We all have unusual memories and experiences that make us wonder if there is another world going on in addition to this one; dreams, thoughts and familiarities, affinities showing up out of nowhere. We are certain of the reality of these experiences; we know we had them and we suspect their importance. It's impossible to explain these phenomena without referencing relatively insupportable studies such as reincarnation or extrasensory powers. But what if one could take all of the little related parts, all the memories, the dreams and the life landmarks, and string them into a cohesive, explainable whole using only one's day-to-day experiences to prove, at least to the strictness of one's own satisfaction, their meaning and intelligence?
I will give you the related experiences. These are by no means all of my experiences, but they have formed the part of me that, every July, falls into an uneasy depression with stabs of deep despair. These are things that really happened, even though they are mainly dreams which only I can know actually occurred. I therefore refer to them as my “facts.”
The facts of experience #1
I was about six years old. I had a dream that I was on an outdoor veranda surrounded by a white balustrade. I was very, very happy to be there; the floor was a smooth white stone expanse that looked grey and chalky under the overcast sky. There was a faint odor in the air, like rain on concrete.
That was it. It was just a moment in a place, but the enchantment I felt was so intense that I was filled with curiosity then, as now: where was this? It was not a child-like joy, it was a material thrill, physical and even self-satisfied, which somehow separated itself from my usual childhood dreams and fantasies. It caused me to remember it, and even to feel the sense that I needed to remember it.
I thought about it over the course of many years, which is the time it took for me to learn the words I needed to describe it, years to realize that although I am certain of the dream and the time in my life I dreamed it, I could not have known or seen a place like this. There was no television then. I was only reading first grade books. Mostly I left it to rest in a corner of my mind, although once in a while I would see a park pavilion that looked slightly similar, and I would think to myself, “Yes, it was a little like that.” I mentioned it to a few people, but there's nothing particularly interesting in relating that one has had a dream of a veranda and was very happy on that veranda.
The facts of experience #2
My older sister Katherine Ann was a bully. I needn't go into the pain of having an older sister who systematically makes one's life miserable, because everyone is familiar with bullies. She controlled my mother with her temper and her fists, thereby enforcing her domination over me with perfect freedom. Kathy seemed to have a desperate need to make sure I had not one iota of anything that exceeded her portion, and even to take some of mine away periodically. I was tested extensively in primary school and found to be gifted, and one of the many things she took away was my ability to go to a school for the gifted and talented; she secretly bullied my mother into not giving the school permission to transfer me there.
The facts of experience #3
I have had throughout my lifetime a recurring dream. It never lasts long and it's always the same. My head has been removed somehow and I am picking it up off the ground in order to put it back on. I can see the cut is smooth and I place it on my head again easily, but I am very curious how this can be; how can I put my head back on after it's been taken off, and how can I still be alive and conscious? That's the dream. I've never attached any significance to it, and I've never before wondered about its meaning. I probably would have forgotten it had I not dreamed it so often.
The facts of experience #4
After my parents' divorce our family fell into chaos. Kathy dropped out of school and became a maid of all work around our house. She used me for a personal maid, even calling me Cinderella. I was always defiant and got beaten up most every day. I stopped going to school simply because we all stopped; but because of my “gifted and talented” status I was watched closely. Within a year of the beginning of my truancy I was sentenced, because of this truancy, to Wisconsin's prison system until the age of twenty-one. This was before the United States Supreme Court outlawed this type of “status offense” sentencing which was inflicted solely on young lower class women.
The sentencing itself was the singular most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me in this lifetime. When the judge finished passing the sentence, which actually did state, “I hereby sentence you to the Wisconsin State School for girls until the age of twenty-one,” I screamed in agony, on and on, trying to cling to my mother as they led me away to the jail. I remember the days after, where I spent most of my time looking out the caged windows on a desolate snow-filled landscape of undeveloped suburban land, feeling total devastation and the certainty I would never see my loved ones again, never walk another day in freedom. There was no future.
There of course was a future, which held the murders of people I loved, the loss of both parents, the rape of my daughter, a heart attack and more; but almost to this day this was the most agonizing experience I was ever to endure. I had never recovered, really, and my anger over being imprisoned for such a mindless reason had never been resolved. Life went on and so did my resentment.
A few years ago, after the release of Sofia Coppola's “Marie Antoinette,” this queen of France was all the rage in the craft world and I wanted to perhaps create something salable out of this phenomenon. I began to read everything I could find on Marie Antoinette and soon became obsessed. I read of her childhood all the way up to the details of her execution. I read of the beheading of her friend Princess de Lamballe, whose head was paraded around on a pike. I read letters she wrote to her lover Axel von Fersen. I decided that for my contribution I would create “infamous forgeries” of her letters to her lover, which I found on a website. I translated these letters into French using an online translator, and wrote them out in longhand using sepia ink and an old fashioned dip pen. I actually sold one! But more importantly, I believe that my mimicking this old style writing in French somehow opened a door. Alas, it didn't give me a connection to Marie Antoinette; it did, however, open some sort of memory in my consciousness.
The facts of experience #5
Shortly after the Marie Antoinette obsession I had a dream that I was put into a prison. I was escorted by a very gentle woman into a cell that was night-time dark, with only a faint light from some unknown source. I knew I was being condemned to death and I knew I had done nothing wrong. The hopelessness I felt was something I never want to experience again--the pain stabbed my chest in an unending burning thrust, and despair coursed through my veins like poison wine. There would be no rescue and no cry to God would be heard.
The cell was made of tall cast iron bars and the room was dank. The floor was stone, I believe. There was no softness anywhere, and I laid down on something, I don't know what. I remember crossing my hands over my chest in a futile attempt to protect myself. That was the end of the dream.
Many weeks later I was thinking casually about the two times I had been in prison. In the middle of my musings it dawned on me that I have only been imprisoned once, when I was a teenager. This other, dream imprisonment for my execution, intruded on my waking thoughts as a memory I took for granted; I realized it had to be part of my real experiences. I know I was in that prison. I had opened a door.
Later that year, on July 17, I called my daughter and told her about the dream I had of the prison and this depression that happens to me every year about that time, She is extremely psychic, but, like me, it's just something that happens now and then. Most times it's spot on but she plans to continue working as a network administrator. While we were talking she sent me a link to the execution of a group of sixteen Carmelite nuns. This time she was completely spot on. She didn't know of all the information she had led me to until I told her later. She just said that she knew from her history studies approximately in what era that sort of prison existed, and she looked up that day in history, July 17, focusing on the late eighteenth century. She said that this “resonated” with her. I have since learned to respect mightily this “resonance” faculty she has.
Carmelites of Compiègne is what she referenced, and is the phrase to look up if you want to further research what I'm writing.
Fourteen nuns and two maids were guillotined on July 17, 1794. Their crime was their Catholicism under Robespierre's Reign of Terror. It was in studying these two maids and their place in the nun's lives that I found information that mirrored eerily my present life.
The two maids were not nuns, and weren't even living with the nuns. Their job was to carry out errands for the sisters which had to do with the world outside the convent. They were sisters, Catherine Anne and Terese Soiron. Catherine Anne was the elder by six years. Terese was talented and a beauty when she was young, and was petitioned earnestly by the Princess de Lamballe, a close friend of Marie Antoinette, to enter into service under her, presumably as a lady in waiting to Madame Lamballe in her home. Terese did not go. It defies the imagination that a maid running outside errands for a group of nuns would turn down a position with one of the higher ranking members of the House of Savoy, but there you have it.
Madame Lamballe herself was executed on the guillotine many years later, in 1792, for being a supporter of the royal family, and her head was stuck onto a pike and thrust outside the upper window of the jail in which Marie Antoinette awaited her own execution. Some say Marie saw it, some say she didn't. Either way, Mme. Lamballe was punished adequately for her royalist leanings and Marie was soon to follow.
It was two years later that the Carmelite nuns and the maids met their fate, during the reign of Robespierre. This was the famous Reign of Terror, a time during which fifteen thousand French citizens lost their heads on the guillotine. According to onlookers' accounts Catherine Anne, who very much loved the Catholic church and was very loyal to the nuns, expressed her outrage about the insults the nuns were getting from the crowds on the way to their executions. Terese, on the other hand, lost consciousness on her way up the steps to the guillotine.
These nuns, in fact the whole lot of sixteen including the two maids, have been written about extensively; operas have been created of their ordeal and much study has been made of them. The crowd was described as utterly and eerily silent during the beheadings, unusual for public executions of that time. One week later the Reign of Terror ended with the guillotine execution of Robespierre himself. Some credit the nuns' sacrifice as ending the reign of terror, and thoughts of their canonization are still being discussed to this day.
I don't need to make this narrative too much longer: I suspect I was the younger sister, Terese. I was very pretty when I was younger and had a variety of little talents, like writing, singing and dancing. I've done some modeling as an adult. I don't boast of this, I say it because this is just the sort of young woman looked for by royalty in order for them to have playmates on staff. Terese was like this, according to record.
Now I will reference my “facts” in the way that I believe they connect me to the life of Terese Soiron
Fact #1
Madame Lamballe was Marie Antoinette's best friend, and it is highly likely that Terese was taken to Versailles, to Marie's Le Petite Trianon, for visits. The position Terese was to fill was one of companion; therefore it was probable that Mme. Lamballe took her to see her best friend to see how she would fit in. I can easily imagine the thrill Terese would feel in all this opulence, realizing she might soon be a part of it. My veranda with the balustrade can be found there; I've seen photographs of the veranda at Le Petite Trianon and I've thought to myself, “Yes, it was exactly like that.”
Fact #2
Terese was, I believe, prevented from working for Madame Lamballe by her older sister, and I believe intimidation and bullying were the methods used by Catherine Soiron to prevent Terese from taking this new employment. The vision of Catherine Soiron raging at the crowd is a vision of my own sister's bellowing. I see this parallel in my own life, with my sister actually preventing me from attending an exclusive school which may have given me advantages not available to her. I can understand Catherine's jealousy, to be left to do all the work alone while her younger sister Terese, whom she probably helped raise, would get to enjoy luxuries and ease.
Fact #3
I have learned that dreams of losing one's head are often dreams of one's own actual beheading. I have also learned that once a head is removed from the body, it has 5 to 30 seconds of consciousness left before brain death occurs. This is the main reason beheadings are no longer conducted. I believe my recurring dream of losing my head and wondering about it is an actual memory.
Facts #4 and #5
I believe my dream of the eighteenth century prison was actually my experience as Terese. In this life, the violent reaction I had to my sentence was quite unusual, and in fact more appropriate for a death sentence. I believe the first jailing was confused and commingled in my mind with the experience in this life, making the occasion much more dreadful than it was or needed to be. Still, the charges against me in this life were arbitrary and very painful, less than Terese's charges but just as devastating to a fifteen-year old girl who isn't certain there even is a future.
When I was a child I inhaled the breathless fairy tales that entertained the same courts as Marie Antoinette's. Although I'm comfortable now, I was born into poverty, and without a shred of outer corroboration I had inside me a pride of my own worth, a haughty conviction that I was cut from better cloth. In these stories I identified solely with princesses, queens, and foundlings of superb grace and loveliness. I had to hide this attitude from others because it was completely without merit. But if, in my soul's past wanderings, I was seen as fit to be plucked and employed by royalty, then forced to continue as a drudge for the rest of my youth, developing a bitter and stubborn pride looks quite plausible. Although that pride has served me well to climb out of the squalor and violence of my youth, I can see how it would torment Terese all the way to the guillotine. I have also had a hatred for the Catholic church. I always felt an outsider even when I was regularly attending mass. Who wouldn't, if her head were lopped off because of a connection to that church that she personally didn't formalize or acknowledge?
Because of all these experiences, none of which are manufactured, and because of the history of the Soiron sisters, all of which is recorded, I believe that this life I have been given continues a struggle that originated in eighteenth century France. I believe my sister, Katherine Ann, shared a sisterhood with me in this previous existence. I believe I've overcome the haughtiness and extended a considerable amount of forgiveness. I suspect this was the point all along.
This search is at an end, for good reason. There have been other dreams of my sister from even earlier times; I know what these memory dreams are now. And in one, though it was so very, very faint an impression, I killed her, I am certain of this. I don't know the method I used, I only know the terrible sorrow and compassion and regret that rushed over me immediately afterward. Too late...too late...I discovered I loved her. I have allowed these doors to close again. My daughter is someone I suspect I've also had a previous life experience with. When I told her of my dream of murdering my sister she stopped me abruptly in great alarm, saying, “Don't, mom! I sense a door opening and I feel like it involved me. Please stop.” I stopped, and haven't mentioned it again until now. Her name is Karen, a name related to Katherine. While I only feel responsible for this life since it's the one I have the ability to work with, I've read that reincarnation can sometimes be a series of fainter and fainter traceries of past evils. I don't want to know any more about it.
The depression and the stabs of despair have abated for this year. Maybe as a result of writing this they won't come back next year. Or maybe they will come with more unwelcome information. I will deal with it then.
In closing: Of course the difficulty with a narrative of this nature, with the positing of my “facts,” is that it can be ridiculed by anyone with a mind to and there are no real ways to defend it. It all happened just the way I've said and I've written it as I know how to in the language of this physical world. I have not participated in a past life regression, nor have I invited any of this in. On the contrary, because all of this came into my life unasked and unexplained I have had to strive very hard to make sense of it, and my search has led me to what I've described here. My only object is to put this experience out into the body of our written claims where someone who is looking for it may find it.
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