Lightoller, 1911
My story begins at the age of eight, in April of 1962, right around the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. I was at school, on the playground at recess and all the children, myself included, were singing "They Built The Ship Titanic". Suddnely, there flashed into my mind the image of an enormous ship, all lit up, sailing under a painfully-clear night sky filled with thousands of stars. Somehow I "knew" that it was an ocean liner, even though at that time I had never seen one before in this life. As the song progressed, however, other, less pleasant images filled my mind: that ship, sinking by the bow, and the panic towards the end amongst them. I began to feel very uneasy so I went to a quiet corner of the playground so that I could be alone and think about what I had seen.
When eight or nine, I began to dream of a pretty lady. Somehow I knew we were married. I wasn't sure what that entailed of course, being so young--I only knew that seeing her in my dreams always made me very happy. It would be almost forty years before I saw a picture of that woman...as it turned out, she was my past life-wife, looking just as she had in my childhood dreams.
About four years later, my parents took me across Lake Michigan on an interlake ferry called SS Milwaukee Clipper. This was a fairly large ship with holds for automobiles and cabins for those crossing at night. Since we were making a day crossing, my father asked me if I would like to take a walk, a suggestion to which I gladly agreed. As we walked along one of the promenades, for a minute or so, I found myself walking alone along a promenade of another, completely different ship. With it came the certainty that I had done this on some other ship, in some other time. It would be a good thirty years before I would find a a picture of that promenade--it was Titanic's portside A-Deck Promenade looking aft. I didn't find the experience at all frightening, just interesting.
A couple years later, my parents let me stay up late to watch "A Night to Remember", the British film based on the Walter Lord book about the Titanic disaster. As I watched it, an eerie sense of deja-vu started to come over me. In retrospect, the sets which were the most accurate gave me the strongest deja-vu. I said nothing to my parents because they already thought that I was weird--telling them that would only have confirmed them in that belief.
About this time, I began to experience dreams of being on a sailing ship. The seas around us were mountains of grey-green water, the sky overhead leaden and the wind howling through the rigging. Although I could not feel temperature in a dream, there was ice on the rigging, the deck, the yardarms...I was up on one of the yards, my feet on the standing rope which ran beneath it, holding on for dear life, knowing that if I lost my grip, I would fall to my death. Only two years later, did I see the ship in my dreams. It was a clipper ship and in reading, the weather I saw in those dreams the weather as it is most of the time down around Cape Horn.
About seven years passed and, in December of 1975, my mother gave me a copy of the illustrated edition of A Night to Remember, the book by Walter Lord mentioned above. Looking at the pictures, the same eerie sense of deja-vu as I felt whilst watching the movie again came over me. By the time that I reached a picture of the Boat-Deck Landing, I was certain I had been aboard her. Since I had not yet come to believe in reincarnation, I immediately rejected the idea. How could I have been aboard Titanic when I wasn't born until a good forty-one years after the sinking?
As the years went by, although I was not yet a Titanic buff, I would watch every movie and documentary on Titanic as it was broadcast on television. I didn't know why I should want to watch them, but I wanted to watch them, and watch them I did. Since none of the movies were accurate, I did not feel the deja-vu I'd felt watching "A Night to Remember".
In October of 1996, I bought a couple of Titanic books to read at work and faster than you can say "White Star Line", I was hooked. I had become a Titanic" buff. About six months later, I began to write a novel on the disaster after the following happened: I was at a patient's house on the anniversary of the sinking. About three-thirty in the morning, I began to weep and it was some time before I was able to stop. Afterwards, I realised that, given the time difference between San Francisco, CA and where the Titanic went down, it was the same time that the last Titanic survivors had been brought aboard the Carpathia eighty-four years before.
As I said, I began writing a novel on the disaster and that was where things started to get really weird. I would write down something, taking my best guess, subject to revision as I learned more. I was surprised how often I turned out to have been right. I wrote about Titanic's engines having been restarted after the collision, though I hadn't read it anyplace in my Titanic books. Only in 2000 did I finally find out that this was what had indeed happened. Then, I wondered why Capt. Smith didn't just run Titanic "slow-astern" in order to control the flooding. I immediately scuttled the idea as something that only a landlubber would come up with. Imagine, when, in 2000, I read the following: during WWI, HMS Garry was badly wounded in her bows after ramming and sinking a German U-Boat. Her commander sent the following to the Admiralty: "Am proceeding to port...stern first...8 knots..." In other words, he was running her "slow astern"! Her commander? CH Lightoller, erstwhile Second officer of RMS Titanic! I figured, hey, if it's good enough for Lightoller, it's good enough for me! Later on the widow of a ships' engineer told me that both things had to do with shiphandling, something in which I have absolutely no training.
By this time, I believed in reincarnation, and I began to accept that I might well have been on Titanic. I wasn't positive of who I'd been, but I suspected that I was probably a male, a member of the crew, and that I survived. A lady at work asked me if I thought I'd been on Titanic and I said that I likely had been.
One evening, I was in a coffee shop working on my novel when a lady and I fell into a conversation about Titanic Suddenly, she said, "You, my dear, were on that ship. I see you as a tall, powerfully-built chap wearing a dark coat with brass buttons and a white cap with a visor." She asked to see my Titanic book and whilst she looked through it, I sipped my coffee. At last she brought her hand down on a picture, telling me that this was who I was back then. Well, I very nearly spit my coffee across the table. The picture was that of none other than Charles H. Lightoller!
Not dwelling on it, I went on about my business for six or seven weeks. Then, a friend of mine who is also a Titanic buff and I talked about the disaster and the ship and she told me she was sure that I had been on the ship and she sensed I'd been a man. I told her I wasn't sure of who I had been but that I knew who someone thought I'd been. I then told her Lightoller, to which she replied that if asked to make a guess, she would have picked Lightoller. Intrigued, I asked her why. "Because when you speak of Lightoller, there is a look on your face and a light in your eyes that I see at no other time despite your obvious interest in Titanic. You're not just talking about Lightoller; you are Lightoller and you are remembering."
Later that night before I went to sleep, I thought, I don't believe it!" Suddenly I heard a voice in my mind: "Believe it!" When I went to sleep, I had the following dream (it was in black-and-white, always a sign that I should pay attention): It was something like an out-of-body experience I was both the person viewing it and the person viewed. I was an old man, my hair (what was left of it anyhow) snow-white. I was dressed in grey trousers and a dark jacket and I was chatting with two ladies (note: I said, "chatting with", not "chatting up!). By the look of the clothing the ladies were wearing, it would have been the late 1940s or early 1950s. Just for a moment, he turned his face towards me--and who should it be but Lightoller!
In October of that year, I attended a Titanic exhibition in Seattle with a friend who knew a bit about my past life. The first part of the exhibition dealt with the building of the ship and, as such, did not affect me very much. Continuing on, we came to reproductions of a First Class stateroom, one of the Palm Courts, and finally, a full-scale reproduction of the First Class Staircase (Boat and A-Deck landings). For a moment, I looked up at the dome and Blam! I found myself walking down the staircase. As I looked down I saw uniform trousers, my shoes and a jacket with brass buttons. When my friend nudged me, I came back to the present.
Continuing on, we saw a reproduction of a Third-Class stateroom, and then, we entered the part of the exhibition dealing with the the sinking and the aftermath. In one case, there was an engine-telegraph from the ship (this sent engine orders from the bridge to the engine rooms) and I put my hand against the glass. Blam! I felt a completely surreal sense of acceleration and found myself on Titanic's bridge. It was nighttime, but as the bridge was all lit up ( something not ordinarily done at night), I believe it was the night of the sinking. Then, that same sense of acceleration and I found myself back at the exhibition.
Nearby, there was a wall of ice with a sign telling people that, when they put their hand against it, to please remember that the water that night was four degrees colder. I laid my hand against the ice--bad idea! Immediately I was back in that bitter-cold water, all those people screaming and stuggling around me, and me knowing that if I didn't get out of that water very quickly, I would die. Thank goodness for my friend's presence--she shook me hard until I came out of it.
Since then, memories have come back to me, some very happy, others I hope not to experience ever again.
Note: for those interested in Titanic and reincarnation, here is a link to Blown Back to 1912, the story of the woman who was once J Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line, the company which owned Titanic.
http://www.bruceismay.com
