This is something I have been very interested in. When my now 19 year old son was about 3 years old and I was pushing him down the street on his pushchair (stroller), he saw an old man walking towards us using a wooden walking stick. He pointed at the man and in his baby voice he said, "I used to have one of those sticks before I died."
The hairs in the back of my neck stood on end.
Reincarnation was not something that was spoken about in our house. Plus the words he used, "before I died," were not something I, or anyone else I knew, had ever said before.
Up to that point reincarnation to me was a good working theory, and I did kind of "believe" in it.
Years later I did have some regression experiences and during my fling with scientology my auditing went whole track straight away. The events in my prior life with regard scientology did cause problems with my case file.
But, I am not entirely convinced that when we experience the memories and lives of other incarnations we are dealing with something that only "us" as an individual entity has experienced. I think it is more in the lines of Jung's collective consciousness (not sure of the name of it).
Imagine also that linear time is a figment of our imagination, this means that all lives happened/are happening/will happen at the same time. Following this train of thought, if something in our own present life experience creates a certain "vibration" that is also being experienced in another life experience, they will resonate with each other, just like two unrelated instruments resonate with the same musical note.
So, for example. I once looked at a picture of the Greek coast and totally freaked out. I said I hated the place and then had a very visual recollection of being very dark, wearing black clothes and being in an large orange grove collecting oranges when a group of people, about 5, star walking toward me. The other workers move away in fear. They come to me and one of them reads a declaration that I am a witch and will suffer the consequences etc.. Next scene, I am at the edge of a cliff looking down at the sea, there are many people behind me and I am pushed off the cliff and fall to my death.
This was a very powerful memory.
Years later, a book by a Dr. Brian Weiss told of a regression by a woman who described a very similar experience in a previous life in Greece.
Did we both pick up, resonated, on the same traumatic life or lives of women who were thrown off cliffs in Greece? Or did we in fact both live there in the past and had similar fates?
It is a very good question.