1: GUN
(1975/11/4)

Two men walked into the office to rob me. I ran into my boss's office and pulled a small gun out of his top desk drawer. The men were were afraid and left.

NEXT DAY

My boss called in from the L.A. office and asked for information on a piece of paper in his top desk drawer. I went into his office, opened the drawer, and there was the small gun that was in my dream.

2: FUGITIVE
(1976/4/2)

I met a Mexican-Indian man dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans. He was in trouble with the law and needed a place to stay. I brought him to my friends' (Cheryl and Dave's) house to hide.

NEXT NIGHT

Cheryl had the same dream. She described the man identically to the man in my dream--same situation.

3: CANYON
(1976/4/28)

I was walking through a canyon and came across some woodpiles. Then I saw a locked gate.

THREE DAYS LATER

At a healing celebration, I woke up early and hiked through the land. I came across a canyon that was used as a junk yard. Lots of wood had been thrown there. I walked on and came to an iron gate that was locked.

4: CATHY
(1976/6/24)

I was talking to a girl with blonde hair by the name of Cathy.

NEXT DAY

Camping in Big Sur I met a young girl with blonde hair named Cathy. We had a long conversation and I learned a lot from her.

I posted this set of predictive dreams not because they're individually dramatic, but precisely because they aren't. Both skeptics and believers in ESP generally have models involving strong emotions: either strong feelings (a crisis, say) spur us to leap beyond local spacetime, or strong feelings (hunger for magic, say?) drive wishful thinking. Even Freud & Jung share this, if little else! Ignore the details, and all four models agree: apparently psychic dreams are about big issues.

In contrast, J.W. Dunne's Experiment with Time (1920s) found exactly the same pattern as Marcoux: not a few apparently psychic dreams about crises, but constant small, even trivial correspondences between dreams and waking events, mostly near in time, but just as likely to be future as past! They were, like Marcoux's dreams, about a house or a gate or a person he'd meet. He found he constantly doubted and belittled such predictions--too brainwashed by his beliefs--both in linear time and in ESP as the Drama Queen of senses. So he read his journal entries backward, and suddenly in the same data found a host of echoes anyone'd accept as references to waking life--if read forward.

Vladimir Nabokov tried Dunne's experiment in the 1960s, and got similar results. I tried it 1983-4 and got the same.

The Rhines' collection of spontaneous ESP experiences also abounds in small events; whatever ESP is, it acts like a normal sense--constant, modest, undramatic--no more otherworldly than your sense of smell.

SOURCE: The New Diary, by Tristine Rainer, intro by Anaïs Nin, 1978, Penguin, p. 257. A guide to the techniques and transformative effects of journaling (dream or not).

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