You have dreamed the future. You say you don't remember? Think again. Surely you've had the experience of déjà vu. The cat crosses the street in front of you, the tall guy steps into the restaurant, the light shimmers on the water or on your new lover's hair just so, and you know you have been in this scene before. I have yet to meet anyone who hasn't felt a tingle at a moment like this, a shiver that brings with it the knowledge that the world is deeper than we have been taught.
What has this got to do with dreaming the
future? Everything. In French, déjà vu literally means "already
seen". The phrase begs the question of how we can
possibly have "already seen" something we have not set eyes on
before. In most cases, what is going on when we experience déjà vu is
this: an event we once dreamed is now manifesting in waking life. We may have
forgotten the dream, but now that it is playing out in the physical world, we
remember something. If we wanted to describe the phenomenon more accurately,
still borrowing from French, we would call it déjà rêvé,
"already dreamed".
What comes back to us, in déjà vu, is
a memory of the future. We traveled ahead of ourselves, in a dream, and forgot
the trip until we found ourselves back in the same place.
The sporadic experience of déjà vu is
just our entry point here, just a way to establish that we are talking about
something that is common, if not universal, human experience. To get better at
remembering the future, we need to become active dreamers. In dreams, we are
time travelers. Released from the laws of Newtonian physics and the consensual
hallucinations we harbor in our everyday brains, the dream self travels into
past time, future time, and alternate realities.
I have the impression that every night, my
dream self is traveling ahead of me on my possible roads into the future,
scouting the ways. He brings me memories of the future, the way you or I might
bring back postcards and souvenirs from a trip abroad. Part of my daily
practice is to scan every detail that I remember from my dreams with this in
mind, asking: is it remotely possible that any of this could happen in the
future, literally or symbolically?
Memorias do futuro. Memories
of the future. I once saw that sign on a bar in a dusty town in the northeast
of Brazil. If we truly have memories of the future, does that mean that the
future already exists?
Yes and no. Any future we can
foresee is a possible - not inevitable - future. When we wake
up to the fact that we have access to memories of the future, especially in
dreams, we can start drawing on this data bank to change things for the better.
We are not condemned to stay on a particular event track unless we have totally
forgotten where it leads, and refuse to consider switching to a different line.
We can use souvenirs of the future, delivered in dreams, to avert an unwanted
future event, or to bring a happy future event into manifestation.
To do these things, we need to grow our understanding and our practice. For simplicity, we can distinguish several modes of knowing the future:
Precognition
Through precognition, we see events and circumstances ahead of
time, as they will be played out. A precognitive dream may be literal, or
symbolic or both. For example, a dream of a twister might turn out to be both a
preview of a literal disaster and advance notice of an emotional storm that
will hit with the force of a tornado. Once you have confirmed your ability to
see - or rather remember - the future in this way, you are ready to do much
more interesting things.
Early Warnings
In dreams and intuitive flashes, and through the play of
coincidence, we may receive an early warnings of a possible future development
we may not want - a crisis at work, the bust-up of a relationship, a health
problem, a car accident.
If we read the clues correctly, we can use such early warnings to avoid a possible future problem by taking preemptive action.
Opportunity Calls
Our dream self returns from his night excursions with tips about coming opportunities. These tips require action if we are going to manifest a future we'll enjoy.You remember a dream in you are in your ideal home, or doing the work that nourishes your soul and your bank account, or you are with your soulmate, who is someone you have not yet met in the regular world. You need to take physical action to get yourself, in your physical body, to where your dream self has already been.
Choosing
Alternate Event Tracks
Dreaming, we discover and inhabit the true nature of time, as it has always
been known to dream travelers and is now confirmed by modern science. Linear
time, as measured by clocks, and experienced in plodding sequences of one thing
following another, always heading in the same direction, is an illusion of
limited human awareness, at best (as Einstein said) a convenience. In dreaming,
as in heightened states of consciousness, we step into a more spacious time,
and we can move forwards or backwards at varying speeds.We not only travel to
past and future; we travel between alternate timelines. With growing awareness,
we can develop greater and greater ability to choose the event track - maybe
one of infinite alternative possible event tracks - that will be followed
through a certain life passage, or even the larger history of our world.
This may be a case of the observer
effect operating on a human scale. It is well understood that at quantum
levels, deep within subatomic space, the act of observation plucks a specific
phenomenon out of a mass of possibilities. It may be that, when our dream
selves observe something of the future, we select a certain event track that
will begin to be manifested in the physical world. By a fresh act of
observation, through active dreaming, we can then proceed to
alter that event track, or switch to an entirely different one.
For much more on this subject see chapter 6 of Conscious Dreaming and my book Dreaming True
Photo: Covered Bridge on Metuje River by RM
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