This was the photo that stunned me. The side of the house and the porch. Note the curious, single, "lonely" window on the second floor that I had remembered. |
By TCC Team Member Dorraine Fisher
Professional Writer, a nature and wildlife enthusiast who has written for many magazines. Get Dorraine's book The Book Of Blackthorne!
The Shift – Belief In Reincarnation
The Day My Beliefs Changed Forever
By Dorraine Fisher
I never believed in reincarnation. Such an idea seemed ridiculous. Not to mention illogical. But there was a time about five years ago that things happened to make me change my mind.
I was going through a very trying period in my life, and, with all the emotional stress, my dreams seemed to come alive at night. They were so lucid most of the time that I decided to start writing them down. And I was so curious about their meanings that I decided to buy a dream dictionary so I could try to make sense of them.
But one night, one dream struck me as odd for some reason. In it, I was walking up a small hill into a beautiful yard toward a stately, white Victorian house. I walked up toward a small porch situated on the side of the house. It seemed to be springtime as the scent of spring blooms from the garden flooded my senses as I passed a small flower patch on the way up. And I noted, curiously, that there was a window next to the door to the left of it and another window single, lonely looking window above the porch directly above that window. It was a detail that was very clear.
In the dream, I stepped onto the porch and walked into the large side door of the house. Inside, I could see a long row of glass cases stretched out before me full of memorabilia. I was curious and I walked up to examine the items. They looked to be the personal possessions of a woman, and then I saw a name embossed on a small journal among the items. It was "Harriet Beecher Stowe."
Now, I wouldn’t have given this dream a second thought, but I didn’t know at the time who Harriet Beecher Stowe was. The name seemed strangely familiar, but rang no other bells in my mind. Though it was a nagging enough feeling that I had to Google the name and find out more.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was an author during the late 1800’s that was said by President Abraham Lincoln to have ignited the opposition to slavery by painting a true picture of it for regular Americans. And she was credited with fueling this cause that ultimately led to the American Civil War. She wrote the famed classic "Uncle Tom’s Cabin."
Okay, fine. She was a great historic figure that had eluded me for some reason. But why would I have a dream about her? Especially if I didn’t know who she was before this?
But I was curious to understand more about this dream. Why would I "remember" a name in a dream that I had not known before? I opened my big dream dictionary to try and make some sense of it. Dreams about memorabilia such as this, the book said, are recollections of a past life.
I was about to simply snap the book shut and give the whole research quest a shove off the table. Past life? Really? It couldn’t be that. It had to be something else. Dreams are said to be about our emotional situations, guiding us toward finding solutions to our problems. I looked and looked for any other details from the dream that might make sense in the context of my life, and I really didn’t find anything. But the scene kept rerolling inside my head like a movie. I could still see myself walking onto that porch and through that side door. It had been so clear. And I recalled the single window on the second story above the porch. I could smell the flowers. I could feel the sun on my face. And when I walked through that door, the old worn floor squeaked a little under my feet. It seemed so real.
Something wouldn’t let me put the subject to rest. I wondered if I could find a picture of the author’s house on Google. I typed in the keywords and found numerous photos of the house; a beautiful stately Victorian house in Hartford, Connecticut. But nothing about it looked familiar. Maybe I saw a different house in the dream, I thought. Or maybe I’m just nuts. But I kept looking, thinking that I needed to look at every image of Harriet Beecher Stowe houses before I gave up the hunt. I kept scrolling.
And then suddenly, there it was. I’d found a lesser-known picture of the side of the house. There was the house I remembered from my dream! The same single, lonely window on the second story above the porch with the steps up onto the small porch and the side door I had gone through to get inside. It was all there as I remembered it…except for one thing. The house in my dream had been white. The house in this photo was gray.
So, as not to be discouraged, I Googled for older photos of the house, and sure enough, the house had been painted white several times in its history. Eureka!
So this was it! This was the exact house from my dream. I had never seen it before in my life, but I had somehow dreamt about it…in fair enough detail to make me think seriously about what had just happened to me.
I then felt pretty sure that I had had some resemblance of a karmic dream. A recollection in the form of a dream about a person I was not familiar with in my waking life, but seemed to remember in my unconscious mind through a night time dream.
Could it have been something else? And unconscious memory? And imagining? Sure, maybe. But this experience had such an impact on me emotionally that I couldn’t dismiss it entirely. Could I dare ask myself if I had actually been Harriet Beecher Stowe in that life, or someone close enough to her to give the name profound meaning to me? It seemed a little silly to entertain such a notion, and yet I couldn’t ignore it.
But whatever it was, that was my "shift" moment when I realized that there might be something to this reincarnation stuff. I started a long research project to find more information on reincarnation and became an even more serious believer. Of course, I’ll never know the answers for certain, but this was the moment when I realized that maybe not everything is as it seems. The moment when I realized how much of a mystery life really is, and how we can never have all the answers. And that’s also the moment when I decided that it was okay if there are some things I never know. But then I don’t have any choice, do I? ***********DF
[More on Reincarnation by Dorraine can be found by clicking Here, Here & Here]
Harriet Beecher Stowe
[More about Harriet Beecher Stowe: http://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/ ]
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