Join the festivities with Sandra and the New “AFTER DEATH” Movie Director Stephen Gray & Producer Jens Jacob
You're listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal podcast network, where we offer you podcasts of the supernatural and the unexplained. Get ready now for Shades of the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain.
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast to Coast AM, employees of Premiere Networks, or their sponsors and associates. We would like to encourage you to do your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself. Hi. I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been on a journey to prove the existence of life after death. On each episode, we'll discuss the reasons we now know that our loved ones have survived physical death, and so will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. Hello, Welcome to another episode. And it's not just any episode, it is a birthday episode. Today we hit three years of having Shades of the Afterlife, three years of you listening to me through over one hundred and fifty hours of episodes talking about the afterlife, some help through grief and living life powerfully. Some good news, really good news. Last episode, we talked to doctor Garrett Yacht about lucid dreaming and it planted a seed within me. And I did some looking on YouTube videos trying to find people who were exploring life after death through lucid dreaming. Couldn't find much of it, but I did find one lady talking about it who said that once she learned lucid dreaming, she went to bed one night and she asked for her eighteen year old friend, who had passed when they were both eighteen years old, to meet with her in the dream. And she did, and she was successful for having a conversation with her, hearing her voice again, and it occurred to her as crystal clear and a memory that now she can keep forever. The thing about lucid dreams are just as they say, lucid, but there's part of our consciousness that is wide awake while our body remains asleep, So we can direct our dreams. We can heal ourselves of different things. You know, in our dream state, our subconscious mind throws back so much of what happened to us during the day and feelings that we had, but it doesn't show them like they happened. The emotions we experience in life represent themselves in other things during our dreams. There's been a lot of research done that we can actually work on our own subconscious and our own emotions in this lucid dreaming state, which ideally would lead to a lot of healing. And of course, if you listened to the last episode, you heard about doctor Yant and the research that the Institute of Noetic Sciences has done with lucid dreaming and people who have suffered from PTSD, and the good news is it was something like over seventy five percent of people no longer experience PTSD when they were able to work through emotions in the dream state. This woman I was telling you about who reunited with her eighteen year old friend, went on to do this after her own father died and lo and behold in that dream state, invited her dad in and it was most healing for her hearing his voice again, seeing him getting that big hug. I've watched and listened to and read so much about lucid dreaming since the last time I was with you, and I decided, even though I'm not trained, yet in lucid dreaming is to do my own kind of experiment. I went to bed one night with the intention of meeting my dad in the dream state. I woke up in the morning, nothing happened. I couldn't recognize that I was in the dream. One important thing we need to do is be present in our day to day life and keep asking ourselves is this a dream? Is this a dream? And by repeating that, once we get into a dream, hopefully that question is this a dream will present itself and we're able to catch ourselves and then recognize the dream and then create what we want. Another suggestion they say is during the day, look at your hand while you're saying is this a dream? Is this a dream? So I tried to to do that and unfortunately, like I said, I went to bed, I woke up, nothing happened. But here's the thing. I woke up at about five am. My fifty seven year old body. Do you know what happens when we get older? We got to go a lot and I decided, well, let me try this yet again. So around five five thirty am, I went to sleep with that intention to meet my father, and I kid you not I looked at my hand while I was dreaming. I was in some kind of a crazy dream too, and my thumb was on the wrong place of my hand, and that's when I knew I was dreaming. And that's when I decided to try lucid dreaming. I'm aware of it. I have a clear memory of it. I put down two lounge chairs and I invited my dad, if he wished to be there, to join me, and he did. It's not like any memory that I have. It is clear. I could tell you exactly what he was wearing from head to tell I could hear his voice, and he told me that he loves me and that he's proud of me. And I got a great, big hug from him. It was real. And now one might say, well, maybe that was just my imagination creating it. If it was, I tell you it was very healing and very comforting. But why can't it be my dad?
Right?
I believe our loved ones in the afterlife are looking for ways to communicate with us, just as we're looking for ways to communicate with them. There's not much research being done about lucid dreaming and the afterlife, so Garrett Yacht suggested a couple of programs. There's one on theions dot org website that you can join. I also looked up the guy that he recommends, a man named Charlie Morley m R L E Y. So I'm onto it. If anybody else wants to join in, I would love to hear from you and hear some of your experiences this episode. Today, I want you to hear some words from the writer, slash director and producer of the new film coming out called After Death. Now, depending on when you listen to this, this could be old news. You can find out more about the film at angel dot com Forward Slash After Death. But at the time I'm recording this. In just a couple of weeks time, it will be shown in movie theaters across United States and Canada and to our international friends. The producer and director assure me that it's just going to be a couple of months before it's available streaming and that you'll be able to see it. I also want to tell you about a yearly online conference that I randomly found just by doing one of my afterlife searches. It's called Beyond the Brain. You can find out more about it at Beyond the Brain dot org. I bought my ticket. It's just about one hundred dollars US, which I think is very fair. I don't get paid for these announcements, by the way, but I'm an interested party. But it's a three day event online with some really great people about the afterlife. The sponsor of this Beyond the Brain yearly conference is Scientific and Medical dot Net Scientific and Medical dot Net. And why I bring this up is the conference is held the first week in November every year, so I know you might be listening to this in December or June and you think, oh, what about me. I'm happy to report at that website, Scientific Andmedical dot Net you can join their organization. It's a nonprofit. You get access to a ton of videos, not just out of the afterlife, which there are a lot, but also on our consciousness leaving our body. What I like about this is there are tons of doctors and scientists involved, So check out Beyond the Brain dot org Scientific and Medical dot Net. We are currently living in a time that there is a lot of unarrest in the world. I've never grown up with a lot of prayer. I've never grown up thinking about the difference I can make on that level. There is a lot of research on the power of prayer and the difference that it can make. Prayer does not need to be something you learned when you were back in church in your younger years. Prayer is a very sincere asking of whether you believe in God, the universe, or even saying, I don't know who's listening. Can you take from me what is needed to send healing where it is needed. It can be as simple as that. If you want to visualize the world or situation being healed, being whole, hearing news that maybe a war has stopped, or a loved one, imagine them healthy and well. But after you say your personal prayer, just take a moment and quiet your mind, whether your eyes are open and you're just doing a present moment meditation, or you just want to concentrate on your breath just for a few minutes and let those unseen forces take that energy and direct it to where it's needed in the world. You have to trust me on this one. But like I said, there's so much research on the power of prayer and who we really are as human beings. If you're new to the show, I've been talking. Like I said, over one hundred and fifty hours, and there's quite a few excellent reasons to believe in the afterlife. But if we believe in the afterlife, what then you hear these people who have had near death experiences where you may watch the movie After Death and you'll notice that there's one common denominator with all of them. They want to serve humanity. They want to make a difference. I don't want to have a near death experience, and I don't want you to either. I would like us all to tap in to some of this lucid dreaming, though, and be reconnected with our loved ones. I honestly feel when we get to a place that we know that we are a soul having a human experience, that we don't die, that when we close our eyes this last time, whenever that may be, we're going to simply open them up and be surrounded by our loved ones, that we will have a better life while we're here, And not just a better life, but one that you are empowered, one that if you've got your life taken care of, it's natural to see where you can make a difference. Years ago, I took a course. It was called Power and Contribution bottom line, they say, find an area that needs help, whether it's cleaning the water of the world, ending homelessness, something that's so big that one person certainly can't do on their own. But if you concentrate on whatever that is, and you keep taking steps to make a difference, then your life will work out. So my promise is that it's a world where people know that we don't die, they know the reality of the afterlife, and then they you get to have a powerful life while you're here. So it's time for our break. Let's do that, and we're going to be back with the director and producer from the new film, which is sure to be a hit, called After Death. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal podcast network.
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Listen anytime, any place. Hey everyone, it's the Wizard of Weird Joshua P. Warren. And now here's more Shades of the Afterlife.
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain. We're going to spend some time now talking to the director and the producer from the brand new film After Death. Here's Stephen Gray and Jen's Jacob.
The whole idea for the film started born out of loss. I've been a filmmaker for about fifteen years now and mostly in the commercial space, a lot of commercials up in Canada here. But a number of years ago, my brother in law was actually a tragedy, get killed by a drunk driver. And going through that kind of immediate sudden loss really caused me to ask a lot of questions. I actually grew up going to church all my life, was raised in a Christian home and consider myself a Christian. Kind of growing up in my young kind of youth and all that, but right here, at this moment, it was crossroads and I don't know, I just had to let go of the idea that there could even be a God, or let alone heaven or any kind of afterlife, because for me, life was chaos all of a sudden, and it just didn't make a lot of sense. My brother in law was such a good person and he also believed in God, and all of a sudden, it's like, what's the point, He's just gone and it's just kind of chaos. So anyway, it was a short period after that where some people started recommending some of these stories of people who had clinically died and then had these experiences and came back. I want to say, there was a few books that were given to me, and not a huge reader, especially like back then, it wasn't a massive reader, and I thought, the idea is interesting, but is a wishful thinking still without having read the stories, and it was actually sounds a little bit strange, but be proved for you, Sandra. In terms of audio, I got given a CD actually of I can't remember where it came from, but it was a recording of a few people who had neared the experiences, and the first person I heard was I think doctor Richard Ebe's story. He's this guy who had fallen like two stories from a building and cracked his head open on the sidewalk, and the things he was starting to describe about what he saw in that kind of next conscious experience was so detailed and so articulate, and honestly, yeah, this is the first time I ever heard something like that. And I'm thinking, what on earth is a doctor doing talking about this? And is he a doctor?
Right?
Sure enough, he's a medical doctor, and this apparently did happen, and it's quite an amazing story. One thing led to another that definitely got me hooked. I consume something like thirty books, I think. Immediately after that, my wife, my mother in law as well. We just went down a road of getting into every kind of book we can get our hands on, and there's a lot of different stories out there. So there's a few stories that for me to rose the top, and I just thought, Okay, I'm a filmmaker. I'm curious how many movies there are on or how many documentaries they are honest, And as I started to explore it's at that time. I think it's like twenty thirteen when I started getting this idea and there really wasn't much out there, and I did watch everything I could, and I bought every DVD and whatever obscure kind of older thing I could get my hands on. Yeah, it was just I guess the quality and different things like that just wasn't speaking to me. And I believe these people's stories in the books, but in the film format it just didn't come through in that same way. So I just thought, I guess I'll go make one. And I don't have the means to make a full feature film at that time, but what I could do was I could save up and figure out how to in a scrappy way tell one person's story. In my head, I just thought, if that's all ends up being, so be it. But I had this idea always to make a feature documentary. I thought the chorus of so many different stories because of these thirty some books that I read was really interesting, Like how many of these stories combined together I think tells.
A bigger, more powerful.
Story than a singular story, because it's just what is going on here, and I think there's power and like testimony, and after testimonies and so many people, it's just like this can't be avoided, can't ignore it. So anyway, I went out and told one story in twenty seventeen, Captain Dale Black. He's this guy who died in a plane crash nineteen sixty nine. He hit a monument in Burbank, California, with two other pilots, and the one pilot was very clearly dead. No resustation ever could happen to that person. The other there was Dale and Chuck were both pilots that at first didn't have any vital signs. They lost Chuck and they managed to barely keep Dale alive.
And he didn't share his experience for so many years.
He actually kept him to himself because he felt that this is sacred, this is something that was really just meant for him. But fortunately for me, he eventually did publish a book and I read it and I just thought, Okay, here's a plane crash again. There's going to be an investigation. There's obviously going to be something of documentation or a plane crash, and there should be in that documentation something at least alludes to how dramatic this plane crash was and.
Is it survivable or not? And all that.
And it turns out the next day after his plane crash made the headlines of LA Times, because at that time, nineteen sixty nine, it was very rare. It was a big spectacle for any plane crash, even one his size was a ten passenger plane. Today maybe less of a thing, but at that time pretty special. And so it made the headlines of the LA Times as well as basically every single newspaper in southern California at that time. So all of that documentation I think helped paint a picture that, yeah, this plane crash happened well for sure, and it was at least clear that two other pilots did die, could not be brought back in Dale did become the soul survivor.
This is all published and.
Then I, yeah, I went and told his story. One person's story, made a tenmute film, not knowing where it would go, hoping that it somewhere, but not knowing for sure. Twenty seventeen, when it got released, it got a fair bit of attention. To my surprise, I wasn't sure how people were going to react to it. Honestly, I didn't even know if they do believe the story or whatever. I just made it to the best of my ability, and I think it was in that same year Jens the Cipher Studios had put out a feature length film called The Heart of Man, which had released in theaters. And it's also a documentary, but I use that term loosely because it was half of It's a narrative film.
It's beautiful, beautifully shot.
It's really also a really difficult subject that a lot of people want to talk about. So in a similar way, I thought, how on earth.
Did these guys pull this off?
This beautiful film, and it's really done in the same kind of approaching style that I want to do with this feature.
So I just reach out to them.
And shared who I am and what I'm doing, and Gens can probably tell the rest of the story.
Well, let's stuck at Gen's first of all, Yeah, how did you meet?
Steve actually just sent out a cold email to me, I believe in Yeah, this around twenty seventeen, I think twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen, and we get a handful of these ever so often you take them all for a grain of saltan but you want to explore and see what people are pitching you, and so thankfully Steve was smart that he had a video or like a short, something that kind of was just more than the idea, and we were just blown away.
By the short.
The short was so beautifully done, so tasteful, and I don't think I'd ever seen anybody quite depict the afterlife or heaven or any of these concepts in this way. So I thought it was just a very unique expression of that. And we hopped on a call with Steve, heard his story and really believed that there was something bigger here. To his point, he had a vision for a feature, and we had even played around with the series. There's just countless stories out there, and we just thought, oh, this would be so great.
It.
To Steve's point, it to be shared in a more visual way because everything else has been either like books or articles and things like that. So it was quite the challenge in the feet to try to depict the afterlife. Obviously there's not much to go by other than what people are talking about inside, but that visually it was very unique and I would say innovative in the way that we've had to think about it. We'd stayed away from what I think has been plagued with cheesiness in other former adaptations of stuff like this, It goes clouds and cherubs, and we really loved Steve's take on it, and not that it's so different in the sense of what people are saying. He just took that and interpreted it in a way that actually made sense, I think, which to me was this cosmic kind of expression of the afterlife. It was just very beautifully depicted. And yeah, so we signed up to be the production company behind it. My business partner Jason Paimer and myself the producers and along with an amazing team. We've had one hundreds of people touch this film. It was just an incredible cast and crew that all signed up to be a part of it. And yeah, we thankfully around the time that we were finishing it, we submitted it to Angel and they loved it. The Guild loved it, which is their group of supporters. And found ourselves this year with a huge theatrical release on the tail end of COVID and all this stuff that was preventing a lot of us from working and doing this, and so it's been a long time coming. It's been little over five years now and for Steve many more years. But we're so proud of what we've been able to accomplish with the limited resources that we had. And yeah, very excited for people to experience it on the big screen.
I can't wait. Jen's let me ask you when this project came about, what were your thoughts about the afterlife?
Yeah?
I had similarly to Steve. I had grown up Christian, But even then I would say it's the thing that I doubted the most of what it would look like to see the afterlife. In a weird way, I don't think I ever even doubted that there's a place where maybe there's a creator or God or whatever is. I just doubted this idea that we go there afterwards. I don't know why that was just my inherent doubt, but I always struggled with the topic of death and just what it means to die, and even further than that non existing I don't know why. It was just such a deep concept for me that I couldn't fully grapple with. And so I've always questioned this particular topic and it was timely to spend years of our lives. You really have to dedicate quite a bit of your energy resource and your talent to something. And because it takes years, it's not like days or weeks or something like that. So you have to make sure that you're fully on board with the subject or the topic or the whatever it might be. And I just knew everybody struggles with this question. There's not a single person that hasn't thought about it. Whether or not you believe it, you think about it, you grapple with it. And for me, I wanted to be a student of the project where I went through the journey myself to understand the facts, the stories, what this was about. And so that was a beautiful place to be. And I love that about documentaries because it's such a beautiful mechanism for how you can learn. I wasn't really great at school, but I loved learning through documentaries and visual videos and things like that. Being a student of this project as well as a producer was an incredible experience because it really was a sponge in the season, letting the interviews, letting the facts, letting the cases speak for themselves. And then yeah, and Steve brought a plethora of knowledge and history and research that he had done prior to this, so we were very lucky that we had, or at least Cipher had that to start with. So yeah, definitely was maybe not as much of a believer at the beginning of the project, was probably the residence skeptic in the group, and found myself reaching my own conclusion through the film, which I hope everybody does, regardless of if you believe it or not. There's something I think that you'll get out of this film, and that's the beauty of the way that this story was told.
Yeah, this is a.
Good time to take our break and then we'll be back with more of Stephen Gray and Jen's Jacob when we get back. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Stay there, Sandra will be right back.
Hi. This is Ouija Board expert Karen A. Dolman, and you're listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
And now back to Sandra Champlain and Shades of the Afterlife.
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain and we're listening to my conversation with Jens Jacob and Steven Gray who are the producer and director for the brand new film called After Death, premiering in theaters October twenty twenty three. I know people in our life after death community are so excited about it. Some of the research that I've done depends on what study, but there's over seventy percent of people believe in the afterlife, which is cool, but probably one hundred percent of people are afraid of what people think if they find out they believe in the afterlife. So there's this inherent fear that we all have. And I had it. I was like a nasty skeptic. So I'm the perfect messenger for this because I didn't believe in it. It's a lot of convincing and now I'm the biggest supporter of sharing what I know about the afterlife and bringing these great conversations. But I think what's happening and what I feel happening even within myself, is people want to share what they love. They want to share their beliefs, they want to share the signs that they've received, they want to share the books that they've read, and as human beings, we're afraid of what people may think. But the thing is with this film it's like giving permission for people to openly talk about it. And I think what's going to happen is when people start talking, they're going to realize that their friends believe in it, they just haven't said anything. And I think there's a real potential for this film to be the catalyst for just everybody talking about the afterlife, whether they believe in it or not, but reasons to believe, whether near death experiences or some of the science things that are happening, or some of the doctors involved. But I'm so proud of you guys even for having that vision and going for it, And it sounds like it's ten years in the making to this, So kudos to you guys for following your dream.
Thank you Santra. It's true what you're saying. I think we uniquely have this ability to help shape culture in terms of a movie about NDEs has not gotten this wide of a release prior, so this is like a huge step forward for this. And I would also like to believe that it's extremely validating for the people that have had NDEs, and I think it's going to be a really cool way for if you did experience this or you do question and you can't openly talk about it. To be able to invite people into the conversation by as easy as saying, hey, come watch this movie with me, is such an easy, easier way to digest it, to feel like you can talk about it, to feel validated. So we encourage everybody to take the skeptics, the skeptic in your family, or the skeptic in your group to a film like this.
Yeah, I think that this film is like one of the perfect kind of conversation starters, especially for someone that definitely hasn't given a thought to that there's something after. I think of even my neighbors here where I live, and some conversations we've had about obviously the course of making this film, even there's interest, but there's a few of them that just and a lot of my friends too, that just don't leave, don't subscribe to it, that there's anything after, that's just wishful thinking. And I think this film does a really good job of not hitting anyone over the head by any means, but just letting the stories speak for themselves. I will say, also, not everyone in the film even believes.
In life after death.
We don't assume kind of anything of the audience and we definitely don't want to subject them to this is what it is, it and that's it. You watch the stories and you see the research and yeah, and the hope is that you.
Come to conclusion.
But it's for sure a conversation starter, like it'll get someone I think ninety percent there if they're considering something after and I think it's just like you're gonna have all kinds of really interesting conversations after having watched this film.
One of the cool things too, is the way that the story is told and the journey that you go through is through a skeptic. His name is doctor Michael Sabam, and he takes you through that whole journey of every question you're hoping to ask, he's asking it in real time in the it. So it's very I want to say, refreshing, because you don't like, you don't feel like, ah, like I wish they just said this or asked that. So it's a beautiful I think way or door into the conversation as well, because it really does ask some of the hard questions. And also I think it's this perfect merriment of the real stories which tugs at your heart. But then also the facts and the science and the scientific community that's done a lot of research into this. So it does this beautiful merriment of both the heart and the mind in terms of how you enter the conversation.
I love it.
So it's told Truugh the story of the skeptic. But let's talk about some of the people who are in the movie. Captain Dale Black, author of Visiting Heaven, Don Piper, author of ninety Minutes in Heaven, doctor Mary Neil, author of To Heaven and Back She's spine surgeon John Burke, author of Imagine Heaven. Doctor Jeffrey Long, author of Evidence of the Afterlife, who just came out with he's talking openly that after five thousand near death experiences that he studied, he is one hundred percent certain there is an afterlife. And of course we all know doctor Raymond Moody, author of Life Afterlife and so many more who coined the phrase near death experiences. Plus, isn't there something like fourteen people that you have within the film?
Yeah, I think we interviewed fourteen people who made it into the film kind of one way or another. That doesn't include we do have some archival as well, been a mash into the film, which show that again, this is something that's been studied all around the world, not just here in North America.
So many pre interviews too.
I wish we could have been able to include a lot more, but you have, you know, sometimes an hour and a half for two hours to try to make the case or make the story. But yeah, there's just so many, just unbelievable the amount of stories there are.
Maybe with the digital copy there could be some of that bonus bonus features. I've got some of the heavy hitters there, and these aren't and nothing wrong with just the average man or woman that has a near death experience because it's real. But sometimes when you hear it's a scientist, it's a spine surgeon, medical doctor.
Yeah, Pilot, I think there's something really profound about There's two things that kind of jumped out at us when we were going through these different stories. We were gravitating towards people that had something to lose and telling their story. And then besides that and sometimes coinciding with that, someone that would maybe have changed their entire life around to move away from selfish motive to selfless motive, And that it was serious enough and real enough that they would be willing to risk everything to change their life around and commit to that life long and then to us, there's got to be something real about that experience, because why on earth would you do that If they're just making it up, that's a very strange move. I don't know what they'd be, like, no logical purpose for it. Yeah, there are several people in our film that had something to lose. Mary's story was that she's been depicted in a few other films as a spine surgeon.
And actually, just.
Like on a personal level, Mary's pretty introverted. She likes to keep to herself, and she wrote the book because she was told in her experience that she needs to tell her story. And it's a long story. But the writing of her book was a whole interesting endeavor as well. Wasn't so simple and it didn't just come about overnight. But she she's shy about sharing personal details of her stories. She has a family, and she's a spine surgeon. She has her own medical practice out in Wyoming, and she's doing fine.
She's happy as she is.
She doesn't want to open herself up to the world and expose who she is and what she believes and what she experienced. But she's compelled to do that because she's told to tell her story, so she does. And if I remember, doctors and nurses and stuff in her medical community, those are our colleagues, those are her friends.
And most of the people.
In that field don't really believe it in any of this kind of stuff, and none of them are advocating that we need to talk about this openly.
It's just not a thing.
And so for her to go and share that so openly, she's risking her credentials. She's risking like kind of her perception right of what people might think of her, and putting that a risk. She has nothing to gain by writing a book. She doesn't need the money. She's doing well obviously as a doctor and with her own medical practice. Like I said, she's a private person. So it's like all these reasons to not tell her story, and yet she does. Now she didn't have to change her career around. She's already doing work in service to people and helping people. But there are some stories of people who, let's say, were in the military, and they have a near death experience and suddenly they can't use weapons anymore. Suddenly they can't continue missions anymore because this is like counter to what they experience, counter to what they learned in their experience. I think one of the biggest transformations that we have in our film is not the only one, but it's Howard Storm. It's a bit of our hero story and we just came to love Howard and you never know how it's going to turn out. And we interview all these people and we just we soak up kind of these stories as they come to us, and it's so amazing to be able to meet these different people and hear their experiences. But Howard just there's something that was really just grabbing us, pulling out our heart strings, and yeah, it's just it's amazing that somebody who's he would call himself at the time like a staunch atheist, like he was very serious about being an atheist, and he also living I think it was like fifteen to twenty years being an atheist. So this isn't just like a new thought or new idea or ideology or worldview. He's just there's nothing after confidently to the point that he's going to he's on his death bed and he's about to take his last breath because he's fighting to continue to breathing. So all he has to do is give up fighting struggling really hard to keep breathing. And then he just says goodbye to his wife. And he knew that for himself. When he says goodbye, and then he slips to become unconscious, that's just going to be it. He's not going to exist anymore. And to his surprise, his conscious experience continues where he was just all of a sudden up out of the bed in a different place, and then he sees himself in the bed.
And he knows where to go.
That's him or that was him, But he just doesn't want to think about that because then then you got to think about that maybe you're dead.
Right. So his whole.
Story is fascinating in that his experience one eighties his life. So who he was before wasn't just an atheist. There's nice people who are atheists around. He was, as he called it, he lived his life. How do I jump on the shoulders of other people so I can get ahead of other people? Like it's dog eat dog. There's no point in life aside from getting status, being famous, getting as much money as you can and at the expense of people, of his relationship with his family and friends and.
That kind of stuff.
Everything was a backseat to him and his focus and his career and his desires in this world, and all of a sudden doesn't want to do that anymore. And his wife didn't recognize him, his kids didn't recognize him.
Let's squeeze in a quick break now, and then we'll come back to hear the rest from the After Death movie. Guys, you're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Keep it here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Sanders Champlain will be right back.
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Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sanders Champlain and we're talking to Stephen Gray and Jen's Jacob, the director and producer from the new movie After Death. You can find out more about the movie Get Yourself a ticket go to angel dot com forward Slash after Death, but it premieres in theaters across the United States and Canada October twenty seventh, twenty twenty three. Right now, we're hearing the story about Howard Storm, who was a staunch atheist, and he was a guy all about himself, didn't care about others. He didn't die when he thought he should have, and as a result of his near death experience, became a different person, became a good guy. So let's continue hearing about the story of Howard Storm.
And eventually his story ends up pretty sad, like his wife and kids leave him and he hadn't spoken to them for years after this whole incident. So then he actually leaves his profession because he just he's surrounded by people that no one believes in this kind of stuff, and he just doesn't really feel like he's doing anything for people in the profession he was, and so he leaves it, takes a ninety percent pay cut, and becomes I think it was a pastor for shortly after, and then all the way told today in service of others and doing all kinds of missions trips and working with like inner city people in the area he's in.
That's his life.
Like I say, the expensive, his family, everyone he's known, everyone, everything he was before is gone. But for him it was all worth it because this is what he's.
Supposed to do and we are. Yeah, it's a pretty big change.
The film isn't all rainbows and butterflies, because there is another side to near death experiences. Correct me if I'm wrong, But people who have near death experiences, some of them really grieve because they'd rather be there than back here.
Yeah, most people that we talked to felt that way.
But hearing there's stories some people only had just an out of body experience for moments. Let's say you did not opering tale or something like that, but that experience was already enough, and the feeling of detaching from their body and not feeling pain anymore and being in this warm light and feeling love and all of that feeling and all that description was enough that they're homesick and they go through years of depression. Typically, that's a very kind of typical kind of story for a lot of people who had in your experience, and also because they come back that no one's going to believe them or no one does, and so they're lonely, and also they miss that place they were in. But yeah, to your earlier point, Sander, we tried to get as broad as we could with the kind of stories we're telling and interviews many people as we could, whether in our film include three stressing or hellish narrative experiences. And I don't know if that's like a perfect ratio of the kinds of experience that are out there, but we just wanted to be open and honest and just sharing the big variety of experiences that people are having, including there's some people that have in their need to experience that go to a place that they might call the void, but for them, it's that place which seems to be almost like descriptively the same as someone who had a distressing the narrative experience. For them, it wasn't that it was the absence of light, but an awareness in a place that exists that's nothingness, but they're still aware and there's still themselves in this nothingness. And then it was actually peaceful and it was almost like this gap for a moment and it was peaceful. And actually there was a few people that we talked to I don't know that we included in the film, but they felt like almost like a presence or heard a voice or something. But again we're only in this void, not seeing anything. So it's really interesting all these kind of varied experiences, and we just wanted to explore what does that variety, what does that look like, and be open and honest about all these different neared experiences.
Are there any religious undertones to this or is this kind of open for everybody form your own beliefs. Here's the information we've got.
Yeah, it's really made for everyone. The thing about death is it affects everyone.
Right.
I grew up as a Christian. My faith was I think it was renewed after going through these neartive experiences and learning about these stories, and I just concluded for myself that I think there is heaven, I think, and that's the hope that I have too, even for my brother in law, that I can see him again, which is that keeps me going, right, That gives me hope. But we don't spoon feed anyone in the reality of an afterlife, and so in the same way, the same thing for kind of the religious stuff too. We of course we have people in the film that they are believers. Not everyone is, but that's not the whole film, because again, death affects us all and we want everyone to come to the table and hear these stories and the science and the data behind it and draw your own conclusions.
Yeah, good stuff. Guys. How can we watch the film? I know I mentioned it in the beginning, but you also have pay it forward? Can we talk about the logistics of people going to see it?
Yeah, So you can go to angel dot com slash after Death and there you can get tickets. We also have, like you mentioned, we have a paid forward program, which is really cool. It's something new that maybe that's something that Angel does really well. And so if you go to a different url Angel dot com slash life after there you have a page where you can buy tickets. You can also pay it forward for someone else. And the whole purpose behind that is we've done it ourselves, even as directors and producers in the film, just making accessible for people who otherwise can't get to the theater to watch it. And these are real people that do you use these free tickets. So they're both paid for by real people, and they're both used by real people and We've heard from countless people that are very thankful that people have paid it forward, and so we want to keep that going and make it accessible for really everyone to be able to watch the film. So if you can, you go to angel dot com slash life after you can pay it forward for as many people as you want. And if you can't watch the film or you don't have the means to buy a ticket, you can also use that same ye real to claim a ticket. You can also claim a ticket from people that have already paid forward.
That sounds so good. You guys have been working your butts off getting the movie done and now advertising it. What do you, guys thinks possible if you had a little magic wand and you could be ten years out in the future to see what might happen out of it.
Season ten of After Death, say it again, I said, season ten of After Death, this series, I've.
Got something amazing. Yeah, I mean we're all in on that idea. Yeah.
Our hope is that, yeah, it that it blows up, and I mean in a good way, just for that that people find hope, right and that people begin to ask questions that haven't thought about this before, This reality of life after death, and we know even from making this film there's so many more stories to tell, and yeah, we would love to continue telling more stories.
We just want to see how the film does.
Anything else you guys want to share before we say goodbye and ask people to go buy a ticket.
Pre sales are such a huge indicator, So if you can tickets are already on sale, go and find a theater that's local to you. It is what is the strongest indicator for how opening weekend does, which is then the domino for how much longer it's going to be in theaters, how many theaters it's going to be in, what international looks like. So it's a big task to try to get the audiences to go out buy a ticket now and even pay it forward if you feel like there's somebody else in your life that you'd like to bring with you or pay it forward to.
Thank you Steven.
Yeah, I just hope that this just has an impact on people's lives. This is the real purpose for me making the film. But yeah, I hope people begin to ask questions who haven't.
Thought about it before.
But also even for this life that we have here, if you're beginning to ask questions about the reality of life after death and if that is real, what could that mean for this life? How could we think about living life differently here? And so yeah, I just hope it causes reflection and to an earlier conversation, I hope it just that it does have that impact on culture and that more and more people start talking about they're near to the experience.
Oh, those are great words. I just want to share one last story with you. In my previous career before COVID hit, my mom and I owned a lucrative catering business and work with race car teams. We've had fifteen hundred people. We were at Daytona and the big races.
Oh wow.
Yeah.
After my book came out, one of the race car drivers came up to me, a bit older, not too old, but he's now a TV announcer. Yeah, Sandra, what's your book about. He was trying to feel me out if it's okay to tell his story, and then he told me that when he was young, he was in a car accident, rushed to the hospital, he ended up floating above his body, looked down, saw his mom and dad and brother praying for him, and in the afterlife, he was greeted by his grandmother and grandfather and he said they were so real that it made this life seem like just a dream. And he got to choose, and he wanted to come back. We saw them praying for him, and he wanted to come back. But he said, Sandra, without that fear of dying, I didn't have a fear of living. So he says, I was able to get in that race car, drive over two hundred miles an hour, win a countless amount of championships because it took away his fear of dying. So it's not my idea that people drive that fast, but with the potential of this film, people will still be a little hesitant, as it's normal about dying. But if we know that we truly cannot die, that we go on who are we and what is our life for? So I'm so grateful that I've gotten to spend this hour and talk to you guys, and let's do it. Let's help people of life to the fullest and reduce some of the fear of dying and help people have relationships that work and good conversation over what's possible all through the film.
Thank you both, Thank you so much, Senadra.
Yeah, we're excited for you to see it, and we want a full report after. We want to we want to hear your full review.
You bet, I'm going to tell them my honest review. Really good guys, and it really gives me a lot of pleasure to share good people up to good things with the afterlife and helping us all ultimately live life. Join our Patreon club if you haven't already, go to We Don't Die dot com where you can get all past episodes of this show and my other show, We Don't Die Radio, which is primarily interviews, so I think you'll love it. Also, we offer a free Sunday gathering with medium demonstration included. Plus we offer at home classes you can tap into your own medium abilities and your loved ones may come through. They're very special classes. Again, We Don't Die dot com and Don't forget go to angel dot com, Forward Slash After Death or Forward Slash Life After if you want to pay it forward and attend that conference Beyondthebrain dot Org. I'm Sandra Champlain. Thank you for listening to me for the past three years on Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast am Paranormal Podcast Network.
Thanks for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Ghost Day and Paranormal Podcast Network. Make sure and check out all our shows on the iHeartRadio app or by going to iHeartRadio dot com