I had an incredibly vivid “past life” experience during a meditation
I’m not sure if this is the right place for this, but I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and I’m genuinely trying to understand what I experienced.
I’m not someone who is absolutely convinced that reincarnation is real. In fact, I’m pretty skeptical about a lot of things. A while ago, purely out of curiosity, I decided to try something like a past-life regression meditation.
What happened was completely different from what I expected.
It didn’t feel like I was watching a movie.
It felt like I was actually there.
The first thing I remember is snow.
It was nighttime. It felt like December or January, around the Christmas season. I found myself walking through what felt like an American city. There were shops on both sides of the street, and their windows were decorated for Christmas.
The Christmas lights are one of the details I remember very clearly.
They weren’t like modern LED lights. They looked like small, colorful lights inside little cone-shaped or bulb-shaped tubes, the kind of old-fashioned Christmas lights you would see decades ago.
The strange thing is that after the meditation, I searched for them online and I actually found vintage Christmas lights that looked extremely similar to what I had seen.
That honestly creeped me out a little. (I should also mention that Christmas isn’t really celebrated in my country, so I didn’t grow up around Christmas decorations or that kind of culture. That’s why I had no prior knowledge of those vintage Christmas lights or what they looked like.)
The street was almost completely empty.
It had snowed, and there was that strange silence that comes after snowfall. As I walked, I could hear the snow crunching underneath my shoes.
Then I remember looking at myself in the reflection of a shop window.
I was a woman.
I had blonde or light-colored hair that reached about my ears. My hairstyle reminded me of the hairstyles women had in older decades around 40's-50's.
I was wearing a fur or fur-like coat.
And I was wearing heels.
(Even within the experience, that detail seemed strange to me. I remember thinking something along the lines of, “Why am I wearing high heels when there’s this much snow?”)
I kept walking.
Then I heard someone’s footsteps behind me.
I stopped.
The footsteps stopped too.
I don’t remember whether I actually saw the person behind me, but I had an incredibly strong feeling:
I knew who he was, and I was afraid of him.
I started walking faster.
The footsteps got faster too.
Then I heard a gunshot.
I don’t remember feeling any pain when I was shot.
What I remember is a very strange physical sensation:
Warmth spreading across my back.
Then I fell forward.
My face hit the snow.
I could feel the coldness of the snow against my face.
At the same time, I could feel the warmth of the blood on my body.
I remember my hand being next to my face.
And the last thing I remember from the scene is looking at my hand lying there on the ground.
Then the image disappeared.
There’s one more thing that has made me wonder about all of this. I have never been to New Orleans in my life, but for some reason, I have always had a strange sense of familiarity with the city. When I see photographs of completely ordinary streets there, I sometimes get this immediate feeling of recognition — not “I’ve seen this exact picture before,” but more like “I know this place.”
I actually tested this with a friend because I didn’t want to rely purely on my own feeling. We used Google Maps and randomly selected ordinary, non-famous street views in New Orleans. My friend would show me three different options at a time and ask me which one felt familiar. We repeated this several times, using different streets, and I kept picking the correct one.
I’m not saying this means I died in New Orleans, because I obviously have no evidence for that. But it does make me wonder whether I might have lived there at some point — perhaps even in a completely ordinary life that has nothing to do with the murder scene I described. I also realize that there could be completely normal explanations for this, such as visual cues, architecture, intuition, or simply chance. But the feeling of recognition is genuinely very strong.
I’m really curious to hear what you think about this. Do you think this could simply be an extremely vivid experience created by my brain, perhaps combining things I’ve seen or absorbed without consciously remembering them? Could the similarities with Fowlkes’ case just be an incredible coincidence? Or do you think there could be another explanation for something like this?
If you know anything about memory, meditation, past-life regression, cryptomnesia, or even historical research, I’d genuinely love to hear your perspective. And if you’ve ever experienced something similar yourself, I’d especially love to hear about it. I’m not necessarily looking for someone to tell me that this was definitely a past life — I’m honestly just trying to understand what happened to me.