Showing posts with label past life regression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label past life regression. Show all posts

Creative Visualisation: Being There


Been spending a lot of time with this lady!
There has been a great deal in the news recently about something called ‘aphantasia’ or the inability to conjure up images inside your head. You can read all about it on the BBC Website here.

There is a whole spectrum of abilities, and people at one end of it can’t do it at all. I was intrigued to note that the late great Oliver Sachs was ‘face blind’ so that when shown, for example, a photograph of Oprah Winfrey, he had no idea who she was. Well, maybe not everyone does know who she is, but this was not a one off. A series of well known faces provoked a shrug and a shake of the head. There’s a whole section of the population who lead perfectly normal lives without being able to visualise things inside their heads. They know, they just can’t visually imagine.

It got me thinking, especially because I had just finished a draft of a rather complicated historical novel, so I was very much in creative writing mode. Most writers of fiction will know that alongside the perennial ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ question, (which makes a lot of sense to non-writers who are intrigued by it, but provokes a faint feeling of dismay in writers, who are generally drowning in unsolicited ideas), there’s the OTHER thing.

I used to think there was a gap but I think of it more as a yawning chasm between non-writers and writers in this respect, and now I know that the ability that creative writers tend to have in spades has a name: hyperphantasia. For most of us, it may be even more intense than that.

Let’s, for argument’s sake, call it super-hyperphantasia.

I suspect most writers of fiction are hyperphantasiacs (if that's even a word!) and if they aren’t, I’d lay bets they aren’t very good creative writers.

But the reports got me wondering if the scientists conducting this research have thought about ways in which writers and other creative people, artists for example, enter this state? To some extent you can summon it at will but I’m not entirely sure you can do it to somebody else’s specification. If you ask me to visualise pretty much anything, I will be able to see it quite clearly ‘in my mind’s eye’ – to the extent that I will be able to describe it for you. I have a strong visual imagination. Years as a playwright – where you always have to see what’s going to be happening and to whom, on stage or on film - have only reinforced it.

I once took part in an experiment in past life regression. It was intriguing, faintly disturbing, immensely vivid. I can still remember who I was, where I lived, how I was dressed, dozens of details. But I have a suspicion that the writer in me was simply inventing the character in response to a number of prompts from the person doing the regressing. Not that she gave me any of these details. She simply asked a series of questions. Where are you? How are you dressed? What are you doing? Where do you live? I knew all the answers, right down to the 'best' shoes that were almost too uncomfortable to wear. But this is exactly what I do when I'm writing.

I had a pair of shoes like this but only in my mind's eye.

I know that when the writing is going really well, it’s similarly intense and vivid. I’m truly elsewhere. I’m in the world of the book or story or play. Mihaly Csikszentmihalji called it a state of ‘flow’, and so it is. Time has no meaning. Then you suddenly come back into yourself and find that several hours have passed by and you have no remembrance of them. And that’s because your mind, your whole imagination has been somewhere else. The room may have grown dark or cold, and you’re hungry and thirsty, and often you feel quite ill and disorientated. Well, I certainly do.

You have been in the world of the book or story or play. You have been seeing it, feeling it, living it and experiencing the emotions of various characters – and for a while at least it doesn’t just feel as real as the ordinary world. It feels hyper real, a place beside which the ‘real world’ feels quite disappointing. You’ve been kind of playing God and sometimes you have the uneasy sense that we’re not really designed to do that. Which is why it takes its toll, why we feel so strange afterwards and so utterly bereft between projects.

Is it worth it? Well I think so. And if you can’t do it, you’ve no idea what you’re missing, literally, so you won’t mind. I’m not sure you can be taught how to do it, but I do think innate abilities can be honed and improved.

I’m often asked about dialogue. It’s hard to teach people how to write good dialogue. There are the usual hints and tips, such as reading it out loud, listening to what people say, how they really speak. But I think good dialogue only comes when you are in one of these states of being 'in the zone', because what you are then doing is not so much ‘making’ people say something as listening to your characters. Climbing inside their heads, overhearing them talk and writing it down – all at the same time. And it’s almost impossible to teach somebody how to do that if they can’t make that quantum leap into being there.

Somebody once said to me that the worlds inside her head were far more real, more vivid than the world outside. I’d identify with that. It doesn’t happen all the time, and I’m not at all sure it could be induced under controlled conditions. Writers of historical fiction have to do a lot of familiarising first, which is essentially what the research is for. It's like a secret agent being briefed before a mission. And then, armed with all that knowledge, you make the quantum leap into inner space.

Also, the experience is not without a few unwelcome side effects: rabid insomnia being one of them. The inner world has a habit of either invading your dreams – not so bad, because at least you’re sleeping - or prodding you awake several times a night, reminding you of its existence. Come back, it says.

And then your characters join in. 'We’re here. We have things to tell you. And no, we’re not going to shut up or go away until you give us the voices we think we deserve.'

If you want to sample a couple of my historical novels to see what happened when I made that leap into the past, you could try:
The Physic Garden
or
The Curiosity Cabinet
And look out for a new historical novel called The Jewel, to be published in 2016.

This post has been reblogged from Authors Electric.

Past Life Regression as a Source of Inspiration

From time to time, especially when I think a post may be of wider interest to my readers, I'll reblog one of my monthly contributions to the Authors Electric blog here. This was a popular post and I know a number of people were intrigued by the idea, even if a few others didn't believe a word of it! So here it is, and you can make up your own minds.

Something very old indeed.
A few years ago, one of my relatives, a Reiki practitioner, came to me with a slightly odd request. She was doing a course in ‘past life regression’ (yes – such things are available) and she needed a case study. How would I feel about being her guinea pig? Other people had said they would be too scared or just didn’t believe in it, but I jumped at the chance.

Which is how I found myself in a warm room, all wrapped up in a blanket, listening to her soothing tones as she took me through a set of preliminary relaxation exercises. This kind of session involves mild hypnosis, so I know it wouldn’t be for everyone. It also, I suppose, involves a willing suspension of disbelief – something writers find remarkably easy. At no point did I ever feel out of control or even particularly sleepy, although I certainly felt relaxed – with occasional lurches into inexplicable discomfort best described as a sense of falling, a momentary dizziness.

What happens next is a strange mixture of the extraordinary and the commonplace. She begins by asking me to look down at my feet. What do I see? That’s easy. I’m barefoot. I’m looking down at two small bare feet and I feel cold. The floor is chilly. So are my feet. What am I wearing? A white nightdress. Where am I? I’m in a room - it’s dark with the light filtering in. A plain room with whitewashed walls. It is my bedroom and there is a cat, fast asleep on the bed. (I don't have a cat, don't particularly like them, so have no idea what brought a cat into my head.) She tells me to go to the door, open it and go out. What do I see? I'm in a long corridor with wood panelling. But I suddenly know that it only looks long because I’m small. I feel small. I'm a child. This is a plain house, with white walls and dark wood and not much furniture and it’s my home. Plain but by no means poor. It smells like home. It’s morning and I can see the sunlight filtering in and I’m pattering down the corridor on cold bare feet.

We move on. I’m outside. It’s summer. There’s a huge, spreading tree. I’m sitting beneath it, playing. I have a doll or dolls. Made of wood, I think, but with clothes. My mother and father are watching me, my father in a long dark green coat. I’m still small. Yorkshire. I think we live in Yorkshire. What does my father do? ‘Does he work?’ my interrogator says. 'What is his work?' I feel faintly confused. No, he doesn’t work. Not work. In fact ‘work’ seems like the wrong word. He sees to things. He just comes and goes. Has things to do. Tells people what to do. There’s land, a farm. My mother sits and sews. There are ladies who come and sew with her, and then I have to play on my own but I don’t mind. Roses. I can smell  roses.

Time shifts. In fact time shifts a bit too quickly. I want the whole thing to go on much longer. I want time and space to explore and contemplate these places and people I can see so clearly. But these sessions seem to have a set length. Maybe they’re afraid we’ll get lost in some hypothetical past! I’m older. What kind of shoes am I wearing? I can see them very clearly: yellow satin, with ribbons and little heels. And they are pinching my feet. They are uncomfortable but beautiful. My dress is very stiff. They stitch me into it I say, casually. I know my full name now. I’m Anne Gilbert, I’m seventeen years old, my mother is dead and I’m still living in this plain stone house with my father. I have no siblings. The house smells of lavender, beeswax and roses. There are a lot of books in the house. But they don’t much interest me. The books are dry, sermons, I say. They are full of sermons and I don’t like them. I can read and write but I don’t want to read them. My voice seems a bit odd to me. Oddly detatched from me if that's possible. If I were to try to pin it down, it would be as though somebody else was speaking. Me and not me at the same time.

I have a friend. That’s why I’m dressed like this, in this dress, in these yellow shoes and this stiff dress. She is richer, lives in a bigger house. I go there to visit her. They are different over there. There are celebrations, visitors. We dance. I love dancing but our house is so quiet. Very quiet. In my head, I can hear the silence of the house. It's not unpleasant at all.

We move on again. I’m twenty and I’m married. I think I must have mentioned my husband’s name but I don’t remember it now. She asks me if I met this man at my friend’s house but I find that quite funny. Oh no, I say. Of course not. He came to our house. He only came to see my father. That’s how we met. He’s a scholar. I distinctly remember the way the word scholar pops into my mind and with it the image of a tall, scholarly husband – not old, but scholarly - with reddish hair. He doesn’t care about his appearance or what he wears, he’s a great ‘thinker’ I say, and I know that I love him dearly. He’s gentle, often distracted. I have to remind him of things. I read to him and I write things down for him. We live ‘in another house’ I say. Not my father’s house but not far away either. Another plain house with a lot of books. I have this image in my head of remote countryside with only a few houses and not much else. We have a little boy. He has red hair too and freckles.

In the next image, I’m forty years old and sad. There's a weight of sadness, of loss. I look down at my feet and see boots. My husband has died and I’m sitting in a chilly stone church – very small, a country church - and I’m sad. For the first time, a date pops into my mind. It is the 17th day of October 1696. (Can that be true? Who knows?) It’s after the funeral. I’ve lost track of time, here in this chilly little church. My son? He’s at sea. In the navy. I miss him. There’s a daughter. Her name is Alice and she’s married. She lives close by. I’m happy for her. But I’m tired. I can feel the sadness and fatigue seeping into me, but it’s not really distressing. I’m too removed from it now. Finally, seven years later, I’m ready to move on. It isn’t painful. I’m just ready to leave. I miss my husband and I’m tired and I slip away. Then, slowly and carefully she brings me back to the reality of the room where I’m still snug under my blanket.

Writing about this now, several years later, I can still see it as vividly as though it really had happened. Especially the wood panelled house, the stiff dress, the yellow shoes. But of course I’m a writer. I can see all kinds of things as clearly as if they had actually happened. That’s what I do. Make things up. And what's more, I often write historical fiction. What both I and my relative found intriguing though, was the very ordinariness of it all – a plain, circumscribed and quietly contented life. I think both of us expected more fireworks. A stronger plot. Fame and fortune. But the reality of day to day living probably was very much as I’ve described for most people, barring war, plague and other terrible eventualities. As you can imagine, I’ve done a bit of googling of Anne Gilbert. I certainly have no Gilbert forebears, to my knowledge. But beyond the fact that Gilbert seems to be a Yorkshire surname, there’s nothing. Nor would you really expect it. 

I still don’t know whether it’s all make believe or not. But I would caution anyone thinking of trying it to make sure the person leading you through it knows what he or she is doing. Even with Anne’s quiet life and death, the images conjured are surprisingly powerful. I could imagine under other circumstances that the whole thing might become a bit distressing, that you could have a ‘bad trip’.

Otherwise, well, whether you believe in it or not, it might give you some interesting ideas for fiction.

The Crusader Rose: one of the oldest in cultivation.
I haven't yet written about Anne Gilbert (not much plot there!) but you can find my Scottish historical novel The Physic Garden, published by Saraband, in paperback and as an eBook on various platforms.