Paradigms Of Reality

When I was a child I had a Dream.  A Dream of my own Death.

In the Dream, I was with a group of other people and we were being loaded into the back of a van by German Nazi soldiers.  There were bench seats facing each other on either side of the back of this van, and we were told to sit down.  I did not know where we were going, but as we were herded like cattle into the van, there was an obvious air of expectation that we were being transported somewhere.  As we sat down on the benches, the doors were closed and then we all noticed that there was gas coming into the back of the van.  There was a sudden collective panic and a terrible understanding that we were not being taken to anywhere except to our own graves, and in that moment of realisation of imminent Death, I woke up.

Dan was also a Death Dreamer.  We would often tell each other about our Dreams in the morning upon waking, whilst cuddled up in bed, and on several occasions he told me that he had Dreamed of his own Death.  None of these Dreams ever gave him the specific details of when, how, where, or anything that could give him the exact scenario of his Death.  But in every Dream, he always knew that he died young.  It was like his Soul was showing him his own ticking clock of Life, and I know that it disturbed him to think that he would not get a full life-time.  He understood that his Dreams were trying to tell him that something would take him out early.  But at that point, I really don’t think he realised that his Death would be by his own hand.  

And yet his premonitions also came to pass.

We also had a powerful Dream connection with each other, and had experiences where we would have exactly the same Dream on the same night, where both of us were present, in the same setting, with the same people, and the same things would happen.  I clearly remember the first time this happened, and we both excitedly reported what we had Dreamed, with the other declaring “me too!”, over and over again.  We both had the dawning realisation that we were accessing each other within the Dreaming Realms, and for me, this was another indication of a deep and powerful connection that our Souls had in a dimensional reality outside of ‘normal’ waking reality.

As an Atheist and Scientist, Dan found these Dreaming experiences difficult to contextualise within his own Paradigm of Reality.

He chose to file them in the part of his Reality Paradigm that he also filed his most powerful psycho-spiritual plant medicine experiences.  This File was entitled “My Own Imagination”, as he couldn’t accept that anything Spiritual, Inter-Dimensional or Energetic was occurring, nor that any such thing as a Soul existed.

Of course, I had also told him when we first met, that I believed we were meant to be together and that our Souls had known each other previously, because I had met him intimately twice before in my Dreams before we ever met in real life.

To begin with, I don’t think he believed me.  But as we started having shared Dreams, his own understanding of reality and consciousness started to become challenged by his own Dream experiences.  My spiritual referencing of the Dreaming Realms challenged his psychological and scientific theoretical concepts about the brain and it’s capacities.  

Our conceptual Paradigms clashed, and yet we still met in the Dream Time.

After breaking up with Dan, I rarely Dreamed about him.  It was like I locked tight that aspect of my own psyche and our Dream connection.  Although I was the one that left him, it caused me deep pain, as I always loved him deeply.  I didn’t want to break up with him.  I wanted to sort out all the problems.  I tried for years everything I could think of to work through the issues.  But Dan didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t.  Because all the problems rooted back to his own self-destructive behaviour and the Darkness that he didn’t want to look at.  Eventually, for my own safety and well-being, as well as that of our children, I left.  It broke my heart, and I think it broke his too.

About a year after we split up and a year before he died, I had a very short Dream where we were just sitting together, and he said to me “I’m scared”.  

“I know”, I replied, and I hugged him to my chest.

Again, with the benefit of hindsight, I think back to that Dream, and it felt like his Soul knew what was coming.  Within that dimensional reality of expanded consciousness, we both knew.  And in the Dreaming Realms, we held each other tight within the tragic understanding that he would be leaving soon.

More Nazi Dreams

In my youth, I had several other Dreams about being in the Second World War.

I remember one particularly powerful one where I was in some kind of camp.  I knew I was a prisoner, an inmate within this camp.  And there were Nazi soldiers in charge, walking around, giving orders and laughing at their obvious power over the inmates that were being held there.

A good friend of mine, Andre, showed up in this Dream, and in the Dream he was also a prisoner in the camp.  We were sat together on a bed in a dormitory hut, as Nazi’s marched in and out, shouting orders at the prisoners.  I remember him whispering in my ear the simple words “It’s all about LOVE”, as he gave me a hug.  And as he hugged me, this huge wave of Light and Bliss just washed through me so powerfully that I woke up.

Andre is Jewish, and as I started piecing together these snippets of Dream information about my own experiences at the hands of the Nazi’s, I wondered who I had been in that incarnation.  

I wondered if I had been a Jew too.

It was clear to me that these were memory fragments of another life-time that were coming to me to be witness ed and remembered.  At that point, I didn’t know what to do with them, other than start to try to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and figure out what I was being shown.  At that point in my early 20’s, I was also starting to understand that people from my current life-time may have been present to a greater or lesser extent in other life-times, and this idea bubbled whenever I experienced strong Soul connections with people that I met.

From my youth, I also had a deep dislike and aversion for anything German.

I remember starting High School and finding out that half of our year group would be learning Spanish, and half would be learning German.  We did not get to choose, it was decided class by class, by the school.  I remember desperately hoping that I didn’t have to do German, and was very relieved when my class was selected into the Spanish group.

At various points through my life I had friends who visited Germany, and I remember thinking to myself how there was absolutely nothing that remotely made me want to ever go to Germany ever.  I also remember thinking how strange it was for me to think like that, as I had travelled all over the world from a young age, and no country had ever made me feel like that.  

There was a deep repulsion that I felt at a core level for anything Germanic.

This was also odd as my own Ancestry on my mother’s side rooted back to Germany and Poland.  My Mother’s Mother spoke German as her first language, despite being raised in South Africa.  Her Mother and Father, my Great-Grandparents, were married in Berlin, and then left Germany at some point between the First and Second World Wars to emigrate to South Africa.

My Great-Grandfather had also been held in a German internment camp when he returned to Germany temporarily, as the government declared him to be a traitor for leaving the country.

But I didn’t know that my Great-Grandfather had been held in an internment camp when I dreamed of being in a German camp run by Nazi’s.

Flashbacks and Fantasies

Over the years that Dan and I were together, I would get occasional visions or flashbacks of him and us, to times and experiences that I didn’t recognise from this life-time.

When my Father died, in the days following his Death, I was lying in bed one night, trying to get to sleep, amidst the hyper-awareness that the initial shock of grief brings.  I had a very strong vision of Dan and myself, from a fly-on-the-wall 3rd person perspective.  I watched us walking away, arm in arm.  I could only see us from behind, so I could see mine and Dan’s backs as they walked away from where I was viewing this scene.  But I knew that it was us.  These two figures were dressed in fine clothes, dating to the 17th or 18th Century.  I was in an extravagant corseted long ball gown type of dress with puffed sleeves.  He had on velvet britches, fancy buckled shoes and a white ruffled shirt.  I could tell we were very rich in this vision, by the clothes that we were wearing.  We walked towards a huge tree that had a large and beautiful, ornately decorated door set into it.  The door was wooden and arched with golden metalwork swirls and spirals all over it.  As Dan and I reached the door in my vision, it opened and we went through the doorway and into the tree, going down a spiral staircase within the trunk and out of view.  Although short, this vision was incredibly detailed, and I remember marvelling at all the intricate aspects of what I was seeing, like the lace on Dan’s shirt, and the corsetry of my dress, as well as the beauty of the metalwork inlaid into the door.

In contrast, I also had one recurrent and deeply disturbing vision of him that came on a regular basis.

Whenever we would go to parties or festivals,  Dan would always try to squeeze the absolute most out of the experience.   He would spend nights and days and nights drinking and taking recreational drugs, and he never wanted the party to end.  He was the archetypal Party Animal !!

In contrast, I normally bailed out comparatively early and headed for home, the van or wherever my bed cave was that night, to get a good night’s sleep.

As we all know, however, the party has to come to an end at some point, or the body gives up.  It was always a toss up which would come first for Dan.  If he was only drinking, then his body would always give up on him way before the party ended.  But if he managed to track down some Class A’s, he could last out the party every time, and was often the last man standing, or at least awake, long after everyone else had given up!

When Dan would finally drag himself back to wherever our bed was on that particular day, I would see an aspect of him that would flash up deep, deep sadness within my own Soul.

He would lie in bed for a day or two in his exhausted come-down, groaning about how awful he felt.  

His normally strong and healthy body would take on a corpse-like look, his skin would grey and his eyes would hollow and be sunken into the sockets in his head with dark circles that gave him a deathly appearance.  The gorgeous curves of his high Johnny Depp cheekbones would take on the skin and bones appearance of the malnourished and the skeletal look of starvation.

The phrase that would ALWAYS go through my mind was “He looks like an Auschwitz victim”.

I do not say this lightly, as I have two good friends whose family histories both bear the horrific scars of the atrocities committed in that Death Camp.

But this was always the phrase that would repeat itself in my mind, like a dark mantra, or possibly a dark memory of seeing him that way before.

Once, during a particularly rocky patch in our relationship, I asked Dan if he would be willing to receive some Shamanic Healing from the wonderful and wise Rita, who was the Shamanic Practitioner that I worked with for many years whenever I needed Shamanic support from someone else.  He reluctantly agreed.

In her Shamanic Journey, Rita saw him skeletal and close to death, lying in a shallow grave.  Her description of him exactly matched how I had seen him so many times on his come-downs, looking like a starved, skin and bones living corpse.  She also received information that he had once been a powerful magician, but that he had mis-used his powers and they were taken away from him.

I often wondered if this was why he was so anti-spiritual anything.  What greater punishment to a powerful magician than to remove all memory of your own power and practise, and to make you disbelieve in the reality of your own skill and talent.

And I knew that Dan also had Shamanic abilities.

He was a very capable Shamanic Journeyer, and as I was going through my training in Classical and Core-Shamanism, I would occasionally manage to convince him to have a go.

When I returned from the very first introductory training that I did, where you learn to Journey and to retrieve a Power Animal for your client, I came home, super excited about what I’d learned, and I wanted to test out my new skills.  

I convinced Dan to participate in a Shamanic Journey to find a Power Animal for himself.

I Journeyed for him at the same time.

I drummed and we both set the intention to Journey to the Lower World to call for a Power Animal for whatever he needed at that time.

When I finished drumming, he asked me what animal had come for him.

“It was a dinosaur” I replied.

“No way!  I got a dinosaur too!  Which dinosaur was it?”

“A T-Rex” I replied.

“No way!  I got a T-Rex too!”

We were both surprised at how the same animal had come to both of us, for him.  And of course, Dan filed this experience in the file named “My Own Imagination”, because to consider any other possible explanation would force him to reconsider his whole Reality Paradigm, and he was not willing to do that.

In contrast, it was more evidence to me that Dan was more than capable of navigating alternative dimensional realities, even if he didn’t consider them in the same way that I did, and I called upon his shamanic skills on several other occasions when I could not Journey myself, due to being pregnant.

He always agreed reluctantly, but also always proved himself to be fully capable of doing the required work, and every time I asked him, he would gave me a full and detailed explanation of what he had encountered in these Shamanic Journeys, whilst simultaneously contextualising them into his Reality Paradigm of ‘My Own Imagination’!

Tripping The Light Fantastic

I would like to mention at this point, that I am no purist regarding drugs and alcohol, and I never judged Dan for his explorations into how recreational drugs and psychedelic plants interacted with his brain and helped him form his own Reality Paradigm.

I spent about five years in my early 20’s delving quite deeply into the realms of recreational drugs and psychedelic plants.

But I realised by my mid 20’s that my body would not support my taking of Class A drugs any longer.  I had my own wild time, for sure, but when I started getting respiratory infections that lasted for a couple of months at a time, any time I partook, I stopped because I understood that the short-term high was not worth the long-term cost to my health.  

However, I do credit that period of my life and my powerful experiences with Ecstasy, LSD, DMT and Psilocybin for blasting open my own doors of Emotional and Spiritual Reality.

This five year period of my own psychoactive drug immersion came after the deeply traumatic three years of being Sex Trafficked in my late teens, by a psychopath that eventually kidnapped me and tried to kill me.  This particular chapter of my life ended with a three month stint in prison due to the fact that he also Criminally Trafficked me.  But more on that later…

After these three years of Hell, Ecstasy was a very welcome Heart-opening experience for the Heart that I had shut down and encased in stone in order to protect it from those terrible experiences that I had endured.  I had always been a spiritual seeker since childhood, but after the spiritual drought that those three years inflicted upon me, my Soul was yearning to spread its wings once more, but also to understand with greater context, what the hell had just happened to me.

Those five years of drug exploration in my early twenties were also the start of my own journey into the realms of healing for my broken and battered, shattered self, as well as continuing to shape my own understanding of spirituality and my relationship with it.  LSD and the psychedelic plants that I now understand to be powerful Teacher Plants opened me up to the possibility that the realms of Spirit and Energy were much more vast and complex than my 20-something-year-old-self had any possible clue about, and it became a starting point for my own explorations into consciousness, as well as spiritual paths and practises that use the shifting of consciousness to access altered states of reality.  This path took me on a journey through Buddhism, Reiki, Crystal Healing, Herbalism, Hedge-witchery and eventually to Shamanism, where my Soul found it’s natural home and talent.

And although I still love the occasional journey with one of Mother Nature’s powerful Plant Teachers, Motherhood pressed the pause button on that particular aspect of my explorations.

Instead, I learned Shamanic methods that use drumming to shift us into altered states of consciousness, which is logistically much more practical, both in professional settings of Therapeutic Shamanic Healing, as well as for the 24/7 demands of Motherhood!!

I understand from my own personal experiences that drugs can absolutely be a gateway into Spiritual Awakening, and while my body eventually rejected anything that was white and powdery, I never had such health problems with those powerful Teacher Allies from Mother Nature; from the Kingdoms of the Plants and Mushrooms.

I have also witnessed both the Darkness and the Light that come with the use of different drugs, in my own friendship circles and wider social circles, as well as how their influences can impact the human energy field, health and lifestyle choices in both positive and negative ways.

I say all this as I believe that Dan’s own journey with drugs had many layers to it.

Firstly, he was an experience junkie!  He loved anything that gave him a buzz, and this included things like music, dancing and travelling, as well as ALL Pleasures of the Flesh!

I believe he also took drugs both to distract himself from his own Inner Darkness as well as to open himself up emotionally from his normal state of being pretty emotionally shut down.

But I also believe there was a part of him that was seeking greater spiritual understanding, connection and answers.  Whilst simultaneously rejecting concepts of God or Spirit, and denying their relevance to his own psychedelic journey.  In this respect, he wrestled with himself deeply.  There was inner conflict and inconsistency with this particular aspect of his Reality Paradigm, for sure.  

One of his most powerful psychotropic experiences, that he loved to tell the tale of was with Salvia, another type of powerful Teacher Plant.  During this experience, he spoke to Gods that identified themselves as Giraffe Gods, and they gave him extensive life advice and told him to stop wasting his life and get on with the important things!!  He didn’t quite know what to do with this experience.  Sometimes he filed it into the category of hallucination and ‘My Own Imagination’, but occasionally, when pressed, he would admit that it sometimes rested in the category entitled ‘Conversations With God’.  This powerful spiritual experience was in direct conflict with his strong self-identification as ‘Atheist’ and ‘Scientist’.  He was pulled relentlessly between these two Reality Paradigms, and having chosen a Shamanic Witch to be his lover, life-partner and Mother of his children, this definitely intensified his inner conflict!  The Atheist Scientist in him would stamp and shout and try to regain conceptual control whenever we ended up in this territory, and I could feel the Spiritual Seeker in him trying to stop the Atheist Scientist from silencing and stamping on his own spiritual curiosity and Soul’s yearning.  

It became a big issue within our relationship as the Atheist Scientist attempted to discredit and invalidate me, my path, my work, my practises and belief systems.  Yet at other times, when Dan had his own powerful experiences of spiritual realities, the Spiritual Seeker in him would come forward and shyly share with me what he had experienced.  It was a Jekyll and Hyde scenario for sure.  And I loved the aspect of him that wanted to explore and understand more deeply, his own spiritual reality.  And yet I hated that aspect of him that would try to Silence and invalidate me and my own powerful spiritual experiences.  

The path of psychotropic plant medicine seemed to me to be the most likely doorway for him to allow himself permission to fully relinquish himself to The Great Mystery, and I hoped for the day that he would have such a great awakening.

Dan had a great interest in psychoactive plants and mushrooms, from both a subjective experiential perspective, but also from a botanical and anthropological perspective.

He had a particularly strong love of Fly Agaric mushrooms.  In fact he loved all mushrooms, but Fly Agaric was his favourite.  He seemed to have a special skill for being able to locate mushrooms whilst out on wild mushroom forages.  His mushroom radar would start beeping and he would divert off the path and just know where a little crop of mushrooms would be.  This skill was relevant for both culinary mushrooms as well as magic mushrooms!  I always found it fascinating that I had much better eye-sight than him, and yet he could locate the tiniest mushroom hidden in the grass every time, while I searched and searched and rarely found anything!  I used to joke that he was half-man, half-mushroom.  

After Dan died, he asked me to try to get a Fly Agaric mushroom into or onto his coffin at his funeral.  I asked Craig, a good friend of Dan’s to try to make this happen, as Craig and Dan both shared a love of mushrooms, foraging, as well as the same birthday.

For many years I had fleeting visions of him in the Central and South American jungles re-connecting himself to the Spiritual Dimensions of Mother Earth and Great Spirit through working with the Teacher Plants that the indigenous people of these places have honoured and used ceremonially for thousands of years within their own indigenous spiritual practises.

This is why I never gave up hope of him finding his own path of healing, especially when I was subsequently lead to Guatemala which is a Central American hub of Ceremonial Plant Medicine.

But alas, this was not meant to be, in this life-time anyway.  Perhaps these were visions of my own hopeful fantasy, or maybe even from a different life-time.  But it feels to me like this part of his journey has been left unfulfilled, as there was a much deeper curiosity there for him than simply wanting to get off his head.

In contrast, alcohol has rarely been a substance that I give much spiritual credit to.

Perhaps this is because I have seen how destructive it’s influence has been within multiple generations of my own family, as well as being Dan’s biggest Demon.

And I do believe that for the most part, it shuts us down, rather than opening us up.  

Energetically, it slows down and numbs the energy field, which is why it is used extensively as a form of self-medication by those who seek to numb their inner pain.

Unfortunately, it is also a depressive substance, so for those running away from their own Darkness, the Demon Drink can run just as fast, and take some people out at the last hurdle.

After his Death, an entry was found in one of Dan’s journals that stated, “I need to give up drinking otherwise I’m probably going to end up dead.  Either by mis-adventure or suicide.  Probably the latter.”  

He knew that alcohol was his biggest enemy.  And so did I.