Interesting topic. I can't say I have anything real concrete to contribute as reply, but I have had a few glimmers or intuitions that might mean something. For example, I have always dreaded fireworks, even as a small child. My grandfather took me and my sister to watch some Fourth of July fireworks when I was very little, and I was terrified. To my grandfather's consternation, I went and cowered in the backseat of the car until the show was over. Later, I have wondered if perhaps in a previous life I might have been a soldier who died in a hailstorm of bullets; perhaps the fireworks remind me of the sights and sounds of the battlefield.
Similarly, I have wondered if my phobias of flying and of outer space (sounds weird, I know) might stem from my having been a pilot or astronaut/cosmonaut who died in the course of performing his duties. It wouldn't be necessary to explain the phobias in these terms, but there might be something there.
I have also had a dream and a mental vision that have provoked speculation in me along these lines. First the dream, which I had quite a few years ago. I awoke once from a dream, recalling the very end of it, and being left with a warm, comfortable feeling. In my dream, I was a woman, clad in a long dress (my surroundings had a nineteenth-century ambience), standing before a window overlooking a courtyard. As I stand watching, a horse-drawn carriage, open (no roof visible), comes into view before the courtyard below, with two males figures seated therein. The man holding the reins was older, and his companion was younger. I feel a sense of great connection to these figures, and am quietly glad to see them. I feel that the older man is my husband, and the younger is my son. As the carriage is brought to a stop, I sense great comfort in knowing that these two are home, as I myself am. And that is when I awoke, with the continued feeling that somehow I had been in a very familiar, comfortable place...indeed, that I had been home.
In my vision, which occurred more recently, I was nursing a very painful, throbbing toothache in bed one night. I had nothing at home to reduce the pain, and was just waiting it out, which was proving to make for one very long night. I decided to quit mentally fighting the toothache, and just meet it head on. I focused on the throbbing sensation...throb, throb, ebb and flow, pain in and pain out, the rhythm of life. I went inside the pain, making no resistance to it. I remembered my visit to Hawaii in 1981, and of the delicious sensation of the soft ocean breeze blowing through the open window into my cousin's bedroom (where I slept) from the beach nearby, and of the soothing sound of the waves breaking upon the shore. I imagined myself back in that nocturnal bliss, and I thought of myself flying over that moonlit beach, past the breaking waves, out over the open ocean. I flew over those inky waters, my spirit borne by the nurturing wind, and my thoughts turned to the ancient Polynesians who had once traversed these uncharted seas, and of how they were like our modern astronauts, peering and probing fearlessly, deeply into the unknown. In my mind's eye a vessel appeared below me--a long wooden craft being steered by strong men, their boat being peopled by their women and their children, their goods and their animals, forging through foreign waters for a new home. I honed in on this slender yet sturdy ship, and focused on a young mother holding and tending her little baby. I focused deeper and deeper into this maternal vignette, as if I became that child, being loved and protected amid the surroundings of that starry sky and those murky waters, so tiny yet so safe. My pain faded away, and I slept.
