When I was six, an angel appeared and spoke to me.

I had been praying obsessively for wings.

This month’s theme for the paid tier Soul Lines is memory. One of the questions I prompted my subscribers to ruminate on is,

What memory/memories define your sense of self?

So I wanted to share with all my readers (free and otherwise) one of the most impactful and defining memories I have:

When I was about six, an angel appeared to me in my grandmother's backyard.

She called me by my name, and told me that my wish would come true.

My wish was that I would be given wings so that I could fly again. I seemed to remember that I could, somewhere, somehow. As a child I was quite tenacious and proactive when I desired something (and maybe I still am), and in this case, I prayed obsessively every night that God give me back my wings. I fully expected a response from God, so the fact that I received one felt very much in the natural order of things. I was grateful, but it was not paradigm-shifting. If anything, it was confirmation of a worldview and spiritual orientation that I had been born with, and it has served as a reminder all these years later that we are all very much seen, heard, and loved.

Before the angel

As far back as I can recall, I knew there was more to me than my personhood, and wondered who exactly was this self I proposed to be. I felt that somehow I was infinitely more. I puzzled over why I could not walk though walls, or move things with my mind, or fly. I spent my nights astral travelling and meeting many entities, journeying to far planets, and each morning fell through multi-colored tunnels and landed hard in my body, arising again as “Michelle” – with dim memories of my nighttime antics, knowing, absolutely, that something real was happening. Life as Michelle felt dense and slow and drowsy. I felt that somehow, daytime was the dreamscape, and something else, someplace else, was real.

During the height of these nighttime travels, at age six or so, I began to pray diligently for angel wings. I truly believed that some mistake had been made, and that I really ought to be able to fly. Having wings felt to me to be the missing piece of life's puzzle, the corrective to my identity as a wee girl, land-bound. I even tied paper plates to my arms and jumped off my dresser, desperate for a quick fix. Luckily, I was cautious by nature, and had a scientific mind. I had the foresight to test the dresser before progressing to the roof, which owing to the failure of the dresser, never happened.

Yet I carried on praying for those wings, for months and months (maybe years) on end. I had total belief that my devotion would be rewarded angelically. Then, one day, my grandfather and I sat together with one hand each on the ‘wishbone’ after our chicken dinner. We tugged at that poor little bone and when it snapped, I got the larger part—which meant that I won. It was a sign, I was sure, a sign that my wings were imminent. That was the RULE of wishbones —the one who breaks off the larger bone gets their wish fulfilled!

Quick anatomy lesson before I get to the angel - what is the chicken wishbone?

I never, never as a child even thought about the symbolism or meaning of the wishbone tug-of-war, much less what part of the chicken we were contending over.

As it turns out, the wishbone is where the wings attach!

the wishbone serves as a strut between the bird’s shoulders to keep them apart, and as a point of attachment for the pectoral muscles that power the downstroke of the wing. Source

Not to mention, not just wishbones, but chickens more generally have their own rich symbolic history connected to the granting of wishes.

The tradition dates back to the Etruscans, an ancient civilization that lived in the area we know as Italy today. But instead of breaking the bone in half, Etruscans would make a wish while stroking the bone — more like a good luck charm. According to Peter Tate’s book, Flights of Fancy, it was during the St. Martin’s Night celebrations in medieval Europe that people started the wishbone tradition as we know it today with two people pulling on the wishbone, then called “merry thought.”  

Poultry have a long history of being used to grant wishes and tell the future. Ancient Greeks used to place grain on marked cards or mark kernels of corn with letters and carefully record which ones their chickens pecked first. The Roman army carried cages of “sacred chickens” with them — the designated chicken keeper was known as the pullarius. Source

After I won the wishbone, the next day I saw what looked like a package on my grandparent’s roof. I knew it was my wings! I insisted that my grandfather go get the package for me. I didn't tell him what it most definitely contained, I just said something like,

“Hey grandpa, there is a package on the roof for me from God, and it is something I asked for when I won the wishbone. Can you please go get it?”

I laugh now. As a six year old, this was entirely reasonable. Looking back, I can’t imagine how eccentric my devoted grandpa thought I was, but we had a very special bond and he indulged all my crazy ideas. (I used to plaster his hair with little-girl hair clips and he’d wear them to dinner just for me).

He didn’t require much cajoling. The very next morning he got out his ladder and climbed up onto the roof.

He shouted down to me, matter-of-fact, that nothing was there. He explained that what I’d seen were just roof tiles piled up at a slight angle and bulging.

(I still cannot believe he climbed onto the roof for me. I suspect he never told my grandmother about it, because she would have freaked out. It must have been our little secret.)

I was disheartened by the absence of a package on the roof, but I still had faith that God would be delivering my wings soon, because I had won the wishbone, after all. So I didn’t cry. I just waited and kept praying.

Then it happened.

A few days later, I kicked a ball into the hedge, and when I came scrambling out, I looked up to see an angel, beatific and entirely Christian in her appearance, a white woman with golden-blonde hair, which was consistent with what I believed at the time (I was being raised Protestant, specifically Lutheran). This angel, dressed in a long white gown, and as tall as the roof of the carport that she stood next to, was bathed in light, her giant white wings protruding from her back. I was surprised, awed, but not scared.

She said, “Hello Michelle. I’ve heard your prayers. You will receive your wings as you’ve asked.” She then gave me a date, or I think she gave me a date — in any case, I promptly forgot whatever she said about the timing of my wings!

(Ughh, if only I could recall —but then, do I really want to know, if it’s the date of my death?)

As for what I do recall: again, AWE. She was enormous. I also felt seen and loved, but in a way that felt natural, and not, as NDE-ers report of their near-deaths, in a way that seemed profound or in contrast with love on earth. I was so young, after all, and probably my memory of non-earthly realms was sufficiently fresh in my awareness that this love and comfort seemed par for the course.

In my childish way, I understood at that moment that all my beliefs were correct —someone was listening to me when I prayed. I was known and loved and taken seriously. It was an experience which embedded this truth into my very being, instantly.

Not to mention, it was so reassuring that I would get what I so desired, even if it wasn’t to my exact timeframe (sound familiar?). I don’t remember feeling upset that I’d have to wait. I was just so glad that someone was on the case!

When I came rushing into the house breathless to tell my grandmother about the angel, she told me I must have been daydreaming, or maybe I’d fallen asleep and had actually dreamt it. (Seriously? I’d just fallen asleep while I was playing in the backyard in the middle of the day? While I was kicking a ball around?)

Her response was so preposterous and dismissive. It had obviously happened, so it seemed both perplexing and pointless to insist otherwise when my grandmother had made up her mind that I was delusional.

In addition to the great gift of feeling validated in my knowing that I was loved and heard and looked after from beings beyond this world, the other worthwhile result of this visitation was that from then on, I trusted my own experience far more than any one else’s explanations of so-called ‘reality.’

For years afterwards, every few months I would sit outside in a small plastic chair, and just wait for my angel to appear again. I wanted to chat. I wanted to know more. I was very patient and very persistent, and waited for an hour or more regularly. I think I finally stopped waiting around the time adolescence began.

She did not return in my waking hours, not that I remember. But I have never stopped expecting magical things to happen. And a few things did, which I will share another time!

Who am I?

As I grew up, I continued to be preoccupied with the seeming finite and limited nature of my beingness. It seemed to me that I could be anyone or do anything, that it was some sort of fated thing that I was a girl, Michelle, placed in my family of origin. I seemed to remember being in other times and places. My first written stories were attempts to write in a Cockney accent, which seemed to be a very loud voice in my head (I was raised in the American South and everyone around me had a Southern accent). When I was about seven, I showed my father a photo of London, and told him that I remembered living there and being very poor. He taught me the word deja vu, the meaning of which was literally my truth (I had seen it all before)—yet his explanation of that term was that my brain was playing tricks on me.

I lost even more faith in adults, and became very quiet about my experiences and memories, which seemed far more real to me than anything people said or thought about them.

I wrote prolifically from the age of six, and by my teenage years kept all my writings in a filing cabinet. I thought that if I kept all my stories and childhood diaries, I might periodically read over them and work out who I was with the impartiality of retrospection.

Even as a teenager I viewed my writing as a sort of record of my identity, a meaning-make exercise, which it remains to this day.

As a late teen, I dabbled in astral travel, meditated, and talked to a few beings in an altered state, the liminal state between sleep and wakefulness. All this confirmed to me that there was, in fact, much, much more than the world seemed to consider, but none of it made much sense, and none of it was clear as that angelic visitation.

As an adult, like most, when faced with educational choices, career choices, and life choices like relationships and so on, I narrowed my focus, relinquished my searching, and came to identify as the person I thought I should be. I followed my ego-desires with determination, very much constructing an identity in response to genetic, childhood, and social patternings, and importantly, in response to my childhood wounding. I took what hurt the most, and tried to make it better by actualising an identity to redeem it. It matters not what the wounding was; it's a pattern we all follow. Wherever there is pain, there is an equal and opposite force of identity-creation in response to it: to repress it, to deny it, to carve victimhood or survivorhood or spiritual warriorhood from it.

Like every other person on the planet, I experienced victories and failures, and created a life that I thought was ‘mine’ and reflected, authentically, who I thought I was and ought to be. I earned degrees, married, and had three children. I wrote novels that never got published, and over time, attempted to quiet my internal struggle to figure out who I was or should be. Nothing felt quite right, and nothing seemed to be working quite as I had hoped, expected, and planned for, but it felt wrong - ungrateful even - to question the life I had.

But then, that’s an essay on another topic, the beginning of a search that would lead to more and more spiritual experiences, and eventually teachers and awakenings. I shared a bit here, on my existential crisis, and here on my changed relationship to ambition.

Always, there is this memory of the angel, and the belief that there is a Being who—even as she perhaps giggled at my tenacity—saw an opening to plant a seed. A reminder.

The angel phenomenon

Since this time, I have researched others’ experiences with angels. Mostly those of trauma survivors. In dark moments of bodily dissociation, they sometimes find themselves in other realms with angelic helpers who communicate that same loving presence I felt: Always-there, ever-watching, and so sympathetic to our human desires even if limited in their ability to shift the human experience beyond facilitating a state-change or effecting a quick emergency astral relocation.

That is, these interventions don’t change the narrative of life directly—there is a return to the trauma experience, the same perpetrators, the same horror—yet the experience most definitely shifts the energetic imprint of the experiencer. In other words, it “increases one’s vibration”—which has a direct consequence on reality here in 3D, particularly in its ability to deflect certain negative experiences.

I have also had a few clients who have had an experience of visitations in the midst of trauma. They see and feel beings who play certain specific roles: a woman appearing as a guide, just emanating mother-love; a being who arrives to carry the child out of harm’s way, after which there is a sense of lost time, and a change of location.

As for me, I was so young, and safe in my family environment, so it’s difficult to say how this visitation affected my energy field, except to say that I was much more open to non-ordinary phenomena afterwards. I note P.M.H. Atwater’s studies on children experiencers of near death, and how there is a definite openness to such phenomena after, as well as an increase in lateral thinking skills and even IQ (thanks to

The Starfire Codes

for sending me down this rabbit hole in my research!)

I’m left with this

My angel experience was a seminal experience in my young life, and explains a lot about me—my incurable faith, my dogmatic belief in the unseen world, my utter conviction that we are always heard by Spirit, always loved, and have guidance that is ever faithful and attentive to our desires and prayers.

It has not led to a career in mediumship, needless to say. I sense things, but not to any professional degree!

A few years ago I had a client on the table receiving some bodywork for trauma release. I had the knowing that there were angels in the room with us. Not just one, but specifically four. After we finished I tentatively told her that I felt an angelic presence. She laughed and said that she always works with four angels, and had called them to her before our session.

So, they are still around, even if I don’t see them anymore.

Now, of course, I wonder if the promised wings were literal or metaphorical. If the angelic being foretold some sort of awakening, or my literal death and the freedom of the soul to fly after leaving the body behind.

Do you have any such experiences? Please do share in the comments below!

For those who are interested in learning how to work with me, you can visit me here: michelle-dixon.com