I was given the following description by a friend:
"It opens with a man having a recurring dream. The dream has something to do with him being in the past driving an old fashion classic convertible car. The dream seems to trouble the man and he has a hard time explaining it to his wife, but he becomes obssesed with it.
I believe that as the movie continues his dreams start to progress with more detail including an old estate house on a lake or pond.
Sometime later he sees the car that is in his dream and also finds the house in his dreams. He starts to get to know or spend time with the family of the house and begins to learn the history of the car the house and the famiily.
At some point there begins to be a thought that maybe this was his past life.
His dreams continue to get more detailed and there starts to occur an image of a drowning at the lake or pond.
I believe there is a climatic ending with a second attempt at a drowning at the lake or pond that is similar to the one in his dreams."
Other details include that the drowning was of his brother (or something like that).
More details to work from? Any idea who may have been in it? Roughly when did the movie come out? Anything more to the setting or locale?
Sounds like a fun plot, in any case. There were lots of movies like the ones already mentioned in the 70’s. Also, many things that may feel like they were movies wind up being episodes of things like Twilight Zone or TV shows like it.
I had one that bugged me for a long time and it wound up being a fusion of several different things, all of which I eventually saw again in order to sort it all out.
She thinks it could have been a TV movie, or at least she remembers seeing it on TV. I will have to ask the time frame, but I’d venture to guess early to mid-70s.
Another thought is that it could have been based on a Robin Cook or Stephen King story. I am not sure about Stephen King, but I kinda doubt it was Robin Cook since his stories tend to be medically related thrillers, and this one doesn’t have that “bent” but who knows. Another author in that genre is Peter Straub but I’m not familiar enough with him to yea or nay.
tvguide.com/movies has an excellent searchable database for this kind of thing. If you use the advanced search, you can search by year, genre, keywords (in the movie’s review), cast, etc. I’ve found a bunch of movies I haven’t seen since childhood that way.