DD seems to know all about my past. Very, very odd.

[FredQuimby]

This has been going on for ages, but I've only just really had the nerve to post about it. >Deep breath<

DD (four years old), says some very odd things. She tells me about my life and these are things she couldn't possibly know. For example, "Do you remember when you used to walk along the little lane and saw the pony and the heron?" - something that used to happen regularly to me when I was about six years old, walking to school with my mum and brother (it was a real horse and a plastic heron!). Also, things like we'll go to a car boot sale and she'll say it's like the jumble sales in the church when uncle >name< was a little boy and he bought a great big Mr Tickle jigsaw but some pieces were missing. This is again something that happened to me as a child. She told everyone in her Nursery that I'd fallen in the kitchen and had stitches in my head. She told them that the doctor was weaing a turban. Again, that happened when I was tiny and she would never have known about it. Another thing is that she identified a distant relative in a photo "Uncle >name

Very interesting thread!

Last week, ds4 and I were in the garden. We were walking around and ds4 kept pointing out weeds in the lawn and telling me to get rid of them! Now, dh and I are not wonderful gardeners and are generally unconcerned about weeds! So I asked him who had been talking to him about weeds.
He said "Grandad"
I said "But Grandad's been away" ( dh's Dad has more or less moved to the UK and hasn't seen ds4 much in the last while)
He said "No, the Grandad with Nana Mysurname. He knows all about weeds" My Dad did indeed know all about weeds, he had a PhD in horticulture but he has been dead 10 years and never met either ds3 or ds4.
I said "Are you sure? You mean the far-away Nana or the Near Nana" this is how he differentiates between my Mum and dh's Mum"
And he said "The far-away Nana. But he is a ghost, you know"

Another time, shortly after my Dad died, we only had ds1 and ds2 and we were driving to visit my Mum. Along a particular stretch of road, ds2, who was 3, suddenly said "Grandad went over that hill, and he never came back"
It was true. My Dad had driven along that route on a business trip and died in the hotel he had been staying in. He had driven over that hill and never come back.

Peacelove. That moved me!

Op. I think you should just let her talk. You don't want her to feel she can say certain things.

Can't!

Baby cakes is only 5mo, so not saying very much that's articulate yet, but I would live to hear things like how he picked us as parents and so on. I am rather woo and always wanted woo things to happen to me, but I lead a terribly prosaic life

My eldest DD would speak of her other mummy when she was 5or6 years old, but I just put it down as confusion in her mind, maybe it was like the others here.

Ds3 once asked me if I remembered when his "other father" died.

My MIL passed away last year. She was very close to my DNiece who she was caring for while my SIL studied nursing both days and nights right up until the day she died.

One day DNiece (then 1.9) was standing in front of the XBox with Kinect motion sensor, SIL and her girls had been playing Just Dance and the sensor was still on.

Everyone else was sitting down so you couldn't see their image on the screen. Suddenly an adult figure appears behind her on the screen just as she starts saying 'Nan, nan, nan'.

Had to name change for this.

My youngest brother used to talk more about "When I was bigger than you ..." than about his recent experiences! He was quite right about the way things were done - in my grandparents' generation and before. His memories of being an adult seemed to go from a hundred years or so earlier, to my parents' early adulthood. (Traumatic times on the whole, lots of war.) I was only a teenager and my knowledge of historical detail only went so far; it's quite possible he had valid recollections from way back.

I was certain I'd been a prince (yeah) although I used to yell at my parents a lot that I was really a princess and they'd stolen me Thing is, I still recall my memory of the moment I died as a prince - I was a child, having just got out of what I now recognise as a Roman-style bath. I was behind a perforated screen with my nurse, who carried a bunch of white cotton towels for me. Soldiers in bronze & leather armour barged in, nurse tried to keep me hidden but I was killed.

My dad had a story from his service in Egypt. He was a reconnaissance flyer - they were mapping the desert for the first time. As he told it, they were flying over dune after dune, moaning about the heat & dust and lack of anything to see, when Dad said "No, keep your eyes peeled, the village of Lot is just over that dune." And it was!

Posts here have got me wondering if we have an ancient Egyptian ancestor, still passing memories along. Heredity wouldn't explain memory of an ancestor's childhood death, but I'm not a fan of reincarnation or anything like that. Perhaps inherited memories can get slightly garbled in the copying?!

I'm not woo, but several woo things have happened to me over the years, so I can't dismiss things out of hand.

DS is only 2.5 and already he's picking up on stuff he shouldn't really know about. When I was pregnant recently, he would touch my tummy and talk about babies. He just sort of stopped doing it I suppose, which I didn't notice much at the time, but then I miscarried.

He did also once talk about his Grandpa, which is odd because his Grandpa (my Dad) died three years before he was born and has never really been called that to him. His other Grandad is very much with us and is called Grandad, never Grandpa. This is before he'd even watched TV, been to playgroup, or read any books that we hadn't read to him, so it's pretty unlikely that he picked the word up himself.

Strange. I do feel a very deep connection to him though, like I've known him my whole life, IYKWIM.

OP defo write all this stuff down. It sounds like this is all something your daughter will grow out of fairly soon - she'll be fascinated to know all this when she's older.

Oh yes, when ds1 was 18 months old I was reading "Miffy" to him. We got to the part where Mummy rabbit says "If we could have a baby now, how lovely that would be" Ds1 turned around and patted my tummy. I was 8 weeks pregnant with ds2 and we hadn't told him and at that age, even if we had said something I doubt if he would have understood.

Zombie does not dismiss the possibility of reincarnation. But she grew up knowing some of the people involved in the early scientific research into the subject. She has always found it fascinating.

www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/home-page

My nephew was very talkative about how he lived before he was born.

He was Daniel aged 13 years old and he lived in a house with his parents. The house seemed to have been crushed with a big rock one day and they all died. Well except for 'Daniel' as he was told he wasnt allowed to stay in heaven and was sent back to earth. He talked a lot about dying and being in heaven .Even as a very small boy he was really scared of bodies and being under covers etc-couldnt play the hiding game with him as he freaked out when heads were covered.

He had a little friend from nursery who always called him Daniel, His real name is nothing like Daniel. DN corrected him every time but to no avail.
One day,prompted by the friend calling him Daniel again DNs Mum told a gathering of other Mums about some of the things DN had been coming out with. Dn stormed into the room and gave her such an evil look that she followed him out of the room.He hissed at her that she should never do this again because ''children are not allowed to tell about before they were born''.

Hmm. Did anyone else see Who Do You Think You Were? Link is to the programme on 40D.

This very nice man was convinced he had a past life. If he did, it definitely wasn't the one he half-remembered and revisited under regression.

I do kind of relate tbh, my dd kind of did the same thing. It was more that she pulled my thoughts from thin air though, I would be thinking of something totally random, she would then verbalise it from thin air. She also identified a place by saying "that is close to Grandad", it was a web address on a random van, she was 2 , she had only visited Grandad once, several months before.

I also remember telling my Mother about her Grandma's house, I totally recall a red fire escape, with chickens milling about in the yard. Which apparently was accurate although I never could have seen it.

I am so not woo, but I could believe in a little bit of telepathy between Mothers and their children before a certain age. It only seemed to occur between dd and I, not her brothers.

For some of the things that occured/dd spoke about I honestly can't see any other explanation.

I am a bit woo I get deja vu a lot (probably more than once a month), am very sensitive to places/people etc without being 'psychic' or 'a medium'.

Anyhow I am interested by this 'hereditary memory' business.

My dad is not at all woo, indeed he is firmly (adamantly!) cynical. Except for the time he visited Rome and felt entirely at home and knew where he was going while walking around (this was in the mid 60s). He says he had an internal voice asking why strangers were in his city.

I had a very similar feeling about Venice (not been to Rome) when I went in the early 2000s. I knew my way around - I didn't get lost at all, and kept steering DH around back streets. It wasn't a feeling of familiarity exactly (although my heartrate went very strange around the jewish quarter) but certainly one that was not of a stranger.

My family history has been traced back to the 1600s. We are boringly staid North Western English on my dad's side - no italian connection whatsoever, I wonder where those memories could have come from?

Been thinking about this alot last night. Just how everything in nature seems to go round in a cycle. Is anything ever truly created or destroyed? Everything is always changing though.

Wow gem!!! Getting deep. Dont know if I'm gonna be able to shake this off my mind today. Xx

How very interesting.

Last week DS (2.6) and I were in the front room. I was ironing, my back to DS and a song came on the tv that reminds me of my mum and makes me cry. DS has never heard the song before (it's quite obscure) and because of the memories it has for me it's not something I would have ever hummed in front of him.

DS piped up "Are you gonna cry, Mummy? Turn it off."

I told my friend how weird this was so a couple of days later she was at my house and DS was engrossed with a toy. She very quietly started humming the tune and he immediately stopped, glared at her and said "Stop it! It makes Mummy cry!"

There is no way he could've known this. No way at all.

A day or two ago I was singing a song to myself that reminded me of when I was a child and would go to Pontins with my family. I was remembering being in the Crocodile Club (!) and DS ran in the room shouting "Snap! Snap Snap!" and snapping his hands together like a crocodile.

Can't explain it.

This thread is so interesting! I've never heard of hereditary memories before but then how does a newborn baby know how to feed, or all the other instinctual things we just know how to do.

My father died when I was a few months old, my parents lived in London before I was born then my mother moved back to scotland just before I was born with the plan that my father would follow once he'd tied things up down south. Sadly he passed away before he could return and my mother never took me back to London, but one night when I was a child I had a dream that I met my dad and he took me to a pub to meet his friends.

I described the place to my mum the next day, even the route to the pub, what the path was like under tunnels etc and even what kind of glasses they used, the tables, and layout of pub, and my mother said I'd perfectly described a pub they used to go to together in London, even down to the big tunnel they'd need to go under to get there.

I wonder if this was somehow her memory I was dreaming of.

Morning all!

Thanks for all the interesting stories. It's really good to know we're not alone in this weird situation.

I've decided against talking to anyone else about this, as I'm worried that all sorts of my memories will 'come out'. Nothing special, but private things. It's unnerving that very personal ideas, like the random word associations, can be said by anyone else. Also at the moment I'm taking medication for anxiety and I'd be worried that people would think I'm going insane!

This is so interesting. Not related to your DD as such FredQuimby, but the fact that you associate shapes with names is also intriguing. I only know about this condition through Mumsnet to be honest - but could that be a form of synaesthesia? I know there are other posters who hear colours or associate numbers with personalities etc. It just goes to show that there are all kinds of brain functions which we don't really understand - it doesn't mean it's weird as such.

I really believe that genetic memory exists. DH has had a similar experience to your DD in that he vividly recalls going to nursery - the building, toys, playgroud, even the rules - except that his memories are of the nursery his father attended in the 60's, and the building itself was demolished long before DH was born. This only came out a couple of years ago, so DH has spent his whole life believing that these memories were his own when it turns out he could never have gone there. He has no memories of his actual nursery, although he recalls his younger brother going there. I don't think it'ssaid the 'woo', I think it's genetic.

Now having said that, there are plenty of stories from DH's family that really are woo... perhaps that's for another thread though. Is there a spooky experiences thread anywhere?

I think it's a bit sad that people can't share these stories without feeling their mental health will be questioned.
There are lots of "woo" stories in my Dad's family but my aunts are reluctant to talk about them. My Dad did and there's one story I would love to ask my aunt about but she freaks out when she thinks about it so I can't.

nocluenoclueatall Tue 12-Jun-12 23:56:48
I do feel a very deep connection to him though, like I've known him my whole life, IYKWIM.

That's just it though, you have in a way. Our DNA was in existence long before we were born. On a cellular level, we did experience our parents' lives. I'm going to look into all that hereditary memory stuff.

What a fascinating thread, thank you so much for sharing, OP