Vonnegut
Dreamed 1970/3/12 by Alan Vaughan
Alan Vaughan... watched one of his favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., on a television talk show one night, and had a dream about him two nights later. He wrote about the dream to Vonnegut on March 13,1970.
"You appeared in a dream I had this morning. We were in a house full of children. You were planning to leave soon on a trip. Then you mentioned that you were moving to an island named Jerome. (As far as I know there is no such place, so perhaps the name Jerome or initial J. has some related meaning.)"Vonnegut's answer was dated March 28, 1970. "Not bad. On the night of your dream, I had dinner with Jerome B. [an author of children's books], and we talked about a trip I made three days later to an island named England."
The experience had all the markings of the spontaneous telepathic dream: A pair of unusual details mixed capriciously into a bizarre dream concoction in which talking with Jerome about going to an island becomes transformed into going to an island named Jerome.
SOURCE: Dream Telepathy, Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner, Alan Vaughan (2nd ed., 1989), p. 3
EDITOR'S NOTE, JUNE 2020
Was the dream really a capricious concoction? Well, depending on your ideology, ESP is either nonexistent or weak, at best like our sense of smell, right? So this feeble-or-nonexistent sense sniffed out four snippets of data about Vonnegut (not two as claimed): "children, Jerome, an upcoming trip, island", and combined them. To me this seems like standard dream staging. And was the effect capricious? Vaughan wrote a fan letter that impressed his idol. Seems to me establishing credibility and building bonds are natural uses for a sense, not capricious or bizarre. I agree with Vonnegut. "Not bad!"
Credulity has costs, but so does skepticism. I recently paid its price. Like most humans, I have a poor sense of smell. Early in the Covid pandemic, I'd read that one symptom was olfactory hallucinations--smelling smoke or sulfur. Well, I started scenting foul smoke--just brief flashes, but memorably awful. At that point tests for Covid were primitive; no home kits. I knew I might be suggestible, but I didn't want to infect my friends, so I got an appointment and biked way across town to a testing site. Wasted hours to find out...
...it wasn't Covid. Because I wasn't hallucinating. Our neighbors, bored and stressed by the lockdown, had bought the cheapest, foulest, stinkiest pot on the planet, and furtively smoked it on a stair twenty feet below me. I never saw or heard them, and the breeze blew the smoke away, but I caught stray whiffs.
Today my default is to trust liminal knowledge--flashes my senses can just barely catch. Be skeptical of skepticism. Science overemphasizes fallibility; I misinterpreted real sensing as hallucination or suggestibility.
It pays to be naïve.
--Chris Wayan
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