Here’s some big news: our own longtime commenter Bruce Siegel has written a book – and it’s a good one!
The book is Dreaming the Future: How Our Dreams Prove Psychic Ability is Real, and Why It Matters, and it recounts Bruce's longtime experiment in precognitive dreaming. (The printed book is available now, and a Kindle edition will be out on July 15.)
Bruce begins by explaining that until he was in his mid-forties he was a knee-jerk skeptic, though not of the militant variety. He simply dismissed all talk of the paranormal as irritating nonsense. But in the early 1990s, his worldview started to change. He writes:
I found myself becoming interested in certain ideas, experiences, and phenomena I had long dismissed, even ridiculed.
For one thing, I began to pay attention to the fact that some of my dreams seemed to correlate with later events in ways that were difficult to explain .…
But despite my newfound openness, I wasn’t blind to the laws of probability. I reasoned that given a large number of dreams and the potential for matching them with an even larger pool of waking events, striking similarities were bound to occur from time to time.
Inspired by J.W. Dunne’s famous 1927 book An Experiment with Time, Bruce decided to document his dreams and see how well they matched up with future events. Ultimately he logged 241 dreams. Remarkably enough, approximately one in four of them came true – “usually within hours.” Some came true almost immediately after waking. This success rate is far above random chance, especially considering the decidedly out-of-the-ordinary subject matter in many of these dreams.
A large part of the book concerns the methods Bruce used to remember his dreams and record them in detail, and the ways in which he improved his methodology. For example, he found that a dream, in order to be worth recording, had to involve something specific and unusual. A dream about eating breakfast had no value in his experiment, because he ate breakfast every day. Recurrent dreams were not helpful, because it could be assumed that, if he dreamed of the same thing over and over, eventually it would have to correlate with something in real life, if only by chance. He also developed precise criteria for distinguishing among dreams of no precognitive value, dreams that might or might not have had precognitive value, and dreams that were definite hits. He explains how he tabulated the statistical results, and how the results might vary if different criteria were applied.
Though Bruce describes a number of his dreams and the real-life observations that correlated with them, he recognizes that the reader is not likely to be completely convinced by someone else’s experience. That’s why the main focus of the book is to encourage us to carry out the experiment for ourselves. He provides a great deal of useful advice on how to get started.
The book inspired me to begin my own experiment. So far, I can’t claim results as good as one in four. I would say I’ve had one likely hit, one "maybe," and the rest have been duds. But I haven’t been doing it for very long, and I’m not yet skilled at remembering my dreams.
Besides the important contribution Dreaming the Future makes to the literature on precognitive dreaming, the book also offers Bruce’s reflections on the wider meaning of it all. In a chapter titled “The Real Subject Here is Consciousness,” informed in part by his study of near-death experiences and related phenomena, he suggests that
time and consciousness are inseparable. Time, in this view, is actually a dimension of reality created by consciousness within itself, so that we might explore certain kinds of experience.
And the same is true for what we call “space.”
Time and space, in other words, are props devised by Mind for much the same reason that storytellers and game designers devise the rules and frameworks that characterize their creations: to spawn worlds within which epic adventures can unfold .…
[I]n recalling these deeper truths, in discovering that we are more than we think we are, we find reason to trust that the difficulties we face in this life aren’t the whole story.
The book closes with an extensive list of resources for further study and several appendices fleshing out the dreams covered in the main text. Full disclosure: my name crops up a couple of times in the book, once in connection with a precognitive dream described in Chapter 9, which was validated by a comment Bruce read on this blog.
Beyond all the other admirable qualities of Dreaming the Future, the book consistently addresses open-minded skeptics in a friendly, non-confrontational way. Unlike some pro-paranormal writers who stigmatize all skeptics or simply ignore them, Bruce wants to reach out and gently persuade people to open up to the possibility of precognition and try it for themselves. He takes care to consider alternative explanations for the hits he describes, and although he's personally convinced of the validity of his findings, he understands that the whole idea of foreseeing future events may strike some reasonable people as impossible or absurd.
His basic attitude is: see for yourself. He believes there's nothing special about his own precognitive abilities, and that similar results can be obtained by anyone who tries.
I liked this book a lot, both for its content and its tone. I highly recommend Dreaming the Future.
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