A Period of Revelatory Dreams and Developing Clairaudience

 

 

After selling her Canadian house and leaving behind a troubled marriage with Roger, Lena and her son Michael arrived in England, the country of her birth.  'Lena' is the pseudonym for author Helen Greaves in her autobiography The Dissolving Veil (1967).  This article is the second in a blog series considering the life and memoirs of Helen Greaves, who wrote about her psychic abilities and 'supernormal' experiences in five books.  In Chapter VI she wrote about the events confronting her upon returning to Britain in 1940. 

War was definitely coming, we discovered, rather to my surprise for I had never really believed that England and Germany would have a second war.  The preparation for it looked frightening, black-outs, bridge guards, hosts of uniformed men; supposing anything happened to Michael!  He was only fourteen years old.


Roger had been terribly shocked by our fight.  He wrote begging me to return; he promised anything that I wanted; he write that he realized that it had been his own fault.  Couldn't I forgive him?  And return.

But I remembered all the other broken promises.


He sent me a barrage of letters and cablegrams.  Return to Canada before it was too late, he commanded.  I replied that we were staying in our own country, come what may.

In early September his ship sailed for an unknown destination.  War had been declared.


Michael was accepted, much to my astonishment, as a boarder in a good school.  I found a temporary home as a paying guest in a country house just outside Guildford, and lived quietly trying to restore shattered nerves and broken health.


The front of my hair had turned completely white; I was only in my late thirties . . .


I read everything that I could find on the subject of spirit communication, and I met people who would discuss it with me . . . for and against!  The more I learned, the more I realized that Grannie's 'return' was not even exceptional; there were records of far more fantastic phenomena.

 

Lena had a 'sitting' with a well-known London medium, given an alias name 'Mr. Arthur Bhaduri.'
  

He confirmed, without any promptings from me, all that had happened through Millie Watkins and Madam K.


. . . he even told me that my husband was being helped in every possible way; and that my return to Britain had not been made simply to break a tie between us.  There was, he said, a much deeper Purpose behind all that happened.  Some time in the future, this would be revealed to us both in a wonderful way.

Meanwhile, I was to find work for myself; and he advised me not to keep my interest on the psychic level alone, but to study the deeper spiritual laws of life


I think that first year of the war in Guildford was the most revealing time, mentally, for me . . .


 . . . I found that I was developing a kind of inner hearing, so that I could almost follow a 'second' line of listening.  And this, with no long 'developing' in circles, as is usual amongst Spiritualists.  This second layer, as it were, of consciousness, came without any effort on my part.  I could switch on and switch off; there were times when I heard other voices distinctly; and there were times when I tried to hear and heard nothing.

 

Roger's letters kept coming to Lena and "he insisted that our lives together were not ended: and he paid Michael's school fees."  In the spring, she moved into a temporary new home just outside Guildford.  The owner of the house 'Mrs. Mary Vernon' was a member of the Society of Friends and thus a 'Quaker.'  On Sunday mornings, Lena accompanied Mary to the Friends' Meeting.  When asked by Lena the reason there was no sermon, Mary is quoted as having responded: "Ah, but my dear, there is a sermon; a sermon beyond speech . . . Sometimes the Meeting becomes very alive, and the Spirit seems to pass from one to the other, inspiring and uplifting.  We allow the Spirit within to move us to speech . . . After an experience of His closeness we go away with grace sufficient for our needs."

One acquaintance for Lena during this period was an unemployed shop assistant worried about the welfare of her son and expressing hatred for her late husband who had left her for another woman.  Lena told her, "This hatred is poisoning your soul!"  Lena than wondered: "Whatever had made me say such a thing?"  She wrote: ". . . suddenly I saw that I was very much in the same position; supposing anything happened to Roger; supposing that he died.  How would I feel about him then?"

Upon joining the war effort, Lena worked at the Postal Censorship.  When her son spent his Christmas holidays with Lena at her residential hotel, he informed her: "Father is here, or rather in Scotland.  His ship is in port.  I got this [letter] just before I left school."  Lena told him that agreeing to see Roger would serve no purpose.  Michael insisted that his father loved her and was a changed man.
    

When Michael kissed me good-night, he was embarrassed.  But he said nothing.

The next evening we went out, had as nice a dinner as one could in war-time London, and went to a cinema show.

It was that cinema that I believe sparked off my dream.  The picture was horrible: a murder hunt about a man being pursued on to a ship in which he was trying to escape.  He tried to escape by jumping overboard and swimming underwater to an island.  He nearly managed it, too.  Only he became entangled with a fishing net from a passing trawler, and, helpless, engulfed, was sucked under.  His body in the net was like a drowned fish, flat and inert.  I went home with the horror of it pricking at me.

And, falling quickly asleep, I dreamed.

Only this time the man swimming for his life was Roger!

I stood on an island, and I watched him struggle.  I saw him slowly drawn down by the tide towards the boat and the net.  I recall that I stood on the beach, not doing anything, scarcely feeling emotion.  Just watching and waiting.

Then I heard him shout.

"Lena!  Lena!"  The name rang over the water, and came back to me like an echo again and again.  "Lena!  Help!  Help!"

In the terrible significance of the dream, I saw Roger's face quite clearly, dead-white, staring, petrified with terror.

The face seemed to come very close to me; his eyes grew fixed like the eyes of a dying man.

Suddenly I could bear it no longer.

"Roger!" I called.  "It's all right!  I'm coming to you!  It's all right!"

The words woke me.  It was the most realistic dream I had ever had, and most terrifying.

The next evening, in her room Lena found an envelope propped against the dresser mirror.  The letter was from Roger and on the back was a pencilled note from Michael: "This was enclosed in my letter from Dad this morning."  Here is Roger's letter —

"I don't think you will see me," I read.  "I can't blame you for not wanting to.  There are things in our past that I want to forget, too; awful things I've done to you, and to myself.  Don't forget that.  I realise it now.  My folly almost tore the two of us in pieces.  I've been a fool.  But that is all over now.  You won't believe me, but I've wrestled this last year with myself . . . and something more than myself!  I felt sometimes that I was wrestling with a serpent . . . a great twining horrible thing that was squeezing out my will . . . and my life!  I believe you know what I mean; and I believe you understand.  God help me, I believe I am free at last!  That awful moment when I realized that you had left me began my rebellion against whatever possessed me!  It has taken these long hard lonely years to be free of it, though.  I have learned a terrible lesson."

"I dreamed of you, Lena, two nights ago.  It was the most realistic dream I've ever had.  I dreamed that my ship had been torpedoed, but I had been thrown clear and was  trying to swim away.  Only I couldn't make any headway against the waves.  They kept flinging me back close to the ship.  And I knew that when she went down I would be dragged down with her.  I was terrified, and paralyzed.

"There wasn't anything I could do.  And then suddenly I found myself calling you.  You seemed to be standing on an island ahead of me.  I tried so hard to get to that island.  I called you twice.  I called your name. . . .

"And then you answered me.  I heard your answer, Lena!  You shouted, 'I'm coming, Roger!  It's all right!  I'm coming to you!  It's all right!"  I suppose I woke up then.  But I felt so peaceful.  I felt that we understood one another now; that all the anger was gone from between us.  That love was left.  For I do love you, Lena.  I always have, even when I was at my very worst. . . .

"If this is our good-bye, Lena, I think now that it is without malice, or anger, or resentment. . . ."

 
After reading the letter, Helen/Lena realized: "That dream was real, I told myself.  We both met somewhere out of time and space.  Our lives belong together.  The bitterness of the pas twas gone.  Love was flooding back . . . love was stronger than hate."  Lena responded by leaving a message for her son in his room —

"Dear Michael,

"Send this telegram tomorrow morning early with this address to father.

"WELCOME YOU HERE WHENEVER YOU CAN GET LEAVE.  LOVE FROM LENA AND MICHAEL."

The next chapter of the book describes the period in Lena's life that followed —

D-Day found us a happy and united family.  Roger had come safely through the perils of the war at sea; Michael had graduated from school into the army, and, as a young subaltern, had taken part in the Second Front landings.  He had fought through France, Belgium and Holland, and had been miraculously protected.  I had worked in London, yet had been no nearer a bomb explosion than half a mile!


Roger was a different person; Michael was happy and successful.  I had found peace.


After Michael was demobbed, we returned for awhile to Montreal.  There Michael studied for a great career at McGill University.  Roger continued at sea, but now sailing across the Atlantic.

But soon the call of London made itself felt with me.  I wanted to come back.  When Michael married, we sold up our home and returned to England.  We were fortunate to be offered the hospitality of some friends we had made during the war.  Laura was a writer and Canadian by birth; her husband was retired from the Indian Army.  They leased us a part of their charming Kensington house, a small attractive flat.  Here we settled down.

The first six months in the flat were "the happiest of my married life."  It was just before Christmas when Roger rejoined his ship.  Then "on the Sunday night of the week before Christmas I had another of those realistic dreams such as the dream which had dramatically drawn Roger to me after our parting." 

In my dream I was standing in a foreign city.  The streets were very narrow and old.  You could almost touch the opposite side of the road.  It was a stormy night, and rain washed down my face.  Suddenly I became aware that a man sheltered under a high wall of a house at the further end of the street.  I didn't take much notice of him, and was pushing on against the wind, when a sharp crack rent the air.

I remember I turned quickly, in time to see the wall behind the man sway and split apart.  Yellow and red bricks broke loose, and catapulted down, carrying the man with them.  He fell face downwards.  A minute later his body was hidden by the rubble.

At this moment I awoke, shaking.  It had been a horrible nightmare.

I believe I would have forgotten it all, except that the next night I dreamed again.  This dream was even more fatalistic.  From it I awoke with a sense of desolation.

In the new dream Lena was confronted with "the body of a man on the floor" in a rectangular-shaped room.  "This was clearly an accident case . . . I was forced to play the horrible role of spectator in this dream of death."  She then saw an English woman with him.  "Where the sleeve of her blue dress fell away, the skin of her arm gleamed with a kind of translucent light.  I saw that she was holding a cup of water to the man's lips."  Lena asked, "What's the matter, Kit?"  The woman replied: "He'll be all right, Chick.  We'll take care of him."

After the dream, Helena/Lena remembered 'Kit.'  "She had been a good friend to me years before, when I first went out to Canada . . . And Kit had always called me 'Chick' . . . But Kit had been dead for more than five years!"  Lena experienced a "clammy finger of premonition" draw itself across her consciousness.

On the afternoon of December 20th, Lena was waiting in traffic when "a sentence of queer meaning came into my mind.  It was like hearing a voice speaking to me that I turned to see if anyone had addressed me.  But nobody had."  She thought the words were frightening:

"If you were hit on the head and you died," spoke the unknown voice in my brain, "you wouldn't really know you were dead, would you?"

That night, she was awakened by her friend Laura's loud knocking at the door.  There was a telephone call from Canada.  It was Michael on the phone.  He told her: "It's Father.  He's had an accident . . . He's dead, Mother.  He died this afternoon."

Lena puzzled over the sequence of events.  "So it had been Roger in my dream . . . the man under the wall; the man on the stone floor; the man to whom Kit was giving a glass of water."  Had Kit been the one to meet him in the next world?  Was the voice heard in Kensington High Street that of Roger's? 

When Lena arrived in Canada, her son met her and took her to a hotel, where he explained what had happened to Roger.

"The . . . accident was on the ship; a cable broke.  Bricks and rubble struck Father's head.  He fell unconscious.  He . . . never recovered consciousness.  I was flown down from Montreal.  The doctors said he had a fifty-fifty chance.  I was with him . . . when he went. . . . He had a cerebral haemorrhage."

 
Lena realized there was no death insurance and there was little money in the bank.  During the Christmas Eve funeral service, she experienced further apparent telepathic statements.  The voice insisted: "Everything's going to be all right for you.  Listen to me, Lena.  You'll be taken care of.  You'll be provided for. . . ."

"Lena, I'm really here, you know!"  Again the words echoed through my consciousness.  Was I imagining that grey suit, that vital personality, the dark, ungreyed head, and eagle-quick eyes?  Momentarily, attention focused.  "I am here!  Look, see these papers in my hand!  They are a settlement for you.  You'll be taken care of, Lena.  I promise you!"  The urgency, the impelling gaze, the slight hunch forward of the shoulders were so characteristic of Roger.  "Lena. . . ."

She stayed in Canada for eight months during the legal proceedings.  Eventually sufficient pension was granted to enable her "to live carefully."

The book offers a variety of accounts of the author's experiences involving psychic phenomena.  Although Lena didn't know the combination numerical sequence to a dispatch box that had belonged to her husband, she found herself automatically turning the knob on the lock dial while murmuring aloud the numbers to succeed in unlocking it.  On another occasion, Lena was reading the newspaper when "suddenly a voice cut across my line of attention."  She reported how her husband's voice related all that had happened while he was unconscious in the hospital.  Michael confirmed the accuracy of the statements.  
 
There is also a conversation describing Roger's life 'beyond the veil.'  He woke up in a "new hospital" and found he could now move, see, hear and speak.  "It was a big place . . . Lots of beds with men in them, a big ward really, didn't seem to be any walls.  The sunshine came right through them!"  He was greeted by a man in a white coat.  "It was Robbie!  Old Dr. Roberts, used to be on the ship with us in the old days before the war.  Died of fever out east when Mike was a little boy. . . ."
 
Part II of the book is entitled "The Psychic Sense" concerning Helen's "gift of clairaudience."  One remembrance involves a clergyman-healer in the Anglican church who was wondering if he had failed in his calling.  Helen related to him a clairaudient message and what was foretold about upcoming circumstances in his life she, herself, eventually witnessed come to pass.  She described later attending a Sunday morning Eucharist Service at his church —

He ascended the pulpit for the sermon, spoke the dedication, and began.  He recalled the healing Ministry of Jesus, and spoke of the miracles of the New Testament.  It was all in the usual stereotyped manner.
 
Suddenly he leaned forward over the edge of the pulpit.  His voice deepened; it became authoritative, strong, resonant.
 
"These things can happen today," he asserted.  An electric wave seemed to ripple out over the congregation.  "They are happening today!" 
 

"Not only two thousand years ago," he assured them.  "But today!  The Christ Spirit is here today—as our Lord promised. . . ."
 
I listened enthralled and grateful.  Here was the new spirit of the coming age, the new faith and consciousness which is our hope and bulwark against the creeping materialism of this twentieth century, and the lifeblood of the Christian Church.

  
Helen acknowledged in her first autobiographical book: "I believe in the Ultimate Good, in the Plans of a Supreme Spirit, in the Presence of that Spirit in me . . . in all of us."