Attitude Indicators and other clues to the future

Virginia Beach

At the workshop I've been leading at A.R.E. (the Edgar Cayce organization) a nice man named Dan comes up to talk to me about ways in which he finds dreams coaching him for the future. "I'm a private pilot," he explains. "Though I haven't flown in the ordinary way in years, in my dreams I'm often airborne. In a bunch of my dreams, a voice tells me I need to check my attitude indicator."

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I thought I had misheard him. Did he mean to say, altitude indicator? Nope. "The first time I was told to check my attitude indicator, I saw that the gauge was really wacky, showing I was up and down and all over the place. The next day, at my work, a supervisor told me he didn't like my attitude. Since then, I'm glad to check my attitude indicator on my dream plane and make adjustments in my regular life when indicated."

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I like the way Dan's dream producers borrowed the cockpit scene with which he was thoroughly familiar to introduce an oneiric technology for self-scanning that helps him to navigate situations that lie ahead. Dan went on to explain that the behavior of his dream compass also gives him course correction. "I might be trying to follow a bearing of NNW. Then my compass swings to SSE, and when I try to reset my course, the compass swings back again. That tells me when I need to change my direction in my regular life."

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Ways in which dreams help us navigate the future have been an important theme at the conference. I recounted a tiny dream of my own from the night before I flew to Norfolk, Virginia, en route to Virginia Beach. In my dream:

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I look at two hairbrushes lying next to each other. Their bristles face each other; the handles extend in opposite directions. Both are the size and shape of my regular hairbrushes, but one seems to have lost its color. The handle and backing of the brush look almost transparent.

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I woke with a sense of mild surprise. In waking reality, I have two hairbrushes the same shape and size as those in the dream. One lives in my suitcase; the other on my bedroom dresser. I make a point of leaving one at home when I travel.

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Because of the dream, I checked on the status of my travel brush which I had moved to a new suitcase purchased a few days before. To my surprise, I could not find the brush. I prolonged my search, again because of the dream, wanting to avoid the two hairbrushes scenario by not bringing down my "bedroom brush" before I had made the most thorough check. Finally satisfied my suitcase brush was nowhere to be found in the bag, I brought down the house brush and set off with that on my trip

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When I got to my hotel in Virginia Beach, I found the TSA had inspected my bag. No doubt thanks to their probing hands, the missing hairbrush had now rematerialized - lying bristle to bristle against the other hairbrush, exactly as in the dream. Maybe the "transparency" of this brush in the dream was a clue that it would go missing for a while.

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I shared this absurdly trivial report to my audience at the conference - and am sharing it here - as a reminder of a feature of dreaming we never want to ignore or minimize: dreams are constantly giving us glmpses of the future. If we can dream something as insignificant as the future situation of a couple of hair brushes, surely we can dream more important events that lie in the future - as we do, all the time, even when many persist in not paying attention.

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Many are first awakened to the reality of dream precognition by a dream fulfilled in a future event that is either quite trivial (hence harmless and often humorous) or tragic (with a depth and darkness of feeling it's hard to ignore). Through practice, we come to realize that we are dreaming the future all the time. Our dream selves are forever traveling ahead of us, scouting the ways. Our engagement with the future in dreams is not confined to precognition, in which we see things we couldn't ordinarily know ahead of time. More interesting than seeing the future that will happen is seeing into possible futures that can be influenced for the better once we learn to read our dream information correctly and apply the insights to make better choices. This is the theme of my book Dreaming True.

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Along the way to making full use of our dream radar, we want to get into the habit of asking of any dream material: is it remotely possible that this could play out in some way in the future, literally or symbolically? It's helpful to look for personal markers that flag the likelihood that a certain dream relates to a possible future event. The literal, even mundane or humdrum, quality of a certain dream, can point to a literal, workaday future situation. A media motif, such as seeing or reading the news, may suggest "breaking news" from the dream place. A "pop-up" - content that feels like an insert in the midst of a dream sequence - may often be a marker of either breaking news or telepathy, or both. I give a recent example involving a "pop-up" that guided my travels to Sweden in my blog post "At the Sign of the Dodgy Fish" (March 11).

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I greatly like Dan's attitude indicator; maybe we can all learn to look in the cockpit of dreams for similar devices that will give us reliable navigational guidance on how we are flying and where we are headed in our lives.