Summary

The Adventures of a Solitary Soul - H. J. Sharp

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Dream 3 - The appearance of the first Angel

We soon moved back to Southampton again, staying in two different flats while our house was being built. It was around 1926 that we moved in. Shortly after this a most significant event for me happened. The stairs consisted of two bottom stairs and a landing. They then turned through a right angle and then there were seven stairs leading to another landing, another turn through a right angle, and finally five stairs to the upper floor. This sequence of numbers much later became of significance to me in respect of the construction or arrangement of our mentation equipment, 2, 7 and 5. On the wall by the upper landing there was a picture based on the first world war. It was of an Angel which tilled the upper area of the composition and which was holding a wreath over the heads of three fallen soldiers. They were propped up against the side of a 1914-18 war tank. I naturally looked at this picture every time I climbed the stairs. I came level with it at the bend of the stairs. The Angel was a large calm, understanding, willowy figure, whose bounds were indeterminate. The picture began to impress itself upon me by the age of 5 or even before. The Angel figure began to appear in many if not all of my dreams and I quickly began to identify it as a part of me that watched me dreaming and not the part of me afraid or enjoying or interested in the dream. I then began to realise that the Angel was following me when I was awake, as a willowy figure hovering over my right shoulder, serving as a protecting and guiding Angel of my waking state as well as in my dreams. Thinking back now, I realise that this Angel figure has become a symbol for that level of my consciousness that observes "me" in relation to external events and my inner state. Looking back at those special moments that I can clearly recall, it is my level of consciousness symbolised by the Angel, that remembers.

Many years later I learnt that lbnal 'Arabi, the Sufi told us - "Angels are the powers hidden in the faculties and organs of man".