I believed in past lives before I even knew I believed in past lives. Being raised Catholic, the concept surely wasn’t ever taught to me. But when I was little I can recall myself saying such things as, “I know I can do this because in a past life I used to…” It always made sense to me, and I could just see it; I seemed to remember. Later when I began studies with a spiritual teacher who understood the human journey in this way, everything felt like it clicked into place. It seemed like common sense to me. Most of the religions and people of the world accept reincarnation as just the way things are. The notion was extracted from Christianity at some point for reasons that might be suspicious, and then the Western world view developed without inclusion of the idea.

Lately I have been feeling a past life move in on me. This is always a good thing, in my experience. Something wants to get finished, a debt cleared, or a previously developed strength is coming back for reintegration. Similar to the way some people can smell weather patterns in the wind, I seem to smell things like this moving in. I had three dreams last night that I think affirm what I’m sensing now. In the first part of the dream, some helpful downloads had just come through; in the second part, several big gorgeous cats – like a jaguar, and a blond one that size, and some others – were all walking toward me, looking me in the eye, no threat at all, they were just coming; third part of the dream, my daughters are receiving a huge inheritance.

I’m sure there is more, but this is how I sense the dream. I think it came in the context of my feeling that a past life energy system is moving in. The first part of the dream is clear; helpful information downloading. The cats, I believe, are my psyche’s way of picturing big energy coming toward me, and the dream seems to say not to worry, there’s no threat here. And the third part speaks to me of the value of doing this kind of work for future generations. The bible talks about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the generations to come. Carl Jung observed that the psychological work that a person leaves unfinished is left for his or her children to grapple with. We don’t do this work for ourselves, we do it for everybody, really.

I’m writing about this in case it helps anyone else think new thoughts about things their lives or their dreams. As physicist David Bohm says, our brain doesn’t pick up on information until we have a concept for it. And then I’m sure we all have experienced that once we have a concept we often start to see it everywhere and wonder why we never noticed before. Our lives and dreams are full of so much information not yet being picked up. It’s good to keep working on our concepts.