What is time? Most of us think of it as some kind of flow of events from the past through the present and into the future. We remember the past, live in the present, and the future is unknown. Precognition, however, makes nonsense of that common definition, suggesting that the future can somehow be glimpsed in the now.
Remembering Their Future
To illustrate this kind of ‘remembering the future’ being possible, I’m not going to highlight well-known and reported examples, such as the vast number of people reporting that they had dreams of planes flying into towers before 9/11 or Abraham Lincoln dreaming his own death. Instead, I’m going to share with you a couple of true stories from among the thousands sent to me by my readers over the many years I’ve been a bestselling dream author. Let’s begin with Rachel’s glass house.
The Glass House
On the evening of my daughter’s fourth birthday, I had a dream that was so vivid I woke up thinking it had actually happened.
Many of my dreams are a collection of random images, but this dream felt like a story with a beginning, middle, and end. In my dream, I was playing with my daughter in a house made entirely of glass. We were playing catch with a ball and laughing and going from room to room.
When we got to a room at the front of the house, I heard birds singing – the sound was so loud it distracted me, and I missed catching the ball my daughter threw me. The ball flew into the glass and the house shattered with splinters and shards everywhere. I heard my daughter screaming. I woke up absolutely terrified and covered in sweat, with screaming still echoing in my ears. I was so unnerved I went into my daughter’s bedroom to check she was sleeping safely. The memory of that dream stayed with me strongly.
A few weeks later, my daughter was invited to a friend’s house to play. The mother seemed keen for me to drop my daughter off and return a few hours later to pick her up. I would normally do that, but something made me hesitate. Perhaps it was because this was the first time my daughter had played at this particular friend’s house? Whatever it was, I told the mother that if it were okay I would like to stay while the children played. The mother invited me in.
My daughter rushed off with her friend to play in the conservatory where there was a doll’s house. The mother brought me a cup of tea and asked if I wouldn’t mind watching the girls while she went to the shops. I said that was fine and took my cup of tea into the conservatory.
The moment I entered, I felt like I had been there before. It was like the glass house of my dream, as it had huge glass windows on three sides from ceiling to floor. I heard birds singing loudly. My dream flashed into my mind and without hesitating I told the girls to come with me into the kitchen.
A few moments after we left the conservatory, I heard this almighty shattering sound. I rushed in and a cricket ball had been thrown through the window of the conservatory right above where the doll’s house was positioned. It had come from the garden next door, where two teenage boys had been larking about. There was glass splintered everywhere and I shudder to think what might have happened if the girls had still been playing there.
Clear Cut
Precognitions like Rachel’s seriously complicate our everyday definitions of past, present, and future, as they suggest that it IS possible to know or remember specific details about the future. And it was a case of precognition for Rachel because the future event her dream foreshadowed was not predictable using memory, logic, probability, or her five senses. The mark of a precognitive dream is that it is random and unexpected.
Here’s another clear-cut example of night vision at work, sent to me by Mike. I’m including it as I’m keen to not just prove that precognitive dreaming – and the waking déjà vu (or should that be déjà rêvé, meaning already dreamed) it ignites – is the norm and not the exception. I’m including it to show that precognitive dreams aren’t just about potential impending disasters. Sometimes the dreams they catch are happy ones:
Motorcycle Dreams
A few years ago, I had this mesmerizing dream. In the dream, I was a stork and I was delivering babies to parents. Some of them were very shocked to see me. I didn’t recognize any of the parents in my dream they were all strangers except for one. It was a friend from my university days. We had been lab partners but had completely lost touch over the years. I told him in my dream stork persona that he was going to become the proud father to twin boys, and he was going to call those boys Harley and Davidson. When I woke up, the dream made me feel unexpectedly happy. I had no idea why.
I forgot all about my dream until a few months later I got a card in the post out of the blue from the friend who had appeared in my dream. He was proudly announcing the birth of his sons – you guessed it – twins. Now he didn’t call his sons Harley or Davidson. But the card he used for the announcement was a picture of him and his wife on a Harley Davidson cradling their newborn sons. It sent shivers down my spine!
Your Inner TARDIS
Both these true stories are examples of precognitive dreaming for the simple reason that research shows precognition is most likely to occur in the dreaming state. It’s obvious why. In the dreaming state, anything is possible and the only things missing are your reason and logic. When you are awake, your conscious reason and logic typically block your innate precognition, and you are more likely to dismiss the sixth sense as nonsense. This doesn’t mean, though, that you can’t glimpse the future when awake– you certainly can. (I urge you to watch the spine-tingling Sir Alex Guinness interview with British interviewer Parkinson on YouTube for a classic example of a true life-waking precognition.)
Of course, it is always possible that what you think of as a precognitive experience is actually a coincidence. Determining whether a particular type of experience is really a genuine precognition and whether a particular person has consistent precognitive skills generally requires scientific analysis and controlled tests. That’s where IONS is leading the way.
And the exciting news is that IONS research suggests that we all have the potential to glimpse the future, most especially when we fall asleep and suspend disbelief in our night vision. All the indications are that the dream state is your inner TARDIS, boldly transcending not just your body and mind but time and space every single night.
