I’ve posted before about children who remember living in heaven before their births or who remember having lived previous lives on earth. Recently, I’ve found some pre-birth memory cases that are particularly relevant to the new book I’m writing on coincidences. These are cases in which children remember dying in a previous life and then communicating with their loved ones from the afterlife, by way of dreams or “signs.”

Let me give you a couple of examples.

The first is a case investigated by the father of reincarnation research, UVa psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson. In his book Reincarnation and Biology, Stevenson recounts how a three-year-old Burmese boy had memories of a past life in which he was named U Mar Din and lived near the pagoda at Pan Aing. The boy also recalled how, after his death as that man, he appeared to his wife in a dream and told her where he’d left some money (5 kyats) wrapped in a white handkerchief. Stevenson and a local researcher went to interview the widow of U Mar Din, who was still living. She told them she had indeed dreamt that her deceased husband told her he’d left a 5-kyat note wrapped in a white handkerchief inside a small box, and she had found the money just as he’d said.

Another example comes from Mary and Peter Harrison’s book The Children That Time Forgot. They describe the case of little Mandy Seabrook who, from the time she was born, looked very much like another of her mother’s children, a daughter who had died years before at the age of five months. When Mandy was two years old, she began recounting memories of having been this other child, even though no one in the family spoke about her. In particular, Mandy remembered the circumstances of her burial and a particular object she’d been buried with: a fluffy yellow ball. Her mother didn’t think the yellow ball had been buried with her deceased child, but an older sibling, when questioned, confessed to having slipped the yellow ball under the body in the casket.

Mandy’s verified memories of her previous life and death lend credence to another memory she recounted to her mother when she was six years old. She asked her mother, “Do you remember the night I died? There was a bright star shining in the sky.” Although her mother hadn’t thought about it in a long time, she did remember an especially bright star that had been “hovering over the garden” that night. She’d mentioned it to someone at the time because it was both strangely bright and strangely low. Mandy told her mother, “That was my star. It was my way of telling you that I would be back.”

It is easy for those who are grieving their loved ones to write off their dreams or their experiences of unusual events as wishful thinking. But these children’s memories indicate that communication from the afterlife does happen. May we not allow our skepticism to blind us to the very real messages of love being sent our way.