The Ghost in the Dream

This post is a follow on from a couple of previous posts A Relative Fashion and J Donald.

So the saga continues. Although the depression lifted, the bad sleep and strange dreams have continued. Maybe I should have been making an effort to remember them, but at 4 in the morning when a horrible image is stuck in your head and you have to get back to sleep and go to work the following day, forgetting it as quickly as possible is definately the goal!

One image has stayed with me this week and I have not been able to leave it in the dreaming at all. A sister watching her brother being burned alive. I got to watch it in horrific detail. It took a couple of hours for me to get back to sleep and I could not forget, no matter how hard I tried.

With a nice bit of timing, Wheelkeeper wrote this post about a ghost she had been assisting and with the assistance of Lisa as well, things have become clearer. The ghost can call to us in the dream and call us to a dream realm where we can receive messages and interact, if they are a loved one, a ghost of one of our own past lives or if we are a Keeper of the Dead.

I have no evidence to suggest I am a Keeper of the Dead, this is after all my first ghost. I am not sure if he counts as a loved one, no living relative of mine ever met him after all, he is a Great Great Great Grandfather. Not sure about him being a past life either. Not sure how I would feel if he was a past life.

I mean after all, killing surely acquires a fair bit of bad karma! And he in all likelihood killed a lot of people. Then there is the other side of the coin, he achieved so very much in his life, he came from nothing and climbed his way up, was respected and rewarded for this and was very, very formidable. I admire him but I am not sure I can live up to him. I think he would look at my lack of fitness, my messy house and start barking off orders....

But I found this article on soldiers and karma. It seems that there is a view that intention is key with karma. If your intention is to do your job well and with honour and to protect your country, then that is fine. Intending to go out and kill people, to rape and pillage, to do bad things is going to accrue a lot of bad karma.

I am currently reading a book, Earth Medicine by Jamie Sams with a reading each morning. This mornings reading was all about honour. To honor the deeds of another is to show appreciation for their contribution. To bring honor to our country is to give of ourselves above and beyond what is normally expected. To honor the self requires sacrifice - to make sacred our roles abilities and talents. If we share these gifts with those we serve, without desire for reward and with an open heart, we will receive joy as a reward.

This is such an appropriate reading for today! Because honor is so very much what he was about. He did his job, with all of himself, all of his ability and he was prepared to make the biggest sacrifice. If he was ordered to do terrible things or they were part of battle there is no dishonor. The fact these things haunted him is a credit to him. Maybe there were things he did that he could have done differently, maybe some images would never leave, maybe there was guilt while he was alive, I doubt he would ever have admitted to it. I can see how that guilt would remain as unresolve in some one like him.

Any individual acts he committed and their attendant unresolve is not what he has to deal with now. They will be played out in life, in the relationships he has with those people. It is his guilt he has to accept and let go of.