Explaining Precognitive Dreams

source: http://www.fireflysun.com/book/DREAM_FAQ.php

Crucial to understanding dreaming, which was my objective prior to falling asleep the night before I experienced this dream, is the idea that there is no world but for that which we filter through our mind's eye. We should think of consciousness as a mental sense organ and, like any other highly specialized tool or instrument (like the scope on a high-powered fire arm), this mental sense organ that puts a face on the real world, is something we routinely correct, calibrate, or re-orient when we sleep. Maybe consciousness as a mental sense organ is affected, possibly architected, by our dreams as much as they are by our waking events during the day. Might dreams, as potently scripted experiences, directly influence the sources of consciousness itself. Think about it. Dreams are experiences. But unlike waking events, which also influence our mental states, dreams do not get filtered through our waking awareness first. We're not conscious when we dream. Also unlike waking events, dreams are not determined by our arbitrary will. Whether we like it or not, when we dream, we're being carried along a current of events over which we have no control. And unlike waking events, dreams do not present us with the static of random happenstances that are not byproducts of our own natures, that do not originate within us, and that may not concern us. Viewed this way, the resemblance of dreams to future events is accessible to common sense. Dreams provide a glimpse of future mental states in which they themselves have a hand in creating!


Sometimes, I like to wait until the end of the day to start thinking about a dream I had early that morning. On the walk over here I was thinking about a dream I had this morning. I see in the dream a reflection of or a precursor to the ideas I developed later in the day. What's the idea? That dreams may be a view of the world from the inside out. The dream I experienced earlier in the day and prior to this course of thinking, was a dream in which I was 'changing' (my clothes) in the foyer of my childhood home (121). I was under enormous time pressure to reach the municipal police station on foot to report a bombing I witnessed. I noticed as I reached for the new T-shirt that it was inside out. I could see the label along the neck and the stitching along the seams. I considered turning the shirt around and inside out so that I would be properly oriented when I pulled it over my head. I did not want to walk out the front door and face the world with my shirt backwards and inside out. I then examined the shirt in the foyer mirror, and then looked at my face and into one of my eyes. As the dream turned lucid I marveled at how I was able to look into my eye (i.e. "I") when dreaming, the point here being is that that's what I do when I dream: I look into my "I," the internal conditions that will exert considerable pressure on how I perceive and approach the world.

Wyatt Ehrenfels, Ph.D.
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