When Dreams Feel Like Memories: My Experience With a Past Life Dream

When memory touches spirit. (Edwardian Woman Ectoplasm)

Lately, I’ve been diving deep into the mysterious connection between dreams and hypnosis, and how both can open doors to memories that don’t seem to belong to this lifetime. This month, I’m exploring past life dreams, how they feel, what sets them apart from ordinary dreams, and how they differ from what we experience in a past life regression session under hypnosis.

There is a difference.

A past life dream often arrives unannounced. It’s not something you plan or guide yourself into. It feels spontaneous, yet startlingly vivid. Like your mind decided to drop you straight into another time and body for the night. It doesn’t have the hazy, symbolic quality of an ordinary dream. It feels lived.

My Past Life Dream

One of the most striking dreams I’ve ever had took place in what felt like the Edwardian or late Victorian period. I was a young woman, maybe in my late teens or early twenties, wearing a long white lace gown with a high collar and my hair pinned up neatly. I was graduating from what seemed like a finishing school.

The scene was beautiful. Sunlight, laughter, and the air filled with rose petals. The nuns, who I knew had been my teachers throughout the year, were dancing and skipping around a Maypole, ribbons flowing as they celebrated spring. Everything was joyful and alive, but beneath it all, I felt an unmistakable heaviness. Dread.

I was sitting beside my closest friend in that life. She didn’t look like anyone I know now, but deep down I knew it was the same soul as one of my dearest friends from middle school in this lifetime. In the dream, I confided that I was terrified of what came next. Marriage. Not out of love, but obligation. My parents had already decided my future, and there was nothing I could do to change it. I remember the quiet resignation in my voice, the sting of hopelessness against the sweetness of the day.

When I woke up, the details came back clearly: the lace, the light, the maypole the flowers. I didn’t feel comforted, just caught off guard and quietly sad. The imagery was seared into my mind and was hauntingly applicable to my current life apprehension towards matrimony. This past life dream has even crept into my hand embroidery artwork due to deep emotional impression it has made on me.

How It Differs From Regression

In a past life regression under hypnosis, the experience unfolds with intention and guidance. You’re relaxed into a specific brainwave state where the conscious mind steps aside, allowing memories from the subconscious to emerge. It’s a co-creative process. You’re both witnessing and experiencing.

A past life dream, however, arrives fully formed. You don’t seek it...it finds you. The emotions are often intense, immediate, and raw because there’s no mental filter. It’s as if your soul momentarily re-inhabits an old body to remind you of something important, even if you don’t yet know what that something is.

This month, I’ll be sharing more about how to recognize the difference between a symbolic dream, a past life dream, and a past life regression experience, and how each can serve as a doorway to healing, closure, and understanding your soul’s long story.

If you’ve ever woken up from a dream that felt too real to be fiction, stay tuned. You might have just touched another lifetime.