Dreams and visions play a vital role in my life and are as crucial to me as they were to Jung. There’s a loose correlation between my initial Dream of Damien and the emotionally intense, ultra-real Dream I had of Formula 1 World Champion Ayrton Senna’s fatal car crash, which I touch upon several times in the Letters.
After speaking briefly with Damien, that night I had the Dream about us and a couple of months later began a relationship with him. In the case of Ayrton, I met him briefly at the 1993 Australian Grand Prix and roughly five months later—two months before I had my Dream of Damien—experienced his horrific crash [in a Dream].
Exactly thirty years later, I submitted an article about the Dream and events surrounding Ayrton’s death to a prominent motor racing magazine. While the editors conceded that they’d enjoyed reading it, unsurprisingly they considered it to be too ‘spiritual’ for their target audience. Ironically, I had toned it down for their benefit, by omitting an account of how several years after Ayrton’s death he ‘turned up’ in my astral energy field as a spiritual guide. There he has been a welcome presence ever since.
He has always sounded pretty much as he did in life, including his calm voice and the endearing way he quietly laughed. When I asked him about twenty years ago why he hadn’t ‘moved on’, he replied that he’d chosen to return, to do as much good as he could. He’s by no means always ‘around’; my hunch is that he’s been helping a lot of other people besides me. He also lives on in the hearts of millions, whose deep love for him is undying, and who still anguish over having lost him.
Now, lest I be accused of hailing from the lunatic fringe, let me make three things clear: firstly, I have no pretensions to being a ‘psychic’, or (non-Jungian) ‘medium’ who channels spirits. I am, rather, more of a mediatrix to events unfolding in the collective unconscious, a gift that most likely arose from a 1983-4 acute spiritual crisis which sensitised me to the shared depths of the psyche. As a result, I’m often able to both detachedly observe and empathise with archetypal trends, collective emotions, and developments unfolding in the World Soul.
Secondly, I’m not implying that I hold any particular belief(s) about spiritual guides, or the afterlife. I’m simply confessing to an experienced mode of communion that for nearly three decades has been as real, effortless and natural to me as breathing. Thirdly—and as I know from decades of experience as a soul-centred psychiatric therapist—for many sufferers of schizophrenia ‘hearing voices’ saps their energy and focus in a debilitating way, preventing them from engaging with the practical and relational demands of daily life. As well, such voices can become accusing, tormenting, tyrannical, or otherwise disruptive and unwelcome. Ayrton, on the other hand, has only ever been kind, encouraging, good-humoured, wise, unobtrusive, and supportive. He’s helped me to stay focused, calm, disciplined, persevering, and appreciative of the sacredness of life and Nature. As an added blessing, he regularly makes me laugh about myself when I need to lighten up.
One can argue that such phenomena are manifestations of autonomous energies of the psyche only through circular reasoning that denies other possibilities, a step which Jung himself was never prepared to take. As he reminds us, we do not know the limits of the psyche. Make of it all what you will. For me, this gift is simply a treasured, mysterious and unquestioned part of my life. And in the end, my only certainty is that love knows no bounds.
On the eve of the new Millennium I asked Ayrton, should he be happy and free to do so, if he would meet me on the Other Side when I die. Straight away he answered, with a hint of mischief, ‘Yes. I’ll drive up in a white car and say, “Do you wanna come with me?”’ As I recall, I burst into tears of amazed, anguished and joyful laughter. Roughly a decade later I came across a YouTube video in which Ayrton, in white socks and comfy moccasins, was preparing to test-drive a white Honda NSX car in Japan. As he was about to take off (at breakneck speed), he asked someone off-camera, ‘Do you wanna come with me?’
Maureen B. Roberts, From StarDreaming [Collective Ink Books, London, UK, 2026]