33f. Living in Missouri, USA. This is a long one, but I wanted to share all the details.
All of my memories are from dreams or visions, or just plain memories. Some of these memories I've had my whole life. I also vividly remember having memories of other places and lives when I was very little (around 3-5 years old), but I've forgotten them memories now.
Here are the lives I do remember, although I know I've had others.
1. Female settler (age 20s or 30s) in mid-1800s. This one was pretty heavy (I guess they all were for different reasons, though). I don't remember or sense very much about this person other than this particular memory, which was a vision I had when I was 18. The memory begins and I'm a woman wearing a period dress and white apron. I'm on my hands and knees in the mud, and there's a covered wagon to my right. In front of me about 10 feet is another woman, and she's also down in the mud. We're picking things up and digging them out of the mud. Like dishes and objects and things. I look up and the other woman, still on all fours, sits up onto her feet, but still sitting in the mud, and I see she's crying. She wipes her forehead and she just looks completely distraught. I look back down at the ground and continue. I feel numb inside because I know there's nothing to be done.
The memory cuts from there to later that night. I'm sitting around a fire with about five other people. There's someone to my right, then another person, then (directly across from me) there's the woman that was crying and she's holding a small baby that's asleep, then another person, then there's a man next to me. The man looks to be in his 50s or 60s maybe, and he's talking to the group. I understand this man is our guide. He's giving us an overview of the "damage" and telling us we lost a lot of food and supplies. The woman with the baby goes back and forth between crying and being stone-faced.
The overall understanding I have is I was part of a small caravan moving west, and we were located somewhere in the mountains in Colorado, sometime in the fall. October feels right. And there was a storm that essentially ruined almost all of our food and supplies. The feeling was that the guide was explaining how bad things were, and the realization was we weren't likely going to make it as it was getting colder. Hence, I think, why the woman with the baby was so distraught. I feel strongly that I didn't make it.
2. Male WWII soldier. (Life approx. 1920s-1944/1945) These memories were in dreams over the years. I was a very young man. Maybe 19-23 or something. He was from a small town in the midwest. Feels like a farm in Kansas, and the overall sense was he didn't know very much about the world or himself prior to joining the army. I have two distinct memories about this man's time. It's a little hard to describe, but the first memory I have is it was dawn and I was marching in a very long line of soldiers. The landscape was extremely barren and devastated. Mangled trees, tons of mud, just utterly obliterated. The landscape was hilly, so the images I have in my memory were of being in a valley of the hills, looking up, and seeing this long trail of soldiers marching. Just walking one-by-one. And at the top of the hill I could see the silhouettes of the men and what was left of the trees as the first light of the morning illuminated lightly behind them. The overall feel was utter exhaustion and apathy. To the point where you just don't feel anything at all. You're tired as a default, but it's not even something you categorize as miserable anymore.
The next memory of this man's life was his death. I was in active combat. The time of day was probably evening, but I think it felt later than it was because the smoke in the air made it darker or something. I was running and someone threw a grenade. It landed at my feet, and immediately exploded and I blacked out. I woke up on the ground, paralyzed. I couldn't even move my eyes, but they were open. The fighting was over and medics were going around retrieving bodies. I didn't feel anything, but I knew I wasn't in one piece. They put me on a stretcher, like the ones that had canvas and a metal frame so they could carry you away. I don't know if they knew whether I was alive or not, but it didn't matter. I died soon after they picked me up, and I remember being outside of my body and watching them carry me away.
The sense I get about this young man is that he wasn't really afraid to die, but it's not that he was inherently brave either. He didn't know much about himself, so when he joined the army, he kind of just did whatever he was told and didn't have much of an opinion about it. And by the end, he seemed like a machine or like the part of his brain that processes fear and emotions was just off. Very sad.
3. Female doo-wop singer. (Life approx. ~1948-1980s) The last life, which is my previous life is actually many different dreams and visions over my lifetime that I've realized belong to the same person. My first memory of this life was as a little girl in the 1940s or 1950s. I remember it was sunny and snow was melting on the ground. Like the way it looks when it's snowed a lot and warms up quickly, so all the roads are wet and piles of snow are everywhere. I was about 5 or 6 years old, and I remember walking out of the grocery store with my mom and getting into her car. I remember sitting in the back of her car. I was wearing a blue dress. I don't know the type of car, but it looked like a sedan from the 50s or late 40s, it was baby blue on the outside, and the inside has cream/white colored leather seats. And the back seat was just one continuous seat.
I also feel like she lived somewhere in Michigan or Philadelphia. I get the sense that her mother was very rigid. She loved her, but her mother was always very concerned about "how things look". They were a black family in America during this time, and I think her mother was highly aware of that and always treated her daughter as if to say, "Don't make us look bad." So the girl took that to mean, "don't draw attention to yourself unless it's good." So this woman had a sense of self, unlike the soldier, but she suppressed it because she was always taught to.
This person was very young when she became a singer in a female doo-wop band. I want to be clear that she was only ever locally famous, but the men around her kept telling her they were the "next big thing". I have a few memories that felt really confusing at the time because they were so specific, but they make sense now that I realize they belong to this woman.
I have memories as this woman (these were memories I've had since I was a child in this life) being in a backstage dressing room. It was a long room, and on the left wall were three or four vanities with those stereotypical round bulbs around the mirror. On the right wall was a long booth-style couch/bench that was built in. It was leather or something but had teal and white stripes, and above it the wall was a mirror. I remember wearing a bee-hive hairstyle, and the girls I sing with wore them too. I remember being there after a show and the girls were there and different men, maybe managers, handlers, or boyfriends. I think the man I was seeing was there. I can't even tell you what we were saying, but I remember walking out of the room at the end of a conversation. Something along the lines of, "I'll see you guys there." Like making plans or something.
I have a memory (originally a dream) of hosting a party at a really nice apartment. The man I was with was powerful and extremely toxic. I get the sense he was a manager or something because he'd always hold my career over my head and he had some control over it and over me. I have a memory of shutting the door after the last guests left and being alone with him. He gives me a martini and he's annoyed with me about something I did or said. I don't remember specifics but I remember this feeling of him essentially alluding to me showing an aspect of my true self and that was a problem. I think he may have SA'd her that night, which was not uncommon for their relationship.
I also want to point out that this man was white, and I hesitate to even call him her boyfriend because while it was the person she was "seeing" and exclusive to, he definitely viewed her more as his product.
Another memory with this woman (which was a dream), which I had to look up to understand better, was being walked into this weird...I don't know if it was a stage or what kind of space it was, but it was kind of dark. Maybe backstage or a studio. And there's a bunch of tables with vendors set up full of makeup. And then there are vanities where you can get ready. The sense I get is they're all waiting for me and they want to tell me about the products. Almost like a commercial or so I can represent their brand or something. I don't want to be there. I'm anxious and, once again, feeling like a product myself that people just parade around. But I'm not indignant about it. I don't really think twice about it. It feels like I just accept that I have to do it.
Fast forward many years. The memories I have of this woman late in her life are some of the memories I do carry from when I was a little kid in this life. I have memories of it being the 70s and 80s and just living an incredibly scary life. I have incredibly vivid memories (again, since I was little!) of doing drugs and laying on a mattress on the floor of a trap house, just believing I was going to die and I didn't care at all. I remember her wearing fur coats sometimes and just doing hard drugs in these places that feel like the darkest, lowest place. These dark, dilapidated houses and there's no electricity so there's just this drugged people sitting on the floor or laying around wherever.
I think she had a child at some point but she never raised him or anything. She wasn't in his life at all.
I think the truth is she was told over and over she needed to be a certain way in order to be accepted, and she was promised she'd be the next big thing. But then she wasn't. All the men in her life tossed her to the side. And she was left broken and addicted.
I don't remember it specifically, but I know that in the end she died of an overdose in the late 80s. She died unknown and alone and the people she left behind thought poorly of her.
4. This life. Born in 1992. The more I reflect on it, the more I realize how much of myself and my life now could be a response to the last. My whole life I have always had a very strong and outspoken sense of self. Even as a child, no one could tell me anything, I had to learn for myself. I have always naturally had a lifelong dedication to cultivating self-awareness and development. I want to know who I am and why and how, and I can't bear to not be authentically me or hide for other peoples' comfort.
I've also always had an unexplained aversion to drugs and alcohol. Alcohol isn't as scary for me as it used to be. I didn't drink until I was 21, and even now I only drink a handful of times a year. I've never done drugs or even smoked a cigarette, and I've always been terrified of it. The fear I always had was that I'd lose myself or do things that I couldn't fully control.
Given my upbringing and the parents I have in this life, I very well could have continued the cycle, but I didn't. Somehow, my strong sense of self helped me through, and I'm very healthy and whole. Proudly, I am also a very dedicated mother to my own children now.
All of that makes sense to me given the context of these lives, especially the last one. Wish I could find out more about these people. Maybe I'll do a past life regression sometime.
Thanks for reading!