On September 3rd, 2001, eight days before the 9/11 attacks, I dreamed that I went outside and saw dark storm clouds in the distance. Then an American Airlines plane appeared, flying very low. Suddenly, it swerved and crashed into the woods. I ran inside and called 9-1-1. When I went back out, emergency crews had arrived and were finding body pieces in the wreckage.
I completely forgot about the dream until 2 weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when I suddenly thought: didn't I have a dream about an airplane crash recently? I looked in my dream journal and there it was. To be honest, it freaked me out! Was it really possible I foresaw the 9/11 attacks in a dream?
I finished reading the book Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self by Eric Wargo, which I mentioned in a recent post.
The author lays out a whole framework of how precognitive dreams are possible and how they work. One of the key points he makes really helped resolve the freakiness I felt with my 9/11 dream. After spending years studying precognitive dreams he and others have had, Wargo suggests that when you have precognitive dreams, what's happening is that you're sensing your reactions or thoughts about a future event. You're not actually seeing future objective events. Essentially, you're remembering your own future thoughts: memory, he suggests, can work both backwards and forwards in time! For some reason, I find this idea much more palatable than being able to foresee the future.
Wargo builds upon the work of J.W. Dunne, who published a book about precognitive dreams in 1927 called An Experiment in Time. When both Dunne and Wargo studied their dream journals, they discovered numerous precognitive dreams. Dunne (and Wargo, too) challenged his readers to do the same. Wargo even says you should assume all your dreams are precognitive.
That's all well and good, but I have a dream journal going back a number of years, and my dreams that could be interpreted as precognitive are very few and very far between. I linked to a couple of them in the previous post mentioned above. So, to convince myself that I rarely have them, I sat down with my dream journal a few weeks ago and started looking for any evidence of precognition. And I could not believe it, but I found one I'd had just the previous week! To say I was stunned is a bit of an understatement.
In the dream (which I had on April 12th), I was eating pancakes with syrup at a table, for breakfast. Somehow, I accidentally knocked my plate on the floor, and maple syrup got all over the carpet. I got really upset, but then started cleaning it up. At the end, I noticed a Christmas tree in the kitchen with a lot of unopened presents.
Four days later, on April 16th, Wendy was making pancakes when the bowl suddenly tipped over, and pancake batter got all over the counter and floor. She got really upset, but then we both started cleaning up the mess. I very rarely dream about pancake accidents, and we very rarely experience them in reality. And yet, my dream preceded the actual event by 4 days.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized this dream followed several patterns Wargo identifies in his book. For one, it is extremely easy to not notice precognitive dreams if you're not looking for them. He likens it several times to the River Lethe from Greek mythology. In my case, I probably would never have noticed this dream was precognitive if I hadn't been reading a book about them and looked through my dream journal for examples.
You'll notice one big difference is that I had the accident in the dream, whereas Wendy had the accident in reality. Precognitive dreams 1) are symbolic representations, and 2) are never specific enough to take action to prevent them. There are some deep sections in the book that explain this. According to quantum physics, sending information back in time is allowed. But any information sent back in time will always result in a future where that information is sent back in time. It's called the principle of self-consistency. Wargo suggests there's nothing I could have done to prevent the pancake accident. If there was, I never would have dreamed about it in the first place. (He stresses this means it's not your fault if you have a precognitive dream that comes true.)
Another pattern is that a big sense of relief (what he calls thoughts of "I survived") are often the target of precognitive dreams. That's exactly what happened here. When Wendy had the accident, she initially gasped and then was silent. I was in the living room and got up to see what happened. Part of me was worried I would discover she'd cut herself and blood would be everywhere. So when I saw the bowl had spilled, and batter was everywhere, I was greatly relieved. It was a mess, yes, but we could clean it up. No first-aid or hospital trips were required.
And finally, let's talk about that Christmas tree. When I first had the dream, I thought "That's weird. It's April, why am I dreaming about Christmas?" Well, the book claims that precognitive dreams often contain a symbolic representation of your thoughts about the dream when you later realize it's precognitive. I think the tree and unopened presents were a sign this dream was a gift I hadn't opened yet, and foreshadowed my excitement when I later realized its value (like a kid at Christmas).
Now I want to dig deeper into my dream journal to see if I can find other precognitive dreams. Wargo points out these dreams often have "calendrical resonance", where you have the dream a few years before the event, on or about the same day. He mentions an astronomer who dreamed he discovered a peculiar exoplanet around a specific star, and 9 years later to the day discovered an exoplanet, with the same peculiar properties, but around a different star!
There are some things in the book I don't agree with, like Wargo's suggestion that all dreams could be precognitive. I now want to dive deeper into the Edgar Cayce readings, to re-familiarize myself with what Cayce says about dreams. He had a decent amount to say on the subject, and helped a number of people interpret their dreams. I was a little disappointed Wargo didn't cover it in the book, even though, funnily enough, he mentioned someone who had a precognitive dream about giving a talk at the Edgar Cayce organization.
Lastly, Wargo says he now believes that precognitive dreams have a sort of social orienting function, which draws us to the reward of human connection. He encourages readers to share their dreams with others (hence this blog post), and says that the precognitive dream itself may be unimportant. What is important is what the dream leads you to do, or the connections it helps you make.
So, let's just say I found this book extremely interesting.