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Life between life – Dr Joel Whitton and Joe Fisher

No matter how misused the immediate past life has been, the oversoul knows there's always another chance to make amends. And so Michael, while semi-slumbering in the bardo, acknowledged the neurotic flaw in his development and planned for himself an incarnation as Magnus - a priest living in 'Poland near Muscovy' during the first half of the fifteenth century. This new life was designed to afford a special opportunity to achieve greater self-control.

Later Michael examined Magnus' life under hypnosis and saw that, in accordance with Church requirements, the priest had succeeded in stemming his innate aggression and suppressing his sexuality. .

There were times when Michael felt at the mercy of his reincarnational experiences. Nightmares intruded on his sleep, and his days were spent turning over the revelations and conjectures that bubbled up in the wake of the hypnotic sessions. But by May 1981 the nightmares and the insights they produced had ceased. So had the past lives. No matter how hard they tried, doctor and patient found themselves blocked from further exploration.

Because Michael was parrying every inquiring thrust, Dr Whitton knew there was, at the very least, one more hidden life which held secrets crucial to the remedial process. Eventually the existence of another critical incarnation was intimated, but all Michael would divulge was a first name - Victor - which meant absolutely nothing on its own. This hiatus had lasted for several fruitless months when Michael received an invitation to visit Maisie Newman's home in Cape Anne, Massachusetts.

Maisie, a professional colleague, had offered her property several times to Michael and Sharron as a vacation base for touring the New England coast. They had never acted on the offer, but this time she was particularly insistent and Michael was frustrated enough with his past-life investigations to want to get away. Ensconced in the seaside home after flying to Boston, the Gallanders rented a car and decided to drive the short distance to the old town of Salem. For a while they walked about the harbour town infamous for its seventeenth-century witchcraft trials. Then they felt drawn to enter a small reference library where Michael idly picked up an old book on the history of witchcraft in the area. All at once, he was struck by an intensely disquieting sensation that soon became strangely physical. 'It was as if something was shaking me,' he later recalled. 'I stood there trembling and perspiring. Something was at work in the back of my mind something I couldn't understand.' Michael was unaware of having any personal connection either with the book or with any of the material it contained; he knew only that his apparently boundless capacity for self-loathing had been aggravated. And that, surely, was significant. Leaving Salem and shaking off the brooding malignance, Michael couldn't wait to get back to Toronto for the next hypnotic session in which he was to confront the reappearance of guilt, sex and religion . . .

Victor Bracknell lives on a farm in New England. He is a staunchly puritanical moralist who believes that pleasure actively hinders the spiritual progress of those aspiring to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It so happens that Victor's wedding day is fast approaching and, with it, the dilemma of how carnal ecstasy must be subdued. Being a locksmith by trade, he fashions a tube-like metal device with a hole punctured at one end, a device he believes will allow him to inseminate his wife while reducing their mutual enjoyment to the absolute minimum. On their wedding night, this instrument severely injures the bride's vaginal area. Victor quickly panics and tries unsuccessfully to staunch the bleeding. Within a few hours, his wife is dead . . .

Breaking the trance, Michael shook convulsively on Dr Whitton's floor as he grappled, at uncomfortably close quarters, with the deathly potential of the act of love. He couldn't help but compare Victor with Hildebrandt. Both had rashly and misguidedly killed their loved ones, though Hildebrandt seemed by far the more malevolent of the two. In a subsequent session, however, Michael learned that Victor embodied his sexual neurosis at its most perverse . . .

After burying his wife in the woods and telling all who inquire as to her whereabouts that she simply ran away on their wedding night, Victor shuns all memory of the fatal incident. Later Victor's sexual disturbance, driven by strong guilt feelings, draws him to Salem in 1692 where he takes vicarious pleasure in watching women convicted of witchcraft die on the gallows. Not content with being an ardent spectator, he ensures that one pathetic old women is sentenced to death by bearing false witness against her.

Michael - who in this life is incapable of telling a serious untruth - shuddered at remembrance of his recent visit to Salem and, as he did so, began to wonder whether the horror would ever cease. He was now only too conversant with karma's endurance and interplay as he scanned the threads of hundreds of years of his past lives stretched across the loom of eternity. It was almost as if he could see them being woven into a cohesive, if disturbing, cord. And although this helped him to understand better the anguish of his current life, it was hardly comforting to know that each successive existence added to, rather than lightened, the karmic burden.

'The Eternal runs one hell of a high school, 'he gasped between trances during one particularly rigorous session.