The children who remember their past lives (opens in new tab)

My mother often talked about children she'd witnessed talking about their past lives. She believed it but I'm sceptical. Then my son started saying things like "when I was a girl" which seemed to confirm it and my mother thought so until I told her he also talked about "when I was James the red Engine" and it became clear this was him recounting stories from books but in the first person.

He quickly grew out of it as his language developed further and I believe similar cases are just young kids being unable to express their ideas accurately.

I have vague recollections of a wild mind when I was quite young.

To be sure, the article discusses two year olds and I neither remember being two nor and I suggesting that my imagination when I was young somehow explains away these accounts.

Nonetheless, as I say, wild times for a child mind trying to "form", trying to figure out how to process the world.

I recall some nightmare that would return periodically over a span of years. Or maybe not? Like deja vu, the mind is an unreliable narrator.

The night terrors I am quite sure were real. They finally passed sometime in my teen years. Sadly I had to witness night terrors in a few of my own children. Thankfully for them I knew what they were and would stay up and comfort them in the night until they fell asleep to forget. And I could tell them that these too would pass.

So while still being the skeptic of anything like reincarnation since it would upend the world view I have carefully pieced together from almost sixty years of observation, I did recognize in the children that untamed mind I once had when I was their age.

I had a friend in high school who's brother was like this as a toddler, would speak to his family lucidly and with detail about another life he remembered. No one was sure where he would have even gotten some of the stories he told. When he was a little older he stopped and then didn't remember anything about it.

Seriously embarrassing for a major newspaper to take this at all seriously. What do you say to child who thinks he remembers a past life? You say “hey - that never happened don’t worry about it.” What a complete waste of time.

And this part: “Scientists say consciousness is produced by the brain…” - there is no other side to that position. There’s nothing else there.

(Yes, I would say the same to a kid about life after death too.)

Stevenson’s Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation is a really wild book. I haven’t read his subsequent work, but it’s amazing to see that it’s being continued.

> Among the cases in the DOPS database, about 15 percent are North American; of those, an overwhelming majority are from Indigenous communities. “There’s no question that the cases are easier to find in cultures where there’s a belief in reincarnation,” Tucker says.

I guess Native American reincarnation works and eastern variants do not