Taking Flight (Part 1): Glider Dream and Fighter Jets

German aviation pilot, Otto Lilienthal, maneuvering his Lilienthal glider, c. 1895.

The Journal Entries of After Death Communication Dream and Divination

There is freedom waiting for you, on the breezes of the sky, and you ask, "What if I fall?" Oh but my darling, what if you fly? ----- Erin Hanson

February 4, 2026

Had a visitation dream from Hans last night–first one in a long while. I’m in the sky hand gliding above a picturesque California coast (a place we return to in these visitations, the same stretch of shoreline where he and I both spent brief time in our respective lives). Even though I’m gliding alone, Hans is in the clouds watching. I look down and see that I’m trying to keep my glider positioned above the narrow walking path that runs along the perilous edge of a steep bluff. The shore is hundreds of feet below and the waves are sharp and frothy. Then, the wind picks up, strong enough to lift the wing, carrying my glider beyond the bluff so that I’m no longer ridge-soaring near land but out over open air, now nearly a thousand feet above the water. Terror sets in and I start to shake.

“Easy now, you can do this,” Hans says, his larger-than-life face forming out of the clouds.

“I can’t,” I say, fighting the control bar, overcorrecting, trying to force the glider back toward land instead of letting it ride the air.

I don’t have to say anything else as I feel Hans take control of the glider, steadying the wing as the pitch smooths out, and the movement is less erratic. 

“I’ve got you,” he says, guiding the glider toward a power line pole with a built-in ladder. He maneuvers the glider just above the lines, controlling the descent so I can safely dismount without touching them. It’s a slow, suspended act, one step at a time, as if gravity itself has acquiesced.

As my feet reach the ground, I’m crestfallen, knowing I had just failed one of his tests.

March 2, 2026

The first card Hans selected today was from the Gratitude deck, from the “Inspiration” category, with the quote: 

“There is freedom waiting for you, on the breezes of the sky, and you ask, ‘What if I fall?’ Oh but my darling, what if you fly?” 

As soon as read it, I was brought right back to the dream account on 2.4.26, nearly a month ago now, when I was hand gliding over the bluff and how I resisted flight and the overwhelming sense that I had failed him as he looked on from the breezes of the sky.

The author’s name from that quote also weirdly ties to Hans’s name, now and then.

“It’s about taking flight in your life,” Hans just said.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/058ba6_1bc548da1e3c4cb6899962b6ea9e52d9/480p/mp4/file.mp4

Growler Jams. At 1:05, the pilot makes his first “signature move,” then adds, “Still have my lucky pen, no big deal,” closing with at 4:32, “A little bit of ASMR on the flight deck.”

April 13, 2026

So here I sit at my computer months later, still turning over the meaning behind his visitation. Beyond his comment about taking flight after selecting the card, Hans has gone quiet again, as he does whenever he wants me to figure something out myself. Or when something else is about to unfold that will make it clear. I wonder if it’s tied to dying. Was the glider symbolic of transport to another realm? If I had trusted myself (and Hans) enough to maintain flight above the perilous water, would that mean that my soul is ready to move on? Or is the event truly just tied to earthly tasks left undone, to the unresolved people, places, and things that I’m too afraid to face?

Instrumental Transcommunication: Paranormally Manipulated Algorithm

He expressed disbelief that Auschwitz and other concentration camps were sites of mass murder, referring to them in a way that aligns with Holocaust denial.

I want to start this section by briefly addressing how the scholarship discusses moments where the YouTube algorithm appears to populate the feed with specific videos in ways that seem personally directed when my established algorithm had nothing to do with these topics. The topics I’m referring to are cockpit/fighter pilot footage and a rare Hans interview. 

When videos appear or surface in an unusual way, especially those tied to a specific person or moment, the experience moves from coincidence into the uncanny. This kind of technologically mediated contact is referred to as instrumental transcommunication (ITC). In practice, this suggests that devices such as phones, computers, or audio and visual recording tools, and now algorithmic platforms themselves, can become sites where voices, images, fragments of text, or other traces associated with the deceased or non-physical entities appear to surface [1]. 

This is how it has been happening for me. Hans has once again altered my YouTube algorithm. The last time he did this was in 2018, when a rare interview, conducted just before his death, surfaced on YouTube. I quickly downloaded it to my computer. A couple of days later, the footage, and the URL, disappeared, but not before an author who was working on his biography at that moment also found it, which he later mentions in the book along with its disappearance. 

Hans wanted me (and the author) to find that footage, as it raises questions about who he had been in life. In it, he expressed disbelief that Auschwitz and other concentration camps were sites of mass murder, referring to them in a way that aligns with Holocaust denial, a point the author also latched onto. I immediately understood as I watched the footage, cringing at his matter-of-fact answers, what it all meant. 

After years of thinking I understood why he had led me to bear witness at Auschwitz in 2012–that it was because he had been a fighter pilot in Nazi Germany–I came to realize it was because he believed these places were nothing more than “work camps.” I sat at my desk in shock, mortified by the evidence he had given me.

“I needed you to know,” he said. “You placed me on such a pedestal. You only saw my beauty and my good traits. You needed to know that I was not perfect.”

I couldn’t speak to him directly for a week or two. I was crushed. Disturbed. I thought about how I could possibly reconcile my love for him as he was before this knowledge with what he had now shared. And yet, it’s hard to explain the love I have for him. Perhaps the phrase unconditional love is the best I can offer, even though it’s insufficient.

"Signature Move": Growlers & Messerschmitts

Inside the Messerscmitt cockpit.

Like the resurfaced interview in 2018, Hans also filled my feed that year with contemporary fighter jet videos. 

“Please,” he said. “Let me show you why I loved flying so much.” 

I relented, and as soon as I started watching, I understood his love for flight, the virtually uninterrupted canopy giving the pilot a full field of vision from every angle. The aircraft, able to respond instantly to the smallest control inputs through fly-by-wire systems. The way the jet shifts position midair, changing vector, pulling high-G turns, climbing nearly vertical. At a certain point, it almost looked unreal, as if crossing into a space only accessible through that kind of speed and precision. I only watched a handful of videos before readjusting the algorithm back to things more pertinent to my day-to-day life–workout videos, health lectures, and graphic design tutorials.

Now, eight years later, Hans has once again tampered with the algorithm on my YouTube page. Once again my feed is teeming with fighter jets. This time it’s cockpit footage with technical narration, a play-by-play of what the pilot is doing. One channel, Growler Jams (named after the Boeing EA-18G Growler), features a fighter pilot narrating over the footage, his voice is deep and sexy. I imagine Hans in his twenties now, doing the recording, causing me to shift in my seat. Then I notice the pilot periodically touching things and making subtle movements he calls “signature moves.” These small, repeated actions seem like ways to stabilize him, to ground his body before takeoff.

Unlike me in the visitation dream, already in flight and anxious, this fighter pilot has the luxury of preflight preparation, that psychological, internal alignment that brings the body and mind into focus before departure. Once he’s in the sky, he can maneuver with ease, fly a thousand feet above the water, returning home when he’s ready, not when he’s afraid.

I watch several of his videos and others that Hans has placed front and center, including contemporary pilots flying the plane he flew during World War II, the Messerschmitt Bf 109. These videos edge Hans closer to me as we watch. The videos place the viewer (me) in the cockpit behind him. I think about the airbase he pulls me toward whenever I take a shamanic journey. There, we fly together. He leads us higher and higher until we’re so far up the earth sits below us in a curved horizon.

To be continued...

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[1] Beischel, J. (2019). Spontaneous, facilitated, assisted, and requested after-death communication experiences and their impact on grief. Threshold: Journal of Interdisciplinary Consciousness Studies (TJICS), 3(1), 1–32.