Prophetic dreams: coincidence or truth?

At the end of August 1883, Ed Samson, a reporter for The Boston Globe, drank heavily after checking in and, unable to walk home, fell asleep on the couch in the editorial office. In the middle of the night, he woke up in a panic: Samson dreamed that the tropical island of Pralape was dying due to a monstrous explosion of a volcano.

People disappearing in lava flows, a column of ash, giant waves – everything was so real that Ed Samson could not shake the vision. He decided to write down his dream, and then, still drunk, wrote “important” in the margin – to think at his leisure what it all meant. And went home, forgetting the notes on the table.

In the morning, the editor decided that Samson had received a message from some wire agency, and sent the information to the room. “Reportage” reprinted many newspapers before it turned out that Pralape Island was not on the map and no agency was broadcasting reports of the cataclysm.

The case for Samson and The Boston Globe could turn out badly, but exactly at that moment information came about the terrible eruption of the Krakatoa volcano. In the smallest detail, coinciding with what Samson saw in a dream. Not only that: it turned out that Pralape is the ancient native name of Krakatau…

Today, of course, it is impossible to check how true this story, which happened almost 130 years ago, is. But there is too much evidence of so-called prophetic dreams to indiscriminately declare all of them to be mere inventions.

Such dreams were witnessed by Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein, Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain – and tens of thousands of other people throughout the history of mankind, regardless of era, civilization and culture.

These dreams contain information that is not symbolic: the images are much more vivid than in “ordinary” dreams, and the meaning is not covered by anything. And to understand these dreams, there is no need to analyze them.

Since the birth of parapsychology at the end of the XNUMXth century, which is trying to explore the supernatural abilities of a person from the point of view of science, its adherents have tried to understand whether prophetic dreams are a reflection of the process of “subconscious logic”.

Perhaps we are constructing future events on the basis of signs not fixed by consciousness? After all, without our conscious participation, the brain is able to register an incredible amount of the smallest details lost in the general array of information: barely audible sounds, images caught out of the corner of the eye, microvibrations, smells, fragments of random thoughts and words.

During sleep, the brain sorts and categorizes these data, establishes connections between them, and perhaps deduces from their totality the inevitability of events whose logic is not available to us in the waking state. Perhaps this could be an excellent explanation for some dreams. But not all.

What vibrations and sounds could tell the same Samson in a Boston bar that at that very moment a volcano began to erupt on the other side of the world, and even tell the name of the island, which last appeared on maps in the middle of the XNUMXth century?

laboratory dreams

Psychophysiologist Vadim Rotenberg once dreamed that he fell, slipping near the house, and his glasses broke on the ice. Of course, there was nothing special in this dream, but the next morning Rotenberg slipped near the house – in the very place that he had seen in a dream. Glasses, of course, fell and broke.

But it was not this event that prompted Vadim Rotenberg to think seriously about the strange dreams, but his scientific specialty – he has been engaged in the psychophysiology of memory and interhemispheric relations of the brain for a long time and professionally. And I have come across the topic of prophetic dreams more than once. “When I began to be interested in prophetic dreams, hypnosis and other mysterious phenomena, colleagues predicted a complete obstruction of the academic world,” he says. “But that didn’t scare me. I am sure that the topic still deserves serious scientific study.”

Unfortunately, there are many difficulties along the way. The subjective ones are that the scientific community is indeed very skeptical about parapsychology.

“Academic science is dominated by the idea of ​​random coincidences of dream images with future events,” explains Vadim Rotenberg. “Such coincidences are statistically very unlikely, but they are remembered because of their high personal significance.”

We may even dream every night that a person close to us, for example, strokes a cat: most likely, we simply will not remember such a dream. But if in a dream the same person sticks his head into the mouth of a tiger, then the dream will no longer be forgotten. And if something like this happens soon in reality, then we will completely believe in prophetic dreams. Although it will be just a coincidence.

There are also objective obstacles. How is it possible to record dreams and the information received in them? Nevertheless, such attempts are being made.

Psychologists Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner, for example, recorded physiological parameters during sleep in the participants of the experiment: the electrical activity of brain neurons, eye movements, muscle tone, pulse.

Based on these data, the onset of REM sleep, the phase of sleep accompanied by dreams, was determined. At this moment, one of the researchers, being in a separate room, focused on “transferring” certain thoughts and images to the sleeping person.

After this, the subject was awakened and asked to recount the dream. In dreams, the information that was transmitted to the sleeping person was regularly present. Subsequently, the results of this study were repeatedly confirmed.

Through space and time

Vadim Rotenberg puts forward a hypothesis that could explain the results of these experiments. Its essence is that the left hemisphere of the brain, which dominates while we are awake, is responsible for the analysis, rational explanation and critical perception of reality.

But in a dream, the main role passes to the right hemisphere, which is responsible for imaginative thinking. Freed from conscious and critical control, the right hemisphere can manifest its unique abilities.

One of them is the ability to pick up certain signals at a distance. First of all, this concerns information about our loved ones, since it is especially important for us.

“I had a friend who literally intimidated his mother: several times upon waking up, he said that he needed to contact one or another of their relatives or friends (sometimes living in another city), because everything was not all right with him. And every time it turned out that something tragic really happened, ”says Vadim Rotenberg.

And yet such dreams, although they impress us beyond measure, can hardly be called prophetic: after all, they contain information about events that occur with people separated from us in space, and not in time.

Is there any way to explain dreams that clearly tell us what is yet to happen? Perhaps yes. But for this, it will be necessary to revise no less than our fundamental ideas about the Universe.

“How can that be?”

Back in the 1960s, physicist John Stuart Bell mathematically proved what was then confirmed experimentally: two particles can exchange information at a speed faster than the speed of light, as if reversing the flow of time in this way. Completely isolated from each other, beams of photons behave as if each particle “knows” in advance how the other will behave.

Bell himself, in popular lectures, illustrated this incredible fact with a simple example: suppose there is a man in Dublin who always wears red socks, and in Honolulu there is a man who always wears green.

Imagine that we somehow forced a man in Dublin to take off his red socks and put on green ones. Then the man in Honolulu must at that very moment – without being able to know what happened in Dublin! Take off the green socks and put on the red ones. How is this possible?

Is the information transmitted between them at superluminal speed through some secret channels? Or do both receive it from some future, really knowing how and at what moment to act?

“Bell’s theorem has presented physicists with an unpleasant dilemma. One of two things is assumed: either the world is not objectively real, or there are superluminal connections in it, ”notes the founder of transpersonal psychology, Stanislav Grof.

But if so, then our usual ideas about linear time, calmly flowing from yesterday to tomorrow, become extremely doubtful. Of course, it is difficult to admit that the world does not work the way we used to think.

But here is what the outstanding physicist of the XNUMXth century, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman wrote about our problems with understanding the Universe and its laws: “The difficulty here is purely psychological – we are constantly tormented by the question:“ How can this be? a completely unfounded desire to imagine everything in terms of something very familiar. … If you can, do not torture yourself with the question “But how can this be?”, because otherwise you will reach a dead end, from which no one has yet got out. Nobody knows how it can be.”

But if the structure of the world does not lend itself well – at least for the time being – to our usual, “left hemisphere” logic, then maybe the right hemisphere can come to the rescue? This is exactly what Vadim Rotenberg suggests.

“The complex network of real relationships that determines the future does not fit into the rigid coordinates of logical thinking, slips out of them and creates the impression of indeterminacy. But right hemispheric imaginative thinking simply does not use this grid of coordinates, and for it the real interweaving of connections does not look either unnecessarily complex or internally contradictory. And therefore, the right hemisphere is able to capture these connections in their entirety in such breathtaking fullness that, as a result, it is possible to predict the future, ”he comments.

And in this case, prophetic dreams not only do not look like something surprising, but, on the contrary, become almost inevitable – after all, it is in a dream that our right hemisphere receives maximum freedom.

“Of course, this is just my point of view, it is by no means universally recognized, and, of course, I cannot prove it scientifically,” Vadim Rotenberg stipulates.

But perhaps science should pay more serious attention to the phenomenon of prophetic dreams? Who knows, suddenly it will turn out not only not to contradict physics, but on the contrary, it will push it to create a new model of the world.”