of pushing through.

Like many people, I had become very good at functioning and not nearly as good at feeling.

So I started doing the work.

Meditation became part of that process.

At first, it was exactly what you would expect. I sat quietly. I tried to calm my mind. I spent a lot of time wondering whether I was doing it right.

Then things started happening.

Nothing dramatic.

Just strange enough to get my attention.

During meditation, I would sometimes see colors and geometric shapes moving behind my closed eyes. Occasionally, insights would appear that felt different from my normal stream of thought. Information seemed to arrive fully formed, as though I had walked into the middle of a conversation that was already taking place.

I didn’t know what to make of it.

My default setting was skepticism.

I assumed I was imagining things.

Wishful thinking.

An overactive imagination.

Some combination of stress, grief and too much meditation.

Then the dreams started.

Or more accurately, the messages started arriving in that space between sleeping and waking.

Sometimes I would hear a voice.

Not with my ears.

But clearly enough that it felt distinct from my own thoughts.

The information was often random.

Unexpected.

Not something I had been thinking about before bed.

Most of it was impossible to verify.

Easy to dismiss.

Easy to forget.

Until one day it wasn’t.

One morning, I woke up and heard a very clear male voice say:

“Angela, I’m sorry to tell you that Matt Smith is going to die on the motorcycle.”

Not his motorcycle.

The motorcycle.

That odd wording stuck with me.

I remember thinking it was strange, but I wasn’t sure what to do with the information. I hadn’t spoken to Matt in years. We weren’t close. Why would I be hearing something about him?

A couple of weeks later, I had plans to meet his sister-in-law for coffee. I figured I would mention it to her if it came up, but honestly, I assumed it was probably nothing.

By the time we met, I had completely forgotten about it.

Then something on her shirt triggered the memory.

I don’t remember what the image was, only that it instantly brought the experience back to me.

So I asked her a question.

“Does Matt have a motorcycle?”

She looked at me strangely.

“No,” she said. “Why?”

I immediately felt relieved.

There it was. Proof that my brain had simply invented something bizarre while I was waking up.

Then she continued.

“He doesn’t own one, but he and some friends are going on a motorcycle trip in a couple of weeks. They’re renting motorcycles for it.”

I felt my stomach drop.

Suddenly, the phrase the motorcycle didn’t seem quite so strange anymore.

I explained what had happened. I told her I wasn’t claiming to know anything. I wasn’t even sure why I was bringing it up. But the experience had felt significant enough that I thought she should know about it.

She called his wife and shared the message.

Thankfully, Matt didn’t die.

Maybe it was coincidence.

Maybe it meant nothing.

Maybe hearing the warning caused him to be a little more cautious on the trip.

I’ll never know.

What I do know is that the experience left me with a question I couldn’t easily dismiss.

If this was simply my imagination, why Matt?

Why a motorcycle?

And why did the message arrive weeks before I learned he was about to take a motorcycle trip?

For the first time, I found myself wondering if there was something happening that I didn’t fully understand.

Looking back, I can see that my reaction to these experiences was probably different than many people’s would have been.

I’ve always been wildly curious.

At any given moment, there are probably twenty-five questions bouncing around inside my head.

Why is that like that?

How does that work?

What does that mean?

Is there another explanation?

I’ve always loved archeology, ancient civilizations, mysteries and the unexplained. Anything that hinted there might be more to the story than what appeared on the surface immediately captured my attention.

So while some of these experiences were certainly strange, my first reaction usually wasn’t fear.

It was curiosity.

I wanted to know what was happening.

I wanted to understand it.

Other people, however, sometimes had a very different reaction.

I would tell them about a dream, a voice I heard while waking up, or some random word that had appeared in my mind and turned out to be something real.

More than once, I was met with wide eyes and an expression that suggested they were reconsidering our entire conversation.

Jason was usually the first recipient of these stories.

I would excitedly tell him about whatever strange thing had happened next while he stared back at me with a mixture of confusion, concern and what I can only assume was an internal debate about whether he should be worried.

Meanwhile, I was already onto my next question.

And once I started paying attention, the experiences seemed to happen more often.

Many of them arrived through dreams.

Or more accurately, in that strange space between sleeping and waking where you aren’t fully in either world.

Sometimes I would wake up with a word stuck in my head.

Not a thought.

Not an idea.

Just a single word repeating itself over and over until I finally got out of bed and looked it up.

The strange part was that these weren’t words I already knew.

One morning it was Ayurveda.

Another time it was the Bhagavad Gita.

Then Shiva.

Then Medtron.

And several others I had never heard before.

Each time, I would Google the word and discover it was something real.

A system of medicine.

A sacred text.

A Hindu deity.

Concepts and ideas that had never been part of my world.

I had grown up in Utah. My knowledge of Eastern philosophy and spirituality was, at best, embarrassingly limited.

Yet somehow these words kept appearing.

I didn’t know what to make of it.

The rational part of me kept looking for explanations.

Maybe I had heard the words somewhere and forgotten.

Maybe my brain was connecting dots without my awareness.

Maybe.

But the experiences kept accumulating.

Then there were the dreams themselves.

Sometimes it felt as though a voice was narrating them.

Not controlling them.

Not creating them.

Just commenting on them.

Offering information.

Explaining things.

One dream in particular has stayed with me for years.

In the dream, there was some kind of disaster unfolding. An earthquake or something similar. Everything felt chaotic and uncertain. Jason was there with me.

Then I heard a voice say very clearly:

“Don’t be mad at him. He didn’t know.”

That was it.

Just one sentence.

I woke up and couldn’t shake it.

The dream felt different from my normal dreams. More vivid. More intentional.

Important somehow.

Neither of us knew what it meant.

But it felt significant enough that we decided to purchase earthquake insurance.

To this day, I can’t tell you whether the dream was symbolic, literal or simply my subconscious working through something.

What I can tell you is that these experiences were becoming harder to dismiss.

Individually, each one could be explained away.

Together, they began to form a pattern.

And that pattern was forcing me to consider a possibility I wasn’t entirely comfortable with.

What if reality was bigger than I thought it was?

In the next part of this story, I’ll share some of the experiences that pushed me even further outside my comfort zone and eventually led me to explore something I never thought possible: leaving my body.

Another thread from my heart to yours.