‘I was twenty-nine before I managed to recover the technique of being able to relive an earlier incarnation in detail and as a deliberate exercise. Until then, my conviction that I had had many lifetimes… was based on disjointed episodes from seven previous lives, four male and three female. These episodes, although as natural as memories from more immediate yesterdays, are frustrating, because I could not fill in the gaps in continuity which would have linked them into coherent sequences.
‘That everyone else did not have even this small degree of far memory was so difficult to understand that until I was eleven I presumed that other people’s reticence… was only another of the incomprehensible taboos that complicated an Edwardian childhood.
‘I also thought that everyone else had second sight, for as grown-ups pretended not to see each other if they met while scuttling in dressing gowns to the bathroom, it seemed no more and no less logical that they pretended to ignore anyone who did not happen to be conventionally clothed in a physical body.
‘In my early twenties…I tried to extend the range of my perception by waking myself several times a night in order to write down my dreams…. With practise I eventually learned how to discriminate between the pseudo and the factual, between a thought form I had created… and a scene which had its own objective reality.
‘… The technique of this type of far memory, as opposed to the isolated incident which is a spontaneous recall… entails learning how to shift the level of the majority of ones attention from the current personality to the earlier one, while still retaining sufficient normal waking consciousness to dictate a running commentary of the earlier personality’s thoughts, emotions and sensations.’
– Joan Grant, from Many Lifetimes