Dreams & Premonitions
What they tell us about healing, consciousness, and our destiny.
Hello Dreamer,
When I was studying for my master’s degree, I did a presentation on a talk that Dr. Larry Dossey gave to the Scientific and Medical Network on Dreams & Premonitions: What they tell us about healing, consciousness, and our destiny. Considering the recent world events, multiple natural disasters, wars, humanitarian crisis, and the US elections, I felt drawn to revisit this presentation and that is what I’m going to share with you on this cold December day.
Dr. Larry Dossey, is a physician from Texas, internationally recognized for his work on bringing spirituality to medicine. He has written a number of books on consciousness, power of prayer, premonitions, and many more. Larry approaches the collective dreams from the angle of premonitions and concludes that they point to what he calls a “soul-like immortal quality to consciousness.”
A few interesting facts about premonitions:
The word 'premonition' comes from the two Latin words: prae (“before”) + moneõ (“to warn”), and it literally means a pre-warning. It is an anticipation of an event without conscious reason.
Premonitions have been called other things such as gut feelings, intuition, 6th sense, hunches, second sight, etc.
They don’t always appear in dreams. They can also happen in waking state, but dreams are a great avenue for them.
While they can warn of nice things, they often precede disasters or life-threatening events, so they give us a tremendous survival advantage. They serve as a survival function if we take them seriously. This makes biological sense from an evolutionary perspective so they might be incorporated in our biology.
Larry believes that premonitions are a form of preventive medicine. They often warn us of upcoming challenges to our health and if we pay attention to them, we can stay alive.
Larry gives some interesting examples:
Amanda, a young mother in Washington State, was awakened one night by a horrible dream. She dreamed that the chandelier in the next room had fallen from the ceiling onto her sleeping infant’s crib and crushed the baby. In the dream she saw a clock in the baby’s room that read 4:35, and that wind and rain were hammering the windows. Extremely upset, she awakened her husband and told him her dream. He said it was silly and to go back to sleep. But the dream was so frightening that Amanda went into the baby’s room and brought it back to bed with her. Soon she was awakened by a loud crash in the baby’s room. She rushed in to see that the chandelier had fallen and crushed the crib. The clock in the room read 4:35 and wind and rain were howling outside. Her dream premonition was camera-like in detail, including the specific event, the precise time, and even a change in the weather.
An OB-GYN in Oklahoma City, knows ahead of time when his patients are going to deliver because he gets strange feelings in his chest when the time is near. It’s like an alarm goes off. This is so reliable that the OB nurses caring for his patients have learned to ask him how his chest feels, as a guide to when a patient will deliver.
Research shows that people often avoid riding on planes and trains the day they crash, compared to normal days. On days of the crash, the vacancy rate on the train is unusually low. This type of premonition is usually unconscious. People don’t say, “The train is going to crash. I’m cancelling my reservation.” They usually report a vague sense that something is wrong or doesn’t feel right, and they find some reason to change their plans.
There is also the event when an entire group of church members were late for choir practice one weekday night at a little church in Beatrice, Nebraska. The church exploded and would almost certainly have killed them had they been there. The odd thing is that none of them had any conscious premonition that the explosion would occur, but they stayed away, nonetheless. Being late was an unconscious behavior, and it saved their life.
9/11 resulted in the greatest outpouring of premonitions and precognitive dreams in history. A simple google search of dreams and premonitions of 9/11 reveals millions of websites of people who reported their premonitions and dreams before 9/11 happened.
Larry notes that children are particularly sensitive to premonitions especially in dreams. An example is what happened in Aberfan in Wales in 1966. A mountain of coal waste came down the hill and took out a junior school killing 116 children, teachers, and other people. A psychiatrist heard that people had premonitions and dreams before this happened and he investigated them. One of them was a 10-year-old girl, who said to her mom the night before the disaster: “mommy, I’m not afraid to die. I dreamt I went to school and it wasn’t there. Something black had come all over it.” She was killed the next day.
The pandemic also penetrated our dreams with dominating themes related to health, loss of mobility and freedom, various kinds of threats, and of course death. Scientists have learned that during the pandemic dream recall increased (perhaps a survival mechanism) which could be due to the intensity of dreams.
Is this stuff possible?
According to Larry, the idea that mind is confined to the brain and the body, and to the present time is simply not true. Nothing in modern physics says that we can’t gain information from the future. No experiment in the history of science has shown that time flows in one direction or if it even flows at all.
Several theories about the nature of time exist:
Closed Time: Events happen only in the present moment and so there is no connection to the future or the past. Everything happens in the here and now, not there and then.
Open Time: Events happening in the present can be influenced by events in the past and the future (there and then).
This is an idea that physics is currently proving. If proven, it means that consciousness may choose to sample there and then rather than here and now.
Blocked Universe: All events which have happened and will happen and are happening, have already happened. It’s our sequential experience of these events that gives us the idea of floating time (premonition friendly).
Long ago Carl Jung proposed that linear space and time simply do not exist at the level of the collective unconscious. It might be helpful to visit Jung’s model of the psyche. What Jung calls the “collective unconscious” is like a vast ocean that contains our individual minds and connects us all. Our individual minds are like icebergs floating in this vast ocean. The conscious part of our mind is the part of the iceberg that is above the surface. The personal unconscious is the part that is below the surface. If linear space and time don’t exist at the level of the collective unconscious, this means that the future is unconsciously prepared long in advance and can be accessed.
This is related to the concept of nonlocality which also applies to space and time. If there is some aspect of our consciousness that is nonlocal, it means that it’s boundless. Boundless means that one consciousness cannot be separated from another if there are no boundaries between them. If this is so, then all minds in some dimension come together to form a single unitary consciousness. Our ancestors used to refer to it as the universal mind, divine mind, cosmic consciousness, and Jung called it the collective unconscious.
It’s important to point out that some of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century agree with this theory. To name a few, Erwin Schrödinger, David Bohm, Gregory Bateson, and of course Albert Einstein.
So what is the big lesson in all of this? What is the vision that dreams and premonitions hold for the future?
Larry considers premonitions as an incredible gift. He says that although they are an aid to our physical survival, their main contribution is in providing us with an expanded vision of who we are and what our destiny may be. They show that we are more than a physical brain and body. Brains can’t operate outside the present or beyond the body but our consciousness can. Premonitions reveal that something about us is timeless.
“I BELIEVE THAT THESE KINDS OF EXPERIMENTS AND EXPERIENCES POINT LIKE AN ARROW TO A SOUL-LIKE IMMORTAL QUALITY TO CONSCIOUSNESS. SO I REGARD THIS WHOLE AREA AS INDIRECT EVIDENCE FOR IMMORTALITY.”
- Larry Dossey
Larry believes that this understanding has profound ethical implications because it suggests an intrinsic unity and oneness between everybody. He warns that unless we get this as a species, we are going to be at continual risk of exterminating ourselves and the only environment we have. He believes that “deep gut level, heart level appreciation of nonlocal oneness and intrinsic unity between everybody” is the only hope we have out of our current situation.
Here are some things that we can do cultivate premonitions:
Daily Meditation practice seems to be the behavior that correlates most strongly with cultivating premonitions.
Keeping a dream diary seems to make us more prone to premonitions.
There is also the role of belief. Children tend to be more premonition-prone because they are not yet accultured to believe that those things can’t happen.
Practice. “The more you practice cultivating the extraordinary, the luckier you get.” - George Leaonard
How can we separate fantasy from genuine premonitions? Research shows that ...
Premonitions usually come in vivid dreams and also in reoccurring dreams.
Premonitions come in shared dreams especially if dreams are shared by people who are close.
Dreams that deal with death often have a precognitive quality. Jung said that if a dream deals with death, take it seriously because you might not get a second chance.
Dreams that are associated with bodily symptoms in dreams or waking life.
World events can and frequently do permeate into our dreams. In fact, there is evidence that world crises often change our dreams collectively. Themes of invasion, destruction, and crossing boundaries in dreams reveal the sense of grief, sadness, and frustration that is currently present in the collective unconscious. This in turn creates a sense of oneness showing us how we are all connected and in it together.
Larry believes that understanding our intrinsic unity helps us rethink some of the ethical mandates that have dawn through human history such as the golden rule. It helps us to perhaps transform the golden rule from “do unto to others as you would have them do unto to you” to something like this:
“BE KIND TO OTHERS BECAUSE IN SOME SENSE THEY ARE YOU.” - Larry Dossey
My hope is that we can learn from our dreams and premonitions that we are in fact One.
In Dream,
Sara
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