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Originally Posted by Trilby
Do you ever have feelings like you've lived another life or an affinity for something you don't understand but it's there?
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I've never had any feelings about previous lives. In the spirit of honest discussion, however, I will tell you that I have on several occasions felt that I knew things in advance that I could not possibly have known.
They are usually stupid and insignificant things: when I was about 10, I eagerly awaited each new issue of MAD magazine. The night before a particular issue was to arrive at our local convenience store, I had a dream about it, and saw vaguely what the cover would look like. I thought about it all the way to the store, amused to see how wrong I would be, but when we got there, sure enough, that's exactly what it looked like. I was so freaked out I didn't say anything, I knew people would think I was nuts. This is the first time I've ever mentioned it at all, in fact.
In another example, I knew what a particular acquaintance was going to name her baby before he was born. We weren't close and this person did not once discuss name choices with me or anyone around me, it's not a common name at all, and in fact I do not like the name, but I just felt certain months in advance that she would choose that name. When I got the email announcement I didn't even get freaked out, because like I said, I had already been certain I was right.
There are rational explanations, of course. For one thing, I know now that I have partial temporal lobe seizures, and one of the symptoms is intense, psychologically-convincing deja vu. I didn't have my first seizure until at least 5 years after the episode with the MAD magazine cover, but it's possible I was having some mild form back then without realizing it. On the other hand, even with the most intense seizures, the feeling is that I "must have" dreamed about it weeks ago in the past. In this case I remember waking up, thinking about the dream, going over the whole dream in my head (in which the magazine cover was an insignificant part,) and thinking about it all the way to the store. It was nothing at all like the experience of a seizure as I now feel them.
As for guessing the name choice, I feel like I am a very good analyst of people and their behavior patterns. It's a little of my spectrum traits coming out: I've been closely watching people since I was very young, trying to figure out why they are the way they are, because so much of human behavior is illogical to me--people almost never act in their best interests! Anyway, I'm good at predicting people's behavior, and isolating things like patterns in taste, so I don't think it's too impossible that I simply recognized that this woman was the kind of person who would be enamored of this particular name. A Sherlock-level analysis combined with a lucky guess--I later heard she was toying between the name she chose and a completely different name I never would have predicted, and supposedly didn't choose until the moment she saw the baby. So things could have gone the other way and I would have probably forgotten all about being wrong. We only remember the times we were right, of course.