Precognitive "dreams"

Many report and believe the true source of many déjà experiences, especially paranormal ones where precognitive knowledge of the future is involved, is somehow connected with experiences that occur while asleep. One is tempted to say "in dreams", but many say these experiences are not like normal dreaming: There is no fantasy involved and the "dream ego" feels quite odd and strange. It may even be that the "dreamer" feels that he or she has somehow gained access to a space or realm they are not at home in or maybe that it is somehow forbidden to be there.

In addition, if the unconscious has the ability or is sometimes given the opportunity to look ahead, there is no reason to suppose that this can only occur while one is asleep (cf. Jung, 1951, par. 974). Recent physiological research seems to indicate that our 90 minute REM (Rapid Eye Movement) cycle doesn't cease upon awakening, but most probably continues throughout the day. Furthermore, dreaming is not confined just to REM cycles, as was formerly believed (cf. Solms, 1997). Thus the unconscious and its activities may weIl and most likely do continue throughout our day-to-day existence. 

Some researchers believe the unconscious, or at least its physical substrate, is located within the non-dominant hemisphere of the cerebral cortex (cf. Myers, 1887, p. 57; Blakeslee). EEG's show no cessation of activity there during the day, so at least physiologically, it seems to be indicated that our unconscious activity parallels our conscious one(s) during waking and continues unabated during sleep, though possibly with cyclic intensity. 

Moreover, there are precognitive dreams which are different from déjà vu "previews". They are usually more symbolic and frequently presage an approaching tragedy connected with some acquaintance or loved one. Then, there are also more realistic precognitive dreams, which are probably identical to the paranormal déjà vu type. These are remembered, though, and taken note of as being possibly precognitive before the fore-seen events transpire. 

When the events "arrive", there may not be such an element of surprise, as with déjà vu, since one knew what to expect. One may even be engaged in altering things so that the events don't take the negative turn that would occur if left to their normal course. There are cases on record, however, where exactly those efforts were responsible for bringing the unwanted fulfillment about (cf. Cox, 1956; Stevenson, 1970). Premonitions would then be due, probably, to less perfectly remembered precognitive dreams and/or fantasies. 

Keeping these reservations in mind, in the following I shall continue to use words like "dream" and "dreaming" in connection with paranormal déjà vu, although "some activity of the unconscious" would be more accurate. I wish to show now that this connection is not new (e.g., Jung, 1951, par. 974; Chari, 1964, p. 200; or West, p.267). It has its history and it has been to some extent investigated. 

It seems that the English Romantic poet Shelley was the first on record to suspect a connection between dreaming and déjà vu. In a collection of some of his prose notes (Speculations on Metaphysics), there is a short section with the heading: "Catalogue of the Phenomena of Dreams, as Connecting Sleeping and Waking." At the end of this section, there is an account of an experience he had had at Oxford while walking there with a friend. He described the scenery and said: 

"The scene surely was a common scene … The effect which it produced on me was not such as could have been expected. I suddenly remembered to have seen that exact scene in some dream of long ...

"Here I was obliged to leave off, overcome by thrilling horror!" (p. 297) 

Although his widow, Mary Shelley, collected and published these reflections only in 1840, she assigned these fragments to the year 1815, seven years before his death. 

The earliest scientific author to mention a connection between dreaming and déjà vu was apparently Hodgson, in an 1865 essay on metaphysics (Time and Space). In a section on the analysis of redintegration, he said: 

"Sometimes we dream of a place that seems perfectly familiar; sometimes we see a place, waking, which appears familiar, though we know we have not seen it before, and then, perplexed, say we must have seen it in a dream." (part I, chapter V, section 29) 

He then proposed the curious theory that it wasn't the scene which was identical to the dream, rather the interest in the subject matter was the same. I have mentioned some other authors that were concerned with dreams and déjà vu in the "something similar" section. 

Along a parallel track, the study of premonitory and prophetic dreams also has its history. It would take us much too far afield to recount it all here, but I would like to mention a few items for those who may wish to delve further. Paul Radestock's book has already been referred to (in the "something similar" section). He often quoted passages from Dr. J. Ennemoser's book on the history of magic, published in 1844. The latter spoke about prophetic dreams (p. 133) and quoted many ancient authorities on dream interpretation. Another author who performed the same service was B. Büchsenschütz. His book, from 1863, has the title: Dreams and Dream Interpretation in Antiquity. Spitta, in 1877, though totally disavowing any possibility of prophecy in dreams, also lists a number of ancient authors. The Scotsman, MacNish, held already the same "enlightened" opinion in 1834. Two other interesting books from that period are K. A. Scherner's The Life of Dreams (1861) and E. R. Pfaff's The Dreamlife and its Interpretation (Following the Principles of the Arabs, Persians, Greeks, Indians, and Egyptians) (1868). 

There have been some famous examples of precognitive dreams. The Bible provides several of the symbolic variety. Divination of the future through the interpretation of such dreams played an important role in ancient Chaldea and Greece. Calpurnia, the wife of Julius Caesar, is reported to have dreamt of his assassination the night before his death in the Senate (Moufang and Stevens, 1953, p. 128). Had he heeded her pleas, he might have lived longer. 

Abraham Lincoln also had a warning in a dream (his own) of his impending demise. He told his dream at a gathering of friends occasioned by the surrender of Robert E. Lee. W. H. Lamon wrote down the account of it the same night. In his dream, Lincoln heard sounds of mourning and came to where someone was lying in state in the East Room of the White House. He asked a nearby soldier standing watch who was dead. The reply was that the President had been assassinated (cf. Moufang and Stevens, 1953, pp. 230-3). 

Such dreams have not escaped the attention of the psychoanalysts. Werner Kemper published at least two papers dealing with these matters. The first (1954-5) had to do with two impressive dreams which came true. The second, longer paper (1956) tackled the problem of the forward-looking aspect of dreams. He compares there the various schools of depth psychology and remarks that C. G. Jung and his followers have long stressed this important aspect (see next section). Hans Zullinger (1951-2) also wrote about a patient who brought him an ostensibly prophetic dream, but he was less convinced than Kemper. 

Nandor Fodor has had a continuing interest in parapsychology and published in 1955 a paper entitled "Through the Gate of Horn". There, he included in his bibliography references to papers by Freud and others who also were confronted with analyzing premonitory dreams. Fodor began his paper with a longish quotation from Homer's Odyssey (W. J. Black edition, p. 248). It is the famous scene where Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, spoke with his wife Penelope after his return. She told him a dream she had had which seemed to portend the death of the many suitors who had come to vie for her hand. In the course of the subsequent conversation, she said, 

"... dreams are very curious and unaccountable things, and they do not by any means invariably come true. There are two gates through which these insubstantial fantasies proceed; the one is of horn, and the other ivory. Those that come through the gate of ivory are fatuous, but those from the gate of horn mean something to those that see them." (Fodor, p. 283) 

Mention was made above (in the section on outside influences) of the Society for Psychical Research. Besides its Journal and proceedings, its first major publication was Phantasms of the Living by Gurney, Myers, and Podmore, which appeared in 1886. Though primarily concerned with bringing together evidence for telepathy (a word Myers coined), there appear several instances of precognitive dreams and one which included an occurrence of déjà vu (case 100, pp. 327 - 328), though not identified as such. 

A few.years later, Myers published his "The Subliminal Self" article in the society's proceedings. As described above (in the section on outside influences), the first part had to do with retrocognition (abnormal knowledge of the past), but he offered some remarks about déjà vu (for which he suggested the alternative term "promnesia"): 

"... a suddenly evoked reminiscence of a past dream may give rise to the feeling of "déjà vu", of having witnessed the actual scene at some indefinite time before … The really important question … is whether the connexion may be other than casual, whether the dreamer may in some supernormal way have visited the scene, or anticipated the experience, which he was destined afterwards to behold or to undergo." (p. 341) 

In the next chapter, dealing with precognition, Myers gave several examples of precognitive dreams, some of which are so close to déjà vu in tone that I would like to present four of them, somewhat abbreviated, here. 

The first is from a man who vividly dreamt that a business associate would show him a collection of slides. The next day, his printer visited him and related that he had just acquired a slide collection containing views from Egypt which he felt sure would interest him. This so amazed him that he told his dream to his children. To quote from the report sent to Myers, the following evening, 

"I went to Mr. Wingat's house, and there to my astonishment stood the very box and its surroundings that I had seen in my dream. I sat down and looked over twenty or more slides, then got up and said, 'I will look at no more!' for there I saw the identical views I had seen in my dream." (p. 459) 

I find this example interesting because it seems he altered things from what he had dreamt. From his account, one receives the impression that he saw more slides in his dream than in reality, because he refused to see more. We shall never know whether his dream-viewed ones were the same as those remaining to be seen in reality. He missed an ideal opportunity to test his precognitive knowledge: he could have tried telling Mr. Wingat the contents of the slides he hadn't yet examined. I would also wish to have known if the sequence of the ones seen followed that of his dream. He didn't say. 

In another account, a lady in England wrote that she was terrified of monkeys and yet dreamt of seeing one. She told her dream to several people, trying to dilute its terror for her. Her husband recommended some fresh air and she decided to take her children out for a short walk. On the roof of a nearby coach house (this occurred in 1867), she saw the very monkey of her dream. She continued: 

"In my surprise and terror, I clasped my hands and exclaimed … 'My dream! My dream!' This I suppose attracted the attention of the monkey and he began to come after us, he on top of the wall, we beneath, every minute I expecting he would jump upon me and having precisely the same terror I experienced in my dream." (p. 488) 

It turned out that the monkey belonged to the Duchess of Argyl, whose lodge was nearby and it had gotten loose. Myers noted that this case was interesting because the dream set the stage for its coming true. Without the dream, she most likely would not have gone out for the walk and her exclamation, based on the dream, helped the terrifying experience continue, as in the dream. One can speak of self-fulfilling prophecy. 

The third example bears some resemblance to the first one in that the lady involved also acted on the strength of a dream to change its fulfillment. In her dream, she went for a coach ride to London. On a particular street, she was standing beside the coach and the driver fell from his perch to the street below, smashing his head badly. The next day, she actually did go by coach to London (as planned previously) and on the way home, they turned into the street of her dream: 

"My dream flashed back upon me. I called him to stop, jumped out ... and called a policeman to catch the coachman. Just as he did so the coachman swayed and fell off the box." 

Thus the accident was narrowly avoided. She found out afterwards that the driver had had diarrhea the night before and had misjudged his strength. She continued the account saying, 

"... my premonitory dream differed from reality in two points. In my dream we approached Down-street from the west; in reality we came from the east. In my dream the coachman actually fell on his head ... In reality this was just averted by the prompt action which my anxious memory of the dream inspired." (p. 497) 

This is not the accuracy of detail normally found in déjà vu, but it is close. It is also interesting because it seems to indicate some freedom of will: events don't have to go as predicted (cf. L. E. Rhine, "Precognition and Intervention", 1955)). It's as if the action of the lady created a split in the flow of time, a fork in the way, where the dream-seen future was one possibility and she got things to go another. Do futures seen with less accuracy allow more freedom of choice? A bit more on this in the next section. 

The fourth example also happened in 1867. A young engineer, T., later a professor at Nancy in France, was helping a friend restore a fallen-in sulfur mine. The wife of the friend was pregnant and one morning T. came running from his bedroom to read his friend a telegram about the birth of their second child. He had read three lines of it when it slowly disappeared and he realized that he had been dreaming. His friend asked him to repeat the first three lines and these were written down. Ten days later, the telegram did arrive heralding the birth and its first three lines were identical with those he had preseen and luckily recorded (Myers, pp. 504 - 505). 

An interesting aspect of this example is that as T. was awakening, he said he could still see the rest of the telegram, even though he could no longer read it. When he wrote the first three lines down, he drew the remaining three which also turned out to correspond with the later telegram. This would seem to indicate that dream memories are mediated by the non-dominant, non-verbal cerebral hemisphere. 

An astronomer at the Paris observatory, Camille Flammarion, was interested in more than the stars. In 1900 he published a book with the title The Unknown and the Problems of the Soul, the eleventh chapter of which had to do with premonitions in dreams and divination of the future. By the 1917 edition, he had included 76 examples, some of which sound remarkably like déjà vu (eg. pp. 373-4, 378-9, 382, 388, and 401 in the 1919 German edition). Towards the end, he remarked (my translation from the German): 

"The human spirit is equipped with faculties, which are unknown to us, but make it possible to see far beyond time and space. And this is what we wanted to document through a number of mutually agreeing testimonials." (p. 415) 

On the last page of the chapter, he said he hoped at a later date to devote some effort to examining more minutely the connections between such prophetic dreams and déjà vu. Some other collections of precognitive dreams can be found in Moufang and Stevens (1953), Osborne (1962), and in Priestley (1968).

Books and articles dealing with premonitions, precognitions, prophetic dreams, and the like have been numerous. In order to stay with my chosen topic of déjà vu, I won't devote much more space to them here. Those wishing to acquaint themselves with the many accounts and investigations need only browse through the Journals and Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, and/or its French, German, Italian, or American counterparts. Some of the books dealing with the topic include E. Lyttelton, Some Cases of Prediction (1937); C. Richet, The Future and Premonitions (1931); H. Saltmarsh, Foreknowledge (1938); and G. N. M. Tyrrell, The Personality of Man (1947). 

A few facts that I might mention in passing that I found interesting during my perusal of this literature are the following. In antiquity, along with many others, Aristotle and Cicero were concerned with precognition and Plutarch with prophetic dreams (Dodds, 1971). There has been some success in experimental trials, not only with humans (where it is in some cases remarkable), but also involving rats (Eysenck, 1975), mice, jirds, and hamsters (Levy et al., 1973)). There may therefore be some influence of precognition in evolutionary survival (Eisenbud, 1976). However, the survival value of precognitive knowledge is questionable: it may help one avoid an accident or attack, but if Bergson, Huxley, and Priestley are right (see below), it is not good to have too much of it. That some helps, though, is shown by the interesting fact that successful business executives tend to score relatively high in precognition tests (Dean and Mihalsky, reported at the Oct. 14, 1970 meeting of the American S. P. R. according to "Parapsychology", vol. 1, #5, p. 21). 

There have been registers where one could send a report of what one believes to be a precognitive dream, vision, or premonition (Nelson, 1976). According to West (1946-9), "... the precognitive dream is by far the most commonly reported psychic incident at the present time ." (p. 265) Green (1966), in a survey of students who went to a lecture on ESP at Southampton University, found the same was true of déjà vu (80% of 115 attendees). Mood seems to be significant in affecting experimental precognitive scores (Nielson, 1970). Precognitive clairvoyance is sometimes experienced in advanced LSD sessions (Grof, 1975, p. 329). 

A book which can be viewed as a milestone in the research concerning déjà vu and dreams appeared in 1927. This was An Experiment With Time by J. W. Dunne, a former Boer War infantry officer turned aeronautical engineer, who incidentally designed Britain's first military airplane in 1906. He had numerous experiences of déjà vu, so numerous in fact that he was faced with the problem that he must be somehow abnormal. He kept a scrupulous record of his dreams and there, like Radestock before him, found astonishing correspondences. He gradually came to the conclusion that his dreaming self somehow had access to the future and that probably most everyone had the same ability if only they would pay more attention to it. He further reasoned that "visiting" the past while asleep was most likely just as easy and that one could find traces of both sorts in looking through ones dreams. 

Through his research he found that not only are entire sequences from the future occasionally previewed while asleep, much more often can one find elements or details from the future or past cropping up in more ordinary dreams (this became known as the Dunne effect). In two experiments, one with the S. P. R. in 1932, and one subsequently at Oxford with 23 undergraduates, despite disappointment that not everyone seemed to have his ability like he wanted to believe, he did find evidence of many precognitive elements in dreams (12% of 165 reported, 148 from the students, and 17 of his own)(see Besterman [1932-3] for an independent report of the results). This might account, by the way, for the some of the vaguer forms of déjà vu that people often have. 

There appears to be no regular rule as to how far ahead (or backward) the unconscious chooses (or can) look. In Dunne's case and others (see below), it varied considerably. Dalton, in his 1962 critical review of Osborn's 1962 book, The Future is Now, tallied the fulfilment lags of the 47 cases reported there, and found that 15 were one day or less, 11 were within 2 to 3 days, with the remaining 21 spread over a period of 4 days to 8 1/2 years (p. 259). Kruisinga (1954) found roughly the same distribution. He recorded 1444 of his own dreams and found 62 correspondences (4.3%) within an arbitrary, self-imposed limit of 90 days following each dream. He chose another 90 day period three years later to serve as a control and found only 17 elements which corresponded with items in the dream series (p. 301). Kooy (1957), a professor of theoretical physics, Breda, Holland, in 2 1/2 years of dream diary keeping, found 193 "Dunne effects". Most, he discovered, occurred within 24 hours. Orme plotted the logarithm of the incidence against the logarithm of the fulfillment-time intervals and shows that the relationship is nearly linear with a negative slope, indicating that the relationship is most probably inversely exponential. 

Dunne remarked that the reason this effect had gone so long so relatively unnoticed is that not many people pay enough attention to their dreams, especially going so far as to keep a written record of them. This is not to mention periodically reviewing this record to check for unusual correspondences with the past or with future elements or sequences. Zuger (1966) found that persons who claim not to remember their dreams also do not report having déjà vu (p. 193). Honorton (1972) arrived at a similar conclusion with regard to experimental precognition trials. 

Further, Dunne noted that there is within us something that resists such scrutiny. Priestley (1968) ascribed this to our instinct for survival. As he said, 

"... this would be a bad time for men and women to be constantly observing that they were seeing, hearing, feeling, what they had already seen, heard, felt, in their dreams. We live in an age that is constantly demanding our sharpest attention. A wrong turn of the wheel or a neglected signal can end our lives hideously. We must attend to things through the narrowest now-point that men have ever known." (p. 274) 

Henri Bergson (1908) was convinced that we are capable of remembering everything we perceive and that it is the job of some mechanism in the mind to keep us from being constantly flooded with all the material we potentially could be. In his theory, déjà vu arises when this mechanism fails to operate as it should, due to tiredness, anxiety, etc., allowing us momentary access to raw perception data before it has been screened and processed, as weIl as to it's normal digested form. Thus the doubling. (This theory does not, as it has been pointed out, account for cases of apparently remembered dreams where there can be, as we've seen, some considerable time lags.) This position of Bergson's bears some resemblance to Freud's notion of the dream censor and it is not unlike Huxley's idea of the mind as a reducing valve, keeping our perceived world narrow enough that we can cope with it (1954). 

A worthy successor to Dunne's self study is the 1974 book published in Germany by a film and theater actress, Christine Mylius. She called it her Dream Diary (Traumjournal) with the sub-title: Experiment with the Future. It seems she has had experiences of déjà vu frequently and intensely most of her life and she began in 1953 to send her dream accounts fortnightly to the Freiburg Institute for Borderline Areas of Psychology, headed by Prof. Hans Bender. By 1974, over 2400 such reports had been archived. 

Fortunately, Frau Mylius also has the habit of keeping a detailed diary. What is especially fascinating is that many of the later dream fulfillments (déjà vu experiences) were recorded on celluloid, since they had to do with her film roles. In this case, one does not have to only take the individual's word for what happened; the investigator can himself see the correspondences between the dream reports and the events which later "come true". 

Prof. Bender, in his foreword to the book remarked (my translation): 

"Family and profession are the preferred territory of the secret antennae for that to come, but accidents, sickness, and death seem also to spread their shadows in her dream experiences ... [Her] diary showed that Fr. Mylius had her psi-dreams often in life situations in which she had to struggle with stress and worry. The future situation turned out to be the solution for the anxiety. That anxiety is a primary motif for breakthroughs in the space-time continuum is proven by the analysis of the countless reports, from all levels of the population, known as 'spontaneous phenomena'. Out of an analysis of 1500 probable paranormal cases at the Freiburg Institute, it happened that in 44% of the cases, death was the theme; in 19%, sickness, injury, or mortal danger; and in 26%, important occurances which were largely connected with strong negative emotions. Only 11% had to do with unimportant episodes. With Frau Mylius, in notable cases, anxiety is the discharging motif, yet the palette of unimportant, emotionally neutral ones is wider than in the statistics quoted above. This may have to do with the completeness with which the authoress describes her dreams and the corresponding happenings. Without 'expectant observation', such coincidences would not [normally] be noticed." (pp. 9 - 10) 

It may also have to do with the closer contact with the unconscious that an individual who is able to remember his or her dreams must have. He or she is thus more able to remember small details -- they are not so far away. 

Prof. Bender further said that he and his colleagues, including Fr. Mylius, are well aware that self-fulfillment can be at work in such cases. He spoke of the breakup of relationships which the unconscious could well know about, way in advance of the actual partings. Anxiety about a believed sickness or death can produce the very thing feared. Possible knowledge which can lead to a reasonable surmise of the future must also be watched for and the results excluded. Coincidence can always be appealed to as explanation for this and that detail. The impressive aspect, however, is the vast quantity and accuracy involved in the incidents reported in Fr. Mylius' book.