Predictive Dreaming

The other day I wrote a post about a shared dream experience I had when I was a kid.  In the comments for the post, the subject came up of another familiar yet mysterious type of dream, dreams of future events.  As I pointed out then, I've had a few minor brushes with this.  I've never had a dream which directly featured an event exactly as it was going to happen, but I have had a few times where a dream was oddly related to a subsequent event in a way that seems to go beyond simple coincidence.  Once I dreamt that I was trying to fix a gas fireplace in my bedroom, only to wake up and discover the next day that my gas furnace wasn't working.  Another time I dreamt that I was in a crumbling, abandoned house trying to retrieve one of my cats that had fallen through a hole in the floor, only the wake up and discover that this same cat had run away again (don't worry; he came back.)  I had a few other instances as well that don't come to mind at the moment.

Now, I think I might have a possible, and I stress the word possible, explanation for this.  If I can't explain how two people can share a dream, an imaginary event supposedly taking place solely in one of the dreamer's minds, then I can hardly hope to reach any solid conclusions regarding predictive dreaming.  However, I tend to be of the opinion that things have reasonable, scientific explanations, elusive though those explanations may sometimes be.  Just because I lack a reasonable explanation for shared dreaming, doesn't mean I'm completely ready to throw in the towel of logic and embrace the world of black magic and wizardly incantations quite yet.

To begin with, we need to visualize the conscious mind's relation to the sub-conscious mind.   First, imagine your memory is a cramped room crammed full of filing cabinets.  The cabinets are stuffed to over flowing with files.  They're spilling out of the drawers onto the floor.  They're piled up onto of the cabinets for lack of space, wedged in tight against the ceiling.  It's a complete pandemonium.  In the middle of the room is the little desk of the over-worked filing clerk.  He's surrounded by mountains of files on all sides.  They tower over him and barely provide room for him to fit in his own filing room.  This clerk is your conscious mind.  Although he is surrounded by these towering archives, he only has room on his little desk for three or four files at a time.  If he wants to look at a different file, he has to put one of the ones on his desk back and retrieve another.  His access to the files is limited to the finite space he has to work with.  The subconscious mind has no such limitations.  It has access to the entire archive at all times.  You might say it's the room and the cabinets themselves.  Except, in this case the files are no mere pieces of paper.  They are a living, breathing thing, organizing and cross-referencing themselves behind the clerk's back.  

Now, that's inside the mind.  When it comes to looking out and perceiving the world and processing new sensory data coming in, the subconscious again has the advantage.  Imagine you're out in the dark at night and you have a flashlight with you.  Your field of vision is limited to what can be illuminated in the narrow beam of the flashlight.  It's useful to light your way, but it hardly provides you with a complete picture of the world around you.  This flashlight is once again our friend the conscious mind.  We carry this flashlight with us constantly, even on the brightest, sunniest day.  It is the focus of our attention.  Like the desk of our file clerk, this focus is extremely limited, and the more intense the focus, the more limited it's range.  Returning to our flashlight analogy, notice how the beam intensifies and yet narrows at the same time as we approach an object.  This how our attention works.  

Our subconscious, on the other hand, is like a cat with night vision.  It sees everything, all the time.  Even the most insignificant piece of sensory information that crosses our path gets received, processed, and filed.  This leads us right back to our filing clerk.  Every minute of every day, new files arrive in the filing room.  Most of it comes from beyond the beam of our flashlight, so it wasn't noticed on the way in.  And the filing clerk, he's far too busy to sort through all this junk, so it just ends up getting stuffed into a cabinet.  That's when that behind the scenes, organic process of cross-referencing and automatic filing sets in without the clerk's knowledge.  

An interesting thing happens when we dream.  It's like the filing clerk has fallen asleep, dozing at his desk with his grey nose hairs fluttering as he snores, and we have an open run at the files.  We have a broader, more liberal access, but it's also a very haphazard and unstructured access because we don't have the clerk to sort through it all for us.  We just start tossing out files left and right, without rhyme or reason.  We put two files together because they both happen to be in red folders, or they both have pizza stains on them, or they both have three Q's on the first page.  In short, we make a complete mess.  In making this mess though, we're liable to stumble across connections that the file clerk might never have noticed.

An experiment was conducted once upon a time, where the subjects were shown composite pictures that featured dozens of different random elements.  They were shown these pictures very briefly, then they were asked to write down what elements they remembered from the pictures.  Then, after they had slept that night, they were asked to write down their dreams.  In almost all cases, their dreams featured elements from the composite picture that they had not written down.  In other words, they dreamt of elements that escaped the beam of the flashlight and the attention of the file clerk, but the information had been processed and stored nevertheless.  

This is where predictive dreaming comes in.  I think, perhaps, that somewhere in this incalculable pile of processed information lies clues to forth-coming events that the conscious mind has failed to pick up on.  If a dream forewarns of this event, and then it happens, the result seems miraculous.  But the only thing miraculous happening here is the conscious mind's failure to pay attention.  Consider this, let's say that you notice, consciously notice, that your hot water heater is leaking a tiny amount of water from it.  You take this as a sign of the water heater's impending failure, and when the tank finally does give out, you're hardly impressed by your psychic prognostication.  Simple logic warned you.  But what if you didn't consciously notice the leak?  You were in the basement.  The leak was in your field of vision, but the beam of your flashlight never honed in on it.  The information still gets processed, and as the experiment above shows, it's even more likely to show up in a dream precisely because it wasn't consciously noticed.  The results could certainly leave anyone mystified and thinking that they had had a genuine premonition.

This is not to say that your subconscious mind is a secret Maytag repairman, diagnosing bad furnaces and worn-out water heaters.  In the case of my furnace dream, it would have been enough for my subconscious to pick up on the fact that something was subtly off or different in the operation of the appliance.  In the case of my cat, he probably slipped out the door without my consciously taking note of it, but I did see him briefly zip by.  He is pretty damn fast, after all.  A fleeting look on a friend's face that should have warned you they weren't quite telling you the truth if you had noticed it, a neighbor's door standing open when it should have been closed passing through your peripheral field of vision as you drive by, a subtle and imperceptible difference in the amount of pressure you need to apply to your brakes, these are the things that premonitions are made of.  Your subconscious might not know what to make of these things.  In fact, your subconscious doesn't make anything out of anything at all.  That kind of deduction is a job for your conscious mind.  Your subconscious just tags, processes, and stores the information.  It does conduct the organic cross-referencing process I mentioned, but it's up to the dreaming mind to stumble across these loose connections.

So that's my two cents on the subject, at least.  As I started out by saying, my own experience with predictive dreaming is limited to dreams of startling coincidence and association.  Maybe my idea breaks down when considering dreams where someone actually sees and experience the event exactly as it's going to happen.  I don't know.  This is just one humble blogger's attempt to tackle the problem.  My resources are limited, and my references are sketchy.  I know I can sleep soundly on my explanation.  Good night.  Sweet dreams.