My Grandfather's Spirit in My Dream Saved My Sight

My grandfather H. Maurice Fridlund, Esq. (aka "Puff") and me

I have always had extremely bad eyes.  I have worn glasses since I was 8 years old.  I am extremely nearsighted.  At 20 feet away, my vision is equivalent to someone with 20/20 vision looking at something the distance of two football fields away!  My world is extremely fuzzy.  In addition, I have other annoying eye issues such as floaters, astigmatisms, cataracts, and retinal degeneration.  As I have gotten older, since my eyes don't change as frequently as they did when I was young, I just to the ophthalmologist once a year for a check up. 

About five or six years ago, I went to bed and was having an very average, rather boring, dream.  I was driving to a school in a neighboring community to pick up my daughter after her soccer game.  I got there, found the school, went inside, found my daughter and we started to leave, when I noticed that the door to the room opened.  Normally, since I am a lucid dreamer, I have very good control over the events in my dreams.  I usually know what is about to happen.  That was not the case here.  The door opened and there stood my Swedish grandfather who we called "Puff" (ironic in retrospect, I suppose, since he died in his mid-80's, when I was in my mid-20's, from a debilitating lung disease called emphysema). 

At any rate, I was very surprised to see him in my dream. 

I said, "Puff!  What are you doing here?"

He replied, "I'm here because I need to show you something, Nancy."

He shuffled slowly over to the other side of the room, just as I had remembered him in real life decades earlier.  He picked up a huge, leather bound text book, opened it up to a particular page and pointed to the writing just below a medical illustration on the top of the left page. 

"Here.  Read this," he said.

I struggled to read the words out of this medical treatise, but they began to look like unintelligible squiggles and floated aimlessly. 

"I can't read this, Puff," I said, "because I'm in a dream."

"Oh that's alright then," he answered.  "I just want to make sure that you go to visit your eye doctor because there is a problem with your eyes and you need to take care of it."

"Okay, I will," I promised.

We hugged warmly and he told me he had to go, and so we parted ways. 

I woke myself up from the dream sobbing with tears running down my face.  But they were tears of joy.  That had never happened before in my life.  I was quite certain there was absolutely nothing wrong with my eyes.  My vision hadn't changed and I had no symptoms of anything at all.  But, in my budding exploration as a psychic, I decided - just for kicks - to go and get my annual eye check up anyway.  So I did.

To my shock, at that visit, my ophthalmologist informed me for the very first time that I had early stage glaucoma and would have to start coming to see him every three months and take eye drops for the rest of my life in order to prevent blindness.  What was even more amazing to me was that my dream conversation with Puff could not have been the product of my subconscious mind trying to tell me about my eye disease. 

Glaucoma is a symptomless disease - until you begin to go blind.  There are only three ways to check for it and none of them would result in any conscious or subconscious awareness - thinning of the wall of the retina, high intraocular fluid pressure, and the beginning of the loss of peripheral vision.  Tests showed that my peripheral vision was still excellent.  So there would have been no way for me to know or sense the presence of glaucoma. 

This was enough to convince me that I had, in fact, been visited by my deceased grandfather - for real!  It would also account for my strange crying upon awakening from the dream.  I also found it ironic that Puff was the one who showed up to tell me about this eye disease.  He is the only other member of my family, on both my mother's and father's sides, who - like me - wore glasses.  It was only suitable that he would tell me about this eye problem.  Furthermore, it was perfect that he showed up with a medical text to convince me about the problem. 

Born in 1896, Puff was a brilliant man.  He spoke eight languages fluently, attended Harvard Law School on a full scholarship and graduated with some of the highest grades ever, and also studied law in France and Germany.  He adored reading books that classified things - like weather, animal species, birds, historical events, etc.  When he sent me a rare letter in the mail, the letter was always divided into a main topic, subheadings and separate clauses.  He wasn't exactly a warm and fuzzy guy, but he had a good heart.  He was a tax lawyer for one of the largest admiralty law firms in the United States and created a very wealthy lifestyle for my mother's family.  Former Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Jacqueline Kennedy's second husband) begged my grandfather to be his lawyer, but Puff turned him down.  He didn't like Onassis' dirty business practices. 

Since that time, I have continued to see my ophthalmologist faithfully every three months and have had to increase my eye drops since my vision is now slowly starting to deteriorate.  Ultimately, there is no cure for glaucoma.  All you can do is slow the onset of the disease.  If Puff had not shown up in my dream, I believe it is possible I could be partially blind by now.

So, I offer this story as proof that the dead can help the living and give accurate medical advice from beyond the grave.  It's wonderful.