Dream Gates

The White Queen screamed before she pricked her finger

The body sometimes seems to “know” about a future event and responds as if that event has already taken place. An old term for this is presentiment.  It can amount to the body presenting anticipatory symptoms.

A personal example: I went to my doctor’s office for my annual physical. A new medical assistant took my blood pressure to get us started. My blood pressure was much higher than normal in the initial reading, much higher even than it had been when I had hobbled into that office two months before with a serious knee injury that had not yet been diagnosed.

I was startled by the blood pressure reading, since I was in excellent spirits and feeling no anxiety about this visit to the doctor.

“What do you want to do next?” the assistant asked. “The bloodwork or the EKG?”

“Let’s go for the blood and get a little color.” We briefly discussed how people react to having blood drawn. Personally, I have never minded the needle or the sight of the blood.

The assistant found the right place and stuck a needle in my left arm. As she extracted the needle after filling the syringe, she started a gusher. I had never seen anything like it in all my years of giving blood or blood specimens. In an instant, my whole left arm was covered in blood, and blood was spattered all over my freshly laundered linen pants.

The assistant squealed and rushed about, trying to stop the blood flow at the same time as she attempted to treat my pants with hydrogen peroxide. I responded quite philosophically, as if the incident had taken place in the past, even as the blood was still spurting and spattering.

When things were under control, I asked the assistant to check my blood pressure again. “I want to test a hypothesis,” I told her. “There’s hard laboratory research that suggests that subjects can exhibit physical responses to events before the actual events take place. I want to check whether the spike in my blood pressure came about because – in some way – my body knew what was going to happen and had an anticipatory response.”

She gasped when she gave me the new reading after releasing the pressure cuff. The first number had dropped by fifteen points; the second number had dropped by thirty points. She was amazed because she thought that after the crazy turmoil of the blood gusher, my readings should have gone up, not down.

“Not if my body knew and reacted to what was going to happen ahead of time,” I suggested quietly.

When the doctor – a careful, conservative practitioner – came in and heard the data, he was quite impressed. “Maybe there’s something in that theory,” he allowed. He decided to check my blood pressure himself. The numbers dropped even lower.

To my mind, this is pretty persuasive first-hand evidence of the possibility that the body, through its own ways of knowing, may anticipate and respond to an event that has not yet taken place.

In my book Dreaming True I described this as “The White Queen Gambit.” As you may remember, in Through the Looking-Glass the White Queen screams before she pricks her finger. When her brooch-pin subsequently flies open and she does prick her finger, she doesn’t need to scream. “I’ve done all the screaming already,” says the Queen. “What would be the good of having it all over again?”

It seems that the body, or the energy field around it, has intricate antennae that are constantly scanning for changes that will affect it. Most of us know about this from everyday experience. You have a “gut feeling” about something. You feet a sense of dread or elation, a lifting of the heart or a churning in the stomach that has no evident explanation until a subsequent event takes place that would cause such physical reactions. When the event catches up with the anticipatory symptoms, you and your body may be quite calm and detached – because you’ve done the screaming or the hyperventilating already.

Scientific research into this phenomenon, sometimes described as “time-reversed interference”, has been going on since the 1990s. Dean Radin ran tests in a University of Nevada lab at Las Vegas that involved showing subjects a series of photographs on a screen that were calculated to produce vividly contrasting somatic reactions, read by scanning heartbeat, perspiration, and so on. A photo of a peaceful rustic scene might be followed by hard porno or a picture of a gruesome crime scene. The very interesting finding was that many times subjects had the physical reactions a certain picture would be expected to produce moments before the image came up on the screen.

I told the story of my gusher in the doctor’s office to Larry Dossey MD, one of the trailblazers for mind-body medicine inAmerica, and asked him what he thought of my theory that the spike in my blood pressure was an anticipatory symptom. Dossey commented, “I think your interpretation is right on target.  People need to know that these ‘presentiment’ effects are not just laboratory curiosities but are phenomena that get played out in real life zillions of times, under our very noses, quietly, often without our realizing they’re happening.”

Maybe we can all do a little better if we let our bodies tell us what’s going down. This is a case of “what the bleep we know” that we don’t usually recognize that we know.

Marc Chagall, "The Painter to the Moon" (1917)

I have a dream: that we will again become a society of dreamers. In a dreaming culture, dreams are valued and celebrated. The first business of the day, for most people, is to share dreams and seek to harvest their guidance. The community joins in manifesting the energy and insight of dreams in waking life. In a dreaming culture, nobody says, “It’s only a dream” or “In your dreams, mister.” It is understood that dreams are both wishes (“I have a dream”) and experiences of the soul.

Dreaming traditions — like those of Australian Aborigines, Native Americans and early European peoples — recognize that the dreamworld is a real world, possibly more real than much of waking life, in which we often stumble about in the condition of sleepwalkers. In big dreams, we “wake up” to a larger reality. Dreaming peoples know that one of the central functions of dreaming is to keep us connected to sources of healing, creativity and spiritual insight in an order of reality that is hidden from ordinary perception. Another of the vital functions of dreaming is to rehearse us for challenges that lie ahead in ordinary life. Dreaming peoples know that we dream the future, maybe all the time.

If dreams were honored throughout our society, our world would be different…. and magical. Let me count the ways:

1. Dream Partners.
Personal relations will be richer, more intimate and creative. There will be less room for pretense and denial. Sharing dreams, we overcome the taboos that prevent us from expressing our real needs and feelings and open ourselves to those of others.

2. Family life and home entertainment.
“What did you dream?” is the first question asked around the table in a family of dreamers. In our dreaming culture, families everywhere will share dreams and harvest their gifts of story, mutual understanding and healing. Parents will listen to their children’s dreams and help them to confront and overcome nightmare terrors. Best of all, they will learn from their children, because kids are wonderful dreamers. This might be bad for TV ratings but it would bring back the precious arts of storytelling, helping us learn to tell our own story (a gift with almost limitless applications) and to recognize the larger story of our lives.

3. Dream Healing.
In our dreaming culture, dream groups will be a vital part of every clinic, hospital and treatment center and doctors will begin their patient interviews by asking about dreams as well as physical symptoms. Health costs will plummet, because when we listen to our dreams, we receive keys to self-healing. Dreams often alert us to possible health problems long before physical symptoms develop; by heeding those messages, we can sometimes avoid manifesting those symptoms. Dreams give us an impeccable nightly readout on our physical, emotional and spiritual health.

4. The Care of Souls.
As a dreaming culture, we will remember that the causes of disease are spiritual as well as physical. We will use dreams to facilitate soul recovery. In dreams where we encounter a younger version of ourselves, or are drawn back to a scene from childhood, we are brought to recognize a deeper kind of energy loss, that shamans call soul loss. Through trauma or abuse, through addiction or great sadness, we can lose a part of our vital soul energy. So long as it is missing, we are not whole and the gap may be filled by sickness or addiction. Dreams show us what has become of our lost children and when it is timely to call them home.

5. Dream Incubation.
In a dreaming culture, we will remember to “sleep on it,” asking dreams for creative guidance on school assignments, work projects, relationships and whatever challenges are looming in waking life. When we seek dream guidance, we must be ready for answers that go beyond our questions, because the dream source is infinitely deeper and wiser than what Yeats called the “daily trivial mind.”

6. Using Dream Radar.
Dreaming, we routinely fold time and space and scout far into the future. As a dreaming culture, we will work with dream precognition on a daily basis — and develop strategies to revise the possible futures foreseen in dreams for the benefit of ourselves and others.

7. Building Communities.
When we share dreams with others, we recognize something of ourselves in their experiences. This helps us to move beyond prejudice and build heart-centered communities.

8. The Art of Dying.
The path of the soul after death, say the Plains Indians, is the same as the path of the soul in dreams — except that after physical death, we won’t come back to the same body. Dreamwork is a vital tool in helping the dying to prepare for the conditions of the afterlife.

9. Walking the Path of Soul.
The greatest gift of dreaming is that it facilitates an encounter between the little self and the big Self. Active dreaming is a vital form of soul remembering: of reclaiming knowledge that belonged to us, on the levels of soul and spirit, before we entered this life experience. So much of the harm we do to ourselves and others stems from the fact that we have forgotten who we are and what we are meant to become. Dreaming, we remember, and encounter authentic spiritual guides who will help us on our paths.

Precognition is knowledge of things to come that we cannot conceivably know about through ordinary channels. A precognitive dream contains specific data about a future event that is not available to you outside the dream. You receive confirmation of a precognitive dream when an event takes place that corresponds to your dream in specific ways. Here is an example from my own journals:

 I dream of a silly little dog decked out with fake antlers for a Christmas show. The dog runs out on the road and is killed. Later he is magically revived by a bizarre character.

When I woke from this dream, my feelings were neutral. I had been a detached observer. The dream experience had been almost like watching a movie. I had no particular associations with the dream, and barely had time to write it down in my journal before rushing to the airport to catch a plane. I was bound for Denverthat day, but missed my connection and was put on a different flight. When the in-flight movie came on, I looked up at the screen and saw a silly little dog decked out in fake antlers for a Christmas photo-shoot. Later in the movie, the dog runs out on the road and is killed. He is magically revived by a bizarre character – a low-flying angel portrayed by John Travolta in the movie Michael. I realized I had previewed the movie in my dream the night before.

This seems to me to be a quite straightforward example of dream precognition. I had no way of knowing what movie they were going to show on the flight toDenver. I wasn’t even scheduled to be on that plane at the time of my dream. If I had heard of the movie Michael at that time (which is possible, though I don’t remember it) I did not know the plotline and had never considered going to see it. A hardhead skeptic might say that the correspondence between my dream and the waking incident was “coincidence”. I can agree with that statement, as long as we drop the notion that coincidence is “merely” coincidence, as Jung and many others have rightly urged us to do. When coincidences of this kind multiply again and again, we begin to realize that something very interesting is going on.

Let’s look at it this way: If it is possible to dream a coming event as trivial as the in-flight movie on the wrong plane, isn’t it likely that we dream about more important things that lie in our future? From what I have observed and experienced, the answer is clear. We do it all the time. I enjoy the tiny, trivial examples of precognition at work because they demonstrate that this phenomenon is not only entirely natural; it is normal. History is full of examples of big precognitive dreams – Lincoln dreaming his death, Caesar dreaming his way across the Rubicon – but, in the context our own everyday lives, the little dreams are wonderful teachers. When our future dreams center on death and disaster, it is easy to get scared off. We may not want to look at these things, perhaps because we feel powerless to do anything about them. The little dreams show us that psychic dreaming is a gift, not a curse. They teach us to trust our intuition. And when we do that, we learn that if we can see the future, we may be able to change it for the better.

A true dream scientist, in Marc Chagall's "The Poet Reclining"

The most original and revealing scientific study of dreams – the only kind that is likely to bring us the big stuff – is research inside dreams, rather than research about dreams.

Charting a path for future research, William C. Dement, a pioneer of scienific investigation of  sleep and dreams, appealed back in the 1970s for “trained introspectionists to give us somewhat more confident information about what goes on in the mind during sleep.” Dement suggested that the most important research would require science to recognize that there are some individuals who seem to be “supremely good at recalling their dreams.” Perhaps they could be encouraged not only to increase their recall even further but to attain some degree of mental control inside the dreamstate “which would allow them to attend to the dream more closely with the idea of remembering it and reporting it.”

Dement concluded: “Our major data about the dream world should come from those best able to describe it” – dream experiencers. [1]

A century before Dement made his remarks, the Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822-1892), a French aristocrat and oriental scholar, made this type of research his ruling passion. He started observing his dreams closely at the age of thirteen, as a way of whiling away his time after completing lessons with his private tutors. Within a year, he noticed he was often aware while dreaming of his “true situation” – that he was dreaming – and was able to “guide their development” consciously. He dreamed, for example, that he was among flowering lilac trees. Aware that he was dreaming, he remembered reading that our memories of smell are “seldom correct” when we wake from dreams. “I caught hold of the branch, and first assured myself that the smell of lilac was recalled in my memory by this imaginary but voluntary act.” [2]

Over decades, Saint-Denys became an intrepid investigator inside his dreams, producing and exploring dream images that revolved

The Marquis de Saint-Denys, 19th century dream scientist

around his research interests. “During the day I reflected on the subjects most worthy of examination; at night, during the dreams in which I was aware of my situation, I sought every possible opportunity to discover and analyze.” [3]

There was a curious blind spot in his dream exploration. He believed that dream images all derive from our waking experiences: that whatever we see in dreams is constructed from life memories. Scientist that he was, he tested this by his experiential method. Perhaps the fact that he was not able – by his own account – to identify dreamscapes that were unrelated to waking life memories was a function of his own belief system. That would fit his own observation that whenever he thought about something in a conscious dream, a corresponding scene or image appeared. Dream images, he concluded, are “the representation in our mind’s eye of the objects that occupy our thoughts.”

Let us add that our best dream scientists are likely to be assiduous dream journalists, keeping detailed logs of their own experiences in the dream worlds, and those shared with them. By collecting and pooling data of this kind, we can overwhelm the silly reductionism that dismisses one-off dream reports as “anecdotal.” If we can point to 1,000 or even 100 dated and authentic dream reports suggestive of precognition, or dream diagnosis, or interactive or social dreaming, we have evidence for these phenomena that cannot be shrugged off because it failed to meet laboratory standards. In these areas, the big game will always elude those who try to pen it in cages. The real dream scientist will seek it where it is to be found, deep in the forests of the night.

References

1. William C. Dement, “Proposals for future research” in Gabrielle C. Lairy and Pero Salzarulo (eds) The Experimental Study of Human Sleep: Methodological Problems. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1975, 442.

2. Hervey de Saint-Denys, Dreams and How to Guide Them trans. Nicholas Fry, ed. Morton Schatzman M.D., London: Duckworth, 1982, 56.

3. ibid, 20.