Sometimes people are hit over the head with something seemingly impossible that happens to them and their world is turned upside down in an instant. That is not what happened to me. For me there was a gradual accumulation of evidence that became so overwhelming over time that it would have been pathological to deny it. I am a logical creature, both by nature and by training, having studied advanced logic in the course of my MSc degree in mathematics, and it was logic that forced me to acknowledge that the world was more interesting than I had supposed it to be. Initially, the accumulation of evidence occurred over the course of several decades as a result of analyzing my dreams. I found that I had dreams depicting events that would occur for me in the future. In time, I became so used to the precognitive nature of my dreams that I just assumed that whatever occurred in my dreams was a depiction of possible future events. And then I started to learn to change what happened in the future so that it no longer corresponded to my dreams.
How is it possible to anticipate something that is going to happen in the future? Materialists usually believe that the world is completely determined,2 so there is no possibility of its deviating from its set course. This idea was famously formalized in Pierre-Simon Laplace’s contention that we could know the past and future if we could but know all of the forces operating in the present.3 Of course, in such a completely determined scheme, the knowing itself would also be determined, as would anyone’s insistence that such knowing was or was not possible. So, for a materialist, that there could be experiences anticipating future events is at least possible in principle, although I have found that most materialists consider such an idea to be preposterous.
With the advent of quantum theory, the older billiard-ball model of reality has been superseded by a stochastic interpretation so that the future is ultimately undetermined until such time as it is observed.4 It is difficult to see how any future event could be reliably predicted in such a scheme whatever one’s ontological persuasions. So we do not really have good ways of conceptualizing how we could know what will occur in the future. I think that part of the problem lies in our lack of understanding the nature of time and, as that understanding improves, perhaps so will our ability to comprehend precognition. The point is that our theories of reality need to account for the evidence and, when they cannot, then we need to develop new ones.
As a young adult, when I first noticed that I was having precognitive dreams, I thought that they must be coincidences. As I continued to examine my dreams over the decades, I found that the coincidences were often reliable predictors of future events. And then I found that I could sometimes change those future events to ones that were more to my liking. So let me start with some of the earlier dreams.
Dreaming the future
The earliest precognitive dream that I can recall occurred sometime in early December while I was a student at the University of Toronto; a few months after defecting from the Engineering Science
program. The dream occurred before I had started keeping a diary. However, I had written down the dream a few years later.
Dream: I dreamt that it was dark outside and that I was on a bus with a number of other people. I was sitting in the back seat when a man got on and came all the way to the back of the bus and sat down beside me. I tried to ignore him. But he crowded me, clutching at me with his hands. I pushed him away, but was too polite to insist that he leave me alone. After a while, he would be at it again, and I would half-heartedly push him away again. This pattern repeated itself a number of times before I finally got up and got off the bus. I stood by the side of the road and watched the bus disappear in the dark.
I thought about the dream when I woke up, could not make anything of it, and so I forgot about it.
About three weeks later I left for a convention. There was a large number of us going to it and so a bus had been chartered so that we could go down as a group. By the time I got to the bus, most of the seats had been taken. I took one of the seats that had been left at the very back of the bus.
But I was not the last one on. Angelo, as I shall call him here, got on after I did. He came to the very back of the bus and sat down beside me.
As the ride got underway, Angelo started asking me penetrating questions about some of the topics that were to be discussed at the upcoming convention. I did not particularly want to answer his questions. I did not feel that it was appropriate for me to do so. But rather than telling him to leave me alone, I made my answers as brief as possible, in the hope that he would give up on me. And I pointed out the superficial nature of his understanding. Angelo was not put off by my responses but took my remarks in stride. After thinking about what I had said he would approach me with another question. Again, I would be as terse as possible. This awkward pattern repeated itself through the wee hours of the night. It was only days later, when I saw him departing the convention in another vehicle, that I recalled the dream and made the connection.
It is interesting to note that there are both literal and representational elements in the dream. The most striking literal element is the dream sequence in which I sit down at the back of the
bus and someone gets on and also comes to the back of the bus to sit beside me. I had not expected to be sitting at the back of a bus at the time that I had the dream. The
physical clutching in the dream could be symbolic of the persistent questioning in real life. The feeling of having that attention directed toward me was the same in the dream and real life, as was
my feeling of politeness. Getting off the bus and watching it depart in the dream was representational in that it signified being free of Angelo’s presence. The fact that I saw Angelo leave in a
vehicle is a literal link to the dream images. So, there are strong correspondences between the dream and waking life. Just a coincidence? Perhaps.
Impossible Happens, The - A Scientist's Personal Discovery of the Extraordinary Nature of Reality
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After decades of analyzing his dreams, a professor of psychology finds that some of them anticipate future events. Not only does he dream the exact day of the year on which one of his books is accepted for publication, but he learns how to use these dreams to create better outcomes in his life. Working with a medium for his research as well as in the classroom, he finds that the medium often gets correct information to which she does not have any ordinary access during apparent conversations with the dead. As his experiments continue to meet with surprising results, the author comes to accept the idea that reality is much more interesting than conventional science has led us to believe.Sometimes the most convincing and meaningful data come not from the university laboratory but from the laboratory of personal life. Gary E. Schwartz, PhD, Professor of Psychology and Medicine at the University of Arizona, author of The Afterlife Experiments and The Sacred Promise.Imants Barušs is a Professor of Psychology who teaches courses on consciousness. Dr. Barušs' previous books include Alterations of Consciousness and Science as a Spiritual Practice.Follow this author
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