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Are Children With Imaginary Playmates andChildren Said to Remember Previous Lives Cross-

Culturally Comparable Categories?

ANTONIA MILLS

University of Northern British Columbia

Abstract Some 15–66% of children in western countries talk aboutimaginary playmates; in India only 0.2% of children are said to remembera previous life. Both phenomena occur from the age of 30 months to 60–90months. This article explores whether the two phenomena are cross-culturally comparable categories. The article describes a study of thepsychological characteristics of a sample of 15 children said to remember aprevious life in India, compared with a matched sample; and compares itwith a sample of 15 children with imaginary playmates and a matchedsample from Charlottesville, Virginia. No significant differences between thetarget group and the comparison group were found in either culture,suggesting that both phenomena are normal. One case of an American childwith an imaginary playmate and one case of a child in India who is said toremember a previous life are described, using a video-recording of thechild’s dialogue.

Key words children • cross-cultural • imaginary playmates • past-lifememory • reincarnation

Are children with imaginary playmates (IP) and children who are said tohave a previous-life identity (PI) cross-culturally comparable categories?Psychological anthropologists or cultural psychologists such as Shweder(1990a, 1990b) represent the extension of the Whorf-Sapir position that it

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is fruitless to look for what he calls a ‘central processing mechanism’(implying the psychic unity of mankind) in cross-cultural contexts.1 ThusShweder sees the western search for universal principles as a suspectprojection of ‘some imagined essential structure of the mind’ (1990a, p. 24)onto cultural others. This is in contrast to the position taken by cross-cultural psychologists such as Avis and Harris (1991) who note that thepygmy Baka children in Cameroon attain the same kind of abilities todifferentiate belief and desire in the same time-frame as western children,despite the culture having a different concept of the nature of the humanmind.2 They agree ‘that genuine cultural variation in the way that mentalstates are conceived does exist, but these diverse conceptions elaborateupon rather than displace a universal assent to certain core concepts,notably beliefs and desires’ (1991, p. 466). To Avis and Harris this suggeststhat ‘other rapidly acquired concepts – for example, the distinctionsbetween mental entities and real entities (Wellman & Estes, 1986) . . . willalso be universal acquisitions. It also implies that at some point in develop-ment children will begin to elaborate cultural-specific ideas around thosecore assumptions.’3

The data from my comparative research on children with imaginaryplaymates (IP) in the USA and children said to remember previous lives,that is, to have a previous life identity (PI) in India, lead me to take aposition somewhere in between these two formulations. To date, I haveconducted four preliminary studies of IPs in the US and made five researchtrips to India to study PI. The first IP study was a retrospective study ofstudents in anthropology 109B at the University of Virginia, and from asporadic sample of colleagues, and relatives of colleagues. The total sampleof 60 adults and young adults yielded 16 cases of IP and one case of PI.Next, I studied the IP of children in one Charlottesville preschool (N = 9).4

In 1992–1993 graduate student Missy Sirch and I studied 15 children withPI and a matched sample from a randomly selected sample of preschoolsin Charlottesville. In India I have studied 49 cases of PI in five researchtrips, and in 1992 gave the same standardized tests to 15 children with IPand a matched sample of control children, as were administered to thechildren in the IP study in Charlottesville.

I began the study wondering if the two different categories masked acommon phenomena, if children with imaginary playmates in NorthAmerica would be thought to be remembering previous lives if they livedin India, and if children in India who are said to be remembering aprevious life would be thought to be talking about imaginary playmates ifthey were in North America. Does PI in India mirror IP in the West? WhatI have found in the process of making the comparison is a fascinatingexample of how children are socialized into paradigms of their culture,how they learn what is considered reality and what is called pretense or

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fantasy in cultures that use vary different paradigms of what is reality andwhat is fantasy. But beyond this I have found that the comparison raisessome important questions about the similarities of developmental pro-cesses across cultures.

I begin by describing some of the ways in which the categories ofchildren with imaginary playmates and children said to remember aprevious life overlap and differ, based both on a search of the literature onthese differing phenomena and on the data from my pilot study ofCharlottesville children with imaginary playmates and children said toremember previous lives in northern India and on the recent research ofHaraldsson (1995, 1997; Haraldsson, Fowler, & Periyannanpillai, 2000). Icompare, in particular, how the two paradigms differ in regards to (i) theage of onset and end of the phenomena, (ii) the frequency of occurrenceof the phenomena, (iii) alternate identity versus externally locatedimaginal other, (iv) the ‘imaginary/fantasy/pretense’ versus ‘reality’ qualityof imaginary playmates and ‘previous life identities,’ and (v) performanceon standardized tests. Finally, I present a brief description of a US childwith an imaginary identity and a slightly longer description of a 30-month-old child in India who is said to remember a previous life. Then wecan return to the issue of cultural construction of reality, and cross-cultural comparison as a means to study human development.

Similarity and Differences Between Children withImaginary Playmates and Children Said to Remember

Previous Lives

The Age of Onset and Duration of the Phenomena

As shown in Table 1, children begin to have imaginary playmates and totalk in a way that is interpreted as being about a previous life at about thesame relatively early age, not long after children begin being able tocommunicate effectively through the use of language at around the age of30 months. Both children with imaginary playmates in the US andchildren in northern India said to remember a previous life continue totalk about their imaginary playmates and to interact with them, and to talkabout previous life people and activities and be some or less intenselyinvolved with it until 70–90 months old. During the time the phenomenaare happening, the child is learning how to process the experience: in theUS the child learns to call it and relate to it as make-believe, and in Indiato call it real previous life memories. At the same time that children in theUS cease their intense involvement with imaginary playmates, and/orbecome aware that they are a projection of their own creation rather thanan entity with some kind of ‘external’ reality, children who are said to

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remember a previous life in India cease having such memories, eventhough they and their socializers may be completely convinced that whatthey did experience were valid memories of a past life. I suspect thischanging perception is related to some universal experience with realitytesting that involves learning which of one’s personal experiences can andcannot be shared/perceived by outsiders. IP and PI are but two of thephenomena that are eclipsed by childhood amnesia, as children learn tooperate with consensually validated concepts of what is real. As Spiro(1993) notes, this typically involves experience related to the physical body.

Recent western work on imaginary companions (Harter & Chao, 1992;Singer & Singer, 1990; Taylor, 1999; Taylor, Cartwright, & Carlson, 1993)draws upon research into the child’s theory of mind (Hobson, 1990; Lillard,1993) particularly as it relates to the child’s development of schemes of the


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TABLE 1Comparison of features of children with imaginary playmates (IP) in North

America and cases of children with previous-life identity (PI) in India

Previous-life identity (PI) American imaginary Feature in India playmates (IP)

Age of first 38.06 months1 30–60 months2

speaking of caseDuration of speaking 31.39 months1 Until 5 or 6 years2

others later in school3

Duration of identity Usually 3–4 years5 6 months, 2 grade schoolIP recalled later3

Frequency of mentioning Daily to occasionally5 Often frequent2

Stability of description Generally stable5 Some variation2

More data neededNumber of items mentioned ≈ 2–405 Insufficient informationRelated 16%6 AI: sometimes known2,8

Acquainted 41%6

Unknown 43%6

Age discrepancy Often marked: IP: similar in age; someChild claims to be adult4 older, some younger2

Cross-sex 3%6 AI: 50% cross2,8

Personality similarity Similar personality5 Similar or complementary(e.g. naughty)7

Status of PI/IP Higher, lower, same5 Super-hero for boys;Nuture-needer for girls11

Sex of subject 64% male6 49% male2

Frequency of occurrence 0.2%9 13%2 to 33%3 to 66%10

Motive of child Rarely noted, 44% recall Companionship2

life in better circumstances

1 Cook et al. (1983); 2 Ames & Learned (1946); 3 Hurlock & Burnstein (1932); 4 Stevenson (1974, 1975);5 Stevenson (1987); 6 Stevenson (1986); 7 Hilgard (1970); 8 Mills (1992/2002); 9 Barker & Pasricha(1979); 10 Singer & Singer (1990); 11 Harter & Chao (1992).




self (Johnson, 1991a; Nelson, 1991, 1993), and the development of pretenseand fantasy/reality distinctions (Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1993; Johnson,1991b; Johnson & Foley, 1984) through the process of learning languagethrough co-narrative (Miller, 1982; Miller, Potts, Fung, Hoogstra, & Mintz,1990) and in private narratives (Nelson, 1989a, 1989b).5

This work parallels work on the psychological and social origins of auto-biographical memory, which presents an alternative to Freud’s explanationof infantile amnesia (Nelson, 1993). Nelson points out that,

children learn to share memories with others, that they acquire the narra-tive forms of memory recounting, and that such accounts are effective inreinstating experienced memories only after the children can utilize anotherperson’s representation of an experience in language as a reinstatement oftheir own experience. This competence requires a level of mastery of therepresentational function of language that appears at the earliest in the midto late preschool years. (1993, p. 7)

Research on reality monitoring carried out by Johnson (1988) and herassociates (Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988) indicates that fantasiesare increasingly likely to be defined as real events rather than imaginingswhen the fantasies are rich in perceptual detail and embedded in support-ing systems of knowledge and belief. Our research suggests that childrenare learning cultural concepts of what is real and what is make-believe,through linguistic and social interaction, from early on. As the child learnsthe culture’s encoding of experience, schemas of the self are built up thatreplace or overwrite the earliest episodic memory. In this theory, the child’searliest stream of thought is not retrievable until the child learns to expressit through culturally accepted categories.6

In western psychology this reflexive ability is called having a theory ofthe mind. ‘Only when a child has acquired a concept of the mind can he“understand” that he is imagining that which he does not have. Acquiringa concept of the mind is both subtle and a crucial step in providingchildren the mental tools for understanding that imagination demarcatesa subjective, pretend world’ (Mayes & Cohen, 1992, p. 34).7 Both PI andIP occur during the time-frame of 30–60 months while children are begin-ning to establish ‘a theory of mind’ based on the parameters of theirculture.

The Frequency of Occurrence of the Phenomena

If children with imaginary playmates and children said to rememberprevious lives begin and cease to talk about these phenomena at aboutthe same age, the two phenomena are very different in the frequency ofoccurrence. As shown in Table 1, between 15 and 33% of American


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children have imaginary playmates. Indeed, using the most liberal defin-ition, Singer and Singer (1990) report that as many as 66% of U.S. childrenhave IP; whereas only 0.2% of children in northern India report PI (Barker& Pasricha, 1979). There are two kinds of explanation for the difference,one based on the difference in the amount of time children spend alone inthe US and in India, and the second based on the cultural perception ofwhat it means to have an imaginary playmate.

For some time, I was under the impression that there was no categorysimilar to children with imaginary playmates in India. When I askedpsychologists in India, and informants from the general populace, if theywere aware of any children with imaginary playmates, the answer wasuniversally, ‘no.’ The explanation was that children were never alone andtherefore had no need to invite an imaginary companion. However,subsequent work, including a survey of South Asian students at Universityof Virginia, conversation with Indian anthropologists (see Khare, 1993),American Indologists, and correspondence and conversation withpsychologists in India has made it clear that an, as yet undetermined,proportion of children in India talk to companions that are not called orconsidered ‘imaginary’ but ‘invisible.’ In India the prevalent assumption isthat the child is relating to a very real but imperceptible being that existson a spirit realm and/or as a part of the child’s previous life memory. Todate, there is no literature on the frequency of children with the ability to‘see the unseen’ in India. The prevalence may be considerably less than thepercentage of American children with imaginary playmates, because ofthe strikingly different circumstances of children’s lives in India and the US.

Children’s play in the two cultures differs strikingly in terms of need oropportunity to entertain oneself when alone, and in the availability of toyswith which to create pretense. In the US, children often find themselvesalone at nap and bedtime, as well as other periods during the day. In Indiachildren do not sleep, eat or play alone (cf. Minturn & Hitchcock, 1966;Nuckolls, 1993b; Seymour, 1993; Trawick, 1990). Thus, whereas US house-holds permit and provide the opportunity for children to soliloquize inprivate monologues when put down for naps, as described by Nelson andcolleagues (1989a), this is unheard of in India.

The hypothesis that children are more likely to develop IP if they spendmore time alone is supported by the finding that in America only childrenor children whose siblings are not close in age develop IPs (Ames &Learned, 1946).8 Youngest children have considerable play time alonewhen their older siblings are off in school; only children have even moresolitary play time to fill.9

In my pilot sample of 15 children in India said to remember previouslives, I found that 9 were the youngest children, and 14 were only, youngestor next to the youngest children. An analysis of birth order in the sample


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of PI or reincarnation type cases from India entered into the Division ofPersonality Studies database shows that the youngest child was most likelyto talk about a previous life, with the middle child being second mostlikely to do so.10

How can we account for this finding? The youngest children in theseIndian families may have more time to play on their own when eldersiblings are away at school; when the newest arrival in the family is still ababy, the next to the youngest again may find time when she or he wantsto or can entertain herself or himself, as the mother attends to the newbornchild. However, this would not explain why the eldest child in our smallIndian sample does not report previous-life memories more often.

The dynamics of birth order are not entirely the same in India and inthe US (Dunn, 1993; Nuckolls, 1993a). Youngest children and the next tothe youngest children in India are seldom alone, and do not sleep alone.Many children live in joint or extended households with three generationsand cousins living in the same household. Are statements made by eldestor next to eldest children in India less likely to be interpreted as beingabout a previous life because the position of the eldest sibling (particularlyeldest son) has special significance as the future head of the household?Beals and Eason (1993) note that the eldest siblings are called upon to caretake younger siblings from a young age (this is particularly true of girls).Does responsibility training inhibit eldest siblings from talking in terms ofhaving an alternate identity or a previous life, and/or does birth orderinhibit others’ interpretation of the child’s speech in this manner? Furtherstudy is necessary to discern if the need for companionship hypothesis thatseems to be related to young American children having imaginary play-mates applies in India.11

Alternate Identity Versus Externally Located Imaginal Other

Another way that the phenomena of imaginary playmates and childrensaid to remember a previous life are dissimilar is in the locus of theimaginal or invisible other. For children with imaginary playmates, the IPis external to the child, or at least is considered external to the child byadults. It is still unclear to what extent the child perceives of him- orherself as the origin or originator of the IP, and to what extent the youngchild sees the IP as an alternate or ancillary part of his or her ownpersonality.

In the US, a small percentage of children have imaginary identities; thatis, they insist that they are X, all the time ostensibly ‘knowing’ that theyare not. Thus, one young girl in our Charlottesville sample insisted thatshe was King Arthur for a considerable period after seeing a video aboutArthur as a child. When she carried it to the extent of insisting on urinating


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standing up her mother was a bit concerned, but was reassured that it wasonly play activity and would pass.

For children in India said to remember previous lives, the ‘other’ isconstrued as internally located; as an alternate or even the true, real orunderlying identity of the child. Although some PI cases begin when thechild plays at some activity associated with the person they are said to havebeen, such play-related activity is not a feature of most cases (Stevenson,2000).

Instead, in India children who are said to remember previous lives andtheir parents typically talk of the previous personality as being one and thesame with the child, and talk of the child as being that person in the presenttense. The example given later illustrates this kind of conflation of identi-ties in PI cases in India. The American example is of an assumed identity,presumed during play to be internal, but recognized always to be make-believe.

Normality of IP and PITaylor (1999, pp. 3–4, 157) points out that ‘the invention of an imaginarycompanion should not be interpreted as a symptom of emotional or inter-personal problems.’ The imaginary playmates reported by 50% of adultswith the contested diagnosis of multiple personality disorder are construedas being alter identities for the child, sometimes adopted as a morecomfortable identity, particularly in cases of childhood abuse and/orsexual abuse (Kluft, 1985). However, Singer and Singer (1990) havedemonstrated that imaginary playmates are in general a part of normalchildhood development. The category of children with ‘invisible compan-ions’ in India – which remains to be studied – may be closer to thephenomena of American children with imaginary playmates, because inboth situations the child plays with the companion as an entity external tothe self. Mills (1994a) and Stevenson (1983) report cases of apparentlynormal PI American children.

The ‘Reality’ Quality of Imaginary Playmates and Previous LifeIdentities

Finally, the phenomena of IP differs from the children said to rememberprevious lives on the dimension of whether it is considered, construed andinterpreted as imaginary or real. In response to my queries, 9 of 15 childrenin the pilot sample in Charlottesville, ages 3–5, said that their IP is make-believe and 3 said it is real. Another 3 declined to make the judgement (seeTable 2). Of the IP, 8 of 15, or more than half, had nonsense or imaginarynames, whereas the remainder had recognized American names. In onlyone instance did the mother originally think her child was talking about a


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real child, only to learn after some weeks from her son’s preschool teacherthat there was no Jack in his school or class (when the mother then askedher son about Jack, confronting him with her new information that hewasn’t in his class as he had previously said, the child said that Jack ‘hadmoved away’).

In most of the other IP cases the child had given clues that the IP wasimaginary from the very beginning. One was called ET and another(Meego) was a being who lived in outer space (the family owned a videoof the movie ET). However, 4 of the 15 had imaginary family members:one had imaginary children; one an imaginary husband (Lee) and a seriesof children; one an imaginary sister; and one an imaginary father andchildren. In India these four IP would undoubtedly be interpreted asrelating to a previous life.

Most of the sample of the children in India who were said to rememberprevious lives have given proper names that are recognized as real names.12


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TABLE 2Comparison of qualities of U.S. imaginary playmates (IP) and previous-life

identities (PI) in India

Charlottesville IndiaIP PI

(n = 15) (n = 14)

NameNonsense 8 0Real 7 14

AgeOlder 5 14Younger 2 0Same 5 0Unknown 3

SizeSmaller 4 0Same 6 0Larger 3 14Unknown 2

SexCross-sex 2 0Same 7 14Unknown 6

Child’s perception of realityMake-believe 9 0Real 3 14Unknown 3




Indeed, the pilot study of 15 was selected from the sample of childrenwhose alternate identity was considered to be a real person known to haveexisted. However, in about half of the PI cases in India the child does notgive the name or village of the person they claim to be, and no one isknown to correspond to the child’s description (Cook, Pasricha, Sama-raratne, Win Maung, & Stevenson, 1983). Nonetheless, the parents (andtherefore the child) are usually convinced that the child is talking about areal person, who they were in a previous life, rather than making up theidentity from their imagination.13

The case of Praveen (described below) demonstrates how the name thechild first gave was interpreted as referring to a rhyming name of arecognized man. Children are learning what is imaginary and what is realat the time that they are talking about what are interpreted as imaginaryplaymates or past life identities. What I am investigating is when and howthe definitions of reality that the adults use become those of the child.

Note, further, that there are no small figures, no elf-sized people, noanimated railway engines or other fantasy figures in the paradigm of theprevious-lives in Northern India. In other words, the American and Indiancategories or paradigm differ in the dimension of pretense/reality/serious-ness. American children are expected to have a vivid imagination and anactive play life; in India child’s play and imagination is assumed to relateto previous lives and all reality is considered the Divine Play, Bhagwan’sLila.14

The kinds of toys, stories, games and activities of the children in thesame sample from America and India reflect the different attitudes towardspretense and reality. The children in India did not have TV, or toys otherthan, in general, a ball. The stories that they were told were typicallyreligious stories which are portrayed, however fantastical they may seem,as true. Indeed, had the families had TV much of Indian TV reiterates thesethemes, enacting the Ramayana stories with modern Bollywood actors andactresses. The statement of Lewis Carroll, the British author of some of theclassics of western children’s fantasy, ‘On a good day there are at least twoencounters with imaginal figures before breakfast’ has no close counter-point in India, where the utterances of children are seen as related to aspiritual if invisible reality (N. K. Chadha, personal communication, 1992;Khare, 1993).

Response of Children with IP and PI to Standardized Testing

Another way of determining if children with IP and children said toremember previous lives are analogous categories is to see if theyrespond in similar ways to standardized psychological tests. Children withIP have already been studied in the US in terms of IQ, creativity and


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hypnotizability (Hilgard, 1970; Singer & Singer, 1990; Taylor, 1999). Untilmy testing in 1992 children with PI in India had not been given these kindsof standardized measures. Subsequently Haraldsson has tested PI childrenin Sri Lanka (1995, 1997, Haraldsson et al., 2000) with interesting results.

During 1992–1993 graduate student Missy Sirch and myself gave aseries of psychological tests to the 16 Charlottesville preschool childrenand to a sample matched in age, sex, socio-economic status and preschoolwho did not have IP. In the summer of 1992 the same series of tests wasgiven to 15 PI children in India and to a control group of 14 children ofthe same age, sex, caste and community. In India the tests wereadministered by psychologist Dr L. P. Mehrotra or Delhi Universitypsychology graduate student Nishi Nagpal. In both the US and the Indiasample the person giving the test was blind as to whether the child was inthe control or target group to eliminate unconscious tester bias or demandcharacteristics.15

The tests given were the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-R),Raven’s Progressive Matrices, memory tests from the McCarthy Scales ofChildren’s Abilities, and Gudjonsson Test of Suggestibility (Children’sAdaptation). The expectation was that the IP sample would have similarresults to previous tests carried out on American children with IP, and thatthe PI children in India would show a similar profile. Suggestibility hadnot previously been assessed for American children with IP. My expect-ation was that PI children would be no more suggestible than the matchedchildren, based on Stevenson and Chadha’s (1990) finding that attemptsto repress PI memories by parents were not effective.16

Our (rather small) control and target samples in India and in the USdid not differ significantly in their scores on any of the tests administered.However, U.S. IP and India PI sample differed most from the controlgroups on Gudjonsson Yield, the Raven’s Progressive Matrixes, and theMcCarthy Memory test. In all of these the IP or PI sample tended to scorelower than the control group, that is they tended to yield less to suggestionthan the control group; they did somewhat less well on the Raven Matrices;on the McCarthy memory test.

The results in India were generally similar. In India the control groupalso tended to score higher on the Raven’s Matrices; they tended to dobetter in some McCarthy memory tests but not others, and they tended todo less well in the Gudjonsson memory test. PI children in India tendedto yield less to suggestions than the control group. Our findings indicatethat IP and PI children do not differ significantly from their peers in termsof intelligence as judged by verbal skills and memory. This is in accordancewith previous findings about the IQ and creativity of children with IP(Ames & Learned, 1946; Manosevitz, Fling, & Prentice, 1977; Schaefer,1969; Singer & Singer, 1990). Although there is a tendency to expect


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children with IP to be more intelligent based on the imaginativeness oftheir IP, my study did not produce strong evidence that the delight thatthey afford others (and themselves) translates into higher scores on verbalor memory tests. However, with a small sample in our IP and PI study itis premature to reach decisive conclusions.17

Haraldsson (1995, 1997; Haraldsson et al., 2000) has reported somewhatdifferent results using, at our invitation, a similar set of tests on a larger PIsample in Sri Lanka. Haraldsson (1995) found with a larger sample ofchildren aged 7–13 years (N = 46; 23 PI and 23 matched children matchedin age, sex and SES), that PI children’s performance on the Peabody PictureVocabulary Test was significantly higher than the control group (p < .001),indicating that the PI children had a greater knowledge of words andunderstanding of language; and that they had a better memory for recentevents (p < .05), but that they did not perform better on the Raven’sProgressive Matrices. Haraldsson (1995) also found that PI children’sschool performance as judged by their parents was much better (CBCLParent’s Form, p < .01), as was their social competence as judged by theirparents on a Child Behavior Checklists (p < .05).18 Teachers also reportedthat the school performance of the children who had had past life experi-ences was significantly better (CBCL Teacher’s Form, p < .01 than thematched comparison group.

In our study both IP and PI children did not significantly differ fromthe control group on suggestibility consistent with Haraldsson’s Sri Lankadata (1995, 1997; Haraldsson et al., 2000). Haraldsson (1995) also foundthat PI children did not confabulate more than children who did notreport PI.

Haraldsson et al. (2000: 538) found that the PI children scored higheron Child Dissociation Checklist than the comparison sample: ‘childrenwho claim previous-life memories . . . are more likely to show rapidchanges in personality, daydream frequently, have intense outbursts ofanger, and often refer to themselves in the third person.’ Their findingsregarding dissociative tendencies in PI children are also supported by theresults of the Child Behavior Checklist, which revealed the target SriLankan children as ‘particularly argumentative, somewhat obsessional,bragging, perfectionistic, more fearful and nervous, and more changeablein mood’ (Haraldsson et al., 2000: 539). Further studies are necessary tosee if these qualities apply in other cultures and to larger samples.

If children with IP and PI are no more or less suggestible than childrenwithout these culturally defined categories, there is nevertheless a con-siderable amount of culturally conditioned interaction between childrenwith IP and PI and their socializers which helps define in the child’s mindwhat he is talking about. The following case studies of IP and PI illustratesome of these interactions.


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Case Studies

The example chosen of an American child exhibiting a minor developmentof imaginary alternate identity is not typical of IP cases in that it is not aplaymate but a play identity which the child is fully aware he is not. Ipresent it because it is useful in showing how well developed Americanchildren’s sense of pretense is at 30 months, and because the sequence ontranscribed videotape demonstrates the interactive process of playing andself-definition. It provides a useful comparison because the child is onlytwo weeks older than Sakte Lal, the subject of the case of PI from Indiadescribed below.

Case 1. Peter Lund: A Case of a Minor Pretend AlternateIdentity

Peter Lund19 was born January 9, 1990 in Charlottesville, Virginia. He wasthe only child when the reported interchange took place; a sister was bornwhen he was 42 months old. His father and mother work in outdoor recre-ation. Peter spends a considerable amount of his time at the recreationfacility in the country, where the clients are adults and where he sees fewchildren. Therefore his companions are largely adults, although he has acousin about the same age with whom he plays during his parents’ frequenttrips to Charlottesville.

The video-recording of Peter at play with his two college-age aunts givesa useful vignette of normal child role-playing. In the sequence Peter is 31months old. The setting is a ‘beach’ on a secluded river, where Peter is playing,and the adults (Peter’s mother and his two paternal aunts) are reading. Peterhas just gone to his Aunt Laura and is vigorously wiggling in her arms. Sheresponds by saying,

Aunt Laura: Are you a big teddy bear?Peter: I not a big teddy bear.Aunt Laura: What are you then?Peter: [with emphasis, long and drawn out] A monster.Aunt Laura: Are you a monster? What kind of monster?Peter: A . . . purple monster.Mother: Oh no.Aunt Amy: Do you know what I am?Peter: Yeah.Aunt Amy: What?Peter: A red monster.Aunt Amy: Purple and red monsters go ‘rrr’ together [and she opens hermouth like a snout and nuzzles Peter. Peter imitates her and together theyplay rather like kittens mouthing each other].

The point of recounting this dialogue is that it shows how easily Americanchildren at 30 months put on pretend personas. Peter, I think we can safely


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say, knows that it is pretend. He knows he has not turned purple because heused the word, any more than his Auntie Amy has turned red. He also knowsthat displays of orality are not the only things one does with aunts, althoughhe returns a few moments later and sees just how far he can go with pretendbiting. (His aunt says, ‘No Biting’ several times, and threatens non-verballyand kindly, to bite him if he bites her, and watches passively when he picksup her T-shirt in his teeth and pulls on it.) The second point of thisinterchange is that it shows how adults interact with, encourage and suggestpretend play behavior, as when Auntie Laura asked if he is a big teddy bear.Peter is thereby learning metaphors and similes. He is aware that he is not ateddy bear, and protests that he is not, but responds with the counter-sugges-tion that he is a monster, a creature portrayed in some of his library ofchildren’s books as products of night dreams in night kitchens.

The next sequence in the video portrays how often Peter asks for assist-ance in verbally defining what he is doing. The scene is Auntie Laura’sapartment in Charlottesville, where Peter has spent the night. He hears a dogbarking outside and goes to look out the window, but becomes distracted byconstruction on a near-by house, and then says:

Peter: What me do-ing?Aunt Laura: What are you doing?Peter: YeahAunt Laura: You are looking out the window. You know you are lookingout the window. You were going to look at the doggie that went ‘woof,woof, woof.’ Did you see the dog outside?Peter: [Looks again at the dog]. Yeah.Aunt Laura: Was it a big or little dog?Peter: Little

Peter used this refrain, ‘What me doing?’ frequently when he was between28 and 33 months. It was as if he was asking for the vocabulary and syntaxto be supplied to him, to have an adult voice for him what he was doing, sohe could learn how to speak about his actions.

When Peter was 33 months old he and his mother, Martha, co-created animaginary or play identity for Peter. The context was Martha and her youngson having something to eat in a restaurant while shopping in Charlottesville.They had finished their food but most of Peter’s juice was left. According toMartha she told Peter that she was ‘Mrs Thimbleberry’ who was going todrink up all the rest of her tea. Martha then asked Peter, ‘Who are you?’ Petersaid, ‘Sant.’ Mrs Thimbleberry said, ‘How do you do’ to Sant, and asked wherehe lived. Sant said, ‘Twelve quarters away.’ Mrs Thimbleberry saw to it thatSant finished his juice.

Since the establishment of Sant, he reappears whenever Mrs Thimbleberryinquires about him, and for curious people like the author, but so far Sant isnot someone Peter talks to, play with, or introduces on his own. When I askedPeter by phone if I could visit Sant, he said, ‘Yes. In my house on a differentroad.’ I am not sure if this was part of the pretense, or a reference to the fact


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that Peter and his parents had indeed moved to a different house on adifferent road. However, Peter is quite sure, according to his mother, thatSant’s middle name is not A. and his last name is not Claus.

At the age of 41 months when I contacted Peter again Sant was not around,but Peter was definitely active in working out the pretense/reality boundary.Looking out the window at the just risen full moon he told me, ‘I can go tothe moon. All I need is a hat with a propeller on it and buttons. The buttonshave to have wires attached. One button is for going up and one is for goingdown. And I need food for when I get there.’ His mother later said that partof this came from a book he had, part was his own idea. Peter repeated thisconcept a number of times, and then was given a propeller hat for his fourthbirthday. He then asked, ‘Can I really go to the moon now?’ He was told, ‘Inyour imagination.’ When I asked him several weeks later if he had been to themoon he said, ‘In my imagination.’

Case 2. Praveen Jatav, a.k.a. Sakte Lal: A Case of theReincarnation Type in Northern India

Praveen Jatav was born around January, 20 1990 on the festival of the sweet-meats, which has given him his nickname, Sakte Lal. Sakte Lal was only 30months old when I and my video camera visited him in the summer of 1992in his home village of Kunvarpur, a village of about 1500 ‘backward’ or sched-uled caste (what used to be called untouchable people) in District Etah, UtterPradesh, India. He is the youngest of six children who live with their parentsand widowed paternal grandmother in a kachcha or mud home. Sakte Lal’sfather has had a high school education and works at cultivating his two acres.They have two water buffalo.

In December 1991, when Sakte Lal was 23 months old, there was someshooting in his village. Sakte Lal’s mother’s recollection of that night follows,from my field notes (my questions are in parenthesis). She said (6/19/92):

He became very agitated and said, ‘Vishnu will come and shoot me,Vishnu will come and kill me.’ I asked, Who is Vishnu? He said,‘Amlapur.’ [This was taken to mean Jamlapur, and Vishnu to refer toKishnu]. Then the child said, ‘Bring my gun and I will shoot Vishnu.’He was adamant and said he will shoot Vishnu. ‘Leave me and I willshoot him alone.’ There was an iron plowing pipe. He put the ironplowing pipe inside it [a gun? Inside the house?] and said, ‘I will shoothim.’ He told me, ‘We should escape from here, otherwise Vishnu willkill us.’ He ran into the room and shut the door. The child has beenfrightened of Vishnu ever since and he keeps on saying Vishnu will comeand shoot us. He won’t go to the fields to relieve himself, he uses theroof of the house. After this I asked him so many questions. I asked him,‘Where did you live?’ He said, ‘Amlapure.’ I asked, ‘What is your name?’He said, ‘Avari.’


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When I first got this account, some six months after the events described, ithad become a locally established fact that the child was referring to Jamlapurwhen he said Amlapur, Kishnu when he said Vishnu, and Itwari when he saidAvari (indeed, in the father’s account of these events, he never mentioned the‘baby-talk’ aspects, saying the child had said Kishnu, Jamlapur, and Itwarifrom the beginning). Everyone agreed that Sakte Lal was Itwari Lal reborn.

This referred to the well known local murder of Itwari Lal of the villageof Jamlapur, population about 1200, some three kilometers from Kunvarpur.Itwari Lal, like this small child, was from the same scheduled caste; Jatav, washis last name. However, his home village Jamlapur, was not all made up ofJatavs. Generation after generation the position of the village headman hadbeen held by the eldest son of a particular Brahmin family. When the eldestson and headman died in the 1980s, his younger brother, who was much lesspopular, nonetheless succeeded in being elected headman. Itwari Lal chal-lenged him in the next election, and because the incumbent was unpopularwith another group of Brahmins in the village, Itwari Lal found support, andwas indeed elected to the important post of headman of the village ofJamlapur. It was the first time that Jamlapur had a scheduled caste person asheadman.

Itwari Lal had had political ambitions for some time before this. He tookadvantage of the changed political climate after independence: he got amaster’s degree from an accredited college, became a teacher in a secondaryschool in the closest town to his home village (Jaithra), and sought to becomethe local Congress-I party candidate. When the late Sanjay Gandhi, the elderbrother of the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, visited this town on apolitical tour, Itwari Lal was on the platform with him and shook his hand.However, Sanjay Gandhi dissuaded Itwari Lal from running for the MLA(Member of the Legislative Assembly) on the grounds that it would not begood for the party.

Years later, when Itwari Lal became headman of Jamlapur, the deposedBrahmin headman, Kishnu, became very envious of him. Kishnu arrangedto have Itwari Lal killed. On January 7, 1989, in the second year of his four-year term as headman of Jamlapur, Itwari Lal and his friend Jagdish weresurrounded by assailants near Jamlapur as they rode their bicycles fromJaithra to Jamlapur. The assailants let Jagdish go but Itwari Lal was shot. Theautopsy, which we obtained from the district hospital, records that Itwari Lalwas shot in the chest with pellets from the shot gun, and shot in the head bya single cartridge. Abrasions on his abdomen suggest that he was hit, orknocked from his bicycle first.

When I asked Sakte Lal’s mother if she had heard of the murder she said:

I was very familiar with the events. My aunt was from Jamlapur, and somany people went to see the dead body. (Did you go?) No. (Had youheard a description of how Itwari Lal had died?) My husband went anddescribed the event.


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Sakte Lal’s mother went on to say that after the shooting incident inKunvarpur in December 1991, Sakte Lal showed her the places where he wasshot. Sakte Lal has two minor birthmarks, and I asked if she had noticed themat his birth. His mother said she did not pay attention to them at his birth,but only when Sakte Lal told about his (Itwari Lal’s) fatal wounds.20

(What did he say?) I asked, ‘How many sons and daughters do you have?’Sakte Lal said, ‘One son and two daughters.’ I asked their names. SakteLal said ‘Nina’ for the eldest daughter, although she is Vina. He said,‘Longshri was my wife.’ I asked the names of the sons and he said Pintu.I asked about the son-in-law and he said, ‘Manoj.’ This was before SakteLal met Manoj. I asked the name of the younger daughter and Sakte Lalsaid ‘Sandaya.’ Then Itwari Lal’s wife came here, having heard of this. Shegave him a five rupee note. And he refused it and said, ‘I had so muchmoney. This is too much less.’ He held out his hands to indicate a largeramount. First Vinod [Pintu, Sakte Lal’s son’s official name] came hereand the boy recognized him. He took his hand and said, ‘This is my sonPintu.’ (Did you know Vinod previously?) Yes.

Vinod, alias Pintu, described the scene slightly differently. (Note that the firstpart of his testimony is second-hand evidence, and the second part is fromhis own eye-witness report. People involved in such cases seldom distinguishbetween their own experience and the narrative of the case as they havereceived it. The narrative for them is equally important.) He said:

There is an uncle’s wife, she told me about the child and she told aboutthe event – there was some kind of quarrel in the village and there wasa gun shot. The child was frightened and said, ‘Kishnu will kill me.Please hide me,’ he said after running home. Kishnu was envious of myfather. After a few months Kishnu was also murdered.

In this last sentence Vinod has skipped from his father’s death, to Kishnu’s.With some pride, but with a motion of the hand suggesting not to write itdown, he later told me, ‘I myself killed Kishnu.’ This retaliatory murder tookplace about the time Sakte Lal was conceived. The events surrounding thischild could hardly be more charged. Indeed, feelings surrounding the doublemurders and the reincarnation case run so high that my translator, himselfa colleague of the late Itwari Lal, insisted that we should take a policemanwith us when we went to Kunvarpur. The chief of police in Jaithra agreedthat it was a good idea, and dispatched a policeman to accompany us.

Sakte Lal’s mother and his father described to me the child’s meeting andrecognition of a small stream of people who came to see the child, includingItwari Lal’s wife, his daughter and her husband, and his younger daughter.Four villagers from Jamlapur came with Vinod. Itwari Lal’s younger brotheralso came on a different occasion to Kunvarpur to see the child. All feltsatisfied that he had recognized them, and said appropriate things. I also havetestimony of a number of these people. Itwari Lal’s daughter Bina told me


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that Sakte Lal said that he had arranged for her marriage in Kuthera, and thatthere was a lamppost in front of his (Itwari Lal’s) house which was on anarrow lane. As she knows, all these items are correct. Itwari Lal’s youngerbrother, Raja Ram, said that Sakte Lal said that Ganga Singh, his (Itwari Lal’s)bhua’s son was from Nagla Gusanyi (bhua means father’s sister, thereforethe bhua’s son is Itwari Lal’s cross-cousin). Again Raja Ram knew this wascorrect.

I was not a witness to these meetings, so I cannot say if these informantswere correctly portraying what Sakte Lal said or unintentionally adding ininformation they would expect a child who was Itwari Lal to know. I waswitness, and my video camera recorded, Sakte Lal’s first meeting with ItwariLal’s daughter’s father-in-law, Mr Hari Pal Singh, and Sakte Lal’s first visit toJamlapur, Itwari Lal’s home village. That footage captures a great deal andreveals what an invaluable record video camera can make.

It shows how Mr Hari Pal Singh fairly importuned Sakte Lal to recognizehim. The child never said his name, his relation, his provenience, despitebeing asked who H. P. Singh was 17 times by H. P. Singh; 6 times by the trans-lator Mr Gaur, and twice by Sakte Lal’s sister. (Is this the same child that saidBina’s marriage was arranged in Kuthera?). Some of the transcripts of thevideo-recording of this scene follows in which H. P. Singh makes two threatsto Sakte Lal.

Transcripts of the Videotape of Mr. H. P. Singh and Sakte Lal

Setting: Next to mini-van in which we came to Kunvarpur. Sakte Lal isin the arms of his sixteen-year-old sister, Manju. Itwari Lal’s daughter’sfather-in-law, Mr Hari Pal Singh, (called H. P. Singh below) is askingquestions. Mr Gaj Raj Singh Gaur, (called Gaur below), my translator,joins in asking Sakte Lal questions. Note that the translation marks theformal or plural use of ‘you’ with a (2), singular ‘thou’ with a (1). Thesame applies to I/me (1) as opposed to us/we (2).H. P. Singh: Are you master [meaning a teacher; this is how Itwari Lalwas called]? (Repeated several times)Sakte Lal: This is a car – Will it run?H. P. Singh: Yes, Did I tell you who I am? [I=we(2)]Tell me, Who am I? (Repeated several times)[After seven more times of asking Sakte Lal to recognize him thesequence continues:]H. P. Singh: Do you want money? Should I (2) give you money?Sister: He will throw it away. [Apparently meaning he does not know itsvalue]H. P. Singh: Will you take money? Will you take money from me? [ItwariLal’s relationship does not permit money to be accepted from hisdaughter’s in-laws]Who am I (2)? Do you recognize me? Okay, let me give him money.(Gives the money.) Tell my name.


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Gaur: Now you (2) took the money, tell him who he is.H. P. Singh: Who am I? If you won’t tell, I will take the money back. Doyou want more money? (2=respect)Sister: Give it back. Give it back.Sakte Lal: (Gives the money back to H. P. Singh.)[Gaur has the crowd of onlookers disperse. After eight questions thedialogue continues:]H. P. Singh: Come on, tell. If you won’t tell I won’t give you a ride in thecar.[After three more interchanges H. P. Singh makes another threat:]H. P. Singh: I’ll hit you (1)? Can I hit you (1)?! Tell me, can I hit you (1)?[again, socially unthinkable]Will you smoke a cigarette? It’s on me. If you tell me my name, I’ll (2)get you a cigarette.

I watched this sequence of the tape at least three times, and had assistancefrom a native Hindi speaker in translating the tape. However, it was not untilI was editing the tape down to a few segments for showing at an AmericanAnthropological Association conference that I watched and listened carefullyenough to note that Sakte Lal’s sister said, ‘Give it back. Give it back,’ justbefore the child did so. This soto voce instruction was not translated in thewritten transcript made by the University of Virginia Hindi teacher. If it hadescaped her attention I suspect it also escaped that of Mr Gaur and of MrHari Pal Singh. It will be interesting to learn if after the passage of some time,in Mr H. P. Singh’s memory, what stands out is not the child’s failure toaddress him by name, or kin term, or to say where either he (as Itwari Lal)or Mr H. P. Singh were from, but that the child returned the money, whichis socially appropriate for the child as Itwari Lal. In India one does not acceptmoney from one’s children’s in-laws (cf. Jacobson, 1974, p. 144). That thechild only did what his sister instructed him undercuts any concept that hewas in this instance acting appropriately as Itwari Lal. Manju was eitherconsciously or unconsciously teaching him how to act appropriately as ItwariLal.

However, there were some ‘recognitions’ made by Sakte Lal in anothercontext of his first trip to Jamlapur (also videotaped) which are the kind thatconvince relatives in such cases in India. One of these apparent recognitionswas of Itwari Lal’s fields. Another was of his house. The third ‘recognition’was of the hand pump and well Itwari Lal had installed in the village whenhe was headman. Regarding the house, when asked by his sister, ‘Where is thehouse?’ Sakte Lal pointed in one direction (correct), and when asked by hissister (who had never been there), ‘Is this it?’ of a particular house, he clearlysaid, ‘Yes.’

The video-recording also captures Sakte Lal’s interest in a framed photoof Itwari Lal and other people from Jaithra. When asked who particularpeople were, he almost never got it right. In fact he was being taught whetherhe was correct or not, and being instructed that one of the figures in thephoto was his [your] ‘friend.’ When he did succeed in pointing out one figure




correctly, after some time of looking at the photograph, he was rewarded bysmiles and audible if quiet acclamation. This was not a disinterested groupof onlookers. Finally, in the hand-a-person-an-item test that was done, ItwariLal got two hits and one miss. However, the hits occurred with people he hadalready met. When asked to give his ‘wife’ an item, the fact that he did so, mayshow only that he remembered her from the times she had visited him in hisvillage a month before. He gave the paintbrush to the younger brother, whenasked to give it to the elder brother (a miss). You will remember that theyounger brother had also been to Kunvarpur to visit Sakte Lal, so again thiswas a recognition of someone he had seen before (he had not seen Itwari Lal’selder brother before this, his first trip to Jamlapur). When he gave the paint-brush to the wrong brother, his giving it to the elder brother on the next trail,then, is merely learning through the process of trial and error. In the eyes ofrelatives, however, these hits were considered recognitions.

I was curious to see if the child the same age as Sakte Lal would respondto the photographs with as much interest as Sakte Lal manifested. I borrowedthe photos, and on another day, showed them again to Sakte Lal and to AryiaBauchan, who was born six days after Sakte Lal in Kunvarpur. The video-recording demonstrates that Sakte Lal was quicker to pick Itwari Lal out ofthe photo on his second exposure to it, and again showed great interest in it.A.B. was much less engaged by the photo, but perhaps it was because thephrasing of the questions was somewhat different. To Sakte Lal, the questionswere ‘Where are you? . . . Where is your friend?’ There was some overlap withthe questions asked of A.B., but more often he was asked simply ‘Do yourecognize anyone in the pictures?’ The subtle, and not always so subtle, differ-ence are similar to the difference in response of mothers to their young sonsand daughters as noted by Fivush (1991). The video-recording demonstrateswhat an interactive process the narration of reincarnation cases is, howconsistently people address Sakte Lal as if he were Itwari Lal, and howintensely people are emotionally bound up in such cases. I will return to theseissues below.

Sakte Lal’s father was impressed by his son’s precocity in language use,particularly by Sakte Lal’s knowing the names of two of kinds of birds thatfrequent his fields. The father feels that Sakte Lal acts more adult than otherchildren his age, and is more fond of neatness, washing his hands and fixinghis hair. Sakte Lal’s mother and others said that Sakte Lal plays at being aschool teacher, and assumes this role with his older siblings.

Discussion and Conclusion

Are children with imaginary playmates and children said to rememberprevious lives experiencing comparable phenomena? As the examplesshow, although they are part of different cultural paradigms of fantasy andreality, they are similar in being shaped through a very interactive processof verbal communication. If the content is different, there seems to beevidence that the process not only of engendering, but of involvement and


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maturation is comparable. PI and IP occur in the same time-frame becausechildren at this developmental stage, termed pre-operational by Piaget, areworking out who and what they are and what is real and its relation towhat is communicable. The vocabulary with which they describe them-selves and their experience is learned through social, culturally constitutedinteraction. In the American context, children can play at being monsters,or big teddy bears, or going to the moon, and play with the ambiguity ofwhether they are monstrous or could go to the moon. Parents make quiteclear what is only play and what is possible (‘Having a space ship wouldhelp,’ Peter’s grandmother added when Peter asked if he could go to themoon with his propeller hat). In India, as Sakte Lal’s case shows, somechildren may be subtly taught that they are a particular person reborn andcan enter into the unfolding drama. However, I have also noted how someparents and others ‘unteach’ a child to be the PI when the child reaches theage of seven, concerned least the child ‘want to claim the property of thePI when he is adult.’

Note, however, that there is evidence that not all cases from India aredue to parental coaching (cf. Stevenson, 1997; Stevenson & Samararatne,1988). Elsewhere (Mills, 2002; Mills & Lynn 2000) I have described the caseof Ajendra, one of the rare cases of previous-life identity in which a writtenrecord was made of the statements and behavior of the child before thecase was solved, that is someone was found who corresponded to the state-ments the child made. In this case this person was someone unknown tothe child’s family. Ajendra made 27 statements when a young child, 25 ofwhich were correct for one Naresh Chandra Gupta. Cultural interpretationinevitably plays a role in each and every case, but it alone does not seemsufficient to explain the totality of the phenomenon of children said toremember previous lives.

There are many ways to approach the question of how children learn todistinguish between mental reality and physical reality, and betweenmental reality and mental unreality. It is my hope that continued closeexamination of verbal interaction between children and their socializers indifferent cultural contexts as they begin, continue and then cease to haveimaginary playmates and previous-life identities, coupled with question-ing and psychological tests of memory, verbal, suggestive, dissociative andhypnotic abilities, will help explain the processes by which children learnthe parameters of reality. We have to assess also when and how a child likeSakte Lal learns that he is not as precocious as his father thinks he is; andthat the role of adult no longer fits. Without careful examination of theinteraction and the child’s self-definition we cannot know whether we cangeneralize across cultures about what is going on. Continued research will,I hope, demonstrate whether or not there are some similar processes ofreality testing used by children in different cultural contexts where the


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definitions of reality are indeed divergent. Further research is necessary toassess how a sense of conservation of identity may be linked to discrimi-nation between imaginable reality and physical reality.

Notes

1. Shweder’s position is that ‘The mind, according to cultural psychology, iscontent-driven, domain-specific, and constructively stimulus-bound; and itcannot be extricated from the historically variable and cross-culturally diverseintentional worlds in which it plays a co-constituting part’ (Shweder, 1990a,p. 13).

2. Avis and Harris conclude that, ‘The fact that belief–desire reasoning emergesat approximately the same age in such diverse settings strengthens the claimthat this mode of reasoning is a universal feature of normal human develop-ment’ (1991, p. 465).

3. The difference between the two, interestingly, parallels the tension betweenhistorians such as Zuckerman (1993, p. 235) and developmentalists such asKessen (1993, p. 227). Zuckerman, while interested in collaborating withpsychologists, sees them as unconscious of the depth of their positivisticbias. Trawick (1990) discusses the turn against positivistic thinking inanthropology succinctly, Marcus and Fisher (1986) discuss the climate ofanthropological research in depth.

4. Of the nine IP cases in this study, two were ‘classic’ IP cases, whereas sevenhad an imaginary or alternate identity (AI), and tried to make their parentsrelate to them as the AI. This differs from children’s more usual donning anddoffing of play identities, which seemed ‘real’ to the child only when in themidst of play. The alternate identities ranged from imaginary people, bothyounger and older than the child, to adoption (for two weeks) of the identityof a playmate who moved away, and included one cross-gender fantasyidentity (a girl claiming to be King Arthur). The frequency of these AI in thissample suggested that these phenomena might be parallel to the adoption ofan alternate identity in PI cases in India and a variant of the more commonAmerican IP. The subsequent study of children with IP focused on ‘classic’ IP,but also assessed the range from usual play identities to ones invested withgreater moment for the child. We will report on this gradation subsequently.

5. Harter and Chao (1992) have recently analyzed the western children experi-ence of IPs in terms of the child’s sense of competence and role modeling andgender stereotyping. They exemplify the western model of IP as functionalpractice for future roles. Their study found that boys’ IPs tend to be super-heros and girls’ IPs tended to be dependent children and babies who neededthe child’s ‘maternal’ care. They concluded that role-modeling begins earlierthan we had thought. Note that not all preceding studies of IP support theirdata: Cross-gender IP are quite common (see Table 1) suggesting that boysrole model feminine roles through IP and girls role model masculine rolesthrough the same mechanism; note further that the recent study of IP byTayler et al. (1993) does not entirely support the Harter and Chao data.


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6. Note that the Hindi/Indian perception of the nature of child’s memory (cf.Kakar, 1981) is at variance with this theory.

7. Avis and Harris’s (1946) use of the term ‘mind’ invites deconstruction on thepart of anthropologists.

8. In my pilot study of 15 children in the Charlottesville area with IP and 15without IP, the tendency for children with IP to be only or youngest childrendid not reach significance (Fischer’s exact p = .10).

9. Yet see the paracosm invented by a child living with seven family members infour rooms, cited by Taylor (1999, p. 138). Paracosms are ‘entire societies orworlds for the imaginary people to inhabit’ (Taylor, 1999, p. 137), and are thecreation of older school-age children who are aware that they are the creatorsof the imaginary cosmos. Taylor (1999, p. 138) notes, ‘In many cases involvingthe creation of imaginary companions, children have some time to be aloneor they are in situations in which other people are not readily available for play.However, very few participants in this [paracosm] study were only children.’

10. Birth order in six tiers for the sample of cases of the reincarnation type fromIndia (data available for 369 of 423 cases): oldest = 42 (11.4%); second oldest= 20 (5.4%); middle = 96 (26.0%); second youngest = 69 (18.7%); youngest= 128 (34.7%); only = 14 (3.8%). Source of sample: Division of PersonalityStudies, University of Virginia.

11. There is considerable literature on the effect of birth order for the NorthAmerican population (cf. Ernst & Angst, 1983). For India, Derne (1993, pp.165–189), Nuckolls (1993a, pp. 22–23), and Seymour (1993, pp. 51–67)discuss the difference in attitudes towards siblings relationships, where thereis greater socialization for harmonious relationships between siblingscompared to the American emphasis on competition. They also note howbirth order affects child and adult siblings’ roles in the family. Shweder(1990b, p. 151) has shown that the attitude toward the individual is ‘socio-centric’ in India, meaning that the person is not differentiated from the statusand role he occupies; whereas the person in the ‘egocentric’ West is notdefined by this relational pattern.

12. I have described in detail (Mills, 1993) the case of one child who never gave‘his’ own (previous-life) name, but did give that of ‘his’ village and ‘his’ bestfriend, and elsewhere (Mills, 1989) two cases in which the child did notmention ‘his’ or ‘her’ name, but that of ‘his’ village and ‘her’ husband.

13. Stevenson has on file a number of cases of reported reincarnation from Indiain which a child is said to remember a previous life as an animal, such as acow or a snake. In one such case a child was said to remember two previouslives; one as a child who died, and an anterior one as a cobra. Such accountsare considered with all seriousness in India, rather than being attributed tofantasy.

14. Trawick (1990, p. 39) notes this differential attitude towards reality andpretense in (south) India: ‘The experience of life itself, the multiplicity offinite sensation given by the body, is the most general form assumed by thehidden, infinite sacred. The experience of life itself, maya, is ambiguous forthis reason. Dreams, theater, fiction, myth, and other kinds of experience that




Westerners think as “not real” are not completely bounded off from ordinarylife in India. If something bad must happen in a play or ritual, special precau-tions must betaken to keep the event out of the ordinary life; the actor whoplays a murderer or villain, for instance must pray that his role and his actsbe confined to the stage. Ritual theater, as for instance, the demon exorcismceremonial in Sri Lanka, involves people pretending to be creatures they arenot, and yet what happens in the ceremony is real, it is not pretend.’

15. Some of the cases of children who are said to remember previous lives inIndia who are part of this sample have been described elsewhere (Mills, 1989,1990a, 1990b).

16. The expectation was that PI and IP children would not be more suggestibleas they seem to be self-motivated and sometimes strong-willed individuals.Hilgard (1970) found that university students who remembered details oftheir IP were more susceptible to hypnosis than their cohorts who had nosuch recall of detail. Hypnotic susceptibility is correlated with the ability tobecome absorbed in mental activity (Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974). Thepresumption is that university students who do not recall details of their IPare more likely to have had IP as young children that are eclipsed as they growolder; and that the university students who recall details are more likely tohave created IP when somewhat older, in the school years, in the age range inwhich children with PI no longer remember or experience them clearly.

17. The analysis of the scores of the imaginary playmate (IP) sample and thematched set, and past-life (PI) sample and the matched set can be obtainedfrom the author. Note that the children are compared against a comparisongroup from their own culture. Cultural differences make comparison ofabsolute scores between cultures inappropriate.

18. Haraldsson (1995, 1997) has further reported an interesting array of psycho-social problems for CORT children, who also scored higher on psychosocialproblems in general than the control group (p < .001). We are in the processof comparing this with the data from our India CORT sample and US IPsample, and plan to report on these factors shortly. See also Haraldsson et al.(2000).

19. I have used pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of the people involved.20. In this case the two birthmarks on Sakte Lal (one pre-auricular pit in front

of his right ear, and one deeper depression on his buttock) do not correspondto the wounds of entry or exit of either the single cartridge or the shoot gunpellets which killed Itwari Lal, as recorded in his autopsy. At the time I wasposing these questions to Sakte Lal’s mother (I also asked Sakte Lal’s paternalgrandmother about the birthmarks), I had not yet obtained the autopsy. I wasunder the impression that the mother thought there was considerablecorrelation between Sakte Lal’s birthmarks and the fatal wounds on ItwariLal, but in all fairness to both these women I should add that they themselvesdid not belabor the correspondence. In some cases of reported reincarnation,birthmarks and birth defects show a striking correspondence (cf. Mills, 1989,1990a, 1990b, 1994b). Again, there is considerable latitude for culturalconstruction/interpretation of birthmarks in terms of reincarnation.


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Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the assistance of the American Indian Society for arranging myGovernment of India approval to conduct research on children who are said toremember previous lives in India. I am also grateful to the Center for the Study ofDeveloping Societies, Delhi and its directors Dr Giri Deshingkar and Dr AshisNandy for making me a Fellow of the Center. My thanks also go to Dr L. P.Mehrotra for administering psychological tests to the children in India, to Mr GajRaj Singh Gaur for acting as my translator for the fifth trip in which the psycho-logical tests were administered, and to Dr N. K. Chadha of the PsychologyDepartment, University of Delhi for accompanying me and assisting me as trans-lator and/or for arranging graduate students to act as my translators during myprevious research trips I made to India. I am grateful to University of Virginiagraduate student Ruhi Malik for translating the tests used into Hindi. I am alsograteful to Sukirti Sahay, graduate student in Economics and Drill Instructor ofHindi at the University of Virginia, for her assistance in translating the video ofSakte Lal into English. I thank Dawn Hunt, Research Assistant at the Division ofPersonality Studies, University of Virginia, for assessing the birth order of thesample from India entered into the database as of October, 2001. In the US I amgrateful to all the Charlottesville preschools which allowed me to send home acontact sheet to parents, and to Michelle Sirch-Stasko, then a graduate student andnow a PhD, who worked tirelessly with me on the study of children with imagin-ary playmates. I am very grateful to Dr Patrick Fowler for his comments on thisand other versions of this article, and for his expert advice on tests to use in cross-cultural conditions with young children. This article incorporates parts of twopapers presented to the American Anthropological Association meetings. The firstwas entitled ‘Children’s Construction of Alternate Identities: A Comparison ofChildren Said to Remember Previous Lives and Children with Imaginary Play-mates’ delivered at the session ‘Selves and Others’ in San Francisco December1992. The second, ‘ “Invisible” Companions: Perception and Projection of“Related” Paradigms From the U.S. and From Northern India,’ was presented inthe Panel ‘Structuring Reality: Perception, Projection, and Cultural Paradigms,’Washington, DC, November 1993. I am also grateful for the critique of reviewersof our NIH application ‘Cross-Cultural Study of Children’s Invisible Companions’(1 R01 MH50079–01A1) which has helped clarify my thinking on the subject.Finally, I want to acknowledge research funds for the research in India providedby the Division of Personality Studies in the Department of Behavioral Medicineand Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, where I was Research Assistant Profes-sor when the research was conducted, and also from the Institute of NoeticSciences.

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ANTONIA MILLS received her PhD from Harvard University in Cultural Anthro-pology. She is co-author of the chapter Past-Life Experiences in Varieties ofAnomalous Experience (2000 APA), co-editor of Amerindian Rebirth: Reincarna-tion Belief among North American Indians and Inuit (1994); and author of anumber of articles on reincarnation cases in India and in North America. She iscurrently Associate Professor of First Nations Studies at the University of North-ern British Columbia. Address: First Nations Studies, University of NorthernBritish Columbia, 3333 University Way, Prince George, British Columbia, CanadaV2N 4Z9. [E-mail: [email protected]]


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