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Do we come back?
And if so… as what?

A king? A Viking? A slightly confused goldfish?

Before we answer that, let's start with something you do every single night.

Cartoon: a green figure asleep on a pillow. Caption: Every night you fall asleep and experience a small death

Lights out. No thoughts. No “you”. Just… nothing.

Then the alarm goes off.

Cartoon: the green figure waking up and climbing out of bed. Caption: When you wake up you're re-incarnated as the same person - or so you believe

Neither your body nor your mind stays the same

Cartoon: three goggle-eyed goldfish in a bowl

You feel like the same person you were yesterday. But are you?

Dig out a photo of yourself aged five. Same haircut? Same favourite food? Same opinion about sprouts? Probably not.

Your body is changing too. Your skin replaces itself every few weeks, and many of your cells are swapped for new ones over the years.

So why do you feel like one unbroken “you”? Mostly because you believe it.

Maybe we're more like the goldfish in the old joke: every lap of the bowl, a brand-new fish. (For the record, real goldfish can remember things for months. Don't tell them.)

Your nightly cast of characters

Now think about your dreams.

When you dream, you create a whole cast of characters: heroes, villains, your old maths teacher riding a horse. Every one of them is you.

They're your forgotten feelings, buried memories and the things you'd rather not think about. They dress up and act things out so you can understand your waking life better. (There's more about this on the Dreams page.)

Guess who's in the cast?

Here's the big idea.

Maybe your Essence (your soul, your higher self, your spirit, whatever you like to call it) does the same thing. It dreams up a cast of characters, whole lives, to explore and work through its own problems and challenges. A witch. A Viking. A police officer. A king.

You are one of those characters.

Yes, you. Step forward.

What about past-life memories?

Some people remember being someone else, somewhere else, long ago. Are those memories real?

Who knows for sure. They might be leaking through from the bigger part of you, the part that remembers every character in the cast. It's a bit like remembering scraps of a dream after you wake up.

A dandelion clock, with a single seed floating away

So… do we come back?

When you die, you return to that bigger reality, where “you” remember every character you've ever been.

If that's true, there's no “re” in reincarnation. You don't come back, because you never really left. You're always there.

But this character, with this face, this family and this particular taste in music, only gets one run.

So live it as if it's your one shot. Because, in a way, it is.

Next: What happens when I die?  |  Dreams  |  Back to Mind

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