My Past Life?

People sometimes ask me what I think of the concept of reincarnation. I hadn’t made an observation on it until about 12 years ago when I began to have a series of nightly dreams about a young woman that it felt as though I had once been.

The first dream opened with the world through my eyes. It was a village in Europe. The roads were cobblestoned and sloping. The shops were attached to one another. In the opening of the dream, I am leaving the village for my home that faces a low-lying street of shops. I come in the side door which feels as if the house is attached to others or else it is small.

Someone is visiting with food. Their appearance reminds me that I’m sad. Someone asks me if I can go do something with them, but I tell them, “I’m sitting shiva.” I’m lucid enough in my dream to want to know what I look like, so I go to a mirror, but it’s covered up. I go to another and it’s covered too. The cloth over the mirrors reminds me, my mother has died.

I hear murmuring voices in the other room. I’m desperate to know what I look like. I step outside of my body and look at myself and I’m about 17 or 18 years old with long straight dirty blonde hair and big brown eyes. Rather slender, rather sullen, rather plain.

I wake up feeling exhausted from the dream.

The next evening, the dream started again. Only, this time I’m outside of my home and neighbors are giving me hugs and crying. I look over and see my father’s motorcycle. It’s some kind of 1930s looking very basic bike. I look up at him. He has my dirty blonde straight hair, kind of long over his ears and dark eyes. He is very tall and kind of reminds me of, well, Gerard Depardieu the French actor. I know that we are in a rush. In fact, the things inside our home are still there. Our neighbors are taking things out that we’re letting them have. We have to rush. We’re leaving at sunset. I feel as if we’re being pursued or feel threatened.

At some point as I’m saying goodbye to my girl friends, I look over onto the cobblestoned street and hear the sound of cars and feel a cold dread in my stomach. I realize it’s the Nazis. I also know that my father and I plan to escape to England.

(In the photo above, I found a motorcycle that was very similar to the one in my dream and it was a German-made one and for some reason I think this might have been Germany or France, although I get the sense that in my neighborhood we are the only Jews and the language feels more of a Latin-based language. I did look up pictures of villages with cobblestones in Germany and France and the buildings looked more French with none of the wood crosshatching you see in Germany, so I am going to assume it was France).

I wake up from this dream, once again feel as if I’ve traveled all night. I’m exhausted and I’m haunted by this girl. I don’t remember ever picking up a dream a second night where it left off the night before. Everything is so familiar. The sounds and smells, the people, the language. I feel as if it’s memories. My own memories somehow.

The next night, I go to sleep and time has jumped. I think it’s perhaps 3-5 years in the future from before. It’s the 1940s. Somehow my father and I separated, got lost, didn’t find each other. He’s somewhere in England and I have moved on to America.

I work as an interpreter for American Troops in Europe. The odd thing is the context of it. For some reason, it seems this woman is also expected by the government to provide “relief” for this traveling important contingent of male officers, perhaps 4 or 5 of them that she interprets for. This seems like it’s common practice and the young woman is desperate to find her father and so accepts whatever job she must to try and find him in a bombed out England. They are using each other for their own ends.

I never found out what happened to that young woman. I wanted to and tried to continue the dreams, but they ended. It makes me wonder if it was during a peak of geomagnetic activity. I have since awakened from dreams speaking a language I don’t know very fluently. I wake myself because of the sound of this language flowing from my mouth so naturally. I always think it’s French. It doesn’t sound German to me at all, so I wonder if perhaps the village was in France near Germany.

I later asked a woman I knew who was Jewish what sitting shiva was. I didn’t know the term and was surprised to hear it was a grieving period when one passes away in the Jewish culture. They also covered their mirrors and people visited bringing foods over. It startled me to learn something I hadn’t known. Surely I had to have been this woman in a past life, right?

I truly don’t think so. As a psychic, when I read other people’s lives, I see it through their eyes and it feels exactly like my own memories of places I’d been and things I’d done. To a non-psychic having this dream, it would seem like reincarnation. To a person who has experienced reading others, it is nothing more than a reading of a life that had been. The fact that in the dream I was surprised to see fabric over the mirrors wouldn’t jive with being a Jewish girl who surely knew the customs. Little things like that gave it away.

No, I don’t think I lived this past life, but I do think for some reason that is still very distant from being discovered yet, I accessed someone else’s life for a time as I do when I read a person. This doesn’t mean it was my life. It simply means I saw it through her eyes. To a layperson who came across this occurrence, it would really feel as if they were remembering a past life. It's the subtle things that will give it away, the details that your conscious mind can't explain but that the mind of the person who lived that life should have known.