Family Stories, and the Nature of Time

This is a true family story from the 1800's.

My great-great-grandmother Helen Reed was born in Watkins Glen. According to family accounts, she was an Episcopalian, an accomplished horsewoman, spoke fluent French and Swedish (which she learned from her housekeeper) and was skilled at the Victorian parlor activity of table tipping, a form of séance. 

Her reputation as a psychic did not come casually. 

As a young woman, she married Edwin Lewis, an opera singer. They moved together to his family seat in Ohio.

Not long after, a newlywed, she woke up one morning and insisted that her new family take her to the train to return to Watkins Glen. This baffling behavior on the part of a new and untested member of the family puzzled everyone, but she insisted that she had to go. She had, she explained, had a dream of her sister’s funeral procession. 

Her sister was dead. She had to return to Watkins Glen for the funeral. 

No doubt shaking their heads at the absurdity, the family duly put her on the train, and she arrived in Watkins Glen to attend the funeral of her sister on time. 

There was, clearly enough, absolutely no way she could have known by any conventional means her sister had actually died on the very night of the dream; but she did.

The marriage, already off to a rocky start, was not to go much better. She gave birth to a baby girl, Annette. While the child was still an infant, she and her husband went on tour in the Midwest where he sang at various opera houses. One night, he finished his performance on stage and left the stage to walk back to the dressing room where his wife and baby were waiting for him.

He never got there. Somewhere on the brief walk between the stage and the dressing room, he disappeared — never to be seen again. This was, mind you, in a relatively small town, and there were few means whereby one could hide and leave without being seen. To this day his disappearance remains a family mystery; there was no sign before it of dissatisfaction or trouble.

Helen remarried John Merrill, whose New Testament Bible (badly in need of rebinding) is sitting next to me as I write this. He's at the top left in the picture.

Here as well is the seashell picture frame containing a silhouette of her mother which Helen Reed made for her on her birthday.

Like Helen, I've had distinct and unambiguous dreams of the future which have then come to pass exactly as I dreamed them. The talent, if you can call it that, for apprehending the future clearly runs in the family. Yet such talents never function well when you need them to; and when they do predict things, they are almost always bad ones. A friend of mine who had died in 1999 came to me in a dream three times in the month before my sister died in 2011, three nights in a row, because I didn’t understand his message until the third time. (I’m a dunderhead.) That third time I understood he was coming to tell me that a family member would die, but I didn’t know which one. 

It was only after Sarah’s death that I got it.

Immediately after Sarah died, that very night, I dreamed in great detail of a chicken dead in the coop. This chicken had unique plumage so one could easily distinguish it from others. The detail in the dream included the exact position the chicken was lying in in the coop. The next morning, I went up to the coop and there was the exact chicken, dead, quite exactly as in the dream. 

The event re-proves beyond reasonable doubt that the future already exists and can be anticipated; and it equally underscores the futility of such information. No one really needs to know that in the future a particular dead chicken will be lying in a particular place. There is a cosmic sense of humor at work here.

The other, most distinctive psychic dream I ever had was equally mundane and useless. In 1994, I was living in Manhattan and had a detailed dream of living in a completely different house in a completely different place, where I was fixing the screen door and had to go through a series of steps that included walking all the way around the house from the inside to the other side through the garage. I remarked on the dream to my now ex-wife at the time, because it seemed so utterly mundane and meaningless. We were living in an apartment in New York City, and the forecast of the house anywhere in our future seemed remote. 

Why even dream of such an ordinary thing, so completely removed from our circumstances?

A year later, through a series of disruptions which involved the aforementioned friend who told me about my sister's impending death (he was still alive at the time) we suddenly found ourselves living in a house in Georgia. I’ll spare you the details about how all of that took place. 

In this new house, within a week or two of moving in, I had to install a screen door. I was halfway through the task, walking around the house outside amongst the bushes between the wall of the garage and the front yard, when I suddenly realized that I was reliving the dream I had had in exact detail. To say that it freaked me out is an understatement. 

The point, as I said before, is that the future already exists. Our perception of time is flawed; and we do have the capacity to perceive time in such a way that future events are visible to us.

These events are called psychic; but I would call them spiritual. The soul can know things that the mind is incapable of comprehending. On occasion, the soul touches the mind to remind it of its superior nature; and when this happens, we suddenly discover that our assumptions about time, material reality, and mortality are all incorrect.

Of course I’ve had many other psychic experiences, some of them involving hauntings and disturbingly unpleasant. We have developed thick calluses over our psyches that protect us from such things, and surely it is, for the most part, for the best. Helen Reed was always disturbed by her psychic abilities; she was a devout Christian, and she felt that the things they brought to her were contrary to Christian spirit. I’m not sure that’s true; but what was certain was that when she had second sight, it almost always predicted something awful. 

One does not learn to live with such things so easily.

We live in the midst of mystery. God flows into each of our Beings according to a set of laws and circumstances beyond our comprehension. Each of us is born where we are for a reason, has the parents we have for a reason. All of this is related to our spiritual development. We even have the family histories we have for a reason. All of it is part of a connected thread. 

Traditional societies and ancient civilizations had a much more powerful understanding of this than we do; most of it has been forgotten. According to Swedenborg, all objects, events, circumstances, and conditions consist of what are called, in his exposition, correspondences: each manifestation in the material world corresponds to a parallel object, event, circumstance, or condition in heaven or hell. Material reality is, in this conception, a form of mirror held up to the spiritual world which reflects it. In this sense, there is an animism to nature; but said animism exists solely in the fact that everything is a reflection of God’s Being, expressed in the coarse and concrete terms of the material. 

Today I will go about most of my business as though each of the material circumstances I encounter were of the ordinary and had no metaphysical nature. Yet already I know this isn’t true; because I live, and I breathe, and the substance of the soul and the spirit, spiritual Being, is what creates the harmonic undertone that follows me wherever I go. I call it sensation; it's a musical note that is struck by the existence of life itself. All of these notes blend together in us. This is why Gurdjieff called his Institute the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. 

Harmonious development exists within this moment, and it is our responsibility to conduct that orchestra. 

For those who are interested, Helen Reed is the older woman seated in the lower left side of the photograph. She has my grandmother’s sister Helen on her lap; and my grandmother Grace is directly to Helen’s right, with an expression that presages both her and my mother’s roguish sense of humor.

Go deep in your heart, and be well-

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.