A trip down memory lane
A trip down memory lane
Speak, Memory. The title of Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiographical memoir swims into my head as I wander along the high street of one of Edinburgh’s more prosperous suburbs en route to my appointment with a past life regression (PLR) therapist. Curious? Yes. Nervous? No. Well, how about a mild sense of trepidation? Hmmm, I have to tick that one. Why Edinburgh, why Lily G Datony chosen not quite at random from the Internet, why PLR? Questions I can’t answer immediately or precisely, except to say that I feel the time is right; and ever since childhood I’ve had a recurring and very strong sense of déjà vu, starting at the age of eight at a seaside picnic when I felt instantly familiar with the location, despite never having been to that part of the world before. Well, leastways, not in this incarnation.
A close friend who’d taken a PLR session shortly before me had emerged howling with grief. She’d experienced herself being smothered to death as a Native American child, and in a second episode killed in an equally brutal fashion. (She’s always hated having her head covered in any way, to the extent of never wearing a jersey, and keeping the duvet well below her neck.) Was I about to be confronted with a similarly violent and tumultuous past? In fact, as it turned out, it was something even stranger.
‘LifeCare’
The venue for my PLR session, a grisly piece of 1970s architecture that looks like a cemented Rorschach inkblot, is dubbed (without any tangible sense of irony) LifeCare Edinburgh, rather than something comprehensible like Community Centre.
The receptionist has a speech impediment that renders her more or less redundant, feral children roam the lobby, and a school-dinner stench wafts out of the cafeteria. I wasn’t expecting the tranquillity and ambience of an Asian spa, likewise I didn’t foresee cracked lino and Calvin and Hobbes dosed with rocket fuel. I tell myself “You don’t have to go through with this if it doesn’t feel right”.
But then Datony appears. She’s about 40, perhaps, a little over five feet tall, and in place of a halo she carries an aura of calm that’s utterly authentic. Never mind the letters after her name, my split-second assay proves she’s gold: 24 carats, and a whole bunch more.
Introductions complete, she leads me into a room that looks like it needs some therapy itself. More lino, more dreary colour schemes, plastic chairs the polar opposite of ergonomic, and the shades of meetings past worthily chorusing their unending agenda. It’s not in any way prepossessing. But then Datony starts to talk.
Lily Speaks
After a little back-and-forthing as to the whys and wherefores, Datony takes me by the cerebral hand and leads me through the streets of reflection. And shows me something to make me change my mind. Well, in a manner of speaking.
“Close your eyes. Would you say you prefer beaches or mountains?”
I plump for the latter, and Datony describes a scene that’s the quintessence of bucolic, alpine serenity. Then we come to a house. I’m invited to open the doors, climb the stairs, take in the long corridor with doors leading off it…
Wait.
Is it a form of hypnosis? Auto- suggestion? I find myself talking quite fluently, aware that I am speaking but it’s almost as if someone else is putting the words into my mouth, occasionally prompted by Datony’s gentle probings. It isn’t quite dreaming, but I have definitely left the tacky milieu of the LifeCentre. I open the first door. And now it gets interesting. At times my heart – nothing but a cliché will do here – pounds against my rib cage, the chief indication that I’m not making this up, but that something was being ever so delicately filleted from the recesses of my memory and served up in 2016.
Holland
It starts in Holland, sometime in the 19th century. We (I have no idea who, but it’s a big friendly group) live in a forest in an assortment of tents, getting what food we need from the land, happy-go-lucky, free-and-easy, plus a host of other liberal adjectives. I recognise the scene, some woods near Utrecht where I walked with friends of my parents when I was about 13. But the setting is less remarkable than the feeling, which is one of sheer merriment.
Greece
Datony rings down the curtain and gives the fast forward button a gentle nudge. Scene II. It’s the same but different. A Greek island, long sunny days, a group of friends free of petty jealousies and rivalries, fish from the sea and olives from the land, little need for clothes or worries, Eden without the serpent or creator, indeed any sort of busybody seeking to intrude on our lives. Et in Arcadia Ego. The island is an amalgam of all those I’ve visited – Rhodes, Skiathos, Halki, Tilos, Karpathos, Crete – though I can’t recall being this, this, this...does ‘surprised by joy’ seem overly pretentious? There’s no other way of putting it.
The Quest
I am seeking the answer to something. I don’t know what, and this does not seem important. But, like Candide tending his garden, the main thing seems to be concentrating on the task in hand. The backdrop is 19th-century America, the Mid West to be not very specific, and travel is by horse, wagon, railway, Shanks’ Pony. At some point I give up the quest, not having found the answer to what I was seeking, but, as the saying goes, “Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home”. I don’t need to explain this, surely? Now, an Atlantic crossing looms.
England
I am old now, living in the countryside, content, approaching the end. How do you feel about death, asks Datony. It’s not really death, I respond. It’s more like I’ve been wearing a pair of shoes for a long time, they’ve been very comfortable and served me well, but now I don’t need them anymore, so I’m just slipping out of them and moving onto the next stage. Whatever that may be.
So…
My pre-Brexit session (an hour, or a little over) with Lily cost £90. If I’d expected to be revealed as a one-time Caligula, Cleopatra or the Ziegfeld Follies starlet Lillian Lee, I was doomed to disappointment. I can’t say that I’m 100 per cent convinced that what I saw of myself in Holland, Greece, America and England actually happened. But I do feel that in some way there was an underlying message in what Datony unearthed. My wife – who I adore to distraction – is Dutch; I’ve always loved the Grecian archipelago; I read Candide as a schoolboy and reckon Voltaire hit the nail repeatedly on the head, and not just about horticulture; and (I’m in my 50s) there’s no point getting worried about getting older, as – to quote Maurice Chevalier – think of the alternative. So perhaps rather than a past life regression, my session with Ms Datony was more of a present life affirmation. Either way, it was 90 quid well spent.
