Saturday, March 27, 2010

A Splash or Two of Precognitive Dreaming

The Persistence of Memory - Salvador Dali

Today, when I got up, I commented to my partner that I had had a bizarre dream that I was back in in a Maths Dept meeting, although I have now retired.

At lunch time I sent my coffee cup flying by accidentally poking my fingers into the rim as I was turning at the table, nearly drenching the keyboard and splashing myself down the trousers, with an uncanny feeling this was becoming a bad habit.

The next cup of green tea, which I have with orange juice to enhance the anti-oxidant epicatechin gallate, I caught the orange juice container, which had a loose lid, against the fridge door and sent the lid flying, scattering juice over the floor, but caught the container in mid-air. Then suddenly it all came back to me!

In the middle of the dream, in which I was making comments which everyone was reluctantly tolerating, because I was retired and shouldn't have an opinion anyway, (actually it was weirder than that - I was talking in a chirpy voice and they couldn't hear me as if I was a ghost - which is a signal of the deeper dreaming stratum), anyway in one of those dream disconnections, this was suddenly interrupted by me getting up scattering my coffee cup on the floor, when I stabbed my finger accidentally into the rim! Not only that, but when I went to bend over to try to pick it up, the entire coffee urn, which was a large chromed boiler on three legs, fell all over the floor as well and couldn't be uprighted because the legs had become rubbery wires, dysfunctional, like the cardboard orange juice container with the unglued screw cap.

So the dream has two splashed containers just as the day has, I reported the dream occurrence hours before the events happened, and it was only when the second splashing became real that the whole weight of the four mistakes reminded me of the full content of the dream and the uncanny implications ...

This harks back to the first precognitive dream I had when I dreamed two nightmares that I was being stung, told my young wife as she arose to feed our newborn daughter, and an hour later was stung wide awake in bed by a wasp that had flown in the window my wife opened after she got up.

My son's response was "of course it might be that the dream primed the events", but this is as much a violation of causality as precognition. Both the real events were accidents, not intentional acts, so priming suggests that dreaming something, particularly in these deep intense hallucinogenic uncontrolled phases of dreaming, might affect future outcomes, not just cause an imprint leading to the person acting out the dream later.

This is of course what quantum theories of dreaming and consciousness might be about, namely anticipating future events which could have significance for the survival of the experiencer. If one dreams a plane is about to crash and one is about to fly, perhaps the dream is priming towards a set of probability futures, or parallel universes, in which these experiences have a non-zero probability of occurring. The dream then leads to a capacity on the part of the experiencer to anticipate disaster and hopefully to evade annihilation.

If so, this anticipatory capacity is not necessarily confined to dreams, but may be the founding property which has caused brains to evolve to become subjectively conscious, namely to anticipate chance happenings beyond the organisms control - perhaps in waking life just in the immediate future of the 'quantum of the present' enabling one, through a degree of foreboding to jump out of the way of the tiger just in time, or on a slightly longer-term basis to intuitively help us decide which shady path ahead the tiger might actually be on.

This would appear to link the unstable and unpredictable properties of a brain state critically poised in self-organized criticality of edge-of-chaos dynamics to respond to quantum sensitivity of its own butterfly effect to generate a form of quantum entanglement that becomes sensitive to the potential future states of the whole system. This would then become the crack in the cosmic egg, in which consciousness has room to utilize Carlos Castaneda's cubic centimeter of chance to good effect.

Finally here is one that happened a couple of months later that shows the same reporting veracity as the stung dream. Last night I dreamed that a group of women had a newborn baby together and they turned to me and threw it out of their van, claiming they had had trying to look after it, claiming was actually mine. I caught it in mid-air and went to look after it but it had strange glutinous transparent white bowel motions. When I woke up I told Christine about it. Then tonight we were watching "House" and the first episode was "Maternity". It began with a couple with a newborn baby which then began to burp up its milk and had an intestinal blockage. Then it became a viral epidemic and second lesbian couple lost their baby. So there were the two elements together in the dream, a women-only group with a baby losing it and a baby with intestinal troubles emitting white glutinous liquid.

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