Can recurrent dreams be about a past life?

[Anonymous]

Sometimes I get the same terrible recurrent dream where I'm a little boy (maybe 7-9 years old) stuck on a burning building, I'm screaming and dying. Then no one can save me and I collapsed. I can feel the burning place, the smell of burnt flesh melting and me succumbing.

Just then I wake up and start sweating. I've never had serious injuries, never even lived in a building and no one in my family had died burning. It's the same same, the same kid and the same event. Can that be some type of past life? Or some other explanation?

Updates

+1 y

Note:
Strangely, I've always felt uncomfortable with building. For some reason I never liked being inside a building and avoid it as much as possible.

[TheSpaceGnome]

Past lives aren't a thing.

Genetic memory is supposedly a thing, but its usually impossible to interpret which fragments are memories, because the brain inserts imagination based events, people, and objects into them to fill in gaps during dreams.

[Asker]

No one in my family knows that boy I keep dreaming about nor of anyone dying in a burning burning. So I'm now confused about it. I don't know why that dream follows me sometimes... the same thing.

[TheSpaceGnome]

Any likely evidence of genetic memory is usually scant at best in humans.

In mice it's been claimed that offspring were able to navigate a maze error free from memory, despite them never being in the maze themselves (their mother has many times with initial errors). However that could simply be the offspring following the mothers scent, but I'm unsure if that factor was accounted for and removed in the study (though I would think that if that were indeed what was happening, then the offspring would repeat the same mistakes the mother did, unless the maze got washed every time short of the last 2 uses)

[TheSpaceGnome]

It's more likely you had a nightmare, got traumatized by it, and have it repeatedly because it's, for whatever reason, easier to remember prior dream events while dreaming.