Group explorations of past lives through hypnotic regression

Dr Helen Wambach used hypnotic regression with large groups of volunteers. More than a thousand people then completed questionnaires covering periods from 2000 BC to AD 1945. She expected to reject about twenty per cent of the questionnaires because of fantasy, inaccuracies, or internal contradictions. The questions were direct and specific: what people ate, how they dressed, their occupations, homes, utensils, the appearance of money, and other details that could be checked against historical and archaeological sources. To her surprise, seventy per cent of participants described their past lives in considerable and accurate detail. There were no Cleopatras, Galileos, or Napoleons among them; most lived in poverty and did hard physical work, and the details of everyday life matched the historical record. Many described lives as people of a different race, which again did not support the genetic-memory hypothesis: a white person could not genetically remember the life of a Black enslaved person. Gender also changed between past lives, though not always.