The season’s 1st round of flu/nasty cold hit our household last week. The husband was first on Monday; followed by me on Wednesday & T (the housemate) joined us in misery on Thursday. The Husband, still not feeling all that well, went back to work on Thursday, leaving T & me (hmmm…T & ME would make a good sitcom title) with 2 days of watching Perry Mason reruns & bunches of old movies including The King & I, which I had not seen in decades & it was as incredibly good as I had remembered. Does The King & I have the best Rodgers & Hammerstein score? Hollywood used to do an excellent job of making movie versions of stage musicals: Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, & The Music Man.
I digress. The poor Husband suffers from a still undiagnosed lung ailment that was first discovered & nearly killed him in late 2004. He has highly scarred lung tissues & a common cold will hang on in his lungs long after other symptoms have moved on. He really suffers & my heart just breaks for him. In April, the Husband was given a session with a prominant psychic as a birthday gift. This person does not use astrology or any other method except just sitting with the subject & talking. She told him many amazing things, including that fact that he suffers from an unusual lung ailment because he – “had been killed by an arrow to the lung in the West during the 19th century”.
In Seattle, sometime in the late 1980s, I did some work for a woman who was a hypno-therapist. She had inquired if I would like to take some of my payment as a session with her. Not trying to stop smoking or loose weight, I asked her to what avail would I want to do this. She suggested a past life regression. I have a sense of adventure & I thought it would be a lark.
The hypno-therapist taped our session. When I came out of it, I was quite shaken & unhappy. It took me most of a week to get rid of my anxiety & shake the feeling off. She told me details of the session & I then listened to the tape, where I heard my voice, but with a different syntax & cadence than my own. When most people are told of a past life it seems that they were often royalty in Atlantis or a peasant during the French Revolution or some romantic notion. You rarely hear about a past life as a housewife in Akron. My reaction was dubious at first. Until I heard the tape.
It seems that I had a life right before my current life. I was Byron Skipworth, born in 1925 in a northern Chicago suburb. I had red hair (I was a red head in this life until I had no hair) & blue eyes. I was estranged from my family of a demanding & abusive father, a sickly mother & several older siblings. I left home at 15 & went into Chicago where I fell in with a group of jazz musicians, most of them black. These people liked me a great deal & named me "Skip". I (Skip) had studied piano when I was very young, but I found a calling playing drums with jazz groups. I was befriended by one black family that allowed me to sleep on a cot in a screened in “summer porch”. I stayed there even during the Chicago winters. At some point in the early 1940s, I was badly injured in an automobile accident. I spent the rest of my life in severe pain as a result of the accident & eventually became addicted to drugs including cocaine & heroin. I was homosexual & had several love affairs with black musicians. I died alone & broke from a heroin overdose in the winter of 1953, just 28 years old. I was born as Stephen in Oakland, California in early January 1954.
After the session, I did some research & found that a Byron Skipworth was born in 1925 in Evanston Illinois. I never looked further & I never listened to the tape again. I hated knowing about my past life & I have never felt comfortable trying to deal with this information. I eventually lost the tape.
Last night, I dreamed as Skip. In the dream I was on the "summer porch" on a winter day & I dreamed the entire sequence of preparing & then injecting heroin. I dreamed all the sensations & euphoria of the drug. In the dream, I made my way to the greenroom at a night club where I was urgently kissed by a very large, very dark black man. We had started having very rough but transcendent sex… & I then I woke up.
In this lifetime:
I have spent a lot of time in Chicago & always felt familiar with the city.
I have an innate musical ability & I play several instruments. From an early age I knew a host of musical & jazz standards. The Husband & my close friends consider me a savant in my ready knowledge of American music from the last 100 years.
I have always had substance abuse issues.
I had an early outrage at the treatment of African Americans, even before the civil rights movement in the 1960s, even as I was growing up in place where they were 1% of the population.
I burst into tears whenever I hear All The Things You Are.
& yet:
I had a very happy & secure childhood, with 2 loving & supportive parents.I have never done heroin.
I have had a lifelong irrational fear of syringes. I can actually pass out from seeing one on a counter at the MD’s or Vet’s office.
I do not have a fetish for or about black men, although I appreciate the beauty of many African Americans.
I have made it into my mid-50s.
The Husband’s psychic noted that he had a spouse/partner who- “worries too much, way too much. He needs to deal with it or it will be his undoing". She said we had been together in may past lives.
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