Hi. If your experience is like my experience, I think 'Joe' is another person that you have some kind of karmic connection with. From what you describe, he either lives in the past or in some place that is enough like our past for you to imagine it that way. I doubt that people have 'past lives' in the sense of a unique one dimensional sequence of lives all of which belong to a single individual and to nobody else. I think we have inner connections with people who have lived before, but the topology of it is not that simple. I also think Joe's life is likely to be in some other world similar to and related to ours, not necessarily in our historical past. I'm trying to understand this sort of thing better for myself. There are deeper patterns underlying our physical experiences, and there are multiple possible 'lives', worlds, or sequences of events that are largely equivalent for expressing those patterns. There is an interrelationship, and some kind of psychic ebb and flow between these different worlds. Its possible for them to branch and join, intersecting physically in our waking world, though for us this doesn't commonly happen in an obvious way. I speculate that premonitions of the future are actually visions of other worlds which are slightly 'ahead' of ours, but this is a guess, and if I knew more I would probably see that my thought of it isn't entirely meaningful.

About 13 years ago I had a relatively strong dream that I later connected with a person that I met in 2009. When that person first saw me, he said that when he saw me he saw himself, as if I was somehow him. I found that to be a very strange thing to say to a stranger when first meeting them, and I didn't have that same kind of impression of him. His personality was quite different from mine, and not entirely agreeable to it. This person died a couple of months later, killed by himself or someone else. I don't think that he could be considered 'me' in a 'group soul' sense, but afterwards I do think there was a connection. So I think it could be that way with 'past' individuals also.

I have had a couple of dreams that could be interpreted as 'past lives', though like I said I don't interpret them that way. For example I was some wealthy and slightly crippled German investor who had a mistress and a couple of very nice pianos. The most remarkable thing to me was feeling what it was like to be him - his motive, the way that he looks at the world, was very different from mine.

Something else I've found out about these sorts of experiences is the other person isn't necessarily aware of you in the same way that you are aware of them. Joe may know something that you can learn from, just by being partially in the presence of his mind, but he might actually have no idea that you exist. For me there is a 3rd party that mediates between me and the other person. That 3rd party could be considered a god or a spirit guide or something, but I don't understand in what sense it has an independent existence.

As a side note, as an experiment I've been able to astral project, but in general I don't. I also don't practice lucid dreaming in the conventional sense, though I am conscious and I think while dreaming. Not everything that people do for thrills is a very good idea, drug use being one example, and I have some reason to believe that astral projection has unhealthy long term effects. I'll probably post my opinions on these topics later.