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An interesting phenomenon is clear childhood memories of events that no one else remembers, or even denies that they ever happened, or simply could not have happened. For example, a person reminds her parents of the time she fell off the horse as a child but they insist: “You never fell off a horse!”
I personally remember running to safety with my parents during a World War II bomb raid. I even remember the cobblestones in the street. I remember the location: in front of a railroad station in Prague. But the war ended five years before I was born. The railroad station was never bombed as far as I know. Yet, the memory is clear, with my parents from this life. Alas, it simply could not have happened as I remember it. Most likely the street in front of the Prague railroad station (where I certainly was during this life) looks similar to a place somewhere else where I was actually running to safety in a previous life time with whoever my parents were in that life.
We can refer to these memories as context transfer memories, that is, memories of a past life event transferred into the context of this life. As a psychologist, I would love to fall to the conclusion that they are a form of a psychological defense mechanism, allowing us to remember a traumatic past life event so we can deal with it in this life without the necessity of accepting the idea of multiple lives. Alas, my own bomb raid memory came to me at a time when I was already accepting said idea. So, while I can describe the phenomenon itself, I really have no explanation as to why it happens.
An interesting variation of this phenomenon is the transfer of past life memories to a known historical context. For example, you may have experienced a brutal death at the hands of an oppressive regime sometime in the Twentieth Century and you may remember it as having been one of the members of the Romanov family. The Romanovs were the family of the last Tsar of Russia. They were brutally murdered by the bolsheviks in 1918. Their fate is quite well known and often discussed on Internet bulletin boards, so it provides a familiar context. Thus, a person murdered by the Communists or the Nazis or some other political group of the last century may experience the context transfer memory phenomenon by believing to have been one of the Romanovs.
Note that this has nothing to do with wanting to be (or have been) famous, but rather with the transfer of a past life memory into a familiar context.
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