Pre-Birth Memories

“Infantile amnesia” is the name for not being able to remember anything before we were two or three years old. However, some people can remember parts of their very early lives. And some recall experiences in the womb, and even before that. This is the category of pre-birth memory. 

Infantile Amnesia and Regression

The inability to recall the first years postpartum, extending back to birth and pre-birth, was once explained in terms of the repression of traumatic and id-based memories and of the impossibility of forming any memories at all without language. Nowadays, the Freudian and linguistic framings of infantile amnesia have largely given way to experimental psychology and neurology. And apparently, children do have recollections from when they were younger, but lose access to them (relatedly, there is also childhood amnesia, referring to poor memories of anything before the age of about 10). Infantile (and childhood) amnesia, it is theorized, may be a function of the development of the hippocampus (Alberini & Travaglia, 2017). 

Therefore, we should ask the children what they can remember – or ask their mothers, which is what obstetrician and gynecologist Akira Ikegawa did. In his 2002 survey conducted in two Japanese cities to which 1,600 (45%) kindergarten mothers responded, a quarter (428) reported their children as having displayed memories of when they were in the womb or being born (Ikegawa, 2015). So, we can recall our early experience – even pre- and perinatal – but that ability tends to decline and disappear as we move into pre-puberty (broadly corresponding with other childhood losses, both in conventional areas – associated with brain plasticity, such as ease of language learning – and also nonconventional ones – including memories of having been someone else in a “previous life” (Stevenson, 1987; Tucker, 2021). That these memories tend to disappear, however, means generally but not always. 

In my own case, for example, I remember being surrounded by bright yellow and held up by my father in the bathroom of the house where we lived when I was young and being loved with my mother beside him. I was a baby. My mother confirmed the likelihood of the memory in general, but the bathroom was mainly white, not yellow. Then, she remembered, I had been bathed in a bright yellow bowl in the house before that, where we lived until I was nine months old. So, the yellow element of the memory was likely from some time in the first few months of life after birth.

This personal anecdote introduces the subject of evidence and the nature of memory. First, there is a moderate claim here to proof that the memory was true (veridical), of something real (objectively the case). Sometimes such memories can be verified. Second, there was the conflation of the single sensation (bright yellow) with an event in the second house (an episodic memory). Indeed, there are well-known issues with the construction of memory as well as its general reliability (note: memories are presented here as such, unqualified by scare quotes, as claims, “so-called,” etc.). Third, there was affect, the feeling of being loved. Emotions are crucial to memories (determining whether we have them, even). And fourth – a new detail – I only gained access to this memory in my mid-20s, during a “body-holding” weekend workshop when the composite event was relived (internally seen and emotionally felt). Previously forgotten events can pop up into our minds at any time, but especially when we are primed, as in workshops.

Since the Western goal of realizing our “human potential” became popular during the 1960s and 70s, the workshop structure has routinely taken people into deeply internal mental states. Popular activities like meditation, psychedelic trips, and trance-dance have also produced inner journeys. Among other things, this has involved the widespread production, sometimes deliberate, of experiences of regression.

Sigmund Freud identified regression as a subconscious response to early-life trauma, whose memory he accessed indirectly (using symbolic association via dreams, etc.). For the last half-century, however, early life memories themselves have been sought, and not only for their psychodynamic efficacy (healing dis-ease) but also for self-realization (becoming whole) on a path of consciousness expansion. Regaining access to memories from the start of life may be a part of our spiritual unfolding, an awakening – or “rebirth.”

In the New Age field, rebirthing was the experiential process initiated by hyperventilation in Stanislav and Christina Groff’s “holotropic” breathwork. I recall him explaining his idea of the “perinatal matrix” (the womb and birth experience as a template for later life), and then, in a workshop, physically making ourselves into a “passage” to help a Kenyan woman act out her birth. But I also remember my Irish workshop partner recalling her role in a team operating a cannon in Napoleonic times and the sight of her dead mother in the pool of the family’s Roman villa – and also the woman re-enacting that birth canal struggle now singing gloriously, entranced, an African queen once again. Rebirthing always went beyond the physical birth scenario to past lives. Now, it has extended from the classical group workshop setting to one-on-one internet sessions and tech-assisted auto-hypnosis (e.g., MonroeInstitute, 2021) – and from past-life regressions to past deaths, through which we enter into our life “on the other side,” between incarnations.

The womb environment may impact on the developing fetus in many ways. Maternal stress during pregnancy affects its size, for example, probably through the amniotic fluid (La Marca-Ghaemmaghami et al., 2017). Newborn babies respond to the music their mother listened to during the pregnancy, as well as to her voice and that language, indicating recognition, thus memory (Partanen et al., 2013). We clearly have unconscious memories stored from before we were born that affect our later lives – but the root of such memories may predate the pregnancy. The children of Holocaust survivors are relatively prone to trauma, for example, a transgenerational effect thought to be transferred epigenetically (Yehuda et al. 2015).

There is an interesting parallel history here. Just as the physical cause of memory has been pushed deeper (to amniotic fluid, now to DNA) and backwards (to the womb, now to previous generations), so also has rebirthing in the psychical realm moved from early life and past lives (on Earth) to life “beyond the veil” and what Michael Newton (2004) has dubbed our “life between lives” (LBL). The former takes empirically determined influences on an individual’s current life back through their body and cellular memory (c.f., Verny, 2001) and thence to the parental environment – toward the aphoristic sins at the seventh generation! The latter takes conscious memory as experiential data, which then becomes detached from the physical world – and goes beyond simple materialism.

Going Back, Going Beyond

In addition to the memory inferred (by psychoanalysis, via galvanic skin response, etc.) and retrieved (at workshops, etc.), there are also naturally occurring or conscious early memories. That is, some adults simply remember something about their early life without any aids. Some recall their first days in the world or being in the womb. Some remember incarnating, and some before that – Martin Ettington gives a succinct account (Mkettingtonbooks, 2022). Such memories may return after childhood (having been subject to the amnesia) or during childhood (initially prevented, perhaps due to the maternal oxytocin produced during delivery). Memories of the “pre-life” are sometimes triggered by a death in the family or near-death experience (NDE). And sometimes the memories seem to be continually available throughout childhood and after – they have always been there, since… well, since it happened. But did it?

Early life memories can sometimes be checked, like my yellow (bathing bowl). Generally, this is not the case, but some reports have been investigated and confirmed – including from before birth (see below). The conventional materialist assumption will have people who sincerely claim a memory from before conception as having unconsciously fabricated it, and then any verification as coincidental (however improbable). False memories are fairly common, of course (and notorious in witness testimony, hypnotic suggestion, etc.). In other words, people with pre-birth memory (PBM) – of being in the womb or before – may not be remembering an experience of something that really happened but experiencing a memory as if it really happened.

The issues raised around memory here are not just psychological, but also philosophical, since as soon as we refer to what actually happened, we imply questions about the nature of reality, which becomes highly problematic in a nonstandard context (like life before conception). To illustrate with another personal anecdote: I remember my father teaching my sister and I how to fly when we were children. We went to the local park one afternoon, he levitated, and we copied him, rising to the height of the trees and above. After a while, we all descended, lay on the grass, and went home. I only remembered this recently. The memory emerged as from a fog, like a memory of a memory, and then became clear. Under hypnosis, I retrieved further detail, and a little more has come back since. The initial memory has been extended, clarified, and fixed, though it hasn’t changed. 

I don’t suppose the event occurred quite as remembered. But nor do I believe the false memory account that would have to be concocted by a “skeptic” – of a dream of flying, say, conflated with normal experience (a visit to the park) and mistaken for a real recollection. In such a case, we begin to delve deeply into the human psyche, into our collective mental culture, and beyond. We can still do science (develop methodologies for memory access and measures for assessment and extrapolate for theory-building), but unverifiable claims are being made, so it is fundamentally different. 

Pre-Birth, Pre-Earth: Assessing the Unverifiable

In evaluating the evidence for PBM – as opposed to just dismissing or ignoring it – one approach is to enter into it empathetically. The second person conjoins with the first person’s complete clarity and crystal conviction, which characteristically accompany their numinous experience of pre-incarnation. Misplaced certainty, however, is also a commonplace human fallibility; confident mistakes abound (especially when we believe we have God on our side). The standard scientific approach to PBM would be to consider it objectively, in the third person, and attempt a conventional explanation. But what if a child were to recall when he was physically conceived – seeing the sex act of his parents-to-be – and later have the details of that memory confirmed by those parents? It was in the front seat of the car, while his sister-to-be was asleep in the back. This is Glenn’s memory. He was born in 1929, remembered as a child, and finally checked it with his startled and embarrassed mom and dad when he was twenty-five (Susanna Lopez Yoga, 1999).

Assuming that no prosaic explanation is plausible, should we believe that the son-to-be was already conscious, as he says, an unincarnated individual observing the scene in real time? Or should we construe a more sophisticated interpretation: actually, the young Glenn acquired temporally distant information (ESP of the past, the event in the car), unconsciously and spontaneously remote seeing back in time and then building the memory from that? The former might be preferred because it is simple, takes the compelling first-person testimony as face value, and also accords with other experiences and related data on death and the afterlife and reincarnation. The latter, however, draws on something we already know – our (super)human abilities to access the informational field across time-space (mediumistically channeling from the “akashic record”) – in order to avoid something even more exotic. Essentially, this is the clever skepticism – or objective detachment, dispassion, the scientific stance – employed in non-survivalist explanations of contact with the deceased. It could also be used, we might note, for veridical NDEs of events perceived when the brain shows no activity – they are actually pre- or post-cognitions, gained before or after but not during clinical death. 

It may be that the living agent (super) psi explanation is ontologically more parsimonious. But we give too much to Occam anyway! His razor gives a good rule of thumb, a principle, but it is not a law; it is very useful, aesthetically pleasing, but also unnecessarily restrictive. In this case, both explanations may work, and perhaps we don’t need to choose. Mystically, they are not incompatible. For even as souls experiencing LBL heaven, we do not go beyond illusion, as reports of the ascended hierarchies encountered there indicate – their being is far beyond mere immortals like us! Rather, we inhabit a relatively rarified realm on the other side, as materially less dense and more loving but still living agents – and now with super-duper psi! It’s just a higher maya! We can paradoxically hold to both the justified faith in literal survival and the subtle wisdom of our reticence.

Glenn told his story to Elizabeth and Neil Carmen in 1999, who had been researching this field since a decade before that. They thus recorded an early confirmed example from contemporary times of the “anomalous” phenomenon of pre-conception memory. Their subject matter has a worldwide history (Carman & Carman, 2019) akin to that of NDEs (Zaleski, 1987), although it is much less well known – presumably because NDEs have recently been studied by physicians due to their suddenly increased frequency in the clinical setting of hospital emergency rooms that provide real-life laboratory-type conditions – none of which applies to PBM. 

Such a history has also been identified for UFOs (Vallee, 1993) – a comparison that is pertinent here since the challenges about what to believe and how to explain it only become more difficult – and easier just to ignore – when, as expressed by psychiatrist John Mack (after a 1952 US Air Force press conference), incredible memories are recounted by credible people (Mack, 1994; US National Archives, 2013). In the case of PBM, these include recollections of a one-off incarnation straight from Source, of previous lives on other planets and dimensions, and of the beginning of this universe and the moment before (AlphaZebra, 2016; Words with Emily, 2020; Love Covered Life, 2021). 

In such a context of non-physicality and unverifiability, what researchers like the Carmens do is essentially to follow the path cleared in the mid-nineteenth century by Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail. Writing as Allan Kardec, the French academician, pedagogist, and educator collated the various spirit responses of ten different mediums – ultimately, to a thousand questions for the five books of the Spiritist Codification. A similar route has been taken for the development of NDE theory (to ascertain its core features, etc.). Now, we can go a step further; since both Kardec’s Spiritism and NDE cover some of the same ground as PBM, a certain degree of cross-referencing or triangulation is enabled. For example, a common item in PBM is selecting the level of difficulty of the lessons to be learned in the upcoming life on Earth; similarly, people have NDEs in which they can decide whether to return to complete their mortal duty, or “mission”; and Kardec (Question 258) reports that “before taking on a new corporeal existence… a spirit… chooses for [themself] the kind of trials [they] will undergo” (Kardec, 1875, p. 120).

A little differently from the Spiritist communications, it is with earthly personal testimonies that we set out in the case of PBMs when developing the new concept, or category – as was also the case with Raymond Moody’s 1975 “life after life,” which didn’t gain currency, and the more modest “near death experience,” which did (Moody, 2015). Concerns about the person testifying and the details of their testimony are, of course, paramount. Returning to the UFO theme, the case of alien abductions is pertinent. Thus, we follow Mack’s methodology of a common-sense judgement and open-minded observation of the general similarity and stability of unconnected accounts, the reliability and unsuggestibility of the individuals reporting, and the sense of their genuineness and lack of ulterior motive. Interpretation comes later; for the science, evidence comes first, explicandum before explicans. 

In collecting the data for PBM, to develop its main features, the core story – as in the case of NDEs (and with abductions) – it is the commonality of independent, trustworthy reports that is key (akin to laboratory repeatability). In this realm of the subjective, agreement becomes evidential. And regardless of whether we know or even can know if the PBMs are “true,” people are reporting the same type of experience. This alone gives it validity. The minimalist, skeptical position requires at least a recognition of the interpersonal agreement establishing an intersubjective reality – which in some metaphysics is all we ever got anyway!

Structural Considerations of PBM as a Category

NDE is now a well-established category. NDEs may occur not near actual physical death, and they may also occur during it (Parnia et al., 2014). Regardless, they occur in the context, as Bruce Greyson (2021) puts it, of a “confrontation with death.” They commonly involve an out-of-body experience (OBE) in the physical realm (e.g. looking down on the surgical bed), whose details may be later verified, indicating an NDE-OBE overlap – these cannot be reduced to the other, they intersect (KMTV, 2013). As a complete, sequential narrative (which is not necessarily followed and mostly, in fact, uncompleted), the NDE morphs into a nonphysical reality (with helpers, life review, etc.) imbued with affective qualities, like radiance, tranquility, and all-encompassing love, and subsequent effects, such as spontaneous supernormal (psychic) abilities and a conversion to some sort of theism. Such “full” NDEs are transcendent and transforming, and the more common, partial NDEs (e.g., with just a tunnel and distant light) much less so. Thus, they constitute “enlightenment” experiences, to be graded and grouped with other samādhis or modes of cosmic consciousness. This phenomenological cartography of the NDE has become socially grounded as the construct of an apparently shared reality that appears innately human (transcultural, historical). 

A full NDE commonly involves a desire to stay in the otherly realm and not return to Earth that is not permitted, although individuals sometimes feel a pull and choose to return (and occasionally can choose not to, as mentioned). Similarly, PBM may also involve a positive desire – to incarnate – while other individuals want not to. This is reminiscent of the response to Kardec’s (1875, p. 73) Question 184, “In passing from one world to another… Has the spirit the choice of the new world… to inhabit?” which begins “Not always, but [they] can make this demand, and it may be granted.” 

There is a parallel here between NDE and PBM in terms of choice; issues around freewill and its limits are features of both. PBM choosing (and its limitations) may include selecting aspects of one’s character and appearance, parents, and families, in addition to the tasks and challenges (life purpose), with key decision points previewed in a life tree graph of probable futures. These choices are made with the guidance of nebulous, authoritative individuals, such as light beings, guides, and angels, perhaps in an empty space or ethereal realm. For the incarnation, a distant light is the target. There is a sense of the time to go being due and then the entry itself, which is fast and sudden. 

In this full narrative, there are often only one or two memories from the womb and after birth; the numinosity is paramount. Thus, people with a full PBM tend to have a certain awareness of their spiritual Self, they come in already enlightened, as it were. When the recollection is (re)gained later in life, that is the enlightenment experience, just as a full NDE is an enlightenment. Another parallel: in physical death, it is observed that the spirit may leave the body some time before the shutdown of biological systems, while in birth, entry may occur after biological (sperm-ovum) fertilization. Just as the death in NDE may occur in two steps, so for the birth in PBM – but in reverse. 

This reversal is a key feature; NDEs and PBMs are not just similar but also opposites or inversions. Full NDEs take us to the afterlife and full PBMs from the beforelife. In NDEs, we can’t actually die; with PBMs, we are already born. The NDE has a life review; the PBM has a life script. Structurally, the NDE and PBM exhibit the logic of binary opposition, as analyzed for initiation by Edmund Leach (1976). This links to Arnold van Gennep’s (1909)  tripartite model of initiation, with its oppositional stages of death and rebirth, presented as separation and (re)incorporation, and the liminal in-between. 

The death in NDE involves separation from the earth plane and the liminality of ascent; the initiating “death” in PBM, on the other hand, is a separation from the bliss-realm, with the subsequent liminal phase a descent into the earthly life;. The disembodiment of (near) death starts with a dualistic separation in which individual consciousness goes out and up from the physical body; incarnation is an incorporation of the self-mind down and into. Gravity (density, mass) is alternatively escaped and encountered in these opposite movements. 

Profoundly, LBL is the liminal phase between lives as seen from our earthly perspective of death and reincarnation – but experientially it is home, so reincarnation is a repeated separation, death a return, and it is this earthly life that is liminal. Together, PBM and NDE reveal what mystics teach about our fleeting moment on the world’s stage – which spirit-workers may use and the elderly may learn (to become elders).

Other structural considerations can be introduced. PBMs, like NDEs, have a paradigmatic form or conceptual core (which can be developed and researched for change over time, false positives/negatives, etc.) (e.g., Lange et al., 2004). We can expand this to talk about an NDE nexus, which includes shared death and end-of life experience (Peters, 2013; Kerr & Mardorossian, 2020). Then, the PBM nexus includes mothers’ and others’ supernormal experiences around birth (pre-birth communications). One girl, for example, insisted she was going to have a brother, who she used to play with in heaven, which the mother didn’t take seriously – until she had a dream of choosing her baby; indeed, she was pregnant, and it did turn out to be a boy, who, as a youngster, made unsolicited comments about heaven and rebirth (Prenatal Memory, 2019). Children-to-be may choose their mother, but mothers-to-be also choose their children, which extends to both parents, and families and beyond.

Regarding the triangulation, mediumistic reports on pre-birth planning have progressed from Kardec with Robert Schwartz’s Soul trilogy, which follows a similar methodology. Schwartz’s work further develops PBM, suggesting that our life-plans default to love (we pass “God’s test” by taking the most loving option for any decision), suffering cultivates the “divine virtues,” and soul-families co-plan, taking into consideration things like parallel selves and interdimensional parenting (Wisdom from North, 2017). The metaphysical mechanisms of this model are those of spiritual law, involving karma and a teleological evolution in which more difficult life-tasks offer greater developmental potential on the path toward universal self-realization. The long-established phenomenology of heavenly realms, a hierarchy of beings, and the primacy of love and light are all maintained, as well as God or Source, of which we are individualizing expressions.  

Impelled to testify, many people are uploading their PBM stories nowadays, and several social media and website spaces have sprung up dedicated or oriented to PBM – such as Jeff and Jody Long’s (1998–2000) research/testimonial site and community group. Some accounts share interesting details – for example, of a “pool” or “basic technology” in the preparatory “entry room” (used as an immersion for incarnation practice) – while others feature supernormal and paranatural experiences in subsequent earthly life, which may be wonderous or difficult (e.g., APeopleExperiencer, 2013a, 2013b; Pre-Birth Memories, 2020; DivineInside, 2021). An impressive interpersonal confirmation is supplied by a combined narrative: Roy Mills (1999) remembers being in the preparation place and, against the rules, turning round to look at the others, and Sandy Briggs (Unity&Love, 2018) remembers seeing him, and six others (they incarnated together as a group with interconnecting missions to share their PBMs and spread the message of pre-existence).

Conclusions and Futures

As a category, PBM is implied by its opposite, NDE. Thus, we establish an NDE-PBM binary. NDEs and PBMs have a “shared language,” in the words of Christian Sundberg, who also emphasizes the problem of sequencing with PBMs – since they “transcend linear time,” they are equally memories of what is not past. Then, applying this to NDEs, there is a sense in which these do not tell us about any future awaiting! Through the category binary, we can extrapolate meanings from one to the other. 

Metaphysically, NDE and PBM afford two understandings. The first supports a post-materialist paradigm. For NDE, this is supplied by veridical OBEs of events that occur during clinical death. Equivalently, PBMs can provide empirically verifiable data that push back the conventionally recognized onset of individual consciousness and against the physicalist approach to the mind-brain relationship. Going beyond this to the second understanding – to what may be dubbed a trans-materialism – NDEs supply evidence for post-mortem survival, and PBM further supports our (re)emerging, undogmatic dogma of reincarnation. It offers an epistemological extension. 

The argument for survival may be considered in a legal sense with a best-case presentation of the preponderance of evidence. Jeffrey Mishlove (2022) recently deployed the argument strategy of assembling a “bundle of arrows” that may be independently weak but are united in strength. He supplied nine such arrows, including NDE. Then, PBM is a tenth. And, with conscious memory, uninduced, supported by veridical detail and related experiences in the PBM nexus, our arrows may become sticks that raise a tepee. Or, we make the arch of reincarnation, connecting NDE through LBL to PBM. Inevitably, the “truth” of this reality may be disputed, partial, and superseded, but it seems to be well supported by a growing body of evidence. Thus, we create a whole new structure, or superstructure – and we move from intersubjectivity toward paradigm shift. The total effect becomes cultural, to wit, the highly successful movie Soul (Docter, 2020). 

The sense of a sea change also applies to the still-emerging phenomenon of PBM. In 1951, Roy Mills understood that he was never to speak on the subject – until 44 years later, in 1995, when he was informed that “the time had come.” Perhaps it has. Perhaps the materialist spell is weakening, our world is transforming, and more people are coming in with PBM. Maybe the veil itself is thinning!

Dedicated to Robin Foy, physical medium and spiritual scientist.

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