I recently read J.W. Dunne’s book, An Experiment With Time (1927). At one point early on he asks the following questions, “What about those puzzling dreams from which one is awakened by a noise or other sensory event - dreams in which the noise in question appears as the final dream incident? Why is it that this closing incident is always logically led up to by the earlier part of the dream?”
I had one such dream experience several years ago that left me baffled in trying to come up with an explanation for the time slippage. It was a somewhat lengthy dream that seemed many minutes in duration leading up to a sensory event (noise stopping), which was an integral part of the dream. At the time, I didn’t think this dream to be precognitive, but rather an instance of time dilation (as written about by Anthony Peake and others) that appeared to consist of several minutes (dream wise), but in reality was packed into the microsecond leading up to the sensory event and eventual awakening. The hypothesis being, the unconscious mind recorded and buffered the noise event, then constructed and played out a dreamscape around the sensory input before the dreaming mind could register the noise.
The dream went as follows: I was a lone astronaut cruising through space in a smallish vehicle that had porthole like windows on every side. The ship’s engines created a very calming type of background rumble similar to what was simulated in the Star Trek series. I remember looking out one of the aft windows and being in awe of the glimmering stars and this gazing seemed to go on for a bit. I then started looking through a technical manual of sorts with several diagrams. It seemed I was doing this to keep myself occupied during the lengthy journey. Closing the manual, I started to ready myself for the approaching docking station of a larger ship. Once secured, I could see my ship entering the station and then the engines automatically shut down. The ship now drifted toward the approaching dock until it came to a gentle stop. Disembarking, I came into a room full of people moving about at their jobs as if this was a common occurrence. No one seemed to notice my arrival, but I had a feeling of pride that I was doing my job professionally and without fanfare. EOD
In waking reality our central air conditioning was broken and I had set up a fan in the bedroom the night before . We were unaccustomed to doing this. In the dream, the ship’s engine rumble was actually being created by the sensory input of the running fan. Recall in the dream, the engines shut down upon entering the docking station. In real life, the electricity actually went out in our section of town at that exact instant shutting down the fan, which was somehow anticipated in the dream. At the time, I had an analog alarm clock that stopped and corroborated the timing of the electrical outage to correlate back to the dream’s engine cutoff.
J.W. Dunne, an aeronautical engineer, hypothesized the “universe was stretched out in time,” and that past, present, and future all existed simultaneously. He also stated, “All dreams, everybody’s dreams - were composed of images of past experience and images of future experience blended together in approximately equal proportions.” Dunne would have classified the above dream as precognition.
Time dilation, precognition, or incredibly rare coincidence? What’s your view?
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