PAST LIFE DIARY

EXOTIC ARTIFACTS (Mechtel) I feel the rather strong movement of a boat. I'm in the room below deck, lying on a wooden bench, trying to fight off the seasickness. There are other people here as well. I hum to keep myself alert. When the movement finally lessens, I gather that we must be getting close to land. I hear men's voices cheering. I get up, careful not to move too quickly, first sitting up with my legs bent over the sides of the bench. I'm wearing striped, multi-colored hoses. My hair is chin-length, wavy, and rather greasy. I hope to have a beer soon at a tavern. That'll make me feel better! I stand up and touch my pouch of coins, jingling as I do so. The crowd is being ushered out of the room through the door and up a few steps. As I'm waiting my turn, I notice a young woman, perhaps in her late twenties or early thirties, with a baby and a young girl. I imagine she might be the only woman on board, and I feel inclined to monitor her well being. As we...

THE UNDERGROUND STORAGE (Anna-Maria) I see a wooden door in a dark wall at the end of a corridor. I won't open the door, but I know that there's a storage room behind it with hay on the ground and a barred basement window. I have a ring with keys hanging from my belt. I turn away from the door, and play with the keys, making a jingling sound. I'm wearing a bright blue skirt, bright yellow socks, and wooden clumps. I take a seat on the long wooden bench which is standing along one of the long walls, and wait for someone. I soon hear a voice outside. " Anna " he says. I wait for a bit and don't reply. It's someone else I'm waiting for. Q: Who is this? And who are you waiting for? Anna-Maria: I'm waiting for Herman. This is another man. He's short to average height and has dark hair. " Anna! " he calls again, angrily now. 'What?' I say. I get up and look for him through the opening in the ceiling. I've been waiti...

LOOKING FOR LOST SOUL PARTS This session takes me to a one of my extraterrestrial existences. I ' m on a very small planet. The soil is soft and gray like wet clay. I ' m wearing a turquoise bodysuit - we all are - and a helmet. I put my hand in the soil to grab a handful of it. We ' re here to look for the remnants of what some of our earlier crew members have left behind when they came here: fragments of their souls. It ' s easy to lose part of yourself on another planet such as this. Q: What brought them here to begin with? - : They/we were using it as a station/base in between planets, similar to the use of a gas station for cars. They don ' t refuel with a substance, but they refuel themselves with energy/electricity from the sun. Not our sun, but another " sun " which is a source of bluish white light.  - : The space-vehicle is essentially man-powered. If they run out of power, they slip back into another dimension. This here is between th...

MEATLOAF AND BASEBALL (Louise) I see a neatly sprayed blob if whipped cream. I see a woman's hand putting a cherry on top. I'm in the kitchen. Outside, I can hear the sneering sound of an electric tool being used. I look at the clock on the wall. It's right about two o'clock. Okay, I'll start preparing the meatloaf. I look among the used matches for a single match that hasn't been used yet, and bend through the knees a little to turn on the small fire at the front of the stove, the one on the right. I'm wearing a white waist apron with frills. As the large cube of butter has started to melt in a small pot, I now lower the heat to let it melt more slowly. Then, I add the jam and cinnamon. Q: Really? Louise: Just let me be; you'll see. Then, I put the breadcrumbs. This turns into a bit of a cooking lesson... Q: Where did you get these? Louise: Oh, you can buy them at the store. I see a transparent bag with " Franklin's Bakery...

GUMMY BEARS (Jeremy) I'm at Tracy's diner. She's wearing a simple, olive-green dress and a white apron. Her hair is not tied together and is standing up quite randomly. This lack of care about her appearance is unusual. She's obviously in not a very good mood. I'm waiting for Josh too, but he didn't show up yet. I drink my coffee and leave. I'm wearing a checkered winter jacket. It's quite chilly. It might be freezing or just about. The bus stops, and I get on, expecting to find Charles on the bus as planned. I'm surprised to find him sitting in the first seat behind the driver. I take a seat next to him. The glass between the driver and us is brown like sunglasses and gives me a sense of cozy privacy. Charles hands me one of two tickets. He bought mine in advance. I t 's just a tiny white paper which has, among other things, " New York " written on it. It's 1962, and I feel like I'm living in the future. We have everyth...

A FEW DOZEN (Jeremy) I'm looking down at my pants. They're slightly flared but not too much, and a hideous color - something between brown and gray. They're that material you don't need to iron. What's it calle d? - A crylic? My shoes are an equally dull color, but you can only see the tip cause the flared ends of the pants hang over them. I do like the feel of my shoes having a bit of a thick sole. I'm wearing a narrow fitted shirt with half sleeves, off-white, in a stretchy fabric with a textured pattern. I quite like it, and I leave the top buttons open. I'm wearing my thin, metal frame d glasses and my bulky wrist watch. I'm at a store wit h a group of… girls. They sell magazines here. It seems like the same stationary supplies store I saw in another session. Molly's here. She refuses to wear her glasses nowadays, says they look hideous. She doesn't want the glasses to repel boys. I told her, joking, that she gotta be sure she doesn...

IN THE ARMY ( Jeremy) I'm looking up at the light on the gray ceiling in the corridor outside of the toilet, feeling completely calm, not thinking. We all take it. It keeps us focused. Even Captain Laurel takes some in what he calls " these trying times " . We smoke in the toilet - we call it the piss hole. I enter with someone else. We each have one draw, and then pass it on to the next candidates. We get it over with quickly and methodically during those few minutes when our supervising officer is gone for a pee himself. We know their schedule, but it's not always reliable, so sometimes we need to improvise. Another scene: I see a grayish blue coverall hanging up in a room. It's a small room in the officers' building. I'm here to clean the place. A woman is here. She's the wife of one of the officers. She's rather young compared to her husband, perhaps in her thirties. Another man, a chubby, middle-aged ginger, is by one of the windows. The...

NOT READY TO BE WED (Marie) I'm in town, carrying two white canvas bags, one in each hand, with leather handles. The bag to the right contains dried brown beans. I feel very sad, hopeless, but I tell myself I must forget about it. A folded piece of paper, a grocery list, is also in the bag. I do groceries for people, three households this time. I still need to get milk and bread. I'm glad to be out of the house in the open air. I need to breathe! I'm so upset. A young man, a ginger-haired lad of nineteen, came to the house, smiling, asking to marry me. Father was okay with it. How dare he bypass my stepmother?? I have plenty of things to do, to arrange! It's disgraceful! I leave one bag of groceries, note included, outside the gate of a house, even though it drizzles. I believe I brought them everything that was on the list. There's a small paper bag in there too, containing medicine for the father of a young girl of about seven years old . The man's always s...

LOCKER BOY (Jeremy) I see a wooden desk in the middle of a rather dark room. I ' m scared, cautiously walking towards the desk, glancing to my left. I ' m in my late teens. I ' m here to take some papers from the desk drawer, intent on signing it on my brother ' s behalf. I don ' t even wanna think what kind of trouble he ' d be in if I didn ' t do this for him. It doesn ' t matter to them that he ' s not clever. T hey think he ' s a crook, a master mind. He did nothing wrong, just played with a dog, someone ' s household pet. The dog was on the porch, and Jason approached it to play with it. A man came out, threatening him with a rifle. Jason put up his hands and said: " No harm. " A couple of police cars arrived, and Jason ran away. They initially lost him cause they weren ' t sure who they were supposed to be chasing. They asked the guy about what happened. His son, upon encount ering Jason in front of the house, ran away...