Highlights of a New Study on Dreams of the Deceased

 There was recently published the paper "Dreams of the deceased: A scoping and mixed-methods systematic review" by Zulkayda Mamat and others.  Here are some highlights: 

• "Liang & He [38] reported that the theme  'a person now dead as alive' ranked among the top three most common dream types across Naxi (82.1 %) and Han (49.7 %) Chinese college students. Similarly, Yoshioka [39] found this theme to be the third most frequent in a Japanese sample (n = 559), with higher prevalence among women. In Germany, Kunzendorf and colleagues [40] found that 44 % of subjects reported at least one dream of a deceased relative or friend."
• "Yoshioka [39] found an increasing prevalence with age, rising from 0 % among youth (18–25 years) to 15 % among those aged 65 and above. Maggiolini and colleagues [41] corroborated these findings in a larger study (n = 1546), reporting higher frequencies of such dreams among older participants...Among participants aged 60+, prevalence ranged from 39.6 % to 56.1 %, compared to 8.9 %–29.5 % in those aged 18–59 [42]."
• "In Canadian nursing homes, 64 % of staff observed residents reporting vivid dreams of deceased people or pets [19]. Among Canadian hospice volunteers, 44 % reported witnessing similar dreams [18]. In India, 50 % of terminally ill patients reported seeing deceased relatives, friends, or acquaintances in dreams [20]. In U.S. hospice patients, 46 % reported dreams or visions of deceased relatives or friends, making them the most frequent end-of-life experience in this sample [55]. In Moldova, caregivers reported that deceased mothers were the most common figures in deathbed visions, with a median of two deceased visitors per patient [35]."
• "Most respondents’ dreams of the deceased were pleasant (55.3 %) or a mix of pleasant and disturbing (31.1 %), while fewer were only disturbing (6.8 %); common themes included pleasant past memories (65.2 %), the deceased appearing free of illness (40.4 %), memories of their illness (34.8 %), seeing them peaceful in the afterlife (26.7 %), or the deceased communicating a message (25.5 %)."

My frequently updated post here may well be the longest post ever published about one person's dreams of the deceased and dreams that seemed to symbolize or reference life after death. In the post I describe 555 dreams I have had that seemed to symbolize or refer to life after death. In the same post I list well over 800 dreams I have had about more than 300 deceased persons. 

Like an Orb Grin

 Photo date April 26, 2026. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

Below we see a mysterious orb I photographed indoors.

Mysterious Yellow Indoor Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 4)

 I have done two previous retrospective posts on mysterious yellow sky orbs, which you can see below (the photos were all taken at night, after the sun had set): 

Yellow Sky Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 1)

Yellow Sky Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 2)

Below is Part 3 of a retrospective showing some of the better photos I have taken indoors of mysterious yellow orbs.  Part 2 can be seen here.

I took the photo below in 2021. We seem to have a speeding yellow orb. 

The photo below shows a mysterious orb I photographed indoors with a reverse 7 inside it.

The photos below show mysterious yellow orbs I photographed indoors.

Below is a mysterious yellow orb I photographed at Grand Central.

The photo below shows a bright yellow orb I photographed indoors.  It looks as if the orb has cast a yellow glow on the steel underneath it.

The photos below show four mysterious orbs I photographed in Grand Central Terminal in New York, one yellow and three blue. They were all photographed on the same day in 2019. 

My photo below from 2019 shows  a mysterious orb near a plant.

Mysterious Orange Indoor Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 3)

 Below is Part 3 of a retrospective showing some of the better photos I have taken indoors of mysterious orange orbs.

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed near a bookcase.

Below we see a mysterious orb I photographed indoors in front of the edge of a book case.

Below we see some mysterious orbs I  photographed indoors, one of them orange.

Below we see a mysterious orange orb I photographed near a scale. My guess is that the photo shows two position states of an orb moving very fast. 

My photo below shows two orange orbs, one of which seemed to be moving fast:

In my photo below we see what seems to be a speeding orange orb.

We see below my TV set while an episode of Star Trek Enterprise was airing. The character on the right is supposed to be an extraterrestrial with bluish skin and two little antennae coming out of its head.  Right in front of that is a mysterious orange orb that was not part of the TV image.  It wasn't my camera flash, which never looks orange if it is reflected when I photograph the TV screen.

The photo below shows a mysterious orange orb I photographed indoors. 

Spooky Trifecta

 Tonight I was alone in the house where I normally enjoy the splendid company of my wife and one or more of my daughters. As I ate I enjoyed watching a youtube.com video entitled Twilight Zone (1959): 15 Weird Facts You Didn't Know. Before, during and after my watching of the video about the weird, spooky world of TV's Twilight Zone, I saw some weird, spooky things. Specifically:

(1) Upon walking up to the kitchen, I was surprised to see a light was on on the floor above the kitchen. No such light had been on when I had lunch using that kitchen, and no one else had entered the house since that time. 

(2) While I was cooking some spaghetti, the exhaust fan above the stove (and its green indicator light) mysteriously turned off. 

(3) Later in the evening a protective hat/helmet that was hanging very securely on a hook rack was mysteriously dislodged, with the hat/helmet crashing to the ground with a loud noise (while there was no change in the hook rack that had held the hat/helmet). No one was in the room where this occurred, and no one had been in it for quite a few minutes. I heard the sound of the hat/helmet crashing to the ground as I sat on a couch several meters away in the adjacent room. The hat/helmet had been hung on two hooks of the hook rack several hours earlier, and had not been touched for hours. 

All of these types of events I have seen before. As discussed here, I have seen three times before (in 2025 and 2024) the fan above the stove mysteriously turn off, always when I was cooking spaghetti. The hat/helmet has mysteriously crashed to the ground one previous time. I have seen many cases of lights mysteriously turning on or off, as you can read about in the series of 35+ posts here. 

Below we see what the hat/helmet looked like when it was on the hook rack that held it. 

And below we see what the hook rack looked like after the black hat/helmet had fallen to the ground. 

You can see from this side view how far out these hooks protrude, making a "just naturally fell off the hooks" explanation seemingly untenable. No breeze would have ever caused a heavy plastic hat/helmet to fall off hooks protruding out this far. 

I cannot imagine any natural explanation of what would have caused such a fall. No one was in the room that had the hook rack shown above. The room's door was closed, and its windows also closed. 

All I can do is chuckle, and say, "It's a Twilight Zone kind of evening."

I can think of one optimistic interpretation here. The mysteriously fallen hat/helmet symbolized protection. It's a hat/helmet like baseball first-base coaches wear to protect themselves from foul balls. I bought the hat a few months ago to protect my head from injury if I ever slip and fall to the ground while walking outside, as people my age sometimes do. So maybe an inexplicable mysterious event involving a symbol of protection is a supernatural sign that I have some degree of protection from a mysterious power, conceivably  some power rather like a guardian angel. 

Postscript: The event of a light above me seeming to have mysteriously turned on was repeated the next Tuesday. I left for a not very long walk in full daylight, locking the front door that is underneath a bright light inhabitants turn on only at night (using an indoor hallway switch). When I returned I was surprised to see that light was on. No one else was in the house. The light is sufficiently bright that failing to notice it being on when you lock the door is all-but-impossible, even during daytime. 

A Pink Orb

 Photo date: April 16, 2026. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. 

A Skeptic Would Say, "It Must Have Just Fallen Out of Your Deep Pocket"

 A few minutes ago I had a fond thought of my late father. A few seconds later I went into the bathroom. Standing, I was surprised to hear the sound of a pen falling to my left, landing on the ground.

How to explain this strange event? I had used the pen earlier to mark on a calendar that I had taken a pill. After I do that, I normally put the pen back in my pen holder cup on the living room table. Conceivably I could have failed to follow my normal habit, and left the pen in my pocket. And conceivably the pen could have fallen out of my deep jeans pocket that is about six inches deep, the same size as the six-inch pen.

But what is the chance of both of those things happening? I'm reminded of when I was questioned as a young boy for walking in the halls during classes without a hall pass you were supposed to get before doing such walking. I claimed that I had got such a pass, but that it "must have fallen out of my pocket."  Some school authority made a skeptical face, saying something like, "Come on -- things don't just fall out of your pocket." 

An alternate explanation here is a Potential Spiritual Manifestation involving some power with the ability to make mysterious movements of matter, with the event being related to the thought of my late father.