From early childhood, I was drawn to America. American TV programmes fascinated me. I particularly remember McHale's Navy making an impression on me as a five-year-old – there was a sense of instant familiarity. The uniforms, the base, the flags, calling the captain 'skipper'. And the reader books at primary school – the Janet and John series, these were m, Anglicised versions of the Alice and Jerry books published in America in the 1930s and '40s. In particular, the book Five and Half Club; the illustrations resonated deeply with me; they spoke of a land and I time I knew, that seemed close.
As a teenager, my interest in American history and culture grew. Eventually I chose to study American Studies at Warwick University. In 1978, I received a travel bursary which enabled me to visit the US for the first time. I was drawn to small-town America, rather than the bright lights or what we'd now call bucket-list destinations. Passing through such towns, I experienced the strongest sense of familiarity. I would find myself feeling, yes, click – a connection, or no, that's changed. But how can a place have changed for someone who's never visited it before? There was that sense of recognition and wistfulness, a slight sense of loss and regret. Something familiar, pleasing to experience, almost within reach, but gone.
Of course, by the age of 20, I'd already absorbed a great deal about America from television, cinema, books, photographs, Airfix kits and music. It is reasonable to assume that I was comparing the real America with an internal image constructed from all those sources. But that does not come close to capturing the subjective quality of what I felt.
Yesterday, I saw an online photograph of a 1947 Cadillac, viewed from the side. *PAFF!*. The lines of the car, the sweeping wings, the chrome trim. I could almost smell the interior, though I've never sat in one. The upholstery, the chrome window-winders and door handles, the AM radio, the decorated dashboard, the split-screen windscreen. The solidity of the thing – this was not a Morris Minor, no! I know the sensation of being in that car. Rather, I feel as though I know it.
And the music! Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, the big-band era. Louis Jordan. Western swing, jump blues, the race music of the day, bebop jazz. The music generates those qualia exomnesia/anemoia moments for me just as powerfully a photograph from the day.
But there's another dimension to all this. Everything described so far concerns my waking consciousness. Fleeting flashes of recognition, sometimes only a second or two in duration, that disappear the moment I begin to reflect upon them.
In dreams, the phenomenon presents itself quite differently. These dreams are rare, but remarkably consistent over my lifetime. I've experienced them over seven decades and have been recording them systematically for at least 20 years. I call these my canonical past-life dreams. They are mostly set in America between the 1930s and 1950s. Unlike my ordinary dreams, they follow a coherent narrative, with recognisable settings, plausible sequences of events and none of the bizarre discontinuities so characteristic of dreaming. The unities of time, place and action remain consistent.
More significantly, I experience them from within. The conscious I is present, observing and participating, with the same immediacy of subjective experience that characterises waking life.
Consider one dream set during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. I'm a boy living alone with my widowed mother on a small farm, possibly in Kentucky. On the horizon, a vast wall of dust is advancing towards our house. My mother is getting me to help secure the bedding and tablecloths in a trunk, closing the windows and shutters against the approaching storm. Our dog is whining in the corner. There's no dramatic climax; I'm simply there, experiencing the approaching catastrophe, with all the understanding that something terrible is about to happen.
There are recurring themes. An interest in machinery, a talent for fixing engines. In one dream, as a teenager, I restore a WW1-surplus Mack Bulldog truck, grey in colour, which has been standing unused in a neighbour's barn. The engine finally catches, roaring into life amid clouds of smoke. The sense of achievement is enormous.
Not all these experiences are pleasant. In another dream, my teenage gang breaks into a bonded warehouse to steal liquor and cigarettes. When a security guard wakes as we are leaving, I attack him with intense violence; I would have killed him had my companions not dragged me away.
There is a consistency about the person whose life I appear to be experiencing. He is mechanically resourceful, enterprising, impulsive, sometimes violent, interested in girls, showing and getting into scrapes. And then there's the racetrack. The year is 1939 or 1940. This is Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland or Pennsylvania. I'm standing outside a horse-racing track, too young to be admitted. The grandstands are modern, with turnstile entrances. It's getting dark. Floodlights illuminate the entrance plaza and car park. Billboards loom overhead. The wet ground is littered with discarded betting slips. Crowds mill around, entering and leaving the grandstand.
I have managed somehow to get hold of a bottle of Rolling Rock beer. I'm standing there, drinking it, watching the people going in and out. It's beginning to rain, and the evening is turning cold. I know I'm not going to get inside. The guy at the turnstile knows me. And that was the entire dream before it moved to more mundane themes. Its ordinariness stands out. No great historical event, no moment of destiny. A young man standing outside a racetrack on a damp evening, drinking a beer, disappointed that he cannot join the crowd and boast to his colleagues about getting in and betting on the ponies. Yet I can recall the scene and its atmosphere. The quality of the artificial light, the wet surfaces, the movement of people, the beer bottle in my hand.
It's the same phenomenon as my waking exomnesia, but in a different medium. In waking life, I experience the atmosphere without the story. In those rare, canonical dreams, the story unfolds within that atmosphere.
Other dreams seem to extend the narrative into the Second World War. It's 7 June 1944, the day after D-Day. I'm travelling south in the back of an open American six-wheel-drive military truck, along with a group of young men in uniform, without insignia. We're on our way to basic training, and shortly we'll be getting our military haircuts. I've just left my girlfriend. Her name is Kelly Kamen. What makes this dream particularly interesting is that within the dream I begin thinking about her surname while the narrative is unfolding. Kamen. The Slavic word for stone. Polish kamień, Russian камень. German Stein. Perhaps her family was Russian-Jewish? The given name Kelly suggests an American-born girl, three or four generations removed from the shtetl. The extraordinary thing is that while the dream is going on, I'm thinking about this, aware that the linguistic knowledge I'm using has been acquired subsequently. Yet I have no awareness of the person who acquired it. I don't know myself to be a man born in London in 1957. I'm the young American in the truck, but with access to knowledge that belongs to a later time.
It's as though the experiencing I remains constant while the biographical identity changes, and the repository of knowledge is somehow accessible independently of that identity.
In another dream, it's the summer of 1945. I'm wading ashore towards a Pacific island recently captured from the Japanese. We're carrying wooden crates from a landing vessel to the beach, containing engine parts and supplies for repairing aircraft. High overhead, against a deep blue sky, formations of shining silver bombers are heading towards Japan. Or another. October 1945. Our ship has docked in San Diego. The war is over. The other men are anxious to get home. My mother has died while I was away, so I'm in no particular hurry. A group of us decides to travel down to Mexicali before going our separate ways.
Later dreams are set in post-war America. In one, I wake in a wooden hotel called the Zig Zag, in a town of the same name. Blood is dripping through the ceiling. Upstairs I discover a decapitated body, and flee in terror, unable to remember what happened the previous night. After waking I searched online and discovered the existence of the Zig Zag Inn in Zigzag, Oregon.
And finally, a hospital. A long, modern, white three-storey building among pine trees. I'm hovering above my body, several feet in the air. A nurse stands at the foot of my bed, looking at a clipboard. She's thinking, “Mr Martin, you will not live until the morning”. I find myself thinking how tactless it is of her to have such a thought. Could these be fragments of one life? A boy growing up in Depression-era America, mechanically gifted, serving in the Pacific War, returning home, eventually dying in hospital sometime after the mid-1950s?
The dates and circumstances fit together well. But dreams can construct coherent narratives from material gathered during waking life. Their realism, however striking, is not proof that the events actually happened.
I have no way of knowing, but wish to know. Epistemically, I would like to know by way of gnosis, direct experience, rather than by trawling through patchy records online trying to find a fit. I have avoided direct searched, not for fear of drawing a blank, but rather because one way or another, it would not tell me much. While I am in awe of the study carried out by the late Prof Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia (and continued to this day by Jim Tucker) into 'past-life cases', they serve only to show that there is a phenomenon present, but the cases go nowhere in terms of explaining how memories from dead people end up being remembered by children. The research into children who report apparent memories of previous lives, notably that begun by Ian Stevenson and continued by Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia, raises interesting questions, but has not established reincarnation as a scientific fact. Nor do they offer any explanation for how this phenomenon arises.
More in the next post.
Autumn most splendid
How much spirituality do I need?
This time eight years ago:
Whoops! Clumsy
This time ten years ago:
Mystical experiences at 37,000ft
This time 11 years ago:
The staggeringly high cost of tax collection in Poland
This time 15 years ago
One stop beyond
This time 16 years ago:
Who am I? (Kim ja jestem?)
This time 17 years ago:
First snow, 2009. Ghastly!
This time 18 years ago:
Train links to town improving
This time 19 years ago:
A beautiful Sunday, south of Warsaw
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