born again

I'm a 170 lb Irish/German/Choctaw built WMD...Weapon of Musical Delight. Know any good agents?
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My little brother did that when he was about 5. He ended up with stitches in his brow from a broken vase he assumed the towel would help him fly over. The time he tried to play Hulk and jumped through a window ended poorly, also. Super-Heroes suck. They hurt the children.
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I don't know about the whole eincarnation thing, but I remember having a dream a couple of years ago that was unlike any I have had before or since.

It was like I was fully immersed in the experiences of another person. Here is what I know. It was America, somewhere hot, maybe a century (or two) ago. I was a black man, and I was standing in front of a group of people in what seemed like a church. I was being sentenced for something I did. Only a nearby priest seemed sympathetic. I remember just looking around at all their expresionless faces (as if it didn't matter that I was about to be hung) and feeling pure hatred towards them all (except the priest for some reason). I remember thinking that I did nothing wrong.

During the dream, I didn't see myself as you sometimes do. You know, as if you were the director and actor. It was more like a memory. I'm not saying that's what it was, but you never know. No dream has stuck with me like this one has.

Anyway, on to the second part, and I flashed forward to the actual hanging. All my feelings of anger and hatred were replaced by pure determination not to actually get hanged, and a little desperation. I remember at the last moment thinking that if I put my hands between the noose and my neck that I'll somehow survive. Anyway, they hung me. The next bit was the strangest bit yet. I "heard" a crack, and was extremely surprised at how little it hurt. Then I wasn't experiencing things from a single perspective any more. It was like I was experiencing things from the outside. I seemed to instinctively "know" all the people who were there watching the hanging. When I say know, it was like I could feel them. I felt sympathy for them. It was like I had a bird's eye view, and not just of the physical scene below me, but the mental scene. What they were thinking and feeling. I remember thinking that these people didn't really comprehend the fact that someone just died at their hands.

I distinctly remember feeling sorry for them all.

Then everything faded to white, and remember thinking I'm going to a better place. Then I woke up, freaked out as I was! The first thing I thought was that people aren't supposed to die in dreams. Anyway, never knew what to make of that one. I'm from Ireland, so the whole slavery thing isn't part of the history of my country, but I was aware of it, and at around that time I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird (one of the best books ever written, incidently), which is all about prejudice in the deep south, and centres on the trial of a black man for a crime he obviously didn't do.

Make of it what you will, fellow paracasters:

Would you care for NSA or CIA agents? Oh, wait!! The NSA has 'analysts,' which I suppose some of us could use after this.

A little of both...medium-rare.

As a kid, some 30 years ago, I watched a documentary about a case of alleged reincarnation here in Germany. A little boy with a strange birthmark on his neck was uttering cries in his dreams that sounded like a foreign language. A psychologist made a tape of this and sent it to a language expert who thought it was Thai. The boy then began to talk about what seemed to have been a former life, ended by a brutal murder (a knife to the neck). Eventually, his family went to Thailand, where they (allegedly) found the boy's former family members.

A sceptic even at that age (I must have been around 10), and not knowing anything about the work of Prof. Ian Stevenson, I thought that was all wishful thinking, because if something like that really occured, there should be a lot more babies with strange, woundlike birthmarks.

Fast forward approx. 10 years. Accidentally, I step into a room where a mother is changing the diapers of an infant and I notice a big red birthmark (not an injury or something) on his chest, looking very much like blood seeping from a wound. I'm kind of astonished but I'm told that the doctors had said these birthmarks would occur more often than one would think and that they tend to become less prominent over the years (during a garden pool party I found out that that's true, the boy in question is now 18 years old and the mark now looks like a straight white line or a scar, although, as I said, it hadn't been caused by an injury).

Of course, that didn't make me reconsider my opinion. I'm not a religious or spiritual person and until recently I tended not to think about subjects like what happens after death. For me, it was quite obvious, that all theories about that again were nothing but wishful thinking.

But as soon as this boy could speak, he would make some very strange remarks and show some unusual behavior (like calling his mother by her first name and at times stating that she was not even his real mother), eventually telling me (when he was about six years old) that he had been murdered in what he called his former life.

Now, that got my attention. But unfortunately, I couldn't find out much. His family has decided to keep all this under wraps snd not to stir things any further, I guess for fear of being ridiculed. Even showing an interest in strange phenomena can seriously endanger your social status where I live, so that was that.

So now I started looking into reincarnation and soon I found the work of the late Prof. Ian Stevenson, which I find just remarkable and not at all esoteric (although on the library bookshelves here you will find his books with the usual psychedelic covers in the esoterics department). I read of the 2000 + cases he investigated, mostly in Asia, but many also in America and Europe. Some cases involve the soon-to-be mother having a dream in which a dead relative seems to announce his rebirth in her child. Which at that point I found rather unconvincing.

A few years ago, a very dear sister-in-law died of cancer at the age of 47. I had known her before she had become family and I had always felt a little more for her than is usual among relatives. I won't go into details, but we always were kind of close (platonically speaking). Shortly after her burial, my sister, who was a few weeks pregnant (and with whom I had stood before the grave that day), told me of a dream she had had of the deceased. She could not remember any details, but she had woken up with a feeling like "wouldn't it be cool if she reincarnated in my daughter?"

Now, I had never told my sister about my interest in the subject, she had never felt an interest in that either and she knew nothing of the earlier case I had stumbled upon (as I said, the boy's family kept it a secret and I sure didn't tell anybody back then) or about my feelings regarding my sister-in-law (that was obviously a well-guarded secret too).

I decided to still say nothing, but as you can imagine, I watched the kid from the first day on (it was indeed a girl). Which was kind of difficult because my sister lives an hour's drive away. EDIT: I did make it a point not to let her sense that I was somehow expecting her to do or say anything unusual, just in case you wondered. I talked to her and acted just as I would have with any other kid.

Okay, to make a long story short, the girl soon showed an unusual affection with me (whereas she was utterly shy with others). Often, since she started to talk, she will whisper like we had a secret or something. And then, not more than a year ago, (she had hardly learned to speak) she looks at me as if she wanted to say Now pay close attention, this is important. And she comes up to me and whispers "I am forever here".

At that point I'm thinking, well, that's probably her lining up words, learning to talk. So I ask "What do you mean, here? Here at this place?"

And she shakes her head, frowning like she wants to say "Man, don't you get it". Gets a little closer and puts her hand on my chest "Here," she says, "here with you."

Man, I'm getting the shivers just remembering that. This is actually the first time I'm telling anybody about this. I can't risk the story to become known here. And there were other, even more baffling "statements", but most of them rather personal, so I won't write them down here.

EDIT: I don't expect anyone to believe a word I'm saying. Heck, if anyone had told me that story a few years ago, I myself would have thought, "well, he's misinterpreting or over-interpreting perfectly explainable remarks and behaviours of kids, who have no idea what they're talking about and just throwing words around." But the thing is, with both cases, the kids are unusually aware of things concerning life and death.

I guess you really have to experience something like that yourself to begin to believe it. I know that in my case, it is against everything I have learned (in a western materialistic upbringing) about the brain generating consciousness and the world not being a paranormal place in general. For my own part, these views are really starting to wear off and the world is beginning to look a much deeper and broader place than I had thought.

Anyone encountering such a connection will never forget the simultaneous feeling of familiarity and high strangeness. So yes, Polterwurst, I believe you. Such an experience can feel like being blindsided by an oncoming train.

Thanks for the comment. I'll have to look up "blindsided" but I guess I get your meaning. That's a nice way to put it. In my case, though, the train has been a rather slow one. Blown away piece by piece, you could say. If not for the first "chain of evidence" (the boy with the birthmark), I probably wouldn't have thought much about these strange remarks of the girl.

The feeling of "Holy crap this stuff is real" took a while, but when it hit... man that's hard to describe. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I have to hold my breath thinking about it.

It's not like, say, seeing a UFO, I guess, where your eyes show you things the brain refuses to accept (as it has been described by some witnesses). I'm still asking myself "Can it be? Am I fooling myself here?" every day, each time coming more firmly to the conclusion that yes, it can and no, I'm not. All those 20 years of my looking into the subject of reincarnation, I have always watched myself so as not to be biased. I always expected another explanation, such as the kids having been influenced by movies they saw, esoteric upbringing or whatnot. But I looked into these alternatives and they just don't hold water.