Drawing on dated emails and unpublished materials unavailable to Michael Sudduth, this paper establishes a secure, detailed timeline for the James Leininger reincarnation case. This secure timeline invalidates the timeline used by Sudduth in his critique of the case, while validating that of the Leininger family and investigator Jim Tucker. Links are provided to PDFs of supporting documents posted to the Psi Open Data repository.

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Part 1 of this paper presented a secure timeline for the James Leininger reincarnation case, showing Michael Sudduth’s criticisms of it to be unfounded. Part 2 begins with an analysis of the exchange in this journal between Sudduth and Jim Tucker over Tucker’s investigation, then recommends improvements that might be made in the investigation and reporting of reincarnation cases to address criticisms, overcome a will to disbelieve in the evidence, and reach scientists and scholars open to following the research findings where they lead. Proposals are grouped under three headings: Case Study Methodology, Reporting Standards, and Statistical Analysis.

As with memories of the present life, memories of apparent previous lives may appear in dreams, sometimes in nightmarish dreams. This paper presents the case study of a dream of a traumatic event (a death) that transpired 36 years before the birth of the dreamer. The dream recurred several times a month from age 4 until the dreamer was in his 20s. The dream invariably caused waking in distress and in a cold sweat and was recalled after waking. These are characteristics of posttraumatic nightmares, although the trauma here would seem to derive from a former life, not the dreamer’s present life. The dreamer continues to recall the event in his 50s and is still severely affected by it. Recurring nightmares are common in past-life memory reports, but this case is unusual in that the dream was detailed enough to permit verification of its main elements as well as the identification of the dream protagonist. The event in question was obscure enough, yet the dreamer’s recollection precise enough, that it is unlikely that the dreamer or his family could have learned about it before his dreams began. I consider the possibility that the dreamer acquired the information through anomalous cognition but reject it partly for lack of evidence that emotions of this order can be acquired via psi. Although no single case can provide convincing evidence for reincarnation, this case adds to the growing body of research that makes the possibility worthy of serious consideration.

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