Unusual food cravings and behaviors are fairly common during pregnancy and most have no discernible reincarnation connection. However, when the children born of those pregnancies crave the same foods, one has to wonder if they were influencing their mothers in some way while in the womb. The phenomenon becomes even more intriguing when the children recall previous lives that can be verified and it turns out that the people whose lives they remember were fond of those foods.

In one case Ian Stevenson studied, that of a Thai boy named Bongkuch Promsin, not only was the Bongkuch fond of a certain noodle dish that his mother had craved during her pregnancy,  it turned out the previous whose life he recalled had been fond of the same dish—and that person’s mother had had the same craving when she was pregnant with him. It looks as if the liking for this dish was so strong that it has persisted over at least three lives, influencing two pregnancies! In another of Stevenson’s cases, a woman whose son recalled the life of an alcoholic had an intense desire for alcohol during her pregnancy, controlled only with great difficulty.

It is not just food preferences that may impact pregnant women. Some women become intensely interested in certain activities while enceinte, and those things turn out to be interests of their children later and also of the people whose lives they recall. One woman experienced an increased interest in music during her first three pregnancies and her children showed an aptitude for music, then with her fourth child she was intensely interested in sewing and cooking, which turned out to be concerns of that child.

Pregnant women may also show aversions for things they normally enjoy, but which are disliked by their children after birth and turn out to have been disliked by the previous persons also. One woman normally enjoyed gambling at cards, but not while she was pregnant. Not only was the child born of that pregnancy opposed to the games that resumed after she was born, but she remembered having been a woman with strong religious attitudes and moral dislike for such activities.

I describe in my forthcoming book with Erlendur Haraldsson, I Saw a Light and Came Here: Children’s Experiences of Reincarnation, how an American woman from Philadelphia, Patricia Stein, experienced an intense craving for hot and spicy foods while she was pregnant with her first son, Stephen. Patricia did not much care for these foods, had not eaten them before her pregnancy, and after she delivered Stephen, they went away.

It turned out that Stephen was very fond of them, however. The discovery came about by accident one evening when he was 3 years old, and Patricia and her sister took him to a Mexican restaurant. Since Patricia and her husband did not enjoy these foods, this was the first time Stephen  had had the opportunity to eat them, but he liked them so much that after that he was treated to them on birthdays and other special occasions. Now in his 30s, he still enjoys Mexican foods.

That night at the Mexican restaurant when he was 3, Stephen also revealed something else. He and his mother and aunt were seated at a booth at the back of the room, where there was a large map of Mexico on the wall. While Patricia and her sister talked, he was studying this map. When their waitress came up, he pointed to a small town in the north-central part of the country and said that is where he was from. He pronounced the name perfectly, according the waitress, a Spanish major in college, and she asked Patricia if she teaching him Spanish. She was not and did not know the language herself. She had studied German and her sister French. Stephen’s father  had studied French and Latin. No one in their family had any acquaintance with Spanish and Stephen had had no exposure to the language.

Phenomena like these are among the signs of reincarnation researchers look for, though they are reported in only a few cases. We need better studies of these influences in relation to cravings and aversions in general to better understand how they might relate to reincarnation. But when they are related to reincarnation, how would this work? We know from many cases that beliefs, preferences and various personality traits can carry over from life to life, but how are these transferred to mothers from within the womb? Are the children influencing their mothers psychically? Perhaps. While Patricia Stein was pregnant with Stephen, she felt impelled to give that name to her baby, although it was not one she and her husband had been considering. I have heard of another case in which a pregnant woman became impressed with a name that turned out to be the name of the deceased person whose life her daughter later recalled. That, however, is a subject for another post.