Exceptional experiences including past-life memories are common.

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Despite skepticism among mainstream researchers, exceptional experiences—such as precognitive dreams, meaningful coincidences, and experiences sometimes described as crisis telepathy—appear to be relatively common in the general population. Large-scale surveys and opinion polls conducted in Western countries suggest that roughly 30 to 50 percent of people report having experienced at least one such phenomenon, with even higher rates reported in some non-Western countries. For any given individual, these experiences may be unusual or infrequent. Yet taken across an entire population, they are far from rare. This distinction is important: An experience can be uncommon for any given person while still being widespread across society. As summarized in my recent Psychology Today post, our findings from a 2026 study conducted with a representative sample of Germans likewise suggest that exceptional experiences represent a relatively common dimension of human experience and merit psychological investigation, particularly for understanding how people interpret events and construct meaning in their lives.

One item in our study, drawn from the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences, concerns memories of a past life: “I have distinct memories that made it seem as if I had lived a past life in a different body.” In our representative German sample, 11 percent of participants answered “yes” to this question. Perhaps such a proportion would not be especially surprising in India,........

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