When you write fantasy fiction you may stir up memories you never experienced before.
I discovered this when I started writing a story about Prometheus returning to the island of Crete and accidentally taking over the massive body of a slow-witted servant who was being beaten to death by his owner for making a mistake during a trade mission to the southern coast of Crete. Prometheus dispatches the brutal owner with his own staff and takes over the trade mission. The saga continued with an adventurous tour of the southern coast of Crete and ended with the eruption of Santorini and its secret alien observation base.
The story practically wrote itself as I kept getting images of places on Crete and of the characters encountered in the story. These images were as vivid as any of my personal experiences this lifetime. My wife suggested that I go to Crete so I could get some local color and describe what the landscape looked like. I went to Crete and hired a guide for three weeks and covered the route I had described in my story. The mountainous landscape is impressive as ever but the heavy forests have been gone for thousands of years. At that time in 2001, I had no experience with past lives and had no expectations of what I would find.
To my surprise, Crete had tilted since the time of my story and the harbors I had seen and described in my story had been transformed into dry canyons opening onto beaches with small rivers running through them. I had been using a map of Crete when writing the story and had populated the coves and harbors with features that were remarkably similar when I visited them in person.
I finally realized I was not crafting a memorable saga with important lessons to be learned, I was simply recalling a host of unrelated memories about Crete and people who had lived and died there. What was more interesting is that these memories were not all from the same era and this made the resulting story impossible to follow as a reader.
The alien base on Santorini had no logical connection with Prometheus and his visit to Crete. The memory just came up when writing a story about the island and noticing that the island had tipped so the historical harbors were now dry beaches.
What this meant for me is that I do better when I stick to non-fiction and report on my conversations with spirits. Trying to write fiction demanded more control of the narrative than I was willing to exert. It appears that when I write fiction, I am presented with graphic images and narratives that are riveting in the extreme but are not necessarily connected to each other. For me, writing imaginative fiction is like opening a box of old and unrelated images and trying to piece together a coherent story with a plot.
If a writer is trained in plot development and storytelling, they may be able to construct a tale without the story trying to write itself. I now have a better idea of what a writer means when they say a character can get away from them and starts doing things the writer never intended.
On the other hand, someone writing short fantasy stories can open their imaginations and let the memories flow. I see this past life memory phenomenon when I look at some of the DUST videos. They may be strange, but they come across as being very real.
Spiritual counseling unearths past life memories as the early Dianeticists found out. As James Hollingsworth reports, The “Weapon Shops” series by Van Vogt was my favorite series when I was young. My Dad met him at a dinner/conference years ago. Using Dianetic auditing for getting SF stories was considered an overt by the Scn community at the time.
The more science fiction you read and write, the more past life experiences come to mind. If you can get comfortable with that idea, you can train yourself to recognize them when they appear. Past life experiences are like any experiences, you can learn from them if you wish to avoid repeating them.