Gildrette Jones

PhD Student

Biography

Gildrette Jones is a school psychologist dedicated to fostering academic, behavioural, and social-emotional growth among youth. She holds a Master of Science and Specialist degrees in School Psychology from Winthrop University (South Carolina, U.S.) and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Puerto Rico. Nationally certified and licensed in North Carolina, her expertise includes psychoeducational evaluation, crisis intervention, suicide prevention, and culturally responsive, trauma-informed counselling. Her experience includes roles at Charlotte Mecklenburg, Union, and Gaston County Schools, as well as independent telehealth contracting, providing behaviour support, academic planning, and crisis services for K-12 learners and students with disabilities.

Though school psychology remains a passion, profound personal transformations have reshaped her path. After her mother’s passing, a Shared Death Experience (SDE) and After-Death Communications (ADCs) sparked a spiritual awakening, turning her focus to transpersonal phenomena. Now pursuing a PhD in Applied Transpersonal Psychology through the Alef Trust and Liverpool John Moores University collaborative, she seeks to advance rigorous scholarship on human consciousness, enriching epistemology and illuminating the unseen to foster healing and deeper understanding of human potential. Gildrette’s current interests centre on anomalous and transpersonal phenomena — ADCs, NDEs, lucid dreaming, psi phenomena, and meditative altered states — alongside everyday meaningful synchronicities such as recurring numbers and vivid manifestations.

PhD research

Gildrette’s doctoral research, “The Effects of Induced After-Death Communication through Lucid Dreaming on Grief and Spiritual Wakefulness,” explores how proficient lucid dreamers experience and intentionally cultivate after-death communication (ADC) with deceased loved ones as a pathway for grief resolution and spiritual growth. Rooted in her own Shared Death Experience (SDE) and subsequent ADCs following her mother’s passing, the project frames bereavement as a portal to expanded consciousness, integrating Steve Taylor’s “transformation through turmoil” paradigm with continuing-bonds theory.

Adopting a trauma-informed, mixed-methods design across two phases, the study first employs phenomenological inquiry (retrospective interviews and prospective real-time explorations) with experienced lucid dreamers (LDers). The second phase co-develops and pilots a safe induction protocol with a small cohort of proficient LDers, assessing feasibility alongside exploratory outcomes in grief intensity and spiritual wakefulness.

Building directly on Tadas Stumbrys’ pioneering empirical work on lucid dream induction, spiritual transcendence, and healing applications, this research bridges transpersonal psychology and bereavement studies, offering novel, ethically grounded insights into lucid dreaming as a self-directed modality for healing and epistemological advancement.