Questions about my past lives?

[Starwhisper]

With the caveat that I'm half in agreement with Yom, I have had some luck with dreams. Usually, it has been in the form of dreaming about something that I would not deal with at all in normal waking life. E.g., repeated dreams of a certain place in France I've never seen at all in waking life and speaking French fluently. Usually it's my modern self exploring a strange-yet-familiar place repeatedly... sometimes, the dream points to a connection.

But to be frank, the most genuine past life flashes I've had have been pretty instantaneous and occurred while awake: e.g., an extreme feeling of deja vu when I saw a picture of game that was played commonly over 1000 years ago. Ultimately, I have a few suspicions and fragments. But getting back to what Yom said: I don't think knowing a ton of details would do me a lot of good--and in fact might be distracting. The flashes were good at the time for pulling me out of a more skeptical worldview (nothing wrong with skepticism, actually, but *pure* skepticism wasn't what I needed to feel fulfilled).

I do have a few friends who remember past lives in detail--one to the point of having been able to read and translate a language she does not speak and never studied. The thing is, those friends aren't exactly the happiest people I've met. At the very least, they've seemed to have had an uphill battle, and stagnation has been a real risk for at least one. So, details can be a real burden in their way, it seems to me.