Chapter 1 Going back 20 years
Deja vù - I have been there before. I have seen it some-place - touched it somewhere and, yes, I have heard it, too. I know this sounds crazy, but I simply knew the outcome of this whole situation. for one fleeting moment, our thoughts stray into an unfamiliar zone, get locked out there in time - shutters opening, closing. We feel a bit queer, somehow out of focus, wonder what happened.
Well, I have experienced this play-back sensation, I went back in time for a heartbeat or two and, as you can imagine, it was not any place nearby, where I relived the moment, but it wasn't as far as you might think neither - not at the turn of the century, the middle ages, the change of the millennium.
Of course, I myself don't doubt that I appeared on this planet before, was here when great changes took place, a fresh wind started to blow. I have lived on this earth more than once - of that I am sure - for I have looked back from time to time, got a glimpse of a former life - admittedly not often, not on a regular basis. I certainly can't tune into former incarnations at will. But I have had vivid flashbacks in my dreams at times - enough to convince me that I walked on this planet before. Not that I ever asked for them, prayed for them -not made to order at all. On the contrary, they kind of forced themselves into my dreams, shook me up, swept over me like fire and left me feeling burnt.
But this is not the Déjà vu I am talking about, for nothing in these impressions of former incarnations resembled anything I had ever encountered in this life, except the faces of people who are close to me now. I clearly recognized them, in their unfamiliar settings—strange garb and all. For I may have been the same person through different incarnations, but I always wore a different shell, another mantle-—roughly woven, finely spun. I have walked many miles in different shoes, on bare feet, and whatever happened on the way brought rise to the same emotions in me as it would now. Through the ages I have felt the same affections, love, grief, anger, hurt, but I did not react as I would now. That's how I know I have come a long way through time. My reactions, responses, tell me that I have learned many lessons. I am a different person. I may have worn my feelings on my sleeve once, but not now. During the wanderings of my soul I seem to have been preoccupied with one lesson: to get my reactions under control, not to feed fire with fire, counter flaring tempers with angry words, but let it die right there - with the other, who stirs up the air with fury and scorn, and I believe it took me many lifetimes and a few years of the present one to learn this. No, the déjà vu I have in mind did not come to me through the ages, from lifetimes long past, when I was richer and more powerful or poorer and more desolate than now. The Deja vu reached out to me from the pages of forgotten dreams, gathering dust in a dark corner of my attic.
Did I have any intentions to go back twenty years to the beginnings of my recorded dreams? I doubt it, for I used to be a sloppy record keeper. I did not even know if the accumulated loose pages were still complete and intact. They had survived several moves—yellowing pages with smudgy ink-written, sometimes blurry passages—bundles of then. I really don't think I would have hunted for their whereabouts again. It seemed such an arduous task. I had a collection of more recent dreams dating back several years to a time when I decided all these loose pages won't do. Henceforth, I had started to put them in binders to have a neatly bound "dream package" at my finger tips in the future, easy to read, more fun to get back to than these old time-worn accounts. What good could they do me, outdated as they were by now? I had gleaned from them what seemed important or relevant at the time-—quite a lot of it, as I remember--but what could they possibly contain at this point in my life that would make all the trouble of sorting them out worthwhile.
What I got from this sloppy record, unexpectedly, was a heck of a deja vu. But deja vu was not the only thing hidden away in these pages. once I started to wipe the dust from the brittle paper and stirred up the sleeping spores, I made myself take it all in — part of the twenty years that had almost been forgotten, stored up there under the roof with all the junk. Once it ends up in the attic, who ever looks at it again? And when I began to read, it dawned on me why many people simply close off the gates to their past. A stray thought to take us back to a funny or happy event of "old and better times" is different from bringing it all up again—the good and the bad, the ups and downs—day by day—with their hopes and despair, the things that had been right and not so right in our "dream house in the suburbs." I suddenly realized why the material had lain there all these years, why I had buried my dreams and part of my past under a layer of dust, in a safe place-completely out of sight.
A big chunk of my life was closely intertwined with the dreams—reality and dreams often intersecting—being observed, compared, analyzed. In the process, I had faced myself, had held family and friends under a microscope, everyone I knew seemed to have travelled through the dream slot at one time or another. Looking at it all again was painful. I may have been a sloppy record keeper, but I had been thorough. Even the little scraps of paper with dreams scribbled hastily on whatever I could find time for during my stays in Europe had survived the trips and the years, tucked away within the pages of a different format. And I had written down all the things most people would skip, who would keep it light instead, so they’d have a happy diary to took back to later on—simply keep a lot of it blank, when depressing days come along. But there were no blank areas in my recollections. Until I traced my dream record back to its beginnings, I had not realized what a conscientious record keeper I had been. And again I was struck by the shadow side of the zones the dreamer will travel through. Often he doesn't care for the shreds he remembers in the morning, so he resists, backs at recall, unprepared to digest troubling material. For in my experience the problems of today, tomorrow, of next week, the disappointments, aggravation, negative emotions that get in the way of our enjoyment, our tranquility, seem to invade the nightly stage often, they have a way of stirring up the dream landscape with much more force, more lasting power than dreams of a soothing and rosy nature. Whatever causes strong reactions in us, makes us boil, resent, gives us grief, appears to hog much of our dreams. Happy events, smooth sailing, do not always cause a ripple strong enough to be carried into the waking state. They have a way of staying submerged, while turbulence forges its way to the top, wedges itself into our memory bank.
Surely, it was no coincidence, not strange at all, that my "non-dreaming" friends suddenly started to dream up a storm, when they entered a stormy period in their life. As soon as they faced the blast of opposition, hostility, falsehood, were haunted by losses, sickness, or up to their necks in trouble of their own or someone else's making, they came to me with their dreams, obviously troubled by their meaning. Come "sun up” their recall would start to wane. Probably for a good reason - they were sick and tired of their dreams. But I never quit. And that is how the reflections began to clear, the echo became stronger. I became receptive because I was willing to travel through the dark regions as well as the well lit areas, the sun and the fun zones.
Chapter 2: Strange how it all happened
Strange how it all happened. It might lead you to suspect that I am not your average, every day dreamer. But then who is? All those “non-dreaming” readers out there, who can’t remember a thing when they wake up, do they receive stimuli and promptings in their sleep, as I do, and are often influenced, guided by them, without remembering what came in? Perhaps they are simply letting their dreams get away from them, but not their effect. Have you ever wondered what they are spun from? Your unremembered dreams, I mean - from the golden thread of elation, of wonder, or the dark shades of gloom and depression - gray and black mixed together. Have you ever given any thought to what might be responsible for your mood when you wake up? Isn’t there sometimes the lingering feeling, the vague notion, that your dreams of the night had something to do with this feeling of exuberance, or the great sadness that comes upon you when you rub the sleep from your eyes? Has it occurred to you that you might have been sailing along on the rosy cloud of expectation and promise for tomorrow or fallen into the abyss of a rejection the next few days or weeks hold in store for you.
There may, indeed, be good reasons for blocking, for not wanting to remember or to know what lies ahead. For that's what we are often ducking from, when we turn our back on our dreams — we simply don't want to deal with the feeling ahead of time that there may be trouble brewing around the corner or right there by our kitchen hearth. I myself have wished to block out recall at times. Certainly on the numerous occasions when sickness announced itself on the dark and raging winds of the funnel cloud — the tornado - always a threat to the dreamer — with me in its path, scurrying for shelter. That’s the time I resented this whole recall business, wanted to learn how to forget. But I only wanted temporary forgetfulness, just to reign in the recall for a bit. Indeed, why would anyone want to remember a specter, the harbinger of harmful vibrations, an advancing threat of bacterial infection, invasion of the virus, a weak constitution buckling again under too much stress? Take your pick and know, whatever it is, looms right there by your door step, not years, or even months away.
The disasters of nature in a dream seem to have a lot to do with the inevitable, the predestined course which, through the ages, have been man's lot to bear. Man may have learnt to predict them, spot them from a distance, but he can do little to change their path. All he can do is prepare himself, duck, run, seek shelter, if available, or dig himself in and wait for the best. Thus, nature’s wrath may be chosen by the subconscious as a symbol of sickness or accidents which have to be faced as our share of life's troubles. They are not announcements for a distant future, but more or less seem to portend something that hangs in the air already. Our subconscious can feel trouble approaching days before we notice the first signs, or feel the sudden impact.
There is good reason for taking the bad tidings with the good. Even the unsettling message born on the wings of turbulent winds often carries in its wake the glimmer of hope — the course of sickness, its outcome, symbolically indicated by the availability of shelter. The hopeful note of the dream comes from the refuge we find — solid underground the best, cure assured within a reasonable time, perhaps a mild bout - make-shift not quite so favorable, health problems with dragging feet and, of course, this has not happened to me yet—it's left to the imagination: a completely different finale, possibly indicating the tolling of the bells -— no shelter at all, the crushing force of the storm carrying the dreamer off to another destination.
3. chapter
What about the greatest adversary of all?
What then about the greatest adversary of all-—this dark thing most of us block out of our thoughts and don’t want to confront in our dreams neither, while others become obsessed with it, see it lurk in every corner, grow totally enamored with its mystery, can’t wait to meet it face to face? They dare to play Russian Roulette with the invisible foe. What about this death, the poet's pal, who wants to grip his readers, "der Tod", ferocious and abundant, most bloody and fierce, having a heyday on today's silver screen in its most violent form? What is his herald in a dream? The grim reaper, a rider of the apocalypse, a grave? Does it mean zap, when we see another person dead, come across our own lifeless form? Are we dealing with “goners”? Not at all! I have had a number of death dreams-—20 years of dreaming cover a long time with many different experiences—and I can report all those dead bodies are still alive, - as we will see, death in a dream is usually a curable disease. However, its appearance serves an important purpose — we should never ignore it.
Yet the "real thing”, as we will find, might announce itself in various, possibly rather innocuous disguises and simply indicate he has an eye on someone we know by assigning him a blank slot in our dreams, taking him out of the picture, so to speak, blotting him out of his rightful place, where he should, by all expectations, present himself. However, if the "doomed” persons play an important role in our life-—be it negative or positive, a constant source of trouble or of good fortune to us—-we will have, through the years, more than one dream which reflects their passing and the circumstances surrounding it. And one of these impressions may also be ominous enough to make us suspect that death has just shown us his calling card, with a name or a face attached to it. If our recall is spotty, this may also be precisely the dream we remember, the one with the dark cast.
It's a startling discovery to go back so many years and to find out that we tuned into the present or the most recent past sporadically many years ago. This “deja vu" makes us realize with a shock "we just lived through this”. Somehow the major events or even some trivial moment of the last year had found their way into our dream diary perhaps 15 or even twenty years ago in some surprisingly prophetic dreams, perhaps at a time when we were only novice dream explorers and had the foolish notion we could penetrate the different dream zones, with their subgroups, in no time. Many years later comes the realization that we will be life-long students. Our time on earth with its many upheavals seems to require the use of additional keys every so often to decipher dreams, which reflect these changes and mirror our personal growth or the spiritual retardation that can go hand in hand with pursuit of material things, the drive and haste to accumulate - not really for enjoyment at all anymore, but for accumulation's sake. We judge ourselves in our dreams. An active subconscious can shake our conscience mightily, using disturbing dreams as a tool, as a sharp instrument to cut right through this layer of "junk” we keep acquiring, hording, guarding until it does something to us. It begins to own us. Certainly, one thing we never would have guessed at the onset of our fascination is the long distance dreams travel through time. A "Nostradamus Peek" through the decades? Impossible, not for us, not for ordinary people. Consequently, hard as we may try, we won't be able to embrace this elusive "science" within a time limit of our choosing. Part of what we dream is too far out in the future to be understood at the moment of entry. We have to accept that we will age while we learn, study, analyze, compare and interpret. We will become old students. The timeless nature of the dream can throw us off track again and again—-the "when” remaining the biggest puzzle of all.
Surely, we would be most reluctant to let the thought cross our mind that we may have to wait for the playback, the real happening of an excitingly wonderful dream until middle age, which holds so little promise for the young. The applause of an audience, which has repeatedly resounded in our ears when we woke up from a recurring dream, may not happen until we are in our golden years. We will have to wait for the woman with the gentle smile, who keeps showing up in our dreams, until our third or fourth try at marriage. The stranger with the distinguished face, who has made our heart beat faster than any man we ever met in real life, may be the companion of our twilight years. Who wants to wait? Waiting for the good stuff until one is too old to enjoy it, is not one of life's cruel jokes, it is one of its rewards. It's neat to get it any time. Unknown to the young, joi de vivre is not a matter of age at all -- the extent to which it can be experienced is a very individual thing.
Even the spinster getting on in years may still get to know it. What is the secret of her smile, of her apparent contentment? Well, she has simply seen herself repeatedly as a happy bride in front of the altar in vision-like dreams—-always the same, decked out in white. Somehow she has known all along there is a bridegroom in her cards, the right one, the perfect match for her, not just any man to walk down the isle with, but the one worth waiting for. She realizes nobody believes her. "Who would want her at her age, when nobody asked for her hand before? That's what they are saying behind her back, but when her time comes to speak the well rehearsed dream words "I do", she decides to wear white--not just to show them a thing or two, all these doubters who sold her short instead of giving her credit for the good sense not to rush into anything—-nor to indicate her virgin estate, for nothing is further from her mind. What she wants most of all is to live up to this dream image of herself that has sustained her through the years of waiting-—beautifying veil and all.
And that, of course, is the fascinating thing about the promising dream, the long-term forecast of a brighter future, better things to come. It has a way of surfacing at a time when the conscious mind is weary and in no mood to perceive of improvements, when the dreamer has capitulated, is stagnating, seems resigned to the idea that "this is it." There is a reason for that. The dream is not only one of promise for tomorrow, but also one of comfort for today. Strange thing! I did not even remember that I had them at some of the most desperate moments of my life. I found them only "when I looked back.”
Chapter 3: Deja vu
The dream as possible cause of a flash-back in years to come, would have to be not only precognitive and literal in nature, but most likely also have the makings of a long term forecast to get lost in time as it does. This would explain why it is so easy to miss the connection between source and reflection. Even though I had tuned into different phases of a distant future and also have lived long enough "to put the pieces together," the deejay vu quality of impressions set so far apart in time and fragmented to begin with, would have been lost forever, if I had not “kept book of my dreams”--the first order of the day for someone who wants “to get some place as a dreamer". But even that would not have mattered since I had no intentions to tackle "outdated” material. It seemed fated to oblivion in the attic and eventually would have fallen victim to a thorough house cleaning act. But, quite out of the blue, I began to worry about the material and its whereabouts. Something stirred me to action. As a matter of fact, I got a shove to locate it from a dream, a different kind of dream, and there are many kinds. A recurring dream, remembered or not, can get us to move, to become aware, can put us into a state of alert. Whatever it is that triggers our responsiveness to something not clearly spelled out, it hard to pin down. It seems to have no name, Let’s call it a “subconscious Shove”. At any rate, it was such subconscious prodding, a silent, but irresistible call demanding action, that got me to go back to the past and end up in the present and, I assume, eventually somewhere in the future, for the trail is timeless.
Why does the deejay vu lead to so much speculation? Why does it burst so suddenly into our consciousness and evaporate just as fast? Instead of having been there all along, it comes and goes like a bird in flight. All of a sudden, I understood. I could not possibly have remembered the original entries all this time, because they had appeared out of context before, had come to me with a question mark in the first place, mere “cut-outs” from an actual life scene, foreseen in forgotten dreams, albeit some with remarkable detail, chock full of clues really, but only at a backward glance, when they can be pieced together. At the moment of entry they simply do not click, our subconscious just has skipped a number of years in our life, has taken a quantum leap through time and snatched a piece from the future, a tiny forlorn fragment to wedge into the landscape of our dreams. At a loss as to what to do with this, the conscious mind simply pushes the input back into the recesses of the subconscious. Yet during the repeat performance, there can be a flash, when dormant impressions break through the barrier and assume a half-life for one brief moment of recognition. Our memory is kindled. We know "we have walked through this door before". But where and when? Our thoughts start to scramble hither and thither, trying to pin this down, put it together, affix a date to it, set it down in the proper location, use our reason to comprehend this, but we can't. The deejay vu is as puzzling and elusive as the well it sprang from, the dream which gives us the detail, but not the whole story and therefore has been buried by our busy conscious mind as useless, stashed away some place where all the stuff goes we can't use, don't want to bother with, all the things that are not related to anything of interest to us in our hectic lives.
This, of course, would not rule out the deejay vu as a flashback from a former life. While I have found that most of my dreams deal with the present and near future, often focus on problems of today or tomorrow, on worries laying in wait as yet imperceptible to the conscious mind, I realize in retrospect that more entries than I had ever expected had come from a future slot. But some of them have taken me way back in time—-into a different body, an alien setting, once a different skin and sex, and I believe, I always went back for a reason, not because it is the in-thing to do. I returned for answers to present barriers, for better understanding of present relationships, to some traumatic, chilling moment of the past and experienced the same sense of tragedy and loss, I once must have felt. I was still reeling from the impact upon waking. If we can gain better understanding of today's perplexing problems by review of the past, we will be taken back as far as is necessary, to our childhood or even beyond. If we can "see" fragments of the future, tune into things we never knew were out there, the backward trail to events that have molded, perfected or crippled us, almost seems like a matter of course. Recognizing unfamiliar places, feeling strange attractions, great kinship with strangers, would certainly not rule out the dream as a vehicle to carry the flash-back through time. The sensation "he is no stranger—I have seen his face before," may be an echo of an ancient past which has echoed through our dreams as well.
Usually we are not forced to travel that far back in time to locate the origin of a shadow we can’t shake. Most likely it roosts much closer to home. Inhibitions and weaknesses we find so hard to overcome are often not barriers of the moment, but always seem to have been there, bugging us, making us self conscious. Certain fears, a lack of decisiveness, image problems, things we cannot quite understand about ourselves, often date back to our childhood, our teens. We may think: we finally left them behind—-we are free, and then this situation arises everyone else seems to handle with aplomb, but there we are, just as before, sweaty palms, dry mouth, aflutter with anxiety. The subconscious via the dream route, may search out the point in the past, where it all started. Through these confrontations we may discover that we did not fare that bad¬badly. We overcame some mighty hurdles. I have learnt through my dreams that a war which robbed me in many ways, did more than take father, brother and all possessions, did more than leave me a "have-not" for years. It cast me in a mold from which I could not escape. All this at a time when girls worry about dates or the clothes to wear to a prom. It wasn't that I did not feel pretty or that I didn't know I was bright, but I did not think I was desirable because I underestimated what I had and overestimated what was missing. I tried to see myself through other people’s eyes, and the result was a pleasant enough picture, without an impressive frame, and therefore only worth half its value. Now I can understand much better why I have often attracted people with problems, or those who are going through hard times, why I felt more at home with people who needed me than the other way around. Getting back in touch with my past through my dreams, made me realize that I emerged from the ruins of a war with less expectations and more limitations than I might otherwise have had, and through the brief, but dramatic glimpses of former lives, I learnt why it had to be that way and no other. Life, our greatest teacher, gave me major lessons in humility and compassion early on by letting me experience firsthand “how it is to be without.”
Of course, many people don't turn on to searching around in the past for clues to what makes them tick now. Looking for insights beyond that, as far back as former lives, leaves them completely cold. Having had a short but meaningful verbal exchange with a spirit in a dream, dear as the departed may have been to them in the flesh, gives them the creeps. Heaven forbid! These are future oriented people. Precognition gets their attention. Fortune tellers have made fortunes on the premise that people pay for good news. As long as the bad forecast is for someone else, they can take that too-—the chill down the spine caused by predictions of misfortune taking place in someone else's home, is bearable. It doesn't penetrate right down to the marrow.
But precognition in dreams, as we will find, is often not clear cut. It can be so elusive that we don't know we are looking into the future. It can be a very complex occurrence in dreams, somewhat like the pattern for a dressmaker, who has to assemble all the pieces of a rare cloth and sow them together to come up with the striking dress she visualizes. It might take her a year because there is not enough material left for an essential part, like one of the sleeves-—somewhere along the line she has to locate a source which can provide the matching material. Such can be the fragmentary nature of precognition in a dream that it might lead to guessing, and guessing, In turn, to distortion and misunderstanding. But even with these drawbacks, it is still a marvelous thing that we can "foresee" anything at all, that the subconscious has the power to cover time and space.
What we can see ahead of time pales in importance to what we can change. The guiding and warning dream transcends that what is fixed and offers us the flexible, the dough like, that can still be molded or altered by our alertness, our own ingenuity. We can knock our heads in on the "hard stuff”. It won’t make a dent. Much better to roll with the punches. But the guiding dream often offers us a choice by taking us to that important fork, where we have to make a decision. It allows us to "see” what will happen if we take the wrong turn. Our subconscious simply lets us "tune” into the upsetting consequences of choosing the wrong route. The importance of such a dream cannot be overestimated. It is the most valuable tool to the right selection of alternatives. However, the dreamer has to know what to look for. Once he is alerted to the tell-tale signs and learns how to put two and two together, it will help him in many life situations, big or small, where an alternative is offered at all. Sometimes he may not even be aware of a different course, blindly, obsessively, hung up on a single-minded objective which will be costly to him or have a negative impact on his life for a long time to come. Particularly if an ideal solution does not exist, he may totally overlook the way out. It may simply not come to mind. Also, it may appear costly, too time-consuming, may smack too much of giving in, of being too obliging, too subservient, it may simply go against his grain. But "his way" may have repercussions and pitfalls his conscious mind could not possibly perceive.
Have you ever thought what comes upon you when you rub the sleep from your eyes? Has it occurred to you that you might have been sailing along on the rosy cloud of expectation and promise for tomorrow or fallen into the abyss of a rejection the next few days or weeks hold in store for you. There may, indeed, be good reasons for blocking, for not wanting to remember or to know what lies ahead. For that's what we are often ducking from, when we turn our back on our dreams — we simply don't want to deal with the feeling ahead of time that there may be trouble brewing around the corner or right there by our kitchen hearth. I myself have wished to block out recall at times. Certainly on the numerous occasions when sickness announced itself on the dark and raging winds of the funnel cloud — the tornado - always a threat to the dreamer — with me in its path, scurrying for shelter. That’s the time I resented this whole recall business, wanted to learn how to forget. But I only wanted temporary forgetfulness, just to reign in the recall for a bit. Indeed, why would anyone want to remember a specter, the harbinger of harm¬harmful vibrations, an advancing threat of bacterial infection, invasion of the virus, a weak constitution buckling again under too much stress? Take your pick and know, whatever it is, looms right there by your door step, not years, or even months away.
The disasters of nature in a dream seem to have a lot to do with the inevitable, the predestined course which, through the ages, have been man's lot to bear. Man may have learnt to predict them, spot them from a distance, but he can do little to change their path. All he can do is prepare himself, duck, run, seek shelter, if available, or dig himself in and wait for the best. Thus, nature’s wrath may be chosen by the subconscious as a symbol of sickness or accidents which have to be faced as our share of life's troubles. They are not announcements for a distant future, but more or less seem to portend something that hangs in the air already. Our subconscious can feel trouble approaching days before we notice the first signs, or feel the sudden impact.
There is good reason for taking the bad tidings with the good. Even the unsettling message born on the wings of turbulent winds often carries in its wake the glimmer of hope — the course of sickness, its outcome, symbolically indicated by the availability of shelter. The hopeful note of the dream comes from the refuge we find — solid underground the best, cure assured within a reasonable time, perhaps a mild bout - make-shift not quite so favorable, health problems with dragging feet and, of course, this has not happened to me yet—it's left to the imagination: a completely different finale, possibly indicating the tolling of the bells -— no shelter at all, the crushing force of the storm carrying the dreamer off to another destination.
What then about the greatest adversary of all-—this dark thing most of us block out of our thoughts and don’t want to confront in our dreams neither, while others become obsessed with it, see it lurk in every corner, grow totally enamored with its mystery, can’t wait to meet it face to face?
Impressum
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 22.02.2014
ISBN: 978-3-7309-8575-5
Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Widmung:
To those I love - we will meet again. - not just for a visit, but when we do, it will be forever