Hi, I'm new to the forum. I don't know if this is the appropriate sub-forum to post this in, because it's not a memory per se but it's a very vivid encounter with several past lives or incarnations in a lucid dream I had recently. It's the most recent in a series of lucid dreams I had while I was deployed through most of 2011; many of these dreams were like allegories about dying or reincarnating, or involved an afterlife 'bardo' where I met people I seemed to have known before this life, or involved Christian baptismal and eucharistic symbols, which surprised me somewhat because I'm more Buddhist in temperament.
Anyway, the dream started out kind of fuzzy, I wasn't lucid at first. It's probably better just to quote directly from my dream journal: "in a war zone, I had paramilitary training as a young boy. I was captured and sent to a concentration or POW camp. A boy who used to be my friend before the war betrayed me to curry favor with the guard. I escaped. I was shot, but I fled into the ravines, rushing through streams fleeing dogs and hunters after I killed the other boy. The river ran dry and I was running through brush and sand, leaving scent traps for the dogs and trying to conceal my tracks, there was a hilly beach nearby."
After that I arrive at a mansion made out of glass and hardwood, breath-taking stately serene classical modernist design, it's like a mansion/castle/temple, full of natural sunlight and the sound of the waves from the sea below the cliffs, it seemed as though the mansion was on an island in the Mediterranean. I was either grown-up now, or a different person entirely, the owner of the house, who was a (20th century - not sure exact decades of activity) intelligence operative and art dealer/collector and amateur classical violinist, a very precise kind of personality, good at his profession in a detached clinical scary way but also totally in love with beauty in terms of music and art, maybe Renaissance and medieval art. I think he was a sadist. Then suddenly I became lucid, and I was myself, my waking real life personality and body, but the intelligence agent guy was still there. I started to fly around the inside of the mansion effortlessly, this is my typical immediate reaction to becoming lucid, I fly around and take stock of ways to manipuate the dream environment. Anyway, oddly, the intelligence guy could fly too, and we had a strange conversation about the application of hypnotic induction techniques to military training and indoctrination, how that could or would change history, and we talked about dialectics with respect to history and awakening in the sense that Walter Benjamin wrote about it, the gestalt of memes which moves generations of peoples.
Then a young woman appeared, she was pretty, about my own age, she seemed gentle and kind-hearted, and she told me after I kissed her that it wasn't appropriate to do anything else, that was all she said, but I suddenly realized that both she and the scary intelligence guy were past lives or incarnations, it was like a direct lucid overwhelming knowing.
I went to the large dining room in the mansion, and sat at a table with about a dozen other people, all of them men as far as I can remember except for the young woman from before. All of them were past lives - but it was like talking to real, actual people or personalities, not like characters in a regular dream. I was lucid, and it was like I knew these people. The consensus of everyone there - what we in fact talked about, was that time is not linear, but it's spherical, or continuous, or a fractal, and that every incarnation sitting at the table is alive in his or her own time, at the same time. The intelligence guy was there. The young woman from before was there, and now I could sense from looking at her face how she was a herbalist and a healer, a really gentle and nurturing person, not a nun exactly but someone very spiritually alive, close to nature, deeply intuitive. Sitting next to me, there was a middle-aged man who looked like a rough woodsman/master craftsman who was very skilled with his hands, it seemed like this guy had participated in the French Resistance, he had a patient quiet intense faintly-sardonic personality, like he had experienced atrocities in the war but had become humble instead of brittle over them, he looked like what I think of as an old 'druidic' type of person.
Anyway, the dream started out kind of fuzzy, I wasn't lucid at first. It's probably better just to quote directly from my dream journal: "in a war zone, I had paramilitary training as a young boy. I was captured and sent to a concentration or POW camp. A boy who used to be my friend before the war betrayed me to curry favor with the guard. I escaped. I was shot, but I fled into the ravines, rushing through streams fleeing dogs and hunters after I killed the other boy. The river ran dry and I was running through brush and sand, leaving scent traps for the dogs and trying to conceal my tracks, there was a hilly beach nearby."
After that I arrive at a mansion made out of glass and hardwood, breath-taking stately serene classical modernist design, it's like a mansion/castle/temple, full of natural sunlight and the sound of the waves from the sea below the cliffs, it seemed as though the mansion was on an island in the Mediterranean. I was either grown-up now, or a different person entirely, the owner of the house, who was a (20th century - not sure exact decades of activity) intelligence operative and art dealer/collector and amateur classical violinist, a very precise kind of personality, good at his profession in a detached clinical scary way but also totally in love with beauty in terms of music and art, maybe Renaissance and medieval art. I think he was a sadist. Then suddenly I became lucid, and I was myself, my waking real life personality and body, but the intelligence agent guy was still there. I started to fly around the inside of the mansion effortlessly, this is my typical immediate reaction to becoming lucid, I fly around and take stock of ways to manipuate the dream environment. Anyway, oddly, the intelligence guy could fly too, and we had a strange conversation about the application of hypnotic induction techniques to military training and indoctrination, how that could or would change history, and we talked about dialectics with respect to history and awakening in the sense that Walter Benjamin wrote about it, the gestalt of memes which moves generations of peoples.
Then a young woman appeared, she was pretty, about my own age, she seemed gentle and kind-hearted, and she told me after I kissed her that it wasn't appropriate to do anything else, that was all she said, but I suddenly realized that both she and the scary intelligence guy were past lives or incarnations, it was like a direct lucid overwhelming knowing.
I went to the large dining room in the mansion, and sat at a table with about a dozen other people, all of them men as far as I can remember except for the young woman from before. All of them were past lives - but it was like talking to real, actual people or personalities, not like characters in a regular dream. I was lucid, and it was like I knew these people. The consensus of everyone there - what we in fact talked about, was that time is not linear, but it's spherical, or continuous, or a fractal, and that every incarnation sitting at the table is alive in his or her own time, at the same time. The intelligence guy was there. The young woman from before was there, and now I could sense from looking at her face how she was a herbalist and a healer, a really gentle and nurturing person, not a nun exactly but someone very spiritually alive, close to nature, deeply intuitive. Sitting next to me, there was a middle-aged man who looked like a rough woodsman/master craftsman who was very skilled with his hands, it seemed like this guy had participated in the French Resistance, he had a patient quiet intense faintly-sardonic personality, like he had experienced atrocities in the war but had become humble instead of brittle over them, he looked like what I think of as an old 'druidic' type of person.
