Though I'm Catholic, I'm a strong believer in reincarnation for many reasons. My family is full of these stories, so I thought I'd share one. Just as a preface for the contrast, I'm a small woman of slight build this time around.

Ever since I was a little girl, from the time I was old enough to remember my dreams around the age of three, I've had a reoccurring dream where I'm a man, a knight in an old castle made of stone in France. There's a staircase that curves upwards, curving all the way up into a high tower. I'm tall and strong, completely the opposite body type to what I have now. I have to be because the armor I'm wearing is really heavy. I keep having to lift my legs up really high to even keep climbing the stairs. At the top of the stairs, there's a window, more like a slit in the stone really. They're coming, an army, who specifically I don't know, but I know they're the enemy. My thoughts about the upcoming battle are ambivalent, like I don't particularly care if I live or die. I think it's because I'm sure that this battle might be my last.

I hurry back down the stairs before the battle begins. I prepare my horse and then the dream gets a little fuzzy. Everything skips forward a bit to the middle of the battle. Either the enemy broke into the castle or I had to go out with the other fighters for some reason, I'm not quite sure which, but I know something has gone wrong for my side. My horse is gone, dead or run away I don't know, but I'm on foot now. It's hard to move in the muck that has been caused by the battle, blood and water mixing together to form a muddy battleground where all the ground has been torn up. An arrow races towards me, and with my armor as heavy as it is, I can't move out of the way fast enough. It pierces me.

The dream is always the same up until now, but the next detail has shifted sometimes. When I was a child, I thought the arrow pierced my breastplate and hit me directly in the heart, killing me almost instantly. Perhaps it was because I died so fast that I don't remember well or perhaps it was because a child's mind is a bit unsophisticated, but as I got older, it shifted to the arrow piercing me more in the armpit area on the left hand side, between where the breastplate and armor on the upper arm had a gap in it. Regardless, it still pierces close to my lung and heart, so I die very quickly. I always wake up at this point in the dream, not feeling scared or upset despite the fact it was all in a first-person perspective, just kind of interested as if I'd just watched a good movie.

The dream used to happen quite frequently when I was a child, sometimes as often as once a month. It started to happen less often around the age of 11 or 12, but even to this day, I still get it about once a year. My parents mentioned I've always wanted to go to France since I was a little girl, mentioning Paris specifically. I've always felt a connection to the country like a homesickness, despite never having visited or having any direct relatives there. Anyone else have dreams like this?