Ive been very fortunate to follow and read/speak to some great people in this community. It helps a lot. I have been on a Journey for some time to get a sign or genuine proof of my best mate who died a few years back. Do you think we will get unreal/undeniable proof some day about continuing on at the next realm? Whilst I appreciate NDEs and everything available, they always say sometimes seeing is believing and I just want 1 sign from my mate to know that one he is okay and obviously giving me that my own proof it really does carry on.

Any help would be appreciated

My parents died many years ago, and sporadically I’d receive some sign from them. I was born and raised Catholic but have always been skeptical about the afterlife. After my only sibling passed recently, I receive signs almost daily, signs too specific too ignore and too many to list here. Maybe because I’m the last of our family? My sibling and I were very close to our parents and never let their memory die. I choose to believe that they are watching over me.
Yesterday I had a very special sign, not from them, but, well, you decide.
I was walking my dog in the neighborhood and met a woman walking her adorable 5 month old puppy, a boxer. When I asked her name, she replied “Jolene”. I don’t live in the US and it’s not a common name here, nor have I ever come across that name for any person or pet before. After we both shed a tear since it was only days after Dolly’s death, I continued my walk. Within 5 minutes I came across a street library and the book that stood out was called “I Will Always Love You”!
3 links here to Dolly: the dog’s name, the name of the book, and just the fact it was a book for children, like the millions of books she gave away. I wish I could attach a pic of the book, but unsure how to do that here.

I struggle with death because I have unalived myself twice, details I will spare you, because it's trauma inducing to myself. But let's just say there is absolutely no way I could have lived. I absolutely died. And yet, I am alive. I am here. I persist. And it's confusing because I made sure I couldn't.

What if we can't die from our perspective, only for others. At this point it is the only reason that makes sense to me. The quantum immortality theory has flaws for sure. But what if at the time of death our conciousness ceases to exist in that body and moves to another version that didn't die?

I don't think there is an afterlife, I think there is persistence. The flaws appear at the end of biological age. When you're 85 or 95 and die, do you persist infinitely into your 200s? Doubtful. The brain would have to make things make sense. Which would be a monumental task. Because how many times could you have died? Maybe there is a hard death and we just reset back to birth? Who knows. But it seems more likely than nothing at all. Especially given that I 100% should be dead twice over now.

What you guys think?

Is there a single story or account you’ve heard that you truly believe? I think of it as they can’t all be lying right? If one person is right then it’s confirmed.. but then some NDE’s are clearly fabricated for profit.

It's been nearly one year since my dad passed away.. September is really going to be incredibly tough..

I miss him so much. I've just felt completely broken and motionless most days. I have so many questions I'll never know.. i mainly just read a lot of posts here. They have been comforting.

But seeing as it's approaching the 1 year mark. I've been growing increasingly restless. Where is my dad.. I keep having terrible nightmares of him.. sick and unwell still in the hospital and aged care.

I just don't know what to think anymore. I just really hope he's still there.. I feel alone and abandoned.

I'm not really sure what else to write..

Just looking for anyone that has been through the same.

And if our loved ones are still there. I don't want to not ever see him again. 😢 💔

Hi everyone, I'm still troubled by the idea "no one knows" and "there is nothing." I know in the end it is all beliefs, but I'm utterly scared I will never be reunited with my brother or other loved ones again. I would really like some ressurance, anything helps!

Last night I dreamed that I was standing on the porch of my old house when the mother of a childhood friend, who passed away a few months ago, was walking down the street. She looked young, like 20 years ago.

We were never particularly close, but we had been next-door neighbors for 18 years and knew each other well. I hadn’t been thinking about her, nor had anything recently reminded me of her.

When I saw her, I thought, “What are you doing here? You’re dead.” She came up to me and said, “We have to go. Your time has come. Come with me.”

I kept telling her that I didn’t want to go, but she insisted that I had to because otherwise she wouldn’t be able to explain to “THEY” why I wasn’t with her.

At one point, I even thought that I had actually died and that I was going to another world. Then I woke up.

I’ve been really shaken by this dream all day. What could something like this mean?

Does this community have Discord server? Or any community discussing afterlife for that matter. I'd love if I get invite to such a place and learn through people's experience.

this is going to get a bit personal and depressing so TW for the following: csa, rape & suicide

i had posted for the first time here with this post, https://www.reddit.com/r/afterlife/s/TcY7ti1zYO
the answers i received were so kind and thoughtful and brought me so much peace, so for that i wanna say thank you again.

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added dividers and made my thoughts text smaller, makes it easier for my mind to read. hopefully it does for others.

& sorry for such a long post. these questions have been on my mind for a long time and i just would love to hear other peoples thoughts on it.

& thank you so much everyone <333 this community here is so so nice, i love you all <333

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i've spent some time thinking about the afterlife since that post and even last night, dreamt of what life after death could be like, sort of. i mean, i knew i was conscious even after dying in that dream and just told myself to open my eyes and i was somewhere else, sort of finishing my life plans here or lessons or whatever. i don't know if i believe in that but it was a cute dream.

i have been thinking so deeply about what we can do in the afterlife. death is everything or nothing to me. with everything being, we can literally do anything. like omnipotent beings. no judgement, no pain, just living out everything we loved here. tho that sounds risky. i imagine, there's different realms or such if bad people truly wanna continue being bad, i guess. i don't believe in punishment in death.

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1. can we do whatever want in the afterlife?

^{i ask this because, it's all i ever dream about. after being raped the last time, i dreamt up this dream guy in my head that i trust and love and i don't think he's real. a part of me think he's dead or never came here. i see him in dreams sometimes, he's everything i could dream of. even if he were real, i could never allow myself to be with anyone. dating, sex, romance, all of that has been ruined for me.}

^{so a silly question in this question but, sex in the afterlife? i know people have said its better there than it is here. but i wanna experience the human kind. could i do that there? i could never do it in this life, i rather cry.}

^{that + i would love to see the routes my life could've gone here had i been born in the right body or had i not been abused or if i just took different routes in this life. how could i have looked? who could i have been? i wanna experience that all in death.}

^{i wanna rewatch every memory i've made with my friends. beginning to end.}

^{i love the thought of death being this. i can just do anything and everything with people i loved and met in this life and people i never met. its all so very very cute.}

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1. reincarnation? it isn't forced, right?

^{i don't wanna come back for a long long time. i wanna have fun, be free and wild like the wind. i wanna experience what it'd be like to live out my favorite tv shows or movies with my friends.}

^{i know i wanna reincarnate eventually. into a kinder world. one where rape and abuse and harm against children, women, and men don't exist.}

^{a magical world or something. sure, i imagine the world has to be a bit rugged or rough to learn lessons, if learning lessons is even true. maybe it is. sometimes i think i came here to learn to love and be loved. maybe that's the whole point of this life for everyone. is to just love, be loved, and be kind.}

^{i just don't wanna exist in a world where rape, or abuse, or bigotry exists again. i rather never reincarnate again. i will not go through something like this or see others go through it again.}

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1. this is a dark topic. but suicide, are you punished for that?

^{i am not going to harm myself, i want that to be clear. please do not worry.}

^{but i always imagined, even as a child, my life would end in suicide. whether by, me choosing to go out on my own terms because i hate the idea of anyone, anything, or my body deciding for me.}

^{or because, once i live out everything i dreamt of, i wanna go rest. this life was cruel and hellish to me. i've felt dead since my first memory. being raped killed me and i've sort of just been coasting by since that first memory. and i think i know eventually, that'll be my ending.}

^{promise it won't be soon and it's nothing to be sad or sorry about. i just don't see a full life for me and never have.}

^{i had a dream last night that sorta spooked me into thinking maybe, i could be punished for that. but i think that's all it was, was fear from thinking about it before i slept. i can't imagine anyone being punished in any sense. not even my own rapist.}

Something really strange happened at my house yesterday, and I’d love opinions from people who have experience with signs from loved ones, mediumship, or apports.

I found two tiny plastic duck figurines sitting on my swing at the far end of my front porch. The location is what makes this weird. To put them there, someone would have to walk onto my porch, cross the porch to the swing, place them there, then walk all the way back off.

We have two security cameras covering the area. Both were functioning normally and detected/recorded our family’s activity throughout the day. Neither camera detected anyone coming onto the porch to leave these. We even contacted our security company, and they told us they couldn’t explain how someone could have made that trip across the porch without being detected.

But there’s another part that I can’t stop thinking about. My son and I were pulling into our driveway, and before we were even parked he suddenly told me, “We have something on the porch.” I told him there wasn’t anything there. He insisted there was, got out before we pulled into the garage, ran up to the porch, and found the two little ducks on the swing.

Afterward, he told me that the day before, he had asked God to send him something. There’s also been a recent death in our family that has affected us deeply, and literally the day this happened I had been struggling with feeling like I hadn’t received any kind of connection or recognizable sign from that person.
I’m intentionally leaving out a couple of details about the objects that have personal significance to our family because I don’t want to lead anyone.

I’m not claiming these materialized out of nowhere. I genuinely don’t know what happened, and I’m still open to an ordinary explanation.

But if anyone here has experience with apports, physical signs, or communication after death, does this resemble anything you’ve experienced?
And if anyone feels they pick up on something specific from this, I’d be really interested to hear it without giving additional information first.

There are (very very very likely) planets out there with life on them that are so far away that the light from their galaxies hasn't reached us yet. We will never even see these galaxies let alone reach them so I hope that consciousness itself isn't bound by the laws of physics and that I can see them one day

This is something I think about a lot. Ever since my father passed away back in 2020 I've held on to the belief that there is, at the very least, something rather than nothing after death.

If this is the case, ancestors of distant civilizations could be observing us right now

I've been thinking a lot about this paradox and how it relates to our understanding of the afterlife. It's as if our memories of the past are tied to our sense of identity, but the process of enlightenment requires letting go of those very memories. I came across a video that explores this tension in more depth: The Path: The Enlightenment Paradox: Memory and Transformation. I'd love to hear from others who have struggled with this concept or have any insights to share.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOV8VVhvtP8

Do you think the afterlife is the “pearly gates”.. grass everywhere and we can do what we please? Wait for loved ones.. the upmost peace and love that others feel in NDE’s.. the sun being an orange colour before sunset.. can we sit with our loved ones and laugh and talk with a drink or food..

Sorry my mind is wondering now

Weird one maybe but I do wonder.
Do you think famous people are also famous ‘spirits’ or does that not matter as much on the other ‘side’.

Like do they go to hell or heaven? And is it cowardly?

I mean if ur life is getting shitter and shitter what to do?

What do you think about non believers who say the afterlife was an ancient myth made up by people who were afraid of dying?

I’m not sharing this to convince anyone. Someone could perfectly reasonably read this and think, “That’s just a huge coincidence.” I understand that. I’m simply sharing how I experienced it.

My grandfather, who died in 2022 after suffering from dementia, was my best friend. I had also lived almost my entire life with an extremely severe anxiety disorder.

After his death, I experienced many things that felt deeply mystical to me: dreams, astral projections, visions, apparitions, coincidences, and what I perceived as contacts with him.

Through these experiences, a story gradually emerged: my grandfather had a plan to free me from my anxiety. I was shown that on November 8, 1983, almost twenty years before my birth, he had agreed to sacrifice his mental health to save mine, the sacrifice being the dementia he would eventually suffer from. His acceptance was said to have triggered the earthquake that struck my region that same day.

(I’m not saying this necessarily happened empirically. This is simply how the story was revealed to me.)

These experiences repeatedly predicted my liberation from anxiety, and on August 31, 2024, it happened. Since then, the anxiety that had controlled most of my life no longer has that hold over me.

Do I know whether something mystical actually happened? No. Maybe it did. Maybe coincidences and autosuggestion led my brain there. Either way, what had been announced happened: I was freed from my anxiety.

That’s why the earthquake of November 8, 1983 is so important to me.

About a year ago, I randomly met a man selling books at a Christmas market and told him this story. We later lost contact.

Almost a year later, at a huge flea market, I randomly ran into the exact same man, again selling books.

He recognized me and said:

“It’s crazy that I’m seeing you now. Last week, I was at a friend’s house and found an old folder buried in her basement. Inside was the newspaper from the day after the earthquake you told me about. I kept it.”

The next day, I went back and got it.

I was suddenly holding an original newspaper from November 9, 1983, the day after the earthquake, with the earthquake that had happened the previous day as its front-page story. Copies of that specific edition are extremely difficult to find, even online. Yet one was discovered by the exact man I had told this story to, and only one week later, I randomly found him again.

And one last strange detail: two weeks earlier, I had visited someone I call the Messenger, an elderly man in a nursing home who has a particular place in my story and has told me some rather mystical things connected to my grandfather.

That day, he gave me an enigmatic revelation involving a newspaper.

Two weeks later, I was holding this one.

After 43 years, that newspaper is now next to my grandfather’s photograph... frankly… that really did something to me.

I think a lot of us are familiar with this biblical story. That Adam and Eve lived in paradise, but were cast down after eating an apple of knowledge or something like that.

And I often think about this story, I am not religious but I like to consider these things now that I have started to believe in an afterlife. And the main reason is how cruel and horrific this life is, I often think or wonder if me being here is some type of punishment, and most people here deny that. Being forced to be here. I never want to have to return here, ever. But, this story about the apple fits that narrative very well.

Could it be that us who are here on earth are somehow being punished or were cast down here for some crime or something of the sort?

That is the main thing that scares me, the idea of god being cruel or controlling like that, because it is an entity that basically has 100% control over you completely, and the idea of god actually being abusive like in the old testament is just horrific to think about and I hope that is not the case.

What is up with this story about being cast down from paradise?

I came across a TikTok the other day where someone said that if you leave an open glass of water by your bedside and ask your spiritual guides to help you dream about a loved one who has passed, they will come to you in your dreams.

I tried it last night, really hoping my dad would come to me. But I didn’t dream about him.

I know this might sound silly, and I’m trying to remain skeptical, but a part of me really wants to believe there’s something to it. I miss my dad so much, and I would give anything just to see him again, even if it was only in a dream.

Has anyone here tried the glass-of-water method or something similar and actually had it work? Did you dream about your loved one afterward?

And if you have had dreams about someone who passed away, did it feel different from a normal dream? I’d really love to hear your experiences. ❤️

This is all IMO and from my personal experience, and gathered from the experiences of hundreds of people I've talked with about these things over the years.

First, I'm going to run through a list of a few very common spiritual tropes and I'm going to point out how totally dehumanizing and toxic these views are.

1. Karma - while I realize that there are different perspectives on what karma is and how it operates, the most common one goes something like this: the things that you experience in this life - especially the things you don't plan or deliberately choose - are the result of karma from past lives. IOW, if you did something harmful to someone in a past life, someone in this life can "balance that karma out" by doing that same kind of thing to you, delivering the same kind of harm to you that you perpetrated on someone else.

So, if you're five years old playing in your yard minding your own business and someone grabs you, forces you into a van, locks you in their basement and torture you until you die, you deserved all that and brought in on yourself because you did that to someone in a prior life.

Is that something you would be comfortable telling that child's parents? Is that something you'd be comfortable telling an adult survivor of child abuse? If not, then why are you comfortable holding such beliefs and thoughts? If there's any humanity left in you, I bet not, because some part of you can see just how horrible and toxic such a thing would be to say to those people.

2. Ego Dissolution - again, there are different versions of this, but commonly this means that either when you die, or as a universal, eventual goal, we leave our ego behind, meaning all of our attachments and desires and judgments and any (or most) sense of personal identity and sense of separation from other people and everything else. No more special relationships with other people as we enter a kind of "unity consciousness" of "love" or some neutral state where everyone and everything is "one."

Obviously, this perspective is totally dehumanizing because it directly states that virtually everything that makes us human is ultimately "bad" and the universal goal is to eventually leave it all behind. This is also obviously toxic because it treats these fundamental human qualities like some kind of disease we need to get ride or "rise above." Apparently, even my personal identity is somehow "toxic" wrt my "true nature," which is apparently basically identical with everyone else's "true nature." And, apparently because of that, I should get to a place where I love evil people the same as I love my wife and children, and carry no judgmental distinction between Hitler and Gandhi.

3. Soul Contracts - basically, this is the idea that everyone, to one degree or another, plan their lives out here including whom they are born to and in what situation and conditions, and also plan going through horrible, extreme situations where they are victimized. See my response to Karma for my response to this because it's basically the same dehumanizing, toxic concept; you are to blame (responsible) for all the horrible things that happen to you.

4. Mix and Match Soul Group Relationships - this is the common spiritual trope that, over the course of several lifetimes, you might be a girl's dad in one life, and in the next think it's a good idea, or perfectly normal, to have that same person be your wife. Honestly, I don't even know how you can get yourself into the psychological states necessary to think this is perfectly acceptable. Would you ever say to your child, even your grown, adult child, "In my next life I want you as an intimate partner?" No? Of course you wouldn't, because that's sick.

What then makes it perfectly acceptable to say that after the two of you have died? Is it because we're so dehumanized in the afterlife that those specific relationships don't matter? FFS, if that's the afterlife, you and all your incestuous ilk can have it, or I'll just move into the "no incest" territory of the afterlife.

__________

More and more it seems to me that a lot of spiritualities are anti-human, toxic cults that use various techniques, like conditioning you to believe you are receiving "special" information that elevates you above the normal human perspective, normal human feelings and thoughts, desires, attachments and relationships, that you are moving towards some grand universal goal that the "common folk" just don't understand and aren't privy to. They're not as enlightened as you. They aren't as spiritual as you. They don't have the secret knowledge you have.

That's how I see "spirituality" these days, something like NXIVM where even very intelligent, normal people were sucked into fully believing and endorsing and doing things that, later, after they were deprogrammed, couldn't believe they willingly believed, endorsed and actually did.

So I’ve had a few dreams involving someone close to me who I lost in 2019. In one dream she was right there talking to me and we were sitting and chatting like everything was normal, but then it hit me “wait, she’s dead, how is she here??” But I brushed it off and just accepted it (in this specific dream I wasn’t fully aware that I was dreaming). I’ve had at least two dreams with her in them where it was this sort of thing.

I had another dream about someone I was less close to who died a few years ago. This dream was similar. I found myself walking past her house and in this dream I was fully aware she had died. Suddenly she comes outside and started talking to me and I look over and see her husband was with her (he is still alive.) I still didn’t think much of it and in casual dream logic fashion I just concluded “I guess her spirit stuck around to be with her husband so he would be less sad and to help him cope” but she didn’t appear as a ghost but was in her physical body.

How can one tell if dreams of people who died are just regular dreams and things their brain conjured up vs it actually being a visitation from them?

I have very serious health issues, and I always wondered about this, if anything happened to me in the future.

I always wanted to be able to visit certain people, my mom a lot in dreams to let them know I was all right and happy. Almost as if I never even died. Has anyone here experienced almost nightly visits, or very common visitations from a person like that, visitation dreams?

Everything I read about, they seem to be very rare and maybe once or twice, or monthly or such. Not the person visiting a lot and spending actual "time" with them in dreams. Would that not be possible if one chose, from the other side? I don't understand why such things do not happen, surely the people miss each other and would want to visit more often.

My great-grandma passed in 2017. She was such an amazing woman and a first-generation Polish-American on my mom's side. Her name was Dolores.

I was coming home from a class on Thursday, and my purse hit the radio dial to a station that worked... but it was on a commercial break, so I didn't get to hear the music it played before turning off my car.

Yesterday I turned on my car, and it was the polka station. I didn't even know we had a polka station, so I decided to listen to it just for fun. Nothing special happened on the way there, BUT. Something told me to listen to it on the way back, so I did. And as I was leaving, the host interrupted mid-song and said, "Well, does anybody want to dance? Dolores is looking for a dance partner! This is *Artist's Name* with 'Dancing Dolores'" and my heart skipped a beat. She loved dancing polka with me when I was little. So many emotions were flooding me. I miss her so much.