Past-Life Memory Sources of Dreams

Like memories of the present life, apparent memories of past lives may be incorporated in dreams. Past-life dreams seldom furnish enough information for a previous incarnation to be identified, but occasionally they do. The dreams of Angela Grubbs are exceptional in their extensiveness and consistency with what is known about the life of a deceased individual, a nurse named Francine Donovan who died in 1923. The memories are largely episodic rather than fragmentary autobiographical memories. Although many elements cannot be substantiated, the dreams contain no demonstrable distortions. The dreams of Grubbs are rendered more important by her having recorded them in emails before their details were verified. The majority appeared shortly after she saw the movie, What Dreams May Come, which may have served as a catalyst for them. This case not only adds to the growing evidence for reincarnation, it contributes to the study of the memory sources of dreams. The function of memories in dreams may involve more than memory consolidation. A key aspect may be subliminal emotional processing of past experience that includes past-life experience if it is relevant to, or remains unresolved in, the present life.