Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self

Book excerpt: • Outlines a set of clear principles to help guide dreamworkers, illustrated through real precognitive dream experiences • Shows how to detect precognitive dreams through their characteristic features, explaining how dreams relate to memory and why dreams about future experiences are often symbolic or distorted • Explores the mind-blowing implications of precognition for our lives, including how our present thoughts actually shape--or shaped--our past Once only the stuff of science fiction, evidence has grown that precognition--glimpses of your future in dreams and visions and being influenced subtly in waking life by what is to come--is real. Your future thoughts and feelings shape who you are now. And your present thoughts and feelings shape--or shaped--your past. In this accessible exploration of precognition, precognitive dreamwork, and a radically new biographical sensibility, the Long Self, that precognition awakens us to, Eric Wargo shows how dreamworkers can play the role of citizen scientists, adding to our understanding of this fascinating, almost unexplored dimension of human life. Wargo outlines a set of clear principles to guide dreamworkers, each illustrated through real dreamers’ experiences. Drawing on psychoanalysis and contemporary sleep science, he explores how precognition relates to memory, explaining why dreams of future experiences are often distorted and what those distortions probably mean. He discusses never-before-described dream features, including “time gimmicks” (symbols hinting at time distortion) and “calendrical resonance” (the tendency of dreams to foretell experiences exactly a year or years later). He describes why an understanding of precognition augments Jung’s theory of synchronicity by highlighting our own role in producing meaningful coincidences in our waking lives. He also shows how precognition manifests in other states of consciousness like lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, trance states, sleep paralysis, meditation, and hypnagogia. We are at a major turning point in science’s understanding of time, causality, and the self. We are more than who we think we are from moment to moment--we are our past, present, and future simultaneously. When we understand this, a dream journal becomes a personal time machine, with mind-blowing discoveries in store for the traveler.