Hmm fiziwig that sounds very interesting - so specific. And you had a craze for carving too - interesting! I for one, haven't the slightest desire! When you wrote - how come others have glamorous lives - it made me chuckle.
I've tried regression twice. The first time, I experienced viewing, and viewing life as, a subsistence farmer, in what I *think* was ancient Iraq. It was a big floodplain, very flat. I don't recall any trees, but I suppose there would have been some? The regressionist prompted us (it was a seminar setting) to look at a door and see what it was like and I thought 'Door? What door?' lol. And she prompted us to look at our shoes and I thought 'Shoes? What shoes?' When she prompted us to go to a special meal - I saw, we had a few boiled eggs. That was special - in fact, it was incredible fortune. The rest of the time, I felt, we had flat bread. Then I saw standing beside our mud hut, and we had a reed mat sort of thing, that was held up with sticks (so there must have been trees) and it was our sunshade, hanging off the side of the hut. And we winnowed and ground the grain there, and sifted it into clay jars. For myself, I was mostly bald and had very unprepossessing features. I wore a grimy plain fiber kilt and my chest was sort of sunken, maybe just in comparison to my belly, which was somewhat distended. My experience of the 'feel' of that experience, was as if I was a bit addled and perhaps very slow and/or uneducated. When I thought about it later, I thought it might feel that way when you are chronically malnourished.
Several years later I was reading about an archaeological dig in Iraq in the 30's. The writer said the workmen subsisted on flat bread, and that it was a special day when they would have hard boiled eggs. Whoa. I felt that whatever I saw, if there was anything to it, was a very, very long time ago. If there *is* something to it - then it really bums me out that the cuisine had not altered for the better by the 1930's.
In the other regression experience, I was an extremely overweight minor functionary (perhaps comparable to a junior clerk) in an Egyptian temple, sometime very late in Egypt's history, if I had to guess by the general shoddiness and hmmm tackiness of things around me (of course, poverty lends a lot to things being shoddy). My favorite thing to do, in this experience, was count up the treasure in the strongroom (oh, so embarrassing) because it made me feel somehow secure. In addition, I viewed doing haggling with people coming to the temple - 'you want this? That will be two kids. For a special extra prayer, toss in a chicken' sorts of things. In that experience I seemed to avoid people outside the temple and spend my time skulking around the place, though I think I lived at home with my mother. I didn't feel that this temple was anything more than hmmm a business proposition, anyway. I also viewed being mocked as a freakish loser by the locals. Kind of reminded me of junior high school, actually - plus ca change! The other thing about it was that I and others seemed to be very jealous of and feel rivalry with a more wealthy temple in the same area. In this experience, it seemed that we were outraged at a land gift being given by a woman (a widow?) to this other temple, and spread spiteful rumors about the deal, and about her. Completely petty and spiteful - it was pretty icky. The feeling of this experience was self-loathing, resentment, clinging to material things and clinging to institutional identity to feel more secure (fount of the jealousy for the other temple?) - and these things felt terribly heavy, like a cloak of lead -- but underneath that, surprisingly, was shyness, gentleness and affection - that sort of went to seed. Afterward it seemed to me the time and setting was kind of bumptious and abrasive - and this person couldn't develop a thick skin and still be a positive force.
A while later I looked through a book that had pictures of Egyptian temples. The one that looked most like what I saw was the temple of Khnum at Esna. But, there were differences. The columns were too thick. What I recall was like a portico with the overhang being pretty high above the head, but the columns were pretty thin, surprisingly so.
Both experiences were tantalizingly ambiguous offering me many different courses of reflection and speculation. But I quite like ambiguity except for occasionally losing patience with it. But I'd rather have it ambiguous than otherwise. But there you see, manifestly unfamous, unrich and the antithesis of glamour. LOL! I'm glad to have indulged myself by sharing it.
Now, Fizi -- what makes you think Alsace, specifically? That's rather specific. Was that in French hands in 1749? Was there fighting? Wasn't the poverty of the regular people pretty notable at that time? Maybe people just didn't have the money to buy the toys. Or, it could be a salesmanship thing. You know, spin the glamour so that the objects are properly perceived for their workmanship! lol!
Szo
