Gary Lachman - Dreaming Ahead of Time: Experiences with Precognitive Dreams, Synchronicity and Coincidence

A talk at Brompton Cemetery. Liminal sleep. Prediction, prophecy, premonition, precognition. I dream the future and so do you. Dunne, Priestley, Lethbridge. A tweet about time.

The idea for writing this book came from a talk I gave in Brompton Cemetery in London in the spring of 2019. The talk, given as part of a series of events entitled On the Borderlands of Sleep, was on Hypnagogia and Precognitive Dreams.

The hypnagogic state is the curious liminal condition each of us enters at least twice a day, when falling asleep and when waking up. There is some debate about the differences between these two transitional states, but this really shouldnt concern us. The hypnagogic state is a half-dream state, as the esoteric philosopher P. D. Ouspensky called it; it is midway between our usual waking state and unconsciousness. Most of us pass through this midway point without recognising it, but with practice we can learn how to remain in it, hovering, as it were, between full wakefulness and sleep. While on this threshold we can have some unusual experiences. We can watch dreams form, and see them with a startling vividness, while yet still being awake and aware of our surroundings. We are in two states of consciousness at the same time, simultaneously conscious and unconscious or at least conscious enough to be critically aware of the symbols and images we associate with dreams, and that we believe have their source in the unconscious mind.

One of the characteristics of this unusual state is that it is auto-symbolic, as the early Freudian Herbert Silberer discovered. That is, the images, symbols, and voices one hears in this condition are, or can be, symbolic of ones physical, emotional, and mental state at the time. Let me point out that I am aware of the paradox of being consciously unconscious, and of the difficulties involved in talking about the unconscious as if it were a concrete thing, a part of us in the same way that our arms or legs are. But I should warn readers that if paradoxes put you off, you may well want to find another book. As we go along, we will run into more than a few of them here.

Hypnagogia is the name coined by the psychologist and philosopher Andreas Mavromatis, who wrote an exhaustive book on the subject, for the visions, images, symbols and auditory hallucinations that accompany this curious state. It is also a state linked to a variety of paranormal or psychic phenomena, one of which is precognition.

The simplest definition of precognition is that it is having knowledge of some event before it happens. It is having knowledge about something before you should have it, before it was, by all ordinary standards, even possible for you to have it. If the definition of cognition is the mental process involved in knowing, learning, and understanding things from a dictionary taken at random and if the prefix pre means before or previous to, then pre-cognition is the act of knowing something before we know it. And this is something that science, as well as reason and logic, tells us is impossible.

Sleep, or being on your way to it, is not a precondition of precognition. There are many examples of premonitions or presentiments coming to people while they were wide awake. But sleep and the half-sleep states of hypnagogia, do seem partial to precognition. I should also point out that there is a difference between precognition and premonitions or presentiments, as well as between precognition and prediction and prophecy, although of course they are all related.

In predictions and prophecies, someone makes a public claim about what will happen in the future, and this can be corroborated or dismissed when that future arrives. Prophecy is usually related in some way to the supernatural and religion. We hear about the fulfilment of prophecy when an event seems to coincide with what the prophets of whatever religion had foretold. Or there are the prophecies of visionaries like the sixteenth century physician and astrologer Nostradamus, whose Centuries seemingly foresaw the French Revolution and the rise of Hitler, among other things. In the twentieth century, Edgar Cayce, the American sleeping prophet, made similar pronouncements. Predictions tend to be secular financial wizards often predict where the market is heading and every year celebrity astrologers take a shot at foreseeing what is in store for the next twelve months. Premonitions and presentiments have more to do with a feeling that something is going to happen, usually something bad. These range from hunches about some decision, to someone having a bad feeling about some enterprise, to foreboding and full panic about a felt upcoming disaster.

Precognition is involved in premonitions and presentiments, but in the form of it that I will be paying most attention to, the person experiencing precognition doesnt know he or she is having a precognitive experience. Until, that is, the event they unconsciously pre-cognised comes to pass and they recognise that they already knew it would happen. There are hundreds of accounts of people waking from a dream and knowing that something has happened to a friend or loved one, or is about to. They see them in an accident or involved in some disaster or in some other form of danger. They may shrug the dream aside, or they may be moved by it enough to call the person. Sometimes their warning comes in time and the danger is averted. Other times, they are too late, or the friend ignores the warning, and the disaster comes to pass.

The kind of precognition I will be focusing on isnt this sort. The people experiencing it do not know until after the fact that they have glimpsed the future. Their glimpse of what is in store is most often mixed in with random thoughts, memories, vague reflections and other assorted confused matter, and does not, as in more dramatic premonitions, stand out as something significant. It is only when the future of which they have had a peek turns up that they say I knew this would happen! I saw it! And this happens most often in dreams. Why that is so is still unclear, but more than one study suggests that the majority of precognitive experiences happen in dreams or, as Mavromatis recorded, in hypnagogic, half-dream states.

I can agree with this because, with a few exceptions, my own precognitive experiences have happened in dreams. By now they have happened more times than I can remember, although I have been recording my dreams, off and on, for the past forty years.

The dreams included here come from that record. In fact, while going over my dream journals from the early 1990s in preparation for this book, I came across dreams that at the time did not seem precognitive but which now, many years later, seem likely candidates. The earliest precognitive dreams I recorded go back to 1980; the most recent are from the past few years. I may have had precognitive dreams earlier than 1980. I know I certainly dreamed a lot before then. If so they are lost in time if, indeed, anything is truly lost in it.

I am not of a sensational nature. I try as a writer and a person to keep an even keel, to stay as balanced and composed as possible, in the face of often surprising events, and to assess things with a level head. But I cant deny it. I have dreamed the future. And if some of the theories about dreams and precognition we will look at are accurate, so have you.