This article about synchronicities and precognitive dreams was originally published in Quest magazine in 1997. At the time I wrote it, I didn’t have access to the dream journals I mention in it, and so had to rely on memory. Since then I have retrieved the journals from Los Angeles – where they were slumbering in storage – and at present am working on a book about dreams, time, and the strange relationship between. This article can serve as a taster for the full-length treatment to come.
Since around 1980, I have kept, more on than off, a dream journal. Some years are less accounted for than others, but on the whole I have a fairly well-stocked entry book for what was going on in my sleeping mind over the last seventeen years.
Along with emotionally charged dreams, there were many about trivial, everyday matters. I would be standing at a street corner and notice a car pass by and realise I had dreamed this the night before. I dreamed of a fountain, with terracotta steps rising on either side. In the dream, this was somewhere in Italy. That day, by chance, I got a lift from a friend into Hollywood and decided to get out a few blocks from my destination and walk the rest of the way. When I got out of the car, there were the fountain and steps; it was not Italy, but Sunset Boulevard. And the feeling. Not exactly déjà vu, but an odd mixture of this and another sensation described by Ouspensky, from his studies with Gurdjieff, called “self-remembering.” Jungian friends “explained” my dreams as “synchronicities.” I had no doubt they were, but didn’t see how calling them this rather than “coincidence” told me anything about how they happened.
I noticed that certain psychological conditions seemed, if not to cause the dreams, at least to accompany them more than others. States of tension or, conversely, of great interest and happiness seemed to be preferable to an even keel. Tension produced an uncomfortable feeling that the membrane separating dream from reality – shaky distinctions at best – had been perforated. Situations in which I would hear, metaphorically, the Twilight Zone theme would produce a feeling that I was “dreaming” while awake, and it took some effort to keep up appearances and not turn tail. It seemed then that the dream feeling was seeping into my waking life and that my consciousness consisted of a muddle of the two. Conversely, when happy, alert, and expectant, I would find synchronicities popping up almost a dime a dozen.
Once, on a weekend trip to San Francisco, it was as if I had stepped into a “synchronicity cloud.” Not only had I dreamed several small events of the day, but I found myself bumping into coincidences left and right. For example, I had been reading Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and had just read about a particular character with an unusual name. I looked up at the building I was standing in front of: the same name was emblazoned across the storefront. Several similar things happened. Likewise, at the start of a move to Europe, I was waiting for my flight at JFK airport, reading The Glass Bees by the German writer Ernst Junger, himself a connoisseur of dreams and psychic phenomena. The hero was describing how, during his military training, his cavalry sergeant had taught him the value of learning how to fall by deliberately arranging a slip from the saddle. The moment I read this, I looked up to see a large man fall flat on his back.
I mention synchronicities because, although some of my “future dreams” were clearly related to my psychological development, many weren’t. Jung defines synchronicities as “meaningful coincidences,” having to do with our “individuation,” our growth and maturity. I mentioned volcanoes earlier. Several years ago, I woke from a dream in which my ex-wife and I were with her uncle in Japan. He was helping us escape from a flood of lava and urging us to hurry. I had never met her uncle nor been to Japan; I also hadn’t heard about the volcano that had erupted there that week until after the dream. Synchronicity? But what had volcanoes in Japan to do with my psychological growth? Again, a few years ago, I dreamed of tremendous explosions and devastated landscapes; only later that day I realised it was August 6, the anniversary of Hiroshima, something I hadn’t remembered until then. Some “future dreams” were perhaps telepathic; my ex-wife may have been in rapport with her uncle in Japan, and I may have picked up her intuition, but she didn’t mention it to me, nor was she aware of the volcano. In any case, this seems to me a case of synchronicity with no particular meaning for me. Yet some other dreams clearly did have meaning. One night I dreamed of a man’s face directly in front of mine; it was nasty, and he was shouting. That night I went to an outdoor concert at the Hollywood Bowl. There was a misunderstanding about my seat, and I lost my temper with an usher; naturally enough, he replied in kind. Only later did I realise his was the face in the dream. Had I been more aware, I could have avoided a foolish argument.
The Invisible Writing
But my most striking dreams are ones in which I feel some “intelligence” is communicating with me, giving guidance and advice. With these, I’m convinced something not “myself” is at work. I dreamed of dancing in a circle of Tibetan monks. We were passing a ball of yarn back and forth; when the ball came to me it began to unravel. We held onto the edges and danced; the yarn opened up and a beautiful mandala appeared. I woke feeling that something extraordinary had happened. That day, in the bookstore I managed, a colleague told me he had found a picture of me in my past life. I laughed as he pulled out a copy of Alexandra-David Neel’s Secrets of Tibetan Yoga and showed me the back cover. There was a photo of a pudgy, cherubic monk with round glasses, the kind I wore. I hadn’t mentioned the dream. The friend said this meant I should take up Tibetan Buddhism. I thought it meant I was on the “right path” already.
One last dream. At the same bookstore I made a habit of putting books aside, thinking I might buy them. One was The Invisible Writing, Arthur Koestler’s autobiography. Koestler wrote of how he had abandoned the “scientific” materialist outlook of his youth while waiting to be shot as a prisoner during the Spanish Civil War. To pass the time in his cell, Koestler worked out the mathematical proof that there is no highest prime number. He became so absorbed in this that he had a kind of mystical experience; only a small nagging at the back of his mind distracted him. “Oh, yes,” he remembered, “I may be shot tomorrow. Is that all?” Koestler then realised he had been wrong to think the reality of the world could be found in the Marxist rationalist thought he had been trained in, the visible proofs of history, economics, and sociology. Reality lay in what he called “the invisible writing,” the intuition, poetic and mystical. The experience changed his life. He left Marxism and devoted himself to exploring human creativity and the meeting points of science and mysticism.
At the time I found Koestler’s book, I was facing a crisis: I had to decide whether to carry on with a PhD program or take a chance on writing, as I had always wanted to do. The doctorate would mean security, a job, prestige, but it would also mean letting go of my unorthodox interests, such as future dreams, and becoming a “serious” scholar. I decided not to buy the book. That night I dreamed that I returned to the store and bought The Invisible Writing. Wish fulfilment? But “bought” in slang means to accept, to believe. The dream was telling me to buy more than the book; it told me to “buy” the idea of “the invisible writing,” a point that came home literally when I borrowed a biography of Jung that night and opened it at random to a chapter describing his ideas about dreams as messages from a hidden self. The chapter’s title? “The Invisible Writing.” I didn’t finish graduate school.
The above article originally appeared in Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America, Vol 85, Issue 12.
Gary Lachman’s new book is Dreaming Ahead of Time: Experiences with Precognitive Dreams, Synchronicity and Coincidence, available from all good bookstores and online retailers.
