Memory I can’t quite place. Past life?

**lidybug** · 09-26-2020 06:45 PM

I have a memory from when I was a child maybe 5 years old. Although I have been told this never happened. It’s more then a dream because I don’t remember it as such. Memories and dreams feel very different.
I’m walking up to a picturesque white plantation home in the south. My grandparents and I walk up a driveway lined with trees and a sprawling green lawn on either side. We approach the front porch of the home with the grandiose white pillars. We enter through double doors into an expansive foyer. I’m Looking up at the high ceiling, in the short distance I see a second floor behind an ornate railing. Three or four doors run the length of the second floor. Downstairs to the right of us is a sitting area. White furniture and nicely dressed people sitting in conversation. I am now sitting amongst the company with my grandparents. Next thing I remember is it’s time for bed. My grandmother asks me to give everyone a kiss goodnight. A young man walks through the front door. He is maybe in his late teens or early 20’s with shoulder length dark hair and dressed in an old fashioned formal wear or his Sunday best. It did not feel old fashion in the memory but this is what gives me a clue of the time period. I walk over to give him a kiss goodnight and my grandmother says “No, not him, he’s bad”. My grandmother would tease often by calling people “loved ones” bad if they had not called her or visited her in a long time. This is the feeling I get from her but I do not kiss him and go up the long spiraling stairs to bed. I look over the railing from the second floor at the people below. I can see myself as if looking at the situation from above outside of myself.
I am in a long white nightgown and my dark brown ringlets are held back to one side with a big blue bow.
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My paternal grandmother was raised in an orphanage from the age of 4-17. She was almost completely deaf due to an accident she had as a toddler. The house mother took her under her wing and taught her how to read. The Bible was often the book she spent many hours reading. She would tell me that she use to sit in the window on the top floor of the orphanage and read while Miss Maude made the beds and did other chores. Afterwards Minnie (my grandmother) would slide down the long wooden railing of the staircase. Grandmom always said she had a wonderful childhood in the orphanage.
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When I was 40 years old I visited the orphanage in which she spent her childhood. I walked up the marble staircase and entered the childhood of my 90 year old grandmother. The orphanage is now a historic museum. As I walked through the home room by room I saw my grandmother eating her meals, sitting by the large fireplace, and opening Christmas gifts. She often told me of her wish for Christmas, a violin. Christmas morning each girl would receive one gift. When handed a package shaped like a violin she could hardly contain her excitement. She tore open the package to reveal a mini pinball game shaped like a violin. She was heartbroken. As I look in the showcases on display I see a violin. Did some little girl really get the gift of a violin? I come upon the staircase a see my grandmother laughing sliding down the railing. There is a chain across the stairs blocking access to the upper floor. I talk to one of the women who work here and tell her of my grandmother and how I would love to see the window she sat in as a little girl reading her bible. She informs me that upstairs is now an office and storage but she is happy to let me take a look. Walking through the rooms upstairs I pass a tables piled with paperwork and other items. I stop at one of the tables, I am struck by a rather large painting wrapped in clear plastic laying in front of me. It is a portrait of a young girl wearing a long white dress her brown locks held to one side with a large blue ribbon. The memory comes flooding back from my childhood. A childhood I can’t quite place. I look up and just a few steps away is the window my grandmother (the same grandmother from that “memory” of my childhood) sat reading her bible. 67763FB0-FF8B-4CD3-9825-D1766283F4E2.jpg

**Sageous** · 09-27-2020 05:43 PM

Memories can be funny things, Lidybug: for example:

At a family get-together last year I brought up a man who I remembered was courting my sister some 40 years ago, named Frank. My sister was then going to college in south Florida, and Frank was living local to the school. He was rich, related to a European family of great wealth, was crazy about my sister (who was decidedly not rich), and he wanted to take her away to Europe the next year. My sister was not so crazy about him, but did like him, his offer, and his prospects. We had talked for an hour or so back then about him, with us finally agreeing that for long term happiness you follow love, and not greed, and maybe Frank should be given a little distance. That hour contained many arguments, details, and emotions, and I remember it well. Here's the funny part: when I brought it up last year, my sister looked at me blankly and said, basically, "That never happened, there never was a 'Frank'." Now, my sister (famously in the family) has a memory like a steel trap and still brings back things, in detail, that happened decades ago, so I couldn't see her forgetting this conversation, much less Frank (and there was no reason for her to lie about it either, for a variety of reasons). So I paused for a moment and said, sincerely, "Hmm, maybe it was just a dream." Even though I was sure it had happened for real, I had to resign myself to the possibility that the memory of a dream from long ago had wandered into my waking-life memory, causing me to "remember" that the dream had actually happened. .

Though I do agree that memories and dreams can and do feel different, because that is true for me as well, remember that dreams, by their very nature, are memories. Aside from the few moments when we have them, dreams exist only as memories -- there are no other records of them; no photographs, recordings, witnesses, and all the other things that lend firmness to actual memory. But they still exist, being memories. And, being memories, over decades they can certainly manage to be stored in the same piles with real memories in our long-term memory, which could cause them to accidentally be remembered as real memories, and not dreams (I think this happens a lot, BTW, especially as we age).

So, among the tens of thousands of dreams you've had over your years, Lidybug, you may actually have had a dream about being that little girl with the blue bows with your grandparents in that wonderful house (or, perhaps, you might have had a dozen different dreams; one about your that house, another about your grandparents, still another about the young man, etc) and when you were in the midst of that very emotional moment at the orphanage looking at that painting, your subconscious dutifully added to the moment by summoning a dream (or a collection of dreams melded into one) that resembled the entire situation. However, the dream had been shoved into a pile of actual memories, so it bubbled up into your mind as real, rather than dreamed.

I know this isn't a very exciting suggestion, but I think it might be worth considering. Dreams and memories can be very tricky sometimes, especially when they've been sitting around in your brain for decades. I guess what "really happened" is yours to choose, or explore -- who knows? I could be all wrong and you really were glancing back to a previous life!

**lidybug** · 09-27-2020 07:51 PM

Sageous, I truly appreciate that you read and comment on posts. Thank you I enjoy the deep conversation. ☺️
My thoughts on past lives have shifted quite a bit over the years. I feel that all our memories are somehow connected outside of time. If we are all connected to the same source, if we all are a fragment of the energy that is at the center of all that is, then why wouldn’t our memories be shared? If illness and personality traits can be located in a persons DNA then could this mean that “past life” memories surface through the subconscious and even into our conscious memories? It’s as if memories are not only accessible to the ego but also the consciousness that witness the ego inside all of us.

**Sageous** · 09-27-2020 11:13 PM

Well, in that case:

Instead of thinking of "remembering" a past life, why not stretch that out a bit and wonder if you are remembering someone else's current life, only that current life happened long ago? That might actually be sort of what you said, so you're likely already wondering, right?

I've been considering the necessary mechanics of shared-dreaming for a while now, and have decided (tentatively, of course, because I could be wrong) that shared dreaming must defy our current known rules of space/time. In other words, the energy that drives shared dreaming must exist outside of space and time to work (I hope you'll take my word on this for a moment, because I know this is not a shared dreaming thread and don't want to go there anyway). And as I mentioned above, dreams are memories, so these same mechanics might just apply to memories.

Because of this, you might actually have shared a dream -- or a memory, as it were -- with someone, sure, but the thing to wonder at here might be, I think, isn't that it happened but why it happened. Yes, we could very well all of us be contributing to a vast timeless pool of collectively shared memories; but that pool would be an ocean, really, with each of us individual souls barely a drop in it. This might sound odd, but that ocean is so vast that even memories from your own past lives would likely be lost in such a great sea of memories. So for another individual's memory to find you in a meaningful manner is, to me, downright miraculous. My question, lately, has evolved into something like what drives the miracle? A glance at a picture during even an emotionally charged moment simply doesn't seem enough, or else it would happening to everyone all the time; so there must be something more. What that something more is, I think, something worth exploring for you!

**lidybug** · 09-29-2020 02:44 AM

Originally Posted by Sageous

Well, in that case:

Instead of thinking of "remembering" a past life, why not stretch that out a bit and wonder if you are remembering someone else's current life, only that current life happened long ago? That might actually be sort of what you said, so you're likely already wondering, right?

Thank you for the suggestion to “stretch it out a bit”! Yes, it all could be happening right now past, present, future. From the perspective of the source of all that is all memories and experiences are happening simultaneously. Like you said the real question is “why”. Why have these memories and experiences come into my awareness?

**lidybug** · 09-29-2020 02:58 AM

Originally Posted by Sageous

Well, in that case:

In other words, the energy that drives shared dreaming must exist outside of space and time to work (I hope you'll take my word on this for a moment, because I know this is not a shared dreaming thread and don't want to go there anyway). And as I mentioned above, dreams are memories, so these same mechanics might just apply to memories.
Yes, I will take your word on this because I agree completely.
Because of this, you might actually have shared a dream -- or a memory, as it were -- with someone, sure, but the thing to wonder at here might be, I think, isn't that it happened but why it happened. Yes, we could very well all of us be contributing to a vast timeless pool of collectively shared memories; but that pool would be an ocean, really, with each of us individual souls barely a drop in it. This might sound odd, but that ocean is so vast that even memories from your own past lives would likely be lost in such a great sea of memories. So for another individual's memory to find you in a meaningful manner is, to me, downright miraculous. My question, lately, has evolved into something like what drives the miracle? Could we hold the drive with in ourselves? Could our openness to receive and inner longing to be connected to the source be the drive. A wanting to remember from where we came? After all perhaps from the perspective of the source we are all fragments remembering what it was to be whole.

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**lidybug** · 09-29-2020 03:06 AM

Sorry about the light blue font color. I’m still learning how to use this it’s been awhile. This has my mind swirling with curiosity. I have felt this past week or so that I’m on the brink of a new understanding. Like pieces of a puzzle are coming together. How fun!
Driving to a river today in the jungle of Costa Rica I shifted my consciousness into the trees. I will write more on that soon.