Astrolabe
Member
So, I should start by saying this is the first time I have bothered to record this down in writing before. This subject has meant more to me than I can describe. Yet I have been very private about it. I have trusted information about my past lives with a few, very close friends.
When I was very, very young, I can remember my mother took me camping, along with my stepfather. It's one of my clearest early memories. In Southern California's desert (this will be important later) where we slept in sleeping bags out in the open air. It was warm enough to do so and we were at some campsite. I got up before they did and started wandering around the trees. I wandered to a field and I can't remember much, except what everything looked like and I knew that I had lived somewhere else before. It is really impossible for me to describe what I felt deep down on an instinctual level. I didn't have any concept of living before but I knew there was a time "before" my mother. Since I had no idea where babies came from this was to me, a huge piece of the puzzle. I remember coming back to where they slept and later when I said I went for a walk without them they didn't believe me and insisted I imagined it. I don't remember if I said anything about another house but if I did they probably assumed I meant the house my mother lived in before (with her mother until I was two). I've gone over the possibility that I did mean that, but throughout my childhood I had a decidedly "wrong" idea that got corrected as my mother told me it was impossible I did anything before she had me, when she explained where babies came from. I remember telling her I was somewhere else before she knew me and she laughed and said that was impossible. Later as I grew, I heard about reincarnation for the first time and as I was playing around in our back yard I mentioned it to her casually. She told me I must never, ever say that again because it was Satanic.
I won't go into the details of my childhood. But it was bad. My mother died when I was 13 and I do not mourn her. Some people shouldn't be parents.
I did have a close relationship with my grandmother up until her stroke left her mind only a fragment of her former self when I was 15. I lived with her periodically. She told me so many stories but one that really (and I mean really) clung to me was one she told me of a boy she fell in love with. She grew up with him. She told me of his interest in cacti. He became a biologist and marine biologist.
Here's where things start to get interesting. I felt a connection with that name throughout all my childhood...just some funny feeling, an interest and in all of the things that you forget as a child, things that don't hold your interest at all, that did. As a child, I was a prodigy. I don't say this to brag. It's just true. At the age of 4, I could read on a 7th grade level. Grade 6 I was at a college level.
I would literally memorize entire books of scientific names, checking out dozens of books on marine biology. My interest in all sea life was intense and as I look back on it, permeated every day of my life, even though I almost never got to visit the ocean. When we did, I only cared about finding specimens.
Without going into detail, my life this time around is different. I am not a scientist now. But I was before. I remember one very specific episode where I pretended to be on a search for desert plants with a friend, and we went up to the railroad tracks so I could look at all the cacti someone had planted there. My interest was intense and I felt like I was doing something familiar. I liked to pretend I was exploring and discovering plants that had never been discovered or written about in scientific journals. At this point I wasn't thinking of my grandmother's friend. I suppose there is the possibility that this influenced me on a subconscious level. But it doesn't explain a LOT of other things. I never knew how he really died until I started my search for who he was a few years ago and discovered he drowned. All through my teen and 20s I suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts and always, always dreamed of drowning myself. I should mention I harbor no such thoughts now, because once I made the connection I knew why that was, why I was drawn towards it.
Another vision, very strong: a woman in Edwardian era skirt with a lantern looking for me in the gloom of dusk and a house beyond and the colors of the desert, a desert that I have never glanced on in this life. It's an image that popped into my head when I was 16 or 17 and wouldn't leave me, of a mother that was not my mother. I thought of her as an imaginary mother for a while.
The dreams started in my mid 20s. The first when I was maybe 26. I am gay so the fact that I dreamed about being on a dock and clasping a woman's breasts from behind, somewhere in Asia, alarmed me. It's one of the clearest dreams I have ever had and I absolutely knew upon waking that this was a memory. I held her there in my arms, in the morning dawn, looking at some hills on the opposite side of a bay, possibly in Japan or the Philippines or Indonesia. Who knows? If what I read later was true, I went to all of those places.
The second dream I was in a truck, driving on the right hand side of the vehicle (American vehicles will always be driven on the left) and it is very dark at night. I am driving on a road (I never learned to drive due to poverty and my parents dying so young...I've usually just survived in life so a car was out of the question and I have very little notion of how to drive but I knew how in this dream) and I can see my reflection in the window. I am on a dirt road. I can barely see because the headlights aren't that strong on the truck. It is very spacious in the front seat. Almost military, definitely 40s era.
I found a file on this man, who I was most likely, and have now read my/his biography. I know he grew up in the California desert. I am reluctant to say more about his life because someone else might find this, so let me just say...I have felt SO many things over this. Am I crazy? Am I just lonely? Am I looking for a family in the past because I was left on my own so young in this one? Is it in my imagination? Or is my vision of who I was accurate? I've seen the photo and it felt overwhelmingly familiar. The reflection who was not-me and yet me at the same time, that memory I have haunts me.
One more dream: by the ocean. I am at a dock area and parking lot and it is the 50s. I am standing next to a car, pointing to a map and giving a woman directions. A song is playing on the radio "Que Sera Sera" of her car, which would place this after 1956. She thanks me and she looks familiar. Everyone's clothing is much more formal. Men in cars wearing suits and hats. I walk along the shore and through a thicket of short palm trees and some scrub brush and I see my friends waiting for me on the beach. It is extremely beautiful and I am filled with love. The swimsuits are very modest, but colorful, with stripes.
Was I him, I ask myself? I have read only portions of some of his books and I am filled with overload. I took marine biology in college and got a 99 in the course. My instructor told me he would write a personal recommendation if I pursued it as a career. But for some reason I didn't think I was good enough in chemistry and math and opted to go for English. I didn't have a lot of confidence. But I did have artistic skill. He said very few students of his had the ability to illustrate scientific fauna the way I could. It was a long lost skill.
The books he/I wrote I can barely stand to look at, and I have found them out, it was easy enough. The first time was in junior high. I noticed that name on a book of flora, with black and white illustrations. I remember taking it in my hands, looking through it and thinking "I've read this before". But I hadn't. So familiar. So powerful. Chill down your spine familiar.
Since I know what my name was and what my legacy was I am haunted even further. What does this lifetime mean? Will I ever have the love I had before? Will I meet someone that means as much to me as I had then? I must have cheated on my wife if what the bio says is true, and no one knew. I had children (which I don't remember) and the photos I found of my/his childhood home were again overwhelmingly familiar.
I think my last lifetime was about exploration and accomplishment in the field of science. It was my Camelot. I was happy. I know that. I was also involved so heavily in my work it took me around the world. Again this is so hard to say. Was I him? It would explain so, so much of how I feel. Of how I would horde 25 cent National Geographics as a child and pore through the pages, wanting to go to those places and feeling it was who I was, but it never was to be in this life.
I think this lifetime I am able to commune with others perhaps in a way I couldn't or didn't before. I think I am able to empathize with people far more than previous lifetimes. I'm not sure. I only have impressions. I had so much in my last lifetime. Is this wish fulfillment? Do I just want to picture myself as having been happy? With all of the things I was "supposed" to have had in this lifetime, or is it all just flotsam in my mind, detritus from the last time around? I tend to think it's the latter but I thought I would share my haunted thoughts with all of you, who do not know me. Maybe it will be worth something to some one.
One thing I will say. I will never contact the descendants. I could. I won't. It's crossing a line. I can't do it. It's like that movie Birth with Nicole Kidman (which btw was not a good movie) only more so because as an adult I know what I am capable of dealing with emotionally and I have no desire to pursue that road, I have no place on it.
When I was very, very young, I can remember my mother took me camping, along with my stepfather. It's one of my clearest early memories. In Southern California's desert (this will be important later) where we slept in sleeping bags out in the open air. It was warm enough to do so and we were at some campsite. I got up before they did and started wandering around the trees. I wandered to a field and I can't remember much, except what everything looked like and I knew that I had lived somewhere else before. It is really impossible for me to describe what I felt deep down on an instinctual level. I didn't have any concept of living before but I knew there was a time "before" my mother. Since I had no idea where babies came from this was to me, a huge piece of the puzzle. I remember coming back to where they slept and later when I said I went for a walk without them they didn't believe me and insisted I imagined it. I don't remember if I said anything about another house but if I did they probably assumed I meant the house my mother lived in before (with her mother until I was two). I've gone over the possibility that I did mean that, but throughout my childhood I had a decidedly "wrong" idea that got corrected as my mother told me it was impossible I did anything before she had me, when she explained where babies came from. I remember telling her I was somewhere else before she knew me and she laughed and said that was impossible. Later as I grew, I heard about reincarnation for the first time and as I was playing around in our back yard I mentioned it to her casually. She told me I must never, ever say that again because it was Satanic.
I won't go into the details of my childhood. But it was bad. My mother died when I was 13 and I do not mourn her. Some people shouldn't be parents.
I did have a close relationship with my grandmother up until her stroke left her mind only a fragment of her former self when I was 15. I lived with her periodically. She told me so many stories but one that really (and I mean really) clung to me was one she told me of a boy she fell in love with. She grew up with him. She told me of his interest in cacti. He became a biologist and marine biologist.
Here's where things start to get interesting. I felt a connection with that name throughout all my childhood...just some funny feeling, an interest and in all of the things that you forget as a child, things that don't hold your interest at all, that did. As a child, I was a prodigy. I don't say this to brag. It's just true. At the age of 4, I could read on a 7th grade level. Grade 6 I was at a college level.
I would literally memorize entire books of scientific names, checking out dozens of books on marine biology. My interest in all sea life was intense and as I look back on it, permeated every day of my life, even though I almost never got to visit the ocean. When we did, I only cared about finding specimens.
Without going into detail, my life this time around is different. I am not a scientist now. But I was before. I remember one very specific episode where I pretended to be on a search for desert plants with a friend, and we went up to the railroad tracks so I could look at all the cacti someone had planted there. My interest was intense and I felt like I was doing something familiar. I liked to pretend I was exploring and discovering plants that had never been discovered or written about in scientific journals. At this point I wasn't thinking of my grandmother's friend. I suppose there is the possibility that this influenced me on a subconscious level. But it doesn't explain a LOT of other things. I never knew how he really died until I started my search for who he was a few years ago and discovered he drowned. All through my teen and 20s I suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts and always, always dreamed of drowning myself. I should mention I harbor no such thoughts now, because once I made the connection I knew why that was, why I was drawn towards it.
Another vision, very strong: a woman in Edwardian era skirt with a lantern looking for me in the gloom of dusk and a house beyond and the colors of the desert, a desert that I have never glanced on in this life. It's an image that popped into my head when I was 16 or 17 and wouldn't leave me, of a mother that was not my mother. I thought of her as an imaginary mother for a while.
The dreams started in my mid 20s. The first when I was maybe 26. I am gay so the fact that I dreamed about being on a dock and clasping a woman's breasts from behind, somewhere in Asia, alarmed me. It's one of the clearest dreams I have ever had and I absolutely knew upon waking that this was a memory. I held her there in my arms, in the morning dawn, looking at some hills on the opposite side of a bay, possibly in Japan or the Philippines or Indonesia. Who knows? If what I read later was true, I went to all of those places.
The second dream I was in a truck, driving on the right hand side of the vehicle (American vehicles will always be driven on the left) and it is very dark at night. I am driving on a road (I never learned to drive due to poverty and my parents dying so young...I've usually just survived in life so a car was out of the question and I have very little notion of how to drive but I knew how in this dream) and I can see my reflection in the window. I am on a dirt road. I can barely see because the headlights aren't that strong on the truck. It is very spacious in the front seat. Almost military, definitely 40s era.
I found a file on this man, who I was most likely, and have now read my/his biography. I know he grew up in the California desert. I am reluctant to say more about his life because someone else might find this, so let me just say...I have felt SO many things over this. Am I crazy? Am I just lonely? Am I looking for a family in the past because I was left on my own so young in this one? Is it in my imagination? Or is my vision of who I was accurate? I've seen the photo and it felt overwhelmingly familiar. The reflection who was not-me and yet me at the same time, that memory I have haunts me.
One more dream: by the ocean. I am at a dock area and parking lot and it is the 50s. I am standing next to a car, pointing to a map and giving a woman directions. A song is playing on the radio "Que Sera Sera" of her car, which would place this after 1956. She thanks me and she looks familiar. Everyone's clothing is much more formal. Men in cars wearing suits and hats. I walk along the shore and through a thicket of short palm trees and some scrub brush and I see my friends waiting for me on the beach. It is extremely beautiful and I am filled with love. The swimsuits are very modest, but colorful, with stripes.
Was I him, I ask myself? I have read only portions of some of his books and I am filled with overload. I took marine biology in college and got a 99 in the course. My instructor told me he would write a personal recommendation if I pursued it as a career. But for some reason I didn't think I was good enough in chemistry and math and opted to go for English. I didn't have a lot of confidence. But I did have artistic skill. He said very few students of his had the ability to illustrate scientific fauna the way I could. It was a long lost skill.
The books he/I wrote I can barely stand to look at, and I have found them out, it was easy enough. The first time was in junior high. I noticed that name on a book of flora, with black and white illustrations. I remember taking it in my hands, looking through it and thinking "I've read this before". But I hadn't. So familiar. So powerful. Chill down your spine familiar.
Since I know what my name was and what my legacy was I am haunted even further. What does this lifetime mean? Will I ever have the love I had before? Will I meet someone that means as much to me as I had then? I must have cheated on my wife if what the bio says is true, and no one knew. I had children (which I don't remember) and the photos I found of my/his childhood home were again overwhelmingly familiar.
I think my last lifetime was about exploration and accomplishment in the field of science. It was my Camelot. I was happy. I know that. I was also involved so heavily in my work it took me around the world. Again this is so hard to say. Was I him? It would explain so, so much of how I feel. Of how I would horde 25 cent National Geographics as a child and pore through the pages, wanting to go to those places and feeling it was who I was, but it never was to be in this life.
I think this lifetime I am able to commune with others perhaps in a way I couldn't or didn't before. I think I am able to empathize with people far more than previous lifetimes. I'm not sure. I only have impressions. I had so much in my last lifetime. Is this wish fulfillment? Do I just want to picture myself as having been happy? With all of the things I was "supposed" to have had in this lifetime, or is it all just flotsam in my mind, detritus from the last time around? I tend to think it's the latter but I thought I would share my haunted thoughts with all of you, who do not know me. Maybe it will be worth something to some one.
One thing I will say. I will never contact the descendants. I could. I won't. It's crossing a line. I can't do it. It's like that movie Birth with Nicole Kidman (which btw was not a good movie) only more so because as an adult I know what I am capable of dealing with emotionally and I have no desire to pursue that road, I have no place on it.
