Paranormal Dreaming
George Constable, Editor In Chief of Dreams & Dreaming (1990), speculates, “It seems that many great events throughout the ages, religious and secular, were preceded by relevant human dreams.” It definitely seems to be the case when one ponders the number of dreams that rulers have acted on, or religious figures in the Bible acted on. In this same book, Montague Ullman is quoted as saying, “…While asleep, we are not only able to scan backward in time and tap into our memory, but are also able to scan forward in time and across space to tap into information outside our own experience. Regardless of how seldom they occur, these manifestations cast a new light on the range of our psychic abilities. They persuade us to look at dreams as ever-occurring in a much larger and more complex frame than we are accustomed.”
Perhaps this ability to cross dimensions of space and time might be the very way we have unconsciously evolved as a species. It is believed by many that dreams are a place where the unconscious mind interprets for consciousness the events and information that are otherwise completely unavailable to the conscious mind, but are absolutely necessary ingredients for evolution. Perhaps not a single invention would have been created were it not for this ability to tap into the unknown, even though a dream or internal experience might not be remembered. Somehow it found its way into the evolution of the species, whether or not there is awareness of where it came from.
A much used quote by Carl Jung reads as follows: “In dreams we pass into the deeper and more universal truth and more eternal man, who still stands in the dusk of original night in which he himself was still the whole and the whole was in him in bright undifferentiated pure nature, free from shackles of the ego.” This is one of the most brilliant things he said, in my opinion, and I believe it to be true. Dreams might be the doorway to the eternal nature of humankind. Many cultures believe that dreams are the realm of the true self, and that the physical world is the illusion. Carl Jung believed in the concept of synchronicity, or that there are no such things as coincidences.
Jeremy Taylor, in Where People Fly And Water Runs Uphill (1992), says, “The benefits of paying more regular attention to our dreams will be great, both at the level of the personal details of our lives, and the larger, collective level of our shared reality and interdependent existence. To quote the old Universalist maxim, the dream comes in the service of health and wholeness to promote ‘the reconciliation of each with all.’”