Okay, now THIS is weird.....the boy who lived before

[Sauron]

Warning. It's The Sun (http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2001290023-2006410683,,00.html), but it is the subject of a tv documentary as well. I'm not gonna quote the whole thing, just enough to whet yer appetite:


By YVONNE BOLOURI
September 08, 2006

LITTLE Cameron Macaulay was a typical six-year-old, always talking about his mum and family.

He liked to draw pictures of his home too — a long single-storey, white house standing in a bay.

But it sent shivers down his mum’s spine — because Cameron said it was somewhere they had never been, 160 miles away from where they lived.

And he said the mother he was talking about was his “old mum.”

Convinced he had lived a previous life Cameron worried his former family would be missing him.

The Glasgow lad said they were on the Isle Of Barra.

Mum Norma, 42, said: “Ever since Cameron could speak he’s come up with tales of a childhood on Barra.

“He spoke about his former parents, how his dad died, and his brothers and sisters.

“Eventually we just had to take him there to see what we could find.

“It was an astonishing experience.”

[Watser?]

That is pretty weird alright.

I saw a documentary once on the Discovery Channel on a couple of Druze boys in Lebanon, Druzes are an offshoot of Isma'ili Shi'a Islam, but they believe in reincarnation. These boys also knew quite a few details, but in the documentary there was no really convincing evidence they could not have known these details another way: one of the previous personages was a Lebanese singer or celebrity and the other was a well-known Druze fighter (in the Civil War). A lot of details about their lives were pretty well-known.

But this is a lot more convincing

[LadyShea]

These stories of children seeming to remember past lives have always given me a moment's pause to consider "what if". It's easy to chalk up vague utterances about "my other Mommy" or "When I was big" to imagination (and believe me, I have seen the awesome power of a child's imagination), but it's a bit harder to blow off detailed stories with proper names, accurate descriptions of places and events, etc.

Unfortunately it's also not really possible to know if those stories were told to the kids by parents or paranormal researchers or whomever that might have ulterior motives.

Oh well, one of those "mysteries" of life that is interesting to read and speculate about.

[Clutch Munny]

Unfortunately it's also not really possible to know if those stories were told to the kids by parents or paranormal researchers or whomever that might have ulterior motives.

Indeed, the number and kind of potential confounds is very large. Think of the number of stories a child tells, and the number of children there are. Now think about how impressive even a few ambiguous details can seem when viewed through the lens of the alleged possibility of past lives. It would surprising to me if there weren't some apparently close fits scattered here and there.

[TomJoe]

Yah but ... when one comes up with details such as surnames, description of the family pet, and location (a specific island and locale on the island) ... that's a pretty accurate description that would be hard to chalk up to just imagination. That's a whole lot of detail to be mere coincidence IMO. I'd be more apt to chalk it up to coaching than an active child's imagination, no matter how active it is.

And I don't say that in defense of some sort of "being", because I personally don't believe one iota in reincarnation.

[Watser?]

Yah but ... when one comes up with details such as surnames, description of the family pet, and location (a specific island and locale on the island) ... that's a pretty accurate description that would be hard to chalk up to just imagination. That's a whole lot of detail to be mere coincidence IMO. I'd be more apt to chalk it up to coaching than an active child's imagination, no matter how active it is.

And I don't say that in defense of some sort of "being", because I personally don't believe one iota in reincarnation.

Yeah, I pretty much felt the same way in both respects

[Crumb]

/me goes off to watch Vertigo.

[Clutch Munny]

Yah but ... when one comes up with details such as surnames, description of the family pet, and location (a specific island and locale on the island) ... that's a pretty accurate description that would be hard to chalk up to just imagination.

The question is the stage at which those details come in. A toddler says, "My house at Dawwa!" His mom says "Your house is on Barra? No, silly!" He copies her pronunciation. Later, she simply reports that he's always talked about living on Barra. I'm talking about how random imaginings get fitted into the framework of adults, as one of the main confounds; I agree that feedback is a key element in extending and refining the details of the subsequent narrative. So too is post hoc revision of everyone's memories.

[ceptimus]

Also, forgetting (or not bothering to report) all the 'misses' and making a big fuss over the 'hits'.

If the kid says there were rockets or dinosaurs in the garden, that is just dismissed as childish imagination. Even if he says something vaguely plausible, like that there was heather growing in the garden, and it turns out that there isn't any, then that is forgotten; but if he says there is a well in the garden, and there actually turns out to be a well, then that's amazing!

[Clutch Munny]

Yep, there'll be multiple endpoints reasoning all over this thing.