More of My Weird Shit

The closest place to play poker from my home in Savannah is in Jacksonville, FL, a two-hour drive. I go there a few times per month because I have a gambling addiction. (Not true. My only addiction is to ice cream sandwiches.) To pass the time on these long drives, I listen to audiobooks. Last night, as I was returning from poker, Martha called. I put her on speaker and she started laughing at me because she could tell from the first couple seconds of the background audio that I was listening to, as she put it, “more of your weird shit.”

The book I’m listening to at the moment is, in fact, really weird shit. Entitled Conversations with Nostradamus: His Prophecies Explained, Vol. 1, the book recounts the author’s efforts to interpret Nostradamus’s 942 predictions, which various scholars and students have been attempting for over 400 years with middling success. The twist is that the author, Dolores Cannon (1931-2014), relies on Nostradamus himself to explain their meanings. The “conversations” with Nostradamus in the book’s title are literal.

To back up, Dolores Cannon (1931-2014) was a hypnotist who developed a system called “Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique” (QHHT), which is designed to bring people into, what she called, the “Somnambulistic State.” This state naturally occurs just before falling asleep and just before waking. While in this state, her clients were able to recall past lives as well as tap into what Dolores called “The Subconscious,” but what we might call a “Universal Consciousness,” or what some people refer to as “The Akashic Records.” This “consciousness” allows access to deep, hidden information.

Nostradamus

To be clear: I’m not endorsing Cannon’s technique and I can’t say I “believe” her results, but it’s impossible for me to deny the consistency of the messages she received over 50 years of work. The most likely explanation for this consistency is that her clients, whether consciously or unconsciously, had absorbed Cannon’s teachings and, so, were primed to respond in ways that supported Cannon’s findings.

That is the most likely explanation, but it may not be the correct explanation.

Her relationship with Nostradamus (1503-1566) came out of this regressive hypnosis technique. She once had a client, a middle-aged woman from Arkansas that she described as having little formal education. During a session, the woman began describing a previous life as a student in 16^th century France. The student’s was a Greek émigré named Dionysus, who studied under Paris’s finest doctor, Michel de Nostredame, better known by his latinized name, Nostradamus.

The famous predictions he wrote were first published in 1555. Written in quatrain form, the prophecies are a bizarre tangle of cryptic messages, anagrams, astrological symbology, obscured allusions to historical figures, and double meanings. Many people believe he predicted Napoleon, Hitler, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and September 11^th among many other events. A typical example of one of his quatrains is below, along with a summary, which I have taken from an article entitled “11 Shockingly Accurate Predictions from Nostradamus.”

When “Dionysius” first came through, and Cannon learned of his association with Nostradamus, she asked if she could speak with the seer. Dionysius agreed to act as a “go-between”. This began the relationship. When Cannon’s original client, the one who claimed to have been Dionysius in a former life, moved to Alaska, Nostradamus suggested she find another “vessel,” through which they could continue their work. Which she did, a young music student named Brenda.

Eventually, Cannon, Brenda, and Nostradamus worked their way through most of – if not all of – Nostradamus’s predictions. (I’m not sure if Brenda continued to be the vessel for the entirety of the work, since I’m only about halfway through the first of three volumes of Conversations with Nostradamus.

Dolores Cannon

From my point of view, what’s most interesting about the book is that it was published over thirty years in our past. As such, it gives us a chance to look at how the quatrains referring to their immediate future (the 80’s forward) stack up against what we now know.

For example, last night during my drive, one of the quatrains really caught my attention because it dealt with multiple events, some of which happened previous to the reading, and some of which were predicted to occur in their future, but which may be considered our past. Here is the quatrain:

The bones of the feet and the hands locked up

Because of the noise, the house is uninhabited for a long time

Digging in dreams, they will be unearthed

The house healthy and inhabited without noise

One of the main criticisms posed by Nostradamus skeptics is that the quatrains are so vague that they can mean just about anything. The above example is certainly cryptic enough that it could obviously be interpreted to mean whatever you want. But listen to how “Nostradamus” interprets it for Cannon, as dictated by Brenda:

“He’s saying this refers to various events in American history and some events to come. This is one of those quatrains with several interpretations. He says ‘the house’ refers to The White House. One of the associations with this quatrain, one of the things he was seeing that he did not bring out very strongly was the events of Watergate. The reason he didn’t bring it out very strongly is that the quatrain seems to be associated with other events that seem more strongly, more important. He thought the people needed to be warned against these instead of just Watergate… he says it also refers to events in the future. There will be a time in another period of great social unrest, even more than the unrest during the Vietnam era… He first shows the concept of a hung jury but he’s applying that concept to an election. A hung election with the nation being the hung jury and the vote being very very finely divided between two different men for President… it will temporarily freeze the processes of democracy. The hands and feet, the very core of the operation – that is, the election – will be locked up, frozen. It will cause a great noise across the entire nation.”

Dolores Cannon speculated that, perhaps, Nostradamus was referring to the 1988 election between George HW Bush and Mike Dukakis, but, as she says, that election went off peacefully. Fast forward, however, to the 2000 Election, when the second Bush, George W., ran against Vice President Al Gore. The vote between the two men was so close that democracy, essentially, froze. The “hung jury” could refer to the Supreme Court, which decided the outcome of the election, handing the victory to Bush, and setting us much further down the hyper-partisan trajectory we find ourselves on today. For months, “the house” was metaphorically uninhabited, as both sides fought over the results. The quatrain might also refer to the current election, which looks as if it could be heading in a similar direction; as Nostradamus said, this particular prophecy refers to “multiple events.”

Nostradamus explained to Cannon that time is less like an arrow and more like a spiral, with events circling back on each other, echoing each other, and influencing each other. He told Cannon that his prophecies are not set in stone and that the reason he made them available was so humanity could nudge our future onto better paths.

Ice cream sandwich

A point of clarification regarding the time spiral before I end: Cannon thought it very important people understood that, according to her, she was not speaking to the spirit of Nostradamus. She was actually talking to the living, breathing Nostradamus. Nostradamus was reaching out to her, in his time, and communicating with her live. Never mind how such a thing could happen, let’s just agree that Cannon believed it happened.

Look, I’m not going to pass judgment on any of this. It’s obviously so strange that it can’t possibly be true. On the other hand, Cannon recorded all of her sessions. Those recordings, to my knowledge, are not available to the public, but I believe that academic researchers can access them through the Dolores Cannon Institute, which is now being run by her daughter.

What I will say is that I have come to believe that life is far stranger than we know. Further, the evidence for consciousness surviving death is compelling, as is the case for reincarnation. Both of those subjects go well beyond this essay and so I will leave them alone. Can a 16^th century physician reach out across time to communicate with a 20^th century hypnotist? My brain says, “Hell no!” My heart, on the other hand, very much wants to say yes. I will leave the last word to Martha, who, after laughing quite heartily at me when she overheard a snippet of the book to which I was listening, asked, “Why can’t I have a normal husband?”

Here’s a video of Dolores Cannon.