People Share Experiences They Know Were From Previous Lives
There’s more to life than what meets the eye. Nobody knows exactly what happens after you die, but there are a lot of theories. One of the most interesting ideas is reincarnation — the belief that the “essence” of a person begins a new life in a different physical form after their previous biological form dies.
On Reddit, people shared supposed past-life memories that made them believe reincarnation could be possible. Do these experiences make you a believer?
The Woman Who Rode in a Covered Wagon
One of my earliest memories was of riding on the seat of a covered wagon. I remembered watching the horses in front of me and seeing the dust they were kicking up from the dry, hot ground beneath us. I was tiny, sitting between my mom and dad. I remember wearing a bonnet because I had to bend it away from my eyes to look to the side.
As a child, I remember getting really frustrated with my mom because I kept asking her when we could go to the place with the covered wagon rides again. She would always insist that she didn’t know what I was talking about and that I had never been on a covered wagon before. She would always say it must have been a dream, but I knew it wasn’t. I was old enough to know the difference between a dream and a memory, and this was a memory.
The Man Who Used to Be a Dog
Up until I was about 3, I told my parents that I was a dog. As in, I had been a dog before I was created as a human. I would begin stories with “Once, when I was a dog…” and vividly remember a picture of a yellow lab that my parents had that I believed was my past-life dog self. I told them “that was me when I was a dog.”
The Bookstore Workers With a Past
I used to help out at a bookstore, and one day I met the new hire. The minute we looked at each other, we both knew we had been together before as adults. Oddly enough, we also both felt it was taboo to get into each other’s lives; something had happened in a past life, and in this one, we were not supposed to interact.
That was hard because there was a strong feeling of comfort we derived from one another. We could finish each other’s thoughts, and the regular customers, managers and employees said that we really freaked them out with our immediate bond. He ended up moving to Australia. Whatever it was we think we did, it was bad enough for him to move to another country.
The Family of Nurses
When my daughter was 3, she told me several times that she knew me, my sister, my mother and my dad before she was here now. She said all of us women wore white dresses and worked in a white tent with red crosses on it. She said we all helped fix grandpa after he got “poomed” (her word for gun sounds when she was little). She also told me that we have taken turns being the mommy. She said I was doing a good job this time. I’ve actually accidentally called her “Mommy” a couple of times when I was really tired.
The Non-believer Whose Experience Didn’t Change Him
I knew a guy who thought all things paranormal were nonsense and laughed at the mere thought that there could be truth to anything outside what was “accepted.” He told me a story of his, though, that really surprised me.
He was in his late 50s, and for his entire life for as long as he could remember he had a dream he was standing in a field. It was always the exact same layout: rolling hills, and he could see the treeline from his vantage point. The only real landmarks were a lone tree and a wooden fence. Every time during the dream, he felt as if he was a young boy and could feel there was a large group of men with him, seemingly behind him.
He never told a soul, not his wife or his kids. One day he took his family to Gettysburg while on vacation. That exact vantage point was the Union “high water line” during the battle. It definitely disturbed him, but he still refused to consider it paranormal.
The Boy With a Second Family
My youngest brother said he had a family before ours. He would tell us stories about his siblings and his parents. He did this until he was 8 or 9 years old.
The Person With Unexplained Fears
There are certain things that really scare me and it doesn’t make sense that they do. The limbs of a tree shaking because of someone on a tire swing or regular swing terrify me. It’s all that I can do to be anywhere near it.
Anything to do with the Roman gladiators makes me feel the terror of knowing that I am practically defenseless and am going to my death. Mummies, not so much the mummies themselves, but the men who created them scare me.
The Child Who Could Speak German
I used to call things by their German names up until I was about 4 (I only remember a few times when I did this, but my mom said I did it often). I’m American, we didn’t know any Germans and as far as I can tell, I didn’t have any exposure to the German language at that age (no music in German, no movies and not much TV exposure because my parents didn’t let me watch much TV).
Mom said she just “thought the words sounded kind of German” and finally checked out a German language dictionary from the library. Sure enough, I’d been calling things by the correct German terms. She said it freaked her out at the time. It’s always been sort of a mystery but if reincarnation is real it might explain it.
The Child War Veterans
A blond 4-year-old boy was being towed by his mom in a red wagon. I was walking my niece of the same age. He asked her if she wanted to ride with him and his mom asked if he knew her. The boy said, “I know her very well, but I was shot in the war and I died for a long time.” The mom got flustered, apologized and said they were Christian.
The Child Dreaming About Past Family Trauma
I fully believe in past lives. My parents told me that up until about age 6, I used to have horrible recurring nightmares of being run over by a bus along a certain stretch of road near where my grandparents lived. It was only when I was in my teens that they told me this: that my great aunt was knocked down and killed by a bus along that exact stretch of road when she was 6.
I don’t really have any of my own memories about it, apart from recurring dreams about that stretch of road that I still have. I don’t get knocked down but I always seem to be there…
The Person With an Extensive Past History
“Yep, several past lives. Roman soldier, French musketeer, WWI British soldier, bank robber in the late ’40s. Except for the Roman soldier, each time KIA.”
The Childhood Friends Who Used to Be Spouses
When I was a young lad, I played a lot with my sister and two other sisters that lived next door. One time (during middle school age) when all four of us were walking through a field, I was walking next to the eldest sibling of the girls while my sister and her sister were out in front of us. Suddenly we both stopped dead in our tracks, turned and looked at each other, and said:
Friend: I just got serious deja vu.
Me: Me too. We have done this before.
Friend: We were married!
Me: And they were our kids!
After a couple of seconds of being dumbfounded by what we just said, she then turned, mumbling a few things, and went home. We were pretty close friends, but after that she became distant. It must have really weirded her out.
The Man Who Was Once a Duck
My uncle always spoke about being a duck in a past life. He sat up in heaven on a cloud and chose his new family.
The Son Who Used to Be a Father
My brother once told my mother that he used to be her father before she was his mom. My mother’s dad passed away about a year/year and a half before my brother was born.
The History Lover Whose Interest Goes Beyond the Norm
I’ve always had a bizarre fascination with history, some periods more than others. I remember in eighth grade, a Holocaust exhibit came through town, and walking through it, I had a panic attack. The pictures were too familiar. I also have this terrible fear of needles that I have no explanation for.
When walking through museums and historical places, things will just feel right. Especially with clothes… I feel like I need to wear them.
The Former Royal Family
My brother and I used to play a made-up game that involved drawing out castle floor plans, complete with secret passages. There were certain elements that we tacitly agreed were mandatory, most notably a specific sweeping staircase with an alabaster balustrade that had a secret passage on the right as you face the stairs. We “knew” certain areas of the castle and stables, but were lost as to other aspects, such as where the servants slept and where exactly the kitchens were. We played this game a lot, for hours on end. I always thought it was just a game.
Then I met my SO. I don’t remember how it came up, but she started talking about memories of a castle and curving staircase that she had never actually seen. When she mentioned the alabaster balustrade, since she is an artist, I asked her to draw it without telling her why. She drew it from a standing perspective, and we had always drawn it from above like a floor plan, but it was the same staircase.
The Toddler Looking for a Friend
A 3 year old wanted to always look around church graveyards for someone called Alice that he knew “a long time ago.”
The Hometown Historian
I’ll go to some places in town or some other towns and have very vivid… I don’t know — visuals? Mostly around my town about wartimes and such, like forts and stuff. There are times when I remember names of people I’ve never met or have very vivid dreams of people I have never met in clothes from way back when. There’s a woman in a very floofy purple dress in most.
The Woman With an Old German Soul
I have always had the feeling that I am not who I am supposed to be. Ever since I was a kid, I would say or do outdated things that only an adult would understand. Like I instinctively knew how to properly make a cup of tea (I’m American, and my parents have never been tea or coffee drinkers).
Very often I have vivid dreams that are more like memories. In one, my family starved to death because of the Dust Bowl, and in another, I was an old German woman in a village. I was speaking German the entire time, which I have no clue how to do in this life. When I woke up, I immediately woke my husband and told him about some of the words I kept repeating in my dream. He told me to look some of them up, and they were all legitimate old German words.
The Girl Who Remembers Her Past Family
My little cousin lived in “my pink house down that road” and could tell anyone about her entire family of six siblings. She also said that she remembered when she was playing in the street that a car hit her and everyone was sad.
The Woman Who Could Recount Her Past Death
I remember as a child having a recurring dream where I was a different girl. I remember seeing myself in the mirror, brushing my hair, hearing a fire alarm and not being able to find my way out while I could hear my mom calling my name.
The next thing I remember is being above my body while it was charred and bloody. I was wheeled out of the house (I even still remember the full layout of the house!) on a stretcher by paramedics, in a body bag, still from the view of looking at myself from above. I remember being no more than 5 or 6, telling my mom about these dreams. My mom just remarked about them being silly, but it’s always bothered me.
The Boy Who Lived in a Farmhouse
Apparently, when I was around 3 years old one day sitting in the basement with my dad, I stopped playing and just told him I wanted to go home now and that this was not my home. He asked where I lived and I gave a vague description. He said I seemed very not myself all of a sudden for a couple of minutes.
A couple of months passed and, while visiting some relatives on the way out to their town on a small back highway, I had pointed to a small farmhouse and told them that’s where I live. I have had multiple recurring dreams of a white farmhouse before. When I told my mom about the dreams, she told me about the house I said I lived at when I was 3 and how it matched up with the description from my dream. I definitely believe in past lives and that the soul simply moves on.
The Person Who Remembers How They Died
I’ve seen a “me” that doesn’t look like me drown in very cold, deep water repeatedly since I was very young. I’ve always had a morbid draw to the Titanic, and before you ask, I was born way before the movie. I’ve seen another me burn alive, feeling the fire burn and blister. Watching people watch me burn. I used to wake up screaming…that they were burning me to death.
The Child Who Watched His Parents’ Wedding
Several months ago (my son was 3), my husband and I were talking about our wedding, which took place about seven years ago. My son was listening, when all of a sudden he chimed in and said, “Yeah, I was there at your wedding.” We told him he wasn’t because he wasn’t even born yet. He insisted he was there and that he watched the whole thing “from up in the sky.” My husband and I thought it was a little strange but brushed it off.
The Person With a Strange Connection to the Trees
When I was younger, I had really bad panic attacks whenever I was confronted with or thought about trees being cut down/mass deforestation. There’s really no reason for me to worry about that, then or now. I was in no direct harm and didn’t feel directly harmed. I would just get really irrationally upset about it.
The Child Who May Have Been a Nazi
I have had numerous instances where I feel as though I was a German military figure in my past lives. One of these instances was that I, as a small child, would draw swastikas in the sand at the beach, at an age where I couldn’t possibly understand what they were and represented.
The Person Who Died Fleeing
Whenever I try to think back to my earliest memories, it’s always in this order. It’s my belief that it was how I died. I’m wearing a robe-type garment like a toga and sandals. I’m covered in blood and running with everything I have. I’m carrying something close to me, possibly a child. I feel this sharp pain pass through me from behind. I look down and see something jutting through my chest. I take three or four more steps and feel another pain. My arms drop and what I was holding is pinned to me now. I stumble and fall and everything goes black.
The Child Who Was Once a Mother
I used to say things along these lines as a child. Not anything about old Mommy or Daddy, but things suggesting I had memories of another life. I used to always say to my mother, “When you were a baby, I ‘posed to hold you.” (Like “I was supposed to hold you.”) I said it to her a lot. I was wise beyond my years, also, from an early age, and can sometimes feel like I’ve done something before I’ve ever actually done it.
The Person Who Shared Past Trauma With Their Mother
When I was younger, as in, maybe 2 or 4 years old, I’d have dreams about being trapped underwater. They were recurring nightmares, and to this day I’m afraid of swimming under things. I mentioned it to my mom a few years ago and she told me around the time I was born, she kept having dreams that she was a Native American back in the day, and she had to go gathering food. When she came back, our tribe had been attacked and she found me face-down in the water in a nearby frozen lake.
The Person Who Remembers a Car Accident
I still have a very short memory of a dream, although I can’t remember actually having the dream, just the dream itself. It starts with a woman who my dream-self identifies as my mother, screaming for my safety. I turn around from whatever I was doing on the dirt road in a busy city to see the terror on her face. Then something crashes into me. I immediately get upset about the extremely consequential accident — I had plans and strategies for this life, and I had to start over. Based on the angle of my vision in this little scene, I can guess my height and say that the dream figure was probably around 6 or 7.
