Jennywren said:
I conducted my own little experiment with Lottie today. I know many people simply dismiss past life memories as being fantasy from the child's imagination. Lottie's memories seemed very realistic to me, and so I was curious as to whether Lottie could deliberately invent a past life story that was historically plausable. I asked her to make up a past life and tell me about it. The results were exactly what I had expected. I will type up what she said and include it in my next post.
Hi everyone,
As it says above, I asked Lottie to invent a past life and tell me about it in order to see if a deliberate fantasy from her could be historically plausable.
As I thought, the answer was no.
Straight away her story contained elements of fantasy. She 'remembered' the life of a princess living in a castle, with a dragon. The castle was full of buttons you could press that would make anything you wanted appear, "If you wanted a sandwich, all you had to do was to press the 'sandwich button', and one would appear!". She wasn't serious, and wasn't reflective like she had been when telling me about her real past lives, she was happy and animated, taking great delight in describing every detail, especially what the castle looked like. The colour of the dragon kept changing randomly between green and red; she obviously couldn't remember, or couldn't decide on a colour, between one minute and the next. She then said that the castle was haunted by ghosts and ghostly objects, and she got so caught up with this new idea that she stopped refering to it as a castle and instead it became a 'haunted mansion' for the rest of the story, and her descriptions of it changed from that of the previous 'castle'. She said there were "living jumping jelly beans" in the haunted mansion, and "Flowers with faces" in the garden. I could identify elements from at least one Disney movie, one stage show she had seen, and one book she owns. With her real past lives, we could not identify any sources for her memories.
Interestingly, she stopped telling the story in the first person and instead the main character just became "The princess". Her character was purely descriptive - she had a blue dress, red shoes, and long hair. Lottie never once identified with the Princess' feelings, thoughts, emotions, likes, dislikes, etc; she was two dimentional in the extreme. There was no mention of her age, name or surname, what she did for a living, her mothers name, a prefered food, any skills she had, or how she died - all things she had mentioned when speaking about her remembered life as Daisy. And one of the things she had not concentrated on at all when remembering her real past lives were what the people had looked like, clothes they had worn, etc. I would say about 95% of her made-up story was purely descriptive, as opposed to, say, 10% or less for her real memories.
The Princess character wasn't the focus of the story either, she was secondary to everything else, including the scenery, and was all but forgotten by the end. Details changed accidently as Lottie couldn't remember details from even several seconds ago. Compare this to the fact that more than 2 years ago the details of her past lives never once changed, even over the course of months!
In her orginal memories you got a sense of the whole lifetime - what she did on a daily basis, up until the day she died. In her fantasy story the life of the princess was mearly a snapshot of what she looked like on one day. The whole story consisted of a visual description of the princess, ghosts, dragon and castle/mansion, and happened in realtime. It wasn't a past life, it was a past 10 minutes. It lacked anything even remotely credible.
I found this experiment to be very telling. A friend of mine once said that Lottie's past life stories were invented, as she has a very good imagination. I couldn't argue about that - her imagination is amazing. But I struggled to believe that a two year old would
a) come up with the theory of reincarnation on her own and out the blue (she had never been exposed to the idea),
b) decide to make-believe she had been someone else in the past, and convince her parents she was not making it up,
c) come up with historically accurate information about common first names, surname, methods of sheep shearing, and music from the 1700's, and invent her own cause of death by starvation (she knew neither what death was, nor starvation),
and d) not change the story or details at all, even over the course of months.
And now I have asked her to make up a past life story, it didn't have the same elements as her real memories - not even slightly.
I am more convinced in reincarnation than ever.