Our days are full of dream residue

We often wake with a dream hangover, even if we don't recall the dreams that caused it. Freud said that dreams are full of "day residue", thoughts and memories left over from waking life. It is no less true that our days are full of dream residue.

     Sometimes we become aware of this when we wake up feeling jet-lagged or even as if we have been run over by a truck, even though we seemed to sleep well enough. This is often the effect of what esoteric writers used to call "astral repercussion". You get out and about in an energy body, in night dreams, and what happens to that astral vehicle may reverberate in your physical system. In extreme cases, like those Dion Fortune made the stuff of the highly illuminating and sometimes cautionary tales in her Secrets of Doctor Taverner, bruises or apparent wounds may be left on the physical body.
    Those jetlag sensations may be caused by a lot of dream travel;  if you are flying across the world in a dream body, especially if you are crossing large bodies of water (which drain energy from the subtle body) you may have quite literal reasons to feel the way you would feel after a long flight on a plane. Frequent fliers need to learn more about the nature and care and maintenance of energy bodies, which is a major theme in my book Dreamgates.

     Our dream activity, remembered or not, often sets the tone for the day. Sometimes we rise with a terrific surge of energy and confidence or a clear sense of direction that was lacking the day before. We may say that we slept well; chances are we also dreamed well.

     The "vigilance" theory developed by Finnish dream researcher Antti Revonsuo maintains that in dreams the brain rehearses for patterns of challenge and opportunity that lie ahead, preparing us to move faster and more effectively when certain situations arise, and that this activity is important and useful whether or not we remember our dreams.

     Deja vu is one of the most striking examples of dream residue, though many of us fail to understand how it comes about. We meet a person or enter a scene that is absolutely familiar to us; we are sure we have seen this before. Most often this is because we are now catching up, in waking life, with an event that first took place in a dream.

    Sometimes dream residue is so outrageous and in our face that we can't fail to see it. In my book Conscious Dreaming I report an episode shared with me by a nurse who dreamed she received a visitation from a guide who appeared as half-woman, half-deer. In the morning, she was amazed to find deer scat on the rug in her second-floor apartment. It seemed impossible that it could be there - unless it spilled from the dream.

    We might recall Coleridge's famous questions:

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

Then we would know that the dream experiences are real, and that what goes on in the dream world doesn't necessarily stay in the dream world. It happens.

Photo of Cafe Jet-Lag in Les Halles, Paris by Robert Moss

We dream the future, all the time

Dreaming, we are released from the limitations of the body and of spacetime. We fold time and travel into the future (and into the past and parallel dimensions).

    I became fascinated by this subject because I have been dreaming about future events, large and small, before they happened since my early childhood in Australia. Here are a few examples:

Dream 1: I check into a hotel where they tell me the credit card I use to pay my bill will be my room key.

Follow-up: Three months later, I make last-minute arrangements to stay at a New York hotel. They explain they have a new system; the credit card I will use to pay my bill will be my room key.

Dream 2: 68 people have signed up for one of my workshops.

Follow-up: Thirteen months later, I arrive at a rural retreat to lead a workshop (not even conceived at the time of the dream) and find 68 people are signed up. The rest of my quite complex dream report gave me very helpful guidance in handling things over the weekend.

Dream 3: A silly little dog decked out in fake antlers for a Christmas event runs out on the road and is killed. He is magically revived by a bizarre character who doesn’t conform to any normal standards of behavior.

Follow-up: The next day, having missed a connection, I am seated on the “wrong” plane for the second leg of a flight to the West Coast. At the start of the in-flight movie, a silly little dog decked out in fake antlers for a Christmas photo shoot is killed on the road, and magically revived by a bizarre character: the Archangel Michael as portrayed by John Travolta.

If we can dream something as trivial as the in-flight movie on the wrong plane, or the key card system a a hotel, it seems safe to assume we dream about the big stuff ahead if time too. And indeed we do.

    How common is the experience of dreaming the future? I think it goes on all the time, because our dream self is forever traveling ahead of us, scouting the roads we have not yet taken in physical life. Even the most prolific dream recaller can handle only a limited number of the “memories of the future” with which the traveling dream self returns to the body. And it may be difficult to figure out what exactly is going on in a future situation until waking events catch up with the dream.

     If you have ever had the sense of déjà vu, you are already deep inside this territory. That feeling of déjà vu (“already seen”) generally comes when you enter a scene in waking life that you have already dreamed. You may have lost the dream, but you recognize a place or a person you encountered when you were dreaming.

      In modern Western societies – unlike traditional dreaming cultures, like those of Aborigines, Native Americans or ancient Celts – few of us are given much encouragement or coaching to grow the skills of dreaming true. Many of us are quite unaware that we dream the future (maybe all the time) until a specific dream jolts us awake.

     The first time many of us notice that we been to the future in a dream is when we are shocked by a dream of death or disaster that subsequently takes place in physical reality. A radio show host told me he was terrified, as a teenager, by a dream in which he looked down on his mother, apparently dead inside a coffin. A week later, he saw the scene tragically enacted in waking life when the family was out tobogganing in the Rocky Mountains. His mother’s sled shot off over a precipice and – when he got to the foot of the slope – the dreamer found himself looking down at her as she lay, with her back broken, inside the coffin-like box .

      Dreams of this kind can seem like a curse, when we feel unable to do anything to change an unhappy outcome we have dreamed. But if we pay attention to our dreams, we’ll soon notice that our dreams of the future don’t only involve death and disaster. Our dream radar scans events large and small, happy and sad, which are coming into our field of experience.

     Some indigenous peoples maintain that we dream everything that will manifest in physical life before it happens. I think this is correct.

     Let’s be constantly aware that the futures we see in dreams (or through waking intuition) are possible futures, not predetermined ones.. We can change the odds on the manifestation of any possible future depending on whether we are able to recognize and clarify the information and then take appropriate action to move towards a desirable outcome or avoid an unwanted one.
    The future we can foresee can often be changed or shaped for the better. If we don’t know where we are going, we are liable to end up where we are headed. The travels of the dream self enable us to take a long clear look down the roads of life, and make better choices.

For much more on this subject, please see my books Conscious Dreaming (especially chapter 6 on "Using Dream Radar") and Dreaming True.

At the Maison Carrée, the Roman temple in Nîmes, a locale I dreamed before I went there. My dream self routinely visits foreign countries before I go to them – and doesn’t have to pay for a plane ticket or wait for his bags.

The ghost at Chopin airport

Frederic Chopin airport, Warsaw, October 11-12

I know everyone in the crowd at the Polish Airlines service desk at Warsaw's Chopin airport: the tub-shaped, jowly man in the orange T-shirt with a Coca-Cola label, just in from Kiev; the shaven-headed Russian with pale bad eyes; the busty Ukrainian woman who got too much attention from the Polish guards at the security check, the petite Ottawa lawyer with her Romanian mother who lends me her cell phone, the friendly Canadians hoping to get home to Toronto tonight. I have been with all these people before. We are all in the same jam, waiting to find out how we will get to our destinations since our flight to Toronto was cancelled without explanation.
     Wait a minute. If I know all these people, that means I must have dreamed this scene even if I forgot the dream before waking events caught up with it. Can I pull something back from the forgotten dream that could help me navigate this situation? Help is needed, because the clerks at the LOT service counter are moving at geological speed. The sun will be down very soon, and it looks like no one is getting out of Warsaw today.
     The long wait and lack of announcements are making a tall man in a red-and-white Canadian football jacket quite agitated. "I am Polish!" he exclaims. "Though I have lived in Canada for over twenty years. I apologize to everyone for how Polish Airlines is handling this!" He demands to see a supervisor. His color is dangerously high, a real hypertensive sunburn. He declares that he doesn't want to have a heart attack so he'll take a break from the line to have a smoke and a Stolichnaya.
     I know him too. And now it dawns on me that I have retained something of the dream in which he (and perhaps all the others) appeared. I told this dream to my Romanian friend, Ana Maria, over breakfast in Bucharest early that same day, before boarding my flight to Warsaw. In my dream, I met "Zbigniew Brzezinski", dressed in what I thought was a red-and-white "folkloric" outfit. He talked about taking low-dose aspirin for heart health. He urged me to go on an assignment to Washington, D.C. I could not understand, on waking, why I had dreamed of Brzezinski, a Polish-American in the Carter Administration and an expert on foreign policy, or why he was giving me a D.C. assignment. Now it seems that "Brzezinski" was a tag applied by my inner editor to a figure who is not Polish-American but Polish-Canadian, and whose "folkloric" garb is a football jacket.
     I am still mulling this when I finally get to the counter and am handed a new itinerary. I have been re-booked on a LOT flight to Frankfurt at 6:30 a.m., in order to catch an Air Canada flight to Toronto, where I will pick up the same final flight to my little home airport that was in my original itinerary. Traveling home to Albany, N.Y. via Toronto looks crazier than it did when I made my original arrangements. Going from Bucharest to Warsaw to Toronto on Polish Airlines was a relatively cheap option; there was a long overnight layover before I could catch my final flight to Albany, but I had planned to rest up at a nice Toronto airport hotel and get home fresh. There is something troubling about the new plan,  but I decide to go with it.

     The waiting game goes on and on, with more glacial lines, at other desks, for hotel vouchers, taxi vouchers, food vouchers. Here comes "Brzezinski" again, declaring there is no point now - it's already 9:00 p.m. - in going to a hotel. He will stay at the airport overnight. This sounds rational to me, and after all it is a dream character speaking. So I spurn the hotel offer, re-check my bag, and stay up all night at Chopin airport.
     One by one, the metal grilles come down at the duty-free stores and the restaurant chairs are stacked on the tables. I run into a store just before it is sealed for the night and buy myself water and toothpaste.
     And Chopin airport becomes limbo. People who are stuck in transit because they don’t have documents that allow them to enter Poland are stretched out on seats, on display stands, or looping round and round in front of the deserted departure gates.
 

   By 2:00 a.m., I have the crawling sensation that I am in a dark and fantastic tale, like the one I just read on the plane. Before I left Romania, my friend took me on a quick tour of used bookstores in downtown Bucharest, in search of English language editions of the fiction of Mircea Eliade, the great scholar of religion and shamanism who also wrote superior novels and tales of fantasy. I found an old collection of Romanian Fantastic Tales published in Bucharest in 1981 that includes Eliade's wondrously creepy story "Gypsies". It's about a man who strays from his regular travel schedule, is lured into a house of witches, and finds himself lost in a nest of separate realities from which he is unable to return to the time or the people he previously knew; he may or may not be dead in his regular world.
    By 4:00 a.m, the airport restaurants have reopened, and I breakfast on strong coffee, and warm rolls. I get on the 6:30 a.m. flight without incident, climb over an immensely fat man to my window seat, and watch the drifting fog as we taxi out onto the runway. Where everything stops. In cracked English, over a crackling intercom, the pilot announces that the authorities have closed the airport due to the fog. Forty-five minutes later, Toronto-bound passengers are asked to leave the plane; they'll be given another flight option since they will miss their connection. I am about to join the rush to the door when I remember that I'm not actually going to Toronto. I'm going to Albany. I check with the crew that my bag will stay on the plane. "Everything fine. Your bag stay in Warsaw." "No, my bag goes with me to Frankfurt."
    We get to Frankfurt three hours late, and my heart sinks at the idea of having to stand in line at another LOT desk. I look out at a sea of people and vast banks of airline desks, without a ticket, boarding pass or a working itinerary, just a baggage claim check. Where is the dream guidance I need?
     I hear a dog barking. A familiar bark. He sounds just like my little schnauzer. I track the bark to a crate where a schnauzer is challenging the outside world while his owner is doing the paperwork required to have him approved for air transport. The sign at the desk reads "Additional Services" and it is a United desk.
     I suddenly understand what "Brzezinski" was telling me in my dream. I need to go home via Washington D.C., not Toronto. Dulles is a United hub, and I often change planes there traveling to and from my home airport.
     When I get my turn at the Additional Services desk, the German clerk is quite helpful. Yes, United has a flight to Washington D.C., leaving at 5:00 p.m. that will allow me to make a connection that will get me home tonight. But my ticket has been written to LOT and I will need to persuade them to let me switch airlines. It takes a real scout to find the obscure LOT desk at that immense airport. I don't have immediate confidence in the Polish Airlines clerk because she types like me, with two fingers, and is still bent on sending me to Toronto. But when I give her details of the 5:00 p.m. flight to Washington D.C., she arranges the change, and gives me a voucher that buys me a pretty good wiener schnitzel as I wait at an airport bistro.
    Oh yes, when Ana Maria and I swapped dreams in Bucharest, the previous morning, she told me she had dreamed that I was delayed for six hours at airports. That proved to be a significant under-estimate, but was certainly an example of how we dream the future for others as well as ourselves.