If readers want to regard The Passing of Merlin Zauber as a work of fiction, that is okay with me. However, since the novel is actually a thinly disguised spiritual autobiography, it might be more accurate to describe it as a type of historical fiction.
All the past-life accounts but one are my own. The exception is Alexander's account of attending a Vienna Boys' Choir concert as a ghost. That, as I explain elsewhere (see Alexander's Personal Ghost Story), was originally intended as a jazz-like recapitulation of an actual concert review that I had written.
The dream sequences, as I discuss in detail elsewhere (see Dreams), are selected from a dream diary that I faithfully maintained for forty years, starting in my early 20s.
The experiences and artifacts attributed to Merlin Zauber's previous life are my own, except that, having departed from my original pre-med program, I decided instead to become a college professor and a corporate technical communicator, rather than a pediatric psychotherapist. And, of course, at the moment I'm still incarnated in my present body.
Merlin's former patient, thirteen-year-old Eric, is a fictious creation, as are the helpful spirits Alexander and Sibyl. In my own between-life memories, when I wasn't floating or sleeping, there were interactions with helpful spirits, but they were never named. Instead, every spirit has a unique "frequency," which is the spirit's ID and remains the same regardless of whether the spirit is incarnated or not. For the purposes of this novel, however, I found it necessary to refer to each spirit by the name of its most recent incarnation. This is poetic license, since the name of a particular incarnation is a temporary convenience. It is as though the body, not the spirit, has a name, rather than merely a frequency. The immediacy of past-life recall in the afterlife suggests that all lives coexist simultaneously in a continuum outside of time. So I could as well have refered to the spirit Merlin as Maria, Gianni, Frosty, or any of his other incarnations.
Merlin's statement at the age of three that before he was Merlin he was Rudi and before that "Hey, You!" came from me, and was recorded in my mother's diary (subsequently lost in a Florida hurricane). When I was regressed hypnotically to the afterlife just prior to the present incarnation, the helpful spirits who were debating whether an incarnation as Robert J. R. Rockwood, Jr., would enable me to fullfill my assigned tasks (including the writing of this particular book), there was some discussion of the incarnations of Rudi and "Hey You," which explains why even as a toddler I could recall those names. It's too bad that the adults didn't ask more questions, which might have elicited more information, but I'm just grateful that there was even that passing reference to cling to.
© Copyright 2005 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.