[This excerpt from Ben's site comes just after he describes a psychotic episode and a set of dreams that appeared to anticipate 9/11. But he'd written those dreams down only after the fact. So he revised his practice...]

Once I had recognised that [my dreams] had predicted 9/11, my mind started to see a new event. This time I kept a careful record of them, both at home in a dream diary and at the bank. I saw an asteroid strike in Britain. I had a second psychotic episode during this period, from September to December 2001.

This set of dreams were more vivid and frightening than the 9/11 dreams and visions. The impacts certainly don't seem to be global killers, but big enough to cause chaos in Britain, should they happen.

Dream 1 – The First Strike

As I looked at the scene, there were two or three houses, two on one side of the road, and one on the other. One house had three young men in it who were sharing this house. The house next door was occupied by a man and his girlfriend. As I approached the two houses I asked to see the man who was sharing the house with his girlfriend and I told him to quietly pack his things and leave. Then as I stood on the pavement and looked up an asteroid about twelve meters high, ten meters across, and about a meter thick fell from the sky. As it approached the ground it stopped and hovered for a few seconds, as though on freeze frame, on a video. This allowed me to study the asteroid, and it glittered red-hot, as it was molten with its heat. It then landed and the ground shook violently, and the scene blanked out with soot. The location was in a small sparsely populated area of Devon.
Dream No. 20; September 2001

Dream 2 – The Second Strike

As I stood in Brighton, with friends, (me playing the part of someone else) a bright object appeared in the sky. As we looked up amazed, I raised my arm and pointed exclaiming 'look at that' as my friends looked up at it. As it arrived it landed in perfect trajectory to my arm as I pointed, it landed on top of me and everything went black.
Dream No. 21; November 2001

Dream 3 – The Second Dream of the Second Strike

This was almost a waking dream or a vision. As the second strike on Brighton landed, I saw a red coloured air ambulance, air-borne at the time of the strike, tip up 90 degrees and crash land into a large hotel, with fire leaping up into the sky.
Dream No. 22; November 2001

Dream 4 – The Third Strike

The fourth dream was the most incredible of all. I was staying in a hospital at the time of the dream. A huge explosion woke me up as the blast hit the ground over the other side of the hill that was on my left. The force of the shockwave physically pinned me to the bed for several seconds, as I heard people cry out in terror. Believing that this was real, I jumped from the bed, myself terrified and ran into the corridor, to find that it had been a dream and that no such blast had taken place. The experience was part vision, part dream and felt physically and visually real, until I went out into the hospital corridor to check it out.
Dream No. 23; 3 AM, 11th December 2001

...The asteroid dreams followed the 9/11 dreams and came in quick succession, in the lead up to Christmas. Asteroid strikes, unlike 9/11, was something which I had been preoccupied with between 1995 up to when the dreams occurred. The last one, Dream 23, was as real as they come. A waking vision or dream which took place in real time and in situ, in the room I was in at the time. A stunningly powerful experience. I can actually pinpoint the area on a map where this asteroid will strike near Cheltenham, UK [see map below].

What Does it all Mean?

...After 9/11 happened I was pretty stressed out, and this is when the asteroid dreams occurred. I know from past experience that stress acts as a catalyst for my dreams making them much more lucid and real. I was however very worried about asteroids and had read and written on the subject, following news stories about them and watching documentaries about them.

A large asteroid will hit Earth one day in the future. That's a fact. It is [unlikely that an asteroid] will split into three and hit the exact locations specified in the dreams. If they do turn out to be accurate it will become a significant step forward in our understanding of precognitive dreaming.

I estimate based on what I have learned about asteroids, the three asteroids could cause upwards of 3,000 deaths and maybe as much as 20,000 injuries. The financial costs could be three to nine billion pounds. Two of the three will hit largely unpopulated areas, and the Brighton one seems small. The largest one... (Dream 3), hits an unpopulated area, as does the Devon strike.

But the detailed dreams, if they were to come true in a precise way, would prove beyond doubt that precognitive dreaming can occur. This does not, in my opinion mean that this is supernatural. It is merely a process we do not yet understand.

--Ben Bamber

EDITOR'S NOTES

Psychology emphasizes the metaphorical aspect of dreams, and warns against literalizing. It's easy to assume that these dreams are symbolic. Certainly the fact that the most vivid of them is set in the real-world location of the dreamer, who's about as stressed out as one can be--in a mental hospital--certainly leads one to dismiss it as an expression of Ben's personal disaster.

And yet, why dream of being others witnessing meteor strikes in particular, at remote locations?

If thirty thousand dreams have taught me anything, it's caution about interpretation. I've treated hundreds of bizarre puzzling dreams as symbolic of something internal only to have them come literally true the next day, or week. Blanket literalizing is psychologically naïve--some dreams do physically express our feelings--but blanket psychologizing is equally naïve and at least as common. The mere fact that a dream reflects stress doesn't explain away its specifics.

Ben's careful recording of details and wait-and-see approach might be interpreted by a traditional psychologist as denial of the personal, emotional import of his dreams; but from the viewpoint of the worldwide shamanic tradition (which takes it for granted that many visionaries receiving such warnings will suffer stress and mental instability as part of the price), it's sound dreamwork--focused not on the personal, but on the larger good.

--Chris Wayan

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