I mentioned premonition dreams in a recent blog post, Answer Comes In A Dream, pt. 2. This is not meant to be anything exhaustive about the subject, but rather just a taste. Actually, it’s more a recounting of a mind-blowing dream experience that a good friend of mine once had. There’s plenty of material out there for you to check out premonition dreams if you’d like. To start with, just google it or even google Larry Dossey, MD. He’s pretty cool.
And before we get into it, let me say that I absolutely LOVE when weird things happen that we can’t explain. When something happens that we can’t explain, we can either pretend it didn’t happen or we can just admit that our knowledge at this point doesn’t have an answer. Mainstream science unfortunately tends to do the former, as astonishing as that sounds. You’d think that scientists would be very open-minded, but often they’re just the opposite, fiercely defending their current view of how things work. When the same weird thing has happened enough times to enough different people, though, it’s time stop pretending that nothing has happened. It might just be that we really don’t understand how the world works. This thought can be unsettling at first, but when you get used to it, it’s quite liberating. We can just go with the flow more and not have to think that we know everything. Because we totally don’t…
I’ll be writing more about this “fringe science” stuff in the future. It has such great implications about the question, “How does the world really work?” One of the implications of studies done with random number generators, for instance, is that our thoughts are not private and that “mind over matter” happens in measurable ways. I know that most of the world believes that thoughts are private and cannot effect matter, but that’s actually not true. The evidence doesn’t support it. So that’s a little preview. You can always read the book The Field by Lynne McTaggart if you’d like – it’s pretty wild in terms of some of the interesting science that’s happened.
If you google “premonition dreams,” you’ll see that they’re dreams in which the dreamer dreams about something that ends up really happening. There are plenty of well known examples, like the 1966 coal accident in Aberfan, Wales or even the events of September 11, 2001. When we read about this stuff second hand, we can say that maybe it’s all made up. Then we keep researching and find more and more examples where there are multiple people involved who can verify the story. At that point, it takes an awful lot of people making an awful lot of stuff up in order for you to keep ignoring the phenomenon. Eventually, the scales of your own personal belief might tip in favor of there being something of substance to this. And then what might happen? You might meet people who have had the experience. That’s what I’m going to share today. And I’m talking about people who are honest and not at all crazy. It could even be a family member. It could be someone you’d least expect. When this happens, just allow your beliefs to change if they want to – you’ll get used to the new beliefs over time.
A friend of mine once had a premonition dream that quite literally blew his mind. He dreamed something and then it happened. Exactly like in the dream. First of all, know that this is the kind of person who is totally honest, trustworthy, dependable, not weird, not exaggerating, and definitely not looking for any headlines or extra attention. He prefers to fly under the radar – that’s just how he rolls. A great guy. He’s extremely intelligent, as well as very logical in his thinking. He probably hasn’t even told many people about this. So when someone like that tells me of this freaky experience, I tend to listen – that’s just me being logical. I’m thinking, “It looks like there’s something to this, and our rules of how things work have to expand in order to explain how this could happen.” No more pretending or ignoring.
So my friend had a dream that he described as being “incredibly vivid,” much more vivid than his normal dreams. And by the way, that’s often a sign that a dream is not just a normal dream. Remind me to write about “visitations” in the future, by the way. A person might also remember these abnormal dreams much more than s/he would remember normal dreams. That was the case with the client mentioned above who found his answer to a situation in a dream (read Answer Comes In A Dream).
On the night of the dream that my friend had, there was a “crazy, monster storm” at the beach. He and the others in the house even slept with the windows and doors open in order to better experience it (the house is built in such a way that you can do this when it’s raining). He said he remembers going to bed “in awe of nature.” He’s not a tree hugger, either – not that there’s anything wrong with that. I just want to cover all the bases. This was one of those times when Mother Nature was wailing and showing us humans who’s really in charge. That’s how hurricanes are down here, by the way.
During the night, he dreamed that he was walking along the beach. Towards the end of the dream, he looked to his right out into the water and he saw a shark. The shark was swimming alongside him as he walked. This continued for a while, and when he got to the end of his walk, he and the shark looked at each other and then the shark took a hard right and swam out to sea.
My friend awoke from this dream, and it was very early in the morning. Nobody else in the house was up yet, so he walked across the street to the Gulf of Mexico. By the way, he said this was “highly unusual” for him. He said he didn’t know why he did this; it just felt like the thing to do. There are boardwalks going over the dunes to the Gulf, and as he crested the boardwalk, he noticed a few things that were the same as the beginning of the dream, small things like birds flying, the various sounds, and how the water looked. He was shocked, curious, and a little skeptical, because the thought he was thinking was that this was not similar to the dream but exact. It was literally the same experience.
His intention from the beginning was just to go for a casual walk on the beach, so he did that but with much more awareness because of the weirdness that he was experiencing. He said that “all of these relatively little things kept lining up, like the sea oats and the driftwood.” He was aware that they were exactly as they were in the dream, but in the back of his mind he kept thinking, “This is crazy, but these are all little things. Am I going to see that shark??”
As he walked, he felt more and more “in the flow” and said that it got very comfortable. When he had walked far enough and turned around to walk back to the boardwalk, the whole experience was getting “more amped up, like the hair on my arms was rising.” Finally, he got the courage to look out to the water to his right and sure enough, there was the shark! He continued to walk down the beach, glancing at it here and there for a good fifty yards. Then when he got back to the starting point at the boardwalk, he realized that was when the dream ended. At this point in the dream, he would stop, take a good look at the shark, and then the shark would take a hard right and swim out to sea.
This is where it gets interesting. Remember that as he first crested the boardwalk, before his toes even touched the sand, he had the thought that he was experiencing the dream exactly. And even after all of these initial small things lined up, and then there were more and more of them, and then the big thing – the shark – lined up, and with everything feeling “definitely heightened, significantly different than normal awareness,” he was still skeptical. I told you in the beginning that this is not the kind of person who goes around making things up. He’s a very straight-up dude. So he still felt like it hadn’t been totally confirmed that he was re-experiencing the dream. He thought, “It could all still be in my head.” He said, “I had to face it directly, but I wasn’t sure how it would end if I did. Finally I looked directly at the shark, there was a strong connection, a pause, and then a release.” And with that, the shark took a hard right and swam out to sea. Exactly like it did in the dream. Exactly. Pretty cool…
The question now is, did this happen or did it not? We’re going to assume that it did, and here’s why. I’d already done lots of research before I heard this story, and I already believed without a doubt that this happens. I might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know logic pretty well because I have two math degrees. It gets pounded in your head after a while. In advanced math, we prove and disprove things all the time. So we’ve been taught that it only takes one of these accounts to be true to mean that this phenomenon is real. One! And if this is real, then our worldview, our explanation of how things work, must include it – so science must include it. If there’s nothing to this, then every single one of these accounts throughout human history has to have been wrong. To me, the chances they’re all wrong is simply ridiculous. Laughable. Probability very near zero.
So we’re going to be logical and assume that from time to time, people have accurate dreams of the future. Our next question, then, might be, “What does this mean?” It looks like I’m going to eventually have another blog called A Deep Mind for the deeper issues. There, we’ll talk about the nature of time. It might not work as we tend to think. For now, though, I think that the main lesson is that we really don’t know what’s going on. And that’s good news! We can chill out and not pretend that we do. As a logical person who has done lots of research on this type of thing and who is not limited to a certain belief system, I can say for sure that some very, very strange things happen in this world. “Spiritual” and “mystical” experiences absolutely happen. And the more you look, the more you find. And as I said above, it doesn’t all have to be true – far from it, in fact. Only one of a given experience or phenomenon has to be true to show us that our laws of how things work need to be updated. One. So we can let go of the need to understand everything. We can let go of the need to control everything. And that’s a good place to be when you get more and more used to it. It takes a lot of work and energy to have to understand everything. I guess I’m often reminded here in these writings of Dr. Larry Burk’s catchphrase, “Let Magic Happen.”
P.S. My friend had another premonition dream a few years later, but it wasn’t nearly as vivid as this one. I think he said it was separated by more time, too, like maybe a week or two after the dream. What he dreamed about definitely happened, though – there was no doubt about that. That dream alone might not seem so definitive, but together with the shark dream, the evidence keeps piling up. And this is just one person out of many. There are over seven billion people on earth now, and most people don’t advertise these experiences. They totally happen – you can take that to the bank. And it’s good news! Let go of your worldview if it’s outdated and just be open to life showing you another one at the right time that works better. And as always, let me know if I can help. I love this stuff…
P.P.S. My own worldview had actually already changed, based on lots of spiritual study and other research, by the time I heard this story several years ago. It had changed in such a way that this story actually made perfect sense. It only affirmed what I already believed. So when I heard this story, it was no more weird than hearing a story about a sports game or the weather. It was more fun, but not any more strange. If I had heard it at a different time in my life, though, my reaction likely would have been much different. So our worldview tends to change and evolve over time. That’s why the key is to be open-minded. Just let it evolve as needed without having to control it. That’s the faster way. Enjoy the ride!