Diana, In Memoriam

As I explain in Chapter five, the planets and signs do not make us who we are and they do not dictate what happens to us: they reflect who we are and mirror our experiences. Each of us will respond in subtly different ways to any one planet, point or sign, the defining factor being a combination of our basic nature, our upbringing and our experiences - life is not so much what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you. Thus, the proximity of Mars - a planet correlating with aggression, ambition, desire and courage - to Pluto, whose keyword is transformation, showed that Diana had the potential to be powerfully changed by acts of bravery or by acts of treachery. I had discussed this idea with her during one of our meetings, and had this to say about it in Synastry, written in 1981, "[Mars-Pluto] presents a violent theme and suggests the likelihood of exposure to dangerous situations" and in With Love From Diana , written in 1994, " I did consider that [Diana] would be the focus of a violent attack, whether this manifested as intense criticism or a physical assault, even some kind of assassination attempt." Clearly, the courage of the Mars-Pluto conjunction manifested in her crusade against land mines, yet the self-destructive quality of this aspect lay at the heart of her bulimia, and it was also at the basis of her 'suicidal' approach to more than one relationship. No one can generate as much passion as someone with a Mars-Pluto conjunction, and no one can muster more hate, revenge and self-loathing.

Thus, in 1997, as Pluto made its way to and fro this volatile conjunction in her natal chart, Diana's life in tandem veered to extremes: while she found passion and love with Dodi Fayed her public image took a nose dive - never before had she received such hostile criticism in the press, it seemed as if her star were in free fall. Diana, when threatened, always went into attack, and it was no doubt this pugnacious aspect that compelled her to utter her famous remark to the gaggle of journalists and photographers gathered on the shores of the Mediterranean, watching her frolic on the Fayed yacht, Jonikal, in the July of that same year: "You're going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do." This statement has been largely interpreted as her intention to convert to Islam and marry Dodi Fayed but it may simply have been an impulse driven comment designed to tantalise, with no clear plan behind it. Tragically, the world was not just surprised by what happened next but rocked on its axis.

My first instinct about Diana's death was that it was no accident, and I said as much, off camera, in an interview with CBS News that same week. However, during the intervening years I have changed my opinion more than once. Aside from the fact that I do not want to be seen as a knee-jerk conspiracy theorist I like to believe I have an open mind, and as new information comes to light challenging my initial assumptions I can change my position accordingly. First impressions, however, are often unfailingly accurate. At the very least Diana's death was convenient. She was a thorn in the monarchy's side, a loose cannon on the deck of the royal yacht. In 1997 the possibility that Prince Charles, the future King of England, might marry Mrs Parker Bowles posed many problems: Camilla, already deeply unpopular with the British people, faced a daunting PR exercise to become accepted as Queen, and with a beautiful, adored and high-profile Princess of Wales roving around the world, that task would be made immeasurably more difficult. (No one in the Establishment would want a repeat of the embarrassing fracas in 1821 when a distraught Caroline, Princess of Wales, and legally separated from her husband, George IV, had to be physically restrained from entering Westminster Abbey during his coronation!)

There are many question marks hovering over Diana's last hours, some of which I will cover shortly, but for the moment I am going to take a more esoteric view of the events leading up to her death.

We all dream, even though many of us cannot remember our dreams and when we do attach no importance to them. I believe dreams can be both prophetic and certainly insightful. Of course, some nights my experiences in the dream time are clearly a kind of psychic house-cleaning, a rerun of episodes in the day and issues that my unconscious has dredged up for closer examination. On other nights I have spectacular dreams, out of the body journeys and flashes of the future. When a dream is significant, not just a 'house-cleaning' exercise, the experience is vivid, full of colour, scent, sound and voice-overs, its storyline is compelling and my emotional response powerful. Carl Jung, the psychologist, would have called such dreams "big dreams".

In the summer and autumn of 1989 I had two "big dreams". I not only recorded the dreams in my journal but such was their emotional impact, I sent them to Diana. They appear below and are exactly how they were written in my note-book, and as published in With Love From Diana in 1994.

1) I was in the front row of an audience watching a play. The curtain went up and on the stage, sitting at a large desk, was Her Majesty, the Queen. She was delivering a sombre speech, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not hear what she was saying. I knew only that it concerned the future of the monarchy. My eyes were drawn to Charles and Diana, who were just behind her. They were posing for photographs and were seated - Charles behind Diana - on a child's rocking horse. Diana was laughing and Charles was urging her to be more responsible and to look serious for the cameras. There was a flash and a large explosion. All that was left on the stage was an empty car seat on a raised dais.

2) I am sitting in a sand dune having a picnic. Diana comes toward me, dressed in white with a black cloak around her. She sits down beside me. I feel awkward and unprepared for her sudden and unannounced, arrival. She is telling me about someone called Peter who has been fired because of her. Apparently, he is going to France and will be undergoing plastic surgery to conceal his identity. She goes on to talk to me about William, and while she does this, she holds up a large figure 3. She then begins to cry, and I urge her not to give up on the marriage. She recovers her composure and I take up the topic of Peter referring to him as a past relationship. "It's not over. It's very much on, " she says. The scene changes to my then home, Bramshott Court. Diana comes into the sitting room with a large gift-wrapped present, which she hands to me. When I open it, I find a strange looking object about three-feet in size - the only thing this object vaguely resembles is the ornate hand of a large clock. I am embarrassed at the enormity of the gift and refuse it, saying I escort her to the car and when I return William is seated in the same chair. He is much older and sporting a beard. He says to me, "They don't tell me everything, you know, For a few minutes we lost complete radio contact with them" As he was saying this to me, I saw an event from an aerial point of view: Two police motorcycles and a white car streaming ahead, leaving a black car on its own. Two vans approach from either side and prevent the black car from moving forward. The dream ends in chaos and I hear my own voice saying, "Isn't anyone going to do anything?"

Although these two dreams came a couple of months apart I believed them to be connected - two halves of the same story - and it was the power and detail of the second that compelled me to send them both to Diana. She came straight back to me the day she received them and although there were many other factors that I imagined she would have taken to heart the point she found to be most interesting was the mention of the name, Peter. She took the phrase a past relationship to be a reference to one of her own past lives as a Christian martyr!

By the time of the accident in the August of 1997 I had forgotten the existence of these dreams and it was only when clients and friends who had copies of With Love From Diana began to telephone me commenting on the eerie connections to the real life circumstances of her death that I began to take a closer look at them.

Over the years I have come to see that there are many ways to extract the meaning from a dream. Leaving aside the psychological component for a moment, there is the story line, which may or may not represent a real life sequence of events, and there are the images that stand out. The action of writing down the dream is as important as the dream itself: the words we choose to describe what we have seen can unlock the entire puzzle, and rather like doing a crossword, anagrams and double-meanings are to be found. For instance, in the October of 2004 I had a dream in which I was on a cliff path; in front of me was a large bush and a voice-over declared, "It's a big night." A black dog came towards me and stuck his muzzle in my ear. Since this dream was just prior to the US election I took it as a sign that George Bush was going to win. What remains to be fully translated is the image of the dog and the muzzle: the dog may represent Bush's being dogged by events during his Presidency or it may symbolize a terrorist (dog of war) putting a gun to Bush's head; the muzzle could be interpreted as the open end of a firearm, or the action of Bush's being muzzled or silenced, which again has two meanings, death and impotence. In this way, by extracting the words and phrases outlined in bold in the Diana dreams, the following emerges:

The Queen. A sombre message. The future. Charles and Diana. Serious. Cameras. A flash. Large explosion. An empty car seat. Sand dune. Black and white. Sudden and unannounced. Peter. Fired. France. Plastic surgery. Identity concealed. The number 3. Marriage. Not over, on. Gift. Prince Charles. Cross. Giving it away. Car. William in the same chair. Loss of contact. Police. Motorcycles. White car. Black car.