Believing that you have seen the future in a dream is surprisingly common, with recent surveys suggesting that around a third of the population experience this phenomenon at some point in their lives. Beliefs like these have been recorded throughout history. The Bible famously describes how Pharaoh dreamed of seven lean cows coming out of a river and eating seven fat cows, and how Joseph interpreted this as the coming of seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine. The ancient Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero reported having a dream in which he saw ‘a noble-looking youth, let down on a chain of gold from the skies’. When he entered the Capitol the following day he saw Octavius and recognized him as the noble-looking youth from his dreams. Octavius later went on to succeed Caesar as Emperor of Rome. In more recent times, Abraham Lincoln reportedly dreamed about an assassination two weeks before being shot dead, Mark Twain described a dream in which he saw his brother’s corpse lying in a coffin just a few weeks before his brother was killed in an explosion, and Charles Dickens dreamed of a woman dressed in red called Miss Napier shortly before being visited by a girl wearing a red shawl and introducing herself as Miss Napier.
What could explain these remarkable events? Are people really getting a glimpse of things to come? Can the human psyche really play havoc with the very fabric of time? Is it possible to see tomorrow today?
Throughout history, these questions have taxed the minds of many of the world’s greatest thinkers. For example, in about 350 BC the classical Greek philosopher Aristotle penned a short text entitled On Prophesying by Dreams. Aristotle’s two-part argument was as simple as it was strange. Having thought about the issue for some time, the great philosopher concluded that only God would be able to send prophetic dreams. However, Aristotle had observed that those reporting the dreams did not appear to be especially upstanding citizens, and often turned out to be rather ‘commonplace persons’. Figuring that God wouldn’t waste time casting his pearls of wisdom among swine like that, Aristotle concluded that prophetic dreams could be safely dismissed as coincidences. It is an interesting argument, albeit one that is likely to be disputed by both modern scientists and Mrs M.H. from Barn-staple. However, despite over 2,000 years of interest in the mystery of prophetic dreaming, it is only in the last century or so that researchers have managed to solve the puzzle.
Before reading further you might like to make yourself a hot mug of cocoa and snuggle under the covers. We are about to enter the strange world of sleep science.
However, before we begin, let’s have a quick memory test. Take a look at the following list of words and try to remember them.
Lamp
Rock
Apple
Worm
Clock
Baby
Horse
Sword
Bird
Desk
Many thanks, more about this later. Let’s start.
Spread Betting
Chapter 5 described how the pioneering work of Eugene Aserinsky helped pave the way for a new science of dreaming. Aserinsky showed that waking up a person after they have spent some time in the REM state is very likely to result in them reporting a dream. In doing so, he kick-started decades of research into the nature of nod. Much of the work involved inviting people to spend the night in special sleep laboratories, monitoring them as they sleep, waking them up after they emerge from REM state, and asking them to describe their dream.3 The work has yielded many important insights into dreaming. Almost everyone dreams in colour. Those who are blind from birth do not ‘see’ in their dreams, but experience many more smells, tastes and sounds. Although some dreams are bizarre, many involve everyday chores such as doing the washing-up, filling in tax forms, or vacuuming. If you creep up on someone who is dreaming and quietly play some music, shine a light onto their face or spray them with water, they are very likely to incorporate the stimuli into their dreams. However, perhaps the most important revelation was that you have many more dreams than you might think.
Sleep scientists quickly discovered that you have an average of about four dreams each night. They take place every 90 minutes or so, and each one lasts around 20 minutes. You then forget the vast majority of these episodes when you wake up, leaving you with the impression that you dream far less than is actually the case. The only exception to this rule occurs when you happen to wake up during a dream, perhaps because your alarm clock goes off in the morning or you are disturbed during the night. When this happens you will usually remember the general gist of the dream and perhaps some specific fragments but, unless it is especially striking, you will soon forget all about it. There is, however, a rather unusual set of circumstances that can greatly increase your likelihood of remembering these dreams.
Earlier in this chapter I presented you with a list of ten words and asked you to try to commit them to memory. Now I would like you to attempt to remember all ten words. To help you, here are five words that are associated with a few of the words in the original list.
Light
Time
Fruit
Gallop
Wings
Please get a pen and a piece of paper and try to remember the original list. Don’t turn over the page until you have done your best to remember all of the words.
All done? Check your list against page 276.
How did you do? My prediction is that you will have been especially likely to remember the words ‘lamp’, ‘clock’, ‘apple’, ‘horse’ and ‘bird’. Why? Because the associated words ‘light’, ‘fruit’, ‘time, ‘gallop’ and ‘wings’ will have acted as cues. It wasn’t that you had forgotten these words, but rather that they were lurking in your unconscious and just required a little help to emerge. A similar principle applies to your memory for dreams. In the same way that the associated words helped you remember words you couldn’t instantly recall from the original list, so an event that happens to you when you are awake can trigger the memory of a dream. To discover the relationship between this effect and the gift of prophecy, let’s imagine three nights of disturbed dreaming.
On day one you go to bed after a hard day at work. You shut your eyes and slowly lose consciousness. Throughout the night you drift through the various stages of sleep and experience several dreams. At ten past seven your brain once again bursts into action and presents you with another entirely fictitious episode. For the next 20 minutes you find yourself visiting an ice cream factory, falling into a huge vat of raspberry ripple, and attempting to eat your way out. Just when you can take no more, your alarm clock sounds and you wake up with fragments of the factory and raspberry ripple ice cream drifting through your mind.
On day two the same series of events unfolds. You go to bed, drift to sleep and have several dreams. At two o’clock in the morning you are right in the middle of a rather sinister dream in which you are driving along a dark country lane. Eric Chuggers, your all-time favourite rock star is sitting in the passenger seat, and the two of you are chatting easily. Suddenly a giant purple frog jumps out in front of the car, you swerve to avoid the frog but go off the road and hit a tree. However, tonight your cat feels a tad peckish and decides to come and pester you for food. As she jumps onto the bed you wake up from the dream with a vague memory of Eric Chuggers, a giant purple frog, a tree and impending death.
On the third night you again fall asleep. At four o’clock in the morning you experience a rather traumatic dream. It is a surreal affair, with you being forced to audition for the part of an Oompa-Loompa in a new film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Although successful, you subsequently discover that the orange makeup and green hair dye used in the audition is permanent. You suddenly wake up feeling very stressed, remember the audition and spend the next 20 minutes trying to figure out the symbolic meaning of the dream. You then go back to sleep for the rest of the night.
In the morning you wake up, turn on the radio and are shocked to discover that Eric Chuggers was killed in a car accident during the night.
And it doesn’t stop there. Soon after convincing yourself that you had a glimpse of the future while fast asleep, a ‘let’s make this experience as spooky as possible’ part of your mind gets to work. Because dreams tend to be somewhat surreal they have the potential to be twisted to match the events that actually transpired. In reality, Eric Chuggers was not driving along a country lane, did not hit a tree and the accident didn’t involve a giant purple frog. However, a country lane is similar to a city road, and a lamppost looks a bit like a tree. And what about the giant purple frog? Well, maybe that symbolized something unexpected, such as the car that drifted onto the wrong side of the road. Or maybe it turns out that Chuggers was on hallucinogenic drugs and so might have thought that the oncoming car was indeed a giant purple frog. Or maybe you see a photograph from the scene of the accident and discover that Chuggers’ car had a purple mascot on the dashboard. Or maybe an advertising billboard close to the accident contains an image of a giant frog. Or maybe Chug-gers’ next album was going to have a frog on the cover. Or maybe Chuggers was wearing a purple shirt at the time of the collision. You get the point. Provided that you are creative and want to believe that you have a psychic link with the recently deceased Mr Chuggers, the possibilities for matches are limited only by your imagination.
So far we have focused on your dream about Chuggers because it resembled events that happened a few days later. But let’s imagine that instead of Chuggers dying, you went out to a supermarket and were offered an especially gorgeous sample of raspberry ripple ice cream? Under those circumstances you might well have forgotten about the dreams involving Chuggers and the Oompa-Loompas, and been tempted to tell your friends and family about how your dream seemed to have predicted the unexpected encounter with raspberry ripple ice cream. Or let’s imagine that a few days later the company that you work for promotes you, and your new position involves wearing a garish uniform. Suddenly the deep symbolism involved in the dream about the Oompa-Loompas would seem obvious, and the dreams about Chuggers and the raspberry ripple ice cream would remain buried in your unconsciousness.
In short, you have lots of dreams and encounter lots of events. Most of the time the dreams are unrelated to the events, and so you forget about them. However, once in a while one of the dreams will correspond to one of the events. Once this happens, it is suddenly easy to remember the dream and convince yourself that it has magically predicted the future. In reality, it is just the laws of probability at work.
This theory also helps explain a rather curious feature of precognitive dreaming. Most premonitions involve a great deal of doom and gloom, with people regularly foreseeing the assassination of world leaders, attending the funeral of close friends, seeing planes falling out of the sky, and watching as countries go to war. People rarely report getting a glimpse of the future and seeing someone deliriously happy on their wedding day or being given a promotion at work. Sleep scientists have discovered that around 80 per cent of dreams are far from sweet, and instead focus on negative events. Because of this, bad news is far more likely than good news to trigger the memory of a dream, explaining why so many precognitive dreams involve foreseeing death and disaster.
At the start of this chapter I described how psychiatrist John Barker found 60 people who appeared to have predicted the Aberfan mining disaster. Does the research into dreaming and memory alter the evidential value of these alleged premonitions? In 36 of Barker’s cases the respondents provided no evidence that they had recorded their dream prior to the disaster. These respondents may have had many other dreams before hearing about Aberfan, and then only remembered and reported the one dream that matched the tragedy. Not only that, but the lack of any record made at the time of the dream means that they could have inadvertently twisted and turned the dream to better fit the unfortunate events that transpired. Blackness may have become coal, rooms may have become classrooms, and rolling hillsides may have become a Welsh valley.
Of course, those who believe in paranormal matters might argue that they are convinced by instances when people tell their friends and family about a dream, or describe it in a diary, and then discover that it matches future events. Do these instances constitute a miracle of the mind? To find out, we are going to drift even deeper into the science of sleep.
Interview with Caroline Watt, from the Koester Parapsychology Unit,
about sleep precognition
www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/CarolineWatt.html
‘Other Than That, Did You Enjoy the Play, Mrs Lincoln?’
Open almost any book on the paranormal and you will soon discover that President Abraham Lincoln once had one of the most famous precognitive dreams in history. According to the story, in early April 1865 Lincoln went to close friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon and explained that he had recently had a rather unsettling dream. During the dream Lincoln had felt a ‘death-like stillness’ in his body and heard weeping from a downstairs room in the White House. After searching the building, he arrived at the East Room and came across a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. A crowd of people were gazing mournfully at the body. When Lincoln asked who had died, he was told that it was the President, and that he had been assassinated.
Two weeks after the dream, Lincoln and his wife went to see a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C. A short time after the start of the play Lincoln was shot dead by Confederate spy John Wilkes Booth.
But the vast majority of books describing the dream aren’t giving their readers the full picture. Joe Nickell has had a long and colourful career that has seen him working as an undercover detective, riverboat manager, carnival promoter, and magician. He is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Inquiry, an American organization that investigates paranormal matters. In the 1990s Nickell decided to take a closer look at Lincoln’s apparent prophecy.4 He tracked down Ward Hill Lamon’s account of the incident in his 1895 memoir, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, and discovered that many of the second-hand accounts of the incident missed out one very important part of the episode. After being told about the dream, Lamon expressed his concern, but the President calmly replied, ‘In this dream it was not me, but some other fellow, that was killed. It seems that this ghostly assassin tried his hand on some one else.’ In other words, Lincoln did not actually think that he had seen his own death but rather that of another President.
Of course, believers might argue that the President did foresee his own assassination, albeit without realizing it. Even assuming that, would the incident count as compelling evidence for precognition? The answer once more lies in the pioneering work of sleep science.
In the late 1960s dream researchers carried out a groundbreaking experiment with a group of patients who were attending therapy sessions to help them cope with the psychological effects of undergoing major surgery.5 The researchers monitored the patients’ dreams over the course of several nights and discovered that when they had attended a therapy session during the day they were far more likely to dream about their medical problems. For example, one patient was having a tough time coping with the drainage tubes resulting from his surgery. After spending time at a therapy session talking about the issue, he was especially likely to have dreams that involved him continually inserting tubes into himself and others. In short, the patients’ dreams tended to reflect their anxieties. Similar studies have revealed the same effect. The
content of our dreams is not only affected by events in our surroundings, but also often reflects whatever is worrying our minds.
Nickell noted that even the briefest of glances through the history books reveals that Lincoln would have had every reason to be anxious about the possibility of being assassinated. Just before his first inauguration, he was advised to avoid travelling through Baltimore because his aides had uncovered an assassination plot there, and during his time in office he had received several death threats: on one especially memorable occasion an incompetent would-be assassin fired a shot through his top hat. Seen in the light of these findings, Lincoln’s famous dream suddenly looks less paranormal.
The same concept may also explain one of the most striking examples of alleged precognition about the Aberfan disaster. At the start of this chapter I described how one of the young girls who would later perish in the tragedy told her parents that she had dreamed about ‘something black’ coming down over her school and the school no longer being there. For several years before the disaster the local authorities had expressed considerable concern about the wisdom of placing large amounts of mining debris on the hillside, but their worries had been ignored by those running the mine. Correspondence from the time makes the extent of these concerns clear.6 For example, three years before the disaster, the Borough Engineer in the area wrote to the authorities noting, ‘I regard [the situation] as extremely serious as the slurry is so fluid and the gradient so steep that it could not possibly stay in position in the winter time or during periods of heavy rain’, and later added, ‘this apprehension is also in the minds of . . . the residents in this area as they have previously experienced, during periods of heavy rain, the movement of the slurry to the danger and detriment of people and property’. There is no way of knowing for sure, but it is possible that the young girl’s dream may have been reflecting these anxieties.
Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there Page 20
