I DREAM THE FUTURE AND SO DO YOU

Some years ago, I discovered a remarkable fact: I dream the future, or at least some of my future experience turns up ahead of time in my dreams. I do not make predictions, or pick winners at the races, although some “future dreamers” have. But bits and pieces of what I will come across in the next day or so – or week, or month, sometimes years – will often show up in advance in my dreams. Let me tell you how this came about.

In 1980 I read a book entitled An Experiment With Time by JW Dunne. I was reading a great deal of literature about the paranormal and the occult at the time, and I came across a reference to the book and decided to check it out. What interested me about it was that the author, an aeronautics engineer, had no interest in the occult (or so he said; I later discovered this was not quite the case), but had discovered by chance that he dreamed the future. The book was published in 1927 and for a time Dunne and his philosophy, “serialism,” which he developed in order to account for the strange temporal anomalies he was experiencing, had a vogue. The playwright JB Priestley used Dunne’s ideas for some of his plays, such as Time and the Conways, and HG Wells, who knew Dunne – as did Priestley – used them in his “future history” The Shape of Things to Come.

What had happened was that Dunne had woken from a dream in which he was arguing with someone about the time. Dunne said it was 4.30; the person in the dream disagreed. In the dream, Dunne thought that his pocket watch had stopped, and reached into his pocket to check. It had stopped, at 4.30. At that point he woke up.

Dunne decided to check to see what time it actually was. He reached for his pocket watch and found that it had stopped at precisely 4.30. He assumed he had noticed this earlier but had forgotten to set the right time and wind the watch, and so had dreamed of it. He wound the watch then went back to bed, assuming he’d have to set it to the right time later. But when he woke up again later that morning, he saw that the watch had the right time. It had stopped at precisely 4.30. His dream had been correct.

IT WAS IF HIS LIFE WAS A FILM AND HE WAS SOMEHOW SEEING SEGMENTS OF IT IN ADVANCE

In another dream, Dunne was in Egypt, near.