I’m walking through a damp, flat landscape with reeds much taller than me. I look down and my green trousers are ragged and I seem not to have any shoes on. A short fat yellow snake darts out by my left foot. I’m tired. The war has gone on much longer than I had expected. Ahead of me men – three? – are shouting as they hunt me. I know it is almost over. I’m partly relieved. I was here for something to do with a railway line. Perhaps I was meant to destroy it? Now I’m going to die. I see myself from above. I’m stretched out. I’ve been shot in my heart. Blood is spreading through the green rags: the remnants of a uniform. As I float up I think of my home on the other side of the world. I see three poplar trees blowing in the wind in a British garden. At their base is a vegetable patch where rabbits come. Regret floods through me that I cannot return. I had promised the trees that I would come back.
PAST LIVES AND TRANCES
In October 2022, I sat for three afternoons with a past-life therapist. This vignette is taken from one of several past lives that I explored on those days. There was a good deal of conversation both before and after. But the trances, which were recorded, totalled just under four and a half hours: an average of about an hour and a half per day. The therapist had some 20 years of experience in the field. Allison is a charismatic American with a soft, memorable voice. I am a historian specialising in supernatural belief systems. I came to this experience as a sceptic. I find it difficult to believe that we survive death in any intelligible form, let alone that our personalities are decanted into other bodies. I am, though, passionately interested in trance states and past life regression depends on the patient entering a prolonged trance.
A trance state is a loose term that we apply to a range of different kinds of altered states of consciousness. A frequently experienced version of trance is the driver who cannot remember part of the journey between home and work because they have gone into autopilot. Repetitive, automatic actions seem particularly effective in inducing trance states: rhythmical dancing, drumming, singing, picking berries, factory work, meditative breathing, even aimlessly flicking between TV channels. Trance states are often also associated with exhaustion or sleep: we more easily enter trances while we are getting ready for bed, when we wake unexpectedly in the night, or while we
