Can dreams predict the future? Can dreams come true? Why do some dreams seem to preview the future? Why is it that some people regularly experience precognitive dreams?
I’m a dream analyst and a scientist, and although I regularly caution people to understand that our dreams are symbolic and reflect our individual conscious and unconscious mindsets, I also know that a rare proportion of our dreams can portray the future in stunning accurate detail.
I know, because this happened to me regularly in the past, and I know because I set aside three years, back in the mid-90s, to research the subject and write a book about it. I included interviews with other precognitive dreamers, and with clairvoyants, and I designed experiments where I was placed under hypnosis to see if I could predict the future. When I found that I saw detailed aspects of my future during these hypnosis sessions, I wondered whether I was powerfully creating my future due to my hypnotised condition. I delved deeper and deeper.
My book, The Shape of Things to Come, was published by Random House in 1998. It is now available as a kindle ebook on Amazon.
Would you like to dip into this book and discover more? Here are some extracts:
FROM THE BACK COVER
This is the extraordinary story of a scientist’s quest to understand her ability to see future events in her dreams. Drawing on current breakthroughs in modern science, this fascinating exploration of precognition is guaranteed to change your perceptions of reality and persuade you that not only is it possible to predict the future, but it’s possible to change it too.
Jane Teresa Anderson’s ground-breaking research provides a scientific explanation for precognition – the knowledge of future events. To do this she takes the reader on a truly compelling tour through telepathy, clairvoyancy, hypnosis, synchronicity, and quantum physics. You will meet some of the fifty precognitive dreamers and visionaries she interviewed along the way, and discover that their extraordinary experiences cannot be dismissed as random events or chance. Four esteemed professional clairvoyants tell of their own experiences, hopes, fears, and philosophies while Jane Teresa acts the detective and weighs up the body of evidence. On her incredible journey Jane Teresa also raises vital questions about predetermination, free will, and the nature of God.
Reality, as you think you know it, will never be the same again.
Jane Teresa’s quest travels the realm of spiritual meaning and purpose while also presenting down-to-earth practical steps and scientific models, based on her own research and personal experience to help you gain insight into the shape of things to come in your own life. This startling research will challenge your perceptions of time and synchronicity, personal power, and individual responsibility in your personal and collective futures.
Jane’s quest travels the realms of spiritual meaning and purpose while also presenting down-to-earth practical steps and scientific models, based on her own research and personal experience to help you gain insight into the shape of things to come in your own life. This startling research will challenge your perceptions of time, synchronicity, personal power and individual responsibility in your personal and collective futures.
INTRODUCTION: WHAT IF?
How would you feel if you found yourself reliving one of your dreams, detail for detail? Would you dismiss it as a strange coincidence, or question your sanity perhaps? You might conclude that your memory had played tricks on you, that there had been no such dream in the first place. Maybe the whole experience was an intense deja vu, an imbalance of brain chemistry leaving you certain that you had dreamed this very occasion before.
Or maybe the experience was genuine, leaving you questioning whether free will exists. If you can see your future before it happens, is it, after all, predetermined? Or did you create your future by seeing it in the first place? How would you feel if you dreamed or had a vision of a fatal accident, only to walk into the identical scene the next day? Was it an inevitable accident? Should you have warned the person concerned? Why did you get to preview it? What does it all mean?
The implications of each of these questions are huge, particularly in the areas of personal freedom, power and responsibility. Many precognitive dreamers and visionaries wrestle with these questions throughout their lives, not knowing where to turn for social acceptance let alone explanation.
Being a scientist, my reaction to these kind of experiences in my own life has been to record all my dreams shortly after waking, a discipline I have continued for six years. My family and those who know me well often witness my excited flourishing of my dream journal in evidence that some event we have all shared has been documented in advance. The awe never dwindles, even though I have now reached an understanding of the hows and whys behind the dramas of precognition. For that is where I now stand, paused at the milestone which marks not the end of my travels, but the conclusion of a three-year research quest which has led me on the most extraordinary journey.
There were many facets to this quest and I approached it from a variety of angles. While my own story interweaves the pages of this book, you will also meet others whose dreams have previewed specific future events, as well as those whose future insights have been received while awake. The stories of four esteemed professional clairvoyants are presented, documenting their experiences, hopes, fears and philosophies of precognition. All these people were interviewed in depth and many contributed additional experiences and thoughts during the three-year period. Each has read and edited his or her story as it appears in this book and each has agreed to publication, although some have chosen pen-names to maintain confidentiality. Several experiences were retold from my radio talkback programmes using transcribed tapes and these are acknowledged as they occur.
The most extraordinary part of the quest for me was the Hypnosis Project in which I was hypnotised into the future six times by John Suess, a well regarded professional hypnotherapist. Going under hypnosis as a scientist, recording and transcribing the sessions in secrecy and then living through the unfolding scenarios as objectively as I could, was exhilarating yet traumatic. The results of my experiments challenged me way beyond the boundaries of my previous thinking. I emerged from those months of headaches, confusion and disbelief with a completely new, yet rational, understanding of the way life is.
You will also travel, through these pages, the dimensions of quantum physics and relativity where reality as you think you know it will never be the same again. Imagery leads you over the bumpy bits to impart clear understanding of these insights without losing scientific accuracy.
The book is structured in three parts. The first, ‘The Body of Evidence’, presents the evidence for precognition (the ‘what?’), through precognitive dreams, visions, professional clairvoyancy and the Hypnosis Project. The intention is to keep you questioning at this stage, to lead you along a similar journey to my own and to give you the opportunity to assess the evidence, reminisce your own experiences and come up with your own theories. Part One threads questions throughout the evidence, much as you might encounter when reading a detective novel. Indeed that was the idea behind this structure, to let you enjoy the book as a great mystery, allowing your conscious and unconscious mind to simmer and brew over the possibilities and the huge implications of areas of this research. While you might find the questioning frustrating and the evidence at times contradictory, you will enjoy the journey best if you enter into the ‘detective’ frame of mind.
The second part, ‘The Mind Questions ‘How?’’, introduces science into the arena to answer some of the ‘hows’ and then progresses through further extraordinary experiences to arrive at a complete understanding of how precognition works. The only question then remaining is whether our ability to experience the future and then live through it again is merely a fantastic mechanism explicable by science and theory, or whether there is a deeper spiritual meaning behind it all.
And so the third part of the book ponders ‘The Soul Searches for Meaning’, completing the ‘what?’ and the ‘how?’ with the ‘why?’. Spirituality enters the picture highlighting meaning, purpose and the role of personal power in addressing our individual responsibilities towards our personal and collective futures. The final practical component shows you how to apply the results of this research to gain maximum insight into the what, how and why of the shape of things to come.
THE REAL ADVENTURE BEGINS (Page 108)
Now, this is where the really exciting part of the story starts, a story which led me through both the elation of discovery and adventure and the fear that I might lose my sanity or find myself on the edge of something explosively powerful, if I progressed any further. The Hypnosis Project results will stretch your credibility and require you to think laterally as well as deeply. As a scientist I dotted as many i’s and crossed as many t’s as I could when travelling in such open territory. Our hypnosis sessions were held in private and each was recorded onto audio cassette tapes. After each session I transcribed the tapes and sent John, the hypnotherapist, a typed word-for-word copy to keep on file. No specific details were discussed with others, except in general terms as reported in this story. Observations were similarly recorded and sent to John as replica copies.
The project was triggered when I was interviewing John about his views on past life regression. He responded that whatever you can do with regression into the past you can do with progression into the future, and that an experiment with progression had been published in the popular press by a dentist who hypnotised a TV journalist two weeks into the future and had him read the news on the local television station. Three of the items actually occurred in that he had predicted an airline crash, the site of the crash, a school bus accident, and the name of the Russian general who was fired that day. All three became fact.
We began the project the week following the initial interview, with a simple hypnosis session to see if I was a good subject, as I hadn’t consciously volunteered for hypnosis before. In typical scientist fashion I fought the induction suggestions, although I was also eager to get started on the adventure. If the results were to have meaning, I resolved, I would have to be as objective as possible. In retrospect this duality may have occasionally held back my willingness to progress into some areas. It can be difficult to be trusting and objective at the same time. On that first day, however, I consciously observed my upheld palm turn and fall into my lap despite my intention to the contrary, dropping the coin it had held, as the first battle was won. Unconscious mind: 1, Conscious mind: 0. Next week the real fun would begin!
CHAPTERS
PART ONE
The body of evidence
Chapter 1 When dreams come true
Chapter 2 Visions of the future
Chapter 3 Meet the professionals
Chapter 4 Hypnotised into the future
Chapter 5 And the big questions are …
PART TWO
The mind questions ‘How?’
Chapter 6 Where is tomorrow?
Chapter 7 Safe science
Chapter 8 Stunned by synchronicity
Chapter 9 Thoughts in a coffee cup
Chapter 10 Time as a red herring
Chapter 11 Hocus pocus or just plain focus?
Chapter 12 Gathering threads
PART THREE
The soul searches for meaning
Chapter 13 God: the painter or the painting?
Chapter 14 Mirror, mirror, who am I?
Chapter 15 Responsibility for the future
Chapter 16 How to develop precognition and make it work for you
EPILOGUE
A dream: Deja deja vu
Sincerely yours
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
A scientist explains how it is possible to predict – and change – the future.
Everything we need to know is right in front of us if we take the time to look. We can sit back and accept the future before us, or we can turn the tide and change the odds. The choice is up to us. Until now, we have not known how to make that choice.