"The SELF is infinite and you are just one facet of it, unaware of your other bodies and lives. Dreams are the key. Dreams, waking or sleeping, are links between you and your parallel incarnations. You must be receptive to them. Tell your SELF before you sleep, that you will dream of your Unearthly Facet."
---Ronald Franklyn, We Pass from View.
Reincarnation is something of a bugaboo for many modern occultists. This is probably due to the number of "I was Crowley/Cleopatra" types that one runs into from time to time. Funny that I never meet any ex-lepers. Less common is the idea alluded to above, that each individual exists as a facet of a Self which has a multitude of incarnations, each with their own reality. Facets which are both human and non-human. The Human facets could arise from alternative courses of action that you (the self reading this paper) could have taken, but chose another. Sounds pretty wacky, no? This model is at least a mathematical possibility, as described by three physicists: Everett, Wheeler and Graham. Saul-Paul Sirag explains:
"In the Universe next door, I'm still a Physicist but working at a different field of research. A few universes over I'm an actor who dropped out of physics and never came back to it. In another universe I died in a concentration camp and don't exist in the present time at all."
It goes without saying that most physicists don't take this model very seriously. No matter. Prepare for Suspension of Disbelief, take a deep breath... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...
To access the other facets of the INFINITE SELF the doorway which needs to be opened is the faculty of Dreaming:
"It is through dreams that man communicates with the Dark Dream by which he is surrounded."
---Charles Baudelaire
While sleeping dreams can be controlled by visualization, sigils and mantras, the waking dream is by far the most potent. Waking dreams range from normal fantasy and day-dreaming, to the Creative Vertigo wherein one may slip into a borderline psychosis. It is easier to 'slip' into such a state and begin to sense what is happening than to consciously orchestrate such an experience.
I recall one instance of succumbing to this dream-vertigo, whilst walking around Liverpool one night. I felt detached and calm, almost blissfully peaceful yet with a growing undercurrent of panic gnawing away at my mind. Everything seemed imbued with a special kind of meaning I hadn't felt before. It was tantalizing, mocking me in its evasiveness. Revealed yet concealed in the movements of the cars and the traffic lights. A message from beyond, but not quite strong enough to break through. The realisation came - that the contact was another aspect of SELF attempting to influence me. A parallel incarnation within a different reality. The vertigo gripped me and I staggered back home. That night I dreamed of our meeting - He thought me and eidolon of the past, I knew him as a foreshadowing of a possible future.
By intensely re-running memory [pause, rewind] I found a common point from which our facets diverged. This occurred a month ago, when I left my job as a bookshop assistant. "He" was still working there, and as I discovered this, I became trapped in "his" reality, dreaming that I was he, dreaming about me. Reality became frayed at this point.
Now I was no longer sure which reality I was inhabiting, but was able to hurl my awareness across Time to glimpse other facets of my INFINITE SELF. Were they as disturbed as I, I wondered? A very thin tightrope to be walked indeed. In both waking and sleeping Dream I was hurled across facets, some of them utterly incomprehensible to me. In one dream I stared into a corridor of mirrors and watched my other forms come and go. Waking hours were punctuated by bouts of memory loss... Our name is Legion. Momentum building up as I leapt between spaces.
Such is the nature of Dreaming Across Time. The theory of parallel incarnations is not important in itself. It enabled me to enter and explore a state of "Creative Derangement", part of which I have just described. To enter in and lose one's sense of SELF and thereby evoke the potentiality of "Otherness", be they human or non-human.