I woke up this morning with my head full of something I have carried for years.
I remember how I died in my past life.
It is a strange sentence to write. The sad part is that I cannot prove it to anyone. I can explain the dreams, describe the room, tell you what I was wearing and show you the small bald spot currently at the back of my head. None of it would count as evidence to another person.
I can only prove it to myself.
The Dream That Kept Returning
I did not arrive in this life with the full memory of another one. I did not grow up knowing my former name, where I lived or what year it happened.
What I got instead were dreams.
The same dream kept returning from my teenage years, showing me what appeared to be the final day of a life I had already lived.
At first, I treated it as a bad dream. I would wake up, pray to God to cancel whatever evil was waiting for me, reject it in Jesus’ name and move on with my day. That is what you do when a dream scares you and you do not yet understand what your mind is trying to show you.
Then it came back.
And came back again.
Each time, there was another detail. The clothes became easier to remember. The room made more sense. The floor, the bed, my age and the feeling inside me all became clearer.
One dream would probably have meant nothing. Even three might have been easy to dismiss. This happened enough times for it to stop feeling like a random nightmare.
At some point, it became law inside me.
It was like watching a film fifty times as a child, then watching it again as an adult and discovering you never understood the story. As a child, you noticed the action and the funny parts. Years later, you finally understand why everyone behaved the way they did.
That was what happened with this dream.
The older I became, the more of the story I understood.
The Man I Think I Was
Apparently, I was careless in my past life.
I was the life of the party. I drank. I enjoyed myself. I wore lace a lot, so I have decided that I was probably rich. Please allow me that conclusion. It is one of the few positive details I brought back.
I also had a wife.
She seemed troublesome in the dreams, although I am now old enough to admit that I might have been the problem. Perhaps she had simply reached the end of what she could tolerate from me. I do not know. I only remember the feeling that we had our issues.
On the day I died, I was drunk.
The floor was slippery. I took one wrong step, lost my balance and went down. The back of my head struck the hard edge of an old wooden bed.
And that was it.
A whole life ended because of one careless step.
I came into this life with a small bald spot at the back of my head, around the same place where I remember the impact happening.
Maybe it is confirmation.
Maybe it is a lesson.
Maybe it is just a bald spot and my mind has spent years building a story around it.
To anyone else, it proves nothing. To me, it is difficult to ignore.
I Was Not Ready to Die
The strongest part of the dream is not the fall itself.
It is the feeling that comes with it.
I remember holding on to many things. Dreams. Ideas. Work I had started. Something I was building. I was nowhere near ready to leave.
Then I made one small, stupid mistake, and everything ended.
That has shaped the way I fear death in this life.
I am not only afraid of dying. I am afraid of coming to Earth with something to do, getting close to it and losing the entire life to something silly.
Then what?
Do I have to wait to be born again?
Do I have to learn how to walk, speak and understand the world from the beginning? Do I spend another twenty years growing up before I even start finding my path again?
And what happens if the next version of me is unserious?
Imagine having to watch a younger version of yourself waste years on things that do not matter while you are somewhere inside him, trying to scream instructions he cannot hear.
That thought bothers me more than death itself.
The Fear That Followed Me Here
Every time I touch the bald spot at the back of my head, I remember to move as though time matters.
I also remember to be careful.
I consider myself one of the most careful people I know. Everything must be done properly. Things must be handled carefully. Food must be prepared carefully. I notice possible risks in ordinary situations and spend a ridiculous amount of my day preventing disasters that have never happened to me.
At least, they have never happened to me in this life.
A wet floor is never just a wet floor to me. A careless decision is never only a careless decision. My mind immediately begins calculating everything that could go wrong.
Something influenced that.
I did not wake up one morning and choose to move through life this way. It feels learned, even though I cannot point to where I learned it.
Perhaps I already know what one silly mistake can cost.
The Clues I Want to Leave
I get a strong urge to leave clues for the next version of myself.
I want to make sure that if I ever return, I remember who I am sooner. I do not want to spend another lifetime relearning everything I may have already understood.
I do not even know what the clues should look like.
How do you leave a message for someone who will have your soul but may not have your face, name, family or memories?
Where do you put something that can survive your death and somehow find you again?
Maybe writing this is one of the clues.
Maybe the small bald spot was the clue left for me, except whoever left it forgot to include instructions. So I have spent years trying to decode it through dreams.
It is weird, but it also makes me a little sad.
There may have been another version of me trying desperately to make sure I did not forget him.
My Faith Does Not Resolve It
I believe in God.
I believe in Jesus.
I believe we are going to heaven.
At the same time, a small part of me believes God may sometimes send people back to complete work they left unfinished. Maybe some of us return because there is something we still need to learn. Maybe we come back for more character development.
I do not have a Bible verse to use as proof. I am also not trying to start a new doctrine.
I cannot fully explain how both beliefs fit together. I carry them anyway.
My faith tells me there is more after death. My dreams make me wonder whether some of that “more” includes another attempt at life.
Perhaps the dream is only a dream.
Perhaps my mind created a complete story from fear, imagination and a bald spot.
I have considered that.
Still, the dream has returned too many times, with too much detail and continuity, for me to treat it like every other dream I have forgotten by breakfast.
What Did You Bring Back?
I wonder how many people carry traits they cannot explain.
Maybe there is something you do repeatedly that makes sense only to you. You cannot tell anyone where it came from. You only know that doing anything else feels wrong.
Maybe you avoid something you have never experienced.
Maybe you feel drawn towards work you were never trained to want.
Maybe you have spent your entire life running towards something, or away from it, without knowing what started the race.
It might be your past self trying to stop you from fucking things up again.
Who knows?
None of us really knows anything until we die.
Maybe death answers every question. Maybe we get the answers and lose them again when we return.
All I know is that I do not want to reach the end of this life with the same feeling I remember from the last one. I do not want unfinished dreams, abandoned ideas and one silly mistake to be the final summary of who I was.
And if God sends me back again, I hope I leave better clues.
Hopefully, when I am alive again, I remember.
