One of the strangest cases in the history of dream research is the amazing story of Claire Silvia. She was a professional dancer with several modern dance companies. As the years passed, Claire’s health began to deteriorate. Here is her account of her contact with the afterlife through her dreams.

"And that is when I began to have my first symptoms. It was getting more difficult for me to walk upstairs. I was getting out of breath on the dance floor which was unusual for me. Every day I was able to do less and less. I was going downhill very quickly."

Claire was suffering from primary pulmonary hypertension, a deadly disease. Her only hope for survival was a heart and lung transplant.

"My mother was basically dying," says Amara, "She prepared herself for death and she was preparing me for her death. She labored to get up in the morning to go to the bathroom. Her breathing was labored and I was afraid every morning whether she would be alive or not."

Then Claire’s bizarre dreams began to unfold.

"I started to have a series of dreams. One dream was that I had the transplant and I had to drink four glasses of milk a day. At the time I questioned this, I said ‘I wonder what this means? Where does this four glasses of milk come in at? I don’t understand what this means.'  And there was no explanation so I just let it go. I lived each day with a thought and a prayer that I would live till the next day and that I would live to see my daughter graduate from high school which was about a year away."

Finally, Claire’s prayers were answered.

"The phone rang and it was the transplant coordinator. She very calmly said, ‘We officially got permission to do heart and lung transplants and we have a donor for you today. I was speechless. All I could say was ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’"

Within hours, Claire was rushed into surgery. After a delicate three hour operation, Claire awoke.

"I knew that I would have to take an anti-rejection drug, cyclosporine. They injected a certain amount of this liquid into a two little cups of milk. Then at night, I repeated this same process. I realized that these were the four cups of milk a day in my dream. At first I didn’t accept it, I kept saying ‘I must have gotten this information from someplace.’  I kept checking around and nobody told me. Then I thought, 'This is bizarre. I don’t why and I still don’t.'"

When Claire returned home, another sequence of unexplained occurrences began. Her taste in food changed dramatically.

"I had a thought one day ‘Why am I cutting up green peppers and putting them into my food?'   I used to hate them and I picked them out. Several weeks after the transplant, they told me I could drive by myself. I got in my car and was driving around and I had this yen to find a Kentucky Fried Chicken place to have chicken nuggets. This was something I just normally don’t ordinarily do."

Just when Claire thought her life couldn’t get any stranger - it did - in another mysterious dream.

"I’m in an open field and it’s very light. It’s daytime and I’m in a playful relationship with a young man whom I see clearly. He is tall, has sandy colored hair and his name is Tim L.  I come back and say goodbye to him and as we approach each other, we kiss, and as we kiss, I feel as if I inhale him into me. It’s like taking this enormous breath. And I know that he will be with me together forever. But it also seemed that this man in my dreams whom I knew was Tim must be my donor."

"I was very curious to find out who my donor was because of all the things that were happening to me and because of the dreams I was having – and the feeling of living with his presence."

Claire became convinced that her donor was trying to communicate with her. She contacted the hospital but they informed her that donor records were confidential. When all hope seemed lost, her friend Fred Stern called to tell her of a message he received in his own dream.

"I had a clear image of a dream," says Fred Stern, "that we had gone to the basement of the public library and had seen in the Portland newspaper a story on either the third or fourth page several days before her operation. A story about the boy who was killed and whom she had gotten her heart from."

Claire and Stern made arrangements to meet at the local library.

"I met Fred at the public library and we looked at the papers the week preceding my transplant. Sure enough, the day before my transplant, as was in his dream, the obituary of a young man who was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was 18 years old. His name was Tim L. as it was in my dream. It felt like my heart stopped beating for a moment. I was standing up and I remember getting kind of weak all over. My knees went a little weak. It was a shock."

"It was almost like magic," says Fred Stern, "like some sense of knowing. It is just wonderful to be a part of it – this unfolding."

It turned out the Tim L. had died in a motorcycle accident shortly before Claire’s life saving surgery.

"I was shocked because now it became more real. Now I had all the information. I had the family’s name. I had details. This person really existed."

Wanting to know more about her donor, Claire wrote to Tim’s family and made arrangements to meet them.

"I was very excited," says Tim's sister Lee Ann, "and the whole family was very excited to meet Claire. It was like meeting my brother all over again for the very first time – seeing him again alive. Claire was very warm towards us. She was loving. She was loving like Tim was."

"There was so much feeling," says Claire, "that it was absolutely exhausting."

It was then that Claire told Tim’s family about her dream.

"My first reaction to Claire’s dream was one of disbelief. I really didn’t believe it until she just started describing things about my brother – like how he was tall and wiry. She described him almost to a T. She was getting the information from her dream. She described how Tim was loving and that he came to her and wanted to be a friend. I just kind of felt that 'Yeah, that’s what Tim would do.’"

"When I met the family, I was trying to corroborate some of the things that had been happening to me. I asked them if he happened to like green peppers and they said ‘Oh, yes, he used to love green peppers. He’d fry them up with cabasa.'  They told me his favorite food was chicken nuggets and that he had apparently just bought them before he died because they had to pull them out of his motorcycle jacket when they found him. When they told me that I said, ‘Oh my God!’"

"Why would she have a dream," Tim’s sister Jackie says, "about her donor unless God was trying to tell her in a way who we were and trying to make it easier for her to get to us so she could see that there was good out of everything she went through."

"All the images that have come to me since the transplant are, in and of themselves, having to do with this new part of me." says Claire.

| Dreams index | Next |