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The Ninth Lesson: Metempsychosis.853
when he was informed that the church was a recent erection.” The fact of
the addition of the church, seems to place the incident within the rule of
awakened memories of scenes known in a past life, for clairvoyance, astral
travel, etc., would show the scene as it was at the time of the dream, not as
it had been years before.
Charles Dickens mentions a remarkable impression in his work “Pictures
from Italy.” “In the foreground was a group of silent peasant girls, leaning
over the parapet of the little bridge, looking now up at the sky, now down
into the water; in the distance a deep dell; the shadow of an approaching
night on everything. If I had been murdered there in some former life I could
not have seemed to remember the place more thoroughly, or with more
emphatic chilling of the blood; and the real remembrance of it acquired in
that minute is so strengthened by the imaginary recollection that I hardly
think I could forget it.”
We have recently met two people in America who had very vivid
memories of incidents in their past life. One of these, a lady, has a perfect
horror of large bodies of water, such as the Great Lakes, or the Ocean,
although she was born and has lived the greater part of her life inland, far
removed from any great body of water, She has a distinct recollection of
falling from a large canoe-shape vessel, of peculiar lines, and drowning. She
was quite overcome upon her first visit to the Field Museum in Chicago,
where there were exhibited a number of models of queer vessels used by
primitive people. She pointed out one similar in shape, and lines, to the one
she remembers as having fallen from in some past life.
The second case mentioned is that of a married couple who met each
other in a country foreign to both, on their travels. They fell in love with
each other, and both have felt that their marriage was a reunion rather than
a new attachment. The husband one day shortly after their marriage told his
wife in a rather shamed-faced way that he had occasional flashes of memory
of having held in his arms, in the dim past, a woman whose face he could
not recall, but who wore a strange necklace, he describing the details of the