“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet said to his friend Horatio.
When I, recently, saw this beautiful painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it brought me back to memories of the beginnings of my work in spiritual healing and triggered a desire to include Frederic Lord Leighton’s “Flaming June” in my monthly blog.
A lucid dream is one in which one becomes aware that they are dreaming and may gain some amount of control over what transpires in the dream. Yet, the visions all transpire in one’s head. However, there is a realm beyond lucid dreams that can be the visitation to a new reality.
While employed in one of my first jobs in New York City, a young colleague of mine was found dead, sitting on a park bench. However, there appeared to be nothing physically wrong with him. His wife claimed that he would “travel” to other places while asleep and, to her way of thinking, he had found somewhere else that he preferred to be.
Needless to say, I found that shocking and, initially, unbelievable.
However, a short while later, I was at a party where there were visitors from some of the Caribbean islands and one of them claimed to have “traveled” while asleep in Grenada to a street in Greenwich Village (which he vividly described and on which I was, coincidently, living) where he had found his wife romantically engaged with another man.
Intrigued, I took a course in astral travel and was, eventually, able to “float” from my body and see my sleeping self from the 11-foot ceiling level of my apartment with an awareness of the night sounds and activities totally independent from those being experienced by my dormant self.
This prepared me for my soon-awakened ability to take people into their past lives, which is an entirely different voyage beyond their mere dream or current life level.
In any case, that is why I am so taken with Leighton’s “Flaming June.” Art evokes feelings and I feel a kinship with both the painter and his model. Perhaps, in a past life, I even knew one or both of them. Even stranger things have happened to me!
So, as we enter the Libra sign of the Zodiac, I wish you pleasant dreams and, if you dare, exciting astral travels!
Flaming June by Frederic Lord Leighton