River 4
Wraith
There is No Time 1966

~~~~~~dream~~~~~~

I was aware that I was in an asylum and something told me that it was London, or thereabouts, and it was towards the end of the 1700s I would say. I don’t know why I think it was that time but that’s what I felt. It was a totally bare room except for a tarpaulin on the floor. Although I knew I was considered insane, inside I didn’t feel insane. I was treated like an animal. I’m really not quite sure how I died, whether I died from neglect or whatever, but as I was dying I remember saying ‘I have to do something to put this right’. There was another woman with me in the cell and I recognised her as a lady with whom I’m still friendly in this life.

~~~~~~

Wraith had been in hospital for many weeks, very ill and weak with a severe bout of hepatitis. She had been extremely stressed for a long time and was now in a situation of personal crisis. She was still in hospital when she had this dream.

The dream helped me to realise the purpose of living and it helped me to get myself into perspective. I should add that I always felt I was half awake at the time. It was certainly not a ‘sleeping’ dream. The experience was totally vivid, I was sort of in two bits: I was in the bed but I was also in the cell. For many years I believed it was recall of an actual experience, although I didn’t know it immediately. It came to me over a period of time when things suddenly started to fit together.

Shortly after the dream, while still in hospital, Wraith was presented with a book by a visiting minister: Elizabethan Episode by Daisy Roberts. A message in one of the margins urged anyone interested in contacting the author to do so, and Wraith did. To her delight she found she lived nearby, and their meetings led to further contact with people and books which pointed her back to a path which she has followed over the twenty-eight years since the dream.

I have had absolutely no regrets about being led back to the path, for that is what it was. I had first begun walking it when I was very small. It also led to one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life: the establishment of a school for adults at a major psychiatric hospital. I believe I was given the chance to fulfil my vow made when I was an inmate.

When she was first married, Wraith and her husband moved out west, and she soon found herself teaching. In her class was a boy with whom she felt an instant affinity which has existed to this day. It eventuated that he was the son of the woman who was in the cell with her in the 1700s. Later, after ten years at an all girls school and becoming senior mistress, she reassessed her work:

I suddenly felt, ‘I’ve got to change’, and I was given the chance, after many knock-backs, to do this job at a major psychiatric hospital. I felt an instant affinity with people who’d been in locked wards there.

Wraith had resigned her position at the girls school and taken a lower salary to set up a school for adult inmates, because she felt that this was her chance to keep the promise she remembered from her dream back in 1966. She had to work from scratch because, although the school was a suggestion from the Department of Health, it was not backed by any government funding. She even had to find a suitable building to turn into her classroom.

There was an old disused morgue there and it was absolutely wonderful because, as soon as I said what I wanted to do, painters and carpenters offered their time for free. I went to Apex and told them that I needed money for pencils and whatever, and they supported me.

For a time the patients didn’t come to the school. I had to go over to the main hospital and I had to go into locked wards with warders: these were the people I was to deal with first up. They took their clothes off, they were just like animals. After a period of about a year they were allowed to walk over to my school, in a line, with a warder.

I was teaching them all sorts of things because there were some there who were illiterate in their own language. I had a number of migrant students who were classified as schizophrenic, but now I realise that some of them were genuinely hearing another voice. I taught them basic literacy, but because they’d been in locked wards for so long that they had forgotten many things: food was just coloured blobs that came out of stainless steel containers. They’d forgotten the names of vegetables or how things grew. So we planted vegetables and we cooked them. I would eat with them. They’d only been eating with their hands before, since they weren’t allowed knives and forks because they were considered dangerous weapons.

They didn’t know what they looked like, as they hadn’t been allowed a mirror, so I put up mirrors in the school and gave them a comb and a toothbrush each. It was incredible when they looked in them, you wouldn’t believe the look on their faces. I taught the women to sew and took some of the better ones down town to shop on their government pensions and we managed to get them clothes that dignified them. Sometimes I brought the patients to my house and we ate in a normal home.

A journalist, reporting on the school at the time, wrote: ‘It’s when one sees these people that understanding dawns on why the institution is called a special hospital. These are sick people in need of special care. Mad? Not a bit! They are individuals who have been beset by physical or emotional disorders. Now they are convalescent, and soon they will be discharged. If the community will make room for them in its ranks’.

Wraith felt that because she had experienced being locked in inside herself (in the dream experience, in her past life, in aspects of her present life) she had reached a state in her development where she could see beyond a person’s body

‘doing silly things. I think the patients could sense that. Naturally you can’t put it into words.’

The combination of the dream experience, her reading, the path she has followed since the dream and the teaching experiences at the psychiatric hospital has led Wraith to that point of seeing well beyond the physical existence of the body.

I’ve realised the total nonsense that the body is. I’ve learnt to look at people in a different way. In fact I’ve realised the non-reality of all things. I used to be very interested in reincarnation. In the dream experience I said ‘I must do something about this’, and repeated for many years ‘In this Life I was given the chance to put it right’. I realise now that it’s all just a script you write yourself. We are just writing scripts until we finally learn, until we write (right) ourselves to the conclusion. It is all a dream and there is nothing but love. That is how it has totally changed my life.

A few months ago I felt I needed to write this:

I was a blank cell,
four stone walls;
I could see no window,
only the canvass covering
masking falls,
softening the yells,
the crazed crying
of the shell I thought my body.
Inside was sanity - and knowing:
I must remember this.

In the next ‘life’ that came
I played the game
of expiation.
I believed I must set free imprisoned bodies,
such as I had been.
I spoke to an imprisoned soul
but sought to set it whole
physically.

Then one night, reading,
suddenly I saw the prison
I remembered from my dream
was but an allegory;
the cell walls were my body,
and the dying wish, the urgency,
God’s voice:
‘Fret not the body
but set the Spirit free’.

Jane’s Interpretation

Wraith’s experience took place when she was half awake, half asleep, so that it felt more like a vision than a ‘normal’ dream. If we begin our return to waking consciousness while still dreaming, and get as far as opening our eyes, we often see the dream projected onto our waking environment. This is because the brain is confused with two visual inputs (the dream and the waking surroundings). It analyses the situation then decides the two images are part of the same scene. This is why visions upon waking are not uncommon. They are known as ‘hypnopompic hallucinations’. Once fully awake, the dream vision tends to fade, leaving us shaking our heads in wonder.

In the same way as we fall asleep or drift in and out of sleep, we often experience dream-like snapshot visions, like ‘slide shows’. Technically these are not ‘normal’ dreams because they are not accompanied by REMs (the rapid eye movements which signal the physiological dream state) or by the brainwave patterns which are characteristic of physiological dreaming. This is known as ‘hypnagogic’ sleep. As we fall asleep we often maintain a dual awareness of our external surroundings and the hypnagogic images. The brain may present these as parallel ‘realities’ (as in Wraith’s dual awareness), or it may rationalise the two sets of sensory data by merging them as one experience.

Wraith’s experience, however had the fluidity and emotional content of a dream, not a hypnagogic ‘slide show’. If, alternatively, her vision was a hypnopompic hallucination, it was unusually long and detailed, unlike the often reported fading vision of a person or visitor from outer space.

Wraith’s experience may have been a partially lucid, or near-lucid dream. In a lucid dream we are consciously aware that we are dreaming. The experience is like suddenly waking up within a dream, becoming conscious of the fact, but staying in the dream. The dream then unfolds in vivid sensuous detail which is frequently described as being ‘more real’ than normal waking life. In a lucid dream you realise you have the power to change the dream in any way, to experience whatever you wish. The whole dream is yours to command and enjoy, if you choose. Some lucid dreamers prefer to remain passive, letting the dream happen without conscious interference, while maintaining total awareness that they are experiencing a dream. While Wraith maintained some degree of dual consciousness and experienced the vivid reality that a lucid dream can bring, at no point did she fully awake to the realisation that this was as a dream experience. Perhaps the ultimate power of the lucid dream is that it allows us direct experience of a commonly held metaphysical belief that what we perceive as our waking life is actually a dream, yet another illusion in our struggle to identify a concrete reality. Indeed, Wraith’s conclusion many years later than her original dream, is just this.

Three decades ago, at the time of the dream, Wraith felt she had glimpsed a past life, a conclusion which solidified over the years, but which then dissolved as further experiences fine-tuned her perceptions of reality. When I am asked to interpret a dream in which the dreamer finds themselves in a realistic, emotionally charged, historical setting previous to their birth date, I am always aware of the dreamer’s unexpressed question: ‘Was this a vision of a past life?’ It is certainly easy for the dreamer to conclude that it was, and it is also easy for a dream interpreter to write off all historically staged dream scenarios as past lives. My personal belief is that we do inhabit a number of bodies, although my leaning is towards a view of occupying parallel realities, rather than successively reincarnating over a period of linear time. Of course, those who adhere to the more conventional view(!) of reincarnation and past lives may be correct. The question, as far as dream interpretation is concerned, is how to view such dreams and experiences.

To illustrate the point, take the currently contentious issue of people ‘remembering’ childhood trauma such as sexual abuse through techniques akin to guided visualisation, hypnotherapy, psychotherapy and so on. Some of these memories may indeed be accurate, as memory repression and denial are common survival traits. However, these techniques largely access the unconscious (and may impinge on the collective unconscious too, when, heaven forbid, the client may experience the traumas and memories of people unknown to them, living or dead), and the prime language of the unconscious is symbolism. Most dreamers have experienced violent or traumatic dreams which are very rarely literal replays of the dreamer’s past or literal visions of the future. Dreaming of being tortured, for example, may be symbolic of emotional oppression in the dreamer’s waking life, or of the ‘self-torturing’ destructive traits of the anxious, self-recriminating person. Dreams of rape may be symbolic of feeling personally violated, not in a physical sense, but in an emotional sense, or in a ‘I need more personal space’ sense. Dreams of sex with a stranger, a work colleague or even a member of the dreamer’s family are normal experiences for many sane, respectable, well-integrated members of society. Such dreams do not necessarily reveal repressed sexual perversion or a longing for incest, but are generally symbolic of our need to integrate and grow, take on aspects of those we know (symbolised as harmonious sex), or increase our awareness of the aspects of others we are unwisely permitting into the fabric of our own personality (symbolised, perhaps, by dreams of rape, disgust or loathing of the dream sexual partner). In no way do dreams of rape, no matter how real the dreams feel, necessarily indicate repressed memories of rape. In rare instances they may, but the overwhelming significance of such images, manufactured by the unconscious, is symbolic. In the same way, any vision or situation experienced in hypnotherapy, guided visualisation or any of the regression techniques should, I believe, be subject to interpretation on a symbolic level (treating the experiences as dreams) before wholeheartedly absorbing the experience as a literal memory.

If, as Wraith now believes, our waking life is but a dream, then our whole experience, in and out of perceived sleep, in and out of hypnotherapy and allied techniques, becomes symbolic of the higher reality anyway. I agree with Wraith. I do believe we experience the world falsely, that what we perceive as our human experience is reflective of our kindergarten level of understanding reality. The symbolic language of that altered state of consciousness which we call dreaming holds the key to greater understanding of human existence and purpose.

Extending the argument further, it would be rash to label any dream perceived as being a past life as being a true memory of a past life - or a parallel one for that matter. My working rule of thumb for dream interpretation of ‘past lives’, which has proved trustworthy, is as follows:

Suppose you have accessed a past life memory in a dream, and you believe that you have experienced many past lives spanning hundreds or thousands of years, millions of days and uncountable daily experiences. Then ask yourself why that particular moment of that particular past life popped up in your dream last night. The reason, if the experience was indeed a past life glimpse, is perhaps ‘because it is relevant to my current situation; it has something to teach me about handling my life now, or it explains, by virtue of my past experience, the situation in which I now find myself’. If this thinking is correct, then discussing the dream experience in terms of an actual past life becomes irrelevant. It is easier, and more practical, to take the dream experience as an allegory, a metaphor, a myth with a moral to the story which helps you to negotiate your present situation. In other words, it is meaningful to interpret the ‘past life’ dream as a ‘normal’ symbolic dream which can shed light on your current life. All that may remain unsatisfied is the philosophical question of whether the experience was dream or actual memory. When I treat someone’s 'past life dream' in this way and they respond to the symbolic content of the dream with recognition because it is meaningful in their present situation, then I feel the dream, and I, have served our practical purpose.

Wraith’s interpretation of her dream, which I completely endorse, is clearly expressed in her poem. Its life-changing nature manifested on a practical level through the dedicated work she did within the psychiatric hospital, and on a spiritual level through the ultimate understanding of levels of perception and reality, which she learned through a combination of the dream and her quest to fulfil her dream promise.

While many of the life changing dreams were touched with some degree of spiritual insight, I identified ten dreams as having strong spiritual content, and six of these to be outstanding in spiritual experience. They were the dreams of Lorna, Francoise, Nellie, Sarras, Dee and Grace. It is interesting to note that Grace was the only person in this survey whose highly charged spiritual dream did not come at a time of crisis in her life (not, at least, as Grace assessed it).