Divine Insights: Can Dreams Really Predict the Future?
(ANALYSIS) Precognition, the purported ability to foresee future events, has long captivated and divided opinions within academia and beyond. This phenomenon is deeply rooted in religious experiences, where glimpses of the future are often intertwined with divine revelation and prophecy.
In many religious traditions, precognitive experiences are considered gifts from higher powers. Prophets like Isaiah and Daniel in the Bible received visions directly from God, guiding communities with forewarnings and words of wisdom. Similarly, Islam attributes precognitive elements to the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad in the Quran, offering insights into future events and moral lessons.
Eastern religions also embrace precognition. In Hinduism, sages foresee future events through meditation and spiritual insight, while Buddhism acknowledges intuitive glimpses of future occurrences as part of interconnected existence.
READ: Is There A Post-Religious Right On The Horizon?
Fast forward to today, and precognition continues to intrigue through personal accounts like Christine Clawley's.
For the six months leading up to the worst health crisis she had ever experienced, Clawley had extremely vivid, recurring nightmares and a persistent feeling of urgency and foreboding. Months before developing a life-threatening throat infection, Clawley had lucid dreams in which she attempted to remove a cyst from her throat. In hindsight, she says this was an accurate foretelling.
“There was actually a cyst in my throat that burst and triggered an infection of necrotizing fasciitis, more commonly known as flesh-eating bacteria,” recalled.
For Clawley, a counselor and writer in Colorado, these dreams appeared to be a form of precognition — the ability to predict or foresee future events. Precognition is often associated with dreams, gut feelings or flashes of intuition that later come true.
Initially, Clawley’s illness began as what she thought was the flu or strep throat. She felt feverish, had a sore throat and even struggled to swallow. By the seventh day, she knew something was seriously wrong. Soon after, “a large, raised rash spread rapidly from my throat and neck down to my chest and abdomen. All of a sudden, my heart began to beat rapidly, and I knew I was going to die. By this time, I would later learn that I had gone into septic shock and a lung had collapsed.”
For almost a month, Clawley lived in a medically induced coma with no more than a 10% chance of survival.
At the time of these dreams, Clawley didn’t take any immediate action about her health. This all changed when she got a second chance at life.
Despite initial skepticism, Clawley has had numerous dreams about health, career, accidents and other events. Following her illness, Clawley dreamed of coughing up a polyp that had formed on her vocal cords, which was scheduled for surgical removal. Remarkably, a day before the surgery, Clawley coughed it up, eliminating the need for the procedure. She also dreamed of being diagnosed with Lyme disease from a tick bite on the back of her head. Several years later, in 2015, she began experiencing neurological and other mysterious symptoms and was indeed diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease.
“For myself,” she said, “I tend to look at precognition as a way of emotionally/psychologically preparing oneself for future events.”
Clawley survived prolonged respiratory failure, three failed extubations, a heart attack and other complications. Today, Clawley is healthy. She is able to run, hike and do yoga, three of her favorite hobbies. She has recorded her dreams for over 28 years now and, in her own words, “consistently experiences precognitive dreams on a weekly, sometimes daily basis.”
To understand precognition, one must discuss Daryl Bem, who until very recently was a prominent psychologist at Cornell University. Bem is to precognition what Freud is to the unconscious. In other words, his work is both fascinating and divisive. In 2011, Bem shook the scientific community with a paper on precognition, asserting the mind’s capability to foresee future events.
Aptly titled “Feeling the Future,” the paper presented a series of nine experiments demonstrating statistically significant evidence that individuals could anticipate random future occurrences. Experiments involving over 1,000 participants repeatedly demonstrated that a person’s responses could be influenced by stimulating events that occurred after the responses were made and recorded.
Bem, now 86, was contacted for this piece. However, due to poor health, he was unable to provide a comment. However, Eric Wargo, a man who has studied Bem’s work closely, was kind enough to give his take on precognition. Of all the people studying precognition today, Wargo is perhaps the most notable and also the most vocal.
The author of numerous books on the topic, Wargo, who holds a doctorate in anthropology, is a passionate defender of precognition — even if many psychologists continue to snigger at the controversial concept. Wargo, who has had many precognitive experiences himself, thinks precognition is probably a basic guidance system that might even work in the simplest living organisms. At its most basic level, like instinct or intuition, it helps us survive. It steers us toward rewards and away from dangers. When asked why he entered this particular field, Wargo responded, “I was working as editorial director for a scientific psychology society and journal publisher in 2011, when Daryl Bem's ‘Feeling the Future’ article came out in another society's top journal. My organization was considering writing a letter in protest, saying that such preposterous findings should not be published, lest it sully the reputation of the field.”
“This attitude,” he noted, “expressed by people who are supposed to uphold empirical inquiry and not dogmatic adherence to a preformed belief system, seemed incredibly unscientific to me.” This experience gave Wargo his first real taste of “the prejudice and hostility” that surround precognitive-oriented research.
As for those most likely to have precognitive experiences, Wargo suggested that people who are more intuitive in how they process information are more likely to be aware of their precognitive abilities than those who rely on facts, procedures and sense data. Those who pay attention to their inner lives — dreams, thoughts, sensations, gut feelings and meaningful coincidences — are more likely to recognize their precognitive abilities, he contends.
Like Clawley, Wargo is eager to push back against the naysayers.
“There are very few people in psych departments who know about parapsychological research,” insists the researcher, “so they readily fall back on the presumption that there's nothing to it and that it is just pseudoscience. Psychologists and psychologists-in-training feel enormous pressure to not flirt with anything that sounds ‘woo,’ lest it tarnish the reputation of their field.”
Wargo feels that the overemphasis on the “science says” approach strips humans of their individual experiences. “We need to listen to real people who have these experiences and reject the assumption that people are biased, unreasonable, have faulty memories, and whatnot,” he contends. By experiences, Wargo means premonitions and prophetic-like visions. He has a point. According to the Sleep Foundation, a U.S.-based organization dedicated to educating people on the importance of sleep, anywhere between 17.8 percent and 38 percent of people have experienced at least one precognitive episode.
For the skeptics reading this, it's important to note that Bem’s work has been replicated on more than one occasion. Despite being dismissed as pseudoscience by much of the academic community, precognition offers a real glimpse into human consciousness. Its prevalence in religious texts suggests a deeper significance.
Dismissing all these experiences as nonsensical seems imprudent and disrespectful. Clawley's encounters, along with the research of Bem and Wargo, present compelling reasons for rational discussion.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places including UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.