DREAM 1: Rhinzl

It's the near future--2000 AD. I'm watching the Miss World beauty pageant. Miss Papua or Miss Sumatra is pretty smart. She wins the talent competition by inventing a teleportation device. That should silence the pageant's critics who call beauty contestants bimbos.

Using that transporter, I, Captain James T. Kirk, beam down to a planet where we've gotten a distress call from a bureaucrat requesting Federation help. I'm here to work, but I chase every babe I see. Yet my lover's on the Enterprise, just a step away. But then I've always been irresponsible that way.

I meet the bureaucrat. He complains too much for me, his story's no fun, so after a few minutes I/Kirk just call the ship and say "beam me up now."

Because I just walk off from ANYTHING I don't like.

But this time I'm halted. In the planetside transporter room, the tech turns out to be an enemy agent, Rhinzl, an extragalactic monster in disguise. He's like a bramble bush of tentacles--only they're barely perceptible. Some hypnosis makes me glance away, overlook him...

We fight. Strangled by invisible tentacles! I gasp "how many of those you got, anyhow?" He won't tell--any scrap of info might be useful.

But Rhinzl forgot shadows! He clouds my mind from seeing him directly, but I can see the shadows of his tentacles just fine.

And the shadow of his zap gun. I snatch for it, focus all my strength on that. It falls. With his advantage gone, we clinch brutally... and in the end I kill him.

Search the house. Find a second alien spy going through boxes in the garage. Fight and kill that one too.

One corpse looks humanoid, the other, tentacular. I need to hide their agents' deaths as long as I can, so I try to feed the bodies to the dogs. They reluctantly eat raw humanoid flesh but balk at pure monster meat. I cajole them into stripping alien flesh off the bones at least. Even the tentacles have bones inside, like vertebrae.

Hmm. Could I disguise them in sculpture, make "driftwood furniture" from them? I try--make a glass table held up by driftwood pieces and alien bones. Similar shapes; the bones look like fragile jetsam--whalebone or very old bleached wood. This may work. I bet I can sell these, make a profit!

It's the skull that's the real problem--glaringly alien. Damning evidence of murder.

Well, self-defense. But Rhinzl's shadowy friends won't see it that way.

DREAM 2: $350 for French class?! I quit!

I sit in on a group or class, trying to relearn stuff I've long forgotten about French composition. My boss Lisa is in the class too. Up to date, or nearly. I like the atmosphere of delicacy and subtlety. They're up to "Do homework for Lesson Ten and have it in by September First." A touch of unease beneath my complacence--I don't want to cram and spend time on this.

Lisa casually says "So you're going to resume the classes Stanford chose for you! How wonderful!" The reason they know schedules and all is that they kept cards that Stanford gave them, and I didn't. And since I didn't design a schedule for myself, I don't know a thing about this.

She adds "Have you paid the three-fifty fee for the French class yet?"

"Three dollars and fifty cents?" I say uneasily, anticipating (but barely believing) her answer: "No, $350. Same as every course."

A fortune for me. I've overcommitted--can't afford the time, the energy, OR the cost. I HAVE to drop these classes!

NEXT MORNING

The main dream borrows heavily from Lloyd Biggle's book Watchers of the Dark--matter transporters, and an alien spy named Rhinzl with illusion-masked tentacles who's caught because his true form still casts a shadow. But I don't see the point of the reference; nothing in my day resembled the dream.

THAT DAY

At work: a library trainee asks me a language question, I explain, and she says "No matter what language, you always know--do you have a degree in linguistics or what?"

"No, I've just picked up a lot of words."

"Well you ought to go back to school and get a degree in it!"

Awkward silence. I don't want to talk of the poverty & chronic illness making that return impractical. At last I just uncomfortably say "I can't right now."

Ashamed I can't afford the language courses. Echoing my dream.

THAT EVENING

Turn on the TV. Doctor Who. Romana (Lalla Ward, who I have a crush on) repairs a transporter unit. Meanwhile, a smuggler brings in alien monsters, because their bodies, when burnt and powdered, are a profitable drug...

Gorgeous girl gets teleportation device working. Then alien monsters are killed, and their corpses are turned into profit. Echoing my dream.

Oh, don't panic; it's all coincidence. These are, after all, such common dream themes.

YEARS LATER

During the early 1980s I repeated--and confirmed--J.W. Dunne's classic dream experiment [example: A Factory Fire] showing dreams don't just react to inner issues or to present concerns, but also, somehow, to upcoming events. Not always big ones! A strange image, a headline, a story, an emotional moment.

Note how the main dream, along with apparent images from the future, has a second peculiar trait: it's set in the future. Many of my apparently predictive dreams display such hints they're about the future; just as many shared/telepathic dreams have characters who discuss telepathy, or use classic dream images for telepathy like mysterious phone advice or voices in the air. Such dreams make me suspect the unconscious doesn't just sense information in ways we don't yet understand but can recognize the source is unusual and flag it as exotic! That implies far more self-awareness than many sleep researchers would accept.

But then most will reject ESP too. And they're wrong. A few instances can be chance, but I've had over 1300 like this--specific, unlikely images. And every book-length dreamjournal I've found, like Anna Kingsford, AE (George Russell), Carl Jung, William Archer, Nancy Price, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Julie Doucet and Al Davison, has at least a few dreams that dreamer considered predictive. Record your dreams consistently and the phenomenon turns up. Just 1-5% of the dreams, depending on the dreamer, but consistently.

Replicability matters.

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