Angel Babies: And Other Amazing True Stories of Guardian Angels. Theresa Cheung

come in the next week I would need to be induced.

      Three days before my induction I stayed late at the restaurant to make sure everything was in place for a big booking the following day. I was filling out some forms when I thought I heard someone come into my office. I looked up and saw a young girl of about 14 or 15 in a white dress. The dress was solid but also translucent. The girl was stunning and it seemed as if bright light was shooting out of her hair. I noticed that she had blonde hair with a fringe unsuccessfully covering a red mark on her forehead that looked like a scar. She smiled and pointed at my bump, saying, ‘Tomorrow’s the day.’

      Before I could ask her who she was or what she was talking about, she moved away and walked out of my office. Mesmerized, I followed her and saw her disappear into thin air. She seemed to glide, not walk.

      The following day my daughter was born. The birth wasn’t easy and forceps had to be used to pull her out. I was too exhausted to hold her right away, but later, when she was placed in my arms, I noticed that she looked a little battered and bruised and there was a deep gash on her forehead. Gently I placed my finger on it and the first words I whispered to her were, ‘We’ve met before, haven’t we?’

      My daughter is going to be 18 next year and she still has the faintest mark on her forehead. People say I’m crazy, but I just know she visited me in spirit the night before she was born. We’re incredibly close. From the moment I held her and saw the gash on her forehead, the strength of my love for her quite literally knocked me sideways. She looked so fragile and bruised, and although I had a nanny lined up, there was no way I was going to let anyone take care of her but me. I didn’t stop working, but I found a way to take her to work with me and hired extra help when life got crazy busy. It wasn’t easy juggling motherhood and work, but then nothing worth doing in life is.

      Anja also met her daughter before she was born. She sent me this lovely story:

      Brown Eyes

      I dreamed that I was standing with my boyfriend Liam in my apartment with a baby girl in my arms. Liam was right behind me looking at her over my right shoulder. We had made a bet on whose eyes she would have and were waiting for her to open her eyes to see who had won. Finally she opened them and I was moved in the deepest of ways, as her eyes were brown and looked exactly like mine.

      I had this dream a year before we decided we wanted children and about a month after it I was told by my doctor that due to polycystic ovaries I might not be able to have children. My little girl already knew better, though. I feel sure she visited me in my dream to tell me that I could have a baby and that she would have the same brown eyes as mine.

      Stories like these suggest that there may well be some kind of soul connection between a child and their parents before birth. Unborn children seem to have the ability to reach out across time and space.

      And it’s not just mothers who have seen their children before they were born–fathers have too. Simon wrote and told me the following story:

      ‘Call Me’

      I’m writing to you about a dream I had the night before my son was born. We thought we had the perfect name picked out for him: Brian. But then I had the dream and just had to rethink my choice.

      In the dream I was waiting to pick my son up from a football match. I was shouting his name, but he didn’t respond. Eventually I said, ‘John!’ and he turned around and said, ‘Hi, Dad.’ In the early days of my wife’s pregnancy we had thought about calling a boy John for a while because it was my dad’s middle name and by happy coincidence also my wife’s dad’s first name, but we eventually decided against it. My wife’s boss at the time was called John as well and she didn’t get along with him and really didn’t want to be reminded of him in any way at home.

      When the baby was born I told my wife about my dream and said how could we name him Brian after a dream like that? She still wasn’t keen on the name John, but eventually agreed and our son was christened John Brian.

      A year later to the day that my brilliant son was born, my wife’s father was killed in a hit and run accident. We like to think he lives on in our son.

      Another parent who wrote to me about a fascinating angelic experience during pregnancy was Nadine.

      A Story about Hope

      I lost my beloved mother to cancer in December 1989 and before she died I promised her that if I had a daughter I would call her Hope and she would be our hope for the future.

      In the middle of 1992 I found out I was pregnant, which was a surprise as I was just recovering from my second ectopic pregnancy and had been told I wouldn’t be able to have any further children due to all the scarring.

      Even after the doctors had confirmed that the baby was in the right place and was doing fine, I couldn’t get rid of the fear of something going wrong. Then when I reached about seven months I started to have dreams in which I could see a baby crying in a cot but I wasn’t allowed to go near it. I would wake up crying myself, feeling totally frustrated. I had this dream every night for over a month. One day I asked my mum in spirit to somehow let me know what was going on, as it was breaking my heart. That night I had the dream again, but this time I was allowed to go to the cot and look at the baby and I saw it was a dark-haired baby girl and my mother was standing next to the cot smiling.

      When I woke up I felt at peace and I didn’t have the dream again. But on 8 May 1993 I went into labour. The baby was born but didn’t cry and I hadn’t been able to see her arrive, so for a moment I panicked, but my husband said, ‘Hope is here. Hope has arrived.’ I didn’t believe him, but the nurses confirmed it. Then she cried, and it was the same cry from my dreams and when they laid her in my arms it was the same baby and I felt a hand take the weight off my shoulders.

      A week later, when I arrived home from hospital, there on my dressing table was an old photograph. It was a baby photograph of my mother and I realized that my daughter and my mother looked exactly the same.

      Nadine believes that the miracles surrounding the birth of baby Hope had started several years earlier:

      I had two ectopic pregnancies and the second one nearly cost me my life. At the maternity hospital the head of department wanted to remove my tubes and give me a hysterectomy and the young resident wanted to do an experimental procedure that had never been performed before. They stood arguing at the foot of my bed and the young resident asked me what I wanted to do. I told him to go ahead and do what he wanted, as someone had to be the first and it might as well be me, and that way I might just be able to have more children (the odds were 5,000 to 1).