Dreaming Ahead of Time: Experiences with Precognitive Dreams, Synchronicity and Coincidence

As the physicist Danah Zohar writes, ‘The whole rhythm of our conscious daily lives is lived out against the background of “passing time”.’8

Yet philosophers are just as baffled as we are. According to one authority, philosophers that have ‘grappled with the problem of time’ have ‘ended up in perplexity’.

Bergson argued that the brain is an ‘organ for survival’, and that its function was essentially eliminative. Its job is to filter out stimuli and information that isn’t essential to dealing with the necessities of existence, and stop it from reaching consciousness; this means 90% of reality. (We know now that it is the left brain that performs this

any attempt to understand time will entail using terms that are just as imponderable as time itself. We cannot get behind or below time and in questioning time must accept as given the very time we are questioning.

means is that our intellect – or left-brain consciousness – is useless when we try to grasp the nature of reality.

Sleep paralysis When we dream, our muscles become torpid, that is, slack and unresponsive, and this is the physiological explanation for an experience that I have had on many occasions, what is known as ‘sleep paralysis’. Sleep paralysis happens when for some reason you – that is your conscious self – ‘wakes up’ but your body is still asleep. It ca

Hopi have no word for time, and that their verbs have no tenses. Like the participants in the rituals that evoke Eliade’s ‘sacred time’, the Hopi live in an ‘eternal present’, ‘indifferent to western science, technology and philosophy.’

Schiller, Schelling, Novalis (‘When we dream that we dream,’ Novalis wrote, ‘we are close to awakening,’ an early recognition of lucid dreaming), Hoffmann,

we’ve seen, illusory or not, it is practically impossible for us to step out of this way of experiencing time. Aside from occasional moments when, for some reason, we find ourselves ‘out of time’ in a positive sense, we are for the most part carried along by this flow, riding in time’s chariot, heading at an equable pace into the future, one tick o