Drown

Today's song is Drown by the Smashing Pumpkins.

Once upon a time I nearly drowned but this isn’t what this blog entry is about...

I was struggling to think of something to write around the theme of ‘drown’ and then remembered a conversation I had many years ago with a passing stranger. (Some of the best conversations I’ve had in life are with random strangers who seem to just appear to tell me interesting stories). He talked about a near death experience he had where he nearly drowned. During the experience he fell deep under water and ‘was brought’ to reside in a lighthouse (I love lighthouses!), which he described as a waiting ground for people to pass over or return to life. A woman came to fetch him and told him he had to go back and wasn’t to pass over. Later in the guy’s real life he met this same woman and she told him that she recognised him too, even though they had never met in ‘real time’ before. They both took part in regression hypnosis, (if you want to know what this is, then look up a book called Journey of Souls- which I had strangely just read a few months before meeting this guy when it fell off a bookshelf in front of me). During the hypnosis session they discovered that they had met in many past lives and he said they became best friends in this life.

I kind of like the idea of meeting someone in many lives (if you like them- not so great if you have to endure an annoying twerp 50 lives over). I met another random stranger at a writing thing earlier in the year and had an interesting conversation over dinner with her one evening. She told me she’d lost her mother when she was a teenager and when she had her own children one of her daughters started saying strange things when she was about 3. The daughter said to her one day: “Isn’t it nice how you now get to be my mummy?” And pointed out a window of a flat over to old buildings saying she used to ‘work there’ and said the windows reminded her of her old school. She also demanded to know “who the characters in her life were going to be”. The aforementioned book Journey of Souls talks a lot about how we get to choose certain people to come into our lives and that we’ll usually recognise them (on a subconscious level) which could explain why you sometimes feel an instant like or connection to people you first meet. You never know... I asked this woman if she’d read Journey of Souls and she said she had. She brought up memories of a period I went through in my early 20s where a lot of weird synchronicities,(look up Jung for an explanation of that one), occurred in my life. She reckoned it was because my mind was free from clutter of study at that point, I had a low demand job and was going out socialising out with creative people a lot, so my mind was more open or something.

I like to think that there’s something a bit more than just the black and white of every day existence and love coming across people like that who tell me bizarre things! I’m still not sure I’m sold on the idea of reincarnation though; it seems a bit of an exhausting concept...