I’m open to these kinds of intuitions, but I’ve never had one strong enough to think it signaled a past life.
The one eerie feeling I have had is being in the Netherlands and in Germany. Like I was home–really among my people–and I hated it. Like coming back to a small town I’d left after high school. I belonged, whether I liked it or not.
I put it down to my ancestors having immigrated from those areas as recently as the 20th century. A lot of that culture survives in my family.
I think it has a lot to do with your ancestry in a way.
(Oh and I do believe in reincarnation)
This is a little off topic but I’ll get back there.
I do genealogy research. I’ve found that many of my ancestors had careers of what I am interested in, carpentry and law enforcement. Course the majority in the 1800’s seemed to be farmers. 20th century was a great deal of different careers of course.
My brother had two children from his first marriage and they grew up without knowing him or anything about him and our family. The daughter is working in law enforcement and the son is a carpenter. My father was a carpenter. I think its amazing the son, my nephew became a carpenter.
Ok back to topic.
I dont know my triggers but I was Jewish in a past life. Also I lived in the later part of the 19th century. Not sure how reincarnation works but its alive and well in all of us, well most of us.
Oh good, I was probably just German then.
When I was a kid, I had a vivid, recurrent dream in which I was on a poorly-lit rooftop, being chased by unseen persons. I was running parallel to the street below when my right foot would slip and I’d fall towards the street. The last thing I’d see was invariably some sort of pole extending within reach perpendicularly to my trajectory. I’d hold out my hands, touch it but it was all going too fast for me to grab it firmly. Next stop : pavement.
Now, what always surprised me about it was the amount of things that I knew about the scene without direct information.
I see it as a weird dream I used to have but when I was younger, I’d sometimes have some doubts.
I’ve had some weird…I don’t even know what to call them…preferences? Feelings about certain things that I couldn’t have explained?
I’ve always had a thing for paisley patterns. Found out a year or so ago that I had an ancestor on my mom’s side who worked in the textile mills in Paisley before he came to the US.
There was a small unincorporated town we’d go through while traveling to see family called Dundee, and I always told my dad that if I fell asleep, to wake me up when we got to Dundee. I do have ancestors from his side who came from near Dundee in Scotland, but I only learned that as an adult.
I’ve always loved gardening. Watching things grow.
Farming goes back many generations, on both sides of my family. I’m sure that would be what I was doing in an earlier life.
My maternal grandfather choose oilfield work instead. My dad choose the military.
That broke the chain.
It would be hard to ever return. The family lands were sold long ago. The knowledge of farming is lost.
I can garden. Farming 20 acreas is a whole nother thing.
I was about 10 years old, and I had never even heard of the concept of reincarnation. The subject had never arisen, or entered my mind.
I was having my hair cut at a barber, and he happened to lightly tap on the side of my head with the side of his scissors. I felt an intense and overwhelming sense of horror, and I thought, “Why did I feel that?”
Immediately I knew - it was because I was killed by being hit on the side the head. Simultaneously, along with that thought, came the image of what I could see at the moment I was killed. Mostly it was my own hand and forearm raised in front of my face, holding the hilt of a sword. Behind that, great clouds of dust, and a large confused mass of men running through the dust towards me. It’s not clear how they were dressed or equipped - just an impression of white and green and some metal.
There was nothing much to indicate time or place, but I’ve always had a deep emotional affinity for ancient Rome. Many years later I read Livy’s account of the battle of Cannae, 216 BC, where Hannibal, having invaded Italy, practically wiped out a Roman army. When I read Livy’s account of the dry fields, and the wind blowing the dust into the faces of the Romans, I felt a deep sense of grief, like someone close to me had died, at the thought that that battle was lost.
Some years later there was another spontaneous vivid memory of a different life, that I may write about later.
I was a member of a landed nobility in central/eastern Europe. It’s the most likely explanation of why I was born with the innate urge to treat everyone like serfs, peasants and servants.
Fetch me a warmed brandy in a chilled snifter…<snap>
You know, life as a colony of stromatolitic cyanobacteria back in the PreCambrian was pretty sweet. Good memories.
When I lived in London, there was a nightclub where I was a regular. In the basement, the music was exclusively 80s Gothic, Cold Wave and Electro-Industrial. As you can imagine, the crowd was colourful (well, if shades of black can be considered “colourful” :D).
One night, a girl I’d never seen before grabbed my shoulders, looked at me straight in the eyes and said : “You’re dead. See all these people ? They pretend to be dead, but you, you’re reaaaaaaaally dead.”
I guess it was a sort of compliment.
My past life memories do not go back that far. I know at one point, probably during the Depression, I was a hobo who road the rails and hung out near old red brick warehouses. The now me LOVES the sound of mournful train whistles and old redbrick buildings.
John Finnemore has a nice sketch on this. A woman asks a “reincarnation expert” who she was during Cleopatra’s reign, and he replies “You were a serf, but then you died at the age of ten, then you were a baby in India but only for a day before you died, then you were born to a slave … and died… then another baby for an hour, then you died…”
Yeah, but that time in the womb made for awesome memories!
I thought you looked familiar! Moving ahead, by 1862 I’d worked my way up to Big Dumb Fish.
I’ve been called an old soul my entire life. I’ve never had the types of experiences/feelings you are describing.
The closest I’ve come is a weird sense of dejavu when approaching a few random locations that I’d never been before. And not old historical sites like Stonehenge, but approaching a horse farm in Ireland, but the feeling was attached the signage etc, which had been built after I’d been born in this current life. So not a “I worked with horses in Ireland” feeling but a “I swear I’ve been to this farm before” when it was my first time in Ireland… The studies on the synapse mis-firing that causes the dejavu feeling are interesting to me as a reslt.
I probably wasn’t anywhere interesting, but I suspect my eldest nephew may have been a Jewish Grandma or a Southern Lady at some point, based on the quality of his rebuffs and delivery. Might even have been the Jewish Southern Old Lady who came up with that “bless his heart!”…
If I’m going to believe in reincarnation, I’m not going to believe in anything like temporal linearity: my life in the 1800s may happen at some point to my future soul.
This isn’t exactly on point, so I apologize if you’re offended.
For a long time, as a child, I believed I was a reincarnated criminal who had been executed by gas chamber, since I had a recurring nightmare in which that happened.
That nightmare made much more sense when I was diagnosed with sleep apnea.
All right, here’s the best contribution I can think of: I don’t normally like to read straight up historical accounts. I’m a fan of historical fiction, or of memoirs, but when you recount an incident without actually including the person’s thoughts and emotions, I find it far less interesting. However, I remember an article from my childhood in American Girl magazine about The Children’s Blizzard of 1888, and the article keenly held my interest. Recently, I was browsing through a list of possible books to read, and I saw one on that blizzard. It prompted this reaction in me, like “that’s the blizzard I read about as a child!,” and I marked it as a book I’d like to read. So something about that particular environmental disaster peaks my interest more than other environmental disasters or incidents in the past. That’s all I’ve got.
Oh how that is a weird feeling. I’ve had many of those happen. Been a while but its still weird
Do you mean within your own family or in general? Plenty of old family farms out there still but they are becoming fewer as time goes by but someone has to feed us…I want to believe that the land, that a generation of family farms, farmed on, are bought up by other family farms. Any farm for that matter. I’ve seen way too many farm fields converted to expensive subdivisions. Many not developed but two to three huge mansion type houses. Is there that many families having large amount of children that need that big of a house? Unless of course the economy picks up and people arent losing their life long careers, houses will continue to be repossessed.
I think maybe there should be some sort of restrictions on building new subdivisions on farm land. Yes allow it but criminy, think on it.
