I was a graduate student in college, studying Classical Rhetoric. I was also a big Shakespeare buff. I read a lot of critical writings on Shakespeare and there was one writer in particular I really enjoyed. He wrote about Shakespeare in a way I could completely relate to. Whenever I studied a play, I would go back to his summary essay on that play and find it as enjoyable as the first time I read it.

I recommended him to fellow teaching assistants and Shakespeare buffs. A couple of years after first reading him, I was cruising the used bookstores in Berkeley with a friend. At one point he said, "Hey, here's a book by that guy you like."

He handed it to me. It was called Alphabet of the Imagination, a collection of essays by the same guy collected and published by his daughters over 20 years after his death. Mostly literary essays on writers like Chaucer, Chekov, Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, and the like. The book really didn't grab me right off, so I put it back on the shelf. But as I walked away, I just got a normal feeling that I would regret not buying it so I went ahead and bought it.

I really enjoyed those essays. The guy had an unusual style that was a pleasure for me to read. At this time I had a roommate, a good woman, somewhat bipolar but okay. Luckily she was not at home when this happened. I wouldn't know what to say to her.

I was reading the book, the essay on Walt Whitman. I remember reading a passage where the author articulated an idea that I had once thought but had never told anyone, and I had never heard anyone else articulate it. It really made me think, Wow, that's interesting.

I wondered about this guy's life, so right then I flipped to the back of the book to read his bio. It said that he had started out studying mathematics, getting his degree in it, before switching to language and literature and Shakespeare. He ended up heading the English Department at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania before his death.

I thought, Huh, that's interesting, he basically did the same thing I did. I had started off on the math/science side of things, even going so far as studying computer programming in college, before switching to language and literature and becoming a fan of Shakespeare.

I turned back to the essay and read a little more, and I remember thinking, Hey, this guy thinks just like me. The way we think about things, the way we structure our thoughts, was very similar. I looked at his bio again and noticed he had died in 1950 and I was born in 1956.

Now here comes the hard part to talk about. I don't quite know how to write this because what happened next is unique in my experience and never repeated itself in quite this way.

I had the thought, Hey, I wonder if this was me in a past life. I just had that thought kind of out of the blue, in the stream of my consciousness, it wasn't really a big deal.

And as I thought that, it was as if everything around me said, without words, and without me hearing an actual voice, IT IS YOU.

And it felt like I burst through a pane of glass shattering all around me, and the conscious awareness that this man had actually BEEN me in a past life suddenly poured into me like an ocean wave breaking through a sand castle barrier to swamp the castle.

And it scared the hell out of me!

I jumped up off the couch, and tossed that book away from me like a hot potato, and skittered across the room away from it. I was shaking in shock and literally in tears. My mind couldn't get my head around what had just happened. I felt like someone had blasted an emergency horn right behind my head.

It took my some minutes to recover. I crept back to the book, lifted it carefully, and began reading it with new eyes. My training in language and rhetoric and how sentence structure contains thought and reflects consciousness helped me see how the sentences I read in that book in fact DID follow some rather unusual characteristics I have in my thinking.

I suddenly made a lot of connections between my thoughts and ideas and interests with his thoughts and ideas and interests.

I went back and reread his other books and made more uncanny discoveries, the kind that could only relate to my mind and was absolutely unprovable to others.

Some years later, I had the opportunity to visit Swarthmore College. It was not familiar, and I found out that 50 years later, none of the original buildings survived that I would have frequented.

I did find a library archive, supported by Quakers, and they allowed my to make copies of a file of my old class notes and student testimonials at my retirement and an old photo of me when I was about 70 years old.

I still have those papers.

That recognition of that lifetime ultimately formed the foundation for a couple dozen other past lives I've come across. I've more or less pieced together my history for the past 2000 years. More often than not, the experience is discomforting and unsettling.

There's a good reason why we forget: The remembrance can play havoc with our current psyche. We like to think that the personality we possess is unique. When you start recalling other lives, other personalities, suddenly this personality is not unique anymore and feels threatened in certain ways. But more to the point, the pain of past lives is contained within our current circumstances, and reflected in our dreams and fears and anxieties. Recalling past lives will trigger and bring up a lot of stuff that's buried and, for the most part, we would prefer to remain buried.

There's more, and other ways I went about proving that this was truly me in my last lifetime. Those details aren't important to anyone but me.

Hey, if you think I'm a whack job, I can live with that. I've learned not to build my sense of self value on the opinions of others.

If you made it this far, thanks for indulging me. Maybe I'll work up the courage to tell another one, one that goes back to King Charles II's court, a past life that haunted my dreams for decades before I realized that what had been haunting me was simply . . . me.