Stevenson noted that children vary in the extent of their identification with the previous person and immersion in the previous life. Many children separate the two lives, signaling their distance from the past with such phrases as, “When I was big . . .” Others use the present tense, saying things like, “I have a wife and two sons,” and seem to imagine the other life as running concurrently with their own. Children may demand to be called by the name of the previous person, even to the point of refusing to respond to their own name.
