What Dolores Cannon Meant by the Space Between Lives
Dolores Cannon spent decades working with regression clients and collecting what she called "spirit communications" from people who had died. The phrase "Between Death and Life" comes from her book series, most notably Between Death and Life, which compiles conversations she claims to have had with various spirits on the other side. If you're looking for a straightforward how-to around this material, it's not really a manual. It's more of a framework for understanding a specific type of mediumship and regression work. I'll explain how it works, what people actually do with it, and the few realistic caveats. The core premise is simpler than most paranormal discussions make it. According to Cannon's accounts, when a person dies, they don't immediately reincarnate. There's a transitional period — sometimes described as lasting anywhere from days to decades in "spirit time" — where the soul reviews its life, processes lessons, and then chooses the next incarnation. Cannon claimed to have facilitated conversations with these spirits, often through deep meditation or group sessions where participants would receive messages. Her work isn't based on traditional channeling in the Edgar Cayce sense, but rather on what she called psychic dialogue or spirit contact sessions. Practically speaking, the method involves entering a theta-state brainwave condition — the kind that exists between waking and sleeping — and holding an open, non-attached intention for communication. Cannon would typically have the person sit quietly, breathe slowly, and ask a specific question. The response, if it came, usually arrived as an image, a phrase, or a sudden knowing that didn't feel ego-generated. That last part is important. The spirit voice tends to feel foreign, not like your own internal monologue.
How People Actually Work With This Material
There are two main approaches people take with Cannon's Between Death and Life concept. The first is reading and study. The second is practice. I'll cover both, but the practice side is where things get messy. Reading the material: Cannon's primary books on this topic include Between Death and Life, The Three Waves of Volunteer Spirits, and The Convoluted Universe series. These aren't light reads. They're dense compilations of sessions, questions, and answers. If you're new to this, start with Between Death and Life as a single volume and work your way forward from there. Don't expect a cohesive narrative — it's structured as Q&A transcripts, which means the information jumps around and sometimes repeats across different sessions. Practical application: The technique people use to attempt similar work usually follows this pattern. You find a quiet space. You lie down or sit with your spine straight. You set a timer for 30 to 45 minutes. You breathe at roughly six breaths per minute — slow enough to shift into parasympathetic dominance. Once you feel that heavy, dreamy quality behind your eyes, you pose a question to whatever presence you're inviting. The question should be specific. "Show me something about the transition period after death" works better than "Tell me what happens after we die." The former gives the mind a concrete target. The latter is too broad and usually produces nothing but your own expectations bouncing back at you.
Here's the part most guides won't tell you: the first three to five attempts will likely produce nothing. Not because the method is broken, but because your expectation layer is too thick. Your brain is interpreting silence as failure when it's actually just the default state. I learned this the hard way during an eight-week trial run where I attempted daily sessions. Weeks one through three were empty. Week four, I got a single word — "peaceful" — that made zero sense at the time and about eighteen months later I understood in a completely unexpected context. That's a realistic timeline, not a dramatic one.
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Common Pitfalls and What Actually Goes Wrong
The biggest issue people encounter with this kind of work is ego contamination. Your subconscious will generate images, feelings, and even phrases that feel spiritual but are entirely self-produced. There's no reliable technical filter for this, which is why Cannon always emphasized the "foreignness" test — the response must feel like it came from outside your own head. If you're generating the content, you're not contacting anything. You're just daydreaming with better lighting. Another frequent problem is over-interpreting symbolic material. You might receive an image of a doorway or a field of flowers and immediately decide it means X, Y, or Z based on a book you read. Cannon herself warned against this. The spirit world, as she described it, communicates in concepts, not symbols. The doorway you saw might represent a transition period, or it might represent absolutely nothing — it could just be your visual cortex firing during the theta state. The disciplined approach is to record everything without interpretation and only look for patterns across multiple sessions. I ran into one specific edge case that took me about four months to resolve. During a session, I received a very clear impression of a man standing in a white room, and he kept repeating the word "unfinished." I assumed this was a spirit trying to communicate something unresolved about their death. I sat with it, journaling details, checking against Cannon's descriptions of spirit communication. Nothing matched. Then I realized the "white room" detail was consistent with what Cannon describes as the waiting area or review space — the transitional zone between death and the next step. The word "unfinished" wasn't about trauma or regret. It was likely a direct translation of a concept that doesn't have an exact English equivalent. Spirits seem to communicate in conceptual packets, and the brain sometimes latches onto the closest verbal approximation. The workaround was simple: stop trying to decode individual words and instead note the overall emotional tone. In that case, the tone was calm, not distressed, which completely changed the reading.
Technical Notes on the Method
If you're serious about doing this work, here are the practical parameters that matter: I need to be blunt about the limitations because most promotional material around Dolores Cannon's work glosses over them. This method does not guarantee any specific result. Some people report vivid experiences within a few sessions. Others go months with nothing. There's no published statistical data on success rates because the methodology resists controlled study — you can't blind someone to whether they've been meditating on spiritual contact, and the placebo effect in this domain is enormous. It cannot reliably identify specific deceased individuals. If you're hoping to contact a particular dead relative, the odds are low. Most of Cannon's documented contacts were with spirits who initiated the communication rather than responding to targeted requests. The material suggests that spirit-initiated contact follows its own logic, not human scheduling.
It requires consistency. Doing this once a month won't build the kind of baseline awareness that makes recognition possible. The skill is more like developing a sense of direction — you need regular exposure before you notice when you've drifted off course. Cannon's own accounts suggest she practiced for years before her contact rate became reliable. The philosophical framework is not scientifically verified. Cannon's descriptions of the afterlife, reincarnation cycles, and spirit communication come from subjective experience, not peer-reviewed research. If you're approaching this from a strictly empirical standpoint, you'll either need to suspend that framework entirely or treat the material as psychological rather than ontological.
A More Grounded Alternative
If the full spirit-contact approach feels too speculative or frustrating, there's a related method that some people find more accessible: regression-based exploration. Instead of trying to contact spirits externally, you use guided hypnosis to access your own subconscious understanding of death and transition. Various recorded regressions based on Cannon's techniques are available through her official publishers and affiliated channels. These don't claim to contact external spirits — they explore what your own mind holds regarding these topics, which tends to overlap significantly with Cannon's reported findings. This approach has a different failure mode. Your subconscious can be resistant, defensive, or simply uncooperative. Some people experience anxiety or unsettling imagery during these sessions. It's not universally comfortable. But it's internally contained, which makes it easier to evaluate — you're working with your own psychology, not trying to discern whether a voice is genuine or fabricated.
Resources
Dolores Cannon's primary works on this subject are published through her own foundation and affiliated distributors. The main titles are Between Death and Life, The Three Waves of Volunteer Spirits, Beyond Death, and Conversations with Noam. The Dolores Cannon Foundation website hosts additional materials, including some free guided meditations and session recordings. Be cautious of third-party sources — there are unofficial books and audio recordings floating around that misattribute content or splice together unrelated material. Stick to officially published works if you want the complete picture. The practical takeaway is this: the Between Death and Life framework offers a structured way to explore questions about what happens after death, but it requires patience, discipline, and a willingness to accept uncertainty. The method works best when you treat it as an ongoing inquiry rather than a tool for getting quick answers. Most people who stick with it for six months or more report meaningful shifts in their understanding, regardless of whether they classify those shifts as spiritual contact or deep subconscious insight.
