Bruce Solheim’s memoir ‘Timeless: A Paranormal Personal History’ documents pain and supernatural experience
Citrus College history professor Bruce Solheim said he received an unlikely visit from lifelong friend, Gene Thorkildsen, in October 2016.
“He was very clear in his messages to me, and one of them is that I have this mission to share my paranormal experiences,” Solheim said.
The visit would not have been unusual, except a month before the conversation, Thorkildsen died of brain cancer.
Solheim documents his vision of Thorkildsen and many other supernatural experiences in his most recent book, “Timeless: A Paranormal Personal History.”
Solheim said he wanted to provide a framework to understand phenomena that science is reticent to consider.
“Timeless” records dozens of autobiographical experiences of supernatural phenomena.
Among other spirits, Solheim writes he encountered an angel, a witch, a flaming demon, Jesus and bigfoot. He describes finding artifacts with spiritual power and hears the voices of dead relatives and the late musician Kurt Cobain.
Pages chronologically recount Solheim’s paranormal experiences as well as those of family and friends. Echoing Homer’s “The Odyssey” and the “Adventures of Indiana Jones,”
“Timeless” is an epic of Solheim’s journeys into the eternal as much as it is a memoir.
Not all the writer’s accounts are glamorous. Trauma and tragedy strike throughout “Timeless.”
At age 5, Solheim writes he first saw the drowned body of another 5-year old. He witnessed his brother’s deterioration from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after the Vietnam War.
Solheim suffered PTSD himself after witnessing the suicide of an imprisoned soldier under his watch as a military prison guard.
He writes of near-death experiences. And he apologizes and describes painful fights with his family, failed marriages and bad decisions.
The life of excitement and tragedy, “Timeless” logs surrenders to fantastic explanations of coincidence.
“I don’t claim powers,” Solheim said. “I just claim experiences.”
Rather than having an experience for clairvoyance and clairaudience as Solheim claims, a more likely explanation that is an overwhelming reality give way fantastic perceptions of it.
The history professor does not say he knows where his experiences come from, but he insists apparitions like that of his friend Thorkildsen transcend a timeless place beyond his mind.
“Where he is, which is a spirit realm right now, there is no future, there is no past, there is just right now,” Solheim said. “It really comes down to this — consciousness is fundamental and it’s independent of this body, of the mind.”
Solheim is using his book to teach a community education course this semester at Citrus called “Paranormal Personal History.”
He said he will explore the paranormal phenomena his book describes with personal accounts, research and guest lectures by psychologists, philosophers and scientists.
The course filled in days. Solheim said demand for the subject is high.
“They’re looking for some kind of a framework of understanding which I hope I can provide,” he said.
