Dreaming Ahead of Time: Experiences with Precognitive Dreams, Synchronicity and Coincidence
by Floris Books • 18 January 2022 • Extract, Philosophy of Human Life • 0 Comments
Can we see the future in our dreams? Does time flow in one direction? What is a ‘meaningful coincidence’?
Renowned esoteric writer Gary Lachman has been recording his own precognitive dreams for forty years. In this unique and intriguing book, Lachman recounts the discovery that he dreams ‘ahead of time’, and argues convincingly that this extraordinary ability is, in fact, shared by all of us.
Step inside Dreaming Ahead of Time: Experiences with Precognitive Dreams, Synchronicity and Coincidence with this extract from the chapter entitled, I Had a Dream Last Night.
The dreams, synchronicities, and odd coincidences discussed in this chapter come from journals I have been keeping since the 1980s. Some periods are better represented than others, and at different times my dream life seems simply to have stopped, or at least I have gone through long patches, sometimes months, when, try as I may, I do not remember my dreams. This is often compensated for by stretches when my dreams are so long and complicated, so odd and unusual, that it takes some time to record them. Some of the dreams here come from a period like this, when my dream life was so complex and involved that I had to stop paying attention to it, simply so that I’d have time in the morning for something other than recording my dreams. These dreams involved strange adventures, magical battles – more than once I have fended off Satanists and witches ‒ visits from aliens, incredible journeys, and ‘meetings with remarkable men’ that would leave me half exhausted and utterly convinced that in my dreams I had actually taken part in these events. I had the feeling that these dreams took place not solely ‘in my head’, but were in some way ‘real’ in more than a psychological sense. I felt that in them I had visited some interior terrain different from the more common ‘everynight’ dreams that have me worried about some trivial problem, undressed in public, or anxiously missing a train. If dreams serve a compensatory function, as C. G. Jung, one of the great dreamers and dream interpreters of the last century believed they did, evening out imbalances in our waking mind, then I can only assume that at this time of my life, I must have been rather bored and frustrated. And having read some of the journal entries that accompanied the records of my dreams at this time – leading up to when I left Los Angeles at the end of 1995 and moved to London to start a new life as a full time writer – I have to say it appears I was.
That I still have dreams whether I remember them or not – that we all do – seems to have been confirmed by science. According to several studies, we dream throughout the night; although many people claim that they don’t dream, this is untrue. They may not remember their dreams – not everyone has the same power of dream recall, although it can be developed with practice – but they have them nevertheless. Dreaming is something we do and we continue to do it throughout the sleeping hours of our life, in the same way that we continue to breathe and our hearts continue to beat. And if some investigators into the dark side of the mind are correct, we also dream throughout the day. Along with the daydreams with which we are familiar, it seems that those we associate with the night are still at work as we go about our daily business.
With this in mind, the idea that our whole life is a dream, that the world we wake up to from sleep is as much a dream as the ones we have left behind, and which informs spiritual teachings and practices such as Tibetan Buddhism and the Fourth Way of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, takes on a new and significant meaning.
King Kong and UFOs
I know I dreamed a great deal as a child, but unlike some dreamers – again, Jung is a good example ‒ I cannot today recall dreams from my childhood. The earliest dreams I can recall are from my late teens, when I was first living in New York in the mid‒1970s. Two dreams I still remember vividly from that time. In one, I was sitting on King Kong’s shoulder, clutching tightly to his fur as he swam around Manhattan. I was nineteen and just starting a career as a musician, in the early days of what would be called ‘punk rock’. I can recall the tremendous sense of power and exhilaration as Kong cut through the Hudson, and the fantastic skyline of a dream New York, with skyscrapers of shining chrome and glass, taller than the real ones. In another dream, huge flying saucers, massive UFO ‘mother ships’, slowly drift over New York, preparing to make contact, as we have since seen in dozens of films, although Close Encounters of the Third Kind had yet to be made. I watched them glide over the tops of the buildings, their shadow covering city blocks. Again, there was a terrific sense of exhilaration and wonder, the feeling that ‘They’re here! They’re really here!’ and astonishment that the first contact with extra-terrestrials was about to be made. (As you might suspect, when I awoke, I was terribly disappointed that this hadn’t happened.)
What stood out from these dreams, aside from their fantastic content, was their remarkable clarity and vividness. King Kong’s fur was as real as that of a dog I might pat. The undersides of the UFO were as intricately patterned as an electrical circuit. And this has been true of many dreams at different times in my life: they seemed to possess a reality greater than that of waking life. In his researches into dreams, Ouspensky remarked on the incredible talent of the ‘dream artist’, our inner stage director who is able to recreate reality so sharply that it is at times almost painful. Today’s efforts at virtual reality and HD TV pale by comparison and it is not surprising that many people, having experienced what I call the ‘crackle of reality’ in dreams, believe that what they have emerged from was more than ‘only a dream’.
Find out more about Dreaming Ahead of Time by Gary Lachman here and discover his other books – Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, The Caretakers of the Cosmos, The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus, Rudolf Steiner and A Secret History of Consciousness.
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