Caution: to some of you, this post is going to be way out there and a bunch of bullshit. Perhaps a lot like the X-Files. But remember in the X-Files, Mulder was often right.

I’ve mentioned before that I was a history major in college. My friend (who could be referred to as “Me-in-a-different-body,” but that name is too long) Kim L., was a history minor at the same college. Between the two of us, we came up with the theory that our interest in specific time periods probably comes from having lived in that time in another life. I’ve always had an interest in the Civil War, and when I was in college, I had something happen to me that confirm my belief that I lived then.

When I was a sophomore in college, I took a course in Civil War history as part of my major requirements. The prof had us read a bunch of Civil War novels as well as texts, so that the battles and the men who fought them would be more than just names on a page. One of the novels he had us read was Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, which is about Gettysburg. I sped through it – it’s an amazing book. The night that I started it, though, I dreamed that I was on a battlefield, dressed in Confederate grey, running towards a clump of trees behind a wall. Men were falling on both sides of me as I ran, and when I was almost to the trees, I was shot in the head. I woke up, drenched in sweat because the dream had been so real.

The dream came back the next two nights. Just as vivid, exactly the same as the first night. It scared the hell out of me all three nights, but I chalked it up to having read Killer Angels before bed. What was interesting to me, though, was that the head wound that I got in the dream was in exactly the spot I’ve had cluster headaches in my whole life. I had no idea what the connection was, though.

Spring break came a couple of weeks later, and as my then fiancee, a friend, and I headed to Philly, I suggested we detour to Gettysburg. I wanted to walk the battlefield and see the spots I had read about in person. They agreed, and we rambled all over, ending up where Pickett’s charge had taken place – the so-called High Water Mark of the Confederacy. I had been to Gettysburg before with my family, but had never walked that particular stretch of the battlefield. As I did, I looked up, and saw a familiar clump of trees. A wave of deja-vu washed over me, and as we got three quarters of the way across the field, I started crying. I couldn’t help it. I realized why the trees seemed so familiar to me…they were the ones from my dream, and the spot I was standing in was the exact spot where I had been shot and killed in the dream. I told my fiancee what was going on and he said “Did you ever think dream was about another life?” Possibly the only smart thing he ever said. I think he was right. Why else would my dream have been so vivid? I had seen that copse of trees before, but from a car as we drove past, and that had been years before. How could I have remembered so well what the view was like from that spot when I had never walked it before?

Believe what you want, but that cemented it for me, years before I ever heard of Wicca. There are past lives, and I had walked in the footprints of one mine.

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