Oh wow, I don't even know where to start. I could write a book on this.
In the lives I know about so far, I have almost exclusively incarnated as a female. This really surprised me when I first realized it, because I thought for sure I would have been born as a male most often. But nope, I have a strong preference for being female, and if I have to be male, I absolutely prefer to be gay.
A lot of information comes to me in dreams. The first dream I ever remember having, when I was maybe 3-4 years old (about the age of my avatar photo) was about being back in biblical times. I don't know any details on it, no idea exactly when or where, or who I was, but I feel strongly it was related to a past life. In the dream my mother and my aunt (not as their current selves but their past life selves) were wearing sandals that were held on their feet with nails driven through their feet. I know this particular depiction was an allegory, not a literal memory - I hope not anyway - that was set off by spending a week at vacation bible school. But the general idea was that life for me and the people closest to me in that time period was just pure suffering. This situation was not like being hung up with nails and left to die...it was more like this is just something you have to deal with everyday, having nails through your feet, and whether the shoe fit or not they were gonna make goddamn sure that you wore it no matter what. That dream is so hard to describe, I don't remember many details, but the feeling of it is still so intense and vivid. Just that consciousness was very, very dim in that time period and the brutality of people was incredible.
When I was a teenager I had 2 dreams, a few years apart, about being a Jewish girl somewhere in Europe in the years around WW2. In the first dream I was maybe about 16 years old, and the war was going strong. I was traveling on my own and had been for what seemed like at least a few years. I was able to pass for "white" so I was not forced into total hiding, but I had to be extremely careful about who I talked to, and be ready to disappear fast if someone started looking at me too closely. I was basically homeless and just staying on the move so I wouldn't get put on a train to hell. I don't know if I was trying to get somewhere in particular, it seemed like I was just always on the run, and had no idea where my family was or if they were even still alive. Anyway in the dream, I was going to stay the night in a boarding house. The woman who ran it knew who I was and was expecting me, so I guess I was following some kind of underground network that helped protect Jews. I remember walking upstairs to my room, which I was sharing with another girl around the same age as me I think. Seemed like I didn't know her at all, we were just strangers caught up in the same circumstances. I heard 1940's music on the radio, which was when I realized, this is not a dream, this is really happening. And I heard bombing going on all around us. The bombing was probably the least frightening thing happening, in fact it was almost comforting to know that a battle was going on. It was a lot less frightening to contemplate dying in an air raid, than it was to think of going to a concentration camp.
In the next dream I had about that life, I was several years younger, and it was sometime in the mid-30's before the war started, and most people were still pretty clueless about what was going on politically. However my family was in the know so they were sending me to a boarding school where I would supposedly be safer than at home. I am guessing this was probably the last time I saw my parents in that life, and from then on I was on my own. Again like in the other dream, I was meant to pass for white, no one was supposed to know that I was a Jew, so I had to be very careful. I went through all the typical new girl at school stuff, being shown around, meeting my classmates - one of them I recognized immediately as being one of my best friends at school in my present life. Then it fast forwarded through a lot of stuff about me having to hide who I was, and sort of lurking around and spying on what was going with the school administration so I could find out what they were up to. It almost felt like part of the reason I was there, was actually to spy on them, and report it all back to someone else...but I was just a kid so...I dunno. Then Hitler came to speak at our school - really I don't know if this part actually happened, maybe this was just metaphor, but it was very detailed. I was afraid for him to see me, because I was sure he would recognize who I was, so I made some excuse not to go in the assembly room. This was a really dangerous move because the teachers, etc. were already suspicious of me. Then I had to sneak in there somehow without being seen, because I needed to hear what he said. Later on the dream definitely dissolved into metaphor, I had a face to face confrontation with Hitler, and he ran away from me like a child having a tantrum.
Here's another dream I had...I watched a woman's entire life from her birth right up until her death. At the end it was as if I had been watching the whole thing being performed in a theater, totally absorbed in it, and suddenly the house lights came back up and reminded me who and where I was. The theater was empty, except for one person sitting to my right...and he looked at me and said, "that was you". And suddenly it hit me, oh my god, what we were watching, that's who I was, that was me, that was my life. And that person unfortunately was hated by a lot of people and ended up having her head cut off. For a long while I didn't take this seriously, because she also happened to be the queen of england, but this point is really negligible anyway, considering how they decided that the marriage was never valid to begin with. How someone can be executed for adultery in a marriage that supposedly wasn't a real marriage is beyond my understanding. Am I still sore over it...you better believe it. My neck f*cking hurts. It juts forward at a crazy angle, probably in the exact spot where the blade hit me, and defies expert chiropractic adjustment. Just being touched there sends me into complete emotional chaos.
