If I understand it correctly the phenomena of visions plays a role in many religions. Things can be revealed by beings such as angels. Those prone to visions have been prone contextually to dreaming too.
My general understanding is that angels are rare and play only a very important pivotal role in the religious context. They do not appear to common or garden people despite what many a new age book suggests. Helping you find the man of your dreams is probably not high on their to do list.
{I am generalising widely}.
Yet seeing something that others do not is classed as a hallucination, which can be a symptom of psychosis. Many of the figures in religious history might be diagnosed as having an episode of psychosis today. They could be locked up and given anti-psychotic medicine.
In indigenous cultures going on a “Vision Quest” might be seen as a rite of passage. Isolated from the day to day and the tribe an individual seeks a vision of the future and his purpose. Visions can be had in caves, on high mountains. Usually, one has to step away from the mundane noise of life, maybe ease off the food.
I have participated in shamanic drumming and gone on a mini-vision quest. I can also use £250,000 femtosecond pulsed optical parametric amplifiers. It is possible that I am unique in this, there may be others. In non-linear optics world it is probably best not to talk about shamanic vision quests it could have a detrimental impact on promotion and employment prospects. So, many may have kept schtum like me.
It could be argued that I have relatively pure Welsh indigenous blood from the matrilinear line based in deepest darkest Snowdonia. As an indigenous it is not so weird for me to do indigenous things.
Anyway, I have had a number of visions over the years including when I lived in Brixton and was an academic. Needless to say, I told no colleagues nor a GP. This primarily because I always knew that I was having a vision/hallucination and was aware of my physical plane surroundings in day-to-day world at the same time. They did not overly impinge, nor were any of them frightening. If you speak to a medic about this kind of thing you could be opening a Pandora’s box and be exposed to pet theories and the latest pharma sponsored medication.
My working hypothesis concerning many of these visions is that most fall in the category of past-life recall. Some might think me whacko or that I have delusions of grandeur. People can have very closed minds.
Back in the mid seventies I used to travel by airplane from Zambia to school in Gloucestershire. There were six flights a year and by the age of 13, in the 1970s, I had 150,000 air miles. I am guilty about my childhood carbon footprint 😉. On occasion there would be a fuel stop at Malta. Each time I landed there I had a massive déjà-vu. Without knowing why, I knew that I had been there before.
This morning around 6 AM I was not sleeping so I started to do a meditation. For whatever reason, I was having difficulty and I started to have a relaxed enjoyable vision of myself in a cowled cloak and chain mail. The setting of the vision was around 800 years ago. I was aware of the vision and the bedroom. I could hear the wife breathing.
Why this is happening now I don’t know. It did point me back to a vision I had in 2003.
The vision last night may refer to “the knights of Malta”, a term used in Brittany for both Templars and the Hospitaliers, Ordre de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem.
I have had many visions associated with this putative life, a French one.
Nearby there is a hospitalier commanderie whose records do not go back past 1313 when the goods of the Templars were ceded to them.
There was also relatively nearby a Templar commanderie and the relics of a small church. The look of which is not far from one I saw in another vision.
What would you do?
Would you tell your general practice GP doctor?
Would you tell your line manager at work?
Would you imagine yourself off your trolley?
Or would you think that the sanest hypothesis was past life recall?
I am quite looking forward to seeing what may or may not happen over the next day or so…
Dreamyoga 