Precognitive dreams



Over the years I’ve had a number of people share dreams where they thought they may have known what was going to happen in the future. I usually skirt the issue and deal with the more tangible images of the dream. When I have commented on the idea of prescience (keen insight), or even the more startling idea of precognition I’ve pointed out that for this to happen you need to have either a keen sense of intuition, or effect would  have to precede cause. Another explanation may be that everything has already happened and we are each living it out, though sometimes our brains malfunction and get ahead of themselves.

Some physicists have studied the phenomena of time and the direction it seems to go in and as it turns out not only does the past seem to make the present, but, oops, the present also seems to make the past and not just a person’s present experience of the past.

At the very miniscule quantum level, that is at the size of a photon of light, it appears that decisions made in how to observe an experimental result actually feedback to the beginning of the event and changes it. In short, the effect can come before the cause. Huh?

Does that mean that not only do our choices today affect the future, but they also affect our past? And does that then suggest that our future affects our present? Does that mean I can change my present by affecting my past? No, is the answer presented by Dr. Fred Alan Wolf PhD popular physicist and author of Taking The Quantum Leap (1989) and Time Loops and Space Twists (2010.) According to him there needs to be a conservation of continuity with regard to time that is when something has happened regardless of whether you’ve affected it in the present toward the past, or the future toward the present it cannot be changed to do so would quite literally split the universe into two universes where each of the two-time lines can co-exist side by side, but not as one.

But does this phenomenon exist in the macro world of our everyday life? In my book The Dragon’s Treasure (see Books by Author at right) I spend an entire chapter on time and report on a study done by two psychologists, Kolers and Grunau, from The University of Toronto (pg 154) where the results suggested that perhaps our minds don’t actually interpret events chronologically. The work of Dr. Roger Penrose also suggests that the ancient Hermetic axiom, “as above, so below” is true in that the quantum realm may be reflected in the macro, or human scale as well.

This asynchronous experience of reality shows up in dreams more often than not. Dreams seem to follow something other than linear time e.g. a nonlinear time, cause and effect is often turned on its head, and in fact everything seems to come at random. Why is this?

The answer may lay, in part, to one of the purposes of dreams e.g. to down load the days experiences, sort through them and encode those that may be of survival benefit and trashing those that may not. These memory fragments may come forward through association, one image associating with another thus appearing random in nature, or irrational. Also that part of the brain called the conscious mind is set up to perceive linearly, but that is the part that is shut down during sleep and the unconscious doesn’t need to work linearly. But both seem real when we are in them. They are even complimentary in that they both see reality, but from different temporal perspectives, thus they offer the potential for the wholeness that doesn’t exist in either, but does within the integration of their opposition–a process Carl Jung called Individuation. Following this concept of complimentary opposition it is no surprise that linear consciousness has its corollary in unconscious nonlinearity.

Sometimes in order for us to perceive reality as it is we need to function outside of linear time where we are not bound by the rules of cause and effect. It is in this realm where the creative composer, artist, poet, and writer dwells and expresses their spirit. It may also be there that we can remember what is yet to become.

It’s as the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s, ˆThrough the Looking Glass” said to Alice, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”