Can Dreams Predict The Future? What Is Precognitive Dreaming?

By Mayukh Saha / Truth Theory

One of the foremost experts in the field of parapsychology and psychology, as well as the study of consciousness, is Dr. Stanley Krippner. His special area of interest, for over 50 years now, has been precognitive dreaming. It is his belief that every citizen is capable of such dreams, and claims to have solid, empirical research to back that claim up. In one of his recent studies conducted at a laboratory, a participant would spend the night trying to dream about an event that would take place the next morning. Interestingly, the dreamer was then woken up close to 5 times throughout the entire night, when they would be narrating parts of the dream to an experimenter. The next morning, the experimenters would be selecting an experience at random, and the dreamer would be subjected to it. 

Subscribe to Truth Theory on Youtube, new videos every week:

 

Precognitive Dreaming- What Is It? And How Do We Experiment With It?

One of the true factors of this precognitive dreaming experience is that none of the participants have any clue as to what their experience could be like- so they would have no idea as to how they should counter it at all. Nevertheless, if the studies reflected significant results, this example would be a prime highlight for dream precognition. At the end of the experiment (that ran for eight nights), outside judges were called in and they would be considering the dreams of the participants against the experiences- and give a result of whether the dreams actually matched the experience that took place the next day. So what did the judges have to say about this experiment on precognitive dreaming? They said that during the majority of nights, at least one dream matched with an experience pre-selected randomly.

Dr. Patrick McNamara, an associate professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and Professor of Psychology at Northcentral University stated that if people had been talking about any other phenomenon, then one could have assumed that it was pretty recognizable. But since there was absolutely no physical mechanism in place for what the studies could be showing, scientists were of the opinion that the experiment was devoid of a reasonable explanation- so everyone involved was quite suspect regarding it. The Professor further mentioned that despite the apparent incongruency in the research, one simply couldn’t discard it. He stated that it had been very well-documented that twins dreamed very similar dreams. In fact, they had the capacity to finish each other’s dreams. 

So, the mere fact that this precognitive dreaming was taking place between people who were relatives or people who shared a deep emotional bond put more merit into the fact that this was something entirely new that science is yet to understand.

Recent Developments In The Field Of Precognitive Dreaming

Dr. Stanley Krippner went on to explain that there was indeed a literal wealth of clinical and anecdotal material that existed which would support the possibility of telepathic effects taking place in precognitive dreams. However, it wasn’t feasible or possible to create an experimental approach to this topic until the development of psycho-physiological laboratory technology. After subsequent experiments were conducted, it was discovered that the sleeping research participants awakened from REM activity were often capable of recalling their dream episodes clearly. This made it possible for the experimenter to request a telepathic receiver to keep dreaming about a stimulus that was being directed at a distant location from a telepathic sender. 

Earlier, there had been an article written about an international team of scientists who had managed to create real-time dialogues with people who were in the middle of dreaming- which is also called ‘interactive dreaming’- which made the recent edition of Current Biology. It was definitely quite fascinating to understand that lucid dreamers were conversing with researchers who weren’t dreaming. What made the study even more interesting was the theory of how communication kept manifesting itself in the minds and dreams of the dreamers. 

Precognitive dreaming has also been a point of interest for Dale Graff, who has a background in the aerospace industry and also served in many of the technical intelligence assignments for the Department of Defense. Interestingly, he was also the director of the STARGATE program, which was designed to study the parapsychological phenomenon and how it influenced intelligence-gathering purposes. In one of his lectures, he spoke about the concept of Psi dreaming, and how an individual experiences such a dream. He also went into detail about how Psi dreaming could be researched and evaluated from a scientific framework. 

Also Read: FORMER AREA 51 ENGINEER: I WORKED ON SECRET UFO PROJECT, HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED

Another article also took careful note of Dr. Teresa DeCicco, the Professor of Psychology at Trent University in Canada, in accordance with this topic. She has also served as a Research Associate at the Center for National Research in Italy and is a well-published author of numerous scientific papers on dreaming, dreams, and spiritual psychology. In a statement regarding precognitive dreaming, DeCicco recalled a special moment that occurred while she was taking a class on Dreams and Dreaming on the night of September 10th, 2001, at a University near Toronto, Canada. The assignment that the class had to submit was a recorded dream from the week before. It was during this class that she came across a paper that was positively interesting. 

One of the students in her class had a dream just a few nights before September 10, where she saw an airplane hitting the CN Tower in Toronto. The plane then miraculously hit the tower yet again and she kept dreaming about great gouts of fire and smoke. The scene then shifted to her father who had been hiding up in the attic of their home- and he was running around trying to avoid people who had incriminated him for being the pilot that hit the tower. The dream was so poignant and emotional that it woke the student from her REM activity. The next day, an extremely similar and tragic incident took place in real life. 

Image credit: 123RF