Witches, Past Lives, and Recurring Dreams: A True Story

Once upon a time, many years ago, I gave a tarot reading to a fellow student from my school. The woman I was reading for seemed very anxious to hear what the cards would say, but all I could see, when I looked at the spread before me, was that she had been burned alive as a witch in a past life, and that these events were affecting her in present day.

This sounded crazy, so I resisted telling it to her. I tried to make the reading about something else, anything else. I talked in generalizations, trying to find some other meaning, but the more I tried to think of something else to say, the more insistent the initial interpretation became. Eventually, pretty quickly actually, my voice ran down and I fell silent. I sat there, staring at the cards, embarrassed. Then I looked up at her and said: "I'm sorry. I want to give you a good reading, but all I can see is that you were burned at the stake as a witch, and that the memory of it is affecting you. It's probably not anything you can relate to, so I apologize for even bringing it up. It's just it's all I can see for some reason."

The woman's whole face lit up "Thank you!" she said. "For the past couple of weeks I've been having these recurring dreams of being burned alive. I haven't been able to shake them, and they've been horrifying. They've seemed so real that I've wondered what they were really about, if they actually were memories or just dreams, that's the reason I wanted a reading. Thank you for telling me!"

True story.

🖤