Are Some Dreams Memories of Past Lives?

Maybe. Probably. Hard to Tell. But Could Be...

In my independent study of dreams over the last decade, I’ve come to believe that some dreams are memories of events we have already experienced, but we don’t consciously remember experiencing. These memories sometimes arrive to us intact in dreams, as precisely the interaction we had, but don’t consciously remember. In such cases, we dream in the first person “I” perspective, and we are the age we were at the time of the event, even if we don’t realize it inside the dream or upon recall.

Our reactions to these dreams upon waking will vary depending on the feelings the dream aroused, but typically we relate to the dream experience as novel, as new. We don’t remember the dream event ever happening to us in waking life, even though it did. It does not feel like memory or remembering something that happened to us, the way remembering does in waking life.

Other times, dreams of the past arise as composites. For example, we may dream of an interaction we had with a teacher when we were in preschool, but our confused sleeping brain may project an identity of someone we know now in our waking life onto the teacher because the emotional resonance matches the one we felt for the teacher when we were little. Or, simpler, the two women resemble each other.

If we adored the preschool teacher as a child, the character in our dream may appear to be someone we feel fondness for in current waking life. If we related to the teacher as strict or frightening, the character “playing the part” of teacher in the dream may be a current-day co-worker or a colleague who, in waking life, causes us distress at work.

Again, this kind of dream, when we recall it, will not have the texture of a memory. It will likely be one of those dreams after which we say to a friend, “It’s so weird, I dreamt last night I was in my old preschool classroom, sitting at a table trying unsuccessfully to color in the lines. I got yelled at by my teacher, but the teacher was Tracey from H.R.!”

With all the stimulation we have to receive, process, and integrate on any given day, it’s easy to understand why the brain doesn’t consciously remember everything that had an impact on us during waking life hours across the many years of a life. One reason why an event may arise in a dream so many years later is to help us process that feeling or a matching feeling arising now. For instance, frustration in waking life now may lead to a dream of when we were first frustrated as a child trying our best to color inside the lines.

The current standard scientific view of the purpose of dreaming is precisely this: mental and emotional processing, as well as organization, categorization, and compartmentalizing of information and memories.

I don’t agree that all dreaming is mental and emotional processing, but I do believe some of it is. And, in my experience, we dream not only of past events from this life that require more feeling and more processing, but also events and experiences from previous lives.

Some of us also dream of other people’s lives, present and past (via aware or unaware out-of-body experiences in dreams.) But for the purpose of this article, we’re going to focus on dreams of our own past lives: why we have them and what they offer us.

How do you know if you had a dream of a past life?

They’re often difficult to identify, especially because for most of us (at least those of us who recall our dreams), our projections onto dreams are quite strong.

Think of the dream where you are in your “childhood home,” but not quite. Or, the dream in which the character you’re with is “my dad,” but also “maybe my boyfriend.” These are likely composite dreams the kind of which I mention above. Our cognitive processes and functions are not as sharp in dreams. We can’t, don’t, or won’t make sense of our environment and stimulation in dreams the way we do in waking life. As you have probably experienced many times, in dreams we are often confused, unable to speak, remember basic information, or move the way we do in waking life. There is room, however, to improve.

In the last few years since I started working my dreams with Natural Dreamwork, my dream characters and places started to clear up a bit for me. Characters weren’t always people I knew from waking life anymore; they sometimes appeared to me as benign strangers. (Or less-benign.) I started to identify dream characters more according to the feeling of the encounter and less as a projected someone in my waking life. I became more aware of my surroundings and my sensory experiences, which allows me the opportunity inside the dream to assess who is who and what is what, and choose my next action, rather than react.

For example, in a recent dream I was walking home from somewhere that I recognized as a place close to home, but it became dark a lot quicker than I expected. I started to worry about my safety. Suddenly, a woman appeared in a car and offered me a ride home. I didn’t “know” the woman in the dream. She didn’t have a name. She wasn’t identifiable to me. And yet I knew she was safe. I knew accepting a ride from her would be okay.

As we begin to get better at being non-reactive in our dreams, dream images can become more expansive than just the people, places, and things we have already met or known from our waking life in the present or past. Our dream images can be of times and spaces beyond the ones we are familiar with from waking life. They can be of before times and spaces, or even dimensions beyond this one. (Multidimensional dream travel is also a topic for another article.)

Once we get better at letting go of our conditioned beliefs and stop being so reactive inside of dreams, we can better see (and more important, feel) the images for what they are.

This is a big part of the work I do when I work my dreams with Natural Dreamwork. Distinguishing feeling from reactivity, and allowing myself to feel rather than react, has had a profound impact on both my dreams and waking life.

An example of this is in the dream above of the woman offering me a ride. In the past, if I had encountered a strange woman in a dream, my automatic response would have been very reactive, based on the extreme anxiety of my past conditioning. I would have certainly run away or said “no thank you” to a stranger offering me help on a dark, deserted road, no matter how kind she seemed. The instinct to run away in terror from a stranger is a little outdated for Adult Me, isn’t it? Especially since I was in a reasonably safe neighborhood, just after sunset. However, there is still conditioning in me that tells me to be immediately afraid and to run quickly from the stranger.

When we stop being so reactive in dreams, we may find ourselves pausing instead. We may find ourselves taking more time and making choices that are different than ones we’ve made in similar situations in the past. We may start questioning our certainty about everything and everyone — which allows room for our experience to become something different than the familiar.

At this stage, we may start recognizing upon waking that where we were and who we were in the dream are not the same as who we are now, and where we live life now, despite the first-person perspective of the dream.

This is key, but it takes practice and persistence. Not the kind of practice some of you may be familiar with from lucid dreaming. We aren’t necessarily trying to get more clear inside the dream, or “wake up” in the dream for this practice.

What’s required for this is a willingness to be inside the dream, in the first-person perspective, and to feel.

To feel all of it. The pleasure, the joy. The terror, the dread.

All of it.

Yes, this means allowing for “nightmares” sometimes. Sometimes our nightmares are asking for attention so that we may heal something very old, and very painful. Perhaps, deep within you, you know that you’re strong and safe enough now to do so.

(Note: I recommend to everyone I know and all readers to be mindful about your mental health and to consult a mental health practitioner if your dreams or dreamwork are causing interruptions in your ability to safely manage your daily life.)

For some dreamers, past places and times can be identified only upon waking and recalling the dream. That’s ok. Again, what we are trying to do here is recognize that there is a benefit and purpose to dreaming of past lives.

Once you’re awake you may remember that the architecture inside the dream reminds you of a movie you saw that takes place during Victorian times. You might realize that characters were wearing period clothing. I used to ruminate a lot over trying to validate that dreams took place in the past during a certain period. I wanted to know for certain the when and the where of the past life dream. I don’t care as much anymore. I am not sure it matters as much as the feelings the dream images are inviting us to feel.

It’s revisiting the feeling, I believe, that dreams of past lives are here to offer us. It’s a chance at re-experiencing an event or encounter that we either did not or could not process at the time it happened.

Some call these feelings karmic traces.

“Karma means action. Karmic traces are the results of actions, which remain in the mental consciousness and influence our future. We can partially understand karmic traces if we think of them as what in the West are called tendencies in the unconscious. They are inclinations, patterns of internal and external behavior, ingrained reactions, habitual conceptualizations. They dictate our emotional reactions to situations and our intellectual understandings as well as our characteristic emotional habits and intellectual rigidities. They create and condition every response we normally have to every element of our experience.” — Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

Psychiatrist and author Brian Weiss writes about this from a different perspective in his many books on reincarnation and use of past-life regression as a way of healing current waking life conditions and limitations. His patient may come to him utterly afraid of water, for instance. They can’t swim. They can’t even put their pinky toe in a large body of water. He will regress them using hypnosis and together they identify a past-life trauma having to do with water. His patients often report rapid healing once they visualize and re-experience the trauma.

If in a past life, I was a victim of Nazi persecution, and I did not have the opportunity to work through the kind of terror that comes from living through fearing for my life or witnessing the death of a loved one by execution, that terror may have carried over into this life and may, as with conditioning from this life, influence my behavior, actions, and choices without my conscious awareness of it.

My dreams of past lives may be trying to bring those memories to the surface, to my conscious awareness, for attention, processing, and mostly, for feeling. It may take time for the feelings to reach the surface, let alone be processed and healed. The Nazi example is a personal one for me. I have dreams in which I am being hunted by a cruel male figure in power, or trying to avoiding torment from a type of persecution. Intuitively, I have come to believe these dreams are a re-experiencing of a past life event or period of time.

“What you resists, persists” is a common catchphrase in modern psychology and in personal development. Similarly, traditions that encourage mindfulness practices invite practitioners to “sit with your feelings.”

I believe there is a deeper, more esoteric reason for deeply feeling our feelings from past lives in dreams: to heal in this life what we could not in the last one.

I believe that this life is part and sum all of our lives; that we are capable of giving the gift of feeling to our “past self” that we were incapable of feeling at the time. Due to the constraints of memory in waking life, I believe that this is most accessible to us in dreams. (Hypnosis and meditation with experienced practitioners are other ways we can access past-life trauma.)

I believe there is a deep, necessary healing that comes as a result of being willing to feel the feelings in these types of dreams. Without it, we carry forward the traces of past-life traumas, just as we do when we aren’t able or willing to re-engage with the traumas of this life.

“Any reaction to any situation — external or internal, waking or dreaming — that is rooted in grasping or aversion, leaves a trace in the mind. As karma dictates reactions, the reactions sow further karmic seeds, which further dictate reactions, and so on. This is how karma leads to more of itself. It is the wheel of samsara, the ceaseless cycle of action and reaction.” — Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

Dreaming, dream recall, and feeling our feelings in dreams through intentional dreamwork allows us the opportunity (night after night) to purify our karma, to discover our true nature, to heal that which we did not have the time or strength to heal previously, or to become that which we were originally before our conditioning and before our trauma, what some call the soul. Please choose whatever terminology or whichever tradition resonates for you.

I’ve been quoting Tenzin Wangyal Rinopche in this article, whose book Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep is a good one for study if you’re interested in dreams, dreamwork and reincarnation. However, I’m equally if not more influenced by the tradition of Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism, which also maintains a belief, as the Yungdrung Bön of Tibet do, in reincarnation and the ability to dream of past lives. If you’re interested in reincarnation, both mystical traditions offer a lot on the topic.

If you’re interested in past-life recall and regression, Brian Weiss’ books are easy-to-read, and offer case studies of patients who’ve had images of presumed past lives arise during hypnosis and who’ve been subsequently healed of related conditions.

If you are curious about using dreamwork as a way to become more attuned to reactivity and feeling in both waking life and dreams, I would highly encourage you to learn more about Natural Dreamwork.

(Note: Any Amazon links in this article are affiliate links. But the recommendations are all from me, from my heart.)