Reincarnation: Recognizing Past Life Dreams

My first girlfriend started breaking my heart in 2001 and didn't stop until five years later. Over the course of our two-year relationship and ten-year friendship, we played out a sick series of events involving addiction, codependency and insanity mixed in with profound love, loyalty and devotion. I credit her with the unlocking of my sexuality and, later, with my downfall into drug addiction. She was often distant and aloof; her parents had shown her little to no affection for the last twenty years. I was persistent and believed that love could conquer all, having been raised by a close-knit family that practiced love unconditional. She told me early on that she was going to break my heart, and I stuck with her regardless. We believed we were soulmates, twin stars that had once been forged as one in the heavens, torn asunder to roam the earth alone until we found each other once again. It was all very dramatic, but we were loopy for each other. It wasn't very long into the early days of our friendship before I began to feel like I had known Amie before, in a lifetime far removed from this one. We knew each other too well, too intensely, for this to be our first go around. I sensed that we had known each other in a past life, it was something I felt and trusted beyond a shadow of a doubt. But my feelings were never confirmed until I started dreaming about us.

The first time it happened, we were knee-deep into our present-day disaster and I was beginning to lose hope. I had not been able to save Jamie from herself, and I was losing her more and more each day no matter how hard I held on. In the dream, myself and another little girl are both orphans in a foreign country I don't recognize, but I know instinctively that it's somewhere in Europe. I am young, six or seven years old. I can't see myself but I know I have long brown hair, and I'm wearing a long white muslin dress with long sleeves and a blue ribbon tied around my waist. My playmate is dressed in similar attire, she is the same age as me and when I look at her dark brown eyes I immediately recognize her as being Jamie.

We are both in foster care with a woman who is the headmistress at an insane asylum. It has to be the late 1700s or early 1800s. The asylum was once a grand castle that was converted into a sanitarium for the criminally insane. We live there with the woman full-time, but she does not love us. The men are truly crazed, the worst of the worst, and the security is lax because the castle is surrounded on three sides by jagged cliffs leading into a raging sea. The girl and I are the only children; we have very little that is ours but we do have each other. We like to play on the small stretch shore behind the asylum, but our sanctuary is often disturbed by the patients who are free to roam the grounds. There is one elderly patient in particular, a schizophrenic man with a bedraggled face who frequently comes down to torment us but if I scream loud enough a guard will eventually come and haul him away.

One day we are playing with a round red ball, rolling it back and forth to each other. It is chilly outside, and windy, and as I roll it back to her the wind catches it and hurls it into the sea. My playmate, who is like a sister to me, rushes into the water after our toy and quickly gets sucked in by the undertow. I wade knee-deep into the icy water, crying and screaming and yelling for help that never comes. I am so small and I cannot save her. I watch as her little body gets thrown against the jagged rocks and then she is gone forever.

Other dreams came later, the most notable being the one where I came across the three headstones of a pioneer family that had died within months of each other in the mid-1800s. One was mine, one was my sister's (Jamie's) and the third was our father's. We had both died before him, and left him heartbroken. His depression was evident in the epitaph's he chose for our gravestones. Mine said, "Jaclyn, my angel" and had a carving of a young girl feeding chickens and doves. Jamie's said, "J. my shining star" and our father's simply said, "I rest with you girls now."

Past life dreams, essentially, are dreams that give you a glimpse into a previous life and they are different from regular dreams in the following ways:

I have never been outside of the United States and I have never dreamt about far away lands. Indeed, I have never had any desire to leave my home, and yet I KNEW that I was in Europe by the size of the cliffs, the shape of the castle on the hill, and the biting coldness of the wind. I also knew the approximate year, and although I did not see her with my eyes during the dream, I knew in my mind that the headmistress always wore a black crepe dress with a high neckline and a brooch at her throat.

Regular dreams are often rapid and random. They are full of chaos. You start out in a classroom with your grandparents and then it's time to leave and you can't find your clothes so you hurry out the door and you're in your best friend's basement knocking down a wall. If something begins to frighten you, you can close your eyes tight in the dream and you'll either wake up or begin a new dream. In past life dreams, there is a logical sequence of events that cannot be changed. You are not in control; your subconscious mind is not creating the dream sequence and thus your subconscious mind is powerless to stop it. The dream, or I should say, the memory, is coming to you from a higher source, and all you can do is watch.

Dreaming is a method of processing, and often dreams are highly symbolic and metaphorical. Close analyzation of our dreams can frequently reveal answers and lessons that our conscious minds have been unable to see. Past life dreams allow us a look at the past life origins of our present day fears. When people undergo past life regressions through hypnosis, the first instance they are brought to is usually the most traumatic moment in the most traumatic lifetime. The fear and desperation I felt in my own dream definitely qualified as traumatic. Why was I unable to let Jamie go when I knew it was the right thing to do? Why my insistence to hang on to her despite all odds? Was it because I had lost her before, and was not willing to lose her again?

Another clue is the element of water. In my present life I am not afraid of water but I am terrified of drowning. I have never had a near-drowning experience, never been strangled or suffocated or anything of the sort. My fear is outside the realm of logic, yet to me it is very real. Could my present-day fear be based on what I witnessed in my past-life experiences?

In most present life dreams you either see yourself as you look today from an outsider's point of view, observing your interactions, or you are living the dream from inside your body. Either way, you manifest in the present and your appearance stays the same as it looks at this exact moment. In past life dreams, you manifest at a different age or as a different gender, or race, with different religious beliefs.

When you awake from a past life dream you are ultra-aware of it's importance. Your recollection of the dream is sharp and distinctive, it feels more like a long-lost memory than a subconcious concoction. And it never fades. Years later, you will still remember the smallest physical details and, especially, the emotions. The dream imprints itself onto your psyche and never goes away.