LARAMIE - It seemed absurd.

A young man in the late 1960s asked University of Wyoming psychologist Leo Sprinkle for help with a phobia about dogs. Sprinkle thought perhaps a childhood memory would shed light on his fears. So Sprinkle hypnotized the man; but no such early memories emerged.

Sprinkle then asked the man to go back to the earliest memory associated with his fear of dogs. He landed in what seemed to be a life as a medieval woodsman who was attacked by wolves. Upon returning to the normal state, he shook Sprinkle's hand and remarked, "Now I know why I'm afraid of dogs."

"This is nonsense," Sprinkle told himself. "But it's helpful nonsense."

A few days later, a 30-year-old woman asked Sprinkle to help her with an irrational fear of drowning. Again, under hypnosis, no childhood trauma was identified. She, too, was asked to recall her earliest memory related to a fear of drowning. She reported the experience of what seemed to be a pirate.

"The pirate was so obnoxious that his buddies keel-hauled him," Sprinkle says.

Despite her obvious discomfort, the woman resisted returning to the normal state because she indicated she was learning something important. When the session ended, she thanked Sprinkle for helping her resolve her fear of drowning. In a later follow-up interview, the woman said she no longer feared drowning and had even taken swimming lessons.

Now the psychologist was intrigued. Maybe - just maybe - this wasn't such nonsense after all.

"Intrigued" is a word Leo Sprinkle uses frequently. In some ways, he has built his career upon it. And at times, the subjects that have intrigued him have been unorthodox. His curiosity has taken him into such realms of inquiry as UFOs and reincarnation.

His interests in the offbeat also have cost him. As a professor at the University of Wyoming, Sprinkle says his colleagues thought he was "not only on the wrong path professionally, but also on the wrong path so far as the university was concerned." So in 1989, after 25 years with UW, he left for private practice.

Sprinkle's demeanor is friendly and his manner gentle. As he responds to questions, he frequently pops up from his chair to sort through reference books in order to correctly reflect the findings of Helen Wambach or Ian Stevenson and other reincarnation researchers. His laugh comes easily.

One model of reincarnation, Sprinkle says, suggests that the Creator is a huge ball of energy, out of which come the archangels, out of which come the angels, out of which come human beings. And Creation is expanding, learning and growing as a result of what we do.

"Some people say human souls are a spark of the divine flame," Sprinkle says. "I like that kind of comment. It makes sense to me."

The model also suggests the conditions for a life are set before birth, depending upon what tasks we need to learn, the projects we'll be involved with and the causes to which we will be devoted.

What has been described variously as a chamber of beings, or a committee or council, helps create the conditions for a life, not in a punitive fashion, but after the manner of a exploration, or a questioning: "Are you going to be taking on too much by being a crippled, little old black lady - who's a Jew," Sprinkle laughs. "Maybe that's more than you want to handle in one lifetime. Maybe you could take that on in two or three lifetimes."

Of course, there are critics who believe the notion of reincarnation is ridiculous, perhaps even dangerous.

Past life experiences might be nothing more than products of an overactive imagination, they argue, forgotten influences from the past, simple lies or even memories not of one's own past lives but from the lives of people now deceased. Some Christian denominations hold that brushes with "past lives" are the work of Satan.

"You haven't been there," counters Henrietta Songer of Sheridan. "You don't know the experience."

Songer seems to be a level-headed, 81-year-old great-grandmother who worked in the electronics industry in California and later was the controller of a road construction firm, where she was employed for over 20 years.

On her first trip to the Yucatan area of Mexico, while visiting Kabah, as she walked across a field and viewed a white archway, Songer says she got a powerful sense that she had been there before.

Subsequently, during her first regression session, Songer says instead of finding herself in New England or in Wales where her ancestors hailed from, she landed in Kabah, where she appeared to be a priest - "I mean, I was a hunk. Wow!" she laughs. She was clothed in sandals and a white garment, and was being transported on the shoulders of four men to the city of Tulum.

When asked to experience the end of that life, Songer says she saw herself inside a temple in Tulum, a shriveled little man hunched over in a corner.

"The best way I can describe it, it's like a dream," she says. "You're seeing all these things, and it's in technicolor. It's like you were there and you're in this other body."

In another experience, Songer says she found herself in a setting previous to birth. There was a gathering of what she describes as "sort of gauzy" figures.

"I didn't have anything to say about it," she says, "and I didn't want to come down and relive a life down here again. I was angry, I was frustrated, but there was nothing I could do about it."

She says she has not experienced death during a regression. "At times, when I've been hurting pretty good, I feel like, man, let me go," she says. "I don't think I would ever take my life - it's not my decision. Some of these guys who decided I needed to come down this time will tell me when I leave."

In the Sheridan area, Songer says she personally knows 30 to 40 people who are interested in reincarnation, but due a fear of ridicule, "A lot of them don't want to admit it."

While belief in reincarnation might seem strange in Wyoming, for the entirety of mankind, it is anything but uncommon, spanning cultures from the Buddhists of Tibet to Indians of the Northwest Coast. Some argue a belief in reincarnation can even be found in early Christianity.

And contrary to a popular misconception, not everyone who reports evidence for a past life claims they were once Queen Cleopatra or Napoleon Bonaparte. In fact, according to Sprinkle, the research of Helen Wambach and others indicates most people, depending upon the time period, report living lower-class lives in villages under rather harsh conditions.

In addition, even though most participants in reincarnation sessions are women - Sprinkle's figures show that of those who participate in workshops, two-thirds are female - Wambach found on average a nearly even split of male and female lifetimes reported.

Sprinkle also speculates that this life and reincarnation might not be part of a closed system; in other words, life could be present in many places throughout the universe and take many forms. On planet Earth, we are of a basic mammalian stock, but other places the intelligent species may be of insect, reptilian or even robotic in origin.

Over the years, Sprinkle and his wife, Marilyn, have worked with thousands of people in private sessions and in reincarnation workshops, not for the purpose of persuading, but for the purpose of seeking.

"I don't try to convince people that what I know is true," he says. "What I try to convince people is that I'm exploring and that I want to find out, and I want to be helpful to people who want to find out. And to me, that's a pretty good motive."