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

[noonar]

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.

chipping how can you explain someone correctly guessing the lottery numbers even though the odds are millions to one against?

atouch I don't think it is an attention thing. I think toddlers have very active imaginations...and a slight problem separating pretend/dream/imagined from real. People with serious MH issues also see ghosts, it isn't attention seeking then either.

My own DD (22 mo) was recently banging on about a 'yellow bear' she had lost for a good 3 days. She has never had a yellow bear and as far as I can tell there isn't one at any of the play groups she goes to.

So if I 'believed' I might go out searching for the yellow bear and, when I inevitably discover that someone somewhere in the family history had a dearly beloved yellow bear that they tragically lost (and if I widen the search to enough relatives then someone somewhere WILL recognise the story) I could ask how the hell my daughter could know about a yellow bear that went missing 60 years before she was born.

But the far more likely answer is that she had a dream about it, or saw something like it in a book etc. and got confused.

The same is true for the stories related on this thread. In the last 100 years there have been around 7,000,000,000 toddlers each of which will have had multiple random incidents in which they synthesised memory/dream/observation into something that didn't happen to them explicitly, making the order of 100,000,000,000 stories/not quite memories. It is all but certain that at least some of these will match in an entirely coincidental way with past events that the toddler knew nothing of.

If you made up 100,000,000,000 different stories don't you think at least a few of them would turn out to have actually happened? Would that make you psychic?

Most 'hits' will be superficial or ignored. The odd one will randomly hit 3,4,5 details correct, in the same way that if enough people play the lottery not only will someone win in a given week, but someone sooner or later will win 3 or 4 or 5 weeks in a row.

In fact we already have multiple lottery winners. Do you think they are psychic? Or can you see that such events are statistically likely?

I just find it strange that many of these children are talking about death - sometimes in quite unusual ways. It seems a bit odd for a young child to talk that way.

my ds2 used to talk to his nursery teachers about his other mummy. after me probing it turned out I wasn't his real mummy and he was just staying with me for now. he named his teddy bear Michael after his brother who had died when he fell out of a tree. he also had a particular thing about elm hillt in Norwich and refused to walk down there. he is six now and doesn't talk about it as much but we still do have visits from random invisible "friends" who come to chat to him. when he started at school there was a man called jack who no one else saw (the school was used as a base during ww2 for soldiers)who used to talk to ds2. now he's moved schools he doesn't get to see him anymore!!!

Icbineg- I love the way you quote science then pull random numbers out of the air to try and back up your claims.....

Isn't that the same technique used by snake-oil sellers?

I'm not wanting to get into a massive debate here. I found the first few pages of this thread intriguing. I do wonder if we as adults get very spooked by kids talking about thier 'other mummy' as we have a very clear concept that mummy is a unique position/relationship so another mummy sounds spooky. Your average preschooler has lots of friends, maybe 2 grannies, 3 uncles, knows 6 bus drivers and imagining/talking about another mummy or a 2nd mummy just isn't as significant or weird for them.

little they aren't random they are order of magnitude correct.

Everyone currently alive (7,000,000,000) was a toddler at some point in the last 100 years.

I will admit that the 15 random stories of a slightly spooky disjointed nature per toddler is a fairly arbitrary estimate...it is based on my DD coming up with them at a rate of 1 per month since she has been able to verbalize.

If you think that estimate is wrong then what do you think it should be and why?

I do embrace science, I also embrace that which science cannot YET explain.

after all for YEARs and YEARS and YEARS scientists maintained that the atom was the smallest possible building brick... yet hey, presto they split it open to find MORE stuff inside!

Have an open mind... that's fun too!

I think it's when your toddler turns round and says things like 'I had to get my men into the mountain' and then 'we are in India'- then the adult says, oh that must have been warm? then the toddler says 'no, it's very very cold' have to get the men to safety.

or " sobbing their little hearts out, telling you they were looking down & they were in a bed & not alive anymore, but it not like beds you have mummy, they were different when I lived with my other Mother & Father & we had lots of thin duvets too & all my bothers & sisters were crying, I miss my bothers & sisters so much"

Anyone interested in past life recall by children may want to have a look at the work of Dr Ian Stevenson. He says himself that it doesn't offer proof, but they are interesting cases. Most of his research is in southern asia and i do wonder how much of this is cultural - past life recall (if that is what it is) in children seems to be far more common in places where belief in reincarnation is the norm, although of course it may be that the research is skewed to those areas entirely because reincarnation is the norm. I'm not aware of any serious study in the west?

I've never read any example of a past-life regression that has proven to be verifiable as fact - all the ones that purport to be have more holes in than my dog-walking leggings (and that is quite a lot ).

Mostly loving, yayyy. I posted up a link from one of his youtubes earlier on. My link wasn't linky enough though......

Dr Ian Stevenson- the man who said that people have birthmarks because of injuries they have sustained in past lives?

The man who left a locked filing cabinet in his office, saying that after his death he would pass a message from beyond the grave with the combination-but which is still locked 7 years on?

Doesn't stop his research being interesting - i did say it wasn't offered as proof. There are many who have said that they would try to send a message from beyond the grave - Houdini springs to mind - and clearly none have succeeded. Why? Well, 1) there is no life beyond the grave, 2) It is difficult/impossible to communicate clear/any info from beyond the grave, or 3) He was reincarnated into someone else before he got a chance .

The birthmark thing is rather odd i agree - some are clearly hereditary. My ds has the same birthmark as has ggf had, but since my dp and fil also have it they can't all 1) have suffered exactly the same trauma in exactly the same place in a previous life, or 2) be the reincarnation of the same person given that three of them are alive at the same time.

While there are clearly flaws in his work he at least did attempt to look seriously at these stories. He didn't try to use them to flog any belief and was happy to say that they were inconclusive. It isn't an easy area to research, but i don't think that means it should be disregarded.

"It is difficult/impossible to communicate clear/any info from beyond the grave,"

Mumsnetter's 3 year olds seem to have no difficulty at all!

little As I said earlier I also embrace that which science cannot explain. But toddlers making up stories that once in a few billion stories have a scary correlation with past events is not in that category. Science can explain that very well as I believe I have demonstrated on this thread without recourse to reincarnation.

I am glad you would like to embrace the science!

Step 1. Identify the phenomenon.

I would frame the evidence in the following way.

Most toddlers will speak on occasion about things that have not actually happened to them or pertain to objects and places that they have not actually seen.

Often they move on quickly from a particular example, often onto another example also not grounded in their current reality.

On some occasions, the toddler is either particularly determined, or encouraged by the parent to explore the 'story' further.

On a very few of these occasions a correlation is found with actual past events, distant places that the toddler had no prior knowledge of.

So I have made the first move and suggested a hypothesis:

That the correlation to real events is coincidental and due to the vast number of stories being told, and the vast number of places objects to which the stories could refer.

In making this hypothesis I am drawing on acknowledged cases of coincidence based explanations in areas such as the 'think of a person and then they phone you' phenomenon, in which it is incredibly unlikely that it will happen to you but incredibly likely that it will happen to someone on the planet because there are so many people. Similarly it is very unlikely that you will win the lottery but likely that someone will.

I estimated the number of occasions of toddlers producing a statement not relevant to their actual real life experience in the last 100 years as being in excess of around 100 billion. This is based on a world population of 7 billion and each toddler coming up with on average 15 such statements.

My conclusion is that if you were to list 100 billion random statements of the kind that toddlers come out with you would be incredibly likely to be able to find some that matched well with actual past events, or distance places. The harder you were willing to look the more likely finding more matches becomes. And hence that there is no evidence for reincarnation being the explanation for this phenomenon.

The next step is for you to either:

a) dispute my numbers and suggest numbers you think are more realistic and why,

b) dispute my conclusion from the numbers (that it is incredibly statistically likely that at least some random stories will match up with past truth) giving a reason why,

c) accept that my hypothesis is sufficient to explain the phenomenon and that toddler pronouncements are not evidence of reincarnation.

but your first assupmtion is that this is coincidence and then everything else backs you up. that's NOT how scientists work...

I didn't read past this point

Isn't it sensible to start with the simplest, most credible explanation of a phenomenon, the, if that explanation doesn't fit, then move on to more complex, less credible ones?

little I didn't assume it is coincidence. I have attempted to demonstrate that coincidence is sufficient to explain the events.

If coincidence is sufficient then it is impossible to demonstrate that something more is needed.

Coincidence will always be occurring - there is no way to stop it?

Also it really really is how science works. You start with the relevant known things that you cannot rule out happening, and then only look to add new elements to your model if your current model doesn't explain the results.

eg. today I had a student with a weird looking spectrum. First stage is to see if the things we know about already can add up to that...only if the answer is NO would we look for an alternative.

if you see hoof print you assume its from a horse

BUT

Sometimes, it will be a zebra.

That is also how science works.

If you're in the Kentish countryside, you would have to have some pretty bloody amazing additional evidence to even consider it being a zebra. And basing anything on it being not a horse would be pretty stupid!

BUT it could be. escaped form the safari park.

I just don't understand the insistence that I should dismiss these experiences. there are plenty of people on here that feel as I do, and have come along to share.

however they are getting drowned out by your insistence that because they cant be explained by science they are ......wrong

and anyone who enjoys hearing about/wonders about is wrong too.

Now i'm big enough to admit that it cannot be explained by science YET. you are so blinkered that you cannot even entertain the idea that there are things that cannot be explained.

I don't ever think we are going to come to an agreement on this...do you?

Of course there are things that can't be explained -yet - loads of things!

And if the hoof print was near a wildlife park then it would be silly not to have in the back of your mind that the print might be a zebra's - even thought it was still probably a horse.

But why is closing your mind to sensible, realistic explanations better than opening it to the paranormal?

Mostly, as I understood it, he wasn't saying ALL birthmarks were a result of a past life trauma/experience - just that some birthmarks seemed to tie in with injuries that were spoken of in their past life experience.

Also, ICBINEG, these stories aren't necesarily working from the idea that a child talks about a random event and it correlates with something by chance due to the number of possibilities out there - sometimes specific information is given about people or places - that reduces the randomness.

If people can accept that we don't know everything yet then I don't know why they stick so rigidly to what they know to explain everything as if there could never be any other possibility. If you never consider other possibilities how could anything new ever be discovered?