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Original poster

anyone else's toddler ever spoken about 'past life' experiences??????

326 replies

noonar · 18/09/2007 13:33

now, am not saying (necessarily) that i believe in reincarnation, but i've just had a rather spooky conversation with my 3 yo dd. (just 3)

the gist of it was that she's bored with being 3 and wants to be a teenager again. when i asked her where i was whilst she was busy being a teenager, she said that she had a different mummy then.

the conversation went on, and then she said that she got sick and she died.

as i said earlier, i'm not saying i believe any of this, but it certainly sent a shiver down my spine.

OP posts:
headinhands · 07/04/2013 21:11

Sorry Bumbke, was referring to January's assertion of the untestable nature of past lives. If untestable equals plausible we can't disregard anything.

bumbleymummy · 07/04/2013 21:13

Untestable doesnt necessarily mean impossible though :)

headinhands · 07/04/2013 21:19

Dione it was just a made up thing but the one I remember the most is dd and her skeleton phobia, she said they would come up out of the floor! She must have picked it up/mixed up ideas from somewhere. That seems more likely than the possibility that she had seen skeletons come up out of the floor in a previous life.

lisalisa · 07/04/2013 21:25

Ok what does everyone make of cases where a person has been regressed under hypnosis to a past life and has started speaking fluently in a language not their own or not known to them and describing places and events from a bygone era which check out as fact when researched? how can this be referred memory?

headinhands · 07/04/2013 21:28

?That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.? Hitch.

He says it better than I ever could. The person making the claim has to bring the goods to the table. If they have nothing to back it up the claim it can be, and should be ignored.

By what process do you decide what is likely/true?

littlebitofthislittlebitofthat · 07/04/2013 21:30

I just think that its a little off.... to maintain something couldn't happen, when you cant prove that it hadn't.

one persons experience and the conclusions they draw from it are as valid as anyone else's.

DioneTheDiabolist · 07/04/2013 21:31

But your DD didn't say that she had experienced skeletons emerging from the floor in a past life, did she?

The difference here, from what I can tell, is that people are discussing specific conversations where a child has claimed to remember a life before this one, people, environments, that sort of thing. You are talking about bedtime fears. They are both quite different.

littlebitofthislittlebitofthat · 07/04/2013 21:32

Headinhands... It can be dismissed by you because you don't have the evidence, but They have the evidence of their experience

seeker · 07/04/2013 21:34

"Ok what does everyone make of cases where a person has been regressed under hypnosis to a past life and has started speaking fluently in a language not their own or not known to them and describing places and events from a bygone era which check out as fact when researched? how can this be referred memory?"

Speaking fluently in a language not the own? Please could you show me something which says this has actually happened?

lisalisa · 07/04/2013 21:35

Seeker - I read a book about past life regression and this was the one case that really really stood out - all the rest could be people not going back to past lives at all but just recounting memories. I have read of this type of scenario a few times now but don't recall the name of the book unfortunately .

headinhands · 07/04/2013 21:39

So what you're saying Dione is that we should believe what the child says. (in which case there are shadow monsters in my ds's bedroom) The issue here is testimony vs what we know to be true. If we start to believe what people say just because they are saying it we have to believe everything anyone has ever said. Do you not see the problem with that method of discerning facts. We have to simultaneously believe in all religions to start with. How do you decide what is and isn't fact? What method do you use?

bumbleymummy · 07/04/2013 21:43

Head, by that logic we should probably assume that all scientific discoveries have been made now and there is nothing new to discover. I mean if we don't have evidence for it now then it can't be possible! It's a good job some people aren't put off that easily and don't just dismiss ideas because they don't have proof that they are possible yet.... I don't think we would be where we are today if everyone did that!

headinhands · 07/04/2013 21:43

So littlebit you regard everyone's testimony as evidence? Do you believe all personal accounts of fairies/aliens/werewolfs etc? If not then you don't actually mean what you just said.

EasterHoliday · 07/04/2013 21:45

seeker there are frequent news stories of people who suffer strokes / come out of a coma speaking languages they never knew or in accents (think Jamaican patois) completely unfamiliar & not local to them.

marissab - there's a Peppa Pig episode where she plays the violin - it sparked an obsession in my daughter which still hasn't passed

bumbleymummy · 07/04/2013 21:46

The issue is that you are assuming that you know something is true...

seeker · 07/04/2013 21:47

Of course not everything's been discovered yet! The whole point about science is that it changes when more stuff is discovered. But that doesn't mean we have to be so open minded that our brains fall out. And if there is a sensible, non woo explanation for something, then that's the explanation to go for. If there really aren't any sensible non woo explanation, then that is the time to consider the woo explanation. But not before.

DontSHOUTTTTTT · 07/04/2013 21:47

Blimey, I don't know about past lives but this thread has certainly been reincarnated.

It's the oldest Zombie thread I've seen. Shock

bumbleymummy · 07/04/2013 21:48

I don't know about that seeker ... I bet the germ theory of disease was considered a bit 'woo' initially.

seeker · 07/04/2013 21:50

But there was loads of proper evidence to support it.

bumbleymummy · 07/04/2013 21:53

Eventually...

DioneTheDiabolist · 07/04/2013 21:55

I am not saying that you should believe either or both. Belief was not the point of my post. What I am saying is that bedtime fears and claims of a life before this one are too different to be compared. One is quite explainable, the other, less so.

littlebitofthislittlebitofthat · 07/04/2013 22:00

headinhands... I believe that it could be real to them.

ICBINEG · 07/04/2013 22:04

"one persons experience and the conclusions they draw from it are as valid as anyone else's."

This is simply untrue on all possible levels.

The experiences of a person suffering an extreme mental illness are not as valid an interpretation of reality as those of someone who is NT. When medical science can describe exactly which hormone levels are elevated when 'episodes' occur and exactly the affect that has on the perception of the individual, their testimony of angels and demons can easily be dismissed as being far less likely a representation of reality than the next persons.

When people say they do not credit memory of previous lives, they have the weight of the over whelming maority of human experience behind them. They have the fact that no one has proven beyond reasonable doubt that such a phenomenon exists (in spite of the hundreds/thousands of people who have claimed such an ability). They have the scientific facts surrounding the influence of brain death on memory, and the evidence of the ways in which immature brains function differently to mature ones.

When people say their toddler is telling them of a previous life, they have only the words spoken by said toddler with no means to verify their origin at all.

These two points of view are almost as far from equally valid as it is possible to be.

stifnstav · 07/04/2013 22:04

I used to do weird stuff as a child. I'd use very oldfashioned phrases and make people feel very uncomfortable.

Apparently I used to have periods when I'd be amazed by modern appliances and I'd tell my mum about what we did without them. Imagine a young child standing looking at a washer with a hand on her chin and the other on her hip and shaking her head in disbelief - they called me the Old Woman.

I honestly don't know what I think of it now. But I have witnessed other children saying very weird stuff too.

littlebitofthislittlebitofthat · 07/04/2013 22:05

what I mean is... that if they have experienced something that I haven't... it doesn't necessarily mean that they are wrong.

and I don't have to believe them its enough for them to be convinced by what they saw.

I'm happy with their explanation IYSWIM

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