What just happened? I feel dizzy. My vision is blurry. I can’t tell if I’m lying down or standing. There’s nothing solid beneath me. I try to blink, but the foggy lumps of white, blue, and green barely sharpen. I wriggle, stretch, and reach out, yet it still feels as if I’m floating.
As my vision finally starts to clear, I see a shape before me, a human figure with its arms outstretched. I notice that it’s lying on the ground and I’m floating above it. Only when its face becomes identifiable am I hit with a shock.
That’s my body, but I’m outside it. How is this possible? Am I dreaming? Or… am I dead.
My Dad once said he’d had an out of body experience something like this. He said He’d hit his head when he fell off a horse. He remembers looking down on his body from above whilst people gathered round and tried to help. He only talked about it once, and I never thought to ask about it more.
Has that happened to me? I can’t remember how I got here or what I was doing before.
I begin to recall something else. Something so long unremembered that I cannot place it at any point during my life. I just know that it’s my memory. This experience, it’s happened before. The last time I died.
The last time I died? This has happened before? Wait, so I am dead?
My body down there, I’ve left it. My Ghost is suddenly coming to this realisation, yet this isn’t the first time this has happened, and yet it feels new.
But… now I remember… this is all part of… the same old process. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve died, it always feels new because the memories always go back into dormancy afterwards.
Yes! now I remember. I’m a spirit; a consciousness outside the physical, who put their memories, personality, and identity into a state of dormancy before seeking a physical body to live out a life within. It’s only when we die that our true self comes back, past memories and all. That’s the strange feeling I’m experiencing, I now recall. All these strange memories I never knew I had from lives I never knew I’d lived, all slowly reawakening.
But… I still feel like me. The me I’ve just been. That life I had. That person. It all still feels so integral to who I am. For the longest time that life was everything I knew, but now so much is flooding back in. It’s like the tide is coming in and washing away my sandcastle. It’s not as if I can forget it, it just feels so small and unimportant now compared to everything else. Why’s that life special compared to all the other ones?
But it still feels important. I still feel attached to it. Of course, I realise I’m forgetting about all the residual feelings this process comes with. It’s always like this. The shock of it. As much as I’ve come to know it, time and time again, this experience is never something I get used to. I know I’ve lived other lives as different people, but having just come out of this one, it’s hard to imagine ever being anyone else.
It’ll wear off, I now remember. My true self will come back to me… gradually. The self that is greater than a single personality and lifetime’s memories.
My old life is over though, yet everything in it still feels important. Everyone who knew me, who loved me. What will it do to them? I don’t want to see the hurt it’ll bring.
How did it happen anyway? How did I die? My body’s dead, but I can’t see an obvious cause. No wounds, no blood. Did I have a heart-attack? A brain aneurism? Oh God, please tell me it wasn’t food poisoning. That would be embarrassing.
There’s no point feeling terrible though. Everybody dies. Another of my previous lives’ memories is coming back to me. Whenever I return to this state, I always find myself falling back on this fact as reassurance. Every time, just like last time. Death is inevitable, but it’s nothing to fear.
Last time? That’s right, I remember the last time. I was someone else before this life.
Yes, a sailor. I’m now remembering how that all ended. It was a lot more obvious that time. The submarine was sinking, and we all drowned. I’d been terrified of the prospect ever since getting inside that claustrophobic metal tube, and yet my greatest fear ended up being my demise. I’m squirming as I remember how it felt.
The sheer terror. It was like the time I was buried alive. Wait, I’ve been buried alive? I now remember. In a different life before that one. Trapped in darkness. Unable to move, or scream, or even inflate my chest in the tight squeeze of it.
No, I’ve been back over these memories before. They always feel fresh and new whenever I’ve just returned from dying. Memories of death. Always the last memory of each life, the most recent, and some of them… I know they are there, but I dare not dredge them up. Not some of the truly horrible ones I know are in the mix. Torments that are best forgotten.
Don’t think about it, I tell myself. Try to look at the positives. Find the excitement that you know this process comes with. You’ve done it before. You can pick a whole new life to have now. A whole new person to choose to be. Anyone you like!
But who am I to be this time? Someone who I’d always wished I could whilst I was the person in my last life? Someone who’ll likely have a completely different experience? Someone from a different place? Someone of the opposite sex? Someone or something that’s not even human? Is that even possible?
What kind of life would contrast the best, I wonder? All the perspective that last life offered. The flavour of its experience. What kind of life might balance that? A life where hardships exist in place of the privileges my last life had? A life where privileges fill the space occupied by the hardships in my last life. Or… a life that does both these things perhaps. How am I to know though, it’s not as if can predict everything that’ll happen once I reincarnate.
Yes, I remember this all too well. If my many lives reveal anything it’s that all these things have their balances, good with bad.
Has that always been by virtue of my choices though? That I choose lives with the potential for a rich balance because the experience is valuable. Am I a good chooser, or is this so, of all lives?
No, surely not. Many an unfortunate life is horribly unbalanced. Too short, too torturous, too unlucky, too unjustly punished. And so too are so many others undeservedly the opposite. I know this because I’ve lived it, I now remember.
I understand now. I’ve come to this conclusion multiple times over each time I’ve remembered.
A choice occurs to me. This will be an undesirable decision; something I know I don’t want but believe I can benefit from. I think that my choice of next life should be one of vastly disproportionate hardship. A lesson I need to learn the hard way.
No wait. I’ve done that before, I now remember, letting my memory slip into those areas. I know what that pain is like, and I understand its necessity in life. It’ll not do well to further torture myself by needlessly repeating it. It’s a lesson I already know and am not yet due to be reminded of. Not yet anyway.
Still, that’s no reason to just pick something that looks cushy.
I guess there’s nothing else for it. The only sensible option to open myself to new perspectives is random choice. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve thought so, and some very interesting lifetimes have occurred from it.
Yes. My mind’s made up. Okay, here I go again.
One thing’s for sure. This feeling of excited uncertainty will be waiting for me when I get back here when next I die. Yes, this is something new alright. Jumping in without knowing what life I’ll get. Just as in life we have no certainty of what lies beyond death, in death I’ve now got no certainty of what life will next offer. There’s always more to experience.
But… should I wait a while before starting a new life, just so as to contemplate all this? Could I maybe stay here a little longer and reflect on the memories of all these old lives I’ve just now remembered I’d had?
…
Nah. Life’s too short to live in the past. Better to keep moving forward.
Here we go.
Benjamin Kirkby 