The piano turned up again on March 2014, and little by little, as I clear up things, I think I am possibly seeing two different phases. Here I can indeed play it, but it is not the same house, but my sister’s, where I was fostered for some time.
«I suddenly saw myself playing the piano, I was even hearing the melody, it seems this piano is placed between two windows… and I think I used to see it like this when I remembered that X I thought lived in the West. I think it is definitive that this X is in reality Susan, when I was living with my sister and her husband, before and after the first trial. I suddenly turned my head to the left and there was my daughter: a 3-4-year-old girl that tries to play with me but she can’t yet… It moves me having her so close. Her hair is of a light colour, not like mine, and she is so beautiful.
I also started to see the porch of this house. There is a rocking chair and possibly some swing, it is a great house and I see it all with brown and golden colours, as if bathed in an autumnal light. Then I have gone back in time and I am in that rocking chair, several months pregnant, and my sister is beside me, and I know our mother is with us too, and my sister’s husband, a young man that remains a bit distant but is kind to me as well. I suddenly feel a lot of sadness and I nearly begin to weep, as we are talking about my father. I feel a lot of rage, and I tell my mum the choice should have been mine, not his, but of course, he was supposed to know better than I what was convenient for me… and no, I know he maybe did it with good intentions, but he should have listened to me when I told him whom I wanted to marry… now I know I missed my only chance to be happy, as that lad married someone else.
It is with my sister I get along the best, she asks me who is the father, I can’t tell her much, but I do say the father is not my ex-husband. She insists, but I don’t say anything, I just see him in my mind and think he had his own life, and we were at great risk, so I really wish he is faraway, out of danger, despite how much it hurts he will never see my child. When I think about him, I see him with long and a bit curly hair (as always), a very passionate and courteous gentleman, someone that makes me feel alive, all the opposite to my husband…
Then I see myself with a bigger belly, and I know the labour comes, and shortly afterwards I go to the city with my mum to surrender. As I saw in another regression, it is very hard for me to leave my baby with my sister, I know it is possible I won’t see her again, and I tell her to take care of her if I don’t come back. I know she will do, as if she was her own.»
(Regression 5-3-2014.)
«It started with images of the bathtub, but I was writing a short tale in which this bathtub appeared, so I don’t know if it is accurate or not. I believe it was already in another regression, when I cut myself on the forearm with the hairpin, but I don’t remember the details now. Anyway, from there I went to the boudoir. I always see a very spacious and luminous room, with white or light-coloured furniture. The brush I use for the hair is also light-coloured, I suddenly notice my maid’s hand on my shoulder and I touch her, about to cry, as I think I am seeing my own eye with a burst little vein reflected on the mirror, besides the grey shadows in the lower eyelids.
Then I remembered the piano… and my left flank started to hurt… and asking myself the reason for that pain, it came to me that it all started with the piano. I didn’t see that piano completely, but I have the impression it is not a grand piano, but rather a small one, made of clear wood. With some space for the strings, obviously, but not too big. I know that in order to tune it, you need to open that part and tighten or loosen some screws that hold the strings. One of the keys is broken, and we call someone to come and fix it. Then I see a very elegant young man, tall and black-haired, possibly with a moustache, he wears a black suit, and together we open the piano. A distended atmosphere, we laugh, something falls down, and when we get down our heads almost touch… yes, maybe someone would say I am flirting, but I am not, I am just behaving like any other young woman of 15, 16, 18 years old… But then my husband arrives and he sees us from the door. He gets angry and very seriously tells me to leave the room. When the young man goes, the worst comes. I only saw this in flashes: he shouts at me, comes towards me, I get back, he starts to beat me with a stick and I protect myself with my forearms, where he beats me. I keep retreating until I manage to turn around, then he beats me on my back time and time again… I can’t move.
The next thing I see is I am on the queen bed (the same one I saw on the wedding night, with light covers too), with a naked back, turned to one side. The doctor has come and he is examining me, while my husband watches sitting on an armchair at the bed’s right. We have told him I fell down the stairs. The doctor says I have a broken rib. It hurts so much I can barely sleep, and I also have some anxiety, both things make me breathe rapidly. To alleviate the pain, the doctor decides to give me something (laudanum comes to my mind, but it is possible this is contamination due to Sherlock Holmes), I know it is going to leave me asleep, and I don’t want him to do it… I don’t know the reason very well, but although it sounds a bit strange, it is because I fear my husband could do something (sexual) to me while I am asleep. Oh, and the image comes to me that the laudanum is administered to me in drops, mixed with some drink.
(Regression 6-4-2014.)
Research on laudanum.
When I wrote down the regression I mentioned Sherlock Holmes, more than anything due to the numerous movies and the typical image we all have of this fictional character, as I hadn’t read any of his books back then. And even so, if I think right now about Sherlock Holmes, knowing he had this drug addict side, fact that I don’t think is generally known, the first thing that comes to my mind is the cocaine he used to inject himself and the opium he might consume in the opium dens of the time. I don’t think there is a description of Sherlock Holmes taking laudanum in drops.
So it was quite surprising to find that what I had written about my regression totally matched the information on laudanum I read from several sources, including the administration in the form of drops.
Laudanum is a tincture of opium containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight (the equivalent of 1% morphine). Laudanum is prepared by dissolving extracts from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum Linnaeus) in alcohol (etanol).
Reddish-brown and extremely bitter, laudanum contains several opium alkaloids, including morphine and codeine. Laudanum was historically used to treat a variety of conditions, but its principal use was as a pain medication and cough suppresant. […]
By the 18th century, the medicinal properties of opium and laudanum were well known. Several physicians, including John Jones, John Brown, and George Young, the latter of whom published a comprehensive medical text entitled "Treatise on Opium" extolled the virtues of laudanum and recommended the drug for practically every ailment. "Opium, and after 1820, morphine, was mixed with everything imaginable: mercury, hashish, cayenne pepper, ether, chloroform, belladonna, whiskey, wine and brandy."
As one researcher has noted: "To understand the popularity of a medicine that eased --even if only temporarily— coughing, diarrhoea and pain, one only has to consider the living conditions at the time". In the 1850s, "cholera and dysentery regularly ripped through communities, its victims often dying from debilitating diarrhoea", and dropsy, consuption, ague and rheumatism were all too common.
By the 19th century, laudanum was used in many patent medicines to "relieve pain... to produce sleep... to allay irritation... to check excessive secretions... to support the system... [and] as a soporific".The limited pharmacopoeia of the day meant that opium derivatives were among the most efficacious of available treatments, so laudanum was widely prescribed for ailments fromcolds to meingitis to cardiac diseases, in both adults and children. Laudanum was used during the yellow fever epidemic. Innumerable Victorian women were prescribed the drug for relief of menstrual cramps and vague aches. Nurses also spoon-fed laudanum to infants. The Romantic and Victorian eras were marked by the widespread use of laudanum in Europe and the United States. Mary Todd Lincoln, for example, the wife of the USA president Abraham Lincoln, was a laudanum addict, as was the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was famously interrupted in the middle of an opium-induced writing session of Kubla Khan by a "person from Porlock". Initially a working class drug, laudanum was cheaper than a bottle of gin or wine, because it was treated as a medication for legal purposes and not taxed as an alcoholic beverage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laudanum
“A careless mishap killed Sarah Newbery on 28 May 1843. She was a widow in her late 80s living in the parish of Hampton Wick near Hampton Court with her son, John Robert Kensett, who had returned from America to be with her in her old age. Due to recent stomach trouble, that morning she had taken a medicine she believed to be tincture of rhubarb, a common purgative. In reality she had swallowed a massive dose of laudanum. Three or four drops of laudanum (tincture of opium) were sufficient to kill a baby; an adult medicinal dose might have been up to 30 drops; seasoned addicts could cope with at least 200. She had taken a fluid ounce – over 550 drops.”
http://wellcomehistory.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/unsafe-medicine/