Be a little cautious before categorically ridiculing your wife's connections with the 'other side.' The 'other side' I am referring to is the non-living. Yes, ghosts, visions in dreams, things that go bump in the night.

My wife has vivid dreams almost every night. Sometimes people from her past, old friends or relatives, are in her dreams. Sometimes there are people from her past that are dead that come to visit her in her dreams.

Usually the living can talk to her in her dreams. The dead can't talk to her. Sometimes the dead are holding candles. She says they come into her dreams to warn her about something.

A few weeks after her grandmother died, my wife's recently deceased godmother and grandmother appeared together in her dreams. They were holding candles. Unusually, for the dead, they spoke to her. They said, "We are waiting for you."

My wife immediately assumed that she was going to join the departed soon. I reminded her that soon she was going home to see her parents again. I suggested to her that they meant they were waiting for her in the old country.

It's important not to make light of their feelings. Most Russians are pessimistic and expect the worst. When my wife tells me she had dreams last night, I enquire about them. She usually responds 'it's nothing good.'

I always try to put a positive spin on the dream if I can. There's no sense in courting the worst. Before you condemn this entire thing categorically, let me point out, if she thinks it's real, it's real at least to her.

All your logic and scientific documentation will not change her mind. While I am not a big follower of all this, it is rather uncanny that when my wife calls her mother, her mother always knows when we have had an argument, or there is some other problem at home.

Her mother interrogates her, "Are you sure everything is okay between you and your husband?" My wife responds, "Yes. Yes. No problem." Her mother probes, "Are you sure? I had a dream last night."

It's almost uncanny. She is right every time. She knows exactly when there is an argument or a problem at home. Maybe they do have connections with the 'other side?'

I ask my wife, "Why can't your mother make stock predictions or something useful like that?" Oh well.