Dreaming is akin to the bardo of becoming, the intermediate state where you have a clairvoyant and highly mobile “mental body” that goes through all kinds of experiences.
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
ANYTHING can happen in our dreams. It is through some of the stranger phenomena of sleep and dreams that many myths and legends have arisen—astral travel, abductions by aliens, night-time visitations by the legendary “Old Hag.” Often such bizarre adventures can be explained as the byproducts of sleep and dreams.
Nearly all the dreams we have relate in some way, however tenuous the link, to our ordinary, everyday life. They may rerun the past, or embellish the present, or even occasionally show glimpses of what seems to be the future. Very occasionally, though, they may present us with scenes from what looks to be another life entirely, in a different time and a different place. Davina Williams, for example, wrote to us describing a vivid, unpleasant and disturbing dream in which she was back in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, a woman in a crowd of people awaiting the hanging of a man, whose crime was stealing a sheep. The man was, she knew in the dream, her husband. Karen Byfield’s five-year-old son has had two nightmares in which, she says, “I am not the mummy he is looking for to comfort him.” At these times Karen’s little boy calls out for “Mamma”—not a word he ever normally uses; she has no idea where he got it from.
Paul King, now forty-one, describes two connecting dreams remembered from childhood. Although these dreams occurred so many years ago, they remain the same in his memory and so vivid he believes he would recognise the places in the dream if he were to see them. In one he is walking down a wood-panelled Tudor-style gallery, conscious of people seated on window seats to his right. He feels a sense of unease, almost as though these people are looking at him. He makes himself look down (the feeling here is similar to a lucid dream, a dream in which you know you are dreaming but feel you are awake) and sees that he is wearing tights. In the second section of this dream he feels he is with his sister (actually he is an only child) in a room with a servant; the servant is very friendly and takes a very large key to open a door. He is taking them into a herb garden surrounded by a high redbrick wall. In the second dream Paul recalls climbing on to a “dumb waiter,” trying to ride on it. It crashes, and he feels he may have been killed.
Such dreams certainly have a reincarnation “feel” about them, but what makes people who have them believe that they are anything more than ordinary dreams? Is there in fact anything different about them at all? People who have these dreams describe them as being more vivid and real than their ordinary dreams. They lack the bizarre quality of an ordinary dream, and they are often recurrent, so that each time the same scene is replayed, and each time the person wakes from it at the same point in the dream. Often these dreams start in childhood and become less frequent as the person grows older, sometimes ceasing altogether.
It’s understandable that when a dream recurs, when the same place is visited, the same scene replayed each time the dream occurs, it may seem to have a special significance and carry a special message. Recurrent dreams are quite common, and they tend to follow this same pattern, being common in childhood and then weakening until eventually they cease altogether. Despite this, these people feel there are special factors in their dreams which convince them that they are not in the ordinary run of recurrent dreams but have a definite reincarnation feel.
V.L. of Gloucester says that she and other members of her family have all experienced spontaneous past-life recall, mainly in dreams. But, she says, those dreams are markedly different from a normal dream. “I could feel the tight silk skirt of my dress restricting my length of stride as I tried to run down a slope—felt the painfal throbbing of a boil on my cheek, the swaying of a horse-drawn coach as we drove along a rutted, muddy lane.” She adds: “I have had a couple of lucid dreams, and they have a different quality entirely to past-life dreams—and both are markedly different from ordinary dreams.”
The “real-life” quality of V.L.’s dream certainly sounds very much like a lucid dream—a dream in which the dreamer is aware that he is dreaming. Lucid dreams mimic almost every aspect of waking experience—the visual imagery is always vivid, and the dreamer seems able to hear and feel, think and reason, make decisions and act on them. However, the lucid dreamer can to some extent “guide” their dream, make things happen and force dream-events to take a particular turn, and there is no suggestion that this is happening in V.L.’s or, indeed, any of the other reincarnation dreams described. The “painful throbbing of a boil” would be unusual in a lucid dream too—pain is seldom experienced in lucid dreams. V.L.’s account is especially valuable because she has experienced both types of dreams and feels able to distinguish between them.
Several other people describe what seemed to them to be knowledge of a past life which came to them in dreams. Mrs. B. Hunter believes that she has had two previous lives, one as a children’s nanny and one as a man. Her knowledge came in dreams when she was a small child. Judith Anderton describes a reincarnation dream that regularly recurred between the ages of seven and twelve, in which she was walking along an avenue of stones which got bigger until they formed a circle. This dream was so vivid that even now, forty years later, she can close her eyes and remember every detail. Grace Morse describes a recurring nightmare that her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter used to have of “crowds of angry people pushing against the house, pushing heads on sticks through the window. Of course, my daughter was terrified. I had an old grandmother who years later in life told me her grandmother’s people had died during the French Revolution. It has always crossed my mind that my daughter could have had a flashback of a previous life.”
Ian Stevenson (in Children Who Remember Previous Lives) has observed that some children who claim to remember previous lives have vivid and recurrent dreams that are very similar to their spontaneous, apparent past-life waking memories. He describes the case of an American girl, Alice Robertson (pseudonym), who had a recurrent childhood nightmare in which she was an adult woman dressed in an ankle-length garment walking along a road in the evening with a young girl whom she knew to be her daughter. Suddenly there was a deafening roar, and the earth seemed to give way beneath her. At this point she would wake up, screaming in terror. The dream seemed so real to Alice that each time she would try to explain to her mother that she had really lived through the scene of her nightmare. But each time her mother had insisted that it was “only a dream.” The nightmares persisted, though they happened less often as Alice grew older.
When Alice grew up, she recognised that the garment she wore in her dream was a sari—something that seemed to resonate with her because she felt a powerful attraction for India. As a young woman she saw a film about Darjeeling, which aroused in her a strong sense of déjà vu. She also discovered that a series of disastrous landslides had occurred in Darjeeling between 1890 and 1920, and she became convinced that it was here that she had lived, and that this was the manner of her death. Attempts to regress Alice under hypnosis to see whether she could recall any more details of her Darjeeling life failed—she merely relived the terrifying death she experienced in her nightmare but remembered nothing further about a previous life.
Anthropologist Antonia Mills has described another, similar case, a fascinating story which is difficult to explain in current scientific terms, and is particularly interesting because it was so well recorded. The mother of the little boy concerned, Thomas Mather (pseudonym), kept a diary, and when Thomas started talking about a previous life she wrote down everything he said.
Thomas was born in Canada in British Columbia, in 1982. He began to talk when he was eighteen months old and was a very verbal child. When he was about two years old he started having recurrent nightmares. He seldom said much about the content of the dreams, but they often seemed to be about Africa and San Francisco. After the age of four he started to have these dreams less often, and by the time he was seven he had only the occasional nightmare, usually related to something he had seen on television.
From the time he was just over two, Thomas started saying things that puzzled his parents because they seemed to bear no relationship to anything he had experienced.
The first time this happened was when the family had been watching the British royal family on television. Thomas remarked: “I know Diana, another Diana. Diana and I were running and there was fire all around. Diana got a fire on her foot. She didn’t stop running. That was a long time ago, when I was big.”
Fires were a recurrent theme in Thomas’s apparent memories, as were other kinds of accidents (including a car accident and a plane crashing into his house). He also talked a lot about airports, aeroplanes, bridges, moving, and “being big like Daddy.” Although the family had never even been to California, Thomas often mentioned San Francisco, Richmond, near San Francisco, where he said he had lived in a big house near the airport, and a place called “Disco,” where he said there was an airport that was not as big as San Francisco’s.
When he was three and a half, Thomas heard his mother describing a car accident she had been in some years before. He commented that he had been in a car accident once, “when I was big.” A few days later he mentioned this again, saying, “I was in a car accident when I was big, big like Daddy.” Asked when this was, he answered: “When I lived in San Francisco and was big like Daddy. I lived by a bridge over a big river.” He also said that there were two little ones in the back of the car at the time of the accident.
At around the same age, Thomas also started talking about a plane crash. He mentioned a jet plane crashing into his house and said: “When I was driving at the airport all the people waiting for planes saw me crash.” He also mentioned that he lived in Disco with his uncle, and that there were “jets with big tired mouths that opened so that cars can go inside.” As he grew older he showed considerable fear of flying, and also of fires, which he would refuse to go near.
His mother describes how, when Thomas was just four, she was showing him a book that asked if the child had seen certain kinds of trees. She asked if Thomas had ever seen palm trees and he replied that he hadn’t seen them in San Francisco but he had in Richmond, a neighbouring city where they do indeed thrive. Thomas’s preschool teacher was struck by the fact that the boy reported that the mail deposit boxes were “the wrong colour” (they are blue in the United States, red in Canada).
Soon after he was four Thomas stopped talking about Disco, Richmond and San Francisco. But he continued to feel, and often to act, as though he were older than his chronological age. Thomas’s parents and his teacher both noticed that he seemed to feel that he was older than he actually was. He resented being treated as a little boy, consistently had friends who were a few years older than himself, and could not understand why he was not allowed to do things that adults did, such as staying up late or going out on his own.
What struck his parents was the matter-of-fact way in which he talked about the places and people he mentioned—as if they were events that had really happened. They realised that most children have fantastic imaginations, but this seemed to them to be more than normal childish imagination. They had read about Ian Stevenson’s work on reincarnation, and although they didn’t have any personal belief in the idea, because nothing Thomas described seemed to have any connection with his everyday life, they began to wonder gradually if memories of some past life might be interwoven with normal childhood fantasies and formed the basis of his dreams.
Even the most vivid dream produces only flimsy evidence for establishing a previous identity. Ian Stevenson describes a correspondent of his who had a vivid dream in which she was an elegantly dressed woman some time in the early nineteenth century, being paid court to by a similarly well-turned-out aristocratic man. She became convinced that she had had a previous life as Lola Montez, the notorious femme fatale who cost King Ludwig I of Bavaria his throne. Stevenson comments: “Another of my correspondents also thinks, for different reasons, that she was Lola Montez. Perhaps I should introduce these two correspondents to each other.”
But although there is very seldom anything like convincing evidence for these dream past lives, occasionally dream evidence can be very persuasive. This account is given by Joan Pidgeon.
In 1977 my husband and I bought an old cottage in Belper, Derbyshire. It was over 350 years old and in need of much restoration. One night there, I had a startlingly vivid dream in which I was sitting beside my coachman (I was quite affluent) as we drove down the lane where the cottage was. It was only a rough track in my dream. As we travelled along, I noted a huge blaze on the far hilltop and said to my coachman: “That looks to me like Ward’s bakery is on fire.” He replied: “Maybe it has been done by the daughter. She has to marry an old man.” He mentioned a name which I cannot recall, but I remember thinking, What a horrible old man, mean and rich. I replied to the coachman: “That must be a fate worse than death!” We both laughed and the dream was gone.
Later, during the next few days, I mulled over the dream, still vivid and real, myself as a young lady in Puritan garb (I am convinced I was the young woman in the coach). So real that I looked up a book on the history of the old mill town of Belper and found there had been a Ward’s bakery in that same spot, which had burned down in the early 1800s. After my dream everything settled to normality, with no more happenings.
Especially interesting is the following dream, dreamed by Heather Charles when she was a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl:
In the dream I was a man, a soldier on a battlefield at night. We were moving forward, the earth was wet, very muddy; there were strands of barbed wire everywhere snagging at clothing. The night sky was periodically illuminated by flares and explosions. In the dream I was aware of a burning sensation at the back of my throat and a strange smell in the air (a little like the smell from fireworks). As I moved forward I sensed something coming at me. It was all so very quick there was no time to react. I sensed it was a missile like a shell that passed extremely close to the left side of my head. In its wake was a vacuum of hot air. In that split second, a part of the left side of my head was torn off, my right arm instinctively came up to support the injury, and I was for a brief moment aware that my hand could feel my gaping head wound, but the wound in my head could not feel my hand. I then fell forward to the earth.
Since then I have found out that battlefields are full of cordite and other substances which could cause a burning sensation at the back of the throat. Missiles travelling very fast through the air do create a vacuum of hot air behind them, and if a piece of the skull is removed, the surface of the brain has no touch sensors, but the hand, does. I wouldn’t have known these facts as a schoolgirl of fourteen, and I do not come from a military family.
I have lived and worked for a short period of time in Germany and have visited the country on a number of occasions. I have always felt “at home” there. I have never had formal German lessons, and yet I managed to pick up an understanding and use of the language quite quickly, so that I could easily find my way around and take care of myself. When I have spoken German, German people say that my pronunciation is like that of a native German.
What is particularly interesting about this dream is the smell of cordite Miss Charles noticed. Smells are very evocative, and a particular smell can conjure up a host of vivid memories or emotions. But both taste and smell are very difficult to conjure up spontaneously from memory, even when they are familiar. Smell imagery rarely occurs spontaneously in dreams, although smells can be incorporated into dreams relatively easily—in one experiment to investigate this, sixteen different smells, including coffee, roses and onions, were put under subjects’ noses while they were in dreaming sleep. The smells were incorporated into almost a quarter of their dreams. But presumably no one was sticking cordite underneath Miss Charles’s nose while she slept. The smell and the burning in the back of her throat are very unusual dream images indeed.
It is also interesting that if the shell had indeed damaged the left side of the brain, and not just removed the left side of the skull, then the motor supply to the right hand and sensation from the right hand would both have been affected and the arm would have been paralysed and numb.
Miss Charles recounts another odd experience. One morning she was lying awake thinking about getting up. “I brought my hand up to my face with the thought I’d better get shaved. In the next instant reality kicked in, and I was astounded to have had that brief experience of thinking and feeling as if I were a man. It has never happened again.”
Anne Jones (pseudonym) was born in 1944, two months after her father was killed during an air raid. Even as a child she had felt there was somebody with her, never more so than when she started holidaying in Spain as a teenager. Since 1964 she has had recurring dreams in which she is always a child. “In the happy dreams I am laughing and dancing around the campfires, always with soldiers dressed as I imagine Roman soldiers were dressed. I’m in the camp with my father, who is not a soldier but always wears a white robe tied in the middle. In the bad dreams he puts me in a basket and lowers me over huge high walls, and I’m so frightened I can hardly breathe. He tells me to run away and save myself.”
A friend put the obvious interpretation of this dream to Anne—that she was looking for the father she had never seen. And she agreed with him until the following incident:
In 1989 1 again went to Spain for three months. I was staying near Málaga. I went for breakfast early one morning, and the waiter was being stroppy about understanding my Spanish (it’s strange that though I adore Spain and in spite of lessons galore I find the language difficult to grasp) when a voice behind me ordered just what I wanted. I turned to thank him and there was the dad from my dreams. I was so shocked I couldn’t speak, and he apologised for offending me and was gone.
A few days later I saw this man again having coffee, and I asked if I could join him and explain. I just felt I knew him, and he didn’t seem a bit surprised as I rambled on about my dreams.
In fact, we became friends, as he was taking time out as well. We did a lot of exploring in the mountains during the next few months, and when we finally had to part he explained that though I was much younger he felt me to be his mother in a previous life.
Unintelligible jargon is a quite common feature of dreams. One lucid dreamer described how he switched on a radio to listen to the shipping forecast, and, although to begin with it sounded to him just as the shipping forecast usually sounds, as he listened more carefully he realised that instead of the familiar sea areas—Rockall, Shannon, German Bight, North and South Uitsera, etc.—he was hearing the weather in nonexistent places such as Wolf and Sofa. Unintelligible dream-language quite often leads people to believe that they are glimpsing a past life in some foreign country, but could it be that this is just simple dream-jargon? K. Holsman describes such a dream, which he felt may have reflected some past-life memory:
I dreamed on five separate occasions I was helping two workmates manhandle a large wooden boat down towards the water’s edge using wooden rollers as a slipway. The weather was very cold and the shoreline made up from fist-sized pebbles. Our feet and lower part of our legs were shrouded with soft leather and kept in place with leather strapping crisscrossed from our feet and tied just below our knees. It was extremely hard work, but from my own experiences manual workers usually laugh, joke and horseplay around, which seems to assist in these heavy manual chores. By the witty and spontaneous comments voiced between us as we laboured, it was obvious we knew one another very well, and every comment uttered, but the uncanny thing is that I didn’t understand the language. It sounds positively contradictory to make such a comment—but can you possibly grasp my meaning of the situation?
The following dream, described by Christina G., also gives a very convincing picture of a past-life memory. Christina G. says she has always considered herself to be a level-headed middle-aged mum with no definite views one way or the other regarding reincarnation. Then,
One night late last summer I had a dream, or rather three dreams in succession. They were very vivid, and even now I can still recall them clearly. It was as if I was moving from early times to what I presume were, judging by the clothing wom by myself and others in the dream, the 1930s or 1940s (around the time I was born). Obviously, I have had dreams before and remembered them but never with such clarity.
In the first part of the dream I was standing on an apron or entrance to an extremely tall building. It was very hot, but the interior of the building was dark with tall narrow columns/pillars or even statues on the left going out into the dark interior (I could only see the left-hand side from where I was standing). I stood slightly apart from the group of people on my right, and as I entered the dream I heard myself speaking a language I didn’t understand. The people were listening to me respectfully, and I felt I was someone of importance. As I glanced down I saw I was wearing a white/cream robe or gown.
The dream then changed, and I was standing on a cobbled street leading up through the town. I had a feeling we were near the sea. The woman with me wore a green skirt and some sort of mobcap on her head. I was wearing a rust-brown skirt. We watched some soldiers come round the corner wearing metal helmets and carrying pikes or staffs. It suddenly became very important to rush to get some papers before the soldiers found them, and we ran up the steep street to a house. The papers were hidden between the wall and the floorboards in a room. The floorboards were polished a lovely golden colour. As I picked up the papers the dream changed again.
This time I was walking with a man down a country lane in front of a large house. It looked very gloomy and neglected. I noticed the man had an old-fashioned double-breasted suit and trilby, and although I couldn’t see it I knew I was wearing a black swagger-backed coat. As we turned up the side of the house, a woman came out of the house across the field next to the garden. She was either fair or grey-haired, wearing a blue floral old-fashioned wraparound pinny. She carried a wicker shopping basket and had a black labrador-type dog running around. She smiled and said it was a shame they had let the garden go—indicating the overgrown garden. We then carried on to the rear of the house and saw a large wooden cross lying on the ground. It was about eight feet long, one foot square, and had a crossbar close to the top. On the crossbar was a metal plate with the inscription “In loving memory of Heidi.” The man and I then turned towards the house and walked towards some french windows. As we walked forward I had the most terrible feeling of dread and reluctance to enter the house. I then woke up.
Even now I still feel curious about the language I was speaking in the first part of the dream, the urgency to find the papers in the second part, the feeling of unhappiness and dread in the third.
The fact that Christina G. was able to recall her dream in such detail does suggest that there was something special about it. But this degree of clarity and intensity of feeling do occur in ordinary dreams. Neither can we take her ability to speak a language she didn’t understand as an absolute indication of reincarnation. Just as in the earlier dream described, the appearance of dream-jargon masquerading as an unknown language suggests that, after all, it could be just a dream, an interesting and very vivid dream, but nevertheless felt by the dreamer to be indicative of reincarnation.
Mrs. N. R. Thomas is now seventy-five years old and says that for approximately twenty years she has lived secure in the knowledge that she died in the Great Fire of London. Since the sudden realisation of that, she has no longer been subjected to the terrifying nightmares that plagued her since she was a child.
I am unaware of my age when the waking nightmares began, but I must have been seven or eight when I recognised them as being exactly the same as I had experienced before, and began to fear the next. These were that I was an adult woman in a street; there was an unseen presence beside me, on the left, and in front were another woman and a man. We were all reaching the top of a slight incline and could see the way ahead in this street of tall houses. All the time the fearful roaring noise became worse, and the buildings on either side continued to fall upon us. I always tried to scream, but no sound ever emerged, then there was complete and suffocating darkness, Then I was again awake, with a great sense of relief. These nightmares seemed to begin while I was awake, and knowing what would follow I tried to escape them but never could. I remember that I wore some sort of black woollen dress that impeded my movements, although it seemed pretty shapeless, but ankle-length. For what it is worth, that is it. I know of nothing before this “death,” and I ask myself no questions about it. It has slotted into place and I fully accept it, finding some comfort in the acceptance of this in a way I cannot explain.
During dreaming sleep, although the cortex of the brain is aroused, providing the rich imagery of our dreams, the muscles are paralysed. This is the reason we cannot act out our dreams—and why when we see a dog dreaming in front of thefire he snuffles and whimpers and twitches, as if dreaming of chasing rabbits, but he does not—cannot—actually get to his feet and chase a dream rabbit around the room.
Usually, when we awake these two processes stop together; the paralysis goes, dream imagery vanishes, and waking consciousness returns. Sometimes, though, the wakening process doesn’t go through to completion. Then, although the person is partially awake, either the dream imagery, or the feeling of paralysis, or both, are still maintained. This is called “sleep paralysis,” and it can produce frightening feelings, such as the classic “incubus attack” when the sleeper wakes to feel a crushing weight on his chest, or sees some terrifying creature in the room and is unable to scream or to run away. The dreamer appears to waken, and, indeed, feels that he is fully awake, but in reality he has only partially aroused into a hallucinatory world.
Mrs. Thomas describes what happened to her very clearly. She mentions the “suffocating darkness,” the “fearful roaring noise” and buildings falling on her, the fact that she “tried to escape but never could” and the “woollen dress that impeded my movements,” and that she “tried to scream but no sound ever emerged.” Most significantly, she says that the nightmare episode seemed to begin when she was awake. All these point to the probability that what she was experiencing was an episode of sleep paralysis rather than a memory of death in the Great Fire of London. But what is more interesting is that the nightmares stopped when Mrs. Thomas had the sudden realisation that they were about a terrifying event in a previous life. This is perhaps an indication of how well past-life therapy can sometimes work—one wonders whether telling Mrs. Thomas that her nightmare experiences were merely the result of sleep paralysis would have had the same curative effect.
This interpretation comes from our current science, where experience is generated by the brain and when the brain dies so does the conscious life of the individual. There is now evidence that mind is not confined to just the brain, and the current scientific work on telepathy indicates that mind is extended through space and through time. In our book The Hidden Door we looked in some detail at precognitive and telepathic dreams. If these do occur (and there is persuasive evidence that sometimes they do), it leaves open the possibility that dreams of a past life are possible within that framework.
Sharon Bond is twenty-eight, married with three children. Her flashbacks to a previous life started about five years ago, around the time her stepmother, to whom she was very close, died. She says they are not dreams but “scenes” that she sees when she closes her eyes and tries to go to sleep, like a film being played in her mind. “I can see an old black and white photo of a boy around two years old dressed in satin shorts and top. He has got dark hair and eyes. I hear a voice in my head which tells me to speak to him. Then I see him as a man dressed in a First World War uniform, and he asks me if I know what it felt like to be shot in the belly. He calls me Sarah and says I’m his sister and that we were very close in my last life. He also says that he was killed in the First World War.”
Recently she has been finding these flashbacks very frightening, almost as though she is being haunted. Several times she has felt she can sense his presence in her room.
In my mind I can see my father, who was a Doctor of Zoology at the Natural History Museum in London. I can also see my brother, who was about six years older than me. I often have flashbacks to the house where I lived and to the museum. I feel I lived as a child around the turn of this century. I’ve also come up with the surname Forsyth. I rang the museum and asked if there was a Doctor of Zoology named Forsyth working there at around the turn of the century, and they told me that there was—a Lord Charles Forsyth Major.
Sharon described some of these flashbacks in more detail. In one, she is walking down a street behind her father, who is dressed in a black suit and top hat. He is holding a walking-stick, which he taps to hurry her up. In another, she is again with her father going into the Natural History Museum. As she looks up she can see a skeleton of a dinosaur. She feels scared but doesn’t tell her father. It seems a dark, cold place, and she doesn’t like it very much. A third flashback has a definite nightmare quality—she is being chased by her brother and his friend. As she gets to a wooden door, her brother opens it and pushes her into the room, which is dark apart from the light from the door. As she looks up she can see a stuffed grizzly bear staring back at her. With this she panics and runs from the room.
She is sitting on the staircase in the house where she lives and has three dolls with her. One is on her lap. In the hallway is a group of men dressed in black suits. One comes over to her and admires her doll. Then a maid comes along and takes her upstairs so that she is out of the way. She also sees herself in a room sitting at a piano, her brother standing beside her teaching her the keys. In another scene she is in the kitchen standing at a huge wooden table, helping the cook make some pastry. The cook tells her: “Don’t tell your father you’ve been helping me in the kitchen or he will be angry with me.” The cook calls her “my lovely.”
The final flashback is at a railway station. She is with her father seeing her brother off as he goes to war. On the door of the train is a number one in gold. There are people everywhere, some crying. As the train starts she runs to the door where her brother is by the window and kisses him and tells him to “keep safe.”
The twilight zone that you enter just as you are dropping off to sleep or in the first moments of waking can give rise to weird, dream-like visions (called hypnagogia if they occur as you are falling asleep, hypnopompia if they occur on waking). These visions are usually fragments of experience, although they can occasionally have a story running through them. They have a hallucinatory quality about them, and often there is no logic linking the scenes. Science can describe these only as pictures being drawn from the memory banks of the brain and having no meaning beyond this. If a wider view of mind is taken, they might easily be interpreted as flashbacks of memory from another life.
Peter Thompson (pseudonym) is a well-balanced, capable and rational man, well educated and holding a position as a senior engineer in local government. Ever since he had this experience he has been searching for an explanation for it:
One Saturday evening my wife and I were sitting in the lounge watching TV, and probably I had been sitting there for perhaps fifteen minutes before the experience occurred. While it happened there was clarity of thought, but the way it started is strange. While looking at the TV the surrounds around disappeared, everything went black because some senses, for example sight and sound, apparently stopped working. The manner in which this happened was as if an image disappeared, as when an older TV shuts down, my vision withdrew to a centre circle point and went out, everything around just went.
At first it was a shock, and while still sitting I thought I had gone blind and deaf or suffered a stroke, but then the next event was that my body went horizontal. There was an incredible force upon me which pushed me down to a horizontal position. This was definitely confusing and frightening, because it meant that I had gone straight down into or through the back of the chair. [At this point Philip thought he must be dying, but then his vision suddenly returned.] I became aware that I was leaning against a wooden post in a hall and looked down to find I was holding a drink and wearing corduroy trousers with a waistcoat. Looking around, it was apparent I was in a music hall, but the people were wearing older, possibly Victorian-style clothing. There weren’t many people in the audience, and there was a lady dressed in black holding her hat, with a friend. The lady turned and looked at me. My gaze then diverted forward to the stage, upon which an overly made-up and chubby red-faced man was singing and dancing. He wore a garish checked suit, while his female assistant wore a sort of thick whitish Basque costume with thick woollen tights. Smoke from lighting lamps was rising. I looked down at the front of the stage, where a row of shells could be seen which presumably housed oil or candle lamps which lit the stage and performers.
Next I looked to my left and saw people who may have been friends standing talking. There was a noise above me; looking up, I could see the dark wood floorboards of a mezzanine floor on which someone was moving a chair about. The post against which I was leaning supported this floor. Again I looked at the performers and suddenly the experience changed and reversed and the vision stopped. Again I was horizontal and the strong force suddenly returned me to the vertical sitting position into the chair and normal surroundings returned.
At this point I did not know what had happened and leaped out of the chair in fright, asking my wife what had happened. Mary did not know what I was going on about: apparently, she had not seen anything happen. The experience probably only lasted two or three minutes.
Perhaps I fell asleep, but I do not fall asleep easily and certainly have never dozed in a chair. Nothing similar has happened since.
Because Peter Thompson’s account is so accurate and detailed we can say that this was almost certainly a hypnagogic experience. It happened when he was on the borders of sleep, and the experience was ushered in by loss of vision and sound. This is exactly what happens when you start to drop off to sleep: if you have ever nearly nodded off on a motorway, you will have noticed that your hearing changes and your vision becomes partially dominated by internal imagery before something fortunately alerts you and you call in at the next motorway station for a coffee. Changes in physical sensation are also very common in hypnagogia; feelings of falling, spinning and flying all occur, as does the sensation of a sudden forcible change in body position.
Peter Thompson’s experience fits very neatly into this category. And if we accept that this was indeed a hypnagogic experience, there is no need to consider a previous life as an explanation. There is probably nothing in the visual imagery that couldn’t easily have been recalled from his present-day memory. Science can certainly explain the mechanism of this dream. It’s impossible for anyone to explain the content of a dream unless he knows everything about the dreamer. Only the dreamer himself or herself is truly in a position to be able to do this.
Dream memory is quite capable of playing the same tricks on us as waking memory. Mrs. Kathleen Cliff had this recurring dream as a child: “I dreamed I was a girl of about seventeen with long, straight red hair. I was wearing a long dress that reached my feet, and I was stood on cliffs looking out to sea with a man who was my father. We were waiting for my brother Michael, who had gone out on a fishing-boat and hadn’t returned. There was a feeling of loss and that he didn’t return. The place was Ireland: how I knew this I don’t know.” The dream recurred until she was seven, then stopped. It wasn’t until she was about ten and her parents had a TV for the first time that she saw a holiday programme about Ireland. Watching this, she turned to her mother and said: “I’ve been there.”
From the information she gives, Kathleen’s dream—cliffs looking out over the sea—does not sound specific enough to enable it to be identified as any particular place. But if a similar cliff and a sea scene were shown in the film about Ireland, they might well have triggered off a feeling of recognition, though without more detail we can’t be sure. Kathleen does, however, add that “I also feel strangely drawn to Catholicism. I am not a Catholic, nor are any members of my family, but I feel that I was once, and sometimes if I pass a Catholic church I have an urge to go in. But being a sensible, logical person, I try and shrug it off.”
Terry Courtnadge had a dream in 1980 which convinced him that he had lived before. He saw himself very clearly standing at the bow of a wooden ship entering a harbour which he did not recognise. Two years later he saw TV pictures of the city of Boston, USA, celebrating its 350-year-old history, and the harbour appeared exactly as it had done in his dream. Could he, after two years, have remembered the harbour he visited in his dream accurately enough to identify it as Boston Harbour? It does seem equally likely that he may have seen and forgotten pictures of Boston Harbour before, and that is why they appeared in his dream and later triggered feelings of recognition when he saw them on television.
When we are thinking about explanations for any of these experiences, we must be aware that we are looking at them through the filters of our current world-view, which limits the range of explanations possible. Sometimes, though, we have to decide whether the scientific explanation for one of these past-life dreams is less persuasive than the non-scientific alternative. In the following account, Stan Bailey describes how he found a place he had visited often in his dreams. Remember that although his description of the place—a village green where three roads met—might fit any number of English villages, Stan, a town boy, hadn’t actually seen any such village greens, though he may, of course, have seen pictures of them in books.
I was born and brought up in Gravesend, north Kent. From the age of about three for about twelve years I had a recurring dream. It was of a place in the country where three roads met, forming a sort of small village green. On the green were a few small trees and a number of seats, and alongside the road on one side was a large brick barn. Nothing ever happened in the dream; I just stood there looking. Then in 1932, at the age of fifteen, I was out cycling with friends one day when we passed through this site. I nearly fell off my bike looking back, I was so surprised. Arriving home, I questioned my mother as to whether I had ever been taken there in childhood. She was quite adamant that I had not. She had no friends or relatives living there, and few people had cars in the 1920s: we certainly did not.
The place was Longfield, and everything was exactly as I had seen it in my dreams, which I had had three or four times a year over twelve years. I can remember telling my mother many times on waking that I had dreamed of “that place in the country again” (I was a town boy).
Needless to say I didn’t dream of it again. For me it raises interesting questions. What happened on that green? Did I live near it, or play on it, or did it have some connection with my death?
It is interesting to note that once he had identified the “place in the country” the dream stopped, as though finding the source of the dream had finally laid a ghost. Others have commented on this: Elizabeth Paradise, for example, reported that her young brother’s memories of his “other house” seemed to vanish once he had satisfied himself that he had found it.
We are so locked into our scientific world-view that we prefer explanations of cryptomnesia or random dream imagery. But supposing we were to take a wider view and consider the possibility that dreams such as Stan Bailey’s might be due to remote viewing (getting an image of a distant place by focusing the attention on it) or precognition? Not an explanation orthodox science could accept (though there is now good scientific evidence that both precognition and remote viewing occur) but not necessarily a past-life one. It would seem that using a past-life explanation adds another layer of complexity.
As a child, and throughout the early years of her life, Jean Wall used to have “dreams,” or so she thought, of a large white house with a balcony around the first floor and balustrades on the front. She had all sort of memories of childhood in that house:
Being scolded for going out on to the balcony because I could fall. The feel of my clothes on my body. Fastening boots up with a buttonhook, and lots more. Then in 1985 my husband and I had a holiday on the QEII that took us to New York. We booked a coach-trip to enable us to see more in the three days we were there. On the second day we went to see the oldest house in Manhattan. I couldn’t believe it. There was my house. I always knew I would recognise it when I saw it but never thought I would have to travel 3,000 miles to find it. As we were waiting to go in, I was busy describing the inside to my husband. I told him that when we go up the stairs, offset to the right of a corridor was the balcony where I was scolded.
Immediately opposite to that was a similar portion of balcony, but I never went out at that point because the bedroom of the person who scolded me overlooked it. When we went into the nursery on the second floor, my husband commented that the floor had sunk to the front, and I said: “Oh no, it’s always had a slope on it.”
None of the furniture was right, apart from one room, and it all looked so neglected; the gardens looked dreadful. But of course they don’t have a National Trust or Heritage to take care of such things. It took me completely by surprise. The only way I could have known that house was by living in it, and believe me I did, from the age of eight to thirteen.
Cryptomnesia really does not seem to fit the facts in this case. And yet if we accept that this really was a past-life memory, we also have to acknowledge a very hefty coincidence—that Mrs. Wall’s previous incarnation took place in the oldest house in New York and that this particular house has been preserved. Given this, the fact that she visited it is not so surprising. Another explanation, and in some ways one that is easier to believe, is that Mrs. Wall had a precognitive dream. As already mentioned, many people do have such dreams and sometimes subsequent events seem to confirm the dream prediction. However, precognition is not entirely satisfactory as an explanation, because in her dream she saw herself as a young child—there is an element of past as well as future time in the dream.
We are so used to the idea of linear time, progressing from past to future, that it is difficult to think of time in any other way. But the evidence now is that in parapsychological experiments time is not like this, and non-linear time is a concept that is now widely accepted in physics. Even within our present scientific framework, we can’t dismiss apparent shifts in time as easily as we could have done twenty years ago. Who knows whether in another twenty years’ time we will even have a mechanism for past-life experiences?
Perhaps the most intriguing dream-recognition experience is described by Philip Pratley. All his life Philip has had a recurring dream in which he is walking up a spiral staircase that gets smaller and smaller as he ascends. Eventually, he gets stuck, can go no further and wakes up. One day, on holiday in Normandy with his wife Terry, they visited a small château, Gratot, where legend had it that 600 years ago the lord of Gratot had been married to a fairy. As soon as Philip started to walk up the spiral staircase leading to the fairy’s tower, he realised that this was the staircase of his dream. “I stopped. Terry bumped into me. Not really believing myself in what I was saying, I told her of my dream. With some alarm she asked what happens when I get stuck. The answer was nothing, nothing at all. I just wake up. We continued climbing, my hands inexplicably cold, an odd sensation at the back of my neck. The staircase was some four feet wide, the access clear and unobstructed. Two more complete spirals and it was a different matter. The staircase finished, and a small, narrower one commenced. With some trepidation . . . I stepped on to the first tread. Ten steps later, I was stuck. The walls closed in, the spiral tightened. I backed off, took off my coat and went up again. This time, with much effort, I pushed my seventeen-stone frame through to the top.” Since this incident, Philip says, the dream has stopped.
Was it simply coincidence that the tower corresponded so closely to Philip’s dream? Probably. But if we want a more romantic answer, there are two available. We can see it as a precognitive dream, a shift forwards out of time. Or we can interpret it as a past-life memory. Philip adds what he considers to be a piece of corroborative evidence. On the landing at the top of the tower, names were carved into the soft sandstone surrounding the door of the fairy’s chamber. Most were dated between 1820 and 1840, when the castle was still occupied. It must, he suggests, have been the done thing for guests at Gratot to carve their names on the entrance to the fairy chamber. The names were written out in full, the Christian name followed by the surname. All except one, where just the initials were carved, with no date. The initials were Philip’s own: PP!