We meet someone for the first time and we are instant friends. We shake hands with a stranger and turn away with an unexplained feeling of dislike. Are we just reacting to such clues to similar tastes as the way the stranger is dressed, the expression on his face? Or does it go deeper; are these feelings echoes from the buried memories of our past lives?
I devised a set of questions to see how my subjects responded to the possibility that people in their lives now were known to them in past lives.
Fully 87 percent of all subjects responding to any of the questions [under hypnosis] about their future birth reported that they had known parents, lovers, relatives and friends who were known to them in past lives. Some had more detailed impressions than others, but there was little doubt that my subjects under hypnosis were aware of how they knew people in their lives now from past lives.
Among the 13 percent who reported no answer to this question, the great majority were resisting the whole birth-experience trip. Even though they answered, “No,” to the question, “Did you know your mother-to-be, or father, or other people you will meet in this life?” some of their reports indicated that they did have some awareness about this.
“Someone is urging me into this life, promising to follow me. I do not want to be born.” (Case A-598)
“All I could get was a feeling of discontent and foreboding, a feeling of fear.” (Case A-596)
“I think it was my father who wanted me to be born. It was hard for me to determine my feelings about being born, because it was like a mental block.” (Case A-593)
“I felt unattached and displaced. Like a foreign entity in a strange place when I was born.” (Case A-585)
Among the 87 percent responding “Yes” to the question about knowing parents in past lives, there was an astonishing variety in the relationships reported. Fathers in this lifetime had been lovers in the past, mothers in the past, brothers, sisters, friends and children. Mothers in the current lifetime were seen as friends, fathers, brothers, sisters, children. There was no consistency at all in the way in which people in this life were related in past lives. The Freudian hypothesis of daughters wishing that fathers were lovers was not evident in the data, nor did sons see their mothers as wives in past lives more frequently than seeing them in other relationships. Often parents in this life were friends or distant relatives in past lives.
Mates and lovers were perceived as friends, close relations, parents from past lives as well as lovers. Some subjects did report that husbands or wives in this lifetime had been in a sexual relationship with them in past lives as well, so there appeared to be a trend for people to work out sexual relationships by assuming the same sex roles in several lifetimes. But again, this was well under one third of the reports of relationships in past lives to husbands or lovers now.
The cases described below show some of the diversity of impressions my subjects had regarding their relationships in past lives with people they know today.
“I knew that my mother was a fellow student at one time, and we had had a very happy companionship. My father was once my older brother who was dull. It seems we made fun of his dullness in a previous life. My grandfather was present at my birth, as he was a doctor, although he did not deliver me. I felt overjoyed to see my grandfather, although I didn’t know whether I knew him from a previous existence.” (Case A-203)
“I knew from past lives my mother, two friends, and my youngest brother. My mother was my servant, and my father was a lover in past lives. The rest I knew, but not how I knew them. I chose to be a girl because my mother needed a girl.” (Case A-508)
“My mother was a mother of mine in a past life and also a child of mine in a past life. My children told me they wanted to be my children before I was born, and I knew them not only from past lives, but from the between-life period.” (Case A-381)
“My mother was a sister or close relation in a past life. My father was a captain of a ship I was a sailor on. I got the impression that many other people who were in this life were in one particular lifetime of mine in the 1600’s.” (Case A-558)
“I noticed a strong physical energy in my heart when you asked about whether I knew my mother, and I had a strong impression she was my sister in a past life.” (Case A-91)
“Yes, my mother was an Irish priest in a lifetime I lived with her before. My sister was a nun in the previous life. Both were s.o.b.’s. My father was an American Indian—a free spirit. I knew that I would experience rejection by my mother and sister.” (Case A-338)
“I knew my mother, and I knew I chose her because we had not finished whatever it was we had to work out with each other. I saw one of my friend’s daughters in flashbacks of past lives. I knew that she would help me at various times in this life. This is surprising because I don’t know this daughter very well now.” (Case A-341)
“I knew my mother had been my mother previously. I had been twins with my father, so we were very close. I was aware of numerous other family relationships that stem from past lives. I was glad to be a sister rather than a wife to my brother.” (Case A-513)
“My mother was a man for a moment on the table in the operating room, when I was born. She had been a former lover of mine in another life when I was a woman. She was larger than her normal self and had darker hair. I saw my father as a young man, but I could not place the lifetime where I knew him.” (Case A-155)
“I did not know my mother, but I knew my father. I seem to have disagreed with my father’s choice of a wife until he explained how much she needed us.” (Case A-431)
“This was a strange experience. Someone named Louis and I wanted to go together. This was against the advice of the elders, but we were together and felt as though we could change the world. Louis is a twin who left the womb early because he had other things to do, and I was growing in the fetus and Louis wasn’t, and I was aware that he was leaving me. I felt distant when I was born and didn’t want to be close to other people. I was in a world of strangers and lost without Louis. I got the feeling that Louis’ spirit may be helping me now.” (Case A-588)
“I became aware that in one of my previous lives my mother killed both my father and myself. Neither she nor my father remember, I became aware, but somehow I always dreamed about this experience. Only now, as I see the relationships here in the hypnosis, have I freed myself.” (Case A-589)
“I think I knew my mother before, but it wasn’t very clear. What did come through clearly is that an aunt of mine was the person I came to be near, and that she was part of my mother’s family. This was the strongest impression of the whole birth experience—the need to be near my aunt whom I knew well in a past life.” (Case A-l)
“I had the feeling I was consulting with others I would be born with, and that I had known them in past lives as well. I knew my brother before as a good friend. And there was a friend named June. I wanted her to come too, but she said, “Not this time.” I knew my mother and father-to-be, but this wasn’t very clear. I know that my daughter’s first unborn child will be an old friend.” (Case A-191)
“I was aware that my brother from a past life was helping me choose to be born and is my boyfriend in this life. My sister was also there between lives and some other person. I also knew my father before. I was surprised at the experience in the between-life state, recognizing people was amazing on my part.” (Case A-354)
“My mother was a nun in a former life and my father was a gambler. I picked them to experience extremes and help them work out their destiny as well as my own. I felt the purpose of my life was to bring together elements from former lives.” (Case A-361)
“I knew my mother before because we had been together at a convent in the 1200’s. I saw a close friend of mine as a teenager in Russia, where I knew him.” (Case B-71)
“I got no pictures about my mother, but I sensed my father and I have been working on this relationship in several past lives, and we have still not cleaned it up.” (Case A-379)
“I knew my mother before when we were both males, and she was a close friend and comrade. I knew my father before, and I had resentment feelings toward him. My son had a close relationship to me in several past lives. It is interesting that I saw my sister as someone that I knew well in the between-life period.” (Case A-511)
“Yes, my mother had been my sister, my father and my child before. I saw many people I would know in this life, some of them I have not met yet.” (Case A-143)
“My mother was a close male friend from a past life. My father was my wife whom I used to treat cruelly in a past life.” (Case A-460)
“I knew my mother in the pre-born state, but not as someone I recognized from a past earth life. My father once caused my death in a past life.” (Case A-424)
“My daughter seemed to be someone I was trying desperately to save in a past life. My husband was someone I disliked and feared in a past life.” (Case A-328)
“My mother was my mother in a lifetime in 500 B.C. and I didn’t necessarily like her then either.” (Case A-398)
“My mother was my sister in a past life and my father was a lover. My first son had been a grandfather in one lifetime of mine, my second son had been a father, and my first daughter a friend. My second daughter I saw clearly as a mother of mine in a past life.” (Case A-225)
“Yes, I knew my mother from many past lifetimes as friends, sister, and in other relationships. My father was a brother. The people I was with when I was deciding to be born, I knew I would be meeting up with in the future. Some would help guide me from the other states and not be born in my time period.” (Case A-372)
In summary, then, 87 percent of all my subjects reported being aware of how they had known important people in their current life from past lives. These relationships were quite varied. Most interesting was the fact that the relationships are not just from past lives, but from the state between lives. This was surprising to my subjects, as indeed it was surprising to me.
My subjects all tell the same story. We come back with the same souls, but in different relationships. We live again not only with those we love, but with those we hate and fear. Only when we feel only compassion and affection are we freed from the need to live over and over with the same spirits, who are also forced to live with us!
Excerpt from Life Before Life
Dylan
Dylan was only two years old when his mother, Anne, first noticed his strange behavior. One fall evening as the light was dimming, he was in the hallway happily playing on the floor with his toys. Anne was in the kitchen making dinner when she heard him say distinctly, “I smoke too.” She was surprised by this odd remark—not the usual play babble—and peeked over at Dylan, who was holding his fingers together, putting them to his lips, and withdrawing them, exactly as if he were taking a drag from a cigarette. Dylan repeated, “I smoke too.” And before Anne could say anything to him, he looked over at her, patted his front pants pocket, and said, “I keep my smokes here.” This puzzled her because no one in the family smoked. She couldn’t think of anyone Dylan could be imitating.
Another odd thing happened shortly after that. Again it was around dinnertime when Anne was busy cooking and Dylan was playing on the floor in the hallway. He was playing with his “pogs,” small cardboard disks that children like to collect. Dylan caught her attention when he blurted out, “Sevens! I’m throwing sevens!” He was on his knees, throwing the pogs like dice with a sidewise sweep of his wrist and then thrusting his little hands triumphantly into the air. He again exclaimed, “Sevens! I’m throwing sevens!”
She shook her head in puzzlement. Where did he get this? She was quite sure he had never seen anyone gamble or shoot craps in his short life. He was only two and she knew that the only TV he saw was Sesame Street and Barney. As most busy parents would, she filed this incident away in her mind, along with the one about the smokes, as a curiosity, one of the many surprises kids are prone to come up with.
But a few months later Dylan developed an extreme behavior that was not so easy to dismiss. On his third birthday someone gave him a toy gun, and from that point on he insisted on having it with him at all times. If he lost it or somebody took it away, he would throw a hysterical fit. He slept with the gun, took a bath with it, kept it in the waistband of his pants, and even tucked it into his bathing trunks at the swimming pool. It wasn’t one particular toy gun he was attached to—any toy gun would do. Whenever he left the house, he had to make sure he had his gun with him. If he found he had forgotten it, he would scream until he was given another one. Once, when Dylan was taken to a funeral, he realized too late that he had forgotten it. He cried so hard it caused him to wheeze and cough. He was making such a commotion his parents had to remove him to the car. It took him a long time to settle down enough so they could drive home.
After the funeral incident, everyone in the family stashed toy guns—in their purses, in their homes, and even in the glove compartments of their vehicles—to avoid Dylan’s hysterical scenes. When he turned five and was about to start school, his obsession caused real concern. The only way his mother could convince him not to take his gun with him was to tell him it was against the law to have a gun in school. Reluctantly, he obeyed.
I first heard the story of Dylan from his aunt Jenny, Anne’s sister-in-law, whom I met for the first time at a party. Jenny had just finished reading my book, Children’s Past Lives, and was eager to talk to me about her now five-year-old nephew, who she was beginning to believe was the reincarnation of her grandfather. She explained that she had long been open to the possibility of reincarnation, but she hadn’t known that it was possible for a child to be the reincarnation of a family member. Now Dylan’s strange behaviors were beginning to make sense to her. She continues the story.
Our whole family dismissed Dylan’s behaviors as just amusing little things he did. We laughed about it. Nobody stopped to think there might be a cause, but by the time I finished reading your book, everything fell into place.
My grandfather, who we called Pop-Pop, was a beat cop in Philadelphia during the Depression. Later he was a prison guard. He always carried a gun with him, always had a gun in his house, and always slept with a gun beside his bed. Always.
During the last three years of his life, Pop-Pop was very sick. He had been a chain-smoker all his life and was slowly dying of emphysema and heart disease. Even during his terrible illness, when he could barely breathe, he continued to smoke. In fact, the last words we heard from him as they carried him out on a stretcher were to ask for a cigarette. He died on the way to the hospital.
The strange thing is that Pop-Pop carried his cigarettes in his pants pocket just as Dylan pretended to do. Most people carry cigarettes in a breast pocket so they won’t get crushed. But not Pop-Pop. And Pop-Pop loved gambling—especially dice. During the Depression he and his buddies would shoot craps behind abandoned buildings every chance they got.
After I started piecing all of this together—Dylan imitating smoking and shooting craps—I asked my mother (Pop-Pop’s daughter) about Pop-Pop’s last days. She told me something I hadn’t heard before. One day while Pop-Pop was napping, my grandmother was cleaning the house and found Pop-Pop’s gun hidden under the sofa cushion in the living room. He had moved it from its usual place on the night table. This really scared her because she was afraid that he was going to use the gun on himself to end his suffering. She called her son, who came and took the gun and threw it into the river. When Pop-Pop found out what had happened, he was furious that his gun had been taken away. I don’t think he ever got over it.
When I heard my mother tell this story about the gun, my heart beat faster, I got goose bumps, and I suddenly realized, “Oh, my God—it makes so much sense! That’s why Dylan has this obsession with his gun!” I am now convinced that Dylan is my grandfather—Dylan’s great-grandfather. I believe he wants to make sure his gun remains with him at all times. He’s still reacting to that incident from his former life when it was taken away from him.
As Jenny told her story, I agreed it was possible that Pop-Pop had returned as his own great-grandson. Dylan’s strange behaviors, which made little sense in the context of his present family and his limited experience in this life, made perfect sense in the context of Pop-Pop’s life.
In many of the cases of reincarnation I’ve seen, young children show behaviors and play activities that mimic their past life behaviors and habits. Dylan’s obsession with guns, smoking, and craps fits the pattern. In some cases, these unusual behaviors are the parents’ first clue that a child is recalling a past life. In one case, for example, a child who had been a garage mechanic in a previous life would often lie on his back under a sofa pretending to fix cars. Another little girl, believed to be the reincarnation of her grandmother, was obsessed with sewing and pretending she was a seamstress, the lifelong occupation of the deceased grandmother. These behaviors are most apparent in early childhood, up to about the age of five, when the memories of past lives are the strongest. They generally disappear between the ages of five and seven, when impressions of the past life normally begin to fade as the child becomes more absorbed in the outside world.
Peter
A little boy shocked his mother, Tracy, when he described the details of a family tragedy that no one in the family dared talk about. Tracy described what happened to me during a phone interview.
Because I was only two years old in 1970 when my family’s house burned to the ground, I have no memory of it. All I knew until recently was that it happened on a very cold night—we live in upstate Michigan, where it gets very cold—and that my parents, five of my six brothers, and I managed to get out of the house in time. My father ran back into the burning house to rescue my three-year-old brother, Gary, but he got trapped in the house and both he and Gary died in the fire. No one in the family ever talked about it because my mother was so devastated from losing my father and youngest brother. Everyone in the family knew it was taboo even to mention it.
I have no memory of that horrible night, but my son, Peter, who was born in 1990, knew all about it. It started when he was three and the night terrors began. Peter would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” Each time when I ran into his room, I was shocked by his bizarre behavior. He seemed to be awake, because he was sitting up and staring straight ahead with his eyes wide open. But when I asked him what was wrong, he pushed me away and yelled, “Go away! I want my mommy, I want my mommy!” Nothing I did could calm him down. He would just scream louder and push me away as if he didn’t know who I was. These episodes went on for several long months, exhausting me emotionally and physically.
Around the same time that the night terrors began, during the day when Peter was awake, he began telling me stories about his “friend” Gary and how he died. He talked about Gary all the time and especially about the night Gary’s family was awakened by the barking of their dog to find the house on fire. He described the house, always calling it the “yellow house.” He said it had a big pine tree next to it that burned too, and a driveway that made a circle in front of the house, not like our driveway. He added that Gary’s grandparents, who lived across the road, ran over and stood outside in the cold with the family watching helplessly as the house burned. He described the three fire trucks that came with their lights flashing and one big fireman with a brown beard. He talked about the fire often, adding a little more detail each time. He seemed to be able to see the whole scene in his memory, and knew exactly what was going on both inside and outside the house at the same time.
Peter was describing details that I had never heard before. Every time he told more of the story, I called my mother, Edith, to see if he was right and not just making it up. Each time, Edith confirmed that every detail Peter gave was correct. The circular driveway, the burning pine tree, grandparents, barking dog, and fireman with the beard—all were accurate.
If that wasn’t weird enough, what really chilled me was that little Peter described how Gary and his father died. He said that when his father ran back into the house to save Gary, they were blocked by the flames and couldn’t get out, so they hid under a mattress to get away from the smoke. I didn’t want to ask my mother about this awful detail, so I asked my oldest brother. He said it was true. The firemen had found both bodies under a mattress.
I started to suspect that Peter might be the reincarnation of Gary. But I tried to find another explanation because nobody I know believes in reincarnation. I thought it was possible that Peter could have been really lucky and imagined all the correct details. But I didn’t see any way a three-year-old could imagine hiding and dying under a mattress. That’s when I started thinking seriously that Peter was the reincarnation of Gary.
Peter repeated the story of the fire, always with the same details, for about a year until he was four. The memories always came up spontaneously and randomly, with nothing I could see to trigger them. For example, he would be playing on the floor with his toys and suddenly stop playing, stare at me, and with a very serious expression tell me again about the dog barking and the brown-bearded fireman and the smoke and hiding under the mattress. When he talked about the fire, his demeanor changed completely. Usually he was a carefree child, so happy and bubbly everyone called him “Silly.” But when he spoke of the fire, he became serious and focused hard on the images in his mind. If I got up to move or do something else while he was talking about it, he would follow me around to make sure I was listening. Clearly, he had something important to tell me and he wanted my attention.
Peter’s accurate descriptions, his changed demeanor, and the fact that his memories dwelled on his traumatic death are consistent with patterns I’ve found in children’s past life memories in general. When young children speak of a past life, their tone becomes serious, matter-of-fact, and does not resemble the sing-songy, lilting style of fantasy babble. Their countenance becomes calm, almost adultlike. Unlike the stories of a child who is fantasizing, these past life stories remain consistent in detail over time—sometimes for weeks, months, even a couple of years. As a child’s vocabulary increases and he is better able to express himself, the story may be filled in with more refined details, but the gist of it remains the same.
When children recall their past lives, they often describe events surrounding their most recent deaths, especially if the deaths were traumatic, as in Peter’s case. To the parents’ amazement, a child will matter-of-factly tell them she remembers being shot, or dying in a car accident or in a war, and sometimes will add explicit and clinically graphic detail. In this case, Peter knew that Gary and his father had huddled under a mattress to protect themselves from the fire—something a three-year-old could never imagine. This kind of accurate detail is often what first alerts adults to a past life memory in a child.
Peter’s mother, Tracy, found an opportunity to test her son’s memory. Edith had a photograph of the whole family taken shortly before Gary’s death. It was one of the few belongings that survived the fire and, curiously, it survived a second house fire some years later as well. Tracy showed the photograph to Peter and he immediately pointed to Gary and said, “That’s my friend Gary.” He couldn’t identify any of the other five brothers, only Gary. Tracy could see from the photo that Peter and Gary looked alike, almost like identical twins. None of the other boys resembled Peter nearly as much.
Another behavior that Tracy believes stems from the tragedy is Peter’s hysterical fear of fire. If a cigarette is lit in front of him, he panics and runs away. If he sees a lighter, he’ll “just flip out.” He doesn’t like wood-stoves, either, and the sight of Edith’s kerosene heater makes him go berserk.
No one knows how the fire that killed Gary started. But from what we know of the workings of past life memories in general, his phobia of anything that could start a fire is understandable. There are hundreds of documented cases of young children with phobias that stemmed from the way they died in a past life, especially if the death was sudden or traumatic. For example, I have in my files several cases of babies who cried hysterically whenever an airplane flew overhead. When they were old enough to talk, and saw an airplane, they warned their parents to hide because they remembered when they were big before and the bombs from the airplanes killed them. Phobias can be very specific and seemingly strange and bewildering to the parents, who see no connection to anything that happened to the child in this life. But if the child remembers how he died in a past life, the correspondence between the mode of death and the phobia suddenly becomes quite clear. In cases of same-family reincarnation where the facts of the previous incarnation are known, parents can easily trace the origin of the phobia.