Let’s just start off by saying that despite the fact that I worked for years as a professional “psychic”, and did so without defrauding or misleading anyone, I
don’t actually believe in psychics. What I do believe is that there is a lot going on that our paltry nervous systems aren’t fully up to interpreting, as it were, openly, but
which can and sometimes do fall into the realm of perception of one kind or another, albeit surely distorted. In the case of what I’m about to discuss – precognition – I have seen it work, have
done it myself (as shall be described), but I also don’t think that’s what it per se is. As in, I do think (because physicists say so) that time doesn't work in any way as
straightforwardly as we perceive it to, but I don't think that there is a fated, immutable future that some people gain miraculous glimpses into. Maybe it’s an effect of distributed
consciousness, one of the most satisfying scientific theories to come along in a while and one which rather accurately accounts for multiple experiences I’ve had, and which I thus use at the
moment as my “currently most plausible model”, which is what I use instead of religion and other superstitions. Regardless, precognition in the form of dream is something that hasn’t happened to
me in a very long time now but to which I am no stranger. And for the record, it is not and has never been something I can “do” “on purpose”.
I remember the first one, of course. It falls eerily into the model described by many regarding their first “psychic” or “metaphysical” experience, in that unlike
all others afterward, it was 100% moment-for-moment accurate and everything else since has been more vague and interpretive. I’ve heard this same story from “clairvoyants”, “dousers”, “rain
dancers”, “shamans”, “priests”, “witches”, “Earth-children” – the first experience is often, it seems, transformationally powerful and clear as day, while afterward one has to work at
believing, making it happen, interpreting it, focusing, what have you. Weird that it would happen that way for me*, an avid realist and devoted scientific-methodist, a deeply committed skeptic,
too. But, as a great man notably said, so it goes.
That first one was, as I said, spot on. I was in that early teenage phase of total confusion and urgent questing after meaning (particularly so in my case, as I was raised by someone whose variable sense of reality had not yet been diagnosed as bipolar disorder +). In the dream, I got out of bed after the adults had had a few people over the night before. When I out got to the kitchen, I decided to eat breakfast even though I wasn’t particularly hungry because half the time if I didn’t, I would be punished for not taking care of myself. The problem was, the sink was full of dirty dishes and the only clean bowl was the favorite of said borderline adult. To use it was to risk being screamed at and grounded. It was, however, not “time” to do dishes. Were I to wash a bowl for my cereal, one of three things would happen: I would be screamed at because the water heater woke up said unstable adult, I would be screamed at because this adult “might have been about to take a shower” and I would have destroyed any chance of this ever happening again by using up the hot water, or, worst, get screamed at, investigated, and grounded because doing dishes “spontaneously” is unnatural in a teen and I must have “done something” and was now attempting to cover my tracks.
This kind of dilemma was absolutely standard for me; many times every day I would have to try to guess what was expected of me, guess what I was expected to have already done, figure out which path led to the least abuse. No big deal. I realized that this time the least amount of trouble would come from using the bowl – it would get me the wearily-delivered lecture about how I had no respect for anyone or for the concept of personal property and then it would all be brushed off with the list of facts making this inevitable: I was just an inconsiderate person, no matter how hard one tried to correct this; I was a flake and therefore “just like my other parent” (long out of the domestic picture); furthermore, I “must be retarded”, which was just another massive burden for said at-home adult to bear, not that I would notice or appreciate anything so social. Being long familiar with this one, I could take it easily – as long as I was careful about my face, of course. Looking sad or crying meant I was being manipulative by trying to elicit pity, looking angry was “defiance”, smiling was (obviously) mocking behavior, remaining carefully neutral was “not listening” or, far worse, “not taking things seriously”, you get the picture. But hey, par for the course for a normal day. No big deal. I used the cereal bowl.
Sure enough, said overseeing adult did happen to get up and come in. Sure enough, everything went down as I expected but instead of being grounded, unusually, I was ordered to do all the dishes, after school, as punishment for having used the bowl. The details of the scene are myriad and tiny but include things like the way said adult’s robe was tied and then fell open to be tied again, the exact position of the bowl in the cupboard, the exact orientation of the dishes in the sink, the specific things left out from the gathering of the evening before. Which cat walked across the room in which direction during which sentence. And so on.
So then, well, this dream ended there, mid-rant, and I woke up and lay in bed a bit overwhelmed by how real it had seemed. Shrugging it off, I got up. And, as of course I’ve already made clear, everything then happened exactly as I’d dreamed it down to the tiniest detail. I hadn’t been permitted to leave my room during and after the adults’ event – I was, after all, an attention whore, always in the way, and "nobody" wants a kid around when it's adult time anyway – but there were the dishes in the sink exactly as my brain had placed them, there were the wine glasses on the counter, the ashtray by the phone with several smoked-down roaches in it. I remember the fascination with which I took that bowl down, far too curious to try to change events from the dream and also still slightly asleep so not tracking all that well. I remember turning my head toward the door through which the adult would, and did, appear. The robe falling open. The cat, a sudden beam of sunlight as the sun cleared the redwood trees outside, the exact lay of that sleepy adult’s hair. And I was sentenced to washing dishes, instead of grounded.
Totally freaked me out.
There were more, several more, over the years, some of them pretty accurate, others which came partway true but deviated in some manner, and a few which felt like precognitive dreams, carried the same… signature?… if you will, but never happened at all (or not yet, at any rate). Some of them involved other people, and in three of those cases I told those people, all of whom laughed at me, but not meanly because they were my friends; two of them reported back later, one with an uncannily “accurate” experience and one who “felt like” what had happened had indeed related to my admittedly wildly obscure dream. For the sake of brevity, though, I’ll cut straight through now to a really freakily accurate, while brief, dream I had a while back.
This happened about 23 years ago. We were young, desperate artists living in a new country in a tiny boiling and freezing apartment and my husband had an art exhibition in a coffeeshop in two days. We needed to varnish a couple of the paintings but we had no varnish and no money. I dreamed that I left our apartment and walked down the long, twisting, narrow stairs to the kitchen in the landlord’s part of the place. I wanted to make some cookies. I told him that I needed flour, that I was in the middle of making something important but couldn’t complete it without flour. I asked if he could lend me some basic baking flour, which came in a blue-and-white paper bag. I remember stressing particularly that I needed a blue and white bag of regular flour. He looked through the cupboards and said that he didn’t have any basic flour, but I could borrow some self-rising flour, which came in a red and white paper bag. I said that it was more than I needed but would do fine, and took it.
When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t remember this dream at all. I got on with my morning and when I knew him to be awake, I went down to the landlord’s part of the place, finding him in the kitchen, and explained that we needed to get some varnish for my husband’s exhibition the next day, but had no money. I asked him if I could borrow ten Guilders. Now, ten Guilder notes, it’s important to know, were blue and white paper. As he started looking through his wallet, the dream came back to me in full, but I didn’t attach any importance to it until he announced that he didn’t have a ten Guilder bill, but I could borrow this 25-Euro bill instead – which was, of course, red and white paper.
So that’s it, that’s the precognitive dream I still hold to be my most "accurate" excepting that first one. "Why" did it happen, though? Humans love things to “have meaning”, for there to be reasons for stuff, but I would have asked to borrow ten, and received twenty-five, Guilders whether I had dreamed about it or not. There’s nothing significant about it, nothing I needed to pay attention to or act upon to achieve or avoid something, which is pretty much what people think such dreams are “for”. Instead it was just as though some part of my brain simply saw it happen, whether via imagination or experience of some kind, and told me about it in metaphor.
This is why, for now, pending further scientific or other developments, I place it most likely in the distributed consciousness realm. That's the theory that we
each live simultaneously in several universes** and some of the experiences happening in one of those universes can be perceived in some distant, distorted way by the expression of one’s
consciousness in another of those universes. Seems perfectly straightforward to me; I hope it’s true, or that if it isn’t, whatever is is even more interesting.
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* Since this is so similar across such a varied field of experience types, I'm tempted to assume it has a neurological basis.
** Some say infinite; who knows, this is all virgin scientific ground, here, but I'm not sure I even believe in "infinite" -- but don't you dare ask me what I think comes "after" or
how there even could be an end to existence, to time... oooh, spooky physics stuff...