Tales of the Double: his doppelganger is being walked by his dog

 

I want to report another of my encounters with someone else's doppelganger. It has a feature I have not seen mentioned in the literature that makes it deeply mysterious and potentially revelatory about travel in a subte body and what may guide and protect us in such outings.
    My story unfolds in a small city in the Northeast. I was in the habit of walking from my home to the local branch of my bank in the era when that branch was still open. Along the way I passed a wine shop with a friendly owner. I would often stop in to say hello even when I was not in need of supplies. That morning, I came to the wine shop half an hour before opening time. 
    I was pleased and surprised to see the owner coming up the next street with his dog. I had never met his dog and was not even aware that he had one. I saw a fine German shepherd that was clearly in the lead. He was holding the leash but it seemed his dog was walking him. He was wearing a mauve plaid shirt, louder than his usual style. He looked vaguely in my direction but did not appear to recognize me so I continued my walk to the bank.
    On my walk back, the wine shop was just opening. The owner greeted me at the door.
    “Where’s your dog?” I asked.
    He was puzzled. “Sally? She’s at home. I never bring her to the shop.”
    “I saw you walking her a few minutes ago, just round the corner. Actually it looked like she was walking you.”
    His expression suggested he was finding me even stranger than usual. “Describe my dog.”
    “German shepherd. Beautiful. Great energy, really leading the way.”
    “That’s Sally. But you’ve never met her. I mean, you didn’t even know I had a dog.”
    “Not until half an hour ago. By the way, I see you changed your shirt.”       
    He was now wearing a quiet monochrome polo. When I described the loud mauve shirt he said, “I’ve got that shirt. It’s at home too.”
    By this stage, I was starting to feel some concern for my friend. There’s an old superstition that if you see someone’s double as large as life, that could indicate coming death. Had I seen my friend’s fetch? I had the feeling it might be risky to have that much energy traveling outside the body while the owner was oblivious to his condition. I wondered if he had been thinking or feeling something so strongly that it might have set part of him off on a journey in a certain direction.
    I was cautious in opening this area of discussion. However he was soon in tears, talking about the recent death of someone close to him. He had not gone to the funeral but now felt the need to make amends for old troubles. “I’ve been thinking about going to the cemetery.”
     “I might think that my dog was leading me that way,” I suggested. Dogs are psychopomps – soul guides – in many traditions. Maybe that German shepherd was what the Norwegians call the  vardøgr, the advance guard of the soul that goes to places ahead of you, on this occasion.

 

 Drawing by Robert Moss

 

The double who arrives at a place ahead of you

 

When Fred, an engineer deeply interested in dreamwork, told me he was planning to drive across the continent to my neighborhood in upstate New York, I invited him to come and stay. The night before he was scheduled to arrive, I stirred from sleep and was startled by a ghostly form the foot of my bed. Man-sized. Peering through the grainy dark, I recognized Fred. He looked dozy and out of things.

    “Fred,” I spoke softly so as not to wake my wife. “You are not due here until tomorrow. Get back to your body and get some rest.”
     You may glean from this that the appearance of what the old paranormal researchers used to call a  “phantasm of the living” was not exotic for me. I had long been aware that consciousness can travel outside the physical body -and does so every night in dreams – and that when it does so it may be using the vehicle of a subtle or astral body. This energy vehicle may resemble the physical body closely, or take other forms.
    I assumed that Fred had slipped out of his dormant body during sleep and found his way to my house, unaware of the time or the circumstances. Uninvited callers who seek to enter my psychic space get an unpleasant reception, But Fred had, after all, been invited – only not for 3 o’clock in the morning.
    When he showed up for breakfast after sunup, I asked him if he remembered any dreams from the middle of the night. “I’ve been on the road since midnight,” he told me, holding out his coffee mug for a refill.
     This was an interesting twist. I had assumed that while Fred was asleep, his dream double went walkabout in the direction of my home. It now seemed that, cruising along the highway, he relaxed enough to release his energy double to arrive at my house early.
     The Norwegians have a word for the kind of double who arrives before you at a place where you are heading. The word is vardøgr. It is probably derived from the Old Norse vardhygi, which fuses vǫrd, ("guard" or "watchman") with hugr ("mind" or "soul"). "Early arrival" and “spirit predecessor” are suggested translations of vardøgr. The etymology might lead us to "soul watcher" or "soul guard" in the sense of advance guard.
    In the Viking era the Scandinavians were quite familiar with several forms of the double, and their ability to travel outside the physical body and shapeshift into many forms. This is such a central feature that a French scholar, Régis Boyer, titled a book on Old Norse magic Le monde du double, "The World of the Double". 
     When I recently returned to research on this theme, I was interested to find that my encounter with Fred the engineer has a parallel in a report from another engineer. In an article for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, L. David Leiter, a mechanical engineer in Pennsylvania, describes how his double appeared at his home ahead of him. He took the highway home on a pleasant sunny afternoon and felt completely relaxed at the wheel, almost on autopilot.
    When he got home, his wife was surprised. Why had he gone out again? She explained that he had come in ten minutes before. Unusually for him he had skipped his usual greeting and kiss on the cheek and gone straight upstairs. She called their child to confirm her story. Worried that there might be an intruder in the house, they checked upstairs and found no one.

Engineers may survive projecting an astral double while at the wheel of a moving car, but I would strongly recommend avoiding this kind of thing while handling mechanical equipment! I have no doubt the safest and easiest way to explore these roads is in dreaming. It is quite likely that you are projecting an astral double every night in your dreams. It is also probable hat among the places you visit in your subtle body are locations that lie in your physical future.  Precognitive dreams can be “memories of the future” in the sense that your double arrived somewhere ahead of you and left you some souvenirs when they came back.

"Dream Double" drawing by Robert Moss