Nightmares from a Past Life
Chapter Three
A terrifying dream started haunting me when I was five. In the nightmare, I was a young boy, barefoot, wearing pants that came down to my calves. I wore suspenders and a flannel shirt. It was a warm summer evening just after sunset. I was walking home along a curved dirt road that ran between a forest on my right and open cotton fields to my left when I saw a group of men on the road in front of me. I froze in fear, knowing I couldn’t escape. A group of perhaps thirty men was walking towards me, dressed in white robes with white pointed hats and cut-out eye holes. Several carried lit torches.
The men gathered around me and demanded to know why I was out so late. Didn’t I know that I was supposed to be home by now? I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there looking up at them in their scary pointed white hats, hoping they wouldn’t hurt me.
Two men grabbed my arms and led me with the others following behind, into the woods to an area recently excavated with a bulldozer to create a local dump. They led me down the front slope over soft brown earth, broken up by deep bulldozer tracks. For some reason the bulldozer tracks stood out to me in the nightmare. I didn’t understand how they were created. The soft brown earth crumbled under our feet as we walked down the slope to the middle of a 30 foot square area. The back of the pit was perhaps 15 feet below the forest floor, with vertical side walls. Everyone gathered around me.
The leader said something I didn’t understand and then ordered one of the men to put a blindfold on me and to start spinning me around. They spun me around until I got the idea, and started spinning on my own hoping to appease. Someone poured a container of kerosene used to fuel their torches, over my head. Another man held a lit torch close to my feet—and I burst into flames. I panicked, spinning a few more times before collapsing to the ground. As my body fell to the ground smothered by flames, I rose up from my body, entering a dark world where I was still on fire and spinning out of control. At this point, I’d awaken from the nightmare in a state of terror.
The nightmare continued even after I awoke. I’d lie in bed, crying to my mother for help. I was still on fire and spinning out of control. Mom raced to my side telling me, “Michael, you’re having that nightmare again! Wake up!” The dark world I was caught in spun at a hurricane rate. Mother felt my forehead, took my temperature, then announced the results to my father—104 degrees. I was burning up! She then poured rubbing alcohol onto a washcloth and rubbed it onto my chest and legs, reducing my fever. The same nightmare continued for five years, becoming less frequent and severe with each year until it stopped when I was ten years old.
Two years after the nightmares ended, I was getting ready to leave for school one morning when something caught my eye on our living room black-and-white TV. I stood with my school books in hand, watching a news story about a group of men marching in Mississippi, dressed in white robes and wearing pointed white hats. Surprised to see the men in my nightmare in real life, I watched them gather around a burning cross. It was difficult to believe that these men existed in real life. They were not just in nightmares. It struck me as strange that I’d had nightmares of the Ku Klux Klan for five years. I couldn’t fathom why. I didn’t want to think about it. I had to get to school. I was just grateful that my terrible nightmares had finally ended.
It would not be widely documented until the ’90s that many children around the world suffer from repeated nightmares of a violent past life death. Read Children’s Past Lives by Carol Bowman for more information on this subject.