Apparitions/dreams verified: Rawlett excerpt #19

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Ian Stevenson investigated a case in which a Burmese woman, Daw Kyin Htein, experienced an apparition of a family friend a few months after his death in a plane crash. The apparition happened one night as she was returning from a trip to the outhouse. When she saw her deceased friend, she invited him to reincarnate into her family. Then she went to sleep and had a dream of him as well, one in which his mother and sister (both still living) asked him to go with them but he declined. The mother of the deceased also apparently had a dream—it’s not clear if it was on the same night—in which her son said he was going to live with U Ba Hein, Daw Kyin Htein’s husband.

Soon after this, Daw Kyin Htein conceived a son, Maung Yin Maung, who had memories of being her deceased friend. Furthermore, at the age of 12, he reported to Stevenson that he remembered being near Daw Kyin Htein’s home after his death. He saw someone he thought was her coming out of an outhouse. He remembered “showing himself” to this person as an apparition, and he remembered her inviting him to become her child. He also remembered communicating with his former personality’s mother and sister. They asked him to be reborn with them, but he said he was going to be reborn into Daw Kyin Htein’s family instead.

As this example shows, sometimes apparitions of the dead double as apparitions to future parents. Although dreams seem to be a more common form of communication with future parents,  it’s not unheard of for parents to see waking apparitions of their future children. However, I know of only one other case in which someone retained a first-person memory of appearing in this way to a future parent.

Intermission memories also offer corroboration for dreams of the deceased. In another Burmese case investigated by Stevenson, a woman dreamt that her deceased husband told her he’d left some money (a 5-kyat note) wrapped in a white handkerchief inside a small box of basket work. She then found the box, the handkerchief, and the money. Later, a Burmese boy was born who, around age three, began recalling a past life that matched that of this woman’s husband. He also remembered coming to his wife in a dream after death and telling her where to find 5 kyats wrapped in a white handkerchief. The boy wanted to know if his former wife had had such a dream, and she confirmed it.

In one more Burmese case, a grown man with past-life memories remembered how, after dying, he’d been guided by an old man dressed in white, first to the house where he’d lived before dying and then to another house nearby, which belonged to the family of the village headman, to whom he was subsequently reborn. In his memory, the old man asked him to wait outside at the first house, and at the second one, after first being told to wait outside, he was then told to enter and that he must stay there. As it happened, this man’s wife from his former life had a dream a week after his death in which an old man in white appeared to her and said he was sending her husband to the house of the village headman. When his wife went to the headman’s wife the next morning to tell her about her dream, she discovered that the headman’s wife had also had a dream. In that one, a man had told her that he was bringing the recently deceased man to be in her family. Then the man went outside and brought the deceased man in before ultimately disappearing. 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.