Reincarnation?

The other day I was recalling a recurring dream I used to have when I was rather young. In the dream I was wearing a tuxedo. It was a nice one too, tailcoat, top hat, the whole 9 yards. And in it I was an adult dancing with a woman in a beautiful evening gown... The thing is the tux and evening gown were not of the present era (or the present era at the time I had the dream, the early eighties). I don't recall what music we were dancing to, but I do recall knowing that the clothes I'd been wearing in the dream were from the past. I was too young to have any concept of when in the past they were from. In hindsight, I believe they were reminiscent of the roaring twenties.

The odd thing is, I've always felt close ties to that era. Some of my favorite classic novels were written in the late teens through the twenties (Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and of course The Great Gatsby, and Ernest Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises). I'm also a fan of silent film-- the comedies of Buster Keaton & Charlie Chaplin, the swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks, the horror films of Lon Chaney, and even some of John Barrymore's and Rudolf Valentino's films.

When I read books or watch films of that era, there's a familiarity that's not necessarily there when I read books or watch older films of other eras that pre-date my life. I suppose there are other possible and likely more plausible explanations out there. But can the possibility that our souls get recycled really be outside the realm of possibility? Our bodies may become worm food or ash after our expiration dates, but are our bodies perhaps merely vessels our souls occupy on a much longer, perhaps even infinite journey of existence?

And if this isn't my first time around, how many times before have I held residence on this third orb from the sun? Who and when might I have been?

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