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Last week saw the publication of “Developing Your Supernatural Awareness.” Subtitled “Connecting with an Interactive Universe,” it is by Dr Fredrick Woodard, a clinical psychologist and certified hypnotherapist, who conducts research on the paranormal, hypnosis and psychotherapy.

Dr Woodard’s private practice is located in Milford, New Hampshire, USA. He received a PhD in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology and trained in hypnosis at the Milton Erickson Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.

Dr Woodard is a direct great-grandson of Madockawando, a chief of the Abenaki nation in the 1600s. He is also a descendent of Charlemagne, who ruled most of Western Europe in the so-called Dark Ages.

In this abridged extract, Dr Woodard (pictured below) features just a few of the fascinating and evidential cases he has investigated. 

		Dr Fredrick Woodard

SINCE 2002, I’ve interviewed more than 100 individuals about their supernatural experiences. Countless others have informally shared theirs with me.

This firsthand research includes cases of people finding missing objects by extraordinary means – having premonitions of future events, encountering supernatural beings, such as angels and the spirits of dead loved ones, communicating in unusual ways with animals, causing electronic devices to malfunction through an energy exchange and seeing unusual objects.

I have always been humbled by the unlimited possibilities in our personal world and in the universe.

These possibilities are available to each of us and are so numerous that they far outweigh any attempts by others to control our minds or manipulate facts to support false beliefs for their own self-gain.

We are connected to the earth and to the air we breathe. Our exhalations are needed by the plants to survive. The circle of life allows us to eat and live in a chain of interconnectedness with other forms of life.

Our ancestors and family members created all sorts of roots and associations for us. Our culture and prior cultures created our present moment.

Our friends and co-workers, our community and our world, spin even more relationships and affiliations.

There are so many possible sources from which our supernatural experiences can sprout and grow. Perhaps even past lives, other universes and other dimensions are affecting us in ways we haven’t even begun to understand.

Is each of us the same essence of spirit in different bodies in different lives Is a spiritual battle being fought between good and evil beings or forces on the earth Understanding the full picture of such complex ideas would take much more than the short one hundred years of one lifetime.

As both a clinical psychologist and paranormal researcher, I’m uniquely qualified to help people who experience things like psychic phenomena and encounters with aliens, ghosts, demons or angels.

I not only validate their experiences (something not many psychologists are willing to do), but also support these individuals as they find meaning in what happened.

I define supernatural as the many evolving parts of our perceiving of awareness (body, mind, emotions and spirit) that go beyond our commonly held understandings and the physical limitations of our world.

Supernatural experiences challenge what everyday life experiences have mentally programmed us to believe.

The question is “Are these supernatural experiences really so unusual” In other words, do we sometimes simply not perceive what is actually going on around us Perhaps by developing our supernatural awareness, we are really just reawakening something that was put to sleep a long time ago.

Such was the case for one of the individuals I interviewed. She was a forty-one-year-old artist of Sioux, Scottish, English, Irish, Danish and German heritage. She had no history of mental health treatment or substance abuse.

One day she was leaving an art show opening at a local college. She was feeling upbeat and happy, even giddy, from seeing the artwork. The two glasses of champagne she’d drunk only added to those feelings.

“I define supernatural as the many evolving parts of our perceiving of awareness (body, mind, emotions and spirit) that go beyond our commonly held understandings and the physical limitations of our world.”

She was getting into her car when she heard her dead German grandmother say to her, clear as a bell, “Bitte anschnallen,” which in English meant, “Put your seat belt on.” At the same time, she felt as if an unseen force were suddenly pushing her toward these actions.

Her grandmother hadn’t been on her mind; the grandmother’s voice and the force had just come quickly and out of the blue with no connection to what she had been thinking or doing at the time.

The voice and the force broke through her happy, giddy feelings like a sledgehammer. Immediately and without question, she put her seat belt on.

About fifteen minutes later, as she was driving down the road, she was involved in a car accident. She rolled her car three times.

The entire windshield caved in, coming within an inch of her face and throat. It had folded in half and would have sliced her head off if she hadn’t been buckled in.

When a police officer came to the scene, he shook his head and said something about how she was blessed and very, very lucky. Her only injury was a laceration to her elbow.

Afterwards, this woman began to question what had taken place. She had always been an atheist, not a religious person.

She didn’t believe in an afterlife. She was pretty sceptical. Her first reaction was “No way. This event could not possibly have been my grandmother saving me.” She thought her mind was playing tricks on her. As time passed, however, she could not deny the evidence.

It took her years, but the experience had been so real that she eventually came to believe that her dead grandmother really had put her hand in the car somehow, and she probably would have been dead had she not put her seat belt on.

Another woman I interviewed – a thirty-two-year-old divorced Caucasian female with a high school diploma and no religious affiliation – described an event during which she had the instant thought that her friend’s husband was going to kill her friend.

She tried to not acknowledge that thought, since, she said, there was no logical support for it.

She had never met her friend’s husband or had any reason to know he might ever hurt her friend. He did kill his wife – this woman’s friend – several weeks later.

Some supernatural experiences seem to bend the rules of time and space – or at least what we think those rules are.

Conversations with dead ancestors, foreseeing future events, losing time during an encounter with a mysterious aircraft, communicating energetically with animals, hearing others’ thoughts and stepping out of the body are just some of the extraordinary experiences that can alter people’s points of view, expand their physical limitations in unexpected ways, and change their attitudes about what is true about time and space.

An experience that alters someone’s sense of time means that the entire event, or parts of it, doesn’t unfold in the logical, sequential order that the person expects and understands to be reality.

		“Events may occur out of what the experiencer thinks of as a normal time sequence yet are later validated.”

An experience that alters someone’s sense of space means that the entire event, or parts of it, doesn’t adhere to what the person understands to be the laws of the physical environment.

Events may occur out of what the experiencer thinks of as a normal time sequence yet are later validated.

Events like this can make us wonder whether time really is sequential, whether events can occur out of sequential time or whether different aspects of time, such as past, present and future, are, in fact, happening simultaneously all at once.

For example, a seven-year-old girl told her mother that she talked to her grandmother and saw this grandmother in her mind.

When her mother showed her a picture of both her grandmothers, the child responded, “Those are not my grandmother.” Later, when visiting her uncle’s home for the first time, the girl pointed to a picture on the wall and said the woman in it was the grandmother she had been speaking with. The woman in the picture wasn’t her grandmother, but her great-grandmother.

Was this young girl talking with a relative from her family’s past Was her great-grandmother talking with a relative three generations forward in her family’s future Were they really talking with each other across time, or were they both talking to one another “live” in what for each of them was the present Throughout history there have been stories proving to individuals that communication between people can continue after one of them has died and that death is not an ending but a new beginning.

In a number of my cases, individuals reported being in a shared space while communicating with someone who had died.

A prevalent characteristic in these stories seems to be a unity between us and the universe cases in which someone is able to communicate with loved ones who have recently died suggests that some connection continues to exist between us and our loved ones even after death.

Apparently, something more is going on beyond our physical measurable existence.

A different example of material evidence validating a supernatural experience came from a fifty-two-year-old married woman with a Bachelor of Arts degree and no religious affiliation.

She and her family had been searching for months for an important insurance document and finally gave it up for lost.

Weeks afterwards, after this woman had forgotten about the search, she went to bed at her usual time without any changes in routine.

At some point in the night, she awakened, but did not open her eyes right away. She felt as though someone was in the room with her, but wasn’t sure who it could be.

She lived with two grown sons. Her first thought was that one of them had come in to get a book and didn’t want to wake her. As the minutes passed, she knew it was not one of her sons.

There was just a sense that “someone” was in the room – a presence. Sensing a presence is hard to describe if you’ve never had this kind of experience.

To her, sensing a presence was like a sense that blind people develop – a kind of prickling of the senses, a vague feeling of danger, though you can’t see anything.

She also compared it to the sensation one might feel when someone is looking at you.

Say you’re staring at the back of someone’s head in church or a similar setting; in a short time, they will often sense that you are looking at them and look back to see who is behind them.

THE AUTHOR says it is “often difficult for individuals to put their supernatural experiences into words.”

She began to get really nervous and wondered what to do. If it wasn’t one of her sons, was it a burglar or other intruder She then asked herself, “Should I scream, hoping to scare this intruder, or fake sleep and hope that they will just go away” As quickly as this fear came it disappeared, and she was just puzzled. One minute she was fearful, the next minute she wasn’t – much the same way someone might feel when they’ve seen a person take off a horror mask.

Once the fear passed, for some reason it did not seem unusual to see her deceased father there. She couldn’t explain why, but her father put her at ease.

Then she smelled his pipe tobacco as if he were in her room smoking. There was no doubt about that; the smell was her father’s favourite tobacco flavour. That particular brand and flavour had not been sold for years.

This woman turned towards the wall at the opposite end of her room where her closet was.

Once she opened her eyes, it was obvious that no one was standing at that wall. Yet she still had this feeling that someone was in her room. The only other place they would have been was by the wall behind her.

When she turned toward it, “My dad was standing near the door, just as though he had dropped in for a visit, smoking his Kaywoodie pipe.” She asked him, “How have you been” and sat up at the edge of her bed. Her father was about six feet tall and very distinguished looking.

He said, “You chaps are all looking in the wrong places for that bloody paper, you know.” By now her initial fear had passed, the experience seemed normal and she felt very relaxed.

She said to him, “Naturally, only you would know where to look.” He told her to go to the desk upstairs and find a particular coin saver of his. The missing insurance paper was in that coin saver.

Several days later, she went to her father’s house and looked for the coin saver. There was the insurance document! My professional research and personal experiences with supernatural awareness have confirmed the following truths about supernatural occurrences and those who experience them.

1. Supernatural experiences can happen anywhere.
2. Supernatural experiences can happen to anyone.
3. Key details of supernatural experiences are often validated by external information.
4. Some detail about the experience is connected to events in the experiencer’s life or has a particular meaning for them.
5. Inner and outer aspects of a supernatural experience often fit together in a meaningful way for the experiencer.
6. Individuals who’ve had supernatural experiences often seek others who have shared similar experiences in order to validate their experiences.
7. Individuals who’ve had supernatural experiences often fear being negatively judged by others.
8. Individuals who’ve had supernatural experiences are often afraid others will think they’re going crazy.
9. It is often difficult for individuals to put their supernatural experiences into words.
10. When individuals are speaking to an entity, that entity often responds accordingly.

Running to 216 pages, “Developing Your Supernatural Awareness” is published by 6th Books at £12.99. A Kindle edition costs £6.99.

The paperback version can be ordered from bookshops or various sites on the internet.