Spontaneous psychic awakenings

What's it like to be 'changed in a flash'?

This is an article about people who feel like they spontaneously developed psychic powers after transformative experiences. You don’t have to believe in psychic abilities - I don’t have a firm opinion, but I’m interested in the experience of suddenly feeling transformed into a different person in a different reality.

On September 2 1988, Elizabeth Krohn was driving her two kids to their local synagogue in Houston, Texas. There was a storm that day, and as she walked across the parking lot with her metal umbrella, she felt the air fizz with electricity and thought to herself ‘this is a really stupid thing to do’. One small fork of lightning came down and licked the tip of the umbrella. And then the big one hit.

The power was unbelievable. The blinding light, deafening explosion, and crackling energy all hit me at once, changing, charging, and charring me.

She had an out-of-body experience, and saw her crumpled form lying barefoot on the carpark (the lightning bolt had blown off the soles of her shoes). Then she became aware of a bright light above her, and she moved towards it. She found herself in a beautiful garden, sitting on a bench next to her grandfather, who had died a year before. She later wrote:

I knew that the abundance of love that this presence communicated to me was an immersion in spirit, the memory of which would never leave me. Still today I can draw on that memory of unspeakable love whenever I need to do so.

She stayed in that garden for what felt like weeks, and learned a lot from the spirit sitting next to her on the bench. She learned that George HW Bush would win the upcoming election, that the Cincinatti Bengals would play in the 1989 Superbowl. And she learned that she had a choice – stay in the Garden and be reunited with God, or go back to her singed body, in which case two things would happen – she would have a third child, and she would be divorced from her husband. She decided to go back, as she thought she needed to be there to raise her three children.

Elizabeth woke up on the parking lot outside the synagogue. But she had been changed in a flash. She had gained the ability (or curse?) to have precognitive dreams, often predicting the death of people. The first time it occurred was a few weeks after the accident. She had a very vivid and memorable dream showing her that an acquaintance had died that night, not someone she knew well but they shared a mutual friend, who worked in a nearby pharmacy. The next morning she hobbled over to the pharmacy (her feet were badly injured by the lightning bolt and this was the first time she’d left her bed since the accident). She asked her pharmacist friend how he was doing. ‘Not so well’, he replied. ‘A good friend passed away last night.’ With an eery, sickening feeling she asked who had died – it was the woman she had dreamt of. ‘I was not just confused. I was frightened.”

The first dream about plane crashes happened eight years later,  on July 16 1996.

It really rocked me badly. In the nightmare I could see the letters “WA” on the wreckage and thought it was a World Airways flight. I knew there were 230 people on board, and that none of them had survived. I knew that the plane crashed in water, and I knew it was flight 800. I called my mom and told her about my nightmare on the morning of July 17, 1996. The next morning, July 18, 1996, Mom called me to tell me to turn on the news, quickly. And there it was: TWA Flight 800 had crashed in the Atlantic Ocean with 230 people on board. No survivors. This particular nightmare really upset me because of its accuracy. TWA was an acronym for Trans World Airlines, an airline that was in business until 2001.

The precognitive dreams kept happening over the years – often of plane crashes and earthquakes. Elizabeth mailed herself letters after the dreams, to keep a record and test if they came true. They almost always did. It felt like a curse to her, to be warned of awful accidents that she was powerless to stop. ‘I have this nightmare about a plane crash and and then two days later there it is on the news. Well, should I have done something?’ It was frightening and also intensely isolating – her husband did not want to hear about it, and she didn’t dare tell her friends.

Occasionally, her new abilities were more reassuring. One night, she was woken up by a phone call. It was her dead grandfather, with a message for her grandmother. He also told Elizabeth to remember the unconditional love she felt in ‘the garden’, to keep it in her mind during her life. Her husband Barry was next to her when she was on that call – he kept asking who she was talking to in the middle of the night. When she hung up the phone, a weird smoke appeared in the room. Barry was freaked out. In fact, he moved out of the house ten days after her Elizabeth’s first precognitive dream, and they eventually got divorced. She tells me:

We were almost 10 years into our marriage and everything was great. And then suddenly it's like this light switch was flipped and I'm not the same person anymore. It’s not like one day I like vanilla and the next day I like chocolate. I would wake up in the morning and and say ‘there's this plane that's going to crash and it's flight number whatever, and there's this many people on the plane’. And that night we'd be sitting watching the news and there it is. He was freaked out by it.

Her friends were freaked out too. Years later, she would write a book about her story with Jeffrey Kripal, the celebrated religious studies scholar and chairman of Esalen. He asked her ‘what’s your biggest fear about going public with this?’ She replied ‘losing my friends’. ‘You will lose friends’, Jeff said. And she did.

My friends felt betrayed. Like, ‘how do you get struck by lightning and have this elaborate near-death experience and call me your friend and not even tell me that this happened to you?’ They were offended and they were mocking -  ‘what a joke, that didn't happen. You're just crazy, go get some help’.

Did she find new friends who shared her interests or gifts? To some extent, though I don’t get the sense she has immersed herself in New Age culture or the pastel-tinted near-death conference circuit. When the internet emerged she learned a bit about near-death experiences (the term was only coined in 1977), and contacted Bruce Greyson, a leading NDE researcher. She says talking to him was a big help. She then met a pastor researching Christian NDEs. He asked her if she’d met Jesus in the garden. She said she hadn’t. ‘In that case’, he said, ‘it wasn’t a genuine NDE’.  Eventually she changed his mind and he opened up to a broader spirituality. He also introduced her to Jeff Kripal.

To some extent she is still not sure what she is meant to ‘do’ with her unexpected and unrequested abilities. She tried being a psychic reader for a day - a friend set her up with a full schedule of readings. ‘I hated it’, she says. ‘I found it physically exhausting. And people asked questions like ‘is my husband cheating?’ Well, probably, if you’re that worried about it’. She quit when a young woman with a serious disease asked her for her prognosis. Elizabeth says she can see people’s auras, and this woman’s aura was very dark, which suggested she was going to die soon. Elizabeth didn’t want to tell her that (‘what if I was wrong?’), and she didn’t want to lie either. So she stopped giving readings.  

In 2018 she published Changed In a Flash, co-authored with Jeff Kripal, who also lives and works in Houston, at Rice University. By a strange synchronicity, she had been struck by lightning about 100 metres from the office of the world expert on such unusual paranormal experiences. Jeff invited Elizabeth to Esalen to speak alongside UFO abductee Whitley Strieber (who has also co-written a book with Jeff). While Whitley is very much immersed in New Age culture and welcomes his weird new abilities, Elizabeth is more resistant. One person in the Esalen audience suggested the ‘point’ of the plane-crash dreams is to help the souls cross over. She’s not sure. I asked her how she feels now – is it a gift or a curse? She tells me:

I don't think I see the precognitive dreams as a gift OR a curse. They definitely felt like a curse for years…Slowly over time, as I thought more about the situation, I came to see it as "not a curse" but more of just a "fact in my life" certainly not a "gift". It took me a while to realize that one of the purposes of the dreams was to show me that I COULD know about things before they happened. However, as was pointed out to me at Esalen, perhaps another purpose of the dreams was so that I could help others transition. IF I could figure out HOW to do that, it would be more of a "gift". I'm working on that! The short answer: I no longer see the dreams as a curse, but understand there is a purpose (or more than one purpose) for my having them. I am moving toward seeing them as a gift, slowly.

After the paywall, four more stories of people who feel they developed psychic abilities unexpectedly and abruptly following transformative experiences.