Paranormal experiences, her companions from a young age
View(s):Bernie Hay, whose book The Mysterious, The Mystical and The Unexplained. has created interest beyond our shores, talks to Randima Attygalle
“What I saw outside the window was so entrancing that I stood still, fully awake by now. Pressed against the first window pane was a white figure….As I watched, the figure glided smoothly to the next window, pressed itself on the pane and then to the next…” documents Bernie Hay, her first experience with a paranormal phenomenon as a three-year-old in her recently launched book, The Mysterious, The Mystical and The Unexplained. Speaking to the Sunday Times in the wake of the waves her third book has created, by overwhelming reader response and the publication reaching even the Library of Congress, USA and 16 US universities, Bernie says with a smile: “even today my experience as a three-year-old is so vivid.”
Bernie Hay
She adds with a chuckle that she was annoyed that her aunt grabbed her and ran out of the bedroom depriving her of such a ‘beautiful’ sight. Strange or ‘paranormal experience’ has been part of Bernie’s everyday life ever since her childhood, so much so she sees nothing strange or eerie about it. For her the experience had never been horrifying or evil but always benevolent or a “warning in good faith.”
Bernie who wears the hats of a writer and lecturer of Linguistics and English Teaching Methodology, also has two previous publications- Lives that touched my own and Love, Learning and Laughter. Although both her previous books were well received, her latest literary labour has made “readers thoughtful,” she quips. “Some even claimed that they couldn’t put it down and sleep came to them only after they finished the whole book and several more started coming up with their own similar experience,” smiles Bernie.
As narrated in the first story ‘The Cloud Figure’ in her latest book, Bernie’s playmate lost her mother to tuberculosis and the child was spending the night with Bernie at her grandmother’s place. Bernie herself was three years at that time. She woke up in the night to the loud wailing of her playmate and was entranced by a ‘cloud like’ figure pressing against one of the windows. Her aunts and grandmother also woke up to the child wailing of amma. “The most amazing thing was my aunt Rose whispering hoarsely to my granny, ‘mummy can you see that?’ which meant she too witnessed it,” recalls Bernie.
The psychic tendency in her is genetic says Bernie, with her mother, grandmother and all her aunts experiencing paranormal activities. The gene is even passed down to her own daughter according to Bernie. Nineteen out of the 21 stories in her book narrate her own experiences. Paranormal phenomena is a subject of scientific research in countries such as Britain and America. Her extensive reading on the subject has unearthed certain authentic records of it. Bernie cites the examples of President Abraham Lincoln, Jeane Dickson who was one of America’s best known psychics and young Israeli soldier Yuri Geller as some of the classic examples in this regard.
As the author notes in her preface, ‘paranormal phenomena are attempting to tell us something, that beyond this mundane world that we can view with our physical senses and beyond the universe that science views through powerful telescopes.’ “It is something beyond science and religion,” reflects Bernie who goes on to note that paranormal activity enables her a “window to another world.”
The Mysterious, The Mystical and The Unexplained which is dedicated to Bernie’s aunts Rose and Lily who too were ‘psychic’ as she explains, also incorporates a few stories which speak of the power of prayer. Bernie urges people to be open-minded about the phenomena without merely discarding as ‘imagination of an insane mind’. Attempting to share psychic experience with those who shun it or have never experienced it themselves, is like labouring to help a person who has never seen a rainbow visualize one, says Bernie. It is also like trying to describe the taste of strawberry-cream combination to a person who has only sampled the two items separately, she notes in her book.
A Stamford Lake Publication, The Mysterious, The Mystical and The Unexplained is encapsulated in the words of Dr. Lakshmi de Silva, former Head of the Department of English, University of Kelaniya: “fascinating because they engage our haunting uncertainties, Bernie Hay’s accounts of unaccountable happenings will absorb the readers. How does precognition warn of lethal danger? How do the living meet the dead? Hay widens our viewpoints and sharpens our alertness to the paranormal.”