Sepoy Orphan
Dreamed 2001 or before, by Lita, as told by Stanley Krippner et al.
I am a small boy of Indian and English parentage living in India sometime during the nineteenth century. I am wandering alone fearfully through our village and I sense rioting in the nearby streets. I walk down a back alley and enter a door through a familiar wall. I am in a garden that is also familiar to me, but it is now overgrown and abandoned. I feel extremely sad; the Englishman who lived here was my father. I walk up to the back of the house and push the door so that it slowly opens. Silently, I look up and see the dark, colossal furniture. I climb the staircase and enter the master bedroom. A very old monkey is sitting in the center of the bed. I remember him as our household pet. Now, he, too, has been abandoned. I climb onto the bed and sit with him as we hold one another.Lita reflected upon the story line of her dream after awakening. She intuited that her mother was a young Indian servant living in an Englishman's estate. Her mother fell in love with the maried Englishman and had a baby boy (i.e., Lita). Shortly before the uprising she and her three-year-old boy were banished from the estate and her mother died soon afterwards. The young Indian boy was abandoned, unable to find acceptance in either culture because he obviously had a mixture of English and Indian blood.
The story line had a sensory quality that paralleled her experience of waking reality; Lita felt that she had relived a memory. Inspired by the sensory details of her dream (traditional Victorian furniture) and her knowledge of history, she decided to research the time period of her dream. She gathered several Eastern history books at the library and discovered that the time period of her dream coincided with the Sepoy Uprising of 1857. This uprising between the British and the Indians occurred in northern and central India and lasted well over a year.
While reading about this uprising, Lita felt a sense of confirmation that enabled her to reflect upon the possible connection between her past life experience and her present life. In her present life, Lita's parents had divorced when she was three years old and she had lived with her mother. Like the Indian boy, her abandonment by her father at a young age caused her to feel intense sorrow, fear, and anger.
However, in her current lifetime she was able to locate her father after twenty-one years and reunite with him. Their reunion occurred in her father's garden and Lita gained a sense of resolution--both from her present life and her past life.
SOURCE: Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them by Stanley Krippner, Fariba Bogzaran and André Percia de Carvalho, 2002, pp.130-1.
EDITOR'S NOTE
This past-life dream neatly echoes Lita's current life. Abandoned at 3? Abandoned at 3. The dream prompted Lita to reconnect with her dad in this life. It all seems very therapeutic; apparent past-life trauma as metaphor for current trauma, and a prompt for its resolution.
But there are other past-life dreams where the situation haunts you, yet doesn't fit your present life. For decades I dreamt gunmen hunted and massacred a group of us on a brushy hillside (example: Hunters' Fire, especially the Notes; but see also Vat Messiah). That massacre can't have happened--in this life. I've faced plenty of trauma, but even as metaphor this dream doesn't fit. When, then, did I acquire that trauma, and why does it keep arising in my relatively nonviolent life? Decades now without an answer.
My point? The therapeutic resolution of this apparent pastlife dream is nice for Lita, but not a how-to template for all. Some such dreams can't be so neatly explained away.
--Chris Wayan
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