Who Was I?

Do you believe in reincarnation or past life experiences? This is a short essay about some memories I had as a child that were from another life.

Not knowing who you are in life can be very confusing and frustrating.  But not knowing who you were can be even more befuddling.  Imagine going through life with memories that aren’t your own, at least not in this life.  No, I’m not talking about schizophrenia or some sort of personality disorder; I’m talking about reincarnation.  

For me, the memories started somewhere between the ages of five and seven- I’m not sure exactly how old I was, but I was definitely too young to understand anything about the complex inner-workings of rockets.  Yet, I began drawing detailed diagrams of multi-stage rockets and spacecraft.  I was born about ten years after the Apollo program ended, and about eight years after the conclusion of the Skylab program.  Further, nobody in my family was involved in the space program and everything I was drawing was before the days of home internet, so it wasn’t like I saw the images online.  So where were they coming from?

My 2D illustrations soon progressed into 3D models that I made from scratch, using cardboard, construction paper, plastic bottles and anything I could get my little hands on.  Like a mini rocket scientist, I taped and glued my creations together on my mom’s kitchen table.  One time I even put fireworks in the bottom of one of my rockets with the intent to launch it into space.  Of course, it blew up on the launchpad but it was still pretty cool.  But the common theme to my rockets was that they were a multi-stage design, which is a point that I’ll come back to in a few moments.

Eventually, my rocket creations transitioned into other types of spacecraft.  I soon began to build space capsules and spacecraft that resembled the lunar lander, used during the Apollo program.  Not only that, but I also became obsessed with spacesuits and I began to “recall” what it felt like to wear one.  Somehow I could remember how cumbersome and restrictive they were; I could remember the sounds that they made as “I” walked around in them and how the soft material felt pressed up against “my” skin.  I remembered how the space helmet reduced my peripheral field of view and what it sounded like to breathe inside of the enclosed bubble-shaped helmet. 

In elementary school, books became the tool for me to explore my strange obsession with the space program.  Again, this was before home internet was common in American households, so books were my method of childhood research.   As I was flipping the pages of a space exploration book, I discovered an image of the mighty Saturn V rocket.  At the time, the Saturn V was the most powerful rocket humankind had ever constructed.  “Coincidentally” it was a multi-stage rocket used during the Apollo program, just like the ones I had been creating from scratch.  I also discovered that the bulky bright-white spacesuits used during the Apollo program looked exactly like the ones in my visions.  Was all of this a product of my imagination, or something a bit deeper?

Of course, I was just a kid at the time so I didn’t know anything about past-life experiences, and my parents probably just assumed that it was nothing more than a childhood obsession.  What little kid doesn’t dream of becoming an astronaut at some point, right?  But, unbeknownst to my parents, this seemingly innocent obsession with space began to have a darker tone.  I remember having thoughts or feelings that something horrible happened to some Apollo or Skylab astronauts.  My obsession with the space program eventually subsided as I got older, but I could never quite shake the feeling that something terrible happened to some unfortunate spacemen.

Secretly, I went about thirty years feeling like I personally knew one of the astronauts who, for some reason, didn’t return to Earth.  In my mind’s eye, he’s a handsome clean-shaven thirty-something year old white male wearing a white spacesuit.  I don’t know where this image comes from, but it’s there.  I tried to forget about all of this, because it’s been very confusing.  The thoughts and feelings are so powerful that it’s almost as if I was the astronaut.  But that’s impossible, right?  And crazy??  Well, not as crazy as the nightmares that I began to experience…

Continued in “Nightmares From Space?”

Author's Note

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