Once, when Dylan was taken to a funeral, he realized too late that he had forgotten it. He cried so hard it caused him to wheeze and cough. He was making such a commotion his parents had to remove him to the car. It took him a long time to settle down enough so they could drive home.

After the funeral incident, everyone in the family stashed toy guns -- in their purses, in their homes, and even in the glove compartments of their vehicles -- to avoid Dylan's hysterical scenes. When he turned five and was about to start school, his obsession caused real concern. The only way his mother could convince him not to take his gun with him was to tell him it was against the law to have a gun in school. Reluctantly, he obeyed.

I first heard the story of Dylan from his aunt Jenny, Anne's sister-in-law, whom I met for the first time at a party. Jenny had just finished reading my book, Children's Past Lives, and was eager to talk to me about her now five-year-old nephew, who she was beginning to believe was the reincarnation of her grandfather. She explained that she had long been open to the possibility of reincarnation, but she hadn't known that it was possible for a child to be the reincarnation of a family member. Now Dylan's strange behaviors were beginning to make sense to her. She continues the story.

"Our whole family dismissed Dylan's behaviors as just amusing little things he did. We laughed about it. Nobody stopped to think there might be a cause, but by the time I finished reading your book, everything fell into place. My grandfather, who we called Pop-Pop, was a beat cop in Philadelphia during the Depression. Later he was a prison guard. He always carried a gun with him, always had a gun in his house, and always slept with a gun beside his bed. Always.

"During the last three years of his life, Pop-Pop was very sick. He had been a chain-smoker all his life and was slowly dying of emphysema and heart disease. Even during his terrible illness, when he could barely breathe, he continued to smoke. In fact, the last words we heard from him as they carried him out on a stretcher were to ask for a cigarette. He died on the way to the hospital. The strange thing is that Pop-Pop carried his cigarettes in his pants pocket just as Dylan pretended to do. Most people carry cigarettes in a breast pocket so they won't get crushed. But not Pop-Pop. And Pop-Pop loved gambling -- especially dice. During the Depression he and his buddies would shoot craps behind abandoned buildings every chance they got.

"After I started piecing all of this together -- Dylan imitating smoking and shooting craps -- I asked my mother (Pop-Pop's daughter) about Pop-Pop's last days. She told me something I hadn't heard before. One day while Pop-Pop was napping, my grandmother was cleaning the house and found Pop-Pop's gun hidden under the sofa cushion in the living room. He had moved it from its usual place on the night table. This really scared her because she was afraid that he was going to use the gun on himself to end his suffering. She called her son, who came and took the gun and threw it into the river. When Pop-Pop found out what had happened, he was furious that his gun had been taken away. I don't think he ever got over it."

This article is excerpted from the book, Return from Heaven:
Beloved Relatives Reincarnated Within Your Family, by Carol Bowman,  Harper Collins Publishers, ©2001.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Carol Bowman holds a master's degree in counseling and practices past-life-oriented counseling and therapy. Through her writings, frequent lectures, and TV appearances on shows such as Oprah, Good Morning America, and Unsolved Mysteries, Bowman has opened the eyes of millions of parents to the fact that some children easily remember their past lives. She is recognized as a leading expert in this new field. She continues to promote research of children's past lives and same-family reincarnation. Visit her website at http://www.childpastlives.org.