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Many of the sources on this site came out of hypnosis. People lie on a couch, close their eyes, and describe a life in Atlantis or Egypt. I have read hundreds of these sessions. At some point I had to ask a plain question. What is past life regression, and what is it worth as evidence?
What I found surprised me. This is not a fringe hobby. It has been practiced for about seventy years, by thousands of trained people, with tens of thousands of recorded sessions. And the sessions tell a similar story. Still, it almost never reaches the news, unless the story is a debunk.
On this page I show the practice first. Then I put the official answer beside it.
How established it is
The modern story starts in 1952. In Pueblo, Colorado, the amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein took a housewife, Virginia Tighe, back before her birth. She spoke as Bridey Murphy, an Irishwoman of the 1800s. His book The Search for Bridey Murphy came out in 1956 and became a bestseller.
Dolores Cannon began her first past life work in 1969 and kept going until her death in 2014. That is about 45 years of sessions.
Brian Weiss says he has regressed more than 4,000 patients since 1980.
Michael Newton was a counseling psychologist and hypnotherapist in Los Angeles. His institute says he built his model of the time between lives from 7,000 clients over 35 years. He published it in Journey of Souls in 1994.
The Michael Newton Institute now has a record of over 55,000 Life Between Lives sessions, according to its own site. It says more than 200 trained facilitators offer them in over 40 countries.
A skill you can learn
Past life regression is not a gift that only a few people have. It is a technique, and people train for it.
Dolores Cannon learned hypnosis from her husband Johnny, who was an amateur hypnotist. Her first past life case came in 1969, when a doctor asked the couple to help a patient with an eating disorder. Under hypnosis the woman described a life as a flapper in 1920s Chicago. I tell the rest of her story on my page about Dolores Cannon.
Cannon later built her own method, the Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique, or QHHT. She founded the Quantum Healing Hypnosis Academy to teach it. Her daughter Julia Cannon now runs the academy, and students still train there.
Brian Weiss took a different road. He is a psychiatrist with a medical degree from Yale. For years he ran professional training courses in past life regression therapy. His own site now says he has stepped back from workshops and training. In his words, he has “trained many excellent practitioners in the techniques of past life regression therapy.”
The English hypnotherapist Steve Burgess came in through his family. In an interview he tells how the publishing company he directed went bankrupt. His father had quit smoking through hypnosis and then trained as a hypnotherapist himself. On his father’s advice Steve trained too. He says he has now done more than 15,000 sessions.
How a session works
A session starts with an induction. That is the spoken part where the hypnotist slowly guides you into a relaxed trance, often with breathing and imagined pictures.
Cannon worked at the deepest level, which she called the somnambulistic state. Her academy describes it as the state you pass through just before you wake up and just before you fall asleep. Most hypnotists avoid this depth, according to her school. Cannon went there on purpose.
Burgess uses finger signals. The client stays in trance and lifts one finger for yes and another for no. Psychologists call this an ideomotor response. That means a small movement the body makes without a conscious decision. Burgess uses it to ask whether a problem started in this life, a past life, or with an ancestor.
Cannon added a second step after the past life. She asked to speak with what she called the subconscious. In a lecture she explained why that step matters.
“A lot of hypnotists, that’s where they stop. They do the past life and that’s it.” (Dolores Cannon, Atlantis, Healing, Hypnosis and Other Dimensions Part 2, 6:38)
“You have to tie it together.” (Dolores Cannon, same lecture, 6:53)
For her, the past life was only the picture. The meaning came after.
“The subconscious has all of the answers.” (Dolores Cannon, same lecture, 7:12)
She said the material in her book series came out of these talks with the subconscious. I review the first volume on my page on The Convoluted Universe Book One.
Brian Weiss and Catherine
Weiss became famous through one patient. He calls her Catherine. In 1980 she came to him with nightmares and anxiety attacks. Under hypnosis she began to describe past lives.
Weiss did not believe in reincarnation at that time. He was a traditional psychotherapist. He says he checked parts of her stories in public records. Later, in trance, she passed on messages that he says revealed facts about his family and his son who had died.
He wrote the story down in Many Lives, Many Masters, published in 1988. Weiss later chaired the psychiatry department at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, and his site lists him as Chairman Emeritus.
What strikes me is the order of events. The doctor did not go looking for past lives. They came to him.
The same story from different people
Sessions can be strange and vivid. In one regression led by Sarah Breskman Cosme, a man describes building with stone that the workers made soft.
“My job is to help make the stone soft so it will fit in the place.” (Sitter, regression with Sarah Breskman Cosme, 39:32)
Later in the same session the answers place this scene on a main island of Atlantis. You can read the full session in my note on a regression and reported Atlantis pictures. Many readers connect such pictures with the Akashic records. I explain that idea on my page on the Akashic record as a source.
What strikes me more than any single session is how much they agree. Different clients, different hypnotists, different decades, and the same themes come back.
The first theme is the time between lives. Newton’s whole method is built on it. His institute tells of a depressed client in 1968 who went past her last death and met her soul group. Cannon wrote a whole book about it, Between Death and Life, in 1993. Burgess describes the same stage in his interview. After death, he says, people meet guides or elders who review the life just lived.
The second theme is a wise inner voice. Weiss heard about “Masters” through Catherine. Newton’s clients spoke with guides. Cannon called it the subconscious, and she noticed that it sounded alike in every client.
“It’s always the same voice, the same way of wording it.” (Dolores Cannon, Atlantis, Healing, Hypnosis and Other Dimensions Part 2, 8:25)
The third theme is healing. Weiss, Cannon and Burgess all say that a fear or a pain often goes away once the client sees the life where it started.
What makes the news
Seventy years of practice, and how often does it reach mainstream news? Mostly when it falls apart.
The Bridey Murphy case is the classic example. Once the book was a bestseller, papers sent reporters to Ireland to check every detail. They found no record of her birth or death in Cork. They also found that an Irish woman named Bridie Murphy Corkell had lived across the street from Tighe’s childhood home in Chicago. Time magazine ran the story on 19 March 1956 under the headline “Found: Bridey Murphy”. The case has been held up as a debunk ever since.
Medical sites follow the same line. In 2016 the blog Science-Based Medicine called the method “Past Life Regression Therapy: Encouraging Fantasy”.
Even good research gets the scare quotes. When UVA published a large reincarnation study in 2026, IFLScience ran it as “Study Of 1,600 “Cases” Claims To Have Found An Odd Correlation In Reports Of Reincarnation”. The quote marks around “Cases” say a lot.
As far as I can find, no major newspaper or national TV channel reported this study. Only the local Charlottesville station 29News covered it.
I have not found one major outlet that has followed a regression practice over years and reported what the sessions have in common.
The official answer
Here the mainstream answer is firm. The most serious reincarnation researchers do not use hypnosis at all.
The Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, DOPS for short, was founded in 1967 by the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson. He left his post as chairman of psychiatry to start it. The group studies whether consciousness can survive death.
Stevenson wrote a statement on hypnotic regression, and DOPS still publishes it. He compared hypnosis to dreaming. He wrote that “nearly all such hypnotically evoked ‘previous personalities’ are entirely imaginary just as are the contents of most dreams.”
He gave two reasons. First, a hypnotist’s suggestion can shape the “past person”. He pointed to experiments by Nicholas Spanos and colleagues in 1991 that showed this. Second, correct historical details usually come from things the client read or saw and then forgot.
He also wrote that strong emotion in a session proves nothing. Healing does not prove it either, because many kinds of therapy help people.
Stevenson did not close the door completely. He wrote that “very rarely something of value may emerge”. His main example was a client who speaks a foreign language they never learned. Researchers call this xenoglossy. He also wrote that he was “in favor of serious research with hypnotic regression”.
The children who remember
So what does DOPS take seriously? Spontaneous memories of small children.
These children are usually between two and five years old. They start to talk about another family, another name, another death, with no hypnosis involved. Stevenson began to collect such cases on a trip to the East in 1961. In an analysis of 856 cases, about two thirds of the children’s statements matched a real person who had died.
Critics have pushed back on this too. The philosopher Champe Ransom argued that leading questions and contact between families can taint the reports. That debate is still open.
Some come back sooner
On 21 October 2026 I saw this research go around on X. Graham Hancock shared it with the single word “Fascinating”. The finding is about the gap between lives.
In August 2026, Saeedeh Sadeghi, Marieta Pehlivanova and Philip Cozzolino of DOPS published an analysis of 1,678 strong cases in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research and Practice. They measured the time between the death of the earlier person and the birth of the child. Researchers call this the intermission.
The median intermission was 16 months. After the most unexpected deaths, it dropped to about 12 months. After the least unexpected deaths, it was about 21 months. The pattern held up when the team checked for memory contamination and family links. It was even stronger in families who did not believe in reincarnation. You can read the study itself and the UVA summary.
The authors are careful. The data are observational. They say only that the pattern may be real and needs more research. To me it means that a life cut short may come back faster.
Where I stand
I take the official answer seriously. A single session can be shaped by the hypnotist and by things the client once read.
But that does not explain everything for me. Tens of thousands of sessions, across decades and continents, describe the same stage between lives. The child cases, which science does study, point the same way. And the news mostly reports the cases that collapse.
This is the same split I found with Noah’s Ark and the Giza tunnels. The mainstream draws a line, and the questions do not stop at that line.
