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Katherinanyc28 · Joined: 04 May 2005 Posts: 273 Location: nyc

Meaning of dreams: Precognitive dreams and premonitions
By David F. Melbourne

About four out of ten reported psychic experiences involve some
seeming awareness of the future. The term premonition is in general
use, and the more clinical word precognition, ('before knowing'),
tends to be used by parapsychologists. In descending order of
frequency, premonitions come in the form of dreams, waking thoughts,
waking imagery and sleep-onset, (hypnagogic), imagery.

We can define a premonition as an experience, (eg dream, waking
thought, etc.), which appears to anticipate a future event that could
not reasonably have been inferred from information available before
the event. The fact that they mainly refer to unpleasant things is
reflected in the term premonition itself, which derives from the
Latin word praemonere - to warn in advance. Sometimes the person who
has the premonition, (the percipient), doesn't know precisely what
will happen but has a feeling that something untoward will occur -
it's then a foreboding or presentiment.

As both authors have had personal experience with precognition, they
in turn, give their own accounts, starting with Dr Hearne:

My own particular interest in this area of parapsychology was thrust
upon me as the result of a personal experience. I had never
considered myself to be at all psychic, but one day something
happened that made me consider that perhaps I had a slight ability in
that field.

In 1981, I was living in Hull and used to visit a colleague, Robin
Furman, perhaps once a fortnight or so. Robin lived in Grimsby and
the journey involved crossing the Humber estuary - before the
suspension bridge was opened. It was a journey I was very used to.
However on one occasion, as soon as I sat on the ferry, I experienced
a strange feeling of concern. I knew with absolute certainty that
there would be some untoward event on the ferry trip. It was
perplexing - I didn't know exactly what was going to occur - but
something would! The feeling was so urgent that I wanted to tell the
captain - but a moment's thought made me realise that he'd think I
was mad. I could have still got off the boat at that point, but I was
fascinated and intrigued by the episode and so remained to see what
would transpire. It was rather cold so I sat below decks.

It was the last ferry of the day and darkness was descending rapidly.
After about half an hour we were some 200 metres off the landing
stage on the other side of the estuary, when there was sharp cry
of "Man overboard!" I went up on deck. A man had somehow fallen off
the bow of the ship. The captain stopped the engines and people
peered into the blackness. There was no sound. The victim's young
wife stood, shocked, holding a young baby in her arms. Everything was
silent. As the minutes passed, we assumed the man had been swept away
and drowned.

Eventually the engines were started and the boat circled the area.
Suddenly, something was seen in the water. It was the man. He was
dragged aboard with boat-hooks and a crew member performed mouth to
mouth resuscitation on him. The boat docked and the man was rushed
off to hospital. To be honest, I was excited about my seeming
foreknowledge of the situation.

Next, David Melbourne maintains a strident belief in precognition,
because, from time to time, he experiences the phenomenon himself.
Following, is an account of one of his own experiences:

Having spent about fourteen years as a firefighter, I ocassionally
dream about fires, which seems perfectly natural. Some of these
dreams carry messages, while others appear to refresh my memory by
bringing back faces of old comrades who had since been forgotten.
This indicates that some dreams also serve yet another purpose, that
of recharging the battery of our memory. However, to illustrate my
point about precognition, let us examine an extremely vivid dream I
had a couple of years ago.

In my dream, I found myself standing just inside the porch of a
wooden house, gazing at a fire which had recently started next to the
porch door. The fire was beginning to spread up the wall. Looking
round, I saw an old-fashioned 'soda acid' type fire extinguisher.
This was the kind where one struck a knob causing soda to mix with
acid, which generated carbon dioxide gas within the extinguisher, in
order to expel the water held within.

I struck the knob, only to find that there was little more than a
dribble of water being expelled by the extinguisher. However, being
extremely careful, I managed to put out the blaze. Just as the last
flame died, the fire brigade turned up with a high pressure hose-reel.

When I awoke, I decided that because the dream was so extraordinarily
vivid, it was a must for recording on paper for analysis at a later
date. It is worth mentioning, that despite the startling clarity, I
did not recognise it as precognitive, although upon waking, the
memory was accompanied by a feeling of anticipation.

That same afternoon, observing our local ferry dock, I set off to
collect my post. As I was getting into my car, I noticed smoke
issuing from my nearest neighbour's roof - the house was built from
Canadian Pine. My neighbour informed me that there was a fire in the
cavity of the wall, between the wooden exterior and the plasterboard
interior - next to the porch door. He had called the local fire
brigade. The sounds of fire cracking away behind the plasterboard
were clearly audible.

At the time, all the owner was able to rig up was a garden hose which
was supplied from a water tank. The absence of pressure resulted in
little more than a trickle from the hose. I ran my hands over the
wall, checking for heat, in order to ascertain the exact location and
extent of the blaze. The fire seemed to be confined between two
wooden partitions, which were about four feet apart.

Knowing that the island's fire crew consisted of part timers, I
realised that there might be some delay - the members have to drop
what they are doing, then make their way to the fire station, before
they can get underway.

During the brief time I was assessing the situation, I was aware that
the fire was beginning to get hold and was showing early signs of
spreading into the roof. I had to make a snap decision, whether to
wait an unspecified time for the arrival of the fire brigade or try
containing the blaze with what little resources were available.

With the fire growing louder every second, I decided to punch a small
hole in the plasterboard near the ceiling. That way, there would not
be enough air to cause any acceleration of burning and at the same
time, it would enable me to push the end of the hose through the hole
and attempt to extinguish the flames.

The resulting hissing noise, as clouds of steam were being generated,
was music to my ears. After a few moments, I instructed my neighbour
to punch another hole about a foot below the first one. Again, the
sound of hissing was encouraging. And so the procedure was repeated
several times, as we worked our way down the length of the
plasterboard.

Finally, the crackling ceased, and I decided that it would be safe to
tear down the plasterboard to facilitate access to the interior
surface. As the first section came away, the fire gave one final
burst of defiant flame before being extinguished completely. At that
point, the fire brigade turned up with a high-pressure hose-reel.

Clearly, my dream had portrayed a vision of the future. Although the
events which I had been privileged to glimpse some ten hours earlier
were not spectacular, they served a purpose. That same dream came to
mind while I was considering whether to tackle the fire myself or
not. Somehow, I knew that events would go exactly as they did, and
there would be a satisfactory outcome.

Normally, my precognitive dreams are almost inconsequential -
reflecting ordinary occurrences in my day to day life. So much so, in
fact, that I often experience the feeling of deja vu and recall vague
memories of a dream. Perhaps this phenomenon is as a result of each
of us acting out part of an unremembered precognitive dream?

Returning to Dr Hearne's experience on the ferry, he found it so
intriguing that it changed the direction of his studies, and led to
serious research into premonitions which, after fifteen years,
remains ongoing. In his own words, he now explains how that event
initiated his studies, and the subsequent data uncovered as a result:

When I met my friend at Grimsby station, I told him earnestly of my
presentiment. The experience had decided me to alter the emphasis of
my parapsychological research from the artificial set up of the
laboratory to the real world - where such phenomena are happening
naturally.

I asked him if he knew anyone who'd had a premonition. He instantly
told of an incredible case concerning his niece Lesley Brennan who -
confirmed by witnesses - precognised the Flixborough chemical plant
explosion. I began to realise that premonitions were frequent in the
population. Surveys in fact show that seven out of ten people accept
the existence of premonitions and that over a quarter of the
population report that they have actually experienced such things.

As a result of several articles being published about my initial
research in several national newspapers, literally hundreds of people
wrote to me and completed questionnaires regarding their
premonitions. Little research has actually been conducted into
premonitions as such. Most scientific effort has gone into laboratory
studies involving the statistical analysis of precognition using card
or pattern guessing.

The data that I received from percipients showed that nine out of ten
of reported premonitions were experienced by females. There was a
possibility that a 'reporting bias' was operating in that perhaps men
were unwilling to admit to being psychic. I got round that by asking
the percipients who else in their family had premonitions. It was
still overwhelmingly a female ability. About a quarter said their
premonitions were always on a particular theme, such as plane-crashes.

As to the number of premonitions reported by these subjects, four out
of ten said they'd had between two and ten, about a third said
between 10 and 50 and about a fifth estimated that the total exceeded
50! This data shows that premonitions are not isolated or random
phenomena but that they seem to be connected with certain people.
Most percipients experienced their first foreknowledge between 10 and
15 years of age. The latency period between the premonition and later
event was usually a day and a few weeks. The subjects were
administered a personality test and observed to be significantly more
neurotic than the 'normal' population. This finding could conceivably
indicate that emotionalism (neuroticism) is part of the 'tuning-in'
process in these people to enable them to pick up distress elsewhere.

* * *

If premonitions were just a recent phenomenon in history we could be
dubious about their reality, but the fact is that they have been
reported in all cultures going back to the beginning of written
records. Cuneiform-script clay tablets from Assyria and Babylonia
testify that dreams including foreknowledge were experienced
thousands of years ago. So too, the ancient Egyptians believed that
dreams were messages from the gods and that knowledge about the
future could be conveyed through the vehicle of the dream.

In fact, in ancient Egypt special temples existed (Serapeums) where
dreams could be encouraged or 'incubated'. After fasting and various
cleansing rituals the incubant would sleep in the temple and await a
special dream - often about the future - which would be interpreted
by the 'learned men of the magic library'. Several papyrii have been
discovered listing different dream symbols. The notion of 'opposites'
in dreams was an early one. Thus, to dream of a birth could refer to
an imminent death.

An ancient Indian book of wisdom, the Artharva Veda, dating from
about 3000 years ago, commented on premonitory dreams that the time
of night that the dream occurs gives a clue as to when the later
event will happen. A premonitory dream occurring early in the night
will come to fruition later than one occurring near dawn.

The ancient Greeks were also fascinated by dreams. Aristotle pointed
out that some apparently precognitive dreams of future illness in
people may be 'prodromic' in that the dream may be aware of symtoms
that are not yet available to consciousness. Also that some dreams
may be self-fulfilling prophecies.

The Bible, of course, refers to precognitive dreams. There are about
15 in the old testament - most of which helped change the course of
history, and there is the one mentioned earlier in this book of the
Pharaoh who dreamed of 7 fat and 7 thin cattle. Joseph decoded it as
referring to seven years of abundance followed by 7 years of famine -
warning of future events.

Most precognitive dreams concern unpleasant things that will happen.
Many of them concern unexpected death to immediate members of a
family or persons close to the percipient. Here is such a case:

'I had a recurring dream every night for a week. In the dream my
mother, who was dead in reality, paid a visit and told me. 'You will
not see Doug and Joy again. They will not be here long'. Doug and Joy
were my brother and his wife.

The dream was very disquieting and I wanted to warn my brother but my
husband told me not to be so 'silly'. Two days after the last dream I
bought the local paper and on the front page were my brother and Joy.
They had been killed flying to Spain. I had no idea they had gone on
holiday.'

Other premonitions concern disasters but where the victims are not
directly linked to the percipient:

'I was in the sixth form at school when I had the first of many, many
experiences of seeing unpleasant events in advance. There was a boy
in my form whom I didn't know well and he had a younger brother also
in my school. The younger brother was about 13. One night, I had a
dreadful nightmare in which I was crossing the nearby Lough in a
sailing boat with the younger boy. The boat capsized. As it sank I
extracted myself from the ropes and rigging, but I could see the
young boy struggling to free himself. I tried to free him but was
unable to do so. I awoke with a terrible sense of doom and fear.

During the day I met a friend, a lecturer at the university, who was
a colleague of the boy's father and told her of my nightmare. That
evening she phoned to tell me that the same young boy had apparently
tried to cross the Lough that day in bad weather (he was apparently a
good helmsman) and his boat had capsized. The boy was drowned.'

While events seem destined to happen, individuals appear to be able
to take avoiding actions:

'After having completed my apprenticeship as an aircraft engineer, I
left London to work in the midlands with a light aircraft maintenance
company. One of my duties was to fly as Observer on air tests, with
our Managing Director as pilot. Air testing can be dangerous, as the
aircraft is taken to its limits such as stalling, spins and single-
engine climbs.

At first I enjoyed the thrill of flying but I soon became dogged by a
recurring dream of being sitting in the right hand seat attempting to
pilot the aircraft with my boss sat next to me, unconscious. The
problem was that I could not fly the plane.

After a while the dream began to haunt me every time I got into a
plane to carry out an air test until one day my nerve went and I
refused to fly.

The next air test crashed, killing both the Managing Director and the
apprentice.'

An especially accurate variety of premonition identified from Dr
Hearne's data is the Media Announcement Type. This is where the
premonition comes in the form of some kind of public announcement (eg
TV or radio news-flash, newspaper placard, etc) that is dreamed or
hallucinated in some way. Perhaps one in 50 reported premonitions is
of this type although many may go unnoticed because the precognitive
element is not realised.

Some premonitions seem to be of fairly inconsequential events in the
percipient's life:

'I was 20 years old and had just begun a new job as an assistant
librarian in Newcastle. I dreamed that a Dutchman came into the
library to ask about some Dutch language novels. In the dream I went
to the file where such requests were kept and could not find it, but
eventually tracked it down to the back room where another assistant
was dealing with it.

The next day it did happen. The Dutchman came in about his request
for Dutch novels. Instead of searching the file I went straight to my
friend in the back room who was indeed working on that request then.'

A small fraction of premonitions actually anticipate happy events.

'I had a dream of someone telling me a horse was going to win, and
its name was BEAN something. Over breakfast I asked my husband if he
had heard of a horse by that name. He said he hadn't, and we joked
about it because I have never had a dream about a horse winning and I
am hopeless at picking a winner at anything. My husband sent my son
to get the daily paper. My husband said he couldn't see a horse of
that name listed.

As I sat down for a coffee at 10.30 I grabbed the paper and straight
away I saw the horse listed - BEAN BOY. I was so excited I rang my
mother, my sister, my brother-in-law and a friend, Harry, who likes a
flutter. they each placed a Å“1 bet on the horse. We put Å“20 of the
mortgage money on it. The horse won (at 7 to 1). I was thrilled.'

Dr Hearne's research approach has been two-pronged. Firstly, he has
obtained large numbers of reported premonitions in order to establish
categories, frequencies, latency periods, and so on and, secondly, to
investigate a few individual percipients very closely.

Barbara Garwell, who lives in Hull, is someone whose premonitions Dr
Hearne has studied over many years. Barbara is a very sweet, sincere,
Roman Catholic lady in her 60s who has had premonitions since
childhood.

She is good at assassinations. We don't mean that she's a Mafioso
type - she seems to be able to pick up on major assassinations before
they happen. For example, 21 days before the killing of President
Sadat of Egypt, Barbara woke from a vivid and violent dream in which
she saw some 'coffee coloured' men spray a group of dignitaries with
machine guns at a stadium. The scene seemed to be the middle east.

President Sadat was actually killed, with several others, when he was
taking the salute at a military parade in a stadium. Soldiers ran
from a vehicle to the saluting base and fired kalashnikov guns.
Although Barbara could not identify the country, the details were
very accurate.

Also, in 1981 Barbara had another assassination dream - this time
more symbolic - in which some German SS men featured. A man got out
of a limousine. He had a 'pock- marked' face and she 'knew' he was an
ex actor. One of the SS men drew a pistol and fired several shots at
the actor, who fell.

Again, exactly 21 days after the dream, an attempt was made on the
life of President Reagan. - a former screen actor - when he was
entering a limousine. John Hinckley, the gunman, had been a member of
a neo-nazi group (the National Socialist party).

Intelligent analysis of both these dreams could, in retrospect, have
led to a knowledge of what was soon to happen and to whom.

There are very many other startling premonitions that Barbara has
received that are catalogued in Dr Hearne's book Visions of the
Future (Aquarian), and her own book Dreams that Come True (Thorsons).

David Melbourne and Dr Hearne are quite sure that chance coincidence
cannot explain her premonitions. Another explanation that sceptics
put forward is that she selects only good ones to relate from many
that do not come true. However, Dr Hearne tested that hypothesis in
1981 by collecting every single premonition she had in that year.
Each was entered onto a form and sent to him. There were 52 in all.
Two blind judges, (unaware), later rated each premonition for
accuracy in any events that happened in the 28 days following. The
judges also did the same for a control year, (ie not the actual
year), but they did not know which.

The premonitions for the correct year had significantly higher scores
than those for the control year. But the most interesting phenomenon
was the consistent 21 day latency period which came out in several of
her major premonitions. That unexpected factor must be important when
the theory behind premonitions is gone into.

Some people who have premonitory dreams are fearful that they in some
way are causing the later disasters. We don't think that is so.
Often, people recognise the same disaster. It is not likely that they
all happen to make the same event occur. It is more likely that they
passively receive the future information.

It seems that the future is being formed a few months in advance.
Major events become 'set', and can be detected by certain
individuals, but the element of free will enables people to avoid
future fixed events.

The negative attitude of official orthodox science, (which probably
dates from the witchcraft era when the paranormal was linked with
sorcery), is retarding the proper advance of knowledge in mankind. In
fact, science is unscientific and fraudulent in this instance.

If a scientist were to conduct an experiment but refused to include
some data because it would not fit in with his or her own theory,
that scientist would be castigated for being unscientific. Yet that
is precisely what Science does regarding parapsychology. It refuses
to face the awkward facts.

There is also a strange breed of authoritarian, censorious people who
wish to preserve the status quo - the sceptics. They seem to have a
strict belief system of negativity. Such people, of course, are
scientific ostriches and do not advance science one iota - they only
hinder it. They are a liability to its progress. It is greatly
insulting and patronising for ordinary people to be told by some self-
styled sceptic that what they know happened to them didn't really
happen at all.

Worrying too, is the great scandal of the scientific journals, which
would not even reply to a scientific paper sent in reporting the
results of a parapsychological experience.

Ordinary people, as distinct from scientists - who are often
blinkered and limited by their strict belief system - know that
paranormal phenomena occur. The media, particularly television, which
follow people's actual interests and beliefs, have begun to give more
exposure to these areas. At one time, the paranormal could only be
discussed very late at night - along with sex - programmes on the
paranormal now occupy peak viewing times. Science is being dragged
kicking and screaming into reality.

What is the significance of premonitions? Premonitions, more than any
other paranormal phenomena, are shouting to us that our ideas of the
nature of the universe and ourselves are completely wrong. Whereas
telepathy, say, could just about be explicable within science as we
know it, precognition is totally at odds with the present scheme of
things. Essentially, it provides an effect (the premonition) before a
cause (the event).

Under the rigid system of science that currently prevails such a
scenario is 'impossible' and so cannot be true. The trouble is,
several things that have been 'impossible' in the past have turned
out not to be so. It was 'impossible' that the earth should orbit the
sun, or that other planets should exist.

'Standard realism' under which science operates is fine for everyday
matters but hardly appropriate for areas such as high energy physics
or the paranormal - where ordinary logic does not apply. According to
science, premonitions cannot exist in the physical universe. At that
point science washes its hands of such phenomena.

The evidence however, tends to suggest, (only physicists and
mathematicians are foolish enough to talk about 'proving' something),
that foreknowledge exists. In that case, by science's own reasoning,
the physical universe cannot exist. The only alternative is that we
live in a mind world - a mentalistic universe. Life itself is like a
great dream. This is a staggering conclusion and tremendously
exciting. It can encompass things like clairvoyance, miracles,
synchronicities, coincidences, poltergeists and the whole panoply of
the paranormal - where current science can only gape open-mouthed.

After all, when one considers it, it seems incredibly unlikely that
we just happen to be alive now, in this perfect environment, just one
time round. From this new perspective the concept of reincarnation
seems most plausible. Anyone who thinks that science has just about
explained everything is totally deluded.

Whereas the stick-in-the-mud sceptics look backwards all the time and
wish to impose their scheme of thinking on others, what is needed are
scientists who are prepared to throw all existing notions away and
rethink things from the viewpoint of living in a mentalistic
universe. What are its implications, predictions, hypotheses? Are
there young scientists reading this who can progress science in that
way?

Consider, then, the implications if an analyst was to interpret
accurately a pregognitive dream which foretold a specific disaster.
If society was prepared to listen and take some form of evasive
action, perhaps many lives could be saved. Working with the BBC's Out
Of This World programme, Dr Hearne identified seven premonitions
warning of the 1995 Japanese earthquake!

DAVID F. MELBOURNE, who lives on a remote Scottish island, has been
studying dreams for 25 years and is known all over the world for his
accurate dream interpretations. Apart from the general public, he has
analysed dreams for celebrities and famous authors, all of whom have
admitted a high degree of accuracy.

David was the first person to discover the 'trigger mechanism' in
sleep, which identifies message-bearing dreams, thus disproving
Freud's idea that dreams are the guardian of sleep. He was also the
first to establish a link between neurological visions, caused by
trauma, and the subconscious. He has written a fantasy novel, and has
had about 40 short stories (nearly all inspired by dreams) published
by various imprints.

More about David F. Melbourne can be found at
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dreamthemes

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