SOUL TREK . . . from the Introduction

 

Something new is in the air. Call it a longing for contact. It almost seems as though the human world has had enough of its splendid isolation, and with a certain humility is learning to listen for voices of other realms.

In popular television shows, a dolphin speaks, angels take a hand in our lives and humans roam the universe, meeting and communicating with any number of life forms. Books about near-death experiences top the best-seller lists; tabloids offer advice on "how to contact your guardian angel." Research that once would have seemed too bizarre is respectable today, with scientists probing interspecies communication, alien encounters, even electronic communication with the dead.

All of this reflects the experience of a great many people whose individual lives have in one way or another been penetrated by something from beyond... something more.

Once a breeze from another world has blown across your doorstep, things are never quite the same. It can happen in many ways: a powerful dream, the touch of a "ghost," a brush with death, a healing presence... Jane Anne Buzana tells how her first encounter with mystery altered her world: "It has opened a whole new realm of learning for me. After this profound and loving experience, there was no stopping me from a never ending journey into the unknown."

For Jane Anne, as for many others whose stories are told in this book, the life-changing experience was a meeting with her child -- before the child was born.

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I was preparing a book on the experiences of new parents when I began to notice tantalizing comments popping up in story after story:

"Throughout the pregnancy I felt we communicated."

"The child's voice came to me often and I knew he was a boy."

These parents were talking about communicating with their unborn children -- and talking about it as if it were the most natural thing in the world!

I was intrigued. Communication before birth seemed a startling new idea. Of course I was aware of projects aimed at stimulating unborn babies by talking to them, playing music -- some even proposed to begin educating in the womb. But here I was encountering something very different. People spoke of hearing from their babies, not talking at them. They described magical, moving experiences of contact that seemed to be initiated by the babies themselves. I wanted to learn more.

I thought back to my pregnancy with my son, several years earlier. Had there been anything like this? Well -- the dreams. Each time I dreamed of my baby, it was a boy. By the time he was born, I was so sure he was a boy that I didn't even think to wonder. And this was a good thing. I never had much to do with little boys, never imagined I could love one of that alien breed. The dreams prepared me, overcame my resistance. I fell in love with my baby boy on the night of his birth.

And how about the way I often laughed in my sleep during that pregnancy? Was my son telling me jokes as I slept?

My curiosity led to a search for stories of other people's experiences. I wanted to know about every possible kind of contact and communication before birth. The enthusiastic response to my request for information told me that I'd stumbled on a realm that had been largely secret, much as contact with the "dead" had once been too private to share.

This book is the result of that search.