The Element Encyclopedia of the Psychic World: The Ultimate A–Z of Spirits, Mysteries and the Paranormal

As a universal symbol of opening and new possibilities it’s not surprising that there are many superstitions concerning doors and spirits. Most of these superstitions are concerned with keeping ghosts from entering homes or letting ghosts escape to the afterlife. For example, it is widely thought unlucky to enter a house via the back door, as traditionally corpses are carried out the back door. Opening doors and windows when there has been a death in the house is thought to help the spirit leave the corpse. A circle chalked on a door is believed to prevent evil spirits from entering, and slamming a door several times during a row is believed to trap a ghost between the frame and the door and force it to leave.

DOPPELGÄNGER/DOUBLE

The appearance of a double of a living person, thought to be a death omen, or bilocation - the astral body of someone having an out-of-body experience. ‘Dop-pelgänger’ comes from the German, meaning ‘double walker’.

The belief in the spirit or soul existing in a double is ancient and widespread. The ancient Egyptians said the soul had a double or Ka, and a special kind of tomb, called the house of Ka, was reserved for the double. Doubles are said to be exact copies of the living person and are usually seen at a location distant from them.

As a death omen there are reports of seeing doubles just as the individual in question is about to die. The double usually appears real but has a ghostly, filmy look about them and can sometimes act mechanically. In some rare cases, such as that of the poet Shelley who saw his own double before drowning, the double appears to the dying individual him or herself. As well as being a death omen, many psychical researchers who have examined cases of doppelgängers believe they are projections of consciousness that somehow take on a form resembling reality. This can happen involuntarily or it can be accomplished at will. English medium Eileen Garrett suggested that the double is a clairvoyant projection that can be manipulated to develop supernatural powers.

DOWDING, AIR CHIEF MARSHALL LORD HUGH [1882–1970]

The hero of the Battle of Britain Air Chief Marshall Lord Hugh Dowding claimed on numerous occasions to be in contact with the spirits of the dead, especially airmen who had served with him or under him in both world wars. Dowding was a prominent member of the London Ghost Club and took an active part in many investigations of allegedly haunted locations with the organization.

DOWSING

Also known as divining, rhabdomancy and water witching dowsing is a form of divination performed using a forked stick, pendulum or rods to find hidden things, in particular underground water, minerals and oil. Today it is used to locate lost objects, buried treasure, mineral deposits and water wells, and to diagnose illness.

Dowsing is an ancient practice with unknown origins, however it is thought to date back at least 8,000 years. Wall paintings, estimated to be about 8,000 years old, discovered in the Tassili Caves of North Africa show tribesmen surrounding a man with a forked stick, possibly dowsing for water.

Ancient Chinese and Egyptian artwork depicts people using forked tools in possible dowsing activities. Dowsing may have been mentioned in the Bible, although not by name, when Moses and Aaron used a ‘rod’ to locate water. It was in the Middle Ages, however, that the first unambiguous written accounts of dowsing come, when it was used to find coal deposits. In seventeenth-century France, there are records of a man called Jacques Vernay a stonemason by trade, who used his dowsing talents to successfully track criminals. However, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, dowsers were often thought to be practitioners of evil. Martin Luther described dowsing as ‘the work of devil’ -hence the term ‘water witching’.

How the dowsing technique was first discovered and how dowsing works is unknown, yet those who practise it are convinced that it does work. Dowsing is still very much in use today in archaeological digs, searching for minerals and missing persons and in alternative healing, when the dowser swings a pendulum over the patient’s body to determine the location and cause of illness. It is not widely known but petrochemical companies employ dowsers to confirm underground sources of oil and gas, and dowsers have also made a contribution towards the understanding of mysterious earth energies, such as those represented by ley lines. The American Society of Dowsers estimates there may be as many as 30,000 dowsers in the United States, but despite this, dowsing still struggles to be regarded as a legitimate field.

How you can dowse

Dowsers say that anyone can have a go at dowsing because, like psychic ability, it is a hidden power that all humans possess. And, like any other ability, such as learning a musical instrument, the more you practise and learn your strengths the more you will define your abilities. Here are some steps for a do-it-yourself dowsing test.

1 Decide which dowsing tool you want to use:Forked stick: This is a Y-shaped tree branch (most often from a willow). The dowser holds the branch parallel to the ground at the top of the Y shape, and then starts to walk. If he or she passes over the hidden object the end of the branch is pulled down, pointing to the correct spot.L-shaped metal rods: For this method two L-shaped metal rods (easily made from a pair of coat hangers) are held in each hand parallel to the floor, and if the dowser passes over the hidden object the rods swing apart or cross each other.Pendulum: Some dowsers believe it is sufficient to hold a pendulum overa map is sufficient.If the pendulum begins to move in a circle or back and forth they know they have located the hidden object. Pendulums are also used for diagnosing illness.Your bare hands: Some exceptionally skilled dowers seem to be able to dowse without a tool, claiming that they feel a resisting force when they locate the hidden object.

2 Ask someone to bury a metal object or bottle of water in the garden just a few inches below the surface.

3 Before starting, mentally ask your dowsing tool to indicate to you when you are passing over the hidden object.

4 Walk slowly in any direction you like, concentrating on the object and trying to remain open and sensitive to the movements of the dowsing tool.

5 If your dowsing tool reacts or you simply ‘get a feeling’ that helps you make a decision about the location of the object, stop and see if the spot indicated is correct. If not, keep trying at different times of the day to see if you have ability for dowsing.

Dowsing has attracted some well-known names from history, including Leonardo de Vinci, Robert Boyle (considered the father of modern chemistry) and Charles Richet (a Nobel Prize winner). Albert Einstein was also convinced of the authenticity of dowsing:

I know very well that many scientists consider dowsing as they do astrology, as a type of ancient superstition. According to my conviction this is, however, unjustified. The dowsing rod is a simple instrument which shows the reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are unknown to us at this time.

Some believe there may be a psychic connection between the dowser and the hidden object. According to this theory all things - living and inanimate - have an energy force and the dowser, by concentrating on the hidden object, is somehow able to tune in to the energy force field or ‘vibration’ of the object, which, in turn, forces the dowsing rod or stick to move. In other words, the dowsing tool may act as a kind of amplifier or antenna for tuning into the energy and it is common for the dowser to find a tingling sensation, chills or shivering when the object is located.

Recent experiments in Russia have shown that dowsing rods can be sensitive to electromagnetic fields and that almost anyone can learn to dowse - although women tend to be more successful at it than men. Scientists believe this may be because unknown force fields respond better to the polarity in women’s bodies. Sceptics argue that dowsing is a matter of luck and that those with a high rate of success just have good instincts for where objects or water may be found. For both believer and sceptic there is no definitive evidence either way.

DOYLE, Sir ARTHUR CONAN [1859–1930]

Renowned for his Sherlock Holmes detective stories, Sir Authur Conan Doyle is also regarded by many as one of the founders of spiritualism.

During the years 1885 to 1888 when Conan Doyle was a physician in Southsea, he was invited to participate in table-turning sittings at the home of one of his patients. He wasn’t convinced of the amazing phenomena produced - or the medium’s integrity - but it aroused his interest in the subject, and shortly after he joined the Society for Psychical Research.

Almost immediately Conan Doyle participated in a series of experiments that convinced him that telepathy was genuine. He continued to investigate paranormal phenomena for the next 30-odd years, until finally, at the peak of his literary career in his late fifties, he took the bold step of publishing two books that firmly associated him with spiritualism: The New Revelation and The Vital Message.

His critics suggested he was merely grief-stricken over the loss of his son, Kingsley who had died of pneumonia, but Conan Doyle denied this. He said instead that a year after his son’s death, he attended a sitting held by a Welsh medium who he believed truly had made contact with his son. ‘It was his voice and he spoke of concerns unknown to the medium’, he said.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most impressive book on spiritualism is the two-volume set The History of Spiritualism, and it is essential reading for all serious students of the subject.

Conan Doyle was involved in a number of public controversies over spiritualism. In the late 1920s, while he was president of the London Spiritualist Alliance, a medium sanctioned by the Alliance was charged with fortune-telling (it was illegal at the time), and the Alliance was fined, £800. Conan Doyle wrote a public protest in The Times, suggesting that this was persecution of spiritualists. He also urged that the Fortune Telling Act be modified, and only six days before his death in July 1930, he led a petition to this effect.

A week after his death, a large spiritualist reunion was held in London, where a chair was left empty in his honour. A respected medium of the day said she saw him in the chair and offered a personal message from the great writer to his family. Since then dozens of mediums have claimed to receive messages from the author.

DRAGSHOLM CASTLE

Dragsholm Castle is one of Denmark’s best-known haunted castles and many investigations there by psychical researchers have yielded positive results.

Located in Zeeland, Dragsholm was built in the twelfth century and became the residence for kings and several noble families. It is thought that the castle has three ghosts: a grey lady, a white lady and the ghost of the Earl of Bothwell.

The grey lady is seldom seen but is thought to be the ghost of a woman who served in the castle and who had terrible toothache. She was cured and is said to return now and again to see if everything is in order, and as a thank you for her cure.

The other two ghosts are believed to be considerably less happy and thankful than the grey lady as both met their deaths in the castle in particularly unpleasant manners. The white lady is said to be the daughter of one of the many owners of the castle. She fell in love with a commoner and when her father found out he was so angry that he imprisoned her inside the thick wall of the castle. It is said that every night she returns to the castle and walks around the corridors, and there have been plenty of reported sightings of her. There is factual evidence to back this story up; in the 1930s, when the old walls of the castle were torn down, workers found a hole in the wall and a skeleton with a white dress in it.

The castle also has old cellars for prisoners. In the 1500s the Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, was incarcerated there for five years and died mad in the cellar in 1578. It is said that every night he comes riding into the courtyard of the castle with his horse and carriage.

DREAMCATCHER

Considered to be a talisman to ensure restful sleep and productive dreaming, the dreamcatcher is a North American device hung above the bed to dispel nightmares and retain the essence of good dreams.

Use of the dreamcatcher by Native American cultures is based on an old Lakota folktale about a spiritual leader to whom the god Iktomi, the great teacher of wisdom, appeared in the form of a spider. As he gave advice about the cycles of life, the importance of working with nature and of taking good advice when it was offered, rejecting bad advice, Iktomi began to spin a web. When the web was completed it had a hole in the centre. Iktomi gave it to the elder saying: ‘Use the web to help yourself and your people to reach your goals and make good use of people’s ideas, dreams and visions. If you believe in the great spirit, the web will catch your great ideas, and the bad ones will go through the hole.’

DREAMS

Everyone dreams. It is estimated that in an average lifetime a person will spend approximately 25 years asleep and experience at least 300,000 dreams, regardless of whether these dreams are recalled on awakening. Researchers believe that babies dream the most, children dream for four or five hours a night and adults for one or two hours. Animals also appear to dream.

Research from the University of Chicago has shown that dreams occur during the rapid eye movement (REM) period of sleep, which occurs for between five and forty minutes every sixty to ninety minutes of sleep. Most people only remember the last dream prior to waking but if they are woken up during earlier dream periods they will recall other dreams.

Unless written down immediately on waking most dreams fade within a few minutes. Dreams usually occur in colour but seldom have smells or taste, and this may be due to the fact that only visual brain neurons fire during REM. Almost all dreams use metaphors to deal with issues in the life of the dreamer, and every event in the dream is believed to have some kind of significance for the person dreaming it.

A brief history of dreams

People have always been fascinated by dreams and what they mean. All primitive religions viewed dreams as ways for the spirits or deities to speak to humans. The earliest known dream dictionary dates back around 4,000 years. Now called the Chester Beatty Papyrus it came from Thebes in Upper Egypt and is kept in the British Museum. In the Chester Beatty Papyrus dreams are interpreted and translated as omens or prophecies. For example, dreaming that your teeth fall out is interpreted as a loved one trying to kill you.

In ancient Greece dreams were also thought to be unlucky or lucky predictions. Around AD 200, Artemidorus, a dream interpreter who lived in Asia Minor, wrote a book about dream interpretation that suggested that dreams were continuations of the dreamer’s day. The Old Testament makes countless references to dream interpretation.

The importance of dreams and their meanings were prominent in the writings of the Early Church Fathers, including St Augustine, up until the time of St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who regarded dreams as insignificant; for several hundred years afterwards, dreams were no longer considered important. Even Shakespeare called them ‘children of the idle brain’. Although dream interpretation did continue to be an important part of the service of magicians and astrologers, this dreams-should-be-ignored school of thought persisted until the nineteenth century. Then along came psychiatrists Sig-mund Freud and Carl Jung, the two men who have had the greatest impact on the way we look at dreams today.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) opened the door to the scientific study of dreams with his book The Interpretation of Dreams; he considered dreams to be the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ and believed them to be wish fulfilment of repressed sexual desires from childhood. To interpret dreams Freud used a method called free association in which the dreamer says whatever comes to mind in relation to events in the dream.

Freud’s work paved the way for the work of Carl Jung (1875-1961). Jung considered dreams to be expressions of the contents of the collective unconscious, a source of shared knowledge that exists within us all. Jung believed the purpose of dreams was to offer guidance and information about the self. They were the language of the unconscious and they could tell us about the state of our inner lives; to ignore dreams was to court disaster. Even though dream symbols from the collective unconscious have universal or archetypal meanings, according to Jung, only the dreamer could interpret the dream’s true meaning, not an outsider.

There have been other theories since Freud and Jung but for the most part dreams are regarded as tools for change, growth and wellbeing. No one knows how, but dreams seem to be able to link the conscious (waking) mind with the hidden part of the mind called the unconscious or intuition and by so doing they provide a rich and powerful inner resource that can enhance life considerably. Today dream interpretation is extremely popular, with people from all walks of life using dreams as unique and very personal sources of comfort, guidance and inspiration.

Dreams, health and creativity

Scientists tell us that dreaming is essential to our mental, emotional and physical health and wellbeing, because dreams can help us relax, release frustrations, sort out information, solve problems or alert us to them, play out fantasies, offer inspiration and restore balance.

There are numerous famous examples of dreams offering inspiration. Solutions to problems, ideas for inventions and artistic endeavours have all found their way to the conscious mind via dreams. Mary Shelley dreamed of the creature that was to become Frankenstein. Other famous literary dreamers include Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson and J R R Tolkien. Paul McCartney heard a haunting melody in one of his dreams and wrote it down. It became the song ‘Yesterday’. Inventions and ideas that have sprung from dreams include the model of the atom, the M9 analogue computer, the isolation of insulin in the treatment of diabetes and the sewing machine.

Dreams and the paranormal

Dreams of the dead are viewed in the West from a psychological perspective and not as actual encounters with ghosts, but many believe that the dead appear in dreams because they have a purpose: usually to offer advice and instruction, as happened in the Chaffin Will case. Some dreams involving the dead are also thought to be death omens. In the eighteenth century Lord Lyttelton dreamt of a fluttering bird and a woman in white who told him he would die in three days’ time. Despite his best efforts to prove her wrong, Lyttleton died as predicted.

Although dreams that focus on communication between the living and the dead have been accepted in many cultures since ancient times as proof that the dead have the ability to interfere with the lives of the living, dreams have also always shared a strong link with supernatural powers, in particular with precognition and telepathy.

Although rare, precognitive dreams are ones in which you see the future before it happens. The ancient Chaldeans, Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Native Americans all believed dreams were a method of foretelling the future, and even today there are instances when people claim to have dreamt of things before they happen. Many people, for example, claim to have had dreams of the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster before it happened. There are also stories of people who cancel trips or flights because of a foreboding dream or people who dreamt the winning lottery numbers.

There is strong evidence that some precognitive dreams warn about future health problems. Jung noticed that if his patients dreamt of injury to a horse - the archetypal symbol of animal life within the human body - they were often in the early stages of serious illness. A 1987 study at Michigan State University showed that cardiac patients who dreamt of destruction were far more likely to have worse heart disease than those who did not. Dreams also serve as a preparation for death, with terminally ill patients sometimes reporting transitional dreams of crossing bridges or walking through doors just before death. These dreams often bring peace of mind.

Dream telepathy has interested psychical researchers since the late nineteenth century. The founders of the Society for Psychical Research in London collected numerous dream telepathy cases in their study of paranormal experiences published in Phantasms of the Living (1886).

Interpreting your dreams

Have you ever wondered why dreams are often hard to make sense of? It’s because the information they contain is presented in the language of images and the number of images your brain can present is endless. Dream experts believe that the images are your own thoughts, feelings and ideas turned into a series of pictures or scenes and it’s up to the individual to translate and interpret them.

Your unconscious mind is working all the time using images, feelings and pictures from your past and present and linking them in with the issues currently concerning you. For example, if you feel stressed you may have a dream where you are swimming and can’t keep your head above water. If you feel confused you may have a dream where you are lost in a dark wood. Some of these images can be universally recognized - a boat, for example, is typically is a symbol of transition - but most of the images in your dreams can only really be interpreted by you. That’s \ why a dream dictionary isn’t always helpful as the interpretations in there will be universal and not unique to you.

A good way to uncover the meanings of your dreams is by free association. You simply go with the first thing that pops into your mind when recalling an image you had in a dream. For example, if you dream of a dog what are the first thoughts that come into your mind when you think about dogs? Forget about universal associations; what are your personal associations with dogs? What a dog means to you and what a dog means to someone else may be entirely different. Perhaps you had an unpleasant encounter with a dog once and rather than being symbols of love, loyalty and devotion dogs represent fear and trauma for you?

The more you work with your dreams the more familiar you will become with your personal images. Always bear in mind that your dream symbols and images will be unique to you. What do you think your dream is trying to tell you?