Precognitive Dreams

I had one unambiguous dream of the very near future, an event that came to pass two or three days after my dream of it. The matter was rather ordinary in a way, and the only reason I became aware of the dream, and able to check that it had come true, was because, at that time, I’d just read J.W. Dunne’s book, An Experiment with Time. Dunne, who published this work in 1947, is probably the best-known expositor of precognitive dreaming. Having read the book, I set myself the task of recording dreams when I remembered them on waking. I wanted to test Dunne’s assertion that most everybody occasionally dreams the future. But just because the future is pretty much like the past, we don’t notice the fact. Record your dreams, Dunne had urged. Compare them to later events. You’ll convince yourself. I took up the challenge. This was in the early 1960s. I had my proof within about a week. As soon as I did I stopped my experiment because recording dreams was tedious. The intention to do so kept waking me up.

The dream itself developed as follows. I dreamt that I was in my office with my door closed so that I could concentrate on writing a final report on what had been a long and painful research project for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. My office happened to be next to the conference room. As I was laboring at my typewriter, this is still in the dream, noises penetrated through the wall and gave me the impression that people were arguing. After a while the argument ceased. Someone then knocked on my door. I rose and opened it. Outside stood the head of our Washington office. He was in the company of a tall black and rather distinguished-looking gentleman. With that the dream ended.

I noted this dream and went back to sleep. I promptly forgot it again—until, some days later, I actually lived the actuality. Events in reality developed almost exactly the same way. The only difference was that, instead of an argument next door, I heard muffled conversation and the persistent clicking of chalk on the blackboard. The noise disturbed my concentration enough so that I grew quite incensed. And, yes. My door was closed. Then the dream-event actually happened. A knock sounded on the door, I opened it. The head of our office stood there with a tall, black gentlemen. He wanted to introduce me to his visitor. The man was the president of the National Bar Association, then a body of black lawyers. The American Bar Association, at that time, had only white members. This was the 1960s, after all. The gentleman was the only black person I ever remember seeing in that office as a visitor in the course of the year I then spent in Washington, D.C.; thus it was an unusual and memorable event. After a few words of conversation, my chief took the gentleman to lunch. I sort of staggered back to my chair, sat down and shook my head: I’d actually dreamt the future. The dream had come rushing back the moment I’d opened the door. And my notes, still there at home, confirmed it with a date.

As Dunne pointed out, precognitive dreams are still dreams; they use symbolical representations of future events. They’re not always as boringly literal as my dream had been. Brigitte had a precognitive dream of Kennedy’s assassination two days before it happened. We lived in a second-storey apartment at the time. She dreamt that she was upstairs looking down at the street below. I came driving by in a convertible. We didn’t own a convertible then; we drove a VW beetle. Then she heard a shot and saw, in horror, that my head was rolling on the pavement down below… In her dream-vocabulary, the President was symbolized by a stand-in, someone who had the role of “head of household” in her own immediate life.

The literature on precognitive dreaming is extensive, some of it recent. Nine-eleven produced a rash of these that some people have collected and made available on the Internet. Mere laziness prevents me from giving links here. But they’re available. Great public events always seem to ease such dreams out of hiding; people recognize, from the news of the events, that they’d actually dreamt them. Thus there were also people who dreamt of the Titanic’s sinking before it actually took place. Denial of this sort of thing is literally impossible if they happen to you or to immediate members of your family. This then lends credence to more distant reports because we are sensible and rational in knowing what we know. Here I refer back to an earlier entry on epistemology.

Precognitive dreams, therefore, represent a dimension of dreaming which goes far, far beyond the more ordinary explanation, which I’ve presented already, namely that dreams are (and most certainly are) the automatic presentation of memories by the awakening brain. What precognitive dreams indicate, at minimum, is that our conceptualizations of time and space, however useful they are in everyday life, do not exhaust the possibilities available to a transcendent function that I call consciousness or mind.