‘Soulmates they didn’t want to forget are remembered as imaginary friends.’

‘Evidence of children remembering past lives or previous incarnations.’

‘Children can sometimes recall memories from a past life.’

What? Noooo, I thought, I will not entertain this idea. It is ridiculous. With that thought came the memory of the last thing that Saranya Ji had said to me, ‘Allow for possibilities that are ridiculous and preposterous. See where they take you.’

‘OK, I will, Saranya Ji,’ I said out loud. ‘I’ll show you I can be open if only to prove to myself and Marcia and Pete that there is some kind of rational explanation. Here I go. See. Open-minded, that’s me.’

I spent the next hour googling case histories of children who had remembered past lives. It appeared to be a phenomenon all around the world, with many famous examples. I tried not to balk when I saw the stories labelled ‘extraordinary’, ‘astonishing’, or ‘amazing’, or read that some children had a birthmark or scar that related to the story they told of a wound they had received in their believed past life. One young boy had three birthmarks that matched injuries of his elder brother who had died twelve years previously. The boy appeared to know details of this brother’s medical history, even though he had never been told them, and he kept insisting he was the elder brother returned. Such tosh, I thought as I continued reading. There has to be some rational explanation.

A young boy kept having nightmares about an aeroplane crash and fire. He claimed he had been a World War II fighter pilot, who had been shot down. He knew details of the aircraft, and that he remembered flying off a ship called the Natoma. Other very specific details kept emerging which led eventually to his parents linking their son to the pilot James Huston, who had flown off the ship and had been killed in action. The biggest sceptic in the case was apparently the boy’s father but, after researching what his son recalled in detail, he came round to believing that there was indeed a link between his son and the dead pilot.

I bet the boy heard the story somewhere or saw a DVD, I thought. There had to be an explanation.

Next I read about a famous case, when a young woman, Jenny Cockell, was convinced she’d lived before as Mary, an Irishwoman who had died leaving young children. For years, she was painfully conscious of having left her children without a mother. She finally went to Ireland, where she was able to point out the house where Mary had lived, locations in the village and give details of Mary’s children’s lives. One of Mary’s remaining sons, an old man when Jenny met him, came to accept Jenny as his deceased mother.