Recalling prebirth events: Rawlette excerpt #21

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—It’s very common for intermission memories to include observations of events in the life of the family the child will later be born into, events that occurred before the child’s birth—or, in many cases, even before their conception. In Ohkado and Ikegawa’s investigation of 21 Japanese children with memories from a pre-birth existence, 15 of the children (71%) reported being able to see what was happening on earth before they were born.

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.

Surviving death cases: Rawlette excerpt #20

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Memories of contact with the living during the intermission period aren’t limited to apparitions and dreams, either. I’ve come across two cases where people remembered being involved in poltergeist phenomena, both of them from India. In the first case, a child in Uttar Pradesh reported that, after his death in a previous life, he hung out near his previous family’s house and sometimes took their food. The family in question confirmed that they noticed food inexplicably disappearing during that time. In the other case, a boy named Veer Singh reported that, after dying, he stayed in a tree outside his former family’s home. One day, he got annoyed at two women who were playing in a swing hanging from a branch of his tree. Realizing he might kill them if he broke off the branch the swing was attached to, he waited until the swing was low in its arc and then caused the wooden seat to break. His father from his previous life remembered an accident like this occurring after his son’s death.

Encountering Other Spirits of the Deceased

Another important element found in both NDEs and intermission memories is memories of meetings with others who have died. There are many accounts of young children reporting familiarity with relatives who died before they were born, and these claims can sometimes be independently verified.

In a case that Jim Tucker investigated alongside Ian Stevenson, a boy named Patrick Christenson had some memories of his deceased half-brother’s life and also had three scars in locations where his half-brother had been deformed. Furthermore, Patrick said that, while in heaven, he spoke with a relative of the family named “Billy the Pirate” who told him he’d died in the mountains after being shot at close range. Patrick’s mother had never heard of anyone like this in her family, but afterward she learned of a cousin with the nickname “Billy the Pirate” who had died just as Patrick reported.

There’s also the case of James Leininger, the boy who remembered being James Huston, a World War II pilot shot down in the Iwo Jima operation. Between ages three and six, James received three G. I. Joe dolls as presents, and he gave them the names Billie, Leon, and Walter. His family was surprised by the unusual names, and when they asked him about it, he said he gave them those names because that was who met him in heaven. It turned out that only 10 men from James Huston’s squadron on Natoma Bay were killed prior to his own death. Three of them were named Billie, Leon, and Walter, and their hair colors matched those of James’s G. I. Joe dolls, with Billie’s hair being brown, Leon’s blond, and Walter’s red.

Cases like this provide not only first-person evidence for the prebirth existence of the child who has the memory but also third-person evidence for the continuing, disembodied consciousness of the deceased person they remember encountering in the intermission period. 

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.

 

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.

 

Recalling funeral or burial: Rawlette excerpt #18

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Those who remember dying in a previous life also sometimes remember viewing their funeral and/or burial. In some cases, they mention something unexpected that was done with their body that can then be verified. In a Sri Lankan case, a girl named Disna Samarasinghe remembered her body being buried near an anthill, which was indeed true of the body of the person whose life she remembered. Disna was also able to point out the location of her unmarked grave.

In one of Ian Stevenson’s cases, a young Thai woman remembered that her previous body—that of a mere baby—wasn’t buried in the village cemetery as it should have been, but rather outside of it. She confronted the undertaker responsible, and he admitted to having done this thing that apparently no one else knew about.

This next case comes from Hertfordshire, England, and was reported by Mary and Peter Harrison in their book The Children That Time Forgot. It involves a young girl, Mandy Seabrook, who appeared to be the reincarnation of her sister who had died at the age of five months. Even though the family never spoke about her deceased sister, when Mandy was two years old, she started recounting memories of having been this other child. One day, while riding past the cemetery where her sister was buried, two-year-old Mandy exclaimed, “Look, Mummy! That’s the place you put me in the ground that time, and you nearly fell on top of me, remember?” 

At the time of the burial, her mother had been taking medication to help her deal with the shock, and she had been so out of sorts that she had lost her balance at the graveside and almost fallen into the hole with the coffin. Mandy also said she’d been buried with a silver bracelet and a fluffy yellow ball. Her mother remembered the existence of the bracelet and the yellow ball, but she only remembered the former being in the casket. Nevertheless, when questioned, an older sibling confessed to having slipped the yellow ball under the dead baby’s body.

One other interesting aspect of this case is that, when Mandy was six, she asked her mother, “Do you remember the night I died? There was a bright star shining in the sky.” When her mother thought back, she realized that she had in fact noticed a star out over the garden, unusually bright and low, and had mentioned it to someone else at the time. Mandy continued, “That was my star. It was my way of telling you that I would be back.” This is the only case I’ve come across in which a child remembered using a sign or synchronicity to communicate after death in their previous life. 

 

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.

 

 

Children recall prior death: Rawlette excerpt #17

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Let’s start with cases of children who not only have a vivid memory of their death in a previous life but also recall what happened immediately afterward. Many of their descriptions, though fairly simple, bear a strong resemblance to NDEs.

For example, Rylann O’Bannion, the girl who remembered dying when a plane crashed in her backyard during a thunderstorm, told her mom at the age of three, “It was raining a lot. There was a loud noise, then the rain shocked me. I floated up to the sky then.”

In another case, a Brazilian girl named Silvia mixed Italian words into her speech from the time she started talking, even though no one around her spoke Italian. She also had a fear of airplanes flying overhead. This fear appeared linked to her memories of living in a place she called the “capitolio,” where planes would drop bombs. Like Rylann, she was three years old when she told her grandmother about a boy who was carrying a bomb that blew up and hurt her and her friend. “Then my friend and me, we went up and up,” she said. Her grandmother asked if she meant up the stairs of the capitolio, but she said, “No, Grandma, we went up, high up there.” When her grandmother asked what happened next, Silvia replied, “I don’t know. Then I came here.”

Another Brazilian child, Kilden, had more precise memories of his death. He announced to his mother, again around the age of three, that his name was “Alexandre” (this was in fact Kilden’s middle name) and he was “the priest.” A decade ago, his mother had been friends with a priest she called Alexandre, and he had died in a car accident—or so she had heard at the time. Her friendship with the deceased priest was the reason she had given her son the middle name Alexandre. Now Kilden not only insisted that his true name was Alexandre, not Kilden, but also said that, when he had been a priest, he was hit by a truck when he was riding a motorcycle. He fell over, hit his head, and died. When his mother checked the facts of her friend’s death, she discovered he had indeed been hit by a truck while on a motorcycle. He’d fallen on his head and died in the hospital the next day.

Years later, around age 13, Kilden heard about a man who died after falling off a ladder, and he started explaining to his mother what happens when someone has an accident like that:

The person who suffered the accident arrives and is put in a room full of instruments. The doctors connect them.... Then the equipment is connected to the chest and the head, and the doctors keep trying to save the life of the person. At this point the person flies into a corner of the ceiling, watching the doctors’ fight to save him. Then a big hole like a funnel appeared in the corner of the wall near me, trying to suck me [in]....

His mother interrupted to ask if he was talking about himself or someone else. He said, “I think it was me. I saw my body and the doctors trying to save me.” He then continued his description, changing again between the third and first person:

When he was sucked through the hole into the tunnel, he saw a strong light at the end, so strong that I turned my head to one side. The light was very bright, and the hole closed behind him, near the wall. At that moment the doctors saw the screen on their machine stop.

Other children have after-death memories of being escorted by guides of some kind. Jim Tucker reports that a boy named Kenny who had detailed memories of dying in a vehicle accident “said that after he died, another spirit, probably the driver of the vehicle, took him by the hand, and the two of them were with other spirits in what seemed to be a huge hall.”

Three-year-old Stephen Ramsay remembered fighting as a soldier in a jungle-like place and dying when a plane “came down and hurt my tummy.” “That was when I died,” he said. “My tummy got hurt and it was bleeding.” Stephen said he then fell asleep, and when he woke up, he was still in the trees, but his tummy felt all better. Then, he says, “[a] lady came to see me. ... She was a nice lady and she told me to follow her. She took my hand and took me with her.” He gave an extended description of the place where the lady took him: a place where people rested after dying and waited until it was time for them to be born to new parents.

This next account comes from someone who retained past-life memories into adulthood. The Venerable Chaokhun Rajsuthajarn, a Buddhist abbot in Thailand, published his description of his memories in 1969, before NDEs had been widely written about. But his account of what happened at the moment of his death sounds very much like the experience many NDErs report of being able to go anywhere instantly and perceive anyone just by thinking about them, while at the same time having difficulty communicating with those still in living bodies. Regarding the time just after his death, when he was still realizing that he was dead, he wrote,

I felt stronger and could move much more rapidly from place to place. My body was light, as if it had no weight. I was so glad that I rushed up to join the conversation of my relatives. But no one noticed me. I grabbed this one’s hand and pulled that one’s arm, to draw their attention. Still, no one did anything. ... I could not make them understand [that I was all right].

They were crying and moaning. Some of them went to tell other relatives and friends in the neighborhood. The latter were now pouring into the house. At that moment, I felt as if I were omnipresent: I could simultaneously see people coming in from two or three different directions. Moreover, I could be there to receive them all at the same time. I could also hear their voices as well as see things quite clearly.

Far distant places appeared to be near, because I could move very rapidly from place to place. I could immediately be there to hear or see. There seemed to be no obstacle at all.

Those who remember dying in a previous life also sometimes remember viewing their funeral and/or burial. In some cases, they mention something unexpected that was done with their body that can then be verified.

In one of Ian Stevenson’s cases, a young Thai woman remembered that her previous body—that of a mere baby—wasn’t buried in the village cemetery as it should have been, but rather outside of it. She confronted the undertaker responsible, and he admitted to having done this thing that apparently no one else knew about.

In a Sri Lankan case, a girl named Disna Samarasinghe remembered her body being buried near an anthill, which was indeed true of the body of the person whose life she remembered. Disna was also able to point out the location of her unmarked grave.

This next case comes from Hertfordshire, England, and was reported by Mary and Peter Harrison in their book The Children That Time Forgot. It involves a young girl, Mandy Seabrook, who appeared to be the reincarnation of her sister who had died at the age of five months. Even though the family never spoke about her deceased sister, when Mandy was two years old, she started recounting memories of having been this other child. One day, while riding past the cemetery where her sister was buried, two-year-old Mandy exclaimed, “Look, Mummy! That’s the place you put me in the ground that time, and you nearly fell on top of me, remember?” At the time of the burial, her mother had been taking medication to help her deal with the shock, and she had been so out of sorts that she had lost her balance at the graveside and almost fallen into the hole with the coffin. Mandy also said she’d been buried with a silver bracelet and a fluffy yellow ball. Her mother remembered the existence of the bracelet and the yellow ball, but she only remembered the former being in the casket. Nevertheless, when questioned, an older sibling confessed to having slipped the yellow ball under the dead baby’s body.

One other interesting aspect of this case is that, when Mandy was six, she asked her mother, “Do you remember the night I died? There was a bright star shining in the sky.” When her mother thought back, she realized that she had in fact noticed a star out over the garden, unusually bright and low, and had mentioned it to someone else at the time. Mandy continued, “That was my star. It was my way of telling you that I would be back.” This is the only case I’ve come across in which a child remembered using a sign or synchronicity to communicate after death in their previous life.

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.

NDE memories of rebirth: Rawlette excerpt #16

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Accounts from NDErs in which they retain consciousness between the time of death and the time at which they attempt to enter a new body lead naturally to what is perhaps the strongest piece of evidence that past-life memories indicate actual survival of consciousness: the fact that many children with past-life memories also retain memories of the intermission period between the old life and this one. If consciousness were wholly dependent on the brain and these children were just psychically accessing the past consciousness of the deceased, we would expect the consciousness they were accessing to end abruptly at the moment of the previous death, and yet many of their memories continue far beyond that moment. They not only correlate with NDErs’ experiences of the period immediately surrounding death but also contain accurate observations about funerary events, other deceased people they remember meeting while in a disembodied state, and events that happened in their future family’s life before their birth, or even their conception. As we’ll see, some of those with intermission memories even remember having contact with their loved ones after death, by coming to them in dreams or manifesting as apparitions or poltergeists.

According to two studies, memories of the period between death and rebirth show up in about 20% of cases of past-life memory, though researchers Ohkado Masayuki and Ikegawa Akira suggest they may be underreported. An analysis of Burmese cases of past-life memory conducted by Poonam Sharma and Jim Tucker shows that intermission memories are significantly correlated with a higher number of verified statements about a previous life, including names. As Sharma and Tucker put it, “their reports of events from the intermission period seem to be part of a pattern of a stronger memory for items preceding their current lives.” In other words, the fact that intermission memories correlate with verified statements about previous lives lends credibility to the intermission memories, which often can’t be verified (but sometimes can, as we’ll soon see).

It’s worth mentioning, too, that memories of the intermission period aren’t only found among people with past-life memories. Anecdotes regarding “pre-birth memories” abound, and books dedicated to the topic include Elisabeth Hallett’s Stories of the Unborn Soul, Sarah Hinze’s We Lived in Heaven, and Wayne W. Dyer and Dee Garnes’ Memories of Heaven. Ohkado and Ikegawa compared stand-alone intermission memories with those that accompanied past-life memories and found no notable differences in content.

It’s also true that some adults retain detailed memories of a pre-birth existence. Two book-length first-person accounts written by adults are Toni Maguire’s Memories of the Light and Roy Mills’ The Soul’s Remembrance. And, as with memories of previous lives, many apparent memories of the intermission period have been evoked in adults through hypnotic regression. However, all the memories I’ll describe in this essay occurred spontaneously without hypnosis. 

 

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.

 

Recalling previous lives: Rawlette excerpt #15

Jim Tucker

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Another frequently recurring feature of these cases is the presence, not just of verbally expressed memories, but of behaviors that match what would be expected of the person in the previous life. Phobias are one example. Ian Stevenson wrote that, out of 252 cases he studied in which the death of the previous person was violent, in 50% of them, the child remembering the death had a corresponding phobia (for instance, a fear of water if they remembered drowning).

Other behaviors reported in children with past-life memories are more idiosyncratic reflections of the past personality they remember. A young girl named Rylann O’Bannion was afraid of thunderstorms and told her mother she’d died in the backyard when there was a loud noise and the rain shocked her. On another occasion, Rylann said she remembered seeing a plane crash when she was standing in the yard. She also remembered the name “Jennifer” and said the year 1971 felt “familiar” to her. These clues helped Rylann’s mother discover a girl named Jennifer Shultz who had died outside her home when a plane crashed into her neighborhood during a thunderstorm. This Jennifer had been born in 1971. In addition to her memories that matched Jennifer’s death, Rylann also exhibited behaviors that were later discovered to match Jennifer’s. They both had the unusual habit of opening and closing the drawers in their bathroom vanities, not to take anything out of them but just to look inside. And both girls created owls from yarn that they then perched on sticks. This commonality can’t be chalked up to a fad in children’s crafts, as Rylann and Jennifer were born almost four decades apart.

More evidence for the validity of children’s past-life memories comes from the fact that psychological testing of the children who have these memories has not revealed any connection with psychopathology. In fact, these children have higher-than-average intelligence and are less suggestible than other children, as measured by the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale.

Another interesting statistical fact is that, among cases in which the death remembered is a natural (non-violent) one, the lives remembered are roughly 50% male and 50% female. However, among cases in which the death remembered is “unnatural” (a murder, a suicide, or an accident), 73% percent of the cases are of male lives. This matches the general statistics on unnatural deaths in the United States, where 72% are male. That is, these children’s memories, evaluated as a whole, accurately reflect sex differences in manner of death in the population at large.

The sheer number of past-life memories that have been verified as accurate combined with the overall consistency of the phenomenon points to past-life memories being much more than the product of childhood imagination. Thousands of children have memories of lives that did take place in another body. But does this automatically mean the survival hypothesis is true? It has been suggested by some that these children are not actually identical with or inhabited by the surviving consciousness of the people whose lives they remember but instead are just accessing those people’s memories by some not-yet-understood process that doesn’t involve the continuing consciousness of the deceased. The idea is that either these children are psychically accessing the past or are psychically accessing “dead” memories.

Little is known about the mechanisms by which these memories present themselves to the consciousness of the children who have them, but whether or not these children are wholly identical with the people whose lives they remember, it is clear that at least part of the consciousness of those people lives on in these children. In the strongest cases, these children not only share the memories of the deceased but also multiple aspects of their behavior/personality and even physical characteristics. Many continue to have emotional attachments to people the deceased knew, in some cases still being in love with their former spouses. Since memories, personality, and interpersonal attachments are three of the primary characteristics we’re interested in seeing survive beyond our death, it is hard not to see these children’s memories and behavior as a kind of survival, even if only partial. (It bears remembering, too, that survival, even while we are still in the same living body, is almost always “partial,” in the sense that we are continually forgetting the previous events of our lives and changing our personality and behavior to a greater or lesser degree.)

Furthermore, these children generally identify themselves with the person whose memories they carry. For instance, the mother of one child with previous-life memories was trying to help him put them behind him and live in the present, and so she told him, “Ryan, you do know that you are not that man in the picture anymore. We just want you to be Ryan.” According to Tucker, who investigated the case, her son responded “that he was not the same as the man in the picture on the outside but that on the inside he was still that man.” (There are, however, some cases in which people with memories of previous lives feel some separation from that other personality, in some cases even referring to them in the third person. See, for example, the case of Kilden at the beginning of the next section, who alternates between third- and first-person pronouns.)

Also, it’s important to note that near-death experiencers corroborate children’s memories of previous lives in various ways. For instance, many NDErs report learning about reincarnation during their NDEs. Mary Helen Hensley, for example, was the daughter of a Baptist minister and as a young person never gave the idea of reincarnation a second thought. Nevertheless, when she had an NDE at age 21, she saw a play-by-play review of her current life as well as suddenly remembering many lives she’d lived before. She says, “Of the many things that I can remember [from the NDE], there is one that I feel compelled to convey with certainty—I think it is important to state that reincarnation is a fact.” Another NDEr reports, “After my NDE, I understood that this life here is only one of many we have to go through. We are bound to be born here time after time [until] we are good enough to go to other dimensions permanently."

In addition, there are a few accounts of NDErs who, while apparently out of their bodies but still hanging around the physical world, remember attempting to jumpstart the reincarnation process by entering the bodies of newborns. Here’s an excerpt from an NDE account published in a London newspaper in 1935:

Then suddenly I was again transported—this time it seemed to be against my wish—to a bed-room, where a woman whom I recognized was in bed, and two other women were quietly bustling around, and a doctor was leaning over the bed.

Then the doctor had a baby in his hands.

At once I became aware of an almost irresistible impulse to press my face through the back of the baby’s head so that my face would come into the same place as the child’s.

The doctor said, “It looks as though we have lost them both.” And again I felt the urge to take the baby’s place in order to show him he was wrong, but the thought of my mother crying turned my thoughts in her direction, when straightway I was in a railway carriage with both her and father.

Interestingly, the NDEr went on to report that he recognized the woman in labor as a neighbor of his. Upon reviving in his own body, he told his parents that the neighbor’s baby was dead because he couldn’t get into its body. They discovered afterward that the woman in question had indeed delivered a stillborn baby that day (and had herself died, just as the NDEr observed during his experience).

 

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.