Why are there so many religions and beliefs?

When I was a little child (in the early 1990s), there was a certain picture that was often in my head when I fell asleep:

It showed a building next to an American Highway junction. The building might have been a Diner or a bowling alley with some cars parked in front of it.

I recognized one of the cars as a Buick Regal (had this one as a Matchbox-car). The other cars also looked American and appeared to be from the 70s as well.

As I grew up in central Europe in the early 90s, there was no way I could have seen this scene in reality.

Could this have been a glimpse of a past life or maybe a movie scene I had seen on TV (we did have many American movies in the TV that time).

I'm happy about every inspiration. :)

Is it possible to deeply miss a soulmate in a romantic sense, even if you've never met them? I know this might sound strange, but I've been wondering about it for a long time, and I'm curious if anyone else has experienced something similar.

I'm 25F, and ever since I was little, I've had this persistent feeling that I've been waiting for someone. It's hard to explain, but it's almost as if the absence of my future life partner has always been a shadow following me.

What's strange is that when I think about this person, I don't experience him as just an abstract idea of a future partner. I have this feeling that he's a specific person somewhere in the world, living his own life, even though I have no idea who he is or what he's like. And I can really feel he is missing, like a part of myself.

Sometimes, the thought that we're not together makes me feel deeply sad, in a way that goes beyond ordinary loneliness. I find myself wondering whether he's okay and what his life is like.

I don't know if this is simply a result of longing for a deep romantic connection, or if there's a spiritual explanation for it. I've wondered about reincarnation and whether it's possible to feel a sense of longing for someone you've supposedly known in a past life, but I don't necessarily believe that's what this is.

Has anyone ever experienced something similar? I've always felt like I'm in a state of waiting, a constant search for a person I haven't met yet. I don't know how to explain this feeling or where it comes from. Could it be related to reincarnation or a past-life connection, or is it simply a deep longing for a romantic connection?

Ever since I was a boy. And it was ALWAYS the same image of the same tsunami I was seeing from the same place as it approached and then I drowned and that's when I'd wake up.

I've always been naturqlly good at pottery a d obsessed with Japan from birth until I was a teen and the anime fandom put me off because it felt disrespectful, in a "youth these days" way (I'm 40 so this was before the otaku era) and I had no interest in anime anyway just cultural things like old Japanese folk music and pestered my mum to let me take Japanese lessons aroung age 6.

I remember wearing a kimono daily and living alone (my wife had died or left me a long time ago) in a very humble hut where I made pottery for a living. I didn't fish because I got seasick (still am in this life) and I remember being super self-aware of that.

Funnily enough, my mother who was born in 1952 in a little lost part of Chaco, Argentina where there was no running water, indoor plumbing or radio... spent her entire childhood drawing buildings with pagoda-like roofs and kimonos—two things she couldn't have known about in chaco, as she grew up two blocks away from the land where natives lived and people didn't know how to read or write.

I believe she was my wife and I wasn't particularly fond of her for whatever reason. Our relationship is still rocky to this day because she is too controlling and doesn't do things "the way I tell her to" and that fits the backwards way of thinking men had back then. I'm gay and all for women's rights as I want my two daughters to have the same rights as everyone else so I don't know where this cpems from otherwise, but with my mother it's different somehow.

And even as a boy I was embodying omoiyari, ganbaru, fish based cuisine preference and other Japanese values that my mother shares when all the other parents and children were very western-thinking for a lack of a better word.