Jekyll and Hyde in Hollywood (Excerpts from the JOHNNY CRUISE audio book)

I wanted to post some sample chapters from my JOHNNY CRUISE audio book, which I recorded last fall and winter. If you like, you can learn more about my experience recording the audio book here: THE AUDIO BOOK EXPERIMENT: Tips and Advice on How to Record Your First Audio Book.

 

JOHNNY CRUISE (available HERE on Amazon) is the first novel I ever wrote, way back in 2009. Set in Hollywood, it is a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like story about a very famous movie star who is at war with his abusive public persona, which has literally taken on a life of its own.

John Cruise (the person) stays secluded inside his mansion high up in the Hollywood Hills while Johnny (the persona) leaves the mansion and does all the movies, premieres, press events, charity events, interviews and talk show appearances. John desperately wants to leave the house and show the public the REAL him, but Johnny abusively makes him stay inside, warning him that the public won't like what it sees and his career will be ruined.

Overall, JOHNNY CRUISE is a dark comedy about an extremely insecure man who'll do anything to look good—or at least stay—in the public eye. Even if it means killing off his real self in the process.

 

Listen to the sample chapters below (CAUTION: there are intense and potentially offensive language, themes, drug use, sexual content etc. in the audio clips, although I did censor some of the language via bleeps):

Matt Burns · Johnny Cruise Chapter 1

Matt Burns · Johnny Cruise Chapters 16 and 17

Matt Burns · Johnny Cruise Chapter 18 Sample

Matt Burns · Johnny Cruise Chapter 20

Matt Burns · Johnny Cruise Chapter 28

…

 

MATT BURNS is the author of several novels, including Weird Monster, Supermarket Zombies!, The Woman and the Dragon and Johnny Cruise. He’s also written numerous memoirs, including GARAGE MOVIE: My Adventures Making Weird Films, My Raging Case of Beastie Fever, Jungle F’ng Fever: My 30-Year Love Affair with Guns N’ Roses and I Turned into a Misfit! Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.

 

 

Other trending writing-related articles by Matt Burns that may be of interest to you:

 

Visiting Mom in the ICU (short story contest winner)

 

THE AUDIO BOOK EXPERIMENT: Tips and Advice on How to Record Your First Audio Book

 

Getting Your Novel Done

 

Getting Your Screenplay Done

 

Making Your Good Writing Great

Writing the Sequel

 

Writing the Trilogy

No-No, Learn to Love the Rejection: Some Sage Advice for Writers in Search of an Agent or Publisher

 

The Story Behind Supermarket Zombies!

The Story Behind The Woman and the Dragon

Other trending non-writing-related articles by Matt Burns that may be of interest to you:

 

My Childhood Obsession with Rambo

 

Video Store Memories

Revisiting the Blair Witch Project

 

A Love Letter to the Emerald Square Mall (about the death of the shopping mall age)

NEVER FORGET the Fun-O-Rama (a traveling carnival memoir)

Some Wicked Good Times: A Love Letter to Newbury Comics

I Dream of Dream Machine (a memoir of the local video arcade)

Skateboarding in the 1990s

PROXOS IN THE PLEX: A Goldeneye 007 N64 Retrospective

 

100 DAYS of ZELDA: Revisiting Ocarina of Time

 

I USED TO BE A GAMER: The 8-bit Nintendo Years

WAAF Goes Off the Air

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Charlie (a story about Burns’ recurring nightmares featuring Charlie Chaplin)

Remembering That Time I Tried to Stop a Shoplifter at the Wrentham Outlets

The Strange, Surreal Moment of Being Called a DILF Inside a Panera Bread Restaurant on a Wednesday Afternoon

Weird Times en la Weirdioteca

 

RIP PowerBook G3

WRITING NEWS! (NEW BOOKS UP ON AMAZON)

Hello all!

Please check out my new Kindle books for sale on Amazon (listed below). All of them are 99-cent Kindle singles. More singles and some novels will be on sale soon. Rate the books, leave reviews, send me positive energy and, hell, send me sexual energy, too, if you want. Thanks for the support!

Matt Burns
Boston, MA.
October 21, 2016

My Past-Life in Hollywood (Update #2)

This is a third update to my previous blog BEING CAROLE LOMBARD: MY PAST-LIFE IN HOLLYWOOD (click HERE to view). In my last update (click HERE to read), I noted some progress I made in terms of finding out who raped me in my past life as actress Carole Lombard. Unfortunately, I have no new developments about the rape at this time. But I do have some other things.

This past Friday, I was driving down a street in Foxboro, MA., and I happened to pass a sign that said "Tarot Readings". I don't know what it was about that sign but I felt it was calling to me for some reason. I felt almost as though it was sucking me in, like it was a magnetic beam or gravitational field or something like that. I thought - hmmmm - maybe I should stop and get a reading. But to tell you the truth I was kind of tired of psychics and mediums and all that jazz. Plus, I didn't want to give out any more of my money to anyone if I didn't have to.

I drove about ten minutes beyond the Tarot place, but the "magnetic pull" became even more intense. I really felt that I needed to go back and get a reading. I didn't know why, but I felt as though I was meant to drive past that place. I don't mean to sound all melodramatic or anything, but it really felt like a serendipitous event.

Anyway, the pull became so intense at one point that I said, "fuck it", turned around and headed back towards the place where I saw the sign. As it turned out, the sign was actually located at the end of a normal-looking driveway. I pulled my car into the driveway and saw a place that basically looked no different than a house, only there was a neon sign on the outside that said "Ten-Dollar Palm Readings". The thought of getting my palm read sounded interesting to me. I never had something like that done before. Plus, ten dollars sounded like a pretty good deal. I decided I would go for it.

So I parked my car, walked into the house and was greeted by an (Eastern) Indian-looking woman named Jesse. She was supposedly a seventh-generation psychic, which sounded like she knew what she was doing, but I would have to wait and see if she was any good.

"What can I do for you?" she asked.

"Um...I guess I just want my palm read."

"OK, come with me."

She led me through a pair of open French doors and we sat in a comfy parlor with some couches and a glass case filled with crystals, figurines and metaphysical-type trinkets.

"Take a seat. Are you right handed or left-handed?"

"Right."

She took my right hand, had me say my name out loud and then had me voice one wish I hoped would come true. So I basically wished my writing endeavors would be successful or something like that, and - only within a couple seconds - Jesse started relaying information to me that (to my surprise) was very accurate. I mean, I always thought palm readings were things friends did to each other at slumber parties; I never thought it was actually a real, legitimate art.

Jesse drew my attention to various lines engraved into my palm that I'd never noticed before. One long, curved line supposedly meant I would live a long life, but at some point I would experience lower body pains (she didn't really elaborate on the nature of those pains). Then Jesse started talking about my career and how my name was going to grow and money would start rolling in, but then people would try to bring me down. She said that I needed to be in Los Angeles because I needed to "go after my dream". The only thing keeping me in the East was family and friends. She also said that California was where my heart was, anyway. "You're an ocean boy".

Jesse eventually flipped my hand over and immediately said something that scared the absolute shit out of me. Honestly, I had never been so freaking scared in my entire life.

"Who's pregnant?" she asked.

"What? Um, nobody, I don't think."

"You have a daughter and somebody's not telling you."

"What??? Uh...no I don't."

"Yeah you do, honey."

I literally started shaking in my chair. I didn't know what the hell this lady was talking about. My fear was that I had gotten somebody pregnant somewhere down the line or perhaps even very recently and I just didn't know about it. But I was pretty sure this wasn't the case. Everybody I had ever had....um...relations...with was still somebody who was in my life in one way or another, even the girls I'd had casual hook-ups with or one-night stands with. And I was pretty sure none of them ever had my child, or was pregnant with my child.

But then a question suddenly came to me, almost within a couple seconds after my initial panic. I don't know why it came into my head so fast or where the question even came from, but all I know is that it was there:

"Could the daughter have been from a past life?"

Jesse nodded her head. "Yeah, possibly." And I was a little relieved, but only a little.

I explained to Jesse that I had been "doing a lot of past-life stuff lately" and that I had discovered I was (supposedly) a famous actress in Old Hollywood.

"As to whether it's true...I have no idea."

Jesse looked me square in the eye and gave me a little smirk.

"It's true, honey."

All right, so there it was: pretty straight-forward confirmation of my Hollywood life from yet another medium, one who was completely unrelated to any other medium I had consulted with.

"OK, then. I guess it's true."

I then explained to Jesse that there was always a feeling in the way back of my mind that I had a daughter during the Hollywood life, but kept the daughter a secret for whatever reason. My 'feeling' mainly arose after I had read a book about Lombard entitled [title omitted], written by a woman named [name omitted] in 2008. The book is about how Carole Lombard secretly had a daughter when she was a teenager but gave it up to her aunt and uncle to raise before anybody other than a few close family members found out. According to [the author], the book is a "story of possibility" filled with content that is supposedly 95% non-fiction and 5% fiction/artistic liberty.

After I read the book, I was very intrigued by the story. I managed to get in touch with [the author] via email and she told me that - as far as I should be concerned - Carole didn't have any child; the plot-line of the illegitimate daughter was a figurative device she used to tell a compelling story. But [the author] also told me something really interesting that I can't repeat here because she wanted it off the record. Let's just say she had access to a 'source' that nobody else has ever had access to when it came to researching Carole's life. And this 'source' was an enormous influence in shaping her work of "fiction". In other words, there is no way to be certain that Carole Lombard ever had a child, but the "story of possibility" is certainly...well...possible.

Taking all of the above into consideration, you can probably see why Jesse's vision of a "secret daughter" lead me to seriously consider the possibility that Carole Lombard did, indeed, have an illegitimate child. I tried to get Jesse to provide more information about the daughter, but all she could say was that she saw the daughter "grown up" and she had my eyes. This was good news to me, because I was pretty sure that - if I did have a daughter in my current life - she wouldn't be very old yet. If anything, somebody may have been pregnant with my daughter (though I later checked with all recent partners and nobody was pregnant as far as they knew).

Anyway, Jesse eventually placed the whole secret-daughter-deal on the back burner and she started discussing my Hollywood life a little more. She said there was a lot of glamour and a lot of success and there were a lot of positive people around me much of the time.

"In fact, you weren't supposed to live your current life," she told me. "You were supposed to accomplish what you are doing now in the former life. But something went wrong. It was a choice you made...I don't know...things didn't unravel the way they were meant to unravel."

Needless to say, I was a little taken aback by what she was saying. "Come again? I wasn't supposed to live this life? That's a little weird to hear." But after a moment, I think I kind of understood what she was saying.

One possibility is that I died too early in the Lombard life (she died at age 33 in a plane crash). Maybe Jesse meant the crash wasn't supposed to happen. I heard that Carole's mother (who also died in the crash) warned Carole that she didn't have a good feeling about the flight and they should take a train instead. Maybe I made the wrong choice by boarding the plane despite my mother's warning. But, then again, how could you really say my death from a plane crash "wasn't meant to happen"? Just because I made a poor choice by boarding a doomed airplane I completely messed up my soul's path forever? I don't really know if that's something that can possibly happen. I mean, talk about the "butterfly effect".

But maybe Jesse was referring to my Poland life, which coincided with the Hollywood life, a phenomenon known as a "parallel existence" (read about this life HERE). In the Polish life, I was faced with a situation where I was essentially tricked - and then forced - into helping the Nazis massacre hundreds of Polish intellectuals. At a certain point during this experience, I was faced with a very tough decision: refuse to partake in the evil and die, or go along with it and live. Ultimately, I chose to go along with it (in fear of dying and being unable to support my nine children), but maybe I was "supposed" to die. Yes, maybe the Polish existence was supposed to end and the Lombard existence was supposed to go forward. But - for whatever reason - the Lombard existence had to be cut short because the Polish existence didn't unravel the way it was supposed to unravel. Maybe Lombard was destined to take her life in a completely different direction, but couldn't do it because of how things panned out in Poland.

I mean, one really has to wonder how two lives influence each other in the case of a parallel existence. Maybe what happens in one life simultaneously influences what happens in the other life. Maybe the Lombard life needed the Polish existence to end at a certain point so it could have more energy or rise to a higher spiritual level and do bigger and better things; but because that didn't happen it was better for Lombard's life to end abruptly and ultimately start up all over again in this current incarnation as Matt Burns (i.e. me). Maybe I am now where Lombard was supposed to be around 1942 when she died. Maybe she was supposed to be where I am now but couldn't be because of how the Polish existence panned out. Yes, I know this is probably confusing as hell for you right now. All I'm trying to do is raise some questions and explore some possibilities. I don't know if there is any truth to these theories.

The fact of the matter is that - according to the psychic Jesse - things didn't go according to plan in the past and I wasn't 'supposed' to live this current life as Matt Burns, but I AM living this life now and that's all I should really be concerned about. Jesse did add, however, that there was a "dark shadow" in my aura because of what went wrong in the past, and it was in my highest and best interest to get a spiritual cleansing before I moved forward with my life. She said this "dark shadow" had the potential of getting in the way of me connecting with positive people in the future. Positive people, she explained, can (subconsciously) sniff out people with negative energy in their auras and they'll keep their distance from them. In other words, the negative energy stuck in my aura could be very detrimental to me forming important relationships in both my professional and romantic life. If this sounds at all familiar, you may have read all about it in the popular book The Secret, which is all about the "law of attraction" (i.e. positive energy attracts positive energy and negative energy attracts negative energy).

Jesse said she had the ability to do a spiritual cleansing for me, but I told her I would sleep on it and get in touch with her later if I thought it was something I wanted to have her do. I actually already knew how to do some form of a cleansing and I wanted to avoid paying money for something I could conduct on my own. In fact, anybody out there has the ability to cleanse themselves if they want to - it's a good way to rid your aura of any negative energy, not just stuff that may have come from a past life. Basically, what you do is stand in front of your bathroom faucet, turn the faucet on with your left hand, let the water run and keep your hand gripped on the handle. Then, you hold a pendulum in your right hand and say the following words:

"I now ask that my high self and my helpers in the light please identify, disorganize and remove all energies within my aura that are not in my highest and best interest to have at this time."

In my case, I wanted to be a little more specific, so I added the following:

"Specifically remove all negative energies I have carried over from my past life in Hollywood and Poland."

If all goes right, the pendulum should start swinging clockwise and you basically just stand at the sink while you get cleared of all the negative energy. It may take several minutes - depending on how much energy is clearing - but you'll know that the process has completed when the pendulum stops swinging and comes to a complete stop. The theory behind this entire process is that all the negative energy from your energy field (i.e. aura) gets washed out of your field and down the drain, all the way into the bowels of the earth where it will no longer affect you. I know it all sounds wacky, but I personally find that I feel lighter and more positive after I do one of these cleanses. It's actually best to do it every couple of days so that any negative energy we pick up from the outside world doesn't accumulate and weigh us down.

But back to Jesse.

I left my "palm reading" on Friday feeling extremely overwhelmed. For one, I still wasn't sure about the mysterious daughter situation and I was still kind of freaking out that somebody was pregnant in my current life. Also, I was concerned about the 'dark shadow' that was in my aura...and whether I would ever get rid of it! And on top of everything else, I felt anxious about how Jesse said I needed to be in LA. Should I be there now? When should I go??? How am I going to make that work? Obviously I shouldn't just go to LA because Jesse said I needed to be there, but, hell, I KNOW I need to be there; I wasn't hearing anything I didn't know already.

As far as the daughter situation goes, right now I'm wondering why I even needed to know I had a secret, illegitimate daughter in the first place. I mean, I guess it's important to know, but it's not like I can try to find her and reunite with her...at least I don't think I can. First of all, it's very likely that the daughter is deceased already, though I suppose it's very possibly there is a granddaughter alive and possibly great-grandchildren. But I wouldn't even know where to start looking for them, and I think they would find me too weird anyway. I mean, what would I say to them? "Um, yes, my name is Matt Burns. I'm a 29-year-old man now, but I have reason to believe I am your grandmother from a past life." Yeah, that would really go over well.

I think the fact of the matter is that the past is the past and I can't really do much about it now. As the saying goes, you shouldn't look back unless you want to go that way. Hopefully a piece of my spirit is still with my daughter/grandchildren - watching over them - but that's as good as things can be right now. Perhaps, in the future, mankind will evolve to a point where we'll be able to reunite with our children from a past life without anybody finding it weird. But that time is not now. I can't really do much about the situation. At least I don't think I can.

Of course, I'll let you know if anything changes and whether there are any more developments in this story. Who knows what else could pop up from the Lombard life? Hopefully it's not any more bad stuff; I'm not sure I would be able to handle much more of that. I mean, to be honest with you, the whole illegitimate daughter thing gave me a feeling of sadness. I don't want to experience any more of those emotions if I don't have to. Then again, if experiencing these feelings is the only way to clear the darkness from my aura, then I guess I say bring it on.

My Past Life in Hollywood

I don't even really know where to start with this story. Let me just say from the outset that you must have a completely open mind when you're reading this blog. The discovery I have made over the past few weeks is incredibly amazing, but extremely weird, bizarre and abnormal. I questioned my sanity at several points throughout this whole journey and I understand if you, the reader, conclude that I am completely out of my mind. Although my discovery is kind of cool (to a degree) I would have preferred NOT to have made such a discovery, mainly because a) it makes me look weird and b) it poses a serious threat to my masculinity. In fact, let me just say right now that - in this lifetime - I am a MAN named Matt Burns. I am completely heterosexual. I LOVE women and all of their body parts. Why am I telling you this? Well, you'll understand in just a moment.

The roots to this particular story can be traced back to January 2010 when I visited a medium named Liam Galvin (read about this visit HERE). Among other things, Galvin informed me that I had a past life in California, though he didn't elaborate on it at the time because he was mostly concentrating on identifying my various spirit guides. However, several months after my reading with Galvin, I started to really wonder who I may have been in California. Was it a recent life? Was I in Hollywood? Or was I a Native American? Mexican? Somebody like that?


Liam Galvin Re: California Life



A month ago, I finally came to the point where I thought I should - once and for all - figure out who I actually was during the California life. So I got in touch with a regression therapist named Donna Ciaciarella who is a rare kind of medium. She essentially possesses the ability to envision people's past lives and then she relates what she sees to her clients on an audiotape.

When Donna regressed me, her "vision" was something totally different from what I expected; instead of going to my California life, Donna was taken to another life I had in Poland during WWII (read the whole story HERE). I was supposedly a non-Jewish man with a family of nine to feed, and I essentially found myself in a situation where I had to compromise my morals in order to provide for my family. I was a machine operator hired by the Nazis to clear land and dig holes that were supposedly going to function as "anti-aircraft trenches". But it turned out that I was digging mass graves where hundreds of Polish intellectuals were to be buried. These intellectuals were killed as part of a Nazi campaign called the "AB Action", which was an attempt to exterminate all members of the Polish intelligentsia who were viewed as a threat to the Nazi agenda. Although I knew complying with the Nazis was very wrong, I still participated in their evil, because I feared that I would be killed and my family would starve.

Needless to say, I didn't expect Donna to relate this kind of traumatic past-life experience to me. I assumed she would go to the California life, though I suppose - at the time - it was probably more in my highest and best interest to learn about the Polish experience. Although I was grateful Donna had helped me come to terms with the trauma, I ended my regression session with her feeling confused. According to Donna, I was in Poland during WWII and lived for about thirty years afterward, which means I died in the late 1960s or early 1970s. This meant that - if I actually had a life in California - it probably wouldn't have taken place in Hollywood. After all, Hollywood is only about a hundred years old and for most of that time I was either in Poland or in Massachusetts as Matt Burns who was born in 1982. Either I had an extremely brief life in Hollywood in the 1970s or I was in California before Hollywood even existed.

Consequently, I came to the conclusion that, if I did, indeed, have a past life in California, I must have been there before Hollywood. Maybe I was part of the Gold Rush, or a Native American or possibly a Spaniard before California even became part of America. But, still, this didn't feel right. If there was any part of California that seemed vaguely "familiar" to me, it was Hollywood. I mean, I really felt deep down that I was in Hollywood before. But how could I have been in Poland and Hollywood at the same time? This would have been impossible. Or was it???

Not long after I was regressed by Donna Ciaciarella, I remembered a book I had recently read entitled The Divine Plan: Beyond 2012 by Caroline Cory. This was a book I had serendipitously stumbled upon back in September at a metaphysics bookstore called "The Enchanted Fox" in Medway, MA. Contrary to what you may think, the book wasn't about doomsday or the end of the world or anything along those lines; rather, it talked about a dawning of a new higher consciousness that would take place around the time of 2012 and several years afterward. During this time, most of mankind will basically "wake up" and come to an unprecedented understanding of what the human experience is all about...why it exists and what its purpose is.

I won't go into every little detail about the book right now, but one thing The Divine Plan talked about was past lives and "parallel existences", the latter concept being something I had never heard of before. The theory is that our soul, spirit, higher consciousness/higher self - call it what you will - has the ability to be in more than one place at the same time. The older and more developed our soul is, the more places we are able to be at one time. This means that we can be in more than one body simultaneously - sometimes two or even three bodies at once.

On top of all this, it's also possible to be elsewhere in a non-physical, spirit form. In other words, we can be in a body but our higher consciousness can be somewhere else existing as an independent, intelligent energy. Right now, for example, I am in the body of Matt Burns; however, about seven years ago, an energy healer with medium abilities told me part of my higher self was in the Middle East trying to maintain peace and stability (this was in the heyday of the war in Iraq). So we can potentially be all over the place at the same time, either as a body or as a spirit. This is a concept that may be very hard for people to believe, but you have to think of your higher self as something separate from your mind. You have no conscious awareness that you are somewhere else other than inside your body. But most people probably are. There is so much more to who we are than what our mind leads us to believe.

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that it isn't at all uncommon for our higher self to be in more than one place at the same time, and it also isn't uncommon for a soul to be inhabiting more than one body at the same time while on earth. So this got me thinking that...hmmmm...maybe I was, indeed, in both Poland and California at the same time. And a couple weeks later - while lying in bed one night - it hit me that this was likely to be the case. But who was I? Was I definitely in Hollywood? Was I a director? An actor? Was I famous? An unknown? Several days went by and the past life in California moved closer and closer to the foreground of my mind. I was being drawn to it for some particular reason. I needed to look into it...find out what kind of person I was...maybe even who I was...and what my life was like.

I figured that the first thing I could do to address some of these questions was "dowse". Dowsing is a practice I describe in one of my previous blogs (click HERE to read), but I will briefly explain it here. Basically, what you do is take a pendulum and ask your higher self and spirit guides 'yes' or 'no' questions. If the answer is 'yes', the pendulum will swing clockwise. If the answer is 'no', the pendulum will swing counterclockwise. I find, however, that you can calibrate the pendulum in any fashion you like. For example, I usually have the pendulum simply swing back and forth for a 'yes' and remain still for a 'no'.

So, anyway, I sat in a chair, started dowsing and - within only a few minutes - I seemed to get all the answers I was looking for. Initially, I asked whether I was, indeed, in another body during the same time I was in Poland. And I got a very strong 'yes' in response. Then I asked whether I was in Hollywood. Another very strong 'yes'. Then I asked whether I was an actor. Yes. And whether I was in silent pictures. A weak 'yes'. And whether I was in 'talkies' (i.e. movies with sound and dialogue). A much stronger 'yes'. And whether I was famous. Yes.

At this point, my mind raced with possibilities. I went through a few names like John Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin and even Ed Wood. But I got 'no's' in response to all of them. Plus, I didn't really feel that I was any of these people, anyway (though it would have been cool if I was). I searched my mind for more names, but after a few seconds it hit me that maybe I wasn't even a male actor. It occurred to me that I may have been an actress. After all, it's not unusual for a male to have had a past life at some point as a female. In fact, some past-life regression therapists argue that switching sexes is necessary in order for the soul to have the experience of being both male and female. The more varied the human experiences, the more well-rounded and fully developed the soul gets over time.

Consequently (and somewhat reluctantly), I asked my pendulum whether I was a famous actress. And I got very big 'yes'. Then, I asked whether I died young or had a full life. I got that I had died young. From there, I asked whether the death was considered tragic. Yes. Then I asked whether I died from drugs or something along those lines, because the first actress to come to mind was Marilyn Monroe. But I got a 'no'.

At this point, I stopped dowsing, sat back in my chair and brainstormed a bit. Who - other than Marilyn Monroe - had a very early and tragic death in Hollywood? In retrospect, I could have thought of a name like Jean Harlow or Virginia Rappe or even Sharon Tate, but there was one and only one name that immediately entered my mind, almost within a few seconds.

"Was I Carole Lombard in my past life?" I asked the pendulum.

Yes. A very strong YES.

"Holy shit."


Dowsing Demonstration:



Listed by the American Film Institute as one of the greatest movie stars of all time, Carole Lombard was mostly known for her roles in "screwball comedies", although she began her career in silent films and also had several dramatic roles in her later years. She was the highest paid actor in Hollywood during the late 1930s (making five times as much money as the President) and was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in the 1936 film My Man Godfrey with William Powell. She was basically on top of the world and was considered to be "Hollywood royalty", partly because she was briefly married to Clark Gable, the so-called "king of Hollywood." Tragically, Lombard died in a plane crash in 1942 at the young age of 33. Hollywood and America and much of the world was devastated.

Now, I should just say right now that I hardly knew anything about Lombard until her name came up from the dowsing. I was never drawn to her in any way, nor was I a fan of her work. And I never had seen one single movie that she was in. To tell you the truth, I wasn't even sure Lombard was an actress. I knew she was at least a socialite who was - at one time - married to Clark Gable. I knew she had died in a tragic plane crash as well. But I really didn't know anything other than that. I would have never (and I mean NEVER) suspected that I was Carole Lombard in my past life, not in a million friggin' years! So it was incredibly strange to have her name pop into my head. I mean, it's not like - on a subconscious level - I WANTED to be Lombard and this is why her name came up. I would have much rather preferred discovering I was Charlie Chaplin, or maybe Humphrey Bogart or any other MAN (yes, MAN!). Heck, I would have preferred being Clark Gable over Lombard because, frankly, Lombard was extremely attractive. An absolute knockout. She was hot!

In short, Carole Lombard was a name that came from way out of left field. The idea of being Lombard was so random and wacky and insane that it made me think maybe - just maybe - there was some truth to it. I mean, on one hand it seemed like a ridiculous idea, but at the same time there was something that felt so right about it.

Needless to say, I needed some means of confirmation, from a source other than myself.

The first person I went to was my medium friend Jan who had helped me identify several of my spirit guides (Lillian Gish, D.W. Griffith, Nathanael West, Hunter S. Thompson, among others). I wrote an email to Jan but it actually took her several days to get back to me. So in the meantime, I visited the Enchanted Fox (the metaphysical bookstore I bought The Divine Plan at), because I wanted to inquire about a lady named Robin Allen who did past-life regression work there. Incidentally, I hadn't even really planned on going to the store that day; it was late on Sunday afternoon and I was on my way to my sister's house, which is in the same town. I had actually just planned on calling the place on Monday, but I figured that - since I was in the area - I might as well stop in and ask my questions in person.

I walked into the Enchanted Fox about a half hour before closing time and saw a woman behind the counter named Rose. Rose had a very pleasant aura about her and was very welcoming to me. I asked about Robin Allen and Rose thoroughly explained everything Robin did (basically everything from energy healing to Tarot reading to past life regression therapy). Then Rose started asking about who I was and why I was interested in seeing Robin. I started telling her about how I was recently very interested in past lives for whatever reason and how I discovered I was in Poland etc. Then I started telling her about a California life I thought I had and how I thought the life coexisted with the Poland life.

"I'm just trying to get some sort of confirmation on it," I said.

"I think you just did," said Rose.

See, as it turned out, Rose was a partial medium/sensitive herself. And she was sensing that, yes, I did, indeed, have a life in Poland and California during the same time period.

"Wow," I said. "But, see, I think I need further confirmation. I think I know exactly who I was, and I just want to be sure."

"Well," said Rose, "when I look at you there's two people coming through very strongly: Howard Hughes and Jack Parsons. Was it any of them?"

Howard Hughes and Jack Parsons??? I told Rose 'no', but I still found it eerie that she would come up with two names that were alive around the same time period as Lombard. Was there any sort of connection?

"The name I was thinking of wasn't even a man," I told Rose. "I think I was Carole Lombard."

Rose hopped onto her computer and Googled in 'Carole Lombard' and 'Howard Hughes'. The results were incredibly interesting. See, Howard Hughes and Carole Lombard used to date each other. And when they weren't dating they were actually very good pals. In fact, Hughes taught Lombard how to fly airplanes. Plus (on a darker note), the plane Lombard crashed in - TWA Flight 3 - was actually an airplane owned by Hughes.

Rose gasped aloud when she saw the connection and said she was getting intense chills, which is what happens to psychics when something strange is going on. Another woman who was working in the store (also a sensitive) got chills as well. Frankly, so didn't I. Rose subsequently Googled 'Jack Parsons' and we realized Parsons was Hughes' employee/friend. How strange it was that the two famous "Aviators" appeared before Rose. Was it their way of having me make the Carole Lombard/aviation connection???

Taking this strange coincidence into account, I believe there was definitely a reason why I walked into the Enchanted Fox that night. There was something almost magical about the whole experience. I most absolutely believe that I was guided there by some invisible force, no matter how lame that may sound. I left The Enchanted Fox that night feeling about seventy-percent sure that I was, indeed, Carole Lombard in my past life. But I wasn't going to be satisfied until I was one-hundred percent sure. I needed better confirmation.

The next day, Jan got back to me about my email and what she had to say was rather interesting. One one hand, her dowsing confirmed that I had a "past life" as both a man in Poland and Carole Lombard, but she wasn't exactly sure how to explain this to me. Here is an excerpt from the email:

Hi Matt,

It's taken me a while to figure out how to answer you. This is what I've gotten dousing and just having gleaned from life.

I think that our spirits always exist, but we only inhabit one body, one time. I think that our souls are in heaven before we're born. Then our souls inhabit a body, and go to hell, purgatory, or heaven after our bodies die. I think that our spirits roam around and maybe can follow someone's life for whatever reason. So when people talk about past lives I think that they just followed someone closely. And I think this is the case with the past life in Poland and Carole Lombard - because I think that our spirits can be in more than one place at one time.

I think that it is more important for you to focus on what you are doing in the present. I don't think that you need to be concerned with where your spirit may have been in the past. I think that where you may have been in the past is known by your subconscious. And if your subconscious is in tune with your conscious, then all is as it should be.

Now, it's important to keep in mind that Jan is still a practicing Catholic and the concept of past lives is something that goes against what the Catholic Church has always taught (i.e. that we are a spirit made by God and we only inhabit a body once). Instead of saying that I actually was these people, Jan said that my spirit "followed" these people closely. And although I can see where she's coming from, her explanation contradicts a lot of what Donna Ciaciarella said when she regressed me. If I simply "followed around" these people, then why do I carry their emotions around with me? Why, for example, do I still carry the sadness from the life in Poland? Why is the Polish man's trauma my trauma?

When it came to Jan's suggestion that I should be focusing more on the present, I completely agreed with her, but I still felt that I was being drawn to all this past-life stuff for a reason. I strongly felt that the (alleged) life as Carole Lombard was revealing itself to me at this point in my life for a significant purpose. I just didn't really know what the purpose was...yet.

So, yes, Jan gave me further confirmation that I was potentially Lombard in my past life. Even though she didn't know how to explain the concept of past lives to me, she still said that I had a past life as Lombard in the same sense that I had one in Poland. Of course, this still wasn't enough evidence to satisfy me. I basically needed somebody to tell me, flat-out, that I was Lombard. Period.

A day after I received the email from Jan, I went to see Robin Allen at "The Enchanted Fox". As I explained before, Robin is a well-respected medium and she also does past-life regression therapy via hypnosis. I had Robin start out by doing a traditional reading on me where she asked "source energy" or "universal consciousness" or "God" - call it what you will - to provide information that was in my highest and best interest to hear at the time. I figured her 'sources' would immediately address my past life in California because I felt it was of top priority. But this wasn't the case...well, not exactly.

Robin began her reading by saying I had a certain "existential anxiety" that I probably wasn't very aware of on a conscious level. It was an anxiety that made me feel "unsafe in my body". I didn't really understand her at first, but basically what Robin was saying was that I have trouble being close to people and being intimate and relating with people on deep emotional levels. Although I'm usually personable and sociable, there is a part of me that supposedly never really feels any sort of deep connection with anybody, and this is partly because I'm afraid of getting too close. Robin also said that I needed to stop using my brain so much, because it's distracting me from opening up my heart to people. On one hand, all my intellectualizing and curiosity about life was good, but in another sense it was distracting me from facing my heart, which is the most important gift we all possess.

I listened to Robin telling me all these very personal things for about twenty minutes or so and I started getting antsy, not because she was making me uncomfortable, but because I was worried that we weren't going to confirm what I came to her to confirm (that I was Lombard in the past). At a certain point, I basically stopped the reading and tried to cut to the chase. I explained why I came to see her and, to my disappointment, she said she wasn't really able to confirm the Lombard life, because that's not what her sources were interested in telling her. However, she said she felt a "female essence" with the California life and she also felt a sense of "victimization" around her. She also insinuated that my "existential anxiety" may have stemmed from this particular past life; that is, I came into the world as Matt Burns already possessing the anxiety problem. Here is an audio clip from my meeting with Robin:



Later into the session, Robin said I could ask a specific question about the California life and she could read Tarot cards to see what the answers were. So I asked whether the lessons I thought I learned from the past life were the lessons I needed to learn. Robin determined - with the use of the Tarot cards - that the answer was 'yes'. Here is an audio clip from this section:



Overall, Robin stressed that she would love to confirm the Carole Lombard life, but she simply wasn't able to. She couldn't give me a definite 'yes' or a definite 'no', though there was an indication that it was likely true. She asked her sources for the information that was in my highest and best interest to hear, and what 'they' were concentrating on was my existential anxiety and fear of intimacy and discomfort in my body etc. And although Robin insinuated that the anxiety was something that possibly stemmed from the California life, she wasn't able to elaborate too much on that. She said she could hypnotize me at a later date and see what came up, but she also said that it wouldn't really be worth doing something like that for simple confirmation. She said that if I felt I was Carole Lombard in my past life then it was probably true.

Frankly, I left my session with Robin feeling dissatisfied. I still didn't have one-hundred-percent confirmation I was Lombard, and I was beginning to believe that I wasn't going to get it. I started thinking about what Jan had told me, how I needed to concentrate on the present - on Matt Burns - because it was this current life that mattered the most. Yes, I was ready to put the whole matter to rest...that is, until the next morning.

Some people say that we are more in tune with our psychic senses either right before we fall asleep or immediately after we wake up. In a semi-awake state, our conscious minds shut down and we experience a more direct communication with our higher consciousness. This theory may explain what happened to me the morning after I had my session with Robin. I had just awakened from a deep sleep in my bed, lazily shuffled onto my knees and a thought suddenly surged into my head.

"Whoa," I said to myself. "I think I was raped."


What I meant was that I suddenly felt that Carole Lombard was either raped or sexually abused sometime during her life and that she never revealed it to anybody. I don't know how, exactly, I came up with this thought, but it felt so true. I don't want to be all melodramatic here, but I started to get intense chills. I even started shaking a bit. I strongly felt that Carole Lombard was raped.

I mulled the potential revelation over in my mind a bit more and I suddenly remembered a documentary I had recently seen about Lombard. It was actually an episode of a show called DEAD FAMOUS and a medium was relating information to the show's hosts about Lombard via Tarot cards (watch video below from around 6:25). One thing the medium said was that the Carole Lombard the world knew was nothing like the Carole Lombard in her private life. She also said there was a secret about Lombard that nobody had yet to discover...because she buried it so deep. Had I come close to discovering this secret??? Maybe so.



But even if I had, indeed, uncovered a deep, dark secret about Lombard I couldn't help but wonder why this was at all relevant. I mean, why was it being revealed to me at this particular point in time? Why was it being revealed at all? I considered that, perhaps, it was because the trauma was affecting me negatively in my current life. Maybe the "victimization" that Robin Allen talked about was from rape and it was affecting my ability to be intimate, close to others, safe in my body - in short, maybe it was the very source of my existential anxiety.

Finally, everything was starting to come together and make more sense. Now I knew why I was so drawn to my past life in California to begin with. It was never necessarily important for me to confirm that I was Carole Lombard; what was crucial was uncovering a past-life trauma that occurred while I was Carole Lombard, one which was affecting my current life in very negative ways. Although it was cool to discover I was a big movie star in the 1930s, the only reason why I made this discovery was so I could deal with the trauma.

Of course, I wasn't completely sure about the rape theory. It felt like it was true, but I needed to know exactly what happened. I needed all the details in order to properly come to terms with the victimization. I thought about giving Robin Allen a call and having her hypnotize me, but I was concerned that my conscious mind would interfere with the regression. Seeing that I already suspected I was Lombard and I was raped, I couldn't trust that my preconceived suspicions wouldn't skew whatever came up during the hypnosis. No, I realized there was only one person I could go to for help with this: back to Donna Ciaciarella.

I managed to get in touch with Donna about a week after I had the rape revelation. She was a little reluctant to do another reading for me because the Poland one was - as she put it - "one of the worst ones [she] had to deal with." But I explained the situation to her and we both came to the conclusion that it was in my highest and best interest to deal with whatever trauma occurred during the California life. However, she made it clear that she was not doing this to satisfy my curiosity in regards to who I was. She explained that who I was didn't matter and she wasn't going to directly address that. What mattered was figuring out a) what happened in California that traumatized me so much and b) why it was still something affecting me negatively in my current life.

"Tell me everything you know already," Donna said to me.

Although I was hesitant to tell her what I thought I knew, I had no choice but to give her the details. Like I said, she wasn't interested in confirming what I already felt; the more information I gave her the more she would be able to help me. So I told her that I felt I was in Hollywood and a famous actress and that I thought I was raped at some point. And immediately, without hesitation...

"Yeah, you were raped," said Donna. "I got that before you even said you were a woman. You were definitely raped."

Now, of course, Donna could have just been telling me this because that's what I was interested in hearing. But I had already come to the conclusion after the Poland reading that this lady was completely legitimate. Plus, Donna's details of the rape turned out to be completely different from what I told her I thought happened. See, I told Donna that I thought a producer or studio-head raped me, and that I never told anybody because I thought they would ruin my career if I did. You know, 'Have sex with me or you career is over'! That kind of thing. But this wasn't really the case at all.

When Donna went into her trance and had her vision she did end up confirming that, yes, "I" was an actress in Hollywood and, yes, "I" was raped. But I wasn't raped by some random guy I didn't want to have anything to do with; I was raped by a man who I was deeply in love with (listen to the audio recordings at the bottom of the page).

It all happened relatively early in my movie career and I was young and naive and somewhat new to the whole Hollywood scene. According to Donna, there was a man "related to work" who "I" essentially had a major crush on (I use the latter quotes because I'm uncomfortable referring to myself as a woman in the first person). This man knew that I had a crush on him and he took advantage of it, led me on a bit and then eventually took me out on a date. Blind to his lack of romantic interest in me, I looked forward to this date for weeks and built it up in my head to be this wonderful fairy-tale-like fantasy. I would think about what dress I was going to wear and if he would hold my hand or try to kiss me and whether I would let him...you know, the usual things young girls think about when they're naive and experiencing a first crush.

But the date didn't go anything like I had fantasized about. Things went sideways as soon as the man started putting his hand down my yellow dress. I told him 'no', but then he started to run his hands up my skirt. I kept on saying 'no' and 'no', but he became more aggressive and it soon turned into an all-out rape. He left my apartment that night without so much as a thank-you and the next time I saw him it was as if he didn't even know me.

I didn't end up pressing charges. I didn't even really get mad at the guy, because - as pathetic as it may sound - I still felt love for him. Overall, I just felt so humiliated, because I had built the date up to be this whole romantic, fairy-tale-like fantasy; but, instead, I just got a big slap in the face. My "dream", so to speak, had been crushed and I felt so stupid for thinking things were going to be so wonderful.

In short, it wasn't really the rape that disturbed me so much as the horrible rejection I had to endure from the man I thought loved me. The truth is that the guy had no interest in me whatsoever, aside from wanting to "get with me" physically. And, according to Donna, I was never able to fully get over the feeling of this rejection. I built the whole experience up to be such a horrible thing and I was petrified by the thought of ever having to experience it again. So I hid my heart deep inside me and never really opened it up to anybody. And it continues to be buried deep inside me to this day, in this current life as Matt Burns.

Now, rape is obviously a horrible experience that nobody should have to endure. But if it happens to us, which is the better way to deal with it? Is it best to close our hearts off from people so that we never have to be hurt again? Or is it better to rise above our fear of being hurt and continue to live our lives with our hearts open to others? After all, we are only a victim of something if we allow ourselves to be. We can live the rest of our lives saying "poor me, I'm a victim" or we can move forward and not allow ourselves to get immobilized by the trauma.

In my case - deep down - I was saying "poor me" and in a lot of ways this has been romantically paralyzing me all my life. The fear of being hurt like I was back in Hollywood has been the source of my anxiety and inability to be intimate with people. Sure, I've been close to girls on a physical level but I've never been able to make any sort of deep emotional connection with any of them, basically (I guess) because I've been scared shit-less of having my heart crushed again. But I have to stop building rejection up to be such a horrible thing. In fact, it's more important to rise above the fear of rejection than to actually be accepted by somebody. Or, to put it another way, a person who isn't phased by rejection is so much more powerful than a person who is constantly accepted. I mean, think about how weak we would be if we were never rejected. We NEED rejection. It's what makes us strong.

So Donna's ultimate advice to me was to go out into the world and get rejected. "Go talk to that random girl waiting in line with you at the grocery store. Go hit on the girl at the bar. Ask the cute librarian out on a date. And learn to love any rejection that comes your way. Think of it as something that makes you a better person in the long run."

I ended my session with Donna feeling as though I had finally gained closure on the entire past-life situation. I had identified and dealt with the problem that I was meant to deal with. As far as confirming my identity as Lombard went, Donna was not willing to do this because she thought those kinds of details would be distracting to me. But she confirmed everything else. I did, indeed, have a parallel existence with the Polish life. I was in Hollywood. I was an actress. And I was raped.

I should also note that Donna went out of her way to describe my physical appearance in the California life as absolutely "beautiful" and "ravishing". "I can't even tell you how beautiful you were," she kept saying. And although it's true there were a lot of pretty actresses in Hollywood, Donna's special emphasis on my "ravishing" beauty made me more confident that it was Lombard she was describing.

So what's the verdict? Was I really Lombard? Deep down, I feel that I probably was. I think I received confirmation on this the day I walked into the Enchanted Fox and Rose told me Howard Hughes and Jack Parsons were around me; there was something so eerie about my experience in the store that day. Plus, I think Jan, Robin Allen and Donna Ciaciarella gave me further confirmation in their own indirect ways.

However, there's also one other clue that I had completely forgotten about until just now. See, back when I visited Liam Galvin in January 2010 he informed me that the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock was one of my spirit guides, and he was "all around me".

"Really??? Alfred Hitchcock?"

"Yeah, he hangs out with you."


Liam Galvin re: Alfred Hitchcock



Needless to say, I felt flattered by Mr. Hitchcock's presence, though I never really understood why he "hung out" with me. But now I may actually have the answer. See, Alfred Hitchcock and Carole Lombard were extremely good friends during Carole's last years. In fact, she starred in the original Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which was directed by Hitchcock in 1941. This was the second-to-last film Lombard made before she died in the plane crash. Is this why Alfred Hitchcock hangs out with me? Did I star in one of his films??? Were we good friends before I died?

The bottom line is that there are one too many coincidences at play here to say that I definitely wasn't Carole Lombard. Putting all the pieces of evidence together, I would go out on a limb and say that I probably was Lombard, though I don't think there is any sure way of getting one-hundred-percent confirmation. One thing is for sure: I was in Hollywood. I was in movies. And I was...yeesh...a woman!

Yes, it's kind of emasculating for a guy like myself to discover he was a woman in a recent past life. But it's important to remember that - technically - my most recent human incarnation was as a man (the Polish man died in the late 1960s or early 70s, way after Lombard). So, again, let me remind you that I am very much a man now. I love women and all their body parts. The fact that I was "in love" with the man who raped me is difficult for me to fathom with the mind/body I have right now. And it makes me cringe knowing that - as Carole Lombard - I was married to Clark Gable when I died. Yikes. I'm cringing right now as I write this! Gross!

Of course, I don't mean to insinuate that there's anything wrong with homosexuality. In fact, one of the reasons why I'm writing this blog is to show people that none of us are solely male or female to the core. Our soul has no specific gender and we constantly switch sexes throughout our various human incarnations. Maybe if people realized this, same-sex marriage wouldn't be such a controversial issue anymore. Love is about two souls coming together as one and that's all there is to it; it doesn't really matter whether they happen to be physically manifested as male and female or both male or both female at the time. The male/female body is merely a suit we wear for a limited amount of time in order to fulfill some sort of vocation or purpose on earth. But our gender in no way defines who we are at the core. And it's not something that we should ever allow to get in the way of love.

On this note, I now come to the conclusion of my story. I must say that the year of 2010 will go down as one of the most bizarre years in my life thus-far. It all started with my reading with Liam Galvin back in January and kept getting stranger and stranger as the months went by. Over the past year, I have communicated with my dead grandfathers, identified seven of my spirit guides, discovered I had a past life in Poland and realized I had a parallel existence as an actress in Hollywood (the identity of whom was most likely Carole Lombard). So what's left to explore now? Probably not too much, but - then again - very much. If you haven't figured it out already, the reality beyond what we perceive as our reality is so much more complex than we could ever realize. There is always more to discover. You just have to be open to it.

As for me, I probably need to start exploring the universe a little less and channel some of that energy into exploring my heart. I know this may sound sappy, but Robin Allen was right: although it's good to open our eyes to the complexity of our universe, it's important to, first, open up our hearts.


PostScript (written on March 7, 2011):

This is a brief update to my previous blog BEING CAROLE LOMBARD: MY PAST-LIFE IN HOLLYWOOD (read the blog above).

When Donna Ciaciarella regressed me to my past life as an actress in Hollywood, she thoroughly described a costume I wore in a film I was shooting "that had to do with a period piece". She described the costume as being a "southern belle dress" (listen to the Part Two recording at the bottom of the page from a little before 2:00).

I consequently tried to find evidence of Lombard wearing this type of a costume, but I came up dry. I researched most of her movies - read what they were about - but none of them was something I would really consider a period piece, especially one that took place in the South.

As it turns out, however, I wasn't looking carefully enough. About a week ago, I started to watch one of the most important films Lombard ever made. It was the film that essentially made her a star. The movie was called Twentieth Century.

I was only about fifteen minutes into the 1934 film when I saw Lombard wearing a dress that gave me intense chills. The dress was almost exactly what Donna Ciaciarella described to me in her vision (see the movie poster above and the photo to the right). Now, Twentieth Century itself was not a period piece, but Lombard's character (Lily Garland) wore the dress for a play she was acting in. And the play WAS a period piece that took place in the Old South. Could Donna have been describing this play within the play? After all, Donna never said the film I was working on was a period piece; she said it "had to do with a period piece".

Of course, it's possible that there was another actress from the early twentieth century that wore a similar dress and may have starred in a period piece that took place in the South; but Donna's vision was almost exactly the same as what was going on in Twentieth Century. And when you factor in all the other evidence (that you can read about in my previous blog), I can now more confidently say that I had a past life as Carole Lombard in Hollywood.

Now, does this mean I am the reincarnation of Carole Lombard? No, I don't really feel comfortable saying that, seeing that I also had a parallel existence as a man in Poland around the same time period (read about the Poland life HERE). All I know is that my spirit, soul, consciousness, higher self - whatever you want to call it - previously incarnated itself as a woman named Carole Lombard. That's all I can say and I'm basically 99.9% sure now that this is true.

The entire mystery, however, is still not completely solved. As I described in my previous blog, Donna uncovered that I was raped in Hollywood by a man I was "madly in love with". Up until now, I assumed that I was raped during the time that I was filming the "period piece" and this is why Donna mentioned the movie in her vision. But my gut feeling seems to be telling me something different; right now, I don't believe I was raped during the time I was shooting Twentieth Century. And I don't think I was raped by anybody I was working with on the film. Lombard's costar (and legendary Hollywood bad-boy) John Barrymore briefly popped up as a suspect, but my intuition tells me he was a good guy and didn't do it.

To be honest, I think Donna described my part in Twentieth Century to me for reasons unrelated to the rape. In his book Regression: Past-Life Therapy for Here and Now Freedom, Dr. Samuel Sagan reminds people that past-life regression doesn't only uncover negative traumas, but sometimes positive trauma as well. Twentieth Century, after all, was known to be Carole Lombard's career-altering movie. It was the film that officially made her a big-time Hollywood movie star. Maybe the entire Twentieth Century experience was so positive that it left a good scar on my soul and this is what Donna was picking up on.

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that I don't think anybody associated with Twentieth Century raped me. But I do have a prime suspect in my head right now. I was reading some of Larry Swindell's biography on Lombard (Screwball: The Life of Carole Lombard) and I stumbled upon a few paragraphs describing a "fling" Lombard had with Howard Hughes when she was about twenty years old. Hughes was supposedly Carole's first crush. She was very much in love with him, but Hughes kept the whole affair very hush-hush and secretive, partly because he was also dating actress Billie Dove on the side. Lombard and Hughes saw each other for a while, but then Hughes called the whole thing off when he apparently lost interest in her. Carole didn't want to let him go. She told all her friends that she would get him back eventually. But she never did.

At the time of the affair, Swindell says that Lombard wasn't acting quite like herself while at work. She was actually fired from a Cecil B. DeMille movie she was working on (Dynamite) because she wasn't remembering any of her lines. According to Swindell, there was a "detectable vagueness about her that seemed contrary to the forthright, eagerly working Carole Lombard [colleagues] would later know and direct. It was the only case of her having been remiss in application." Was there something bothering Carole that made her 'vague' and 'remiss'? Was she just hurt when Hughes dumped her? Or was there something else bothering her???

What I'm getting at is that the "affair" between Lombard and Hughes sounded very similar to the situation Donna described to me in her vision. Donna said I was madly in love with whoever raped me. It was a teenage-like crush that I blew out of proportion. I had fantasies of marrying the man and living a fairy-tale-like life happily ever after. But the man had no romantic interest in me whatsoever. Donna described him as a "womanizer", which is exactly what Howard Hughes was known to be.

On top of all these similarities, I couldn't help but remember my eerie experience at a metaphysical bookstore called "The Enchanted Fox", when a medium working there (named Rose) said she saw an image of Howard Hughes when she looked at me. We were both confused as to why she was seeing Hughes, but could it have been because he raped me in my past life? This is all too possible, but I don't have any evidence to support anything. I am currently in the process of trying to get a medium to corroborate my suspicions, but I haven't had much luck yet. I also asked my friend Jan to dowse for me, but she wasn't able to get any answers for some reason. Maybe I'm not meant to get any answers. Maybe I'm just completely out of my mind. It's very possible, I suppose.

But, yes, right now Howard Hughes is the number-one suspect. I feel in my bones that it was him, but I can't go pointing fingers unless I have some sort of confirmation from a source outside of myself (which, I suppose, has to come in the form of a medium). Of course, Hughes is long dead (he died in 1976), so it's not like I would be able to press any charges or anything. But it would still be nice to attain some closure in regards to the situation.

I will, of course, keep you updated if there are any more developments in this mystery. If you have any information that can help me out (either from the real or spirit world) please let me know. I'll take anything I can get. Thank you.

NOTE: There is now a second update to my past-life in Hollywood available to read HERE.

...

The videos below are the actual recordings of my regression session with Donna Ciaciarella. Please note that these are merely excerpts from an hour-long session and I also edited areas where there were long periods of silence or parts that I thought were superfluous. You may have to boost your volume a tad, as most of the session was recorded a little low.PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE