The Flashlight and the Mail Drop: Two Modes of Dream Precognition

I make a practice of asking of any dream, Could any part of this be played out in the future, literally or symbolically? I am then alert for any follow up to the dream in ordinary reality. Over decades now my journal has been, in addition to all else, a log of precognitive and premonitory dreams. The hundreds of match-ups between dreams and subsequent events that I have tagged confirming that we have the ability to visit or receive glimpses of the possible future. 

I scanned two dream reports in the early hours this morning putting that question, Could any part of this play out in the future? 

Eastern Blessing Ritual

In the first dream I lead a procession in an Eastern country around a holy site, perhaps a cemetery. We are clad in simple white and yellow garments. I receive inner guidance that we must address our request for blessing to three revered figures, one a prophet or saint, another a statesman. We pause at a place where I kneel and touch my forehead to the ground as I solicit blessings from these ancestors. My words are chorused by the group. 

Turkish Airline Official Gets Ahead 

In the second dream I need to sort out a return flight at an airport in Turkey. The airport is oddly deserted. Only one person is ahead of me in line and I expect to get quick service. However, the airline agent leaves his post at soon as he finishes with the customer ahead of me. He turns into an outsize, bronze-colored head hanging on a wall. It seems this is how he likes to take his breaks. I wave and call. When I get his attention, he is apologetic and respectful. It takes a while to go through the details of itinerary, seat selection and documentation. 

Neither dream stirred strong emotions. I enjoyed the mystery and exotic elements in the first dream. It felt like a vividly real experience in a place otherwise unknown to me, in this world or another reality altogether. It seemed most improbable to me that I would find myself there in the future in ordinary reality, except perhaps in the pages of a book or via a screen. You are very unlikely to see me in that posture of prayer. 

After recording my dreams, I checked my email. At that moment, A new message came in from academia.edu, a site for scholarly research that sends me an unsolicited recommendation with a link to an academic article every day. The title of today’s recommendation was “The Blessing Ritual of Assam”. I would normally have deleted the message – I have to ration my reading time – but because of my dream I downloaded the pdf. 

The article, by a postgrad at the University of Delhi, describes how in the northeast state of Assam people seeking a blessing kneel, heads lowered, before their intended benefactors and place their hands on their feet. The formulas of the lead speaker are chorused by the group. I don’t recall any placing of hands on feet in my dream, and I don’t know that the location was Assam. Still, I had never received a message about a blessing ritual before, and the resemblance to my dream was strong enough for me to feel that the dream previewed the article. Did the article arrive in my dream inbox before it arrived in my email? Without the dream, would I have read the article? (Probably not) Without the dream, would the article even have arrived? 

I turned my questions to the second dream. I have traveled to Turkey several times and might possibly visit again. So I marked my second report “PC” for “precognitive” (more precisely, possibly precog) despite the anomalous part where the airline agent becomes an outsize head on a wall. This could be a visual pun for someone who wants to get ahead or is swollen headed. The transformations of the airline agent were less surprising to me than the state of the airport. Even in the midst of pandemic or revolution, it is hard for me to imagine that Istanbul airport- where I have waited in the longest lines I have ever seen - could ever be as empty as that. 

My dream catch this morning was small fish. Nothing of much importance going on here, no high emotions aroused. However, it’s fun playing games with dreams for the sake of the play, even more so when this turns into valuable data, the data of state-specific science. In writing about dream precognition in his excellent 1964 book Man and Time, J.B.Priestley observed that the difficulty in assembling evidence involves  “the trivial and the terrible”. People tend to disregard dreams they find trivial and run away from dreams they find terrible. The way forward is to decide – if the game appeals to you – that you will record all dreams in a journal and revisit your reports after the passage of time to see whether waking life caught up with the dreams. 

My little dream reports from last night may be examples of two modes of dream precognition, which we can call shining a torch and checking the mail. I am quite certain we have intuitive radar that scans our environment across space and time, reading the land and locating challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. This is part of our human survival kit. This kind of intuition comes especially alive in dreams, when we lay aside our cognitive inhibitions. 

In his pioneer study An Experiment with Time, J.W.Dunne compared dream precognition to walking along a path in a darkened landscape holding a flashlight in front of you. My Turkish airport dream may be this sort of experience, though I won’t know that until I return to air travel. I don't expect the scene to be reproduced in every detail, not only because of the bronze head but because dream memories are often mixed. Details blur as we retrieve them, we mix up bits and pieces from different scenes, and our takeaways may reflect our reactions and feelings around a future event rather than the event itself. 

It takes no effort to see that my Blessing Ritual dream fits the model of checking the mail. Our future self may send us messages back across time. I picture this as the heap of mail I used to find when the mailman pushed letters through the slot in the front door. In the dream state, we go through the mail and pick out a few items. As we surface from dreams, our half-awake editor, true to what Aldous Huxley called the "reducing valve" of the brain, selects a smaller number of items. or censors them altogether.

There are other ways of understanding dream precognition. The one I like best is the most ancient: that dreaming is traveling. On any night soul or consciousness may travel across time as well as to other dimensions. “Dreams are the news that is told to us by the souls when they come back,” a Kwakiutl shaman told Åke Hultkrantz. So we might see our dream images as postcards from a journey, which could be to another time or another world.

When dreams are caused by future events

We are time travelers in our dreams and one thing that goes on, probably every night, is that the dream self travels into the possible future, scouting out challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Depending on whether we remember such dream scouts, and can read the information correctly, and can then decide on appropriate action, we can move away from undesirable future events and towards ones that are more attractive.

     My recent experience in which clock time - unusually - corresponded to a dream has me thinking about a great pioneer researcher in this field. He was in every way a product of Britain in the Edwardian era. I can think of few less likely candidates for Psychic Friends Network – as either client or reader – than J.W.Dunne (1875-1949). 

    A gentleman soldier and aviator, he came out of the Anglo-Irish military caste. He designed and built the first British military aircraft, and his prototype was soon adopted and manufactured in the United States. He was devoted to fly fishing. In all things, he was a determined scientist and rationalist who looked for the logic in life’s anomalies. Like the best Britons, he was also marvelously pragmatic: if the data presented to

him did not fit existing theories of how things worked, then to hell with the theories. 

      The data that shook Dunne’s conception of reality – first when he was a sub-lieutenant of the Imperial Yeomanry, fighting the Boers, then when he was convalescing in Italy, and many times later – were dreams in which he saw, with remarkable accuracy, events that lay in the future. Sometimes his dreams anticipated news of world events that he had not yet received. His dreams gave him “news flashes” of an earthquake in Madagascar and of troop movements in Sudan long before the newspapers arrived with printed reports of those events.

    Dunne started keeping a detailed journal of his dreams, and found that he dreamed of the future – on average – as often as the past. This led him to realize that in dreams, time works differently than in our usual experience of waking life. He drew friends and family members into an ongoing “Experiment with Time” and collected a great deal of data on “time displacement” as observed in dreams. 

    He extended his experiments into waking precognition – for example, by trying to guess what he would find in a book he would later pick up at random in his club. He quickly concluded that precognition can be achieved in waking states as well as in dreams, but requires “a steadying of attention” and practice in controlling the imagination that are not easily attained. 

    He published his findings in 1927  in a book titled An Experiment with Time that had wide influence in the interval between the two world wars; it was read and eagerly discussed by many leading scientists, writers and politicians.

    Dunne evolved a complex mathematical model he called Serialism in his effort to account for the fact that time does not move in a linear fashion in dreams – and perhaps in the larger universe. In his last book,  Intrusions?,  published posthumously, he makes the bold statement that his precognitive dreams were "caused by something which I was going to experience in waking life later on”.

    This is a most interesting theory: that future events not only cast a shadow before them, but cause us to dream of them – and perhaps, in dreaming, to help bring a certain event track into our physical experience, out of an immense range of alternative possible futures.

    In Intrusions?, he  provided further details of the precognitive dreams recounted in An Experiment with Time that he suppressed in the earlier book, apparently for fear of not sounding scientific and respectable. The strongest  dream "intrusions" containing glimpses of the future were often accompanied by inner voices, sometimes a tremendous chorus of voices crying "Look, look, look!" He describes this phenomenon as the "rousing of attention".

    Dunne moved towards the understanding that our experience of  linear time  is an illusion of the limited ordinary mind. Viewed from the fourth dimension,  past, present and future are in fact simultaneous and only experienced sequentially because of our mental perception of them. In the dream state the mind was not shackled in this way and was able to perceive events in the past and future with equal facility.

Tolkien's wager with Time

In one of his letters, J.R.R. Tolkien reports that he once made a bet with C.S. Lewis that led to a grand (but unfulfilled) literary project and what became a lifelong inquiry into the nature of time. The two great scholars and fantasy writers "tossed" to decide which of them would write a fantasy epic centered on adventures in space, and which would write a parallel epic devoted to adventures in time. Lewis got the assignment in space, and proceeded to produce the magnificent Space Trilogy of adult fantasy novels. Tolkien got the assignment in time, which he would certainly have chosen for himself, since he was always fascinated by the possibility of time travel and of slipping into the Other Time of Faerie, which he ruminates on in his important essay Of Fairy-Tales.

     Tolkien never produced his Time Trilogy. He did write some unfinished stories that center on time travel, the first of which is titled "The Lost Road." The finished works may be lacking, but it is fascinating to track where Tolkien's mind and imagination - and dreambody - traveled on this assignment. He became convinced that dreams and the practice of dreaming are the key to time travel. He was entirely correct in this. He found an exemplar in J.W.Dunne, the soldier-engineer-dreamer whose groundbreaking book An Experiment with Time remains hugely exciting, as a study of time travel through dreams that is grounded in first-hand experience.

    This note is merely to announce that I am currently tracking Tolkien's adventures in past time and Other Time. I'll post longer reports when I'm ready. Assuming that I have his blessing, since he has turned up in several of my lucid dreams, along with C.S.Lewis, with advice that I did not always follow right away...

The Shores of Faerie. Drawing by J.R.R.Tolkien (1915)