"Why is it that most people's past lives were so much more interesting than their present ones? They were all Egyptian princesses/handmaidens/priestesses or burned at the stake for their pagan beliefs or innocent Irish maidservants murdered by wealthy lovers."

That is a common misconception, Bee, which is endlessly repeated by skeptics....(rather as the phrase "little green men" is endlessly repeated by AFO skeptics, despite the fact that no AFO witness I've ever heard from claims to have seen little green men).

Regression therapy results and other serious investigations into the matter suggest that people's memories of past lives usually run the gamut of all possible types of lives, most of them pretty mundane and ordinary by the standards of the time. However, the most traumatic incidents in any of those lives tend to leave strong emotional impressions. Thus, if you ended a life by being burned at the stake or going down in a sinking ship or being murdered by your lover, for example, then it is likely to have certain lingering emotional influences in subsequent lives, because the strong emotions are still resonating in the subconcious. One is much more likely to focus on a single traumatic incident than on a succession of several hundred similar days of getting up in the morning and doing one's daily work, right? ;-) This is just as true in the context of one life as it is in the context of many.

Now, for example, I am afraid of deep water and I don't like being in it. I am afraid of cold water. I also don't like going out on the ocean or on any large body of water if I can help it. Can you guess why that might be?

The fact that I seem to have died a traumatic death on the ocean in a certain past life registers far stronger on me now than do the other thousands of days in that very ordinary life when things were quite normal and not too remarkable...

I have had no memories of past lives which suggest I was anyone famous or particularly rich...but I have had rather distinct memories of several past lives. In some I was male. In some I was female. Like other people, I got caught up in the great events of the times (wars, etc)...and some of those lives ended in a traumatic fashion while others ended more quietly.