The Rhine-Jung letters: distinguishing parapsychological from synchronistic events - J.B. Rhine; Carl Jung

Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 1998 by Victor Mansfield, Sally Rhine-Feather, James Hall

Healing Old Wounds

This happened twenty-one years ago, four weeks after the birth of my

first son. I was a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student living in an

idyllic cottage on Cayuga Lake. My wife and I were luxuriating in being

parents, our healthy new son was greedily nursing, and the fall leaves

swirled around us with vibrant colors.

In two successive nights, I had very similar dreams of my father. I had

never dreamed of my alcoholic father in my life, nor have I since. He left

me as an infant and had almost no contact with me. My mother lovingly

raised me entirely by herself and remarried when I was twenty-one. In my

mother's eyes he was justifiably evil incarnate. Occasionally when she was

at the height of her anger because of some bad behavior of mine she would

say, "You're just like your father!" This was the nuclear weapon of curses.

Both these vivid dreams portrayed my father in a very favorable light. In

the dreams, he told me that he was a sensitive and poetic person who found

it impossible to live with my headstrong, aggressive mother. He claimed that

it really was not his fault that he left. The two successive dreams seemed

very peculiar to me, especially since they were so alike. I attributed them

to my becoming a father, but they were still mysterious.

The day after the second dream, my father's brother called me on the

telephone; a real shock, since I had nothing to do with anyone in my father's

family and had no contact with them for fifteen years. He told me my father

was dying in a Veterans Administration Hospital in Washington, DC, and that I

should go and visit him. I immediately blurted out, "Would he come and see

me if I were dying?" I told my uncle I had no interest in seeing him now

after all these years.

I hung up the telephone. Rage, bitterness, and self-pity enveloped me

like live steam. Where was he when I needed him? How come I had to take my

mother's brother to the father and son banquet when I got my letter in high

school football? How come my most vivid early memory of him was his stumbling

into my mother's apartment and vomiting explosively all over the walls

in the bathroom? Ferocious fights between my father and mother, face

scratching, me standing there in helpless fear saying, "Mommy, I'll get you

my hammer to hit him ... "--all this washed over me. That rotten bastard!

No, he made me a bastard! He cheated me of a normal childhood. He would not

even pay the $5.00 per week of child support awarded by the divorce court.

Maybe the half-brother I had never met, sired while he was married to my

mother, would visit him in the hospital. How embarrassing it was to be

investigated by welfare workers to see if my mother and I were eligible for

aid. After all those years of telling people my father died in World War II,

that stupid bum writes my high school and asks how I am discharging my

military obligation. He never even sent me a Christmas card! Why did he

screw me up like that? Let the son-of-a-bitch die by himself as he deserves!

I wandered around all that beautiful fall day with hot tears streaming