Very few human children remember their past lives, but even in these children mainstream culture usually represses these memories. Most children don't remember past lives. Adults typically don't remember past lives. Only a small fraction of people are psychic and recollect their past life experiences some time in their adult life. My friend James is one of those lucky ones. Even though some people recollect their past lives, in Western mainstream culture they have trouble incorporating these experiences in their world view because they have little understanding about souls and past lives. In India and some cultures of the 3rd world, past lives are respected and understood. The human experience for these people may be quite different.
In alternative culture of the West, there are groups which are aware of souls and past lives. These are lightworkers, new age people (which largely overlap with lightworkers), people in psychic culture, spiritualists, and other diverse grassroots groups of spirituality. Very often people cannot remember their past lives, but use the help of psychics tell the people about their past lives. I learned about my past lives from many people and some channeled aliens. Strangely, these messages almost never corroborate each other. I still take the messages about my past lives seriously but with some caution. I often take the personality of a psychic reader and gauge their messages by my trust in them. I wish I knew more about my past lives as do many people. The mainstream culture is ambiguous about the issue of past lives. Some movies and books treat the question seriously. People are aware of the concept, but many people in daily lives treat the idea of souls and past lives as fiction. A typical mainstream mindset is very materialistic. It allows for some spiritual life but formalizes it into something impractical and people typically push the spiritual life away and are afraid to talk about it in public for they could be judged as insane. Spirituality is very often considered superstition and mainstream people often choose to think "scientifically" as opposed to "succumbing to superstition". Even new age people speak openly about spiritual matters only in private circles and avoid speaking and often thinking about spirituality in environments which are not conducive to it.