INTRODUCTION

For years, J.W. Dunne had spontaneous predictive dreams. He concluded they weren't "psychic" in the popular sense--no telepathy, no clairvoyance, no messages from Beyond the Veil. Instead they seemed to be mishmashes of elements pulled both from his recent past and near future, as if the dreaming mind doesn't even distinguish them!

During World War I, Dunne started his famous experiment--methodically writing both dream and day events, and reading the sequence both forward and back to fool his biased waking brain into scoring the correlations fairly. He found it exhausting, but ultimately successful--dream experiences before waking ones so specific and similar even his engineer-trained skepticism had to concede his dreams just ignored waking-world time. Echoes of tomorrow were as common as echoes of yesterday!

Like any good scientist, he then tried replication. He was careful not to seek believers in ESP. His subjects were naïve, often poor dream-recallers (at the start--they all improved just from writing them down.) He started with his siblings, added Miss B and Miss C, Mrs. L...

--Chris Wayan

MAJOR F'S EXPERIMENT

Major F., the next person approached, entered upon the experiment with considerable interest. He pointed out that, if there were anything in this business, it might mean the spotting of a Derby winner. He finished satisfied that I was perfectly right, but also satisfied, I am afraid, that the dreaming mind did not properly understand its business.

He happens to be a marine artist of considerable reputation; and on the second day of the test he set forth to paint a couple of boats which he had previously seen lying on the beach. But he found that one boat, which was pointed at both bow and stern, had been painted, since his last visit, in staring lifeboat (red and blue) colours. However, he made his sketch--a process necessitating, of course, long and close attention to the boat and its colours. The vessel stood on short, green turf. Some distance away, on a pier which came into the picture, was another long, red, somewhat boatlike object with something draped across its middle. Major F. took field-glasses to ascertain what this stuff was, and discovered it to be a net.

The associated dream-image was that of a red-and-blue lifeboat standing on green turf with a net draped over its middle.

This dream had occurred during the previous night.

Major F., at first, could not see the connection. He thought that the similarity ought to have extended to everything else in the dream scene, and was disappointed that this had not been the case. However, he continued the trial.

On the next day it rained heavily, and we both set our to look for a sheltered place from which to paint pictures. We entered a small house which was in course of construction, and, finding the view from the lower windows too restricted, erected a ladder against the cross-beams of the unfinished upper storey, and climbed up on to these. The ladder was a rather unusual one, in that it had square rungs.

One of Major F.'s dreams on the preceding night had been that he was climbing a ladder which did not appear to be set against any wall. It went up, so to say, into space. And it had square rungs.

He had not been up a ladder for six years.

What finally convinced him, however, was this: He dreamed that he was sailing a toy boat with a small boy protégé of his to whom he had (actually) presented this vessel. A little later on he dreamed he saw a similar boat, but full size, dismasted, and with its sails lying flat on the water. The crew were washing them. A few days after this he heard that his boy friend had been taken to a pond to sail his new boat, but instead of doing so had insisted on removing the sails, laying them flat in the water of the pond and scrubbing them.

He agreed that these three results, taken together, were conclusive.

SOURCE: J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time (1927; 2001 reprint; pp.50-51)

AFTERCLUNK

I've noticed, as I annotate Dunne's An Experiment with Time, that the World Dream Bank's 700-odd subjects used for the links below don't well suit the dreams of Dunne and his fellow guinea pigs. He put a microscope to mundane dreams to show hidden details were often precognitive--that everyone inserts some predictive elements in dreams. But the subjects and links I chose were biased by the history of dream research (archetypes, emotions) and my own shamanic dreams (lots of weird creatures, many mythical). But how do you score "ladder with square rungs" or "washing a toy"? I don't even have a list of dreams about "cleaning & maintenance." Yet. Argh!

(Four sweaty hours later): Okay. Now we do.

--Chris Wayan

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