Here's an interesting little case, fairly typical of the cases I receive from parents. Although I describe it as "typical", each story is unique in how it affects the child and parents, and what it shows us about these memories. This child's memory was triggered by the image of a Native American deity.
We have a clay artwork of a figure of an Indian playing the flute. My daughter, now six, used to show us this figure when she was two years old; she called it "Kopelnik". We could not ascribe anything to this, and decided then that she made up a name for it.
Last night I was at the Phoenix Big Sky Airport and was browsing around a souvenir shop. I noticed this figure, and to my amazement learned that it was called Kokopelli, a southwestern Indian deity.
I am an academician in engineering and I am largely a skeptic about such things. However, there is no way I can explain this other than a past life experience. Our kids watch very little TV at home, only Russian cartoon movies for an hour per week. (I am Turkish and my wife is Russian.) So it is impossible, when she was two, that she could have picked it up from elsewhere. Also, as clear from the above, my wife and I were clueless about the Indian culture so we could not have possibly fed this piece of information to the child through second-hand conversation. We saw the clay figurine when we were in Phoenix before we got married and hung it on the wall. It was just a piece of art we saw and liked. Otherwise we are not enthusiasts of Indian culture.
Other than this single episode, she did not tell us anything specifically about a past life experience. However, she loves her toy horse, and when she was four or five she made a totem poll- like set-up and worshiped it.
Then we thought this was some imaginative play, but now I think this was the emergence and re-creation of past experiences.