Past life memories?

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“Both you and I have taken many births, I remember them all, O Arjun, but you do not remember.”
- Shri Krishna to Arjun in the Bhagavat Geeta

 

The phenomenon of visual hypnogogis gradually became less frequent and I begun to experience something else. Just before I fell asleep scenes, sometime with people in them, begun to ‘pop up’ randomly in my mind I use the word ‘pop up’ for a lack of a more appropriate word. The difference between this and hypnogogia, was that while hypnogogia seemed as if I was sensing something outside of me, these scenes seem to come to the surface from somewhere deep within me, like some long lost memories. However they were strange to me because I did not seem to have any conscious memory of having visited those locations or having met those people. It was almost as if somebody else’s memories had been put in my head !! On one occasion I saw a child climbing some dimly lit staircases. He seemed to be wearing modern western clothes. In another occasion I saw a young man riding a motorcycle across a field. He seemed to have western features. On another occasion I was a young boy sitting on a ramshackle bridge which overlooked some kind of a big dug out pit. On another occasion I was a small child with a woman who appeared to be my mother. We were sitting atop a dome shaped building, and some kind of a commotion seemed to be happening below us. When I recollect, from the look of the people around me, it was probably a time period of 18th century. On another occasion I was a young man (westerner) named Illad, there was a radio in the room, this model was in use during the period of the Second World War. Somebody seemed to be calling out my name and was backing against the wall in fear. There are numerous such instances and I have written them down in my diary in detail, sometimes with sketches. In a lot of these scenes I seem to be an outsider looking at the scene and in some, as in the above mentioned case, paradoxical as it may sound, I was both the character and the onlooker. So I was both Illad as well as someone who was looking at this scene from ‘outside’. As if my consciousness was at two places at the same time!! The question is are these past life memories?

 According to Paul Brunton:

“How absurd and superstitious … is the lore of the soothsayer which professes to provide a prophetic interpretation for all dreams! Nevertheless we know, if not from personal experience then from recorded statements which are too authentic to be disputed, that this lore is not without some valid basis in so far as it applies to a single class of dreams only. A dream may be an accurate perception of some event happening at a distance in space or time; that is to say, it may be a genuine clairvoyant vision in the better sense of this much-misused term. How is it then that some dreams can thus take shape as forecasts of future happenings?

Now because the same time-series which rules waking life does not rule dream life, and because bodily sense-experience is mental in essence, it is possible under certain conditions which are more easily provided for most people by dream than by waking, for the mind to perceive in advance of their physical occurrence events in which the body is involved, and to project itself sometimes into the future with fair accuracy. This is the rationale of most prophetic dreaming.

It may happen that we dream things and thoughts, persons and events, which cannot be ascribed to earlier waking perceptions by any stretch of theory. Such dreams leave extremely vivid after-images and their memory is hard to shake off, even after several years have passed. They may indeed exert an unsuspected yet profound influence in shaping some attitude of our wakeful life. The sense of familiarity with new places or persons may, on rare occasions, be due to this cause. These dreams arise out of our karma and are either actual transcripts or vague reminiscences of former happenings, their roots are deep down in earlier incarnations and they revive events which happened then.”