On record there are countless cases of how people have used clairvoyant and precognitive dreams to solve problems or to gain vital information.
It is said that Abraham Lincoln dreamed of his own assassination days before it took place. There are techniques which can be used to obtain these dreams and perhaps even to foresee the future in a precognitive, psychic way.
Dreams are, as Sigmund Freud often said, “the royal road to the unconscious”. They provide information, they enable us to communicate psychically with others, and dreams can give us information that can literally alter our lives.
Of all the extra-sensory perception techniques, dreams are the most intuitive and accessible.
The Welsh mining village of Aberfan suffered a horrifying tragedy in 1966. The coal tips above the village had been loosened by three days of continuous rain and on the morning of 21 October, their foundations gave way.
Millions of tons of slag and coal slipped onto the village, killing 144 people – of whom 128 were children of school age. One of these schoolchildren had apparently foreseen the disaster in a dream, because two weeks before the calamity she said to her mother, ‘I am not afraid to die.’
Then, the day before the landslip, she spoke of a dream in which she had seen the school engulfed by ’something black’.
She was buried in a communal grave with the other children.
After he heard about this, a consultant psychiatrist at a local hospital decided to investigate precognition of the disaster.
By means of a newspaper appeal, he asked people who believed that they had had dreams about the event before it happened to contact him. One startlingly accurate account was delivered by a 47 year old woman from Plymouth who claimed that she had had a dream which had predicted the tragedy.
This was confirmed by the fact that she spoke about her dream the day before the tragedy in front of six witnesses at a church meeting. This was the way she described it: ‘I saw an old school house in a valley, a Welsh miner and an avalanche of coal hurtling down a mountain.’
She went on to describe a rescuer and a small boy who was saved, both of whom were later recognized at the scene of the rescue operation.
Some scientific investigations have been conducted on this subject, and seem to provide good evidence for the reality of psychic dreams. At the Maimonides Medical Centre in New York, Dr Montague Ullman set up a Dream Laboratory.
His procedure for investigating telepathy in dreams was based on waking up a subject immediately after a dream, so that he could remember its contents. (As long ago as 1950, scientists had identified the rapid eye movements (REM) that occur only while a sleeping person is dreaming.
REM makes it very easy to check when a person is having a dream – you simply watch his eyes while he sleeps.) Dr Ullman signalled to an ‘agent’ when his subject was dreaming, and the agent then tried to influence the dreams of the subject. Not all the results were significant, but the correct hits are so striking that they leave no room for doubt.
On one occasion, the subject was a man called Dr Erwin and the agent was a member of the laboratory staff, Joyce Plosky.
She selected a picture of Salvador Dali’s The Sacrament of the Last Supper, which shows Christ with his disciples against a background of a fishing boat on the sea.
She then tried to transmit this to Dr Erwin. After his dream had finished, he was awoken and recounted what he had experienced: ‘An ocean, strangely beautiful with fishing boats.
A dozen or so men pulling a fishing boat ashore. The Mediterranean area, perhaps Biblical times. I think of Christmas, feeding the multitude with fish and loaves.’
The Dream Laboratory extended their work to test for precognition in dreams by asking the subject to dream about an experience which the laboratory staff would create for him next day.
Malcolm Bessent, one particularly good subject, managed to dream correctly about the event which was later to be staged for him on eight consecutive tests!
But despite this good evidence for the precognitive potential of dreams, it is probably the anecdotal accounts which convince most people: for example, the Aberfan episode described above.
Telepathy and precognition occur in dreams fairly frequently, but we cannot remember when it happens, simply because of the difficulty of recalling our dreams when we wake up in the morning.
However, there is a fairly simple procedure for recalling dreams immediately after they have occurred. For example, suppose that you wished to be warned of any dangers you might run into on a car journey.
You would spend some time just before you fell asleep programming yourself to receive information about any dangers that you face.
To do this, you need to learn the relaxation exercise described in learning to use psychic techniques and use it just before you fall asleep.
When you are relaxed, visualize yourself writing down the dream with a pencil and paper placed by the bed. Mentally repeat: ‘I want to have a dream which contains information about my journey and any dangers I face.
I will wake up with a dream in mind, and remember it so I can write it down.’ You will probably find that you wake up during the night with a vivid dream. Write it down at once.
Do the same immediately you wake up in the morning any conscious thoughts will take it clean out of your mind.
Whatever dream you can remember should contain the information you require.
Here is an example of the sort of results that can be obtained with this technique.
While I was writing this, I decided to travel to London to do some research. Unfortunately, the weather was not so good. Blizzards had reduced traffic flow to a crawl and blocked many roads.
The night before I was due to leave, I went through the relaxation exercises and mentally programmed myself to receive information about the best route to take; the one that would get me there safely and quickly, in fact.
During the night, I woke up with a vivid image of children skating on thin ice and one falling through into the water.
This did not seem to have much significance, but I now know better than to dismiss such dreams. I set out down the freeway, which is normally the fastest route.
About thirty miles from the start of the journey, there was a traffic bulletin on the radio which warned of black ice on, amongst other roads, the one I was on. After a time, these dreams happen so reliably that there can be no question of doubting them.
This is now my attitude, so I did not hesitate to leave the freeway as soon as possible.
My journey continued on an alternative route and took much longer than I’d planned, although I did arrive safely.
Not until I phoned home the next day did I know that on the section of freeway I had been planning to use there was a thirty-vehicle pile-up caused by a lorry skidding on black ice.
Thus you cannot always be sure of how the psychic information will be presented, but there will be enough clues to let you figure it out. The important point is that you probably will not receive a warning in a clearly phrased instruction (’Don’t travel on the freeway’).
There’s usually a symbolic, visual representation of the answer to your question.
From time to time, there have been reports that people have obtained information in dreams which has led to financial gain or other material benefits. A typical example was related by Jose Silva, the founder of the Silva Mind Control courses mentioned elsewhere.
When he was developing his mind control course, he was desperately short of money and almost gave up in despair.
However, one night he had a dream in which three numbers appeared to him as though they were illuminated by a bright light. Thinking nothing of it at the time, he dismissed the dream.
Next day, his wife asked him to visit a small town just across the Texas/Mexico border. He went with a friend and on the way told him about the dream. Now, here is the fascinating part of the story.
When they visited a small shop in Mexico his friend pointed out a Mexican national lottery ticket – that had exactly the numbers seen by Silva in his dream.
What would you have done? Silva bought the ticket there and then. It is almost unnecessary to add that he won a large prize!
Now, this was an unexpected dream which clearly involved clairvoyance and precognition. But the important point is that a psychic communication brought Silva some good fortune.
I leave it up to you to find out if your psychic faculty can do the same for you!
A slightly different technique is available for solving problems by using the relaxation and visualization exercises.
In the examples described below, the solution to a problem which had been bothering the person in question came quite unexpectedly in the form of mental images while he was half-asleep.
Kekule was a nineteenth-century chemist who discovered the shape of the benzine molecule, a carbon/hydrogen compound which had confounded all previous attempts to describe its shape.
As Kekule dozed in front of his fire, an image of a snake with its tail in its mouth flashed across his mind. Suddenly he realized that this was the answer!
The whole basis of organic ring chemistry was born in one flash when Kekuli realized that the molecule folded back on itself.
Many similar examples have been recorded. Elias Howe, who developed the sewing machine, tried for months to design a method of stitching cloth with the up-and-down movement of a needle.
All his efforts seemed to be in vain until he had a dream about native savages in the jungle.
They were threatening him with their spears; at the tip of each spear was a hole with a thread hanging from it.
This was true inspiration – the machine could be made to work perfectly by putting the needle hole at the tip of the needle.
It is not just mechanical inventions that have resulted from while mental imagery.
Many great works Of music and poetry have been created in dream-like states of mind. Mozart received entire compositions in his mind, and Coleridge created much of his poetry in a semi-conscious state.
The phenomenon is well defined by scientists, who call it hypnagogic imagery. One laboratory which has specialized in investigating hypnagogic imagery is the Menninger Clinic, Topeka, Kansas.
The director at the time, Dr Elmer Green, and his staff have found that anyone who experiences hypnagogic imagery shows alpha or theta waves in their brain. As a function of the creative right brain hemisphere, this is exactly what one would expect.
To be fully aware of images produced as solutions to problems, the subject must remain conscious at the alpha level.
There is no clear answer as to whether or not hypnagogic imagery is psychic.
The dividing line between psychic and non-psychic brain power is blurred, and if you use dowsing, divination and so on for solving problems, what difference does it make how the technique works?
The procedure is simple – during time in alpha, you mentally ask the question which is troubling you, and hopefully your mind will create images that provide an answer.
If you are ill, you might receive an image of the deficient organ in response to the question: ‘What part of my body has a problem ?’
Alternatively you could use the technique for helping yourself work out problems with your relationships, career or, indeed, just about anything you care to try.
The whole world of your subconscious is waiting to be tapped, and it has far more knowledge and power available than you might realize.
Learn the relaxation and visualization technique described in an earlier section and try it for yourself.
You may find that your creativity and intuition increase dramatically, along with the more obvious benefits of developing your psychic dream and problem solving power.
Dreams can be used to solve problems; to foretell the future; to gain information psychically; and to reinforce goals.