The Purpose of Past-Life Dreams

How to Recognize Them and How They Help Us Evolve

Jen Sonstein Maidenberg
Into the Dream

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Photo by Jen Sonstein Maidenberg

In my 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.

The reactions to these dreams vary depending on the feelings aroused, but all of them share a common feature in that we relate to the dream experience as novel, as new. We don’t remember it ever happening to us, even though it did. It does not feel like memory or remembering.

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.

If we adored the teacher, for instance, the character in our dream may appear to be someone we feel fondness for in current waking life. If we related to…

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Jen Sonstein Maidenberg
Into the Dream

Dreamwork practitioner, researcher, writer. Healthfully obsessed with dreams, time, & memory. To learn about one-on-one dreamwork, visit jenmaidenberg.com