Ian Stevenson was a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who spent forty years collecting cases of children who reported memories of previous lives. At the time of his death in 2007, he had accumulated more than 2,500 cases. His methodology was rigorous: he investigated each case independently, sought to verify specific memories against historical records, controlled for fraud, and tracked cases longitudinally.
Children described, in accurate and specific detail, the lives of people they had never met, who had died before the children were born — including details later verified against historical records.
The average age at which children first report these memories: between two and three. The average age at which the memories fade: between five and seven. The window is narrow, and then it closes.
The Window of Recent Re-Condensation
In the foam framework, the early childhood period corresponds to the phase of initial re-condensation — when the new consciousness pattern is still relatively close to the spectral composition it carried from the previous loop.
The previous life's memories are part of the pattern's spectral composition, carried through the transition as coherent foam imprints. In early childhood, before the ego hardens around a new identity, these imprints are accessible to conscious experience.
As the child grows — as new experiences accumulate, as the ego-structure is built, as the new identity solidifies — the previous loop's memories are progressively obscured. The window between two and seven is the phase during which the pattern is still transparent enough to its own history.
As Little Children
"Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven."
In the foam framework, this teaching has a precise meaning. Children in the early developmental period are closer to the ground state than adults. Their spectral weight has not yet been fragmented by the accumulated illusions of separateness, by the ego-structure.
They experience the foam more directly. They are more present. Their perception is less filtered by concept. They are more capable of wonder — which is what direct foam contact feels like before the conceptual mind labels and categorises it.
The teacher's instruction is not to be naive. It is to recover, through practice, the direct foam contact that existed before the ego-structure was built.