Did I Choose This Life?

You arrived in a life that already had a family, a place and a set of circumstances waiting for you. From this side of birth, none of it feels like a decision you made.

Christian Sundberg remembers the question from the other side.

He describes being asked whether he was ready to return to physical life. He remembers refusing, eventually agreeing, and examining the fear he hoped to overcome. Then came a much harder step: entering a body and losing access to the awareness that had made the choice.

His account opens a possibility that reaches well beyond the question of a previous life. What if the circumstances we struggle to understand were once part of a journey we wanted to undertake? And what if entering that journey meant forgetting why we came?

Two much shorter childhood accounts bring that possibility into ordinary places: a village market, a bus ride, and a room where a bride picked up her dog.

The life he wanted to experience

In Sundberg’s account, existence before birth had a quality of connection that ordinary language struggles to convey. Other beings were present, but thoughts, feelings and intentions could be shared directly. The separation that defines so much of human experience was largely absent.

One being stood out. Sundberg describes him as beautiful, powerful and joyful, and remembers wanting to understand how he had become that way.

The answer surprised him. This being showed him an experience of intense suffering during a physical life. He had faced it, accepted it, and grown through it. Sundberg was struck by the relationship between that difficult experience and the being he now encountered.

He wanted to discover that kind of growth for himself.

This is where the idea of choosing a life becomes more personal. The attraction, as he describes it, was the possibility of change: becoming capable of meeting something that had previously overwhelmed him.

Sundberg remembers many physical lives, although he does not give a precise count. Eventually, after one of them, he decided to stop for a while. He compares the interval to a long vacation he did not want to end.

A guide kept returning with the same question: was he ready to go back?

For a long time, his answer was no.

The fear that was still waiting

When Sundberg finally agreed, he says he and the guide examined his previous experiences. They considered what he had learned, the qualities he had developed and the things he had overcome.

One fear remained.

It concerned pain, but its most frightening quality was the feeling of being trapped inside it. He remembered being overwhelmed by a painful death in another life. The prospect of suffering without an escape still felt unacceptable to him.

From the state he describes before birth, he believed he could approach that fear again. He asked whether it could really be overcome and was told that it could. Others had done so, and he could take as long as he needed.

He decided to try.

According to his recollection, a possible life was presented to him whose circumstances suited that intention. He accepted it. What looked manageable from a state of connection, however, felt very different when that connection began to disappear.

What the veil took away

Sundberg calls the transition into physical life the veil.

He describes a gradual reduction in access to his wider identity, comparing it to the volume on an amplifier being turned lower and lower. Awareness of who he was, where he had come from and how he was connected to other beings began to fade.

Then he found himself in the womb.

In his recollection, the change was overwhelming. The darkness and isolation felt like a sudden separation from everything he had known. The larger awareness that had chosen the experience was no longer available to explain it.

He panicked and fought against the veil. He says he managed to leave the body, but then became aware that the developing physical life had ended.

What followed, in his account, was an encounter with the grief of the mother and the people around her. He felt the sorrow spreading through those connected to that brief life. His own attempt to escape had consequences he had not understood from inside the experience.

He remembers profound regret. He still wanted to face the fear, but this opportunity was gone.

The difficulty at the heart of his story is clear: making a choice with a wider awareness did not mean he could comfortably live through it once that awareness was hidden.

Learning to stay

Before trying again, Sundberg describes entering a practice environment.

He compares the exercise to being lowered into dark water. It was a setting in which he could experience the loss of control and then return. He could repeat the process, gradually learning to remain calm as the familiar sense of connection receded.

The exercise centred on surrender: allowing the experience to happen without immediately fighting his way out.

Eventually, he felt ready to attempt the transition again.

He remembers entering the womb and meeting the same darkness and separation. This time, he stayed. Then, he says, he became aware of a presence that showed him something of his larger identity.

He describes stars, galaxies and the universe, with an overwhelming feeling of connection and joy. The meaning he took from the experience was that his identity had not been destroyed by losing access to it. What he was could still exist beyond what he could presently perceive.

That reassurance calmed him. He remained, and the life continued toward birth.

Remembering what he had forgotten

Sundberg also describes impressions of birth itself: cold air, bright light, sound, touch and people moving around him. The physical world felt overwhelming. Gradually, the earlier memories disappeared.

For most of his life, he says, he did not remember the sequence that had brought him there.

Around the age of thirty, during a period of meditation and personal change, the memories began returning in fragments. Images, feelings and events gradually formed a larger account: the long rest, the guide, the choice, the failed attempt, the practice and the eventual arrival.

This gives the question in his story its emotional force. A life chosen for a purpose could still feel bewildering from within it. The person living through the difficulty would no longer have the same access to the reasons that made it seem worthwhile.

Sundberg describes remembering that missing part of the story. Other accounts of the period before birth are much smaller, with details that could almost disappear into everyday life.

The boy who followed a man onto a bus

In Thailand, Bongkuch Promsin described a journey that began after a previous death.

He said he remained near his former body for a while and then tried to return home. Along the way, he became lost in a village market. There he noticed a man, followed him onto a bus and went home with him.

That man, Bongkuch said, became his father in the next life.

The case summary published by the Psi Encyclopedia relates the detail that made the journey especially interesting: the father had visited that market and had taken a bus home on the occasion described, although that was not his usual way of travelling.

The setting gives the account a very different atmosphere from Sundberg’s. The movement toward another life takes place among ordinary human activities. Someone visits a market. Someone gets on a bus. A boy later describes those actions as part of the route that brought him to his family.

The bus ride becomes the link between the life he remembered leaving and the one he would enter.

A white dress and a dog

Another account, discussed in the 2014 research by Ohkado and Ikegawa, concerns a Japanese girl who began speaking about the period before her birth at the age of five.

She described seeing her mother wearing a beautiful white dress and holding a dog.

Her mother recognised the scene. After her wedding ceremony, she had gone into a room where the family dog was waiting. Still wearing her wedding dress, she had picked it up.

The child’s description brought together the clothing, the animal and the mother in a moment that belonged to the family’s life before her own birth.

There is no elaborate journey in this account. Its interest rests on a small, recognisable scene and a mother who remembered it. The image is easy to hold in mind: a bride, still dressed for her wedding, with a dog in her arms.

Where does your story begin?

These accounts differ greatly in scale. Sundberg describes a long preparation, an intention to grow and the difficulty of surrendering a wider awareness. Bongkuch describes finding his way toward a future father. The Japanese girl describes a moment in her mother’s earlier life.

Sundberg’s account asks the most direct version of the question: could entering a life involve a choice that the person living it no longer remembers? The children’s accounts widen that question to the possibility of awareness before birth itself.

The stories leave room for different ways of understanding memory. Their enduring pull is the possibility that something of us precedes the point at which our familiar biography begins.

Perhaps the first day of a life is not the first day of the awareness living it.

Perhaps birth marks the beginning of the part we usually remember.