Memories and Past Lives

What people describe

The experiences gathered under this heading vary a great deal. Some people describe a single scene, returning again and again: a coastline under an unfamiliar sky, the inside of a hall, the view from a great height. Others describe fragments with no scene at all: a name that feels like their own, a smell, the memory of a body with wings or paws, a grief whose cause they cannot find.

Some impressions arrive in dreams, often as dream shifts. Some come as a sudden sense of recognition in an ordinary place. Some are less like pictures than like knowledge: a quiet certainty of having lived as something else, somewhere else.

These impressions are more often reported by otherkin, whose kintypes come from worlds no one can visit, but some therians report them too, usually as memories of an animal life: a den, a hunt, a winter. Many otherkin and therians have none at all, and they are no less who they are for it.

How the community has treated them

From early on, the more careful voices in the community settled on a working rule: memories of another life are matters of personal meaning, not evidence. They may help a person understand themselves. They cannot prove anything to anyone else, and they are not a fair thing to demand of anyone.

A few customs follow from that rule and have held up well.

• A kintype rests on the present. Many experienced members say that an identity should stand on what a person feels and does now, with memories as color and not as foundation. If the memories were set aside, would the identity still be there?
• Memories are not ranks. Remembering more, or more vividly, does not make anyone more genuine.
• Nobody is owed your memories. They are private unless you choose otherwise.

Some people call these impressions past-life memories. Others prefer plainer words such as impressions, recollections or simply "memories," with the quotation marks spoken aloud. The choice of word is often a quiet statement of how sure the person is, and it is courteous to use the word they use.

How ordinary memory works

Anyone thinking carefully about these experiences should know a little about memory in general, because it applies to everyone's memories, including memories of this life.

It is widely understood that memory is reconstructive. Recalling something is not like playing back a recording. Each time, the mind rebuilds the memory from pieces, filling gaps with what seems likely, and the rebuilt version is what gets stored again. Over many tellings a memory can drift a long way from where it began, and it can feel just as certain afterward.

Memory is also suggestible. Pictures seen, stories read, questions asked in a particular way, and other people's accounts can all be woven into what a person remembers, without their noticing. Dreams and vivid imaginings can later be recalled as things that happened. And neither vividness nor confidence is a reliable sign of accuracy. A memory can be sharp, detailed, deeply felt and still partly built from elsewhere.

None of this proves that impressions of another life are imagined. It says only that the tool being used to examine them is a good deal less steady than it feels, and that is worth knowing before building anything large on top of them.

Shared memories and group stories

Sometimes several people come to believe that they remember the same other life: the same world, the same events, and each other. In some corners of the community this has been called shared memory, and finding someone who seems to remember what you remember can feel like a homecoming.

It is also where the greatest care is needed. When people compare memories, details pass between them. One person's image becomes another's recollection, the group's account grows steadily more detailed and more alike, and agreement begins to feel like confirmation. Doubt becomes hard to voice, because doubting the story can feel like doubting the friendship.

A few cautions are worth keeping in mind:

• Write down your own impressions before you hear anyone else's, and keep them separate.
• Notice whether belonging to a group has come to depend on agreeing with its story.
• Be wary when a shared past is used to make claims on someone in the present: that you were once their partner, their sibling or their sworn companion, and therefore owe them something now.
• Feel free to step back. You can value people without sharing their account of the past.

Anyone claiming authority

A small number of people use memories, their own or ones they claim to see in others, as a source of authority. They may say they remember you from before, that they can tell you what you were, that they held a rank or a title in another life which others should respect now, or that they alone know the truth about a shared past.

Be wary of this, always. Nobody can tell you what you are. A person who asks for loyalty, secrecy, money, private conversations or obedience on the strength of memories is not to be trusted, however kind or certain they seem. This is especially important for young people. If an adult online tells a young person that the two of them share a past life, the right response is to stop talking to them and tell a trusted adult. The advice on the awakening page about staying safe applies here in full.

Journaling and patience

The most useful habit for anyone with impressions of another life is the same one that serves therians who want to understand their shifts: keeping a journal. The essay Keeping a Shift Journal describes the practice in detail. For memories, a few points matter most.

• Write promptly. Note an impression as soon after it comes as you can, before it has been retold.
• Date every entry, and do not revise old ones. If your understanding changes, write a new entry. The record of how it changed is valuable in itself.
• Note the context. What had you been reading, watching or dreaming? Were you tired, unhappy, elated? This is not a way to explain the impression away. It is a way to see it clearly.
• Separate the impression from the meaning. "I saw a gray shore under two pale lights" is an impression. "I lived on another world" is an interpretation. Keep both, but keep them apart.
• Wait before sharing. A few months of private notes will tell you more than a single conversation.

It is fine not to know

Some people understand their impressions as true memories of a past life. Some think of them as the mind's way of picturing something real about themselves that has no other language. Some treat them as meaningful dreams, and some simply do not know. All of these positions are held by thoughtful people, and the page on spiritual and psychological understandings sets out the wider range.

Agnosticism is not a failure of nerve. It is often the most honest answer available, and it leaves room for the impressions to mean something without needing them to prove something. A kintype does not depend on memories, and a life can be lived well with the question left open on the bench.

When memories are distressing