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Feature Story
Past Life Dreams :
Messages of the Soul
An Interview with Sabine Lucas, PhD
by Elyssa Paige
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
— Santayana
Past lives represent the world of the unknown to me, like the depths of the ocean that are hidden from the sunlight. I opened my mind and heart to this topic in order to explore it with Sabine Lucas, PhD, a licensed Jungian psychotherapist who specializes in dream analysis and past life integration. Author of Past Life Dreamwork: Healing the Soul through Understanding Karmic Patterns, Lucas shows us that getting in touch with our past lives provides a sense of wholeness within, allowing us to forgive others and better understand our relationships and experiences in the present moment.
Vision Magazine: How can our dreams help us find forgiveness in our lives?
Sabine Lucas: Dreams always offer another perspective to our conscious observations and attitudes. They are usually closer to the truth than we are in our conscious minds. All dreams supply us with additional information. This is particularly true with past life dreams because they show us what we had experienced in past lives to bring certain things about in our present lives.
If we hold a grudge against a person in this life—and it may be a very legitimate grudge—the past life will sometimes supply the complementary information that shows us what happened in another life with this particular person.
Forgiveness is something that can be achieved after you’ve had insight to these dreams. It is a process that we have to go through and we can’t really skip any steps. We have to go through the anger, we have to go through the grief, and then when the process is over, we can reach a point of true forgiveness.
VM: As a Jungian psychotherapist, can you explain how past life dreamwork is supported by Jungian theories?
SL: Not at all, actually. Jung, at the end of his life, began to be open to the idea of reincarnation. He wrote about it in his memoirs but his family and his publisher intervened, advising him that he would lose all credibility if he were to publish what he had written.
Basically the problem was that could be a conflict between the archetypes and past life theories, even though I think that this is not necessarily a conflict. According to Jung, the archetypes are timeless images shared by all of humanity, such as mother, father, child, birth, death or trickster. They are impersonal and can stand on the merit of their own. On the contrary, past lives are personal. In Jungian psychology, it had previously all been lumped together under the archetypes. Perhaps the archetypal theory would have to be revised a bit to encompass past lives as being different from the archetypes. There is tremendous resistance in the Jungian school against the concept of reincarnation. I am the first one basically to break the ground of trying to make the differentiation and to validate it through the empirical observations that I’ve made in my practice.
VM: Is there any scientific evidence to support reincarnation?
SL: Well, it’s actually now in the works. It started with Ian Stevenson who died last year. He worked at the University of Virginia and conducted research in India about children remembering past lives. He gathered testimonies and medical records of information relating to birthmarks, birth defects, and other physical marks which correspond to wounds or other features on the deceased person whose life the child remembered.
Paul Von Ward, author of The Soul Genome, is now trying to put this all on a somewhat different basis by focusing his research on facial similarities, biometric measurements, personality traits, and idiosyncrasies in order to prove the existence of reincarnation on a scientific basis.
VM: In your book, you discuss “soul bloodlines.” Can you explain this term?
SL: The bloodlines are basically the characteristics and also the lives that people carry from one lifetime to another. They are the common themes that run like threads or veins through past life material. To know these bloodlines increases your understanding of yourself in new and previously inconceivable ways. It also helps synthesize all the lifetimes into a meaningful whole.
For me, I’m now in touch with 46 different lifetimes. About half of these came through dreams and the other half I got through very helpful and authentic past life readings in Zurich. I was able to trace the similarities through my different lives, leading me to call them bloodlines of the soul, in contrast to our genetic bloodlines.
VM: How does getting in touch with past life memories help resolve issues we face in this lifetime?
SL: I think we have to see where our strengths and weaknesses are. That’s one aspect of it. The other aspect is examining what we can do about the karma that we have with others. Karma is a very important issue and it is part of the reason that I sat down to write my book. I feel it’s very important that we finally start to take responsibility for our actions. As we become aware of what’s happened between us and another person in a previous life, we can avoid making the same mistakes again. Otherwise we tend to get a repetition compulsion. This is a tendency discovered by Sigmund Freud to repeat painful and traumatic experiences of the past. In Freud’s opinion, it is driven by the death instinct. According to my own observations, this tendency or compulsion carries over from one lifetime to another.
VM: How can we distinguish regular dreams from past life dreams?
SL: I have developed three different types of past life dreams and I’ve shown how they differ from other dreams. Typical dreams are usually symbolic, but past life dreams are different. If you have a classical past life dream, there is basically no symbolism there. This type is lacking all normal dream features, such as familiar places and people, symbols and archetypes. Instead it is realistic and factual. It has the déjà vu feeling of half-conscious memories. The classical past life dream tells a story which quite often has the characteristics of another time or another country. These dreams are very easy to recognize because you basically stumble across them.
The informatory past life dream is even more unmistakable because it is completely devoid of images and action. Instead the dreamer is informed or simply knows that he or she was, for example, a revolutionary in Russia in 1918 who shot innocent people to death. This type of dream, if it can be called a dream at all, is just direct information. It only occurs when you’ve done a lot of work with past lives and you’ve built a connection to that plane the information is coming from.
Then you have what I call the hybrid type, which is more difficult to recognize because there are both realistic and symbolic elements involved. It dwells in a twilight zone where boundaries are blurred and other interpretations are possible too, especially archetypal ones. Whenever I am not sure if I am dealing with archetypal material or past life material, I use the presence or absence of realistic and personalized elements as decisive criterion, because as I mentioned, past life material is personal, while archetypal material is universal. The hybrid past life dream is the most common type and can be easily missed. If this were not so, and the other two types were more common, past life dreams would have been included in psychological typologies a long time ago.
VM: What led you to pursue this work with past life dreams?
SL: I personally discovered past life dreams by having a dream that was totally different from any other dream I’ve ever had. All of a sudden, I dreamed I was a man in a medieval European town being stoned by an angry mob. In order to buy time and get away from my tormentors, I said I had to urinate. They let me step inside a barn to relieve myself in private. Then I totally had a blackout because there was a blank in the dream. Next I was on an ox-cart with a red-robed priest by my side. During the time of the Inquisition, red-robed priests accompanied accused persons on their way to the ecclesiastical court. I had collapsed on the wagon floor and was sobbing uncontrollably because I knew that I was a very famous man in this town and I had lost control. At that point, I woke up.
Five years of analysis and intensive study of my dreams had familiarized me with my inner figures enough to know that the man in my dream did not fit the Jungian model. No authority could have convinced me that this figure was simply an archetype, the template of the animus, a woman’s inner male. He was too personalized for that. While in his body, I was keenly aware of his sensitivity, the complexity of his feelings, and his overwhelming sense of shame. I knew it was not an ordinary dream. Reincarnation, which as a philosophical concept had never interested me before, became a living reality for me.
VM: Can you briefly describe your most interesting case study?
SL: I worked with a man who, although very successful professionally, was very lonely and had the feeling that his emotional life was being impacted by a past life. He had already done extensive past life regression but it wasn’t until he came to me that everything came out. We discovered a past life in which he had been a female during World War II whose name, according to him, was Hilde. Hilde was originally working for the film industry and was a friend of Eva Braun [who was Hitler’s secret mistress for 12 years and eventually because his wife]. At one point, Hilde showed a documentary about the war in Poland to Hitler and Eva Braun. The relationship between Hitler and Braun was top secret at that time. Braun came up to Hilde and said that if she told anyone, she’d be in big trouble. Hilde ended up telling her mother, who then confided in her best friend. Ultimately, it got back to Eva Braun and consequently, Hilde was stripped of her civilian existence and drafted into the SS to work for a concentration camp. She lived this way for a number of years until she finally had a heart opening and began to help the female prisoners. At that point, she was questioned by the Gestapo and was executed. This story was remembered in 47 dreams over a period of five years. By the end of this period, the man was finally able to establish a loving relationship in his life. He has been in this relationship ever since and is a very happy man now.
VM: How would you respond to a skeptic of reincarnation and past life dreams?
SL: I wouldn’t try to convince them. I have never come from the position of theory. As I mentioned, the whole thing started with a dream and I had never given reincarnation any previous thought. To me this is an experiential reality. I respect and understand people who have not had this experience and are therefore skeptical. I don’t know if I would believe in reincarnation unless I’d had all these experiences myself.
VM: Is there any way that this work with past life dreams could go beyond helping individuals to heal humanity’s karmic patterns?
SL: I hope very much that these stories, which are very well documented and convincing, will show how our karma inevitably comes up. Sooner or later, we have to experience what we’ve created and what we’ve done to others. I hope that these stories will have a profound effect on the people who read them. That’s my hope and it’s one of the reasons I have written the book.
I also think it’s important for the public to know that we incarnate in all races and in both genders. So if we discriminate against other people and show them intolerance on the basis of race, creed, or gender, we are basically discriminating against a part of ourselves. We either have been that sort of person before, or we will be in the future because we need to get to know what we reject.
VM: How have you utilized forgiveness in your own spiritual journey?
SL: I had a major issue with my mother. I had been largely victimized by her in this lifetime, leading me to have very serious grudges against her. Even though I didn’t forgive her, I never really retaliated. This went on until I realized through a past life regression what kind of past life history I had with her. I discovered that I had actually killed her in one of my previous lives and of course that had created a tremendous amount of bad karma between us. At one point, I had a dream where she was not only that person who had injured me in this life, but she was also my teacher who referred me to this previous life in the dream. After I had that dream, I was able to finally forgive her. I saw that the enemies that we encounter in our lives have two faces. On one hand, they are our enemies, and on the other hand, they are our teachers who help us become more conscious in our soul evolution.
In my opinion, the proper integration of past life material is a psychological necessity. Only if the information is deeply absorbed and responsibly owned can it contribute to an individual’s emotional and spiritual growth.
To order Sabine Lucas’ book, Past Life Dreamwork: Healing the Soul through Understanding Karmic Patterns, visit Inner Traditions Bear & Co. at www.innertraditions.com. For more information on Sabine Lucas, explore www.pastlifedreams.com.