THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT
Memories of Another Life, a Lost Love, and a Reunion Across Time
By Janet Kira Lessin
October 2026 | © 2026 Aquarian Media
[IMAGE 1 — TITLE: THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT]
The Dreams That Began Before I Had Words
I was a very little girl when I began dreaming about being a grown man. The dreams started so early that I don’t believe I had even left my crib when I experienced the first series, which involved a young man who fell to his death from a French fortress. I would eventually call him Jules, although I knew nothing about his name, his country, or the historical circumstances surrounding his death when those dreams began.
By approximately three years old, I was experiencing another recurring series of dreams, this time involving a handsome gentleman dressed in a white suit. He lived in what I would later recognize as the nineteenth century, and his life revolved around a beautiful woman, children, and an idyllic setting beside a lake.
At that age, I had no concept of romantic love, marriage, or the complicated relationships between adults. Yet when I dreamed, I experienced myself as a grown man, with his thoughts, emotions, and surroundings. When I awakened, I returned to being a little girl in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, trying to understand why my dreams took me into the lives of people so different from myself.
I remember questioning this contradiction, even when I was very young. I asked myself, “Why am I having these dreams of me being a grown man when I’m obviously still just a little girl?”
I couldn’t make sense of it. These weren’t stories someone had told me or ideas I had picked up from conversations about reincarnation. I had no understanding of reincarnation, and no one around me discussed such things. My parents didn’t even realize how much I could understand, and when the earliest dreams began, they didn’t yet know I could talk.
I grew up during the 1950s and early 1960s in a neighborhood where strict Christian beliefs governed much of family and community life. My parents shared that religious outlook, and my mother especially believed in the devil and the dangers of anything that challenged her understanding of God. Whenever I said something she considered unacceptable, she launched into lectures that could go on endlessly, warning me about the terrible consequences of entertaining the wrong ideas.
The funny thing was, I never thought God was such a bad fellow. But Mom? Look out! She put the fear of Mother in me.
I didn’t feel safe sharing my unusual dreams with either parent, and the surrounding neighborhood offered little encouragement to question the religious explanations everyone accepted. I learned to keep my experiences to myself while continuing to explore them privately.
Fortunately, nobody could control the freedom of my inner world.
Somewhere along the way, I encountered the word reincarnation, which gave me a possible explanation for the memories I had already carried for years. The dreams had come first, long before I possessed the vocabulary to describe them.
As I grew older, I gradually understood more of the adult emotions I had experienced in those dreams. The joy of running toward someone I loved, the affection I felt for the children, and the sorrow that followed acquired meanings I couldn’t possibly have understood as a toddler.
The dreams continued returning throughout my life, sometimes after long intervals, and each repetition brought another piece of a story that had begun before I could explain it to anyone.
The Man in the White Suit
[IMAGE 2 — RUNNING THROUGH THE WILDFLOWERS]
In the dream, I am a handsome young man dressed in an elegant white suit, running through a meadow filled with daisies and yellow wildflowers. I feel wonderful, bursting with happiness and anticipation as I race toward a beautiful woman who has been waiting for me.
Ahead stands a white gazebo beside a small lake, surrounded by enormous weeping willows whose graceful branches hang toward the ground. The countryside glows in the warmth of a beautiful spring day, and wildflowers spread across the meadow in every direction.
Two magnificent white swans glide across the water with their two babies, accompanied by ducks and geese. The lake sparkles beneath a clear sky, and the entire setting radiates peace and happiness.
The woman I love has prepared a picnic near the gazebo. When she sees me approaching, she runs toward me with a beautiful smile, her long white dress flowing around her as yellow ribbons stream from her hair and clothing.
[IMAGE 3 — THE WOMAN WITH THE YELLOW RIBBONS]
I hurry toward her, overcome by the joy of seeing her again. Everything about her feels familiar, and the happiness between us fills me completely.
Nearby, children play among the flowers, absorbed in their activities and unaware that I have arrived. In my earliest recollections, I believed there were four children, two girls and two boys. The girls wore beautiful white dresses decorated with ribbons of different colors, including pink and blue, while the boys wore handsome little suits, perhaps navy blue.
[IMAGE 4 — CHILDREN PLAYING NEAR THE GAZEBO]
The children’s clothing and the picnic always made me wonder whether the occasion was Easter. Everyone wore beautiful clothes, the weather was perfect, and the day carried the excitement of a special family celebration.
For years, I assumed that the woman was my wife and the children were ours. I felt such happiness and affection for them that those relationships seemed obvious to me as I grew older and began interpreting what I had experienced.
Yet the dream never revealed their names, and I never heard anyone identify the children or explain their relationship to the man in the white suit. I simply experienced the happiness of being among people I loved.
That beautiful afternoon became one of my most enduring memories, returning throughout my childhood and adult life with a vividness that never diminished.
Was the Man in the White Suit Holly Taft?
[IMAGE 5 — HOLLY TAFT AND THE MAN IN WHITE]
For the longest time, I believed the man in the white suit and Halsey Cook Taft, whom everyone called Holly, were the same person. The memories came to me during overlapping periods of my life, and both involved nineteenth-century men whose experiences I remembered from the inside.
My connection with Holly became especially vivid during the early 1990s, when I lived in State College, Pennsylvania, and attended a weekly meditation class with my friend Megan. During one of those classes, I experienced a detailed vision of Holly’s childhood and the night President Abraham Lincoln died.
I remembered being Holly, a teenage boy who had once played with Willie and Tad Lincoln at the White House. In my vision, I accompanied Tad during the terrible night when his father lay dying in the Petersen House across from Ford’s Theatre.
I later explored this experience and the historical people involved in my companion article, Halsey’s Witness: My Life as Holly Taft.
Historical records establish that Halsey Cook Taft was born on August 17, 1849, in Lyons, New York. His father, Horatio Nelson Taft, worked in Washington, D.C., during Lincoln’s presidency, and the Taft children became regular companions of the President’s sons. Holly’s half-brother, Dr. Charles Sabin Taft, attended Lincoln after the assassination.
Holly died in Sag Harbor, Long Island, on September 23, 1897, at the relatively young age of forty-eight. He rests in Oakland Cemetery.
As I investigated his adult life, I found surprisingly little information about his personal relationships. I couldn’t locate records establishing that he had married or fathered children, which raised questions about my long-held belief that he was the man in the white suit.
Of course, the absence of those records doesn’t establish that Holly never loved someone, lived with a companion, or helped raise children. Historical documents often tell us far more about a person’s employment, property, and death than about the relationships that shaped everyday life.
My research also brought me to Holly’s younger brother, William Cook Taft. According to family information I found, Holly served as an usher at William’s wedding. William married and had three daughters, which introduced another possibility I hadn’t previously considered.
Perhaps Holly lived near his younger brother’s family and became a beloved uncle who spent time with his nieces. The children I remembered might have included family members or children of close friends rather than his own sons and daughters.
The dates complicated that possibility, however. William’s youngest daughter was born after Holly died in 1897, and William had daughters, while I distinctly remember at least one boy playing near the gazebo.
As I revisit the dreams, I also question whether there were four children or perhaps only three. I remember at least one boy, but I can no longer say with certainty how many children were present.
Other explanations remain possible. The woman in white could have been a widow with children from an earlier marriage. She and the man might have loved each other without marrying, or they might have enjoyed a close relationship with children who belonged to relatives or friends.
Perhaps the man was Holly, and the surviving documents simply haven’t revealed the relationships I remember. Or perhaps he was someone else entirely.
I have found no reason to insist upon either explanation. I remember the man, the woman, the children, and the happiness of that beautiful afternoon, but their identities remain open questions.
The Painting in the State College Art Store
[IMAGE 6 — DISCOVERING THE PAINTING]
Between 1989 and 1993, while living and working in State College, Pennsylvania, I visited a local art store that sold original prints and provided professional framing services. During one visit, I glanced up at a picture displayed on the wall and encountered something that stopped me in my tracks.
The picture showed a handsome man wearing a white suit, running through a meadow of wildflowers toward a beautiful woman dressed in white. Yellow ribbons decorated her clothing and hair, and she ran toward him with the same joyful expression I remembered from my recurring dreams.
The white gazebo stood beside the lake beneath the weeping willows. Swans and ducks occupied the water, while children played nearby.
I recognized the entire setting immediately.
I had dreamed about those people and that beautiful place since I was a very little girl. For decades, I had carried the scene in my mind, returning to it in dreams and trying to understand why it meant so much to me.
Now I stood in an ordinary art store in Pennsylvania, looking at an illustration that closely resembled my private memories.
I never learned the artist’s name or the title of the picture, and I don’t remember whether I asked anyone in the store about it. I have searched for the artwork in recent years without finding an exact match, although some romantic Victorian paintings and decorative prints share elements of the scene.
The painting remained in my thoughts long after I left the store. Whatever its origin, encountering such a familiar image among the framed prints startled me and renewed my determination to understand the memories I had carried since childhood.
Flowers on a Grave
[IMAGE 7 — THE WOMAN AT THE GRAVE]
The dream of the beautiful meadow had another chapter, one that replaced its happiness with overwhelming sorrow.
In this later scene, I watched the woman I loved kneeling beside my grave. She wore a black mourning dress and a long dark veil, and she carried flowers that she placed upon the gravestone.
I experienced her grief with the same intensity that I had experienced the happiness of running toward her through the wildflowers. Her sorrow reached me across the dream, and I understood that the man whose life I had experienced was gone.
The memory never revealed how he died. I have wondered whether an illness, an accident, or some other event ended his life, but I remember no deathbed, battlefield, or final moments that would explain what happened.
I remember the woman kneeling beside the stone, mourning someone she loved deeply.
For many years, I connected the man’s death with Holly’s passing at forty-eight. That connection fit the story I had assembled from the memories, but the graveyard scene contained no identifying date or inscription that established whose grave I saw.
The sorrow has remained with me as vividly as the happiness of the meadow. I remember the woman’s smile and her yellow ribbons, and I remember her grief as she knelt beside the grave in black.
Those contrasting scenes have accompanied me throughout my life.
What I Remember and What I Filled In
[IMAGE 8 — THE FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY]
My research into Holly’s family has taught me something fascinating about the way our minds work. We remember experiences and then begin connecting people, places, and events into a complete story. Sometimes those connections help us understand what happened, while other times they reflect assumptions we made without realizing it.
I believed the children in the meadow were mine because I felt tremendous love and happiness in their presence. I believed the woman was my wife because of the powerful romantic connection I experienced as we ran toward one another.
But did I actually hear the children call me Papa? Did I witness a marriage or hear anyone describe the woman as my wife? Or did I understand those relationships through the emotions I experienced?
I can distinguish those questions now in a way I couldn’t when I first began dreaming as a little girl.
At three years old, I had no concept of marriage or romantic relationships, yet I experienced the emotions of a grown man who loved a woman and felt tremendous affection for the children near her. As I grew older, I interpreted those emotions through my developing understanding of adult life.
The images remained consistent in their central details: the man in white, the woman with yellow ribbons, the field of wildflowers, the white gazebo, the lake, the swans, and the children playing nearby.
I also remember the later scene of the woman in black mourning beside a grave.
The names, precise relationships, and number of children are less certain.
My identification of the man as Holly Taft followed a similar process. I connected the memories because they came to me during overlapping periods and involved nineteenth-century lives. Years of genealogical research have since introduced possibilities I never considered when I first assembled those experiences into a single story.
Perhaps the children belonged to the woman. Perhaps they were relatives or friends. Perhaps Holly loved someone whose life never entered the records I have examined. Or perhaps the man in the white suit belonged to another lifetime altogether.
I continue exploring these questions without forcing an answer.
These are my past-life memories, and I want to share them as I experienced them, including the discoveries that have helped me reconsider earlier conclusions.
Summer of ’69 on the Pizza Steps
[IMAGE 9 — JANET AND MOLLY WITH THEIR GUITARS]
In the summer of 1969, when I was fifteen years old, I met Molly, a sixteen-year-old girl who shared my love of music. We both carried guitars, and our voices blended beautifully from the first time we sang together. Our friendship developed quickly, and we spent much of that summer singing and talking on the broad dark-slate steps outside a neighborhood pizza parlor.
The shop occupied an old corner building in the Pittsburgh area, probably dating from the late nineteenth century. Its glass storefront allowed passersby to see much of the little restaurant, including the single pinball machine near the back. A red neon sign reading PIZZA glowed in the window, while the sidewalk curved around the corner toward the surrounding neighborhood.
The steps were wide enough for two teenage girls and their guitars to sit comfortably off to one side without blocking customers entering and leaving the shop. We claimed that spot as our stage and spent summer evenings singing Beatles songs and other favorites from the sixties for anyone who stopped to listen.
I had long, straight sandy-blonde hair with reddish highlights, bangs, fair skin, and blue eyes. Molly was a little taller, with long, straight dark hair parted down the middle and beautiful light-brown eyes. Our hair reached the middle of our backs, following the fashion of the day, and we both attracted plenty of attention.
Cars sometimes slowed as they passed, and the wolf whistles came often. We enjoyed the attention, the music, and the freedom of spending long summer evenings together. We sounded wonderful, and we knew it.
When we finished singing, we sometimes spent more time talking before heading home in opposite directions, Molly toward Emsworth and me toward Avalon. I usually arrived home between nine and eleven, following the unspoken rules that governed my teenage independence.
Those conversations gave me an opportunity to share experiences I had kept private through much of my childhood.
I told Molly about Jules, the young man whose fatal fall from a French fortress I had dreamed about since I was extraordinarily young. I also described the man in the white suit, the woman with yellow ribbons, the beautiful gazebo, the swans on the lake, and the children playing nearby.
I told her about the later dream in which the woman knelt beside the man’s grave, overwhelmed by grief.
Molly shared some of her own past-life memories, and we talked openly about experiences that had little place in the religious conversations surrounding my childhood.
Yet when I described the woman in white with yellow ribbons, Molly listened without revealing any particular connection to the scene.
I had no idea what she would tell me twenty years later.
The Letter
[IMAGE 10 — MOLLY’S HANDWRITTEN LETTER]
Molly and I remained close friends as we grew older, married, and established our own lives. Eventually she moved to another state, but we kept our friendship alive through long handwritten letters.
Yes, we actually sat down with paper and pen, wrote several pages about our lives, folded them into envelopes, attached stamps, and waited for the mailman to deliver them! Looking back, I appreciate how much care went into those letters, especially when we had something important to share.
Approximately twenty years after I first told Molly about the man in the white suit, one of her letters brought those childhood memories back to me with extraordinary force.
Molly wrote that she remembered our life together.
She remembered being the beautiful woman in white beside the willow, with yellow ribbons decorating her dress and hair. She remembered the love she had felt for the man who ran toward her through the meadow, and she remembered the devastating grief of losing him.
She told me she had been that woman.
I had carried those scenes in my own memory since early childhood, returning to them in dreams and trying to understand their meaning. Now my teenage friend, who had listened to the story while we sat with our guitars on the Pittsburgh pizza-parlor steps, wrote to tell me that she remembered experiencing the other side of it.
I felt a strange mixture of astonishment and recognition as I read her words. Molly’s letter connected with details I had shared with her so many years before, particularly the woman with yellow ribbons and the grief that followed the man’s death.
She described a love and sorrow that I recognized immediately.
I had told her the story when we were teenagers, never imagining that two decades later she would write to say she remembered being the woman I had described.
That letter became another remarkable chapter in a mystery that had accompanied me almost my entire life.
Lovers Then, Friends Now
[IMAGE 11 — LOVERS IN ONE LIFE, FRIENDS IN ANOTHER]
When Molly and I met as teenage girls in 1969, our friendship grew through music, laughter, long conversations, and the trust we developed while sharing our unusual experiences. We never approached that friendship romantically, and we both eventually married men with whom we built our lives.
Yet the memories we shared connected us with another relationship, one in which we remembered loving each other as a man and a woman.
For a while, I wondered why our friendship hadn’t carried the same romantic attraction I remembered from the meadow. As I explored my experiences of other lives, I came to understand relationships as connections that can take different forms across lifetimes. People who share one kind of relationship in one life may encounter one another as friends, relatives, companions, or even adversaries in another.
Molly and I found each other as teenage girls who loved music, and our friendship gave us the freedom to discuss experiences we might otherwise have kept hidden.
Twenty years later, her letter brought another dimension to that connection. She remembered the woman in white, the yellow ribbons, and the sorrow of losing the man she loved. I remembered experiencing the happiness of that relationship from the man’s side and the grief that followed.
We had lived separate adult lives, yet our memories brought us back to a scene we had discussed during one beautiful Pittsburgh summer.
I still cannot identify the man in the white suit, and my research into Holly Taft has raised as many questions as it has answered. Nevertheless, Molly’s letter remains one of the most meaningful developments in my exploration of those early dreams.
Her recollections gave me another account to consider alongside the memories I had carried since childhood.
The Mystery Remains
[IMAGE 12 — THE THREADS OF MEMORY: CLOSING COLLAGE]
I have spent much of my life exploring memories that came through dreams, meditation, and unexpected moments of recognition. Some led me toward historical people whose lives I could investigate, while others left me with vivid scenes and emotions but few clues about the identities involved.
The man in the white suit remains one of those mysteries.
For years, I believed he was Halsey Cook Taft, the boy I remembered from Lincoln’s deathbed. I haven’t abandoned that possibility, but my research has taught me to distinguish the memories themselves from the conclusions I drew afterward.
The children might have belonged to the man, the woman, relatives, or close friends. There might have been three, not four. The woman might have been his wife, his beloved companion, or someone whose relationship with him left no surviving historical record.
I remember the emotions and the setting far more clearly than the names and family relationships.
Most of all, I remember running through that beautiful meadow in my white suit, eager to embrace the woman who hurried toward me with yellow ribbons streaming from her hair. I remember the white gazebo beneath the great weeping willows, the swans and their babies, the ducks and geese, and the children playing among the flowers.
I remember the sorrow of watching that same woman kneel beside my grave.
I also remember being a little girl in Pittsburgh, puzzled by dreams that took me into the lives of grown men before I had learned anything about reincarnation. I carried those experiences privately through childhood, protecting them from a religious environment in which I didn’t feel safe discussing them.
Then I met Molly, and we shared our music and memories on the steps of a little neighborhood pizza parlor. Approximately twenty years later, she sent a handwritten letter describing her own memory of being the woman in white.
Perhaps another painting, family record, photograph, or dream will someday help me identify the man whose life I experienced so vividly. Perhaps I will discover that he was Holly, or perhaps another name will emerge.
I keep researching, remembering, and reconsidering what I once thought I understood, letting the original experiences speak for themselves while staying open to new discoveries.
The man’s name remains unknown, but I have never forgotten the beautiful afternoon by the lake, the woman with yellow ribbons, or the love that brought us running toward each other across a field of wildflowers.
And I have never forgotten the friend who, twenty years after hearing my story, wrote to tell me she remembered being that woman.
She is one of the many who carry one name.
Related Reading
Halsey’s Witness: My Life as Holly Taft
https://dragonattheendoftime.com/halseys-witness-my-life-as-holly-taft/
Jules and the Bastille
https://dragonattheendoftime.com/jules-and-the-bastille/
About the Author
Janet Kira Lessin is an author, researcher, media producer, and lifelong extraterrestrial contact experiencer whose work explores consciousness, reincarnation, human history, spiritual experiences, and the connections between lives. Through Aquarian Media, she shares personal accounts, historical research, and explorations of the mysteries of human existence.
Aquarian Media
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