In one of Ohkado and Ikegawa’s cases, a child told her mother, “I saw you in a gorgeous white dress. You were holding a dog.” The mother clearly recalled that, after her wedding but while she was still wearing her wedding dress, she had returned to a room where her dog was being kept and held it.
In a case collected by researcher Carol Bowman and reported in her book Return from Heaven, a two-year-old remembered hovering over his mother before his birth and seeing her cut her finger and go to the hospital for stitches. He even mentioned that she’d been wearing a yellow dress. All of this was true, but he couldn’t have seen the dress after he was born because it had gotten blood on it and his mom had thrown it away immediately afterward.
In another book by Bowman, Hilda Swiger describes a trip to Epcot with her four-year-old grandson Randy. It was Randy’s first trip to the resort, but when they went into a certain restaurant, he insisted that his dad was about to sit in the wrong place. Randy pointed to a table and said, “That’s where you sat before.” Not long after Randy was conceived, the family had come to Epcot, and they’d sat at that table. When his dad asked how he knew this, Randy said, “Oh, I was following you and Mommy around that day when you came here before I was born.”
James Leininger’s parents report that, when he was four years old, he told his dad, “When I found you and Mommy, I knew you would be good to me.” His dad asked where he’d found them, and James replied it had been in Hawaii. “It was not when we all went to Hawaii,” he said. “It was just Mommy and you. ... I found you at the big pink hotel. ... I found you on the beach. You were eating dinner at night.” James’ parents had once stayed at a pink hotel in Hawaii, five weeks before he was conceived. On their last night, they’d eaten dinner on the beach in the moonlight.
According to two studies, approximately half of those who have intermission memories recall something about how they came to their parents.211 There are even cases that include memories of the events directly surrounding conception, and these memories sometimes persist into adulthood, as the next few examples demonstrate.
One grown woman remembered her whole life having a vision of herself floating above her parents in a mountain cabin, feeling love and excitement. As an adult, she finally decided to mention her vision to her mother and described in detail the cabin she’d seen. It turned out this was the place her mother and father had secretly made love for the first time, a week before their wedding, although they’d always said she’d been conceived on the wedding night.
An older gentleman named Rennie, who had a distinguished career as a U.S. Air Force pilot and intelligence officer, reports that when he was seven, he mentioned to his mother that he remembered where he was before he was born. Then he asked her, “Was I placed with you and Dad when you were in the front seat of a car?” She brushed him off, calling his suggestion “indecent.” But in his mid-20s, he asked his parents about it again. Specifically, he asked if they’d conceived him in the front seat of their 1917 Overland. They were embarrassed to discuss it, but when he told them the details he remembered—how they’d opened the car door and his mother had checked to be sure Rennie’s sister was asleep in the back—they confirmed everything he said.
A 45-year-old woman named Nan also reports a verified conception memory. She remembers her father coming home while her mother was making lunch and taking her into the bathroom. Her mom insisted she needed to put in her diaphragm, but he said not to worry about it. “I can remember that,” says Nan. “I thought, ‘Now is my chance. Here is my door.’” When she was an adult, Nan finally told her mom about this memory and had it confirmed that she and Nan’s father had had sex in the bathroom at lunchtime and that it was the one time they didn’t use a diaphragm.
In contrast to these conception cases, other children don’t seem to find their parents until the pregnancy is some ways along. An Indian Christian named Prashant still had a memory at age 40 of coming down from the clouds toward Earth, “zooming in” until she noticed a kind of market or bazaar where there was a joyful couple singing together while they clasped hands. “The man was wearing a light blue sweater and blue jeans,” she says. “[T]he woman was dressed in a traditional Indian orange sari.” She got even closer to the woman and remembered entering her uterus and what it felt like to be inside the womb. When she was a child, Prashant thought of this memory as a dream, but at age 17, she told her parents about it, and they confirmed that, when Prashant’s mother was four months pregnant with her, they had worn those precise clothes to the engagement ceremony of a friend. It was the only day they’d ever held hands and sung in public, and they were at the New Delhi South Extension market.
Finally, I should mention that there are children and adults who remember pregnancies associated with themselves being miscarried or aborted. Often they returned to the same mother in a later pregnancy, or sometimes to another family member.
One of the most detailed memories I’ve seen in this category comes from a case reported by Elizabeth and Neil Carman in their 2013 book Cosmic Cradle. It involves another Elizabeth (not identified as the author of Cosmic Cradle) who, as soon as she could talk, told her mother, “I was in your tummy twice. The first time, I washed away. The second time, I came out like a zipper.” Her mother had never talked to Elizabeth about her miscarriage. And coming out “like a zipper” seems like a pretty accurate way for a toddler to describe a C-section, which was how Elizabeth had been born.
Many years later, at age 28, Elizabeth still had a vivid memory of the miscarriage. She said,
Mom was taking a shower. She had her hands on her head shampooing her hair. The last thing I saw was her looking down at me; then I went down the drain. I did not feel pain. I remember the strong thump of hitting the shower floor, shaking everything within my core. I recall falling out of her body in slow motion and the emptiness and vastness. I felt exposed, no longer being in the womb, feeling unprotected. The drain was dark; it slowly started closing up, and at that point, I died. Everything stopped. I ceased to have awareness of that experience.
Elizabeth’s mother confirmed these details. When she was 12 weeks along with her previous pregnancy, she felt something fall out of her in the shower: a white glob two or three inches long.
Interestingly, Elizabeth actually remembered initiating the miscarriage. When she was seven, she was riding in the car with her mom in a neighborhood she’d never been to before when she pointed at a non-descript building and said she’d been in that building before. Her mom confirmed that this was the building where she’d gone to the doctor during the pregnancy she’d lost. “That was me,” said Elizabeth. “I was a boy, and you and dad had a fight. I chose to leave and come back as a girl.” It was true that her mother had sensed her baby was going to be a boy, and she’d fought with her husband about whether to circumcise him. Neither of them was willing to budge on the issue. Once she was an adult, Elizabeth was able to explain that she’d known her parents were in danger of divorcing over the circumcision question. “I needed them to stay together to fulfill what I came here to do,” she says. “So I chose to leave.” Though her mother had never previously connected the two events, she did confirm that the miscarriage had happened the morning after the circumcision argument.
Intermission memories clearly provide an essential piece of first-person evidence for consciousness apart from the body, expanding on the experiences of provisional death provided by NDEs and the evidence provided by the memories and personalities of deceased persons that recur in new bodies. Intermission memories provide crucial evidence that memories of previous lives are not caused by mere psychic access to the past but are due to an actual continuity of consciousness stretching from death in a previous life through birth into a new one.
I want to emphasize that intermission memories of using apparitions, dreams, and poltergeist effects to contact people left behind complement NDErs’ memories of contacting people through apparitions. Together, they provide crucial evidence that, when these phenomena occur after death, they are at least sometimes not mere super-psi simulations but actual reflections of the ongoing, first-person consciousness of the deceased.
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.
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