When you read fantasy fiction you will stir up memories you never experienced before. I read my first Science Fiction back in 1947 and turned on images and ideas that changed my life forever. When I think back now to what I experienced reading Astounding Science Fiction, I can still see the alien landscapes that sprang to mind at that time.
The stories I read at that time were mostly sagas, prose narratives of heroic exploits, essentially adventure stories rather than psychological dramas or thinly disguised polemics designed to present a particular point of view about gender, politics, or global warming. As a result, these “fanciful” stories sprang almost unmodified out of the collective unconsciousness of the writer’s mind, instead of being carefully crafted to prove some point.
I remember reading a book by HP Lovecraft one night in the 1950s and the monstrous landscapes it evoked are still fresh in my mind in spite of the fact they were not from this earth.
When HP Lovecraft conceived of some marvelous or horrifying character, like Cthulhu, for example, suddenly this particular monster would go viral and become stamped on the public’s consciousness.
When AE Van Vogt wrote The World Of Null-A in 1948, there were passages and imagery which still stick in my mind even though I have long forgotten the storyline.
From my early reading in 1947 right up to 1976, I had been reading sci-fi and fantasy magazines without realizing that I had opened the door to strange memories of places I have never seen in this lifetime.
It wasn’t until I received Scientology auditing in 1976 that I realized that I had memories of past lives and could recover them at will in session. Even then, I did not realize that the images I saw reading sci-fi and fantasy books in the 1940s were past life memories. I just did not realize it was that easy to contact the past.
Today, when even small children can access fantasy stories and videos on their cellphones, who knows what memories are being uncovered. When your memories are no longer confined to this lifetime, your perspective changes, even if you are a tiny tot.
The memories you can access are not confined to the tiny fraction of time covered in written history on this planet. If you read the right stories, you can open the grand can of worms that is history before the physical universe was created. You are, after all, immortal and you have deliberately forgotten much of what you have experienced for very good reasons. As cruel as times were 5000 years ago, they were preceded by eons of conquest and adventures great and cruel which laid waste to whole star systems. Certainly, there is evidence of great and noble deeds, as these stories come up in many counseling sessions, but over the long haul, life has determined to proceed on a dwindling spiral with less and less nobility and sanity as time passes.
When you read prophetic novels like Brave New World and 1984, and marvel at the way they hit you in the gut, it is because at some level you can remember times of insane cruelty and know that these books are absolutely true at some level.
It has been said that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. When you read dystopian fiction, you are reading about societies that are dehumanizing and frightening. These have actually existed in the past, so reading 1984 and others of that genre will give you some idea of what will happen if we cannot learn to live sanely.