Dreams of the Future--Psychic or Precognitive Dreams

Can we dream the future? Are psychic dreams and precognitive dreams REAL?

What happens when we sleep? What happens when we dream? Are there truly such things as precognitive dreams and dreams that tell the future? Where do we go? What do our dreams mean? Can a person be psychic in his/her sleep? Can one dream a premonition that comes true in waking life? If we have a dream that tells the future, can we then make use of the information given to us in our dreams? Have you ever had a premonition in a dream that came true?

I've looked for many years for the meaning in dreams and dreaming; I've done some research and read quite a few books on precognitive dreams or premonitions in dreams. I have a special reason for this interest. Are psychic dreams valid? Can a dream really foretell the future? Are dream meanings valid at all?

All of these questions have intrigued me or haunted me for many years.

You see, I once had a precognitive dream.

I was at a family reunion in my eldest brother Jerry's house in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, and had opted to sleep on the floor in his den rather than going to a hotel nearby. I went to sleep peacefully, then snapped awake after having the very worst nightmare I can ever remember: I thought I was Jerry, and that I owned a farm, and I was being crushed to death by a piece of farm equipment overturning. The feeling was so awful, painful...terrifying...I really just don't have the words to describe it, and so vivid I can recall it exactly to this day, twenty-odd years later.

I must have screamed. I woke my brother Louie, who was also sleeping in Jerry's house, somewhere nearby. He came to find out what was wrong. I was shaking and trembling and still very disoriented. I told Louie of my dream (probably in a fairly incoherent way). He calmed me down: he kept insisting it was just a dream, though my heart was telling me all the time, it was something more, something worse.

Now, at that time, my brother Jerry was not a farmer. He was a very successful businessman who owned a computer robotics company for anodizing computer chips. The farthest thing from anyone's mind was that Jerry would ever become a farmer. He ran away from our farm when he was 17, and vowed never to return.

I was around 30 years old; my eldest brother Jerry was about 46 years old, at the time of the dream and the family reunion.

Within a year or so, Jerry had become divorced. He then sold his business and bought a grape farm. Within a couple of years, he had remarried and was starting to make a go of his new venture with his new wife. His main customer for his product was Welches' Grape Juice. He seemed happy enough whenever we visited, but always, at the back of my mind, was that dream. I tried to tell him about it; I tried to warn him, but he very understandably kind of pooh-poohed the whole thing.

My eldest brother Jerry died, at 50 years of age, from a farm accident. A heavy piece of farm equipment that he was unloading from a truckbed overturned on him, crushing him to death.

I felt so guilty: I should have warned him more. I should have found a way to make him take me seriously, instead of being too embarrassed to pursue the subject with him. Because, you see, in my heart, I knew what was going to happen to him. I had already dreamt the whole thing.

The books that I've read and the research that has been conducted, mostly at Duke University but also other places; places that specialize in sleep disorders, seem to be very skeptical of the validity of precognitive dreaming, or dreaming of the future.

The reason why is a valid reason for a scientist but not valid in real life. Science doesn't count something as valid and true unless it can be repeated under controlled conditions, in a laboratory. The problem with thinking that way in relation to psychic phenomena is that psychic events don't typically happen in any predictable, repeatable way. Not the very few events that have happened to me, anyway. I tend to think that if a so-called psychic can repeat and control the phenomena, then it's probably fake. In real life, a psychic event takes an ordinary person completely by surprise, and seems very eerie, scary and inexplicable.

That is why most psi phenomena or psychic powers have been debunked by the scientific community at large.

First of all, in conventional scientific terms, an event cannot precede it's cause. So we can't be aware of something happening before it happens. To a scientist, this simply isn't possible to begin with. So, already, any scientists conducting a psi experiment are predisposed to disbelieve.

The type of experiments conducted were tests with a forced choice of objects that the participant in the study selected, to be compared with the choices the experimenter made, blindly, without knowing the participant's choices, after the participant had already chosen. A meta-analysis of this data collected in well over 300 experiments conducted by over 60 different science studies indicated there is firm, definite validity to precognition as a reliable affect; though the percentage of data so affected was small, still, precognition was the only explanation for the statistical anomalies. This analysis took place in the late 1980s and used data collected over a period of many years of research.

Even with this exhuastive body of evidence, collected and analyzed by scientists themselves, conventional science still does not recognize the validity of precognition or most psi phenomena.

Scientist then made the test even more stringent: they did what is called "unconscious perception studies", where the subject did not know he/she was being tested for psychic phenomenon or precognitive abilities. Scientists Dick Bierman and Dean Radin have recorded positive evidence of precognition in these experiments.

Probably the best and most well-known study of dreaming the future was conducted by Louisa Rhine at the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. She collected over 7000 psychic phenomena; the majority were dream-related and involved precognition or premonitions.

In a separate study in Atlanta, David Ryback collected from 433 dream questionaires the information that well close to 67% of the people had dream experiences that they believed to be psychic or precognitive; Dr. Ryback found that truly about 9% of the people had actual premonitions in dreams that validly came true at a later date, from events completely outside the subject's control.

One of the most fascinating explanations of the valid psychic phenomenon of premonitions, dream premonitions, precognition, or dream precognition, is called the resonance theory, based on the "block model universe".

Translated into simpler language, the theory is that all future events already exist, simultaneously. Space-time is a continuum but not a linear one. Everything that will happen, is already there. Everything that ever was or will be, is there. One big block of space-time that has everything that ever was or will be in it, along with everything that ever happened or will happen in it.

The resonance comes into play because similar events involving identical people tend to have a resonance that attracts other similar events happening to identical people. Isolated events are really quite rare. As an event occurs, so it has happened in the past and also the future. I know it's an old wives' tale that really does seem to be true that things happen in threes. What we tap into when we have a valid premonition, or dream premonition, or precognitive dream, is a memory of the future triggered by some resonant present stimulus.

I like this theory. I can work with it. I think it was maybe enough to be sleeping under my brother Jerry's roof, to set up the necessary resonance for me to see, and feel, in my sleep, a valid premonition of his grim death.

What bothers me, to this day, was--having been given this information, it seems there was nothing I could usefully do with it to change future events. Maybe I just didn't try hard enough, or maybe it just wasn't possible to change future events that are tumbling around in this big block of space-time and already written in the sands of time.

Maybe. That's one question I really wish I knew the answer to, for certain.