Of lives and dreaming
May. 20th, 2020 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootA post from a friend on the subject of reincarnation: https://www.facebook.com/caitlinmatthews.author/posts/10158427535538967
I don't know what to make of this subject; recovered memory can't always be trusted, regression is questionable, and god knows how much inadequacy is covered with wannabe past life celebrities. None the less strange memories that are not memories arise. I tend to treat my dreams as a land of Other, a hidden country... The sunken cathedral, the old city, the yellow castle... But some places feel different within that paradigm, the place where the water runs uphill, now associated in my mind with somewhere real in Germany. The land behind the Alhambra that doesn't exist in the form I see it. Real places and times overlayed with dweomers of the mind.
One day in the 90s I found myself staying overnight at Moscow airport. Getting off the plane (Aeroflot; an adventure in itself) I heard a voice say 'welcome home.' The place was poor, it stank of urine, tanks were said to be on the streets and the rubel was worth nothing outside the country, but for all that I found myself wanting to stay rather than go on to Kathmandu in the morning. I liked the place, with no particular sense of its history or culture.
I dismissed the comment heard as the kind of batty experience that makes up so much of my life, and did not stay, for all my regrets about it. 20 years later I learn of a connection via DNA to these lands, and while fascinated, don't forget that our DNA traces an endless story that wanders the whole Earth. A similar experience occurred when I landed in California, and dismissed that as my internal anthropomorphism (is that a word?) of a warm bright day bathed in the optimism of a different country, deep as thunder, bright as the sun. Having said that, years later, a (the!) robustly skeptical boyfriend had a very odd experience. I knew of it because I was woken by a half-yelp half-scream, and there he was staring at me.
He told me he had woken up and turned over to see me watching him.
'But it wasn't you,' he said, 'it looked like some, I don't know, some Native American woman.' He shook his head. ' Your eyes were open, it was so...Freaky. Freaky dream. But I was awake.'
We talked it away as a freaky dream, because what else could it be? But he was very shaken in the way that only a stern rationalist can be when faced with something that makes no sense. And it really doesn't. To everyone's relief I didn't take this as a sign to go invest in sage sticks and dreamcatchers.
I get a lot of strange experiences in my head and beyond. Told my aunt and my mother about them in case I was becoming mentally ill. They laughed their heads off.
'When the voices start telling you to do things, especially when those things are bad or make no sense, you come tell us,' they said. 'This is just a little girl's imagination.' But long before my mother's symptoms became acute, Dad was teasing her about the little faces she saw in the cracks of wood, in the folds of curtains.
'Fairies?' she said, 'I do not know why you are so obsessed with them. Ugly little things, ignore them.'
I don't know what to make of this subject; recovered memory can't always be trusted, regression is questionable, and god knows how much inadequacy is covered with wannabe past life celebrities. None the less strange memories that are not memories arise. I tend to treat my dreams as a land of Other, a hidden country... The sunken cathedral, the old city, the yellow castle... But some places feel different within that paradigm, the place where the water runs uphill, now associated in my mind with somewhere real in Germany. The land behind the Alhambra that doesn't exist in the form I see it. Real places and times overlayed with dweomers of the mind.
One day in the 90s I found myself staying overnight at Moscow airport. Getting off the plane (Aeroflot; an adventure in itself) I heard a voice say 'welcome home.' The place was poor, it stank of urine, tanks were said to be on the streets and the rubel was worth nothing outside the country, but for all that I found myself wanting to stay rather than go on to Kathmandu in the morning. I liked the place, with no particular sense of its history or culture.
I dismissed the comment heard as the kind of batty experience that makes up so much of my life, and did not stay, for all my regrets about it. 20 years later I learn of a connection via DNA to these lands, and while fascinated, don't forget that our DNA traces an endless story that wanders the whole Earth. A similar experience occurred when I landed in California, and dismissed that as my internal anthropomorphism (is that a word?) of a warm bright day bathed in the optimism of a different country, deep as thunder, bright as the sun. Having said that, years later, a (the!) robustly skeptical boyfriend had a very odd experience. I knew of it because I was woken by a half-yelp half-scream, and there he was staring at me.
He told me he had woken up and turned over to see me watching him.
'But it wasn't you,' he said, 'it looked like some, I don't know, some Native American woman.' He shook his head. ' Your eyes were open, it was so...Freaky. Freaky dream. But I was awake.'
We talked it away as a freaky dream, because what else could it be? But he was very shaken in the way that only a stern rationalist can be when faced with something that makes no sense. And it really doesn't. To everyone's relief I didn't take this as a sign to go invest in sage sticks and dreamcatchers.
I get a lot of strange experiences in my head and beyond. Told my aunt and my mother about them in case I was becoming mentally ill. They laughed their heads off.
'When the voices start telling you to do things, especially when those things are bad or make no sense, you come tell us,' they said. 'This is just a little girl's imagination.' But long before my mother's symptoms became acute, Dad was teasing her about the little faces she saw in the cracks of wood, in the folds of curtains.
'Fairies?' she said, 'I do not know why you are so obsessed with them. Ugly little things, ignore them.'
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2020-05-22 03:27 pm (UTC)I think, yes. The memories no longer exist as discrete quanta (if that makes any sense at all! 😀) except for the very young and maybe a handful of really exceptional older folk.
But the connections exist. For example: The way that you and R and I instantly bonded made me think that we had all three had had a closer connection in a previous existence.
Your friend sounds like a very interesting person!
Michael's a character! Rather unapologetically idiocyncratic, which caused frictions, as you may imagine, in his marriage to my beloved Barbara.
He has an amazing ability to compartmentalize, and I suspect that's what's allowed him to deal with his voices.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-23 06:22 am (UTC)It certainly felt very easy, warm, with none of the awkwardness one might expect from people meeting for the first time. Something extremely special in that connection!