Regression and memory

The teaching

As the psychology of memory teaches it.

Memory is rebuilt

Memory is not a recording that can be played back. Each time something is remembered it is rebuilt from fragments, filled out with what usually happens and what seems likely, and stored again in its new form. Frederic Bartlett showed this by having people retell a strange Native American tale, The War of the Ghosts, again and again over weeks and months. With each telling it grew shorter and more ordinary, its odd details dropped or changed into familiar ones, until it was more like the tellers' own stories than the one they had heard.

Where a memory came from

The mind keeps the content of a memory far better than its source. A scene from a film, a novel, a history lesson, a dream or a grandparent's story can be recalled years later as something one lived, because nothing in a memory is stamped with where it came from. The mind judges the source afterwards, mostly by how vivid and detailed the memory feels, and a vivid imagining can pass that test as easily as a real event. Psychologists call the slip a failure of source monitoring.

Forgotten sources

When the source is forgotten altogether, what returns feels new. As a girl, Helen Keller wrote a story, The Frost King, that turned out to follow closely a tale she had been read years before and had no memory of hearing. Carl Jung noticed that a passage of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra repeats, almost word for word, a story Nietzsche had read as a boy in a book by Justinus Kerner. In a past-life session the same thing can bring back names, places, dates and customs taken in long ago from a book, a film or a museum, and present them as memories of another life.

What hypnosis does

Hypnosis is a state of focused attention and heightened responsiveness to suggestion. It does not open a vault of perfect records. Under hypnosis people produce more material, true and false together, and grow more confident in all of it, so that the vividness and certainty of what they recall rise without its accuracy rising with them. A memory made sure in this way is harder to correct afterwards, because the person now remembers remembering it clearly.

The shaping question

The questions build the scene. A subject asked to go back before birth, to look down at their feet and say what they are wearing, to step outside and say what they see, is being invited to imagine, one detail at a time, and a willing mind supplies each detail as it is asked. The subject is not lying. They are doing what the situation asks, and what they already believe about reincarnation, history and themselves shapes what comes. The guide's reactions shape it further, rewarding the details that fit and passing over those that do not.

Imagining makes it feel remembered

Simply imagining an event makes people more confident that it happened to them. Asked to picture in detail breaking a window with their hand as a child, people become surer afterwards that it may really have happened. The more vivid and repeated the imagining, and the more a trusted person treats it as plausible, the more it comes to feel like memory. A past-life session joins all three: deep relaxation, vivid imagining repeated, and a guide who treats what comes as real.

Words that change a memory

Even a single word can alter what is remembered. People who watched a film of a car crash and were asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each other gave higher speeds than those asked how fast they were going when they hit, and a week later more of them remembered broken glass that was never shown. With repeated suggestion from a trusted source, people have come to remember whole events from childhood, such as being lost in a shopping centre, that never took place, and to add details of their own as they retell them.

Why it feels like memory

A memory feels true because it is vivid, because it comes with feeling, and because it carries a sense of having been there. None of these is proof. Imagined scenes can be vivid, a story can move a person to tears, and the sense of familiarity can attach itself to anything. Déjà vu, the brief, strange feeling of having lived a moment before, is one of the commonest experiences there are, more frequent in young adults and when tired or stressed, and it is a passing slip in the feeling of familiarity, not a glimpse of another life. If it comes often, with odd smells, fear or lost moments, it should be taken to a doctor.

Testing a story

A story of another life can be examined like any other claim. Write down every detail that could be checked: names, places, dates, money, clothes, food, words in the old language. Ask which of them the teller could have met in books, films, school or family talk. Ask which are wrong for the time and place, as when a farmer of the Middle Ages counts in a coinage not yet minted or a Roman soldier names a weekday in English. And ask whether the teller can do what that life would imply, such as speak its language. A story that matches a well-known novel or film closely is a sign of a forgotten source.

What such a story can be

A story of another life, like a dream, can still say something true about the one who tells it. The fears, longings and unfinished tasks in it are often those of the teller's present life, put into costume. Read so, written down and kept, it can be a useful mirror. The traditions that teach rebirth do not ask anyone to dig up former lives, and the Buddhist books count such memory a by-product of deep concentration, never the aim. Regression can stir distress and leave false memories that last, and it is not a treatment: anyone troubled by memories, of this life or another, is better served by a qualified therapist.