Dreams (mostly examples of apparent predictive dreams) reported by J.W. Dunne in his An Experiment with Time. They're listed roughly in the order they appear in the book, to show the development of his great experiment.

Dunne looked for precognition in everyday dreams, not spectacular cases. He simply compared his dreams to waking events a few days later as well as earlier. He found dream images echoing the future just as frequently as the past. Anyone approaching his data fairly has to concede he found a symmetrical pattern--rich connections to events one day off (past or future), sparser references two days off, and so on, forming a bell-shaped curve: ordinary Gaussian distribution centered on the present, but spreading into past and future equally! It's as if the dreaming mind were in a balloon, looking down on the timescape: things directly below (both past and future) are quite clear, but quickly foreshorten as one looks further into the distance. Whether there's a horizon beyond which we can't see, Dunne couldn't say--he had at least one precognition decades before the event, Sky-Boat. Like a peak on the horizon? Or looming over it?

Dunne (and those who replicated his experiment--see Miss C and Major F below) had trouble recognizing even obvious predictive echoes. Only if he pretended they were in the past, reading his own journal backwards, would backward echoes suddenly come clear. He describes it as a trance he had to shake himself out of, over and over. Precisely the opposite of the credulous eagerness so many skeptics attribute to psychics and parapsychologists! It takes effort to strip off cultural brainwashing, even when your experience proves it false.

Dunne also points out how Einsteinian spacetime fails to explain why we experience time as a flow; that requires at least one more time dimension. To be fair, I find Dunne's own theory of infinite "serial time" overkill--a few time dimensions, like a few spatial dimensions, give enough elbow room for a working multiverse. But regardless of his theory, his experiment poses a real challenge to conventional physics and psychology. For when I bothered to carefully and fully replicate his experiment (unlike most of his critics), I got his results--as did Vladimir Nabokov and Nancy Price; even those trying it for a single night got results--like Robert Graves and James Joyce.

RELATED TOPICS: time - predictive dreams - dream ESP & societal aspects of ESP - JB Priestley and Louisa Rhine collected time anomalies - Ann Faraday's ESP model (emphasizing, like Dunne, that it's ordinary and mostly unnoticed) -- See also the full INDEX OF SUBJECTS.

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	HALF PAST FOUR: by J.W. Dunne; 1899, a dream of clocks and time I say it's 4:30 PM; the waiter says 4:30 AM! I wake in the night to find my watch says 4:30, but it's stopped! I wind it, and next morning...
	PELÉE: by J.W. Dunne, April/May 1902; a predictive nightmare with a scientifically important error I was on an island about to explode like Krakatoa. I warned the French colonial authorities "4,000 people will die if we don't get them out!" but no one listened. I woke. The paper came. "Mont Pelée erupts, kills 40,000". I had missed a zero! But 40,000 turned out to be wrong too, implying...
	A FACTORY FIRE: by J. W. Dunne; late 1903, a predictive nightmare. Dunne dreamt of a fire with smoke so toxic it killed people on a balcony in open air! Then came the evening newspaper...
	RUNAWAY HORSE: by J.W. Dunne, spring 1904; a mixed predictive dream NIGHTMARE: a huge horse goes wild, leaps a fence and chases me. NEXT DAY: a horse does just that--yet every detail's different...
	THE FLYING SCOTSMAN: by J.W. Dunne, fall 1913; a lucid predictive dream Just north of the Firth of Forth in Scotland, a train fell from the track to a grassy park where small groups of people wandered. I sensed it was one of those odd dreams of mine & tried to get the date--next spring. On April 14, 1914, the "Flying Scotsman" jumped the parapet 15 miles north of the Forth Bridge and fell to the golf links below...
	SPY WITH A BUN: by Miss C, 1918, a dream experiment urged by J.W. Dunne DREAM: I meet a woman with a bun hairdo, black skirt, black & white striped blouse. I think she's a spy! TWO DAYS LATER: I meet that woman--bun, skirt, blouse. And all the hotel guests here say she's a spy...
	MAJOR F.'S EXPERIMENT: by Major F., Nov/Dec 1920, dream experiment urged by J.W. Dunne DREAM 1: On green grass, a red & blue boat with a net draped atop. Predictive. DREAM 2: Climbing a ladder with square rungs in a space w/o walls. Predictive. DREAM 3: A small boy with a toy boat. A sail's laid out flat for washing. Predictive...
	SKY-BOAT: by J.W. Dunne, c.1889; a long-term predictive dream As a child I read Jules Verne's Clipper of the Clouds--a metal craft with many propellers on spars, not wings. Soon I dreamt I designed & flew quite a different craft, like a small boat of canvas on a wood frame. 20 years later, I was test-flying a new aeroplane with a boatlike cockpit of white canvas on a wood...

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