Another boundary of memory is presently being breached by the arrival of more and more memories of life in utero. This area of discovery raises many of the same issues that have surrounded birth memory but presents an even more profound challenge to understanding the relationship of brain to memory. The problem is that the farther back you go from birth, the more you run out of brain material to account for memory. This has led scholars to propose new concepts of memory storage and processing. Before looking at the theories, however, let us look at the memories themselves.

In hypnotherapy, womb memories are nearly as common as birth memories. Like many birth memories, they come without request and can sometimes be verified as true. Some memories are pleasant reports of everyday life; most, however, deal with life and death issues that have persisted into adult life as mental health problems.

My client Loretta remembered something that happened while she was still in the womb. Her mother was standing on the deck of a boat, holding tightly to a railing, trying to steady herself. "She’s looking at an island. There are other people looking over the water, listening to someone tell them where they are going, explaining tot hem about the island. My father is standing by my mother, worried about her. He wants to know if she is all right. The rocking of the boat is making her sick. She sat down and is rubbing her stomach. I feel the motion on the stomach, the rubbing. My mother was rubbing me, and she was worried if I was all right. She was relaxing me by rubbing."

Loretta’s mother and father were surprised to hear this story of an even that took place during the third trimester of pregnancy. They said that she had correctly reported their outing on a sightseeing boat, something they had never told her. Even if they had, it would not explain the empathy, perception, and clairvoyance found in her report.

My client Kim remembered her mother talking about her shortly before her birth, telling her brother that she was going to be born. "He’s asking, am I a boy or a girl? We’ll find out when I’m born in about two weeks. She says if I am a girl my name will be Kimberly Sue. She doesn’t know what it will be if I’m a boy."

Memories close to birth are not hard to explain. We can probably assume that whatever equipment is in place at birth is probably in place a little earlier. Memories that go back into the first and second trimester require a different explanation. This is the case with a host of memories of attempted abortion.

While in hypnosis, my client Irene remembered an abortion attempt. To find the trail that led back to this womb memory, we had followed a particular emotion, a very frightened feeling: "It’s too sad. I already remember it. I was hardly formed and my mom is using some kind of remedy to wash me away. It feels real hot…I know she is trying to get me out of there.. I’m just a little blob. I don’t know how I know, but I know. My aunt seems to be giving my mom directions. I can hear her voice and another woman in the background. She is not supposed to get pregnant. She doesn’t know me… It didn’t work either. It had a strong harsh smell, almost a disinfectant smell, like ammonia, strong, a vile, strong smell…I can see where is was too; I was way up there, just teeny. I know nobody really wanted me them…but I was determined. I was a fighter even then. Poor mom would die if she know I know all this stuff! "

Other hypnotherapists have also encountered these memories. Josephine Van Husen has written about forty-eight survivors of abortion attempts and how the patients themselves had to teach her to appreciate and work with these memories. She learned that she could ask the size of the head in relation to the shoulders and calculate the prenatal age. She was impressed when some stories were confirmed by the mothers.

An awesome sign of memory is the reactivation of forceps bruises or a blue area on the throat where a person was being choked by the umbilical cord! That these marks come and go with the memory is a sure sign that memory has been preserved somewhere. In experiments with deep regression in hypnosis, a Soviet psychologist found that authentic reflexes of the perinatal period could be reproduced . Others have found that, under certain conditions, clients can access information of their own early gestation ; ; ; and .

Australian psychiatrist Graham Farrant discovered in repeated primals that his mother had attempted to abort him. When he telephoned his mother and asked about it, she denied it but after he described to her how she had taken a bunch of pills and gotten into a hot tub, she broke into tears and said, "You couldn’t know this; I never told anybody." Farrant calls these deeply ingrained unconscious memories "cellular" memories.

Sometimes these memories blossom in time as if programmed by an internal clock . In a study of veterans’ nightmares, Van der Kolk discovered that post-traumatic nightmares may recur, even after decades of latency, in response to important events, such as puberty, marriage, birth of a child, illness, or retirement. He reports that in sleep stage II and III (not REM) nightmares are usually exact eidetic recreations of the traumatic experience itself—a tribute to the durability of memory.

Canadian psychologist Andrew Feldmar discovered a time factor in a series of adolescent patients with a history of more than five suicide attempts each, always at the same time of year. With extraordinary insight, Feldmar eventually determined that the suicide dates of four patients corresponded to the month in which their mothers had tried to about them. They had no conscious knowledge of the abortion attempts that they were unconsciously acting out. What looked like "insanity" was in fact a memory. Feldmar discovered that they had even used a method of suicide similar to the method of the abortion, for example, chemicals or instruments. After discovering that their suicide attempts were seasonal intrusions of prenatal memory, the patients were free of the compulsion. When their anniversaries returned, they never wanted to try suicide again.

Prenatal memory is rich, varied, and seemingly impossible—prompting whole new theories of memory as process rather than place ; ; .