Barbara Bretton: Past-Life Regression

So let me set the scene for you: it's 8:30 on a cloudy Saturday morning in central Long Island and I'm running across the parking lot of the Hauppauge Ramada Inn toward my very first past-life regression. I am clutching my bed pillow and the belief that something fabulous is going to happen.

Am I excited? How do I answer that question without hurting your ear drums? I am so far beyond excited that it's downright embarrassing. I've already told you about my still-futile ghost hunt but I had high hopes for the past-life regression. I am there with my four favorite writer friends and I'm wide open to anything that might spark a new book idea and maybe open a window to a whole other world of experience.

The whole thing was Bettye's idea. She knew the trance medium (I'm not sure if it's trans-medium or trance medium) and vouched for the woman's integrity. All we had to do was bring our pillows and trust the process.

Hey, I can do that!

After introductions, we are told to lie down on the floor of the conference room and get comfortable. Comfortable? Was she kidding? My heart was thumping so crazily I could barely catch my breath. I felt like I was on the verge of Something Big. Michelle was scared to death. Darlene was skeptical. Connie was silent. Bettye was her usual ebullient, enthusiastic self.

"Okay," said the medium, "now that you're settled, let's do a few relaxation exercises."

Oh, come on. I'm not here to relax. I can relax at home. I can relax in the coffee shop. Let's get moving.

But the exercises worked and suddenly I found myself drifting toward sleep. The medium's voice snapped me back into the moment.

"Now we begin," she said. "We'll start at the bottom . . . your feet . . . see your feet the way they were . . . "

That's more like it. I knew exactly what I was going to see: dainty feet in glass high-heeled slippers. What else? I mean, I knew deep in my heart that there was a beautiful 18^th century English heroine with a score of eager suitors lurking deep inside me waiting to get out.

Imagine my surprise when I saw two enormous work boots instead! I was horrified. Work boots? What in the name of romantic fantasy was going on? Whose past life was this anyway?

The medium was oblivious. "Now we'll see your ankles and calves," she said.

Oh, great. I saw worn and filthy trousers over thick ankles and we all know that no self-respecting heroine ever had thick ankles. What a disaster this was turning out to be. She worked our way up the body and I got more depressed with every part revealed. No dainty ballgown-wearing damsel for me. I was a man. And an ugly one at that! I was a big, rough-hewn, foul-tempered Swedish coal miner.

Believe it or not, things went downhill from there. She told us to age ten years. "Where are you?" she asked. "What are you?"

I was finally getting married. My wife hated me but she had no choice. She was as homely and old as I was. I saw us on our wedding night and I was a rough and uncaring lover who made her cry. I didn't care. I sat by the fireplace and smoked a pipe. Even my dog didn't like me.

"Fast forward another twenty years," the medium instructed and I see myself sitting by the same fireplace, still smoking a pipe. My dog is dead. My wife is dead. I lost a leg in a mining accident. I am bitter, miserable, and alone.

Hey, I want my money back! Where are my ball gown and slippers and handsome suitors? This isn't what I came here for. I don't want to be a one-legged Swedish coalminer with a bad attitude.

When it was over (and not a minute too soon, I might add) the medium asked us to sit in a circle and share our experiences. I knew what was coming. My friends were all Queen Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette and Madame Pompadour in their past lives and would share a big laugh at my misadventure.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Michelle froze in the middle of her regression and snapped out of the reverie. She was the 19^th century wife of a powerful man who didn't love her and she died in childbirth. (Footnote: one year later Michelle voluntarily had a tubal ligation. She was thirty-three.) Connie was a highly-paid call girl who lived in a penthouse apartment. The walls were white, the furniture was white, her clothes were white. Susan was a World War II fighter pilot. Bettye was a scribe for Queen Hatshepsut. And Darlene? She was nothing. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't come up with a single past life. The more the medium worked with her, the angrier she got and she exploded in rage at the rest of us an hour later in the coffee shop.

What does it all mean? I've spent a lot of time over the years wondering about exactly that. Am I a believer? Well, I'm not a dis-believer but the jury's still out on the experience. I'm one-quarter Swedish. The man who lived next door to us when I was a little girl had a wooden leg. The week before the past-life regression Sixty Minutes ran a story about female coalminers. Were those the triggers that sparked a little other-worldly fiction in this writerly brain or was it a coincidence?

Any ideas?

Barbara Bretton

We follow the mystics. They know where they are going. They, too, go astray, but when they go astray they do so in a way that is mystical, dark, and mysterious.

Ryszard Kapuscinsk

Bonnie Vanak: Oh those uber Alpha weres...

My November Nocturne, Enemy Lover, is true shifter book. It shifted so many times while writing it that some days I felt like a werewolf clawing at the keyboard. Or a floating fairy flying the story to a new stratosphere. You see, I started out creating Jamie, the heroine, as a flying fairy. I wanted her to be pixy-like, a kind of Super Fairy. That didn't work out. So instead Iendowed her with superpowers she doesn't know she has until halfway through the book. She can teleport, play "floater basketball," and has the power of telekinesis. In one scene in the French Quarter, she physically hurls Damian, the hero, and a rival werewolf into the air to prevent them from killing each other.

Flying werewolves! It fit, and seemed cooler than flying monkeys. Enemy Lover pairs an old-fashioned, powerful Alpha Draicon werewolf with a young, hip woman who is his very reluctant destined mate, Damian is a protective, aggressive Alpha who would give his life for his pack and especially for Jamie, his mate. He's sexy and dynamic, but as overpowering as he is, she is equally strong. Jamie tried killing Damian with a poison kiss because she believes he murdered her brother. She also happens to be a computer geek who is into World of Warcraft and she's dying of a spell turning her into stone. Damian is faced with searching through New Orleans to find an ancient book of magick to save her life, figuring out what Jamie means when she calls him an "uber Alpha" and fighting the Morphs, the enemy that want them both dead. Then he finds out she's got a whole boatload full of psi powers he's never before encountered. What's an Alpha to do, let alone an "uber" Alpha?

When I created the Draicon werewolves for my first Nocturne, The Empath, I decided to have them search for their destined mates, who contained the missing half of their magick. They needed an enemy to fight, so I invented the Morphs, former Draicon who turned evil by killing a relative to gain power. Morphs can shapeshift into any animal or insect form. In Enemy Lover, they shift into a swarm of hornets to attack Jamie and Damian.

But for Enemy Lover, I wanted the Draicon to have a more powerful weapon in the Morph war. Jamie possesses the ability to become that weapon, which is ironic because she regards all Draicon as her enemy, especially Damian. Damian must convince her to trust him, and gently coax her into becoming his lover and his mate. It's a challenge he never anticipated, especially when he discovers she can turn him into a flying werewolf. Jamie gradually turns to him, enlisting his help in harnessing the magick she's longed for all her life. Yet the use of her new powers expedites the stone spell, changing Jamie's internal organs into granite and turning her hair and nails gray. Damian and Jamie must race against time to find the magick book before Jamie is forever turned into stone.

Each of my Nocturne books can be read alone, even though they are connected.

I hope you enjoy Damian and Jamie's story of courage, strength and how two strong-willed individuals learn to set aside the past to forge new beginnings formed from love and understanding. You can read an excerpt of Enemy Lover on my website.

Happy reading!

P.S. An interesting bit of trivia — part of Enemy Lover was written on location in the French Quarter at the Hotel Provincial. The hotel, a former Confederate hospital, was recently named one of the top ten best haunted hotels by AOL Travel. Maids have reported seeing bloodstained sheets appear and vanish. I didn't see any ghosts, bloodstained sheets, or even flying werewolves while staying there. However, I did have a great view of the Ursuline Convent from the bathroom window. The convent is rumored to be haunted as well. That particular ghost story inspired a funny scene in Enemy Lover.

Barbara Bretton asks: Do you believe in ghosts?

I think I do but until one of them taps me on the shoulder and says hello I can't say for sure. Over the years I've gone out of my way to put myself in the path of random ghosts but so far to no avail. Haunted inns, ghost walks up in Maine, hanging around old houses that are supposedly riddled with ectoplasmic activity. You name it, I tried it without so much as a cold chill or a tiny whisper in my ear.

I open myself up to the possibility. I clear my mind. (Not that hard to do . . . ) I try to project the image of a congenial hostess, eager to show the spirits that, horror movies notwithstanding, we really can all get along just fine. But nothing happens. Nobody appears. No wraithlike woman in flowing white garments. No angry guy with a machete. Just me and my belief that sooner or later somebody from the other world is going to take pity on me and drop by to say hello.

Now before you think I'm totally crazy, let me give you a little background information: my mother was psychic. Not foretell-the-end-of-the-world psychic or 1-888-I'LL-MAKE-MONEY-OFF-THIS psychic. Just the everyday, scare-the-pants-off-her-daughter kind. She knew things she shouldn't have known, saw things nobody could have seen, predicted family deaths that were so random and unexpected as to be downright shocking. Maybe because I grew up with it, I never gave it much thought but lately I've been thinking a lot about something that happened to her and to her father before her not long before they died.

My grandfather lived 100 years, the last eight of them blind. About ten days before he died, he told us that a woman had come by the hospital to visit him. A plump, happy woman in a bright blue dress who talked with him, and laughed, and had a dimple in her right cheek. She said she'd be with him through it all. Which was just great except Grandpa shouldn't have been able to see that bright blue dress or that dimple. My grandfather was sharp right up until the end and when we asked, "How is that possible?" he shrugged and replied, "I don't know, but it happened." And, to be honest, I believe it did.

Three years later my mother dreamed that a big, round woman in a bright blue dress came into the bedroom she shared with my father, sat down in the rocking chair near the window, and started to knit. She had a sweet face, a happy laugh, and a dimple in her right cheek. The dream didn't unnerve me until my mother told me about the time her dead paternal grandmother came to visit her. She wore a bright blue dress and (you guessed it) liked to knit.

None of which is all that scary except for the fact that my mother died three months after that second visit, less than forty-five days after a cancer diagnosis we never saw coming.

Ghostly visits? Precognitive dreams? I don't have any answers. I wish I did. All I can say is beware knitters in blue dresses.

Have you ever seen a ghost? Do you believe they're out there? I'd love to know.

Barbara Bretton
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