Hi Andy
Was there any particular event that changed your worldview or was it a gradual thing? I’m interested in this. If so, have you written about it?
Do you continue to experience events like those described in Dreamer? What do you think about some people having them while the majority don’t, at least not to the point where they are very persuasive of something unusual.
It was gradual and I did write about it in my book, Dreamer. That said, a better description is that I started out unalterably opposed to the idea that any kind of psi was real. Then, despite quite a few impressive examples of psi in my life, my resolve to interpret them as anything but psi was unshaken. This remained the status quo until around 1984 (when I was 18). At that time I had a veridical dream about a ghost. I did brush it off but unlike prior examples, the thought of it nagged at me every once in a while. In other words, a tiny seed of doubt was there but I largely managed to ignore it. A year later, my wife-to-be started telling me that I was dreaming of the future. Somehow, her way of insisting this was happening had the effect of hardening my skeptical instincts. At that time I was just as hostile to the idea as I was before the ghost example.
Over the next few years, my wife continued to point out what she thought were precognitive dreams. Among them were: veridical dream of lottery numbers, correct premonition (while waking) of a suicide (a person I hadn't even seen or met at the time I had the premonition), and a plane crash. These weren't totally ignored but they weren't wholly trusted either. Then, in rapid succession, there were a few things that were unquestionably odd: a dream of the Ramstein airshow disaster, the dice rolling event described in the PT article, a similar event but with Scrabble tiles, and a few others. That got me thinking about some of the earlier examples that I had previously discarded. At that point, primarily because of the backgammon and Scrabble events, I was positive that there was no non-psi explanation for those two events. However, I still doubted the dreams.
The reason was that they seemed so rare and there was no written record. I wanted a piece of paper with a date to feel comfortable accepting them. This is now 1989, when I was 24. My wife and I argued about it. Perversely, I still disagreed with her about the dreams, though I had to accept that with the dice and Scrabble tiles something odd was definitely going on. Those events also reminded me of some earlier, similar events, that dated back to 1972 or so, making me think about them differently. Then, on September 15, 1989, I decided to settle the question by starting the journal. At the time, I didn't expect it to work because I thought that my wife was making mistakes with the way she remembered the dreams I described to her on waking. I also felt that even if she was right, the dreams were so rare that it would be difficult to capture one in the journal. I assumed that if I found one unusual dream over the course of a year, I'd be lucky.
The journal did the trick. Within a few days, the precognitive dreams started rolling in. By the end of 1989, I was willing to accept that precognitive dreams were real. I still didn't believe in ghosts or God, but that changed over time also. The start of accepting the idea of ghosts was just thinking about the earlier incident when I was 17, but then I discovered a number of veridical OBEs in the journal. I may not have ever seen them but for a call from a friend who suspected I had dreamed of her that night. I had, and the dream content matched what happened on her end, three thousand miles away. I started looking into other dreams of friends and found more like it. Over time, I saw that I was more likely to have a veridical OBE than a dream of the future. At least, more likely to be able to verify an OBE than a dream that looked like it might be precognitive.
I have always dreamed of ghosts. Possibly the earliest I recall was around 1972, when I was six. The combination of the veridical OBEs, the ghost dreams, and the veridical ghost dream of 1984 were enough to convince me of survival by 1990. Reincarnation, oddly, was something I accepted prior to the journal, thanks to reading the research of Ian Stevenson around the time of the Ramstein air show disaster dream. That also probably contributed to me taking my wife more seriously. I don't talk about this much because I don't think of it very often but at the time of the Ramstein dream and some of these other events, I lived a block and a half away from the Parapsychology Foundation in New York City. I discovered it at around that time and got in the habit of reading in their library on Wednesdays. This might be surprising but those books didn't push me that far in the direction of accepting psi.
The reason the Parapsychology Foundation was less influential than one might think is that the exact content I read wasn't in every case the best material. They have a good library and in their upper floors have a terrific archive of research. However, I never looked at their research due to a total lack of interest. In their library, the books could be broken down into two categories: pop-occult and scientific. Unfortunately, the pop-occult outnumbered the rest and at the time I couldn't tell the difference. That means I did not discover Sheldrake, Krippner, Rhine, or any of the scientists writing on these topics. Instead, I was reading Van Dahniken, Holzer, and others who essentially collected ghost stories and then juiced them up in the most unbelievable ways. That said, there was one notable exception: Ian Stevenson.
I thought Stevenson's work was credible and fascinating. I read almost all of the books they had by him, which may have been all of his books at the time. I also read a book by Adam Crabtree and a couple by Colin Wilson. One thing all of these books had in common is that they didn't deal with dreams. None of them did. There may have been a mention here or there but not much. At the end of the day, I walked out of the Parapsychology Foundation with my opinion of my dreams unchanged (not enough proof), though I did at that time accept reincarnation (to my surprise).
The funny thing is that although there were a few books that had minor things in them that came across as credible, I thought of those as "real" examples, whereas my dreams were, if anything, pathetic shadows of the real deal. In other words, even if my dreams were psi, they were too few and too weak to be of interest to anyone.
So the "gradual transition" took from around 1984 (ghost dream) to 1989 (almost 1990). It took from 1990-2000 for me to accept the possibility of a god, then until 2004 or so before I accepted the idea that the physical universe was likely created by God.
If you'll forgive a metaphor, I'll write something about Yoga. There was a time when I was very good at Yoga poses. I could do a one-armed lotus handstand, for instance. I could do a full splits and then rest my back on my rear leg while grabbing my rear foot with both hands. And yet, every new pose required some effort to master. No matter how good I got, new poses had to be learned. The same is true for how my beliefs changed. I never simply accepted all psi at once. Each specific type required its own evidence before I would accept it and move on. That means that there were times when I had a puzzling collection of ideas that I accepted and others I rejected, though both were closely related.
Now, after researching this for almost thirty years, I do not look at my own experiences as trivial. From the research I've read, my experiences are unusual in a number of ways and have few published parallels. That said, they are substantially different from the most easily replicated form of psi that I am aware of: mediumship. I simply don't have that experience, though I have a suspicion (based on certain dream content) that I know why. I mention this because my experiences fall into the "spontaneous" category and that makes them more difficult to deal with for people who want replicable abilities for the sake of establishing credibility. I can say that within a given period of time, like a year, I can expect a certain number of OBEs, precognitive dreams, etc, but not when they will happen or why. Nor have I had much luck making them happen, though with a few striking exceptions.
I should also add that I lost all interest in attempting to prove psi with my dreams a long time ago. Remember that I originally kept the journal to satisfy my own curiosity. Once that was satisfied, I did talk about it with others, including here on Skeptiko, but after many such interactions, my interest has waned. This is particularly true after finishing my book and the five papers I published subsequently. Now, I feel like I can just direct people to the articles, skip the conversation, and spend my day doing other things.
The effect this has had is that the type of dreams that interest me the most are spiritual dreams that usually have no content that can be checked for veridicality. I continue with the journal to explore those because I think there is genuine value there. Proving that precognition happens is really the small stuff and hardly interesting compared to the spiritual subjects.
Best regards,
AP