Claire Sylvia’s Afterlife Dreams

By Kevin Williams

Dr. Ken Ring writes, "After posting my spoof of Dick Cheney’s heart transplant in my last blog, my webmaster, Kevin Williams, drew my attention to a story he had written up on his website that concerned a remarkable, indeed, an amazing, case of cellular memory following a heart/lung transplant. The satire I wrote about Dick Cheney was fictitious, but it was based on extensive research that shows in that in some cases, the recipients of such transplants begin to experience the tastes and habits of their donors. After reading Kevin’s article, I asked him if he would be kind enough to reprint his story as one of my blogs.  Kevin graciously acceded to my request, so what follows is his article.  I think you will find it as mind-bogging as I did.

One of the strangest cases in the history of dream research is described in the documentary, The Secret World of Dreams. It describes the amazing story of a woman named Claire Sylvia, a 47-year-old drama teacher from Boston and former professional dancer with several modern dance companies. In 1983, she was diagnosed as having primary pulmonary hypertension – an often fatal, rare progressive disease which causes blood vessels in the lungs to collapse. Her health slowly deteriorated until she was forced to give up her job and became home bound. She was also dependent on oxygen and could only move around in a wheelchair with great difficulty. A heart-lung transplant was her only hope and the risks involved were considerable.

Soon after the transplant, she began having strange and incredibly vivid dreams about a young man she didn’t recognize. Eventually, Sylvia realized that the young man in her dreams was the 18-year-old organ donor whose heart and lungs resided in her chest. Through her continuing dream contacts with her donor, she learned a lot about him including his name. She then decided to do some research to find out if this “heavenly” information was correct. Her research proved that it was indeed correct. Sylvia then met the young man’s grieving family and Sylvia shared with them the amazing story of her contact with him through her dreams. Claire Sylvia died in August of 2009 from a blood clot in her lung; 21 years after her heart-lung transplant. The following is the detailed account of her amazing story:

“My mother was basically dying,” says Amara, “She prepared herself for death and she was preparing me for her death. She labored to get up in the morning to go to the bathroom. Her breathing was labored and I was afraid every morning whether she would be alive or not.

Then Sylvia’s bizarre dreams began to unfold.

“I started to have a series of dreams. One dream was that I had the transplant and I had to drink four glasses of milk a day. At the time I questioned this, I said, ‘I wonder what this means? Where does this four glasses of milk come in at? I don’t understand what this means.’

“And there was no explanation so I just let it go. I lived each day with a thought and a prayer that I would live till the next day and that I would live to see my daughter graduate from high school which was about a year away.”

Finally, Sylvia’s prayers were answered.

“The phone rang and it was the transplant coordinator. She very calmly said, ‘We officially got permission to do heart and lung transplants and we have a donor for you today.’

“I was speechless. All I could say was, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God!'”

Within hours, Sylvia was rushed into surgery and after a delicate three-hour operation, she awoke.

“I knew that I would have to take an anti-rejection drug, cyclosporine. They injected a certain amount of this liquid into two little cups of milk. Then at night, I repeated this same process. I realized that these were the four cups of milk a day in my dream.

“At first I didn’t accept it, I kept saying, ‘I must have gotten this information from someplace.’

“I kept checking around and nobody told me. Then I thought, ‘This is bizarre. I don’t know why and I still don’t.'”

It was May of 1988, and Sylvia’s operation was Connecticut’s Yale-New Haven Hospital’s first successful heart-lung transplant on a female patient.

Five days later, journalists were invited into the hospital to interview Sylvia in the intensive care unit. During the press conference, a reporter asked her:

“Now that you’ve had this operation, what do you want right now more than anything?”

Sylvia replied: “To tell you the truth, right now I’d die for a beer.”

Sylvia was momentarily stunned by what she had just said, not so much because it was flippant, but because of the fact that she does not like beer and has never liked beer.

When Sylvia returned home, another sequence of unexplained occurrences began. Her taste in food changed dramatically. Five weeks after the operation, when she was allowed to drive for the first time, and she headed straight for Kentucky Fried Chicken – a fast food she had never previously enjoyed. She couldn’t explain this sudden craving. Nor could she explain many other apparent changes in her personality, such as, why she was starting to look at women the way a man might look at women, for example, or why her favorite colors are now green and blue rather than the hot shades of pink, red and gold she used to prefer. Other strange things occurred. Sylvia started eating green peppers, a vegetable she had formerly meticulously picked out of salads.

Around this time Sylvia had a strong, unexplainable desire to visit France. On her return, just when Sylvia thought her life couldn’t get any stranger – it did – in another mysterious dream.

“I’m in an open field and it’s very light. It’s daytime and I’m in a playful relationship with a young man whom I see clearly. He is tall, has sandy colored hair and his name is Tim L.

“I come back and say goodbye to him and as we approach each other, we kiss, and as we kiss, I feel as if I inhale him into me. It’s like taking this enormous breath. And I know that he will be with me together forever. But it also seemed that this man in my dreams, whom I knew as Tim, must be my donor.

“I was very curious to find out who my donor was because of all the things that were happening to me and because of the dreams I was having – and the feeling of living with his presence.”

Claire became convinced her donor was trying to communicate with her. She contacted the hospital but they informed her that donor records were confidential. When all hope seemed lost, her friend Fred Stern called to tell her of a message he received in his own dream.

“I had a clear image of a dream,” says Fred Stern, “that we had gone to the basement of the public library and had seen in the Portland newspaper a story on either the third or fourth page several days before her operation. A story about the boy who was killed and whom she had gotten her heart from.”

Claire and Stern made arrangements to meet at the local library.

“I met Fred at the public library and we looked at the papers the week preceding my transplant. Sure enough, the day before my transplant, as was in his dream, the obituary of a young man who was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was 18 years old. His name was Tim L. as it was in my dream. It felt like my heart stopped beating for a moment. I was standing up and I remember getting kind of weak all over. My knees went a little weak. It was a shock.”

According to Fred Stern: “It was almost like magic, like some sense of knowing. It is just wonderful to be a part of it – this unfolding.”

It turned out that Tim L. had died in a motorcycle accident shortly before Sylvia’s life saving surgery. She had received the organs of Tim Lamirande, 18, of Saco, Maine.

“I was shocked because now it became more real. Now I had all the information. I had the family’s name. I had details. This person really existed.”

Wanting to know more about her donor, Sylvia wrote to Tim’s family in Maine and made arrangements to meet them.

“I was very excited,” says Tim’s sister, Lee Ann, “and the whole family was very excited to meet Claire.”

Sylvia then met the Lamirande family. According to Fred Stein:

“She [Claire Sylvia] was very apprehensive because she didn’t know what she was going to meet, but she was warmly received, particularly by Tim’s sisters. They were very positive and said how much Claire’s atmosphere and behavior reminded them of their brother. What was important too was that we had come to the conclusion from her dreams that the donor must have been a hyperactive person, and the family confirmed this, saying that when he was little he had to be kept on a leash because otherwise he would run off, and at the time that he died he was holding down three jobs as well as attending college.”

Tim’s sister, Lee Ann, said:

“It was like meeting my brother all over again for the very first time – seeing him alive again. Claire was very warm towards us. She was loving. She was loving like Tim was. There was so much feeling that it was absolutely exhausting.”

Sylvia told the Lamirande family about her dream. Afterward, Tim’s sister replied: “My first reaction to Claire’s dream was one of disbelief. I really didn’t believe it until she just started describing things about my brother – like how he was tall and wiry. She described him almost to a T. She was getting the information from her dream. She described how Tim was loving and that he came to her and wanted to be a friend. I just kind of felt that, ‘Yeah, that’s what Tim would do.'”

Sylvia told them: “When I met the family, I was trying to corroborate some of the things that had been happening to me. I asked them if he happened to like green peppers and they said, ‘Oh, yes, he used to love green peppers. He’d fry them up with cabasa.’

“They told me his favorite food was chicken nuggets and that he had apparently just bought them before he died because they had to pull them out of his motorcycle jacket when they found him. When they told me that I said, ‘Oh my God!'”

The Lamirande’s also confirmed that Tim liked beer. And Sylvia’s burning desire to visit France was also explained. The Lamirandes were French Canadian. Tim’s favorite colors were also blue and green.

One night after visiting the family, Sylvia dreamt that 22 motorcycles were being revved up to be driven round town to commemorate some event. In the morning she realized it would have been Tim’s 22nd birthday. To celebrate, she asked a friend with a motorcycle to take her for a ride. It was, she said, “exhilarating.”

Tim’s sister Jackie remarked: “Why would she have a dream about her donor unless God was trying to tell her in a way who we were and trying to make it easier for her to get to us so she could see that there was good out of everything she went through.”

Sylvia stated: “All the images that have come to me since the transplant are, in and of themselves, having to do with this new part of me.”

Over the years, Sylvia kept in touch with Lamirande’s family. When Sylvia died in 2009, Joan Lamirande said, fighting back tears in a telephone interview from her home in Saco:

“She was a wonderful person. As long as she was living it was as if my son was still alive. Now that she is gone, I know that my son is gone.”

The implications of Sylvia inheriting personal characteristics of her donor are astounding. This is because it supports “cellular memory” which is the hypothesis that memories can be stored – not just in the brain – but in all the cells of the human body. One particular study published in a 2008 edition of Nature called Cellular Memory Hints at the Origins of Intelligence is suggestive of cellular memory; however, mainstream medical science does not acknowledge memory outside of the brain is possible. If it were possible, it would mean medical science would have to re-evaluate the accepted view that all memory is stored in the brain, much like data is stored on a computer’s hard drive. Nevertheless, research in Israel indicates that 34% of people who have undergone heart transplants have had some kind of experience of what is now known as "trait transfer."