People who remember their past lives aren’t hard to find. Just last week I came across three different four-year-olds who all said they died in 9/11, a three-year-old who said he remembered getting crushed to death in the hydraulic systems of his father’s pencil factory, and a two-year-old who also died in 9/11. But I had dismissed these stories as nothing more than those of beautiful children with gifted imaginations, until last week, when I encountered a dozen adult males at Yale University with similar powers of recollection.
All these men happen to be part of the same extracurricular club called LEO. But they have something stranger in common: they all vaguely remember a past life in which they were “brothers” of something known as “SAE.”
“I’ve been having this recurring dream for weeks now,” recounts Tyler, 20. “I’m standing on the porch of this house that kind of resembles our house, you know, the LEO house. But something’s off that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s unclear when the dream takes place because everyone is wearing 90s NBA jerseys but I’m checking an iPhone 6. Anyways, people are coming up to me and I’m making them show me a Yale ID, when suddenly I say ‘Welcome to SAE.’ And then I wake up in a cold sweat. My pants are always wet and I think I’ve peed myself before realizing that with all the thrashing, I just spilled the 4Loko I had saved to wake me up in the morning. ”
Others have vivid memories of events and voices. As Austin, 22, explains, “There’s these voices in my head constantly whispering things like “sexual misconduct,” and “penetration without consent.” It’s particularly haunting because I have no idea what these phrases mean, let alone what they mean in relation to my life. Luckily, I have a clearer memory of my past self, a happy one. I can picture this man, wearing a suit — I don’t know why, but I think his name is Dean — speaking with a warm voice, ‘…no evidence of systematic discrimination found in my investigation of SAE.’ It’s so simple but it always brings me this incredible sense of relief. Sometimes when I feel overwhelmed, I just like to close my eyes and imagine what it was like for my past self to be assuaged of all his fears and stress at once.”
These stories may seem unremarkable, yet ten others, all of whom are members of LEO, shared similar memories and dreams involving ‘SAE.’ And though this alone may seem like a coincidence, the phenomenon extends further, to a physical dimension. In other reincarnation cases, I’ve seen reports of birthmarks in spots of stabbings and freckles where piercings once were, but never anything quite like this: all twelve men’s right buttcheeks are somehow branded with the letters ‘SAE.’ Could these young men all have been stabbed by alphabet cookie cutters in their past lives?
There are too many pieces to this puzzle I simply can’t put together. For example, several upperclassmen at Yale recall seeing eerily-similar looking men at a fraternity called Sigma Alpha Epsilon in May 2016, before it disbanded amidst complaints of sexual misconduct and racial discrimination. Strangely enough, May 2016 is the date many of the supposedly reincarnated reported as the beginning of their lives as LEO members. Could the ‘SAE’ these men vaguely recall have any connection to the Yale fraternity, however tangential? How could they have been reincarnated as adult men in just two years?
All of this might just be the tip of the iceberg. A new batch of young men are now beginning to have flashbacks to life in a different organization, known as DKE. Stay tuned for my next investigation, as we see how deep this rabbit hole goes.
— H. Rubin