Mod+ 282. CAN YOUR DREAMS PREDICT DEATH? NEW EVIDENCE, SURPRISING RESULT.

You are right to think I am not making any money on the book. To date, several years after its publication, I have received no money at all for any of the copies sold. My agent did try to give me a check in the first year of publication, but it was too small to be worth the fee my bank would have charged to deposit dollars from an American bank into my Dutch euro denomination account. For that reason, I instructed my agent to give it to the Salvation Army or treat herself to lunch--and to do the same with any other checks of similar size or less. I haven't heard from her since.

AP

Andy, I would like to know how pre-cognition and psi in general fits into your worldview and philosophy of life the universe and everything. Are you a mentalist? Monist? Dualist? Theist? How do you make sense of it all and how does this affect your every day life decisions?
 
I enjoyed reading the synopsis. Sometime, when life is less hectic, I will have to listen.

This did lead me to buy Andrew's book, I did enjoy it. It was exactly what I was looking for.

As someone who can sometimes be skeptical (I work in a lab as a graduate student) and has enjoyed video games (Final Fantasy was one of my passions growing up), I found it especially informative. I, like the author himself, had questions about some of his dreams.

---
Also, after reading this thread, I had some mundane events in my life that reflected my dreams. I will have to pay more attention to see what I can uncover. Had a dream about bugs all over the floor. The next day, I was called into the lab to catch a large cricket on the floor, which I then released outside. I have never had that happen before.

Cheers.
 
Chris Robinson is now working as a psychic on there. He too used to dream about dead people all the time, and his premonitions were used by police detectives in the UK.

Chris Robinson certainly claims this but no police force has backed up this claim (AFAIK)... There is nothing like Andy's rigour in Robinson's work.
 
I really liked your post. But one thing I find very funny, is the link to "Oranum" as an example of liars.

What is so funny is that a man named Christopher Robinson is now working on Oranum as a psychic. However, what you may not know is he was once known as the "Dream Detective", and in my opinion is 100% legitimate, and probably the most remarkable precognitive dreamer ever put to the test scientifically by Prof Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona.

Prof Schwartz filmed the dream experiments, some of which I have seen on YouTube, and it is quite honestly staggering. Chris Robinson and his ability really was the first thing which started to open me up to the possibility that life may be a lot stranger than we are told by conventional sources and authorities, and this led me on to Skeptiko, and my own dream diary, and remarkable premonitions of my own, which I will post here later when I have time.

Funny and coincidental that you mentioned Oranum, and that I happen to know Chris Robinson is now working as a psychic on there. He too used to dream about dead people all the time, and his premonitions were used by police detectives in the UK.

Actually, this is a mistake on my part and it really isn't a coincidence either.

I have also read Gary Schwartz and have been aware of Christopher Robinson and been very impressed by him and by Gary Schwartz's books (I have read the G.O.D. Principle and another book by him). I also knew Christopher Robinson was on Oranum and I even "chatted" with him a little bit on it. I even have his book "Dream Detective" (though I haven't read it).

What happened was this. I wanted an example of some dodgy psychics and Oranum was the only website I knew like this so I used it as an example. A mistake. My actual opinions are the following:
-Most psychics selling their services are frauds. I have no idea what %. Would be interesting to know. I would imagine that quite a few of them don't know they are "frauds". They just sort of get carried away with it (and new age stuff in general).
-Some psychics selling their services are genuine and have talents but they are very hit and miss.
-Websites like Oranum are interesting but I think they are dodgy. They prey on the vulnerable. They pollute the genuine psychic stuff which does exist and they pollute the whole paranormal space. I don't object to psychics selling services but I do think the way it is usually done is hucksterism at its worst.

I have paid for a psychic reading twice (once with someone who I am convinced has real talents) and both told me nothing of interest. Though apparently I was around with the Mongol hordes in a previous life or something like that :)
 
Actually, this is a mistake on my part and it really isn't a coincidence either.

I have also read Gary Schwartz and have been aware of Christopher Robinson and been very impressed by him and by Gary Schwartz's books (I have read the G.O.D. Principle and another book by him). I also knew Christopher Robinson was on Oranum and I even "chatted" with him a little bit on it. I even have his book "Dream Detective" (though I haven't read it).

What happened was this. I wanted an example of some dodgy psychics and Oranum was the only website I knew like this so I used it as an example. A mistake. My actual opinions are the following:
-Most psychics selling their services are frauds. I have no idea what %. Would be interesting to know. I would imagine that quite a few of them don't know they are "frauds". They just sort of get carried away with it (and new age stuff in general).
-Some psychics selling their services are genuine and have talents but they are very hit and miss.
-Websites like Oranum are interesting but I think they are dodgy. They prey on the vulnerable. They pollute the genuine psychic stuff which does exist and they pollute the whole paranormal space. I don't object to psychics selling services but I do think the way it is usually done is hucksterism at its worst.

I have paid for a psychic reading twice (once with someone who I am convinced has real talents) and both told me nothing of interest. Though apparently I was around with the Mongol hordes in a previous life or something like that :)
Mongol Hordes no less? lol Might explain your 'hostility' towards psychics :) (Kidding)

I agree with most of what you said, though I perhaps naively do not share your pessimistic view that" most" psychics are frauds (though I don't doubt an alarmingly large percentage might be outright frauds). I just find it hard to imagine that "most" psychics are knowingly and wilfully misleading and lying to people, and preying on the vulnerable. I do often suspect that a very large percentage may be people who like you say are into new age subculture and ideas and are quite airy fairy, perhaps lost in the clouds, and while not really "frauds", they are certainly not very good, or accurate, or even psychic, and are probably misleading themselves as much or more than the people they are doing readings for.

However, I am an optimist, and I find it hard to believe that too many people can coldly calculate and manipulate their way through life (though I don't doubt some can very easily - usually think these are our leaders in politics and business).

I still find a coincidence you mentioning that site though, merely for the fact Chris Robinson probably deserves mention in this topic, and he now works on that Oranum site, which I only went to once to try and chat with him, and I did too, he is a very nice and very humble guy.
 
Chris Robinson certainly claims this but no police force has backed up this claim (AFAIK)... There is nothing like Andy's rigour in Robinson's work.

I don't know enough about Christopher Robinson to really comment on this but I do think that Christopher Robinson is a very different personality to Andy. I agree he does not have the rigour but that doesn't mean he is not genuine. Andy is exceptionally intelligent, motivated, educated and willing to share.

Like Andy, I work in computers (FileMaker database software development) and I am very logical and rigourous (I hope). This is necessary. The database won't work if I am not logical and it will become a horrific mess of code if I am not rigourous (though some of my databases are horrific messes). Anyway, my point is that not everyone is like this at all. Some people are less intelligent. Some people care about different things. Some people have not had many educational opportunities. Some people are fundamentally disorganised but all these people still have valuable stories to tell. So, I don't think we should dismiss Christopher Robinson. To my knowledge, he is the only other living example of somebody who has had many, quality precognitive dreams. There is another person (deceased I assume as his book was written in the 1920s) named J.W. Dunne. His book, "An Experiment with Time" is referenced on the back cover of Andy's book which is why I bought it (though I haven't read it - expensive habit buying books and then not reading them).
 
Chris Robinson certainly claims this but no police force has backed up this claim (AFAIK)... There is nothing like Andy's rigour in Robinson's work.
Well, personally I have no doubt about Chris Robinsons abilities to dream precognitively. It wasn't his book about his time helping the police through his dreams that convinced me of that, it was his experiments with Gary Schwartz. After the experiment with Prof Schwartz, he in my eyes acquired a high degree authenticity. I don't need some sceptic to measure the depth and dimension of every footstep he has ever taken before I believe he can do what he says he can do, and it is abundantly clear to me that he can do those things.
I know he doesn't have the remarkable database Andy has, but my god, to discard his abilities would be a travesty in my opinion, and the height of folly.
 
Well, I've listened to the podcast now and that was very interesting.

One big question I have though is - what's it all for?

Andy's precognitive dreams seem almost as random as the one I had about the Lamborghini. I see no pattern, no...reason behind it all.

And this frustrates me. I was brought up in a family of scientists and became one myself, and I have a dreadful urge to connect things up as having purpose.

Many of our precognitive dreams seem not only to have no purpose, but also to be totally arbitrary as to whom they are about.

( had one other incident which was connected to death - but it was not a dream, as such, so I haven't mentioned it yet.
When my father died, I had a waking vision of him. I hadn't had any contact with him for over a year and was unaware that he might have been ill, but on the night he passed over, I saw a head-and-shoulders vision of him looking about 25 years old. It was another couple of nights before I found out that he had died. )
That one seems to have reason..he was my Dad. But the other? And some (maybe most) of Andy's dreams seem to be the making of fairly arbitrary connections. I had no presentiment when my husband died, for example.

So, I don't know if I'm making any sense here, but I just wanted to get that out ther.

Do precognitions serve any valuable purpose in our lives?
 
Well, I've listened to the podcast now and that was very interesting.

One big question I have though is - what's it all for?

Andy's precognitive dreams seem almost as random as the one I had about the Lamborghini. I see no pattern, no...reason behind it all.

And this frustrates me. I was brought up in a family of scientists and became one myself, and I have a dreadful urge to connect things up as having purpose.

Many of our precognitive dreams seem not only to have no purpose, but also to be totally arbitrary as to whom they are about.

( had one other incident which was connected to death - but it was not a dream, as such, so I haven't mentioned it yet.
When my father died, I had a waking vision of him. I hadn't had any contact with him for over a year and was unaware that he might have been ill, but on the night he passed over, I saw a head-and-shoulders vision of him looking about 25 years old. It was another couple of nights before I found out that he had died. )
That one seems to have reason..he was my Dad. But the other? And some (maybe most) of Andy's dreams seem to be the making of fairly arbitrary connections. I had no presentiment when my husband died, for example.

So, I don't know if I'm making any sense here, but I just wanted to get that out ther.

Do precognitions serve any valuable purpose in our lives?

Your desire for understanding "what it's all for" seems to have become the subtheme for this thread. As I and some other commenters have mentioned here, this inability to put the puzzle pieces together can be quite maddening. We get to have a certain degree (or perhaps total) certainty that psi is real and dreams can contain verifiable, precognitive or clairvoyant properties, but you don't get to know the bigger picture beyond that. It's sort of like J.B. Rhine and Jung and the other old time researchers asserted: Since we know precognition and telepathy and telekinesis are real phenomena, then somehow the mind works outside of time and space, and if the mind can work outside of time and space, then we can at least rest assured there is a *possibility* of an afterlife, and (though I don't think anyone took it to this additional conclusion) therefore there may be some genuine, external meaning and context to our existence, (i.e., we're not left with just a choice between brute existentialism or despair). But, for me at least, considering I can't make heads or tails out of what the big narrative is behind these smaller narratives of psi experience, I'm left still having to decide for myself what it all means. Perhaps that's "the point." Maybe that's what we're "supposed" to do. But I don't find that satisfying... so I bitch and commiserate on here about it, lol. We've gone down the rabbit's hole, I suppose, and I guess that rabbit's hole has a logic that reason knows not of.
 
I'd like to point out a recent episode of "Where Did the Road Go?" that may or may not pertain to some of Andy's experiences discussed on this episode. The episode I am discussing is called "A Trojan Feast." Here is a link: http://www.wheredidtheroadgo.com/show-archive/2015/item/212-july-25-2015

In this episode Joshua Cutchin discusses paranormal food experiences, for lack of another phrase. Faeries, bigfoot, aliens... and all of them in the context of paranormal beings offering food to people. He mentions somewhere that old faery lore posited that, in order to see the faery kingdom, a person would have to eat some sort of food that the faeries offered them. The kingdom or realm only became visible upon ingesting the substance offered. I bring this up because Andy mentioned that many times he became fully lucid in a dream only after a character in his dream presented him with some sort of substance. It struck me as though this engagement with the substance enabled him to "see" that realm and to interact with it. I like Andy's interpretation of these offerings as being akin to anchors for the senses so that one might have one's attention drawn in more potently within a dream. All the same, I found the parallel between what was being discussed in the WDTRG episode and Andy's experience pretty unlikely and began to wonder if there may be some metaphorical similarity there. Just wanted to point this out.
 
Well, I've listened to the podcast now and that was very interesting.

One big question I have though is - what's it all for?

Andy's precognitive dreams seem almost as random as the one I had about the Lamborghini. I see no pattern, no...reason behind it all.

And this frustrates me. I was brought up in a family of scientists and became one myself, and I have a dreadful urge to connect things up as having purpose.

Many of our precognitive dreams seem not only to have no purpose, but also to be totally arbitrary as to whom they are about.

( had one other incident which was connected to death - but it was not a dream, as such, so I haven't mentioned it yet.
When my father died, I had a waking vision of him. I hadn't had any contact with him for over a year and was unaware that he might have been ill, but on the night he passed over, I saw a head-and-shoulders vision of him looking about 25 years old. It was another couple of nights before I found out that he had died. )
That one seems to have reason..he was my Dad. But the other? And some (maybe most) of Andy's dreams seem to be the making of fairly arbitrary connections. I had no presentiment when my husband died, for example.

So, I don't know if I'm making any sense here, but I just wanted to get that out ther.

Do precognitions serve any valuable purpose in our lives?

But ain't these phenomena a clue to what's really going on during our everyday mundain experience...
 
Last night my new girlfriend told me she had a dream of the number 9 and that if I gamble to play that number in the casino, I woke up did a load of house cleaning and then sat in front of the telly for a few minutes, switched over to the horse racing channel and placed a bet on number 9, only bet all day and it won with eighteen runners in the race at odds of 10/1. So I got a nice return.


After checking the result of all races about 42 across the card, and hundreds of horses, only one other race had a number 9 winner.

lucky or precognitive?

Who knows.
 
Andy, I would like to know how pre-cognition and psi in general fits into your worldview and philosophy of life the universe and everything. Are you a mentalist? Monist? Dualist? Theist? How do you make sense of it all and how does this affect your every day life decisions?

I do believe God exists and that our spiritual existence is aided by our physical actions but that our spirit is eternal while our bodies are temporary. These few things and a few other positions affect some of my interactions with others, but for the most part they play a passive rather than an active role in my life. For instance, I do not believe that mind=brain or that evolution as it is currently taught are correct. This affects my ability to interact with people who assume the opposite and take it for granted that both points are settled scientifically. In conversations, this comes up more often than I like, but in many different ways. For instance: "Are you a Christian?" The answer is "not exactly" the same answer I would give for any religion and yet I do believe in God. This doesn't compute for people who equate God with religion, or as an invention of religious interests. I see God as independent of religion in the same way celebrities as people are independent of the paparazzi who follow them and try to record their activities. Questions related to death--even in movies--will also bring this up. For me, threat of death is a less compelling narrative device than the potential for moral corruption or redemption, even if on a comparatively minor scale. To me, such stories are always epic, but life or death stories, if they do not contain a moral component, are uninteresting. This means that conversations about movies like this will frequently bring up the reasons for feeling this way and that will bring my dreams into the conversation.

AP
 
Well, I've listened to the podcast now and that was very interesting.

One big question I have though is - what's it all for?

Andy's precognitive dreams seem almost as random as the one I had about the Lamborghini. I see no pattern, no...reason behind it all.

And this frustrates me. I was brought up in a family of scientists and became one myself, and I have a dreadful urge to connect things up as having purpose.

Many of our precognitive dreams seem not only to have no purpose, but also to be totally arbitrary as to whom they are about.

( had one other incident which was connected to death - but it was not a dream, as such, so I haven't mentioned it yet.
When my father died, I had a waking vision of him. I hadn't had any contact with him for over a year and was unaware that he might have been ill, but on the night he passed over, I saw a head-and-shoulders vision of him looking about 25 years old. It was another couple of nights before I found out that he had died. )
That one seems to have reason..he was my Dad. But the other? And some (maybe most) of Andy's dreams seem to be the making of fairly arbitrary connections. I had no presentiment when my husband died, for example.

So, I don't know if I'm making any sense here, but I just wanted to get that out ther.

Do precognitions serve any valuable purpose in our lives?

Whether they do or not has no bearing on whether they happen, and that is usually the question asked by skeptics. The answer is yes, and that is when we have the luxury of questions like yours. Some dreams appear random (though this could be incorrect) others definitely seem purposeful. To me those are the most interesting dreams. Usually I label them 'prophetic' instead of 'precognitive', because they involve being told or shown the future for some purpose, whereas the run-of-the-mill 'precognitive' dreams are passive observations, like looking out a window of a car as it passes through a city.

AP
 
This is definitely interesting work but I'm not sure how "ground breaking" it really is. Back in 1927 J.W.Dunne recorded and published his precognitive dream experiences in his book
"An Experiment with Time." We have now had over 100 years of empirical research into precognition which we know to be statistically significant from an experimental point of view. Unfortunately, the level of interest in this kind of research has appeared to have fallen off. I think this is mainly because science is increasingly driven by its practical applications to the world. Precognition is strange and fascinating but we have are a long way off utilising it in a practical way similar to its use in the novel/movie "Minority Report." In relation to the forum question: I grew up in an Australian Outback town called Broken Hill. The town's most famous resident was a famous artist named Pro Hart. Pro Hart's son built a weird looking igloo-shaped house just a block away from where I lived. Having never met Pro Hart, the house was my most significant meaningful association to him. One night I had a dream about the igloo house and upon waking to the morning radio news I was immediately informed by the news that Pro Hart had just died. I had never dreamt about the igloo house before nor dreamt about it since.
 
Well, I've listened to the podcast now and that was very interesting.

One big question I have though is - what's it all for?

Andy's precognitive dreams seem almost as random as the one I had about the Lamborghini. I see no pattern, no...reason behind it all.

And this frustrates me. I was brought up in a family of scientists and became one myself, and I have a dreadful urge to connect things up as having purpose.

Many of our precognitive dreams seem not only to have no purpose, but also to be totally arbitrary as to whom they are about.

( had one other incident which was connected to death - but it was not a dream, as such, so I haven't mentioned it yet.
When my father died, I had a waking vision of him. I hadn't had any contact with him for over a year and was unaware that he might have been ill, but on the night he passed over, I saw a head-and-shoulders vision of him looking about 25 years old. It was another couple of nights before I found out that he had died. )
That one seems to have reason..he was my Dad. But the other? And some (maybe most) of Andy's dreams seem to be the making of fairly arbitrary connections. I had no presentiment when my husband died, for example.

So, I don't know if I'm making any sense here, but I just wanted to get that out ther.

Do precognitions serve any valuable purpose in our lives?
Rather like Andy, I think the most important thing is that these things do happen at a rate that defeats any statistical explanation.

Having had only very slight experience of ψ phenomena, I maybe shouldn't speculate. However from so many of the accounts I read, I get the impression that there is a screen between us and knowledge of this sort that breaks in a rather unpredictable way - i.e. maybe it is a fault in some sense. It is rather like sitting in a classroom and just occasionally getting knowledge (in the form of odour) of what dinner will be - with perfect ventilation that isn't meant to happen because it distracts the kids!

Like most people, I forget my dreams almost instantly, and perhaps this is part of the screen.

Clearly that screen varies from person to person, and Andy's must be pretty threadbare :)

Maybe for those whose screen is really thin, it is possible that the person themselves selects material to focus on - maybe these are the ones that appear purposeful.

I have huge problems understanding the idea that we are here to learn something, and yet we can be arbitrarily helped on the way - it is rather like the teacher coming into the examination room and whispering a hint! But maybe the relationship is more like that of a coach with client? I get the feeling that the relationship between this life and a (presumed) larger existence, will turn out to be so extraordinary that we can't really imagine it.

David
 
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I do believe God exists and that our spiritual existence is aided by our physical actions but that our spirit is eternal while our bodies are temporary. These few things and a few other positions affect some of my interactions with others, but for the most part they play a passive rather than an active role in my life. For instance, I do not believe that mind=brain or that evolution as it is currently taught are correct. This affects my ability to interact with people who assume the opposite and take it for granted that both points are settled scientifically. In conversations, this comes up more often than I like, but in many different ways. For instance: "Are you a Christian?" The answer is "not exactly" the same answer I would give for any religion and yet I do believe in God. This doesn't compute for people who equate God with religion, or as an invention of religious interests. I see God as independent of religion in the same way celebrities as people are independent of the paparazzi who follow them and try to record their activities. Questions related to death--even in movies--will also bring this up. For me, threat of death is a less compelling narrative device than the potential for moral corruption or redemption, even if on a comparatively minor scale. To me, such stories are always epic, but life or death stories, if they do not contain a moral component, are uninteresting. This means that conversations about movies like this will frequently bring up the reasons for feeling this way and that will bring my dreams into the conversation.

AP

Thanks for sharing. I like the Paparazzi analogy! :)

Since we're on the topic of pre-cognitive death dreams and God.... I'm curious, could you search your database for anything to do with this coming September 13-23? Maybe search the terms: dollar collapse, mayhem, pandemonium, crash, jubilee, debt explosion, Shemitah, Elul 29 5775, Jade Helm 15, Walmart, FEMA Camps, Tetrad, Blood moon, and disaster?

Or if anyone else has any forebodings regarding this coming September, please share! :)

(I'm serious!)
 
Thanks for sharing. I like the Paparazzi analogy! :)

Since we're on the topic of pre-cognitive death dreams and God.... I'm curious, could you search your database for anything to do with this coming September 13-23? Maybe search the terms: dollar collapse, mayhem, pandemonium, crash, jubilee, debt explosion, Shemitah, Elul 29 5775, Jade Helm 15, Walmart, FEMA Camps, Tetrad, Blood moon, and disaster?

Or if anyone else has any forebodings regarding this coming September, please share! :)

(I'm serious!)

that... doesn't sound good?
 
Thanks for sharing. I like the Paparazzi analogy! :)

Since we're on the topic of pre-cognitive death dreams and God.... I'm curious, could you search your database for anything to do with this coming September 13-23? Maybe search the terms: dollar collapse, mayhem, pandemonium, crash, jubilee, debt explosion, Shemitah, Elul 29 5775, Jade Helm 15, Walmart, FEMA Camps, Tetrad, Blood moon, and disaster?

Or if anyone else has any forebodings regarding this coming September, please share! :)

(I'm serious!)
I can tell you without searching that those terms won't result in anything, particularly not linked to a specific date. The words 'disaster' and 'crash' would yield a few hits but they wouldn't cross-reference with the other terms. It's funny but we all have our own vocabularies and preferred ways of saying things. Because of this I know I haven't written these other words in my journals. It is kind of like the name 'Bobbie'. When I wrote it in my journal earlier this year, my impression was that it was the first time I'd ever written it in the journal, and that it only appeared in my email in reference to one person. I checked, and was proven right. I have a hard time remembering my student's names sometimes, but this stuff is easy.

AP
 
I can tell you without searching that those terms won't result in anything, particularly not linked to a specific date. The words 'disaster' and 'crash' would yield a few hits but they wouldn't cross-reference with the other terms. It's funny but we all have our own vocabularies and preferred ways of saying things. Because of this I know I haven't written these other words in my journals. It is kind of like the name 'Bobbie'. When I wrote it in my journal earlier this year, my impression was that it was the first time I'd ever written it in the journal, and that it only appeared in my email in reference to one person. I checked, and was proven right. I have a hard time remembering my student's names sometimes, but this stuff is easy.

AP
As I remember from reading your book some time ago, you don't seem to get dates in your dreams either.

David
 
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