Paranormal & Fortean : Deja Vu An Unusual Case

The French expression Deja Vu means "already seen." It describes experiences that people have with some frequency. Some cases of deja vu seem to 'hit' the person experiencing it lightly, and some like my experience discussed in my 3 January 2009 post hit you over the head like the proverbial ton of bricks. The following case is one of those and is of a higher degree than most instances of deja vu.

The story appeared in a four column article written by Christopher Wren in the New York Times on 17 April 1979. Wren was in Egypt when he wrote the article entitled, "Briton with a Sense of Deja Vu Calls Ruins 'Home'. It all started when Dorothy Eady, at the age of three, fell down a flight of stairs in her home in Plymouth, England. She had been pronounced dead by the local doctor. "When he came back with the death certificate, the body was sitting on the bed playing', she revealed. Then she began to cry. "They asked why I was crying, and I said, 'I want to go home.' They assured me I was home." Wren wrote : From then on she was convinced that she belonged in another, dimly remembered time. She played hooky from school and hung around the Egyptology Room of the British Museum in London. When she first saw a magazine photograph of the magnificent temple at Abydos, she told her parents: 'Here is my home, but why is it in ruins and where are the gardens?' "

It was not until 1933, when she was in her late twenties that she was able to go to Egypt. " I never left; I never wanted to." She took a job with the Egyptian Antiquities Service and acquired experience in field excavations, but it was some years before she had time to travel to Abydos. 'As soon as I saw the mountain, I knew where I was. The train stopped, and I got off.... There was no other place for me to be." The Times article continued: "In 1956 she managed to get transferred to help with the excavation and restoration of Abydos, which has some of the finest bas-reliefs of pharanonic art. Her colleagues were surprised by her immediate familiarity with the temple. 'In the pitch dark I went to each place they told me to.' " She would then describe the scene. "Every time I was right."

Dorothy had mentioned gardens being at the place as a child. No discovery of this was made by any archaeologists. However, when Dorothy got to the scene she was able to give the exact location. The tree roots, vines and even the old, dry water canals were there too. The Times article continued: "She also correctly estimated the height of damaged columns where the temple roof was missing and she translated some of the more enigmatic hieroglyphics. In a previous incarnation, she believes she was the orphaned daughter of a common soldier and a vegetable seller and she was adopted by the temple, where the spring resurrection rituals to the god Osiris were conducted. " I can't remember an ordinary life, so I think I must have been stuck in the temple. I have a vague memory of possessions. I can remember an awful killjoy of a high priest."

The period of history that Dorothy believes she had previously lived in was 3,200 years ago in the nineteenth dynasty under Seti I and his successor Ramses II. Dorothy Eady named her son Seti. She had married an Egyptian, but the marriage had lasted only two years. In the village where she lived, Dorothy was known as Om Seti, which means mother of Seti. Dorothy admits that "her Odyssey from the middle-class gentility of Plymouth to the rural poverty of a remote Egyptian village (where she was living in at the time of the article and living on a modest pension) sounds bizarre." Some people say that when "I fell downstairs it knocked a screw loose." Whatever the truth behind this story, there is no question of her abilities as an archaeologist. "Her grasp of ancient Egypt is formidable", writes Wren. "Egyptologists still visit her sparsely furnished house in Abydos to benefit from her knowledge and her lively self-deprecating wit. James P. Allen of the American Research Center in Cairo has described her as a patron saint of the profession. ' I don't know of an American archaeologist in Egypt who doesn't respect her."

Note to reader: There are other cases where bodily trauma has triggered what people feel are past-life memories. In a German newspaper, Rheinischer Merkur, from 31 May 1947, a similar story is told. The story involved a girl in Ihansi, India, who fell out of a third story window. Fortunately she did not suffer lasting bodily harm, but suddenly began to speak in several languages. Scholars later found these languages to be old Indian dialects that had not been used for centuries. Dorothy Eady died in 1981 and is buried in the desert near Shunet el-Zebib. I wanted to do this post because I thought it related to my continuing study of reincarnation and different theories and experiences of it. The major source for this post was, Reincarnation A New Horizon In Science, Religion And Society by Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams. The book was published by Julian Press in 1984, pp 80-82. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Eady