For several years I kept an aquarium in my living room. One night as I lay in my bedroom sleeping, I dreamed the fish named Goldie fell with a thud against the aquarium floor. Startled, I awakened and went to the living room to see if she was all right. Goldie was swimming around looking just fine.
The next day Goldie got hung up in the plastic leaf decorations. I set her free and she plunked to the bottom just like in my dream although without making a thudding sound. The fish died later that day.
This is a typical example of a precognitive dream. It was literal in the sense that I saw in the dream substantially the same image I saw in waking life. Although some precognitive dreams take longer to come true, most do within twenty-four hours. Research indicates the same experience I've had personally.
The subject matter was mundane. Well for me, not for Goldie. The subjects of most precognitive dreams generally pertain to the ordinary events of our lives.
These clear dreams predict by showing what looks like reality and give us tips about our waking life. For example, they give warnings, important or trivial, and rehearse alternate futures from which we can choose the same way we consider alternatives while we are making decisions while awake.
Precognitive dreams can be literal like the Goldie dream or symbolic like one I had about a plane crash on January 2, 2009.
I was jumping to safety from a plane crash. Those who had survived jumped into the sea and hoped for rescue aboard ship. I watched myself and others cannonball into the water, which was frigid. I awoke momentarily, realized I was in a dangerous situation, and felt afraid. My heart was thumping. I went back to sleep and dreamed the same scenario again two or three more times.
Over the next few days I dreamed of travel danger.
One day as I drove past Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, my hands shook so much I considered getting off the freeway and stopping the car. Although I drove on home, my distress was so great that I cancelled my plans to go to New York City to visit a friend in March.
I interpret I was getting precognitive flashes of the U S Airways plane, which went down in the Hudson River on Jan. 17. U S Airways is headquartered in Phoenix, so that very plane could well have been sitting in the airport as I passed by and felt so much trepidation. My emotions, although important, served as secondary confirmation to my disaster dreams, specifically the terror of having to jump into the frigid water.
Normally I'm not afraid to fly, so this was an unusual circumstance for me. I honored the dreams and did not take the chance but have gone on other flights since, even U S Airways flights.
Besides literal dreams and symbolic dreams, other aspects of dreaming psi can occur. Psi is a general term to indicate any anomalous experience like precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, or psychokinesis. It's not always obvious which faculty dreaming psi involves. One of my dreams might have been an example of precognition and telepathy.
I dreamed I ordered a floral arrangement, which consisted of a spray of flowers with a teddy bear. I don’t know who I was ordering for, but definitely a family member.
Four months later my sister had surgery. I asked my granddaughter, Emily, to go on a flower delivery website and pick out something she thought my sister would like so we could send a gift to the hospital.
On her own, Emily picked a floral spray with a teddy bear and balloon. So perhaps I dreamed the future, but telepathy might also explain what happened. Perhaps Emily tapped into my conscious thought or my dream memory. She has on several occasions said what I was thinking. Maybe I subconsciously sent her the message.
Such events happen frequently within families or with people who are close to each other.
Dr. Stanley Krippner, a medical doctor, did phenomenal research on telepathy in dreams at Maimonides Hospital in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. The experimenters assembled a collection of photographs of art prints. On the night of the experiment, the experimenter chose one art print and focused on sending the image telepathically to the dreamers.
The dreamers in the other room went to sleep with the directive to dream about the target art print chosen for the night. They wrote summaries of their dreams. Afterward independent judges were given all of the art print and dream summaries. Their task was to match the art prints with the dream summaries. The high number of hits, far beyond what would have been calculated by chance, showed dreamers dreamed about the target pictures.
The Ganzfeld protocol, developed in the 1930s, is still in use in psi laboratories. It attempts to measure waking telepathy where a sender sent a mental image of a photo or picture to a receiver who was blindfolded and listening to white noise. Over the years these results have consistently come in at one-third where chance would be one-fourth. The hits increase when the sender and receiver are close like husband and wife.
Research on psi began in the 1800s and continued through the 1900s with notables like J. B. Rhine and his wife, Dr. Louise Rhine, at Duke University. They studied precognition among other things. It's even going on today.
You can be a part of it online by going to these websites: noetic.org, gotpsi.org, aspr.com.
In history Calpurnia, the wife of Julius Caesar, had two dreams that prophesied his death by assassination. Plutarch recorded her dreams for posterity. Interestingly, one was a symbolic dream, that the pediment of their house collapsed. We could interpret Caesar himself being the pediment or pillar of their household. Calpurnia's other dream was literal, that Caesar was stabbed, and she wept over him as she held him, murdered, in her arms. If only Caesar had trusted his wife's dreams, he might have lived much longer.
In the Old Testament of the Bible there are several examples of psychic material in dreams and visions. Joseph had dreams that came true and could interpret the dreams of others. Samuel heard the voice of God in dreams. It would seem that interest in psi ability is ages old.
Perhaps we as the human race are developing our abilities in telepathy. Jeremy Taylor, author of Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill and several other books on dreaming, believes that the human race is developing greater telepathic abilities.
Taylor suggests that in our evolutionary past humans dreamed together to develop language. If that's possible, then perhaps we are developing our telepathic abilities now for the next stage of our evolution.
Often when we recall dreams we have the experience of seeing an image of a person in our dream. That person communicates with us despite the fact that his mouth does not move. We just seem to know what he means without his using language. We seem to operate telepathically in our dreams, perhaps helping ourselves to become more telepathic in the waking state.
Regardless, one thing we know for sure is that we can provoke our own precognitive and telepathic dreams. If you intend to have a precognitive dream and ask your dreaming self to assist, chances are you'll be successful. The better record you keep of your dreams, the greater the chance you'll find successful demonstrations.
Here's a Tip
• Ask a partner to select some dynamic looking photos from a magazine. Have him focus on one each night while you attempt to dream about the subject. Then compare your dream notes to the pictures used. You can make it more complex by inviting a third person to judge the dream stories and match them to the photos.
• Set a time for one person to send a telepathic message in words or an image from a picture to another person. Generally images that evoke emotions work better. Make sure you are in separate locations. Then compare your pictures or stories to the target image.
• Ask your dreaming self for a precognitive dream of something that will happen the next day. Write the dream down as soon as you awake so you'll have evidence for a demonstration.
• Set up a precognition dream study with interested friends. For example, "At 6 am (PDT)Pacific daylight time on the morning of Nov. 3 I will shuffle a deck of regular playing cards. Then I will turn up the top card." Your task is to see in your dream or intuition which card I will turn up. Feel free to submit entries anytime up until the drawing.
• Try your hand at games on psiarcade.com, noetic.org, gotpsi.org, and aspr.com.
