In regards to “past lives,” while I don’t necessarily believe that those experiences actually reflect “past lives,” if you hang out with people who do (which I have – Mom was big into the New Age growing up), they often do describe very mundane lives. Those just don’t often get written about or published. I’ve had a “regression session” myself, and I “remembered” being a medieval doctor, which I guess is a little glamorous, and a rural widow living alone in a sod house. Both of those were obviously unconsciously fabricated, probably from movies or books I read, but neither was a prince or princess. (That said, I met more than a few Cleopatras, and only one of them had any real grasp of Roman history or politics. And you don’t have to dig hard to find any number of Aleister Crowleys online. I like to ask them about the finer points of mountain climbing, about which they are all universally ignorant).
For my part, I lost interest in past lives when I entered college, deciding that if reincarnation was real, it didn’t much matter anyway, because those people were still dead and not really me. Taking philosophy courses will do that to you.
