{"id":4210,"date":"2013-06-24T09:01:08","date_gmt":"2013-06-24T13:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=4210"},"modified":"2013-06-24T09:34:33","modified_gmt":"2013-06-24T13:34:33","slug":"the-edwardian-gentleman-who-found-that-dreams-are-caused-by-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2013\/06\/the-edwardian-gentleman-who-found-that-dreams-are-caused-by-the-future.html","title":{"rendered":"The flight pioneer who learned from dreams of the future that the time is always Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I am giving a talk in London tonight on “Dreaming the Future”. We are time travelers in our dreams and one thing that goes on, probably every night, is that the dream self travels into the possible future, scouting out challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Depending on whether we remember such dream scouts, and can read the information correctly, and can then decide on appropriate action, we can move away from undesirable future events and towards ones that are more attractive.<\/p>\n

Since I am going to speak on these things in Britain, I am thinking of a great pioneer researcher in this field who was in every way a product of Britain in the Edwardian era. I can think of few less likely candidates for Psychic Friends Network \u2013 as either client or reader \u2013 than J.W.Dunne (1875-1949). A gentleman soldier and aviator, he came out of the Anglo-Irish military caste. He designed and built the first British military aircraft, and his prototype was soon adopted and manufactured in the United States. He was devoted to fly fishing. In all things, he was a determined scientist and rationalist who looked for the logic <\/em>in life\u2019s anomalies. Like the best Britons, he was also marvelously pragmatic: if the data presented to him did not fit existing theories of how things worked, then to hell with the theories.<\/p>\n

The data that shook Dunne\u2019s conception of reality \u2013 first when he was a sub-lieutenant of the Imperial Yeomanry, fighting the Boers, then when he was convalescing in Italy, and many times later \u2013 were dreams in which he saw, with remarkable accuracy, events that lay in the future. Sometimes his dreams anticipated news <\/em>of world events that he had not yet received. His dreams gave him \u201cnews flashes\u201d of an earthquake in Madagascar and of troop movements in Sudan long before the newspapers arrived with printed reports of those events.<\/p>\n

Dunne started keeping a detailed journal of his dreams, and found that he dreamed of the future \u2013 on average \u2013 as often as the past. This led him to realize that in dreams, time works differently than in our usual experience of waking life. He drew friends and family members into an ongoing \u201cExperiment with Time\u201d and collected a great deal of data on \u201ctime displacement\u201d as observed in dreams. He extended his experiments into waking precognition \u2013 for example, by trying to guess what he would find in a book he would later pick up at random in his club. He quickly concluded that precognition can be achieved in waking states as well as in dreams, but requires \u201ca steadying of attention\u201d and practice in controlling the imagination that are not easily attained. He published his findings in1927 \u00a0a book titled An Experiment with Time <\/em>that had wide influence in the interval between the two world wars; it was read and eagerly discussed by many leading scientists, writers and politicians.<\/p>\n

Dunne evolved a complex mathematical model he called Serialism in his effort to account for the fact that time does not move in a linear fashion in dreams \u2013 and perhaps in the larger universe. In his last book, \u00a0Intrusions?,\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0published posthumously, he makes the bold statement that his precognitive dreams were “caused <\/em>by something which I was going to experience in waking life later on\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is a most interesting theory: that future events not only cast a shadow before them, but cause <\/em>us to dream of them \u2013 and perhaps, in dreaming, to help bring a certain event track into our physical experience, out of an immense range of alternative possible futures.<\/p>\n

In Intrusions?<\/em>, he \u00a0provided further details of the precognitive dreams recounted in An Experiment with Time <\/em>that he suppressed in the earlier book, apparently for fear of not sounding scientific and respectable. The strongest \u00a0dream “intrusions” containing glimpses of the future were often accompanied by inner voices, sometimes a tremendous chorus of voices crying “Look, look, look!” He describes this phenomenon as the “rousing of attention”.<\/p>\n

Dunne moved towards the understanding that our experience of \u00a0linear time \u00a0is an illusion of the limited ordinary mind. Viewed from the fourth dimension,\u00a0 past, present and future are in fact simultaneous and only experienced sequentially because of our mental perception of them. In the dream state the mind was not shackled in this way and was able to perceive events in the past and future with equal facility.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am giving a talk in London tonight on “Dreaming the Future”. We are time travelers in our dreams and one thing that goes on, probably every night, is that the dream self travels into the possible future, scouting out challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4210"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4213,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4210\/revisions\/4213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}