How Did They Know? Coincidence or Communication from Another Dimension?

by Craig Bennett

Jane Goodall died on October 1, 2025, at the age of 91 while on a speaking tour in California. She is known the world over as a pioneering primatologist whose groundbreaking study of chimpanzee behavior greatly expanded our understanding of what are often assumed to be our closest primate cousins. Her book Reason for Hope, however, is much more about her own life and experience than about the simian subjects of her studies. In it, she deals intermittently, and rather unexpectedly, with matters well outside the compass of empirical science.

Goodall’s husband Derek was diagnosed with cancer in September of 1979. She was deeply affected by his death, as they apparently had an extraordinarily close relationship. She took some time to go back to her family home in England before returning to Gombe, the African sanctuary where she conducted most of her research. But she did return, knowing that this was now where she truly belonged. Then, one day not long after her return, she found herself walking up a trail that she and Derek had often walked together—and suddenly the world opened up for her once again. However, this paled before what she was to experience that night.

At some point she woke up—or believes she must have—and Derek was there, very much alive. He spoke to her for what seemed like a long time, telling her all sorts of things that she should know and do. While this was happening, she felt her body grow rigid and heard the pounding of her heart and the rushing of blood through her veins and arteries. She thought she might be dying. But she was somehow not the least bit frightened. And then it suddenly stopped. At that point, she said, she remembered nothing except that Derek had been there. Everything that he had said to her was gone from her memory as if it had never been present. And then she fell quickly into a deep sleep.

In her reflections upon this event, she states that she had “always known” that two human minds were capable of communicating with one another across distance, and the experience she had with Derek’s appearance that night gave her to suspect that they may be capable of communicating across time, as well. Interestingly, she feels no need to prove this. She knows, she says, that a great many people feel as she does. But, she acknowledges, Western education provides us with none of what we would need to convince skeptics “of the reality of the spirit.”

On the night that Derek died, two other things happened that can be considered comparably extraordinary. Each of them was experienced by a child, which seems consistent with the observation that children seem to be closer to that liminal area between realities that admits occasional glimpses from our own into another; and each of them is difficult to account for except by a claim of particularly unlikely coincidence.

The first involved Grub, Jane’s son, who was away at boarding school in England. He was, at the time, unaware that Derek’s death was imminent. He and Derek had become close in the preceding years. During the night when Derek died, he had a disturbing dream in which one of his aunts, his mother’s sister, came to him and told him that Derek was dead. This woke him up feeling rather shaken; but he was thirteen at the time and didn’t want to allow a nightmare to worry him unduly. But the dream came back—twice, making him increasingly uncomfortable over its content. And then in the morning, his aunt did appear at the school, cautioning him that she was the bearer of sad news. Before she was able to speak further, he told her that he already knew that Derek had died. As Dr. Goodall wrote, her sister had been completely taken aback—until Grub explained to her the dream that he had the night before.

The subject of the other such occurrence was Lulu, the daughter of friends in Dar es Salaam. She and Grub were the same age, but Lulu was a victim of Down’s syndrome. She had great affection for Derek, however, because he had always favored her with lots of attention and kindness. On the night of his death, she woke up in the wee hours of the morning and ran to wake up her nanny, urging her to come to her room. She couldn’t remember Derek’s name, but she referred to him as that man who “comes with Jane and walks with a stick [Derek used a cane].” She wanted her nanny to come to her room and see that Derek was there—and that he was smiling.

As Dr. Goodall pointed out in her writing, these were “[t]wo children in two parts of the world. Two children whom Derek had loved.” How does one explain this in conventionally scientific terms? Such a double coincidence is remarkable, to say the least; and the bond of love that existed between Derek and those two children would seem to suggest a reason why he appeared to each of them, even though Lulu was neither a blood relation nor part of his family with Jane and Grub.

Dr. Goodall relates a couple examples of close relatives who had such experiences, suggesting that she herself had come by her own honestly enough. It’s been my impression that psychic abilities do tend to run in families. This maysuggest at least a partially physiological explanation for them, as if the activation of a particular circuit or circuits in one’s brain were triggered by the influence of an ordinarily recessive gene that remains dormant in most of us. If this is the case, then it may also account for Grub’s preternatural awareness that his step-father had died. But what about Lulu, the little girl with Down’s syndrome to whom Derek had been so kind and attentive? She was not related to either Jane or Derek except by a bond of sincere and innocent love for a grown-up man who had shown her such kindness, enabling her to feel as if she actually mattered to another adult besides her own parents.

The experience of Grub and Lulu also tends to substantiate the idea that children are still somehow closer to… what? A different reality? Another dimension? The one from which they came into this world, perhaps? Or might it be that they have not yet been successfully trained to dismiss out of hand anything, even deeply personal experience, that fails to respect the boundaries imposed by our scientific world view?

-Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and most book stores.

SOURCE: Goodall, Jane. Reason for Hope. New York: Grand Central, 1999

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