Far Memory: Lessons in Time Travel, Bilocation and Seership from Joan Grant

She is conceived in the Blue Grotto on Capri, with Carabinieri standing guard over the site. This is because her parents, traveling in royal style, are mistaken for British Royals visiting Italy incognito. So Joan Grant begins the story of her life in her memoir Far Memory.
    I discovered her through her novel Winged Pharaoh which takes us vividly into a life lived in early dynastic Egypt by a girl who is trained as a dream seer in a temple of Anubis and grows to become a warrior-queen defending her country against invaders. This remains my favorite book on the practice of dreaming in ancient Egypt, though academic Egyptologists may cavil at some of its contents. It was a bestseller in its day, and the author initially kept mum about the fact that her novel, for her, was not fiction, but “far memory” of a past life in Egypt, triggered when she was allowed to handle a blue scarab. Much of the content came through in channeling sessions recorded by her then husband.
    I first picked up her memoir Far Memory to clarify how Joan Grant received her knowledge of ancient Egypt, and of other lives in other cultures. I recently re-read it, for the sheer pleasure of its bouncy narrative and to follow, in closer detail, how central the author’s own practice of dreaming became to her gifts as a writer, a psychic and a time traveler.
    As a young child, she remembered other lives. She dreamed of a French girl who died in Paris under the guillotine, and knew – through dreaming that experience – that “beheading does not hurt at all.” She received visitations from her deceased grandmother. 
    When her father took her to  a subway station on a family visit to New York, she glimpsed the remains of a man who had thrown himself in front of a train. She dreamed that she met this man, and took the form of the daughter he loved to comfort him, washing  him clean from blood and whiskey fog, and reattached his severed feet. She did this, not as the child Joan, but as a personality that was living as a girl born in 1906, with the knowledge of many other lives and a sense of identity that transcended any single body or life situation.
      During World War I, she traveled in dreams to a battlefield, where she took on the body of a Red Cross nurse, carrying out orders to deal with casualties in one of two ways: to explain to soldiers who had just been killed that they were “safely dead”, or to encourage the wounded to return to bodies that were not yet due to die.  “I had to get close, so close to the person I was trying to help that I became part of him: feeling, seeing, fearing as he did, until I could slowly instill my own faith in him.”
     And she wakes from these dreams in the body of a girl who is now eleven and can’t get the adults around her, apart from the occasional servant, to take her dreams seriously. The disconnect is so great that for a time she seeks to cut herself off from her dreams. But this plan can’t prosper because dreaming is a vital part of her calling. She starts getting confirmation of things she has dreamed but could not otherwise know about. Finding a young man in uniform alone at the breakfast table, she dares to tell him the dream from which she has just awakened in which she was with a soldier named McAndrew when he was killed. She describes his regimental badge and the slang name his unit gave to their trench. The officer at the table identifies the regiment as Canadian, and after checking is able to confirm all the details of the dream, the name of the soldier who was killed, even the slang name of the trench.
    She makes dream excursions, and she receives visitations. Jennie, her deceased grandmother, gives her music lessons and plays through her hands – an obscure piece that a Cambridge professor recognizes because Jennie played it for him. The sheet music no longer exists, and Joan could not know the piece in any ordinary way. “Quite extraordinary but completely evidential,” pronounces C.G.Lamb, the professor of engineering and amateur psychical researcher, giving her encouragement both to grow her clairvoyant gifts and to pursue academic studies.
    Another mentor was H.G. Wells, a house guest at Seacourt, her father’s immense estate on Hayling Island. Wells urged her to write – which she had not considered – while insisting that “you must live in order to write about living”.
    She dreams of places before she goes there, and of events unfolding at a distance in space or time. The night before Esmond, the lover she plans to marry, is due to return to her, she dreams he is staring at something on the floor, puzzled and angry. In the morning the news comes that he killed himself, apparently accidentally, cleaning his revolver. Later, she dreams of a kind of honeymoon with him in a beautiful environment he says is another planet, and delights in the kind of body she can enjoy here. “It was a material body, obeying a less stringent law of gravity, able to run faster, to leap higher, to swim farther under water, but still in its own place equally solid as the one I re-entered on waking.” She is startled when Esmond tells her that dream visitors aren’t especially welcome here. The residents call them ghosts, ‘earth-ghosts”.
    She develops the discipline of a real dreamer. She wakes herself several times during the night in order to record her dreams. She learns to distinguish “true dreams” from “the fustian and tinsel so dear to psychoanalysis”. In “true dreams”, she travels across time and space. She is with people at a distance . She visits the future. She enters or reenters life experiences of other personalities.
    In her development of “far memory” of those other lives, psychometry – the art of receiving impressions while handling a physical object – becomes increasingly important, after she first establishes that she can do it. But first and last, in the education of Joan Grant, is the dreaming. Reading her, we are reminded of just how important and just how practical this is. We urgently need many more people who can do pyschopomp work of the kind Joan narrates, helping the dead to find their way, and the best training for this is in dreaming, as I explain in my own "manual for the psychopomp" (Part III of Dreamgates) and in my Dreamer's Book of the Dead.

She was quite Egyptian in her insistence on the survival of a "supra-physical" body as well as the soul, and the possibility that a living individual can have more than one of these vehicles. A true pharaoh of Egypt, as I recall, was credited with having as many as 14 kas. It is "fun" to change your energy template, Grant informs us.

    "Another advantage of having more than one active, current supra-physical [body] is that it makes it easier to appear in two places at once." She gives a personal example. She was worried about a woman who was scheduled to undergo a C-section, an operation considered highly dangerous at the time. Although she could not be with her, she thought of her intently just before the procedure. Later the woman's husband thanked Joan profusely for the visit his wife said she had made, slipping in through the french doors from the hospital garden so as to be unobserved by the nurses, comforting her to the point that her fears dissolved and she slipped gently into a state of natural sedation.
    Joan waited some time after the birth before telling the mother that her visit was not an ordinary physical event. The woman responded, "Thank goodness I didn't know you weren't solid! I should have been simply terrified if I'd known I was seeing a ghost."
    We find this story in a recent collection of her occasional writings titled Speaking from the Heart. There are indications in the essays and memoirs here that Joan Grant experimented at least a little with what I find to be two of the most rewarding lines of exploration of our relations with a family of counterpart personalities, living in different times and dimensions. "Two personalities in the same series communicate with each other through their Integral - the Spirit." 

    This suggests that at the hub of many lives, playing out in different worlds, is a higher self that may operate outside time and may facilitate contact between personalities living in different times. We want to try to ascend to the perspective of that higher self, with its view over many times. And we want not only to understand how the legacy of past lives may work in our present lives - and may be healed, when seen for what it is - but how we can reach back across time to heal something in the life of a previous self. 

Ten Books That Gave Roadside Assistance on My Soul Journey

 

Books have been faithful and essential friends all my life. I had a difficult and lonely boyhood, an only child who suffered double pneumonia twelve times between the ages of three and eleven. Books were my portals to realms of imagination and wonder as I lay in the half light of sick rooms. I thrived on good historical novels and on scifi and fantasy.

I like to own paper copies of all the books I read so I can sniff them and caress them and interact with a pencil. I live with an extended book family of around 14,000 volumes. My best finds are often mediated by dreams and by lively shelf elves of the kind that make books materialize and dematerialize in magical ways. My cat Lucy has recently asserted herself as a shelf elf or more - a supervising librarian- on four paws 

Like my favorite writer, Jorge Luis Borges, I sometimes picture paradise as an Infinite library. Like another of my favorite writers, Mircea Eliade, I also know that the most important book I will ever write - and one of the most important I will ever read - is my own journal. Recording dreams, observations and reading reports in my journal is essential daily practice for me.

I was recently invited to identify ten books that have provided guidance and inspiration in my spiritual odyssey and share what was happening in my life when they came to me. My journal was there to remind me what restored my inner compass and put gas in my tank in the critical passages.

 

1

The Odyssey 

Since I was boy, the Odyssey has been my favorite vision of life as a mythic journey. Beyond the thrill of sea monsters and angry gods and one-eyed monsters, the tale of Odysseus, the “man of many ways” is the story of a wounded warrior who is healed in the realm of the Divine Feminine. This is why Robert Graves thought it was created by a woman, and I believe he is right. In the Odyssey we see what it means to travel consciously in the presence of a guiding spirit, in this case the goddess Athena. We see that dreams are a field of interaction between gods and humans and transit lounge between the Otherworld and the physical world. Has it been made clearer anywhere else that the hardest part of the heroic quest is the homecoming? A large part of the epic is devoted to the struggles of the returning traveler to find their feet on home ground. I have used many translations over the years, not least for occasional bibliomancy; my favorite now is the most recent; the clean, spare poetic version by Emily Wilson.

 

2

W.B.Yeats, Collected Poems 

I knew many of Yeats’ poems by heart before I was presented with my first copy of his collected poems at my graduation from Canberra Grammar School as a prize for writing verse.  In his “Song of Wandering Aengus” I thrilled to the bardic voice of one who lived close to the Otherworld, who knew the secrets of shapeshifting and understood soul loss and soul recoveryI learned much more from Yeats’ other writings, especially Mythologies and A Vision and from walking in his footsteps in Ireland, where it is easy to understand his statement that “the visible is the skin of the invisible”. He appeared to me during a shamanic journey, saying “What better guide to the Other Side than a poet?” and I was enchanted to let him play that role in my inner life as I wrote The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead. I learned the truth of his conviction that kindred spirits reach to each other across time and may generate a “mingling of minds”. I shared his experience of a creative daimon that is forever driving us to attempt the things that are most difficult, short of the impossible.

 

3

Dion Fortune, Secrets of Dr Taverner 

She was a true priestess of the Wester Way. I came to her first through her important book Psychic Self-Defence, which is not for the faint-hearted. I proceeded to read, over the years, everything that I could find by her. I was excited to discover that she regarded her fiction as her most important writing on the practice of real magic A character in her novel The Goat-Foot God says that "writers will put things into a novel that they daren't put in sober prose." Dion Fortune herself said "the novels give the practice." While I love The Sea Priestess and her other novels, it is the stories collected in The Secrets of Dr Taverner that I return to again and again. The central character is a soul doctor in tweeds who deals with such complains as reincarnational dramas, astral repercussion, psychic attack, soul theft and energy vampirism. The Taverner stories are both entertaining and a valuable source of practical guidance on psychic protection and spiritual cleansing. In its fictional wrapping, The Secrets of Dr Taverner is a practitioner's casebook and perhaps the most accessible of all Dion Fortune's works for the contemporary reader.

 

4

Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents *

When I moved in the 1980s to a farm on the edge of traditional Mohawk country in upstate New York, because of a hawk and a white oak, I started dreaming in a language I did not know, which proved to be an archaic version of the Mohawk language. The speaker was an ancient arendiwanen, or “woman of power”. Our encounters recalled me to ancient ways of dreaming and healing and gave me immense research assignments. In the way of synchronicity, a used book dealer turned up at my door with all 73 volumes of the Jesuit Relations in the back of his truck. These are the reports of blackrobe missionaries from Indian country in the 17^th century. Read carefully, drawing aside the veils of religious prejudice and fear, we have here an extraordinary source on the spiritual practices of Native Americans in Northeast America at the time of first contact. The Iroquois taught their children that dreams are the single most important source of both practical and spiritual guidance. They believed that dreams show us “the secret wishes of the soul.” In a time of war and imported disease, they recognized dreaming as a key survival tool and sent their dream shamans to scout the future. You’ll find the essential things I learned from the Jesuit reports -and the direct teachings of the Mother of the Wolf Clan who led me to use them – in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the SecretWishes of the Soul.

 

5

C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections 

I discovered Jung in high school and devoured many volumes of his Collected Works when I was an undergraduate. In the midst of my own psychic storms in 1987–1988, I turned to Jung again, to see how he made sense of his own “confrontation with the unconscious.” My main source was Memories, Dreams, Reflections, his life story as recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé. We did not yet have the Red Book, and the memoir is in any event a more accessible account of what was essentially the Underworld ordeal and initiation of a shaman-scholar of the West. Central to Jung’s ability to restore his inner compass was his daily recording of dreams. “Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed” is one of the most helpful statements that has ever been made about dreams and dreamwork, and confirmation for me of the method I was obliged to improvise in my own time of testing. He confirmed for me that engaging with images in your inner life – including the terrifying ones – is a path to healing and self-empowerment. I felt the deep truth of his ringing assertion that “anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.” I write about Jung as “The Dream Shaman of Switzerland” in my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

 

6

Jane Roberts, Seth Speaks 

When I was going through a crisis of spiritual emergence at midlife, a friend prevailed on me to read Seth Speaks, a book channeled by Jane Roberts from an intelligence who describes himself as “ an energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical matter”. Previously somewhat resistant to channeled material, I found myself gifted with the clearest model of multidimensional reality and the multidimensional self that I had encountered. The book was a life ring for me in my efforts to understand and navigate “past life” and parallel life connections. Seth confirmed for me that we may live many existences at one time. We are connected to personalities living in the past and the future and in parallel realities, ane it is all happening Now.  Reincarnation is for real, but only one of many after-death options, and we mustn't get trapped in linear conceptions of karma and in past-life "passion plays" because any past or future is a probable reality that can be accessed and changed Now.

 

7

Joan Grant, Winged Pharaoh 

Winged Pharaoh thrilled me with its vivid depiction of the practices of a dream school in ancient Egypt operating in the precinct of Anubis. Joan Grant published it as a novel, but revealed later that it is actually a book of “far memory” of a life in early dynastic Egypt. We follow Grant’s alter ego, Sekeeta, as she learns to go scouting in dreams to find lost objects, look into the future, observe things happening at a distance, and discover what is going on behind the scenes. As a child, she sleeps with a wax tablet beside her bed, and her first task each morning is to record her dreams. She takes her reports to the priest of Anubis, her dream teacher. Some days she must carry out assignments he gave her inside a dream – for example to bring him a certain flower, or bird feather, or colored bead. She learns to travel in dreaming beyond time and space, to scout the possible future, and to communicate with the deceased. She encounters people who have died and are confused about their condition and moves into the role of psychopomp. In the language of ancient Egypt, a dream (rswt) is literally an “awakening”. Winged Pharaoh reawakened me to what it means to dream like an Egyptian and I have used it as a handbook in guiding others.  

 

8

Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism 

A lifelong student of the medieval Sufi philosophers, French scholar Henry Corbin brought the term Imaginal Realm into currency in the West. In Arabic, the term is Alam al-Mithal and it refers to the realm of true imagination, an order of reality that is at least as real as the physical world, with cities and schools and palaces where human travelers can interact with master teachers. Corbin’s great work Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi is a marvelous essay in visionary spirituality that embodies his driving purpose of helping to free the religious imagination from all types of fundamentalism. Corbin regarded study as a quest. In The Voyage and the Messenger looking back on his scholarly journey, he wrote that “to be a philosopher is to take to the road, never settling down in some place of satisfaction with a theory of the world…The adventure is…a voyage which progresses towards the Light". His books were with me, to anchor and orient, through the incandescent nights when I found myself in dialogue with Persian philosopher mystics and riding with the heaven bird of Persian mythology, the Simurgh. The Man of Light is Corbin’s most accessible work and one to which I return again and again. The subtitle of my book Mysterious Realities is Tales of a Dream Traveler from the Imaginal Realm.

9

W.T. Stead, The Blue Island 

I love the Victorian ghost hunters, especially F.W.H. Myers, W.T. Stead and William James. They were passionately dedicated to producing evidence of the survival of consciousness after physical death that would meet the scientific standards of their day. They promised that after their deaths they would continue their work by trying to communicate in exact detail from the Other Side. Among all the channeled books that resulted, my favorite is The Blue Island,in which Stead (who went down with the Titanic) recounts his early after death experiences to male mediums sitting in the presence of his daughter. As a former journalist, Stead is especially interested in how news is transmitted in the transition zone where he finds himself. He describes a communications center, “an amazingly well organized and businesslike place” constantly filled with ex-physicals. “Those who had on earth believed and those who had not, came to try and wire a message home.” The ones who feel a “heart call” always get priority. They have a system of “travelers”, who can reach receptive minds on Earth. Stead describes how the living can reach to the departed in a similar way. You concentrate on an individual in the spirit world, and if you put enough energy into that thought, the individual you have in mind will feel you and you may be able to open a communications channel. This beautiful little book is one of the essential Western books of the dead.

 

10

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning 

I reread this extraordinary book every few years. A successful Jewish psychiatrist in Vienna, Viktor Frankl was carried off to Auschwitz and reduced to a walking skeleton with a tattoo on his arm. In one of the darkest nightmares of history, he applied his imagination. He grew an impossible dream: of a scene in the future when the Nazis were a memory and he was standing in front of a well-fed audience in a good suit giving a lecture on “The psychology of the Concentration Camps”. In his vision the Nazi evil was so thoroughly destroyed – and he so thoroughly restored – that he could lecture about it from an objective perspective. Frankl not only survived the Holocaust. His dream played out a year after the war, in every detail. I have derived three life-orienting lessons from this. First, that however tough our situation may seem to be, we always have the freedom to choose our attitude, and this can change everything. Second, that our problems, however bad, are unlikely to be quite as bad as the situation of someone who has been sent to a Nazi death camp. That thought may help us to gain perspective, and to stand back from a welter of grief and self-pity and rise to a place where we can start to dream up something better.Third, we can make inner movies, and if they are good enough it is possible that they will play in the theater of the world.

 I look over this list and wonder why it does not include so many other books and authors that have affected me deeply: Albert Camus, Rilke, Herman Hesse, the Upanishads, Dostoyevsky, Christopher Brennan, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Hilda Ellis Davidson, Ursula Le Guin, Mary Oliver, AE (George Russell), the (for me) inescapable Borges and Eliade. Again, my journal shaped my selections, reminding me how certain books converged with critical passages of spiritual emergence in my life, when I needed confirmation even more than inspiration.

*I'm not expecting anyone to read the 73 volumes of the Jesuit Relations that are on my shelves although today you can no doubt find them onlne. I was looking over the books that gave me anchors and life rings in decisive passages in my journey.In this case, I needed confirmation of what I was learning from the Mother of the Wolf Clan I call "Island Woman"in my books. In another book that was very important to me, The Journal of Major John Norton, a half-Cherokee British officer in the war of 1812, I confirmed the historical identity of Island Woman as the grandmother of Molly and Joseph Brant, born Huron (Wendat) and adopted into the Mohawk natoion after she was captured by a Mohawk raiding party aged about five.

 

The Dream School of Anubis

Those who write from true imagination can take us where historical data cannot, into the Magic Library. Among the most intriguing – and to my mind, the most reliable - published sources on the Egyptian way of dreaming are three books that have all been classified as fiction. Two are ancient works; the third is a novel that was very popular in the 1930s but is waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation.
    Apuleius (who was almost certainly a Mystery initiate) chose the mask of a comic novel for The Golden Ass, or the Transformations of Lucius, in which Isis speaks directly to humans in dreams, travelers encounter each other in the dreamspace and dreamers are coached for future events before they manifest.
     In another ancient tale, The Romance of Alexander the Great, pseudo-Callisthenes describes the practice of a sorcerer-king of late Egypt, Nectanebo, who fights battles long-distance and visits others in dreams (not always, alas, for the most evolved purposes).

     Joan Grant’s book Winged Pharaoh (first published in 1937) takes us into the possible reality of the First Dynasty and the dream training of a king’s daughter who becomes co-ruler of Egypt. As she explains in a memoir (Far Memory), the book came to Joan through “far memory” of a possible past life. After a short visit to Egypt, she was shown a collection of Egyptian scarabs in London. When she took the oldest in her hand, she saw vivid scenes of the time and place from which it had come, and then began talking as Sekeeta, the dreaming princess of her story.

    We are dealing here with a visionary narrative that transcends the categories of fiction and nonfiction. The best word to describe it is the Greek term mythistorema, which could be translated as “mythic history” but which I would prefer to render as mythistory – in other words, a true history of something that may or may not have happened but always is.

     The most fascinating element in Joan Grant’s mythistory is the description of a dream school that operates within the temple of Anubis. When she is a small child, Sekeeta’s mother gives her a tiny statue of Anubis – represented as a black hunting dog – and a little painted house for it to live in, and tells her that Anubis is the bringer of dreams to small children.

     When she is a few years older, Sekeeta meets her dream teacher Ney-sey-ra, the priest of Anubis. Her training begins in the dreamspace, when he shows her an open lotus flower and tells her that just as the lotus opens its petals to the sun, she must learn to open the gateway of soul memory to reflect the light. When the scene is played out in waking life the next day, she recalls her dream, which is confirmation to both that she is ready to begin her training.

     She learns to go scouting in dreams to find lost objects, look into the future, observe things happening at a distance, and discover what is going on behind the scenes. Suspicious of a foreign ruler who is visiting the court, she embarks on a dream journey to his country – flying to her target like a bird – and brings back a very detailed and disturbing report that she shares with Pharaoh, her father.

    At the age of twelve, she becomes a full-time student at the dream school, taking up residence in the temple of Anubis. She sleeps on a bed with Anubis heads carved at head and foot. Beside the bed she keeps a wax tablet, and her first task each morning is to record her dreams. Every morning she goes to the priest of Anubis and tells him what she has recorded. Some days she must also carry out assignments he gave her inside a dream – for example to bring him a certain flower, or bird feather, or colored bead. Through practice her memory is trained and sharpened.

    After three years, she undergoes advanced training. On the night of each full moon, she sleeps in total darkness in a room that has been psychically shielded. She undertakes many assignments, visiting distant places and bringing guidance and healing to people on both sides of death. She recounts her dream travelogues to her teacher and he confirms her experiences, adding further details and sometimes suggesting follow-up missions. When she finds herself blocked by a monstrous crocodile, for example, her teacher tells her that this thing was “a creation of the evil one” designed to scare her back into her body and sabotage her work. Next time she must go on, and if the adversary is too strong, she must call to the priest for help.

     Frequently, in her dream travels, she encounters people who have died and are confused about there condition. She meets a man who had been murdered in a wine-shop in Crete, and refused to believe he was dead. Her teacher encourages her to go to the dead man again, gently help to awaken him to his condition, and guide him in the right direction on the paths of the afterlife.

Anubis as psychopomp, on a shroud in the Louvre

     At this point we come fully alive to the intimate connection between dreaming and dying well, and the reason why Anubis is such an appropriate patron of dream travel. As every school child knows, Anubis – most often portrayed as a human figure with the head of a jackal or black dog – is a guardian of the Otherworld, who watches over tombs and mummies and guides souls of the departed to the Hall of Osiris. But Anubis’ significance goes much deeper. As psychopomp, or guide of souls, he is the patron of journeys beyond the body (which is why he is invoked to guard those who have left their bodies under trauma or anesthesia) and everyone journeys beyond the body in death and dreaming, with or without instruction.

     As Sekeeta’s training in the dream school deepens, she takes on more and more work as a psychopomp. One of the most movingly realized scenes in the book is one in which Sekeeta helps a grieving widow who has been crushed by the drowning deaths of her husband and son. Sekeeta advises the woman that she can meet her loved ones in dreams. The woman insists that she does not dream. (How often have we heard this from people we know?) Sekeeta gently insists that, nonetheless, she would like the woman to be open to a dream experience with her loved ones.
     That night, Sekeeta goes out – as a conscious dream traveler – to reintroduce the grieving woman to her husband and son. She enters the woman’s dream space, and finds herself sobbing over the dead bodies of her loved ones, frozen in a past scene of trauma. With the power of her focused intention, Sekeeta bathes the widow in light and lifts the “cloak of grayness” that is preventing her from seeing her husband and son as they now are. There is a loving reunion, and Sekeeta skillfully guides them to a beautiful park-like setting where they can share happy times together.

     This episode is a wonderful glimpse of what compassionate psychopomp work is all about. It seems entirely plausible to me that advanced spirits in ancient Egypt did it this way. I know that gifted dreamers are doing the work in very similar ways today, because many have shared comparable experiences with me during training in our contemporary dream school.     As entertainment, Winged Pharaoh is wonderful fun. But when you read it as an active dreamer, you’ll find that it suggests a whole curriculum of study. The exercises Sekeeta’s dream teacher gives her are ones you can practice with a partner. 

For more on dreaming like an Egyptian, please see The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Anubis mask, late period. Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum, Hildesheim

Washing dishes with Obama

I am having lunch with President Obama at a pleasant, contemporary house of wood and glass that matches its environment, an upscale, lightly wooded development. The trees around the house are mostly aspen and birch, leafless in this season. Our meal is simple, just sandwiches and soft drinks. After we eat, Obama washes dishes in the sink while the other lunch guest dries. I grab a dishcloth, wanting to do something useful, but succeed only in drying a glass.
    The other lunch guest is a young man or teen my own age. I am a high school senior or freshman college student and we have been invited to lunch with the President as a special honor. We are dressed up for the occasion in blazers and ties.
    I find a screwdriver and other tools on the kitchen counter. Obama laughs and remarks that Michelle is an excellent "carpenter" and that in another life she would have been a wonderful tailor. As we walk from the house under the trees, there is no sign of security, but surely the guards are there. I would like to ask the President about this, but I feel a little shy.

I woke from this morning dream after dawn, feeling that I had really been there, though not as my present self.  I was moved by Obama's simplicity and modesty. I could still feel my boyish awkwardness, trying to find something useful to do in the kitchen, still hear the soft crunch of grass and leaves underfoot as we walked outside. I needed a moment to review where I was, who I was and who I had been.

I had been up very very late re-reading Far Memory, the autobiography of Joan Grant, the remarkable British psychic and novelist whose novels (of which my favorite is Winged Pharaoh) were based on her memories and dreams of lives lived in earlier times. In her memoir she describes how from early childhood she remembered her lives in different bodies and this sometimes made it hard for her to accept the confinement of an young child's body and circumstances. I was reminded of my own difficulties of staying in the body of a young Australian boy when I was growing up.
    My intention for dreaming, when I finally went to bed, was to explore "far memory" - the memory of other lives. I now want to understand how my dream of being an American teen, in the kitchen with the President, relates to that intention. Perhaps part of the connection is that the dream suggests the mobility of consciousness, and that as humans, we are connected to people in many times and places in nonordinary ways, including in our contemporary world.
    Of course, there are many ways to read the dream as a set of dream symbols, especially if I play the "What part of me?" game. 

The dream and the intention

The first and best game to play with a dream that follows an intention is to explore the ways in which two may be linked. This can require some real detective work! When we set an intention for the night, our dream producers can astonish us by responding in a quite unexpected way that nonetheless turns out to be deeply relevant, on investigation. Sometimes they seem to ignore our intention because they think, maybe wisely, that there is something more important to know that we did not ask for (and may not want). Sometimes our dream self just wanders away from the original set course and brings back memories of other things. 
    Even when it's hard to find the link between the dream and the intention, it's important not to give up on the game too soon. Here others can help, because another person can sometimes spot connections the dreamer cannot see.

Drawing (c) Robert Moss
  

Ghost at the Savoy, Far Memory & our many lives

"Should you find yourself sitting in a ghost's lap in a crowded restaurant, as I once did in the grill room of the Savoy Hotel in London, it is better to have a companion who can warn you if you talk to it too loudly, otherwise you are liable to startle the waiters." The speaker is Joan Grant, the author of a series of wonderful historical novels, starting with Winged Pharaoh (first published in 1937) that were based on her "far memory" of what she believed to be her previous life experiences.

In the incident at the Savoy, she felt that the ghost was lonely so she signaled for his ghostly friends to come and join him. Half a dozen turned up and "seemed so solid that I was surprised no one else saw them." When she left the restaurant, she noticed a little brass plaque behind her chair, stating that the American impresario Charles Frohman had regularly dined at this table before he was drowned on the Lusitania. "I suppose [the table at the Savoy] was a kind of heaven for a fragment of his personality."

This is a sample of the marvelous personal anecdotes that enliven the pages of Speaking from the Heart, a collection of previously unpublished writings of Joan Grant edited by her granddaughter Nicola Bennett, together with Jane Lahr and Sophia Rosoff. The book was published by Overlook Press in 2007, but - though I am generally on the alert for anything new by or about Joan Grant (who died in 1989) I had somehow managed to miss this treasure until Jane Lahr contacted me recently.

We learn a good deal here about Joan's full experience of "far memory", about how she and her last husband "K" (psychiatrist Denys Kelsey) practiced past-life therapy, and Joan's theories about the survival of multiple aspects of an individual after physical death. She was quite Egyptian in her insistence on the survival of a "supra-physical" body as well as the soul, and the possibility that a living individual can have more than one of these vehicles. A true pharaoh of Egypt, as I recall, was credited with having as many as 14 kas. It is "fun" to change your energy template, Grant informs us.

"Another advantage of having more than one active, current supra-physical [body] is that it makes it easier to appear in two places at once." She gives a personal example. She was worried about a woman who was scheduled to undergo a caesarean, an operation considered highly dangerous at the time. Although she could not be with her, she thought of her intently just before the procedure. Later the woman's husband thanked Joan profusely for the visit his wife said she had made, slipping in through the french doors from the hospital garden so as to be unobserved by the nurses, comforting her to the point that her fears dissolved and she slipped gently into a state of natural sedation. Joan waited some time after the birth before telling the mother that her visit was not an ordinary physical event. The woman responded, "Thank goodness I didn't know you weren't solid! I should have been simply terrified if I'd known I was seeing a ghost."

Joan's was a way of personal experience that fueled both creative and healing work. She changed her mind about a number of things. Once a firm believer in the lost continent of Atlantis, for example, she came to believe that this was a myth that gave structure to impressions of many different past-life situations. "The cuckoo has no nest of its own; it lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. Atlantis has no past of its own; so it lays the burden of its mythical doom on the the future."

She noted that ignorance of history leads to a clustering of "past-life memories" around well-known cultures and periods. I find this very frequently, when people try to sort out when and where in time events in a dream or journey are unfolding. I am forever encouraging people to do the detailed research required to nail down the facts of "past-life" impressions. Such research can provide very useful confirmation of the objective validity of a sighting or "far memory".

There are indications here that Joan Grant experimented at least a little with what I find to be two of the most rewarding lines of exploration of our relations with a family of counterpart personalities, living in different times and dimensions. "Two personalities in the same series communicate with each other through their Integral - the Spirit." This suggests that at the hub of many lives, playing out in different worlds, is a higher self that may operate outside time and may facilitate contact between personalities living in different times. We want to try to ascend to the perspective of that higher self, with its view over many times. And we want not only to understand how the legacy of past lives may work in our present lives - and may be healed, when seen for what it is - but how we can reach back across time to heal something in the life of a previous self.