Must say I've often wondered about this too George. I don't know but my personal sense is (given that time is unitary in the absolute sense) that we probably can be reincarnated backwards in time....

Hi George-
I wish I could give you a definite answer with all the edges tucked in. But honestly I don't know what the rules are for reincarnation.

I have had people on only one or two occasions who told me of reincarnations out of calendrical order. In one case, the woman was a miner's wife who had to help move the family over a narrow mountain path in mid-winter.  She was holding one child and carrying the other, and as she walked over the path she slipped and instinctively reached out to grab a rock to steady herself.  This caused one of the children to fall. She was devastated, sure that she was a murderer, a horrible mom, a terrible person etc etc.

After they arrived in the place where the mine was she eventually got hit by a rock or something and died. She went into the afterlife with every confidence that God was going to run her through the Cosmic Meatgrinder.  Instead, she found herself reincarnated as a rabbit in a woodland area. As she went about doing her rabbit thing, a native hunter shot her with an arrow, and took her home for dinner. She understood that this was her destiny in that world, and had no problems with it.  It was her good (or bad) fortune to feed this man's family. (This is sort of a spontaneous Chod, similar to what Vajra has been mentioning recently.) Then she realized that the death of her child was similarly a response to a vast number of causes and that her slip on the trail was merely the means whereby it would occur. She was then reborn into a more modern world as a person again.

The retrogression into an animal lifeform is extremely rare in my experience. Just when this happened, I don't know, but it may well have been centuries prior to her trip over the mountain. (However, one day while camping in the mountains, I shared a vision of the countryside -  me included - with a passing hawk high above me. So this might be quite common. Many shamans use similar methods to discover their totem animal.)

My usual expectation is that we start as a primitive critter (I recall that I was a worm, for example) and then more or less work our way up to human status. This belief can be found in ancient Egypt as well. Most people I work with give me an equivalent kind of history. The most abstract were recollections of being a lava flow that sort of absorbed information as it crystallized, or a woman who was an amoeba, and who found herself under a microscope in a bizarre lab where they studied her - and then insulted her by flushing her down the sewer.

Just as people can learn about the past, it is also possible to go into the future to learn what is coming up - except that there are so many alternatives that we only have a small chance of making a proper guess which is going to happen.  When I teach regression, I always require students to take someone forward in time as well - so it seems reasonable that they might actually go forward to incarnate and then return here.  But I have no data.

Wish I could be more helpful -
dave

i've never thought about this subject, but as they say there is no time in the afterlife, or time is happening all at once, having lives out of earthly chronological order wouldn't matter, would it?