Samvedna’s shriek pierces through the tranquillity of the midnight. Sitting up, as she wipes the sweat off her forehead, she finds her heart still pounding.
It is the same nightmarish dream: Her right-hand clasps around the rung above. Someone, above her, unmindfully places his hobnail boot on her hand. When she asks him to be mindful, he replies, “I am so important to myself, so superior to you, and so righteous in my own eyes that I cannot and need not see who suffers in my shadow. Moreover, I am doing what is so common.” She begins to writhe in pain and scream.
Despite being sleep-deprived, Samvedna dreads going to bed these days because of this recurring dream. Realising the severity of the problem, she sets up an appointment with Kokila, a past life regression therapist.
Session after session, she is going deeper into who she has been and what message this recurring dream possibly has for her.
Session 1: It is one of the Sundays in the year 1738. I am a black slave named Adam working in a tobacco plantation, somewhere in Virginia (USA). I am feeling feverish and tired, so I think of stopping for a while to take a momentary rest. A few moments pass. Suddenly, I hear a whip snapping at a
lightning speed on my back followed by my own scream. I find my back burning with a lacerating pain. “Move your ass, you son-of-a-bitch!” Larson, my overseer, yells at me. I tremble with fear. A little later, I hear a woman screaming. I turn around and see Larson dragging my wife by hair towards a small room.
Session 2: Calcutta, India.
Tuesday, November 17, 1818. I, Sukanya, am lying on some logs of wood by the side of my husband’s corpse who died of cholera, this morning. Someone begins to pour ghee on our bodies. I suddenly realise what I am getting into. I am just 27. It is my life, and I want to live. I wonder how can my own people be so cruel—will any of these people agree to exchange positions with me? Someone places more logs of wood over my body. I hear the sound of a crackling fire. The fire begins to engulf me. I am screaming, kicking and trying to wriggle out somehow... but having been tied, I cannot move.
Session 3: It is January 7, 1943. I am Candice, a Jew. The train is slowing down to stop. I look out of the window to read the station’s name: Treblinka. The German soldiers order us to alight from the train and follow them in a line. As we walk through a corridor, I look out through a small window. I notice several men picking up decomposed bodies from a huge pile and tossing them into a truck. As we approach a big hall with a steel gate, the soldiers order us to strip. Even though the hall is packed to its capacity, the soldiers continue to push more and more of us into it until our bodies begin to crush against each other. The gate closes behind us, and I hear someone shouting: “Gas!” I begin to gasp for breath and scream as loudly as I can. The whole hall gets filled with screams that grow into a crescendo before falling off.
Session 4: September 17, 1977.
I am walking with several other pigs through a narrow-barricaded corridor. I intuitively feel an impending disaster and tremble with fear. I decide not to move any farther. When a man notices this, he thrusts a prod into my rectum. A current of agony rushes through my whole body like the lightning. I begin to run. A few steps later, I stop again. This time, he punishes me with vengeance by burning my face with the prod in his hand. I begin to walk again, in excruciating pain. A gate opens and I find myself suddenly entering, along with many other pigs, into a steel
cage that starts moving downwards. We are all squealing in desperation as we fight for air while writhing in horrific pain and throwing our limbs violently and helplessly.
Samvedna breaks down after her last session—it had, at last, revealed the message hidden in her recurring dream: She had been working, as a veterinary surgeon, in a charity animal hospital for the last 14 years. Allured by a higher salary, she had recently joined a multinational that owns piggeries and slaughterhouses. Her recurring dream was trying to convey her unconscious disgust with herself for switching her work, overnight, from that of healing to that of killing. The sessions provided her with a first-hand experience of how we are the “others” whose hands we crush under our hobnail shoes. This helped her in reversing her decision and thereby in restoring her deep sleep.
Anil Bhatnagar is a corporate trainer, motivational speaker and the author of Reverse Your Thoughts, Reverse Your Diseases and several other books.
thrive.ab@gmail.com