I have mildly precognitive dreams. When I record my dreams for a few weeks, and review them, I find slight but definite foreshadowings of real life events. This capacity of mine does not extend, yet, to reliable stock predictions but it is entertaining and a reminder that we humans mingle with eternity on a nightly basis, whether we remember it or not.

Let me share three such dreams, in descending order of probability:

it’s as if I somehow contain a larger, smarter mind than the one I use daily

First, I recently dreamed that I would be meeting with a restaurant owner and that he would be giving me advice. And in fact, the following day, this event did take place. Now, this dream is not mysterious—the fact is, I knew about the meeting, but it had slipped my mind. It would be fatuous of me to claim psychic abilities for what is plainly a case of the subconscious merely reminding me of a previously scheduled event. On the other hand, it does demonstrate that information is processed below the level of conscious thought.

Second, I once dreamed of escape through a long, wet, exceedingly narrow tunnel. The next night, impulsively, I decided to watch The Shawshank Redemption, a movie I hadn’t seen before and didn’t know much about. But the climactic scene was familiar; Andy Dufresne’s escape through a narrow, watery sewer exactly replicated the scene from my dream. Now this, I aver, begins to resemble a genuinely psychic event. I hadn’t seen the movie and had not, at the time of the dream, even decided to watch it. But perhaps I read a review or overheard conversations about the movie. So it’s possible that, here again, I subconsciously processed information not available to me consciously; it’s even possible that my subconscious engineered the event by prompting me to rent the movie, close the loop begun with the dream, and thus have the rather thrilling experience of foreseeing the future. But if so, how fascinating; it’s as if I somehow contain a larger, smarter mind than the one I use daily, a mind that organizes more information than I am able to, a mind that, apparently, has its own agenda.

My final example is somewhat disturbing, at least to me. I was scheduled to visit a company in Michigan as part of a due diligence team. In a dream—or nightmare, really—a few days before the trip, I saw myself and others at the company standing around in shock, contemplating a horrific disaster unfolding on television. The sense of dread was so palpable that I considered canceling the trip. But in the end I didn’t let a mere psychic event outweigh corporate need, and so I visited the company on September 11th, 2001, and stood around with others, watching on TV as hijacked planes brought down the World Trade Center.

Now this seems impossibly strange. And yet… there were people who knew 9/11 was coming: the hijackers and their handlers, at minimum, and in the shadowy world of government, perhaps there were yet more. Is it possible that my subconscious sifted vast amounts of subtle evidence, made a prediction, and passed it to consciousness via my dream? I don’t honestly know. And here’s another thing I don’t know: what would be the difference between that and genuine precognition?

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