For the first decade that I suffered from severe and almost daily migraines, I didn't consider them a gift. Yet, in a way - a very painful one - they are.

My headaches began setting me apart from the rest of society at the age of 15. Back in 1996, my brother got a Nintendo 64. Eager to try it out, I begged him to give me a turn. But it was unmistakable - watching the screen gave me headaches.

Everyone who gets migraines has a different "trigger" - a food, a smell, lack of sleep. My triggers are all visual and luminescent: looking at fluorescent lights, TV, and movies. That keeps me out of gyms, some stores and restaurants, and even some jobs.

In 2006, after trying 20 medications with limited success, my doctor gave me the prescription I'd needed all along. "Unless you exercise outdoors for 30 minutes a day, there is no pill I can give you that will help."

Introduction

In recent years, there has been an effort, particularly by American folkloric scholars (e.g., Hufford 1982; Rojcewicz 1986), to bring some conceptual order to a disparate array of paranormal and transcendental experiences whose academic study has heretofore tended to be associated with distinct and somewhat insular disciplines.

Included in this set of non-ordinary occurrences are such phenomena as out-of-body experiences (traditionally the province of parapsychology), near-death experiences (near-death studies, medicine), shamanic experiences (anthropology), psychedelic experiences(transpersonal psychology), night terrors (folklore), and UFO encounters (ufology). That there are significant similarities among subsets of these experiences, both in terms of phenomenology and aftereffects, has long been recognized, but so far there has been no sustained scholarly effort to build conceptual bridges between these experiential domains or to foster their comparative study, despite some expressions of interest in such undertakings (e.g., Ring and Agar 1986). In the spirit of this kind of endeavor, the need for which has been persuasively set forth by Rojcewicz (1986), I would like to present here a framework for a partial conceptual integration of two non-ordinary experiences previously held to be quite separate and unrelated. I am referring to near-death experiences (NDEs) and alleged UFO encounters (UFOEs),[1] between which I believe there are some hitherto unsuspected links.

This paper has second purpose as well. After delineating certain commonalities between these types of experiences, I intend to explore their possible joint significance for the evolution of human consciousness. This will involve an attempt to embed these and other types of non-ordinary experiences in a second kind of conceptual matrix that will provide a still more encompassing perspective in terms of which to view the implicit connections among the variety of experiences we will be concerned with.

Thought death was clear but? A new book, Opening Heaven's Door, will challenge your views. In the second part of our serialisation, bereaved people recall visits by dead loved ones

A humid night in summer. Ellie Black wakes at around 3am and her eyes focus on a figure at the end of her bed. It's her father, from whom she's long been estranged. Now fully alert, she watches him as he tips his hat and bows with a flourish. Then he's gone.

The following morning she relates the experience to her daughter at the breakfast table. Later that day the phone rings - with news that her father died in the early hours. A tall story? Not at all.

The brain circuits that respond to faces and sex appear to activate abnormally in pedophiles when they look at children's faces, scientists say.

These new findings could lead to novel ways to diagnose pedophiles, and could shed light on the evolutionary roots of sex, the researchers added.

In the animal kingdom, there may be a number of mechanisms preventing adults from attempting sex with children. For example, "pheromones emitted by child mice inhibit sexual behavior of adult male mice," said lead study author Jorge Ponseti, a sex researcher at Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel in Germany. "If scientists inhibited these pheromones in the child mice, adult male mice started to mate with these babies."

The universe is full of mysteries that challenge our current knowledge. In "Beyond Science" Epoch Times collects stories about these strange phenomena to stimulate the imagination and open up previously undreamed of possibilities. Are they true? You decide.

A 3-year-old boy in the Golan Heights region near the border of Syria and Israel said he was murdered with an axe in his previous life. He showed village elders where the murderer buried his body, and sure enough they found a man's skeleton there. He also showed the elders where the murder weapon was found, and upon digging, they did indeed found an axe there.

In his book, "Children Who Have Lived Before: Reincarnation Today," German therapist Trutz Hardo tells this boy's story, along with other stories of children who seem to remember their past lives with verified accuracy. The boy's story was witnessed by Dr. Eli Lasch, who is best known for developing the medical system in Gaza as part of an Israeli government operation in the 1960s. Dr. Lasch, who died in 2009, had recounted these astounding events to Hardo.

Are you irate, irritable and irrational when presented with evidence that goes against your preconceived notions of how the world operates? Looking for a solution to your stress? Join us this week on The Eyeopener as we examine the theory of cognitive dissonance and how it stops people from confronting the uncomfortable truths about the way the world really works.

Much like key players in social networks, University of Kansas scientists have found evidence that there are keywords in word networks that hold together groups of words in our memory.

In a study published in the Journal of Memory and Language, Michael Vitevitch, KU professor of psychology, showed that research participants recognized these keywords more quickly and accurately than other words that were like the keywords in many respects except for their position in a network of 20,000 similar-sounding English words that he and colleagues created in 2008.

"If words are indeed stored like a network in memory, said Vitevitch, "we should be able to see how characteristics of the network affect language-related processes. Our findings clearly show that there are words that hold key positions on the word network and that we process them more quickly and accurately than similar words that they hold together in our memory."

Have you wondered how caught up we get in our daily lives that we hardly make the time to bond with nature. In our spare time, we either watch TV, play games, sit on the computer or meet friends. That has a negative impact on our health.

There is a term called 'Ecopsychology' which shows the connection between ecology and human psychology. Well, hope this doesn't sound too boring, but its a simple theory which we just forget.

Distancing yourself from nature and finding comfort in this concrete jungle has negative effect on humans, mentally and physically, and even nature.

We develop less empathy towards nature, so end up destroying what we never created, but the fact remains that humans have an emotional bond with Mother Nature, which we remain oblivious to.

At around 4am that morning, my father gave an audible sigh. It was loud enough to wake my mother, who sleepily assumed that he was having a bad dream.

But he wasn't. That sigh was his final breath as he died.

No one, least of all my father, had known he was ill. As for my mother, she'd assumed he was still asleep when she rose a few hours later and had breakfast alone.

Afterwards she'd returned to the bedroom and tried, with increasing desperation, to wake him.

There was, however, one person who knew about Dad's death well before Mum did: my sister Katharine, who lived 100 miles away and was herself suffering from terminal breast cancer.

'On the night of my father's death,' she told mourners at his memorial service some weeks later, 'I had an extraordinary spiritual experience.

'It was about 4.30am and I couldn't sleep, when all of a sudden I began having this amazing experience. For the next two hours, I felt nothing but joy and healing. I felt hands on my head, and experienced vision after vision of a happy future.'

When she awoke that morning, she'd described them to her teenage son Graeme as she drove him to school. Among the visions of the future, she told him, was one of his own child - a yet- to-be conceived five-month-old granddaughter - whom she'd played with on her bedroom floor.

It wasn't till Katharine got back home that my mother phoned to tell her Dad had just died.

Suddenly, she knew the reason for the powerful surge of energy and joy she'd felt in her bedroom, the sense of someone there. 'I now know that it was my father,' she said.

Now, my family isn't in the habit of channelling ghosts. Indeed, my first reaction to my sister's vision was close to hysterical laughter.

But, almost immediately afterwards, the vision began to make profound sense, like puzzle pieces slipping perfectly into place. Without discussing it, we were convinced as a family that Dad had done something of great emotional elegance.

The phrase "conspiracy theorist" is a derogatory smear phrase thrown at someone in an attempt to paint them as a lunatic. It's a tactic frequently used by modern-day thought police in a desperate attempt to demand "Don't go there!"

But let's step back for a rational moment and ask the commonsense question: Are there really NO conspiracies in our world?

The Attorney General of South Carolina would surely disagree with such a blanket statement. After all, he sued five pharmaceutical companies for conducting a price-fixing conspiracy to defraud the state of Medicaid money.

Similarly, in 2008, a federal judge ruled that three pharmaceutical companies artificially marked up their prices in order to defraud Medicare.

In fact, dozens of U.S. states have filed suit against pharmaceutical companies for actions that are conspiracies: conspiracy to engage in price fixing, conspiracy to bribe doctors, conspiracy to defraud the state and so on.

The massive drug company GlaxoSmithKline, even more, plead guilty to a massive criminal fraud case involving a global conspiracy to bribe doctors into prescribing more GSK drugs.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. A deeper look into the criminality of just the drug industry alone reveals a widespread pattern of conspiratorial behavior to defraud the public and commit felony crimes in the name of "medicine."

What is a conspiracy, exactly? As any state or federal prosecutor will gladly tell you, a "conspiracy" is simply when two or more people plot to commit an act of deceit (or a crime).