"...To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause..."
Shakespeare's Hamlet compares death to sleep, concerned that even in death, we'll still be dreaming – and those dreams will continue to haunt us. And so is it as our consciousness passes from one incarnation to another? To me, it was long clear that William Shakespeare was an Old Soul; a consciousness that had passed through many human containers before becoming an Elizabethan playwright. His intuitive understanding of memories of past existence is clearly stated in these lines.
We wake each morning, sometimes remembering the night's dreams, sometimes not. (Having a bedside notebook to jot down key points is a valuable aide memoire.) There's no doubt that you had that dream. But was that you that had that dream your ego, or your consciousness? A blend, I would argue. One way to see what's what in your dream is to sift through the contents bearing in mind this quote from Mark Belchner, from his book The Dream Frontier. Dr Belchner says that "dreams don't lie". "Our dreams are not concerned with disguise and censorship. They are our most honest communications, perhaps the only human communication in which we cannot lie. We can lie about our dreams, but not in our dreams." I divide my dreams into the humdrum, the routine ones that merely clear out partially digested or incomplete thoughts, and the Big Dreams (as Freud called them). These don't contain disjunctive cognition, where people, places and times blend and where logic evaporates. The Big Dreams are consistent in terms of place, time and action (the Three Unities of Greek theatre), and bring back events from your consciousness' past existence.
Not only can we not lie in our dreams, we cannot lie in our qualia memories. Sharp and precise, though fleeting and ephemeral. We call these phenomena déjà vus; flashbacks, which triggered or unbidden bring back a moment of conscious experience that we have had before.
Below: how Google's Imagen 3.0 imagines a past-life flashback. Personally, I have always found them to be pleasant; an old familiarity returning to me, with a tang of nostalgia, a sense that I am never to return there. But not unsettling – nothing like these expressions.
Having experienced this all my life, I have trained myself to pinpoint the moment in childhood from which those qualia memories were from. The A40 road to South Wales, Chessington Zoo on a primary-school trip; a family visit to Winchester Cathedral. I can feel their echoes, conforming to the experience I felt at the time, before melting away. [I have been compiling the most-oftenly encountered current-life flashbacks for several years now on this blog.]
Rarer, though entirely consistent and persistent, are the 'past-life' flashbacks and dreams, that confirm to me the reality of previous incarnations. They feel the same as the current-life ones; the same mechanism, the same flavour of 'pleasance' mixed with 'longing to return'. They strongly suggest to me a continuity of consciousness that spans beyond our biological lifetime. But quite how this 'works' (to use a mechanistic term) is still beyond me. Are we to dress metaphysical phenomena in scientific terms ('consciousness borne aloft on a field of neutrinos') or are they ultimately ineffable?
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