Please note the title and let’s all pretend that reincarnation isn’t hogwash. This isn’t Great Debates so please hold off on pissing on the idea. And I’m not looking for your brand new, as of this thread, “recollections.” Instead I am looking for the moment when you felt like you had lived before, and the circumstances that triggered it.
My wife believed that in a previous life she had been a surveyor in North Africa. I asked if I had a previous life and she said, “You have a young soul, so probably not.” Okay.
Years later we were at Walmart and I was watching some Jack London-ish movie in Electronics and found myself oddly and strongly affected by a scene of tying dogs to a dogsled. I rushed over to her and started to explain what I had seen when a daughter asked, “Why is daddy crying?”
Wife answered, “He misses his dogs.”
“But our dogs are at home.”
“Different dogs.”
Daughter probably figured she meant my dogs from when I was a kid, like King (named after Sgt Preston’s lead dog) and let it go.
Early the next morning I looked into the darkened living room and for a moment instead of furniture and stuff on the floor lit by our streetlamp it was a snowy clearing with my team curled up sleeping.
Prior to all this I had momentary “memories” of the Klondike Gold Rush and climbing that damned hill, the Chilkoot Pass, over and over again. Were this thread intended to debate reincarnation, WHICH IT IS NOT, a very good case could be made that I had watched too much Sgt Preston as a kid and read too many books and seen too many documentaries (one of each) and that I was a bit mentally ill and unmedicated. FTR, I miss my hallucinations.
So, how about you? Was your trigger talking about it at a slumber party or whilst getting high with your buddies? And remember that I’m looking for true stories so if you are negative or obviously BSing I will Junior Mod your ass. 
I have had the feeling I was in a English household in the 1800s. It happens when I hear cockney accents or smell musty /greasy odors. I am fairly certain I was below stairs and did scullery work. I just know, deep down, how these people felt. It always makes my arms ache and my stomach turn when I get these feelings.
I can see from a far place where I fit in the whole scheme, I was a little tiny cog in a giant wheel of a household. I had a pride that someone today would only laugh at.
Fine. I will throw myself under the “you’re an idiot” bus.
As a child, laying on the lawn with my sister, watching a plane fly overhead, I had memories of being worried about planes flying overhead to drop bombs. Tied to those memories, I had memories of standing on the back of large boat waving goodbye to people on a dock as the boat pulled out to sea. I was fairly young at the time. It was before I learned anything about the Blitz, or about the evacuation of children. The first time I visited England, I had the profound sense I was coming home. On subsequent visits, I did not have that feeling.
There you go. Mock away.
(comforting tone) This is not the place for mocking, but I could open a Pit thread if you’d like.
Well, this is the Dope. Home of Skeptics and Snark. 
I was a grikdach in the army of Florn in the galactic cluster of Hrorh.
You Earthlings are so parochial.
Where did I say that the thread was limited to reincarnation of your life essence on Earth?
ETA: Though I am wondering what you had done as a grikdach that got you exiled here.
I think I was a woman in the path of Sherman’s Army during the March to the Sea, so it would be more late 1864, not exactly 1862. Seriously. When I read diaries, journals, narratives and letters of the women who lived through that, I have a very strong emotional response. Crying for hours, breaking out in a sweat and feeling like a I am on the verge of a panic attack, and I don’t have panic attacks. I have thrown books across the room and even vomited. My heart has felt like it was going to beat out of my chest, but I still keep getting drawn back to that specific time and place. Other settings don’t effect me like that at all.
I especially felt an intense reaction to a woman named Dolly Sumner Lunt, who lived near Covington, GA. And having been all over the areas between Atlanta and Savannah all my life, I know what is fact and what is fiction, and I know I am not just reacting to what people have told me. Once when I was driving on a back road near Madison, GA, something compelled me to turn the car around and pull over. Lo and behold there was a little rural cemetery with iron fencing around it. I know there used to be a community and farms in the area. It just felt so very familiar. I stood there and cried and cried over these graves and I have no idea why.
Something in my DNA remembers.
I am not pissing on anything, but being a data point.
I get this idea, but I have nothing remotely resembling what you’re talking about. And when I dream, I dream things like “I went to that store down the road and bought three cans of soup; then I came home.”
I have also been told that I have a young soul, and without believing in reincarnation, it resonates with me. I feel like I approach the world and my experiences as if they are brand new to me. I don’t have any sense of past lives, except that in natural environments I tend to imagine myself there at a much earlier time (in a U.S. forest as an American Indian; in the Sinai desert as a Biblical Israelite, etc.)
Going by population numbers in 1900, rolling 1d10 for the top 10 populations gives me: somewhere in the French Republic and associated colonies (I rolled a 7). The colonial population was a bit higher than the population in France, proper. Now let’s see what the highest population colony . . . dang. It’s the five colonies making up Indochina. No wonder I don’t remember it. Dread of the future blotted things out.
In 1892 I suppose most people, anywhere, were farmers, or helping on farms. So I was probably planting rice.
I have been told I have an old soul. I never understood that, until my baby was born. She came to me with an understanding and wisdom that can only be gained by age. If I am an old soul, she is positively ancient. She knew things no American child, in this century should know let alone understand.
Just to be clear to the currently young, “Who were you in 1862?” was a play on the advertising blurb for American Graffiti, “Where were you in '62?” and not a request for a specific year. As near as I can tell, either as a believer or a denier, I weren’t nowhere, though my great-grandfather and eponym was gestating.
I don’t know about the 1800s - I’d like to think I was an eccentric fellow of some sort.
More recently (early 20th century), I may have been someone in the army or air force. When I drive past military places - typically where they look something like this, I have a strong emotional response that I can’t even properly describe - it’s something like a weird blend of yearning, melancholy, physical hunger and homesickness.
(taking as given the thread scenario)
I’ve never had the experience. When I see movies or pictures of people from other eras, all I can think is “I would never have survived under those conditions.”
But I’m curious of any of those who have experienced the feeling, does anyone imagine being of another species or even a different gender than your current one?
References to World War I make me cry* Other historical wars do not affect me the same way. It makes me wonder if I lost someone dear to me in that war. I didn’t in this life… so maybe in the last one?
I like German beer and food and I’m not very good at painting, so I assume I was probably Hitler.
Hitler was a sorta-vegetarian, so proper German food was out. And he wasn’t a bad painter, just not a very good one.
I always have the feeling of being a human female. I definitely have a girl brain in a girl body, and as the old song says, I enjoy being a girl. So I am not sure if my strong female identity in this life is clouding anything, but I don’t think so.
The intense feelings that bubble up seem to be associated with fear and sadness, mostly fear of violation, both emotional and physical, and it is an amplified version of the familiar fear many women feel when you find your self in a vulnerable situation. The sadness is what remains in that aftermath, and the helplessness of the situation.
When you read lines in a personal journal like “Mrs. Treadwell and her daughter were violated in the worst possible way” and it is just left at that, you know exactly what that means in the language of that era.
Why I can read of similar accounts from other times and places and it doesn’t gut punch me like that, I do not know. Maybe I am just picking up on the psychic loop of energy that permeates that part of Georgia.
I have only experienced this when I am awake. I never dream about it. My dreams, much like DavidwithanR, are just silly nonsensical versions of my everyday life.
It is not very a very pleasant thing, so one would think I would avoid reading of their lives, but something keeps pulling me back, like they don’t want to be forgotten somehow. That’s awfully maudlin, but that’s my impression.
