On a night we dream, yet so often we are unaware of our dreams. Should we be sleeping lightly at the time, dream recall is possible, and often, those who keep a dream diary can find precognitive elements in their dreams.
Of course, the central question, here, is this: are these dreams really precognitive, in that they see into the future, or do our unconscious thoughts provide imagery and conclusion on decisions we are trying to make?
The latter suggests we decide our future in subtle ways.
We decide unconsciously, and the ‘self’ is actually unaware of this process. Hence, the only precognition involved is a change in our conscious attitude or actions.
I’ve often thought that a society, or culture, can operate in the same way. Taking a Jungian interpretation, does culture contain within itself a form of communal introspection which guides how our society develops?
Such musings are, at present, contemporary.
Physicist and futurist, Professor Michio Kaku, of City University in New York, has been writing recently on subjects that echo the above idea.
‘So many times predictions are made that certain things are impossible only to find
them becoming possible a decade or a few decades later,’ he wrote in his new book,
The Physics of the Impossible …
Could such predictions be our guide for the future? He uses Star Trekian transportation as an example. Manipulating ‘quantum entanglement’, physicists have already seemed to ‘transport’ a photon some 89 miles.
Would this have happened if Star Trek had not been their precognitive guide? An interesting supposition, which suggests that science unconsciously moves in directions devised, not by rationality, but what we culturally imagine. Indeed, Einstein once said:
‘If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.’
Which brings me to the place of the paranormal in modern culture. Whilst unexplained ‘events’ continue to happen, the scientific ‘culture’ maintains their impossibility. And there is evidence that, due to this, such ‘events’ are occurring less and less.
There is a peculiarity of particle theory that the role of the ‘observer’ is essential in defining the ‘reality’ the particle actually takes. Could it be that it is the same with culture? If we decide something is, or is not, does that make it so?
Such musings could offer a direction for the future of paranormal research.
For it suggests that the non-existence of the paranormal could be proof of its validity, in that it is the ‘idea’ that it isn’t there that makes it disappear.
And equally, it allows the possibility that what is placed in the media could also, eventually, become so. We may well be the creators of our own phenomena. Which leaves the question: does it really exist or not? If it can be dreamt of, the answer is probably yes.
By Anthony North, April 2008
