Here’s a strange synchronicity that began as a dream. It comes from a non-fiction book, Man & Time, by British novelist and playwright J.G. Priestley. The author was promoting his new book in 1963 on the BBC, when he asked viewers for accounts of their precognitive dreams. He was deluged with nearly a thousand letters.
Here’s a summary of one of them, which I found in ONE MIND, by Larry Dossey.
One woman wrote she had told three people with whom she was eating breakfast that she had just dreamed that as they were finishing breakfast a farmer arrived with 33 eggs in a bucket. Later, as she was standing halfway up the stairs, three more eggs were handed to her That was her dream.
Shortly after the actual breakfast, a farmer arrived and handed her a bucket, which he said contained three dozen egs. She transferred them to a basket and paid for them. Minutes later, her husband told her that he had counted the eggs and there were only 33 of them, not three dozen.
While the woman was counting them for herself, she was called from below by an someone who met her halfway up the stairs. The person explained that three eggs had been mistakenly removed from the bucket, and then handed her three eggs.
Priestly wrote: “Thirty-three and then three eggs in the dream; 33 and then three eggs in the real event. You can call it coincidence just as you can call it boojum or anything else….But if you stop clinging to coincidence and try explaining this trumpery affair, you might shatter one kind of world.”
As Dorsey noted: “The replacement for that shattered world is one in which linear time is no longer a tyrant, and causes do not always precede events.”
+++
As an addendum, I read a rambling psychological study of the people who answered Priestley’s request for examples of precognitive dreams. The writer, psychologist Katy Price, in her conclusion notes that she has never had a precognitive dream. Interestingly, Priestley in his book says this about psychologists:
“And it does not surprise me that experimental psychologists—some of them attempting to deal with the psyche as if it were a lump of sodium—do not have precognitive dreams: Their minds are made up against them.”
I’m not sure that is the case for this psychologist. It’s hard to tell what Price thinks about precognitive dreams, since she seems most interested in categorizing and quantifying the results of Priestley’s call for precognitive dreams. She did make one interesting observation when she said that Priestley is not a scientist so he has more freedom to pursue matters that extend beyond the acceptable margins of science.
you remember your 33rd b.d. Rob T.??
Mike, that may be true in certain situations….”belief”, etc., however, I began to have precog dreams when I was a young child. The first one was a recurring dream that I had intermittently from the time I was six until it manifested exactly as in my dream, when I was 17, Another precog dream I had several times while in jr. high: in the dream, I saw my then-boyfriend, who was the quarterback on our school football team, laying in a casket wearing a dark brown suit, and a huge “wreath” of flowers shaped like a football was in front of the casket. I went to the breakfast table crying. My Mom told me I was being silly, it was “just a dream. My boyfriend, Bill, was athletic and the picture of health. The week before school started, he was mowing the coach’s lawn and fainted. He was immediately diagnosed with acute leukemia and died just seven days later. At the funeral home, Bill was in the casket wearing a dark brown suit and there was a huge wreath of flowers shaped like a football in front of it. During y childhood and youth, I knew nothing of such events. However, I absolutely, 100% agree with you about “over-complicating life”. Recently, I’ve found myself doing everything within my power to simplify my mind’s much-too-crowded ideas, theories, possibilities, etc., etc., etc. It just gets overwhelming after a lifetime of all this kind of material, so I’m giving my thoughts a much-needed rest! Your comments are very relevant….in many situations, folks DO indeed complicate life when it isn’t necessary.
33 is a sacred number to the Celts, where everything occurs in 3’s – the Triple Goddess (become later the Father, Son and Holy Ghost) represented the passage of the cycles of time or nature – birth, sustaining, death, rebirth. Three times three occurs all over the place – the 9 fates, 9 Norns, etc. In a sense, 3 is about Time………..
Love the quote about the psychologist. I have a family member who is a clinical psychologist and considers me clinically mentally ill because of my beliefs. She has a whole system of psychological terms to describe why I’m nuts and mediums and psychic phenonmena are a form of wishful delusion. That, I think, is what can happen when one is awarded degrees and paid to be an “expert on the mind”.
I once fell asleep on my porch swing, dreamt that I was investigating the former sorority house across the street. It was due for demolition and I’d always wanted to check out the early 20th c. house. I climbed the ornate carved staircase and found a doorway to the roof of the ballustraded front porch. I was examining the dutch tile siding when I turned and saw myself sleeping on my own front porch across the street. Freaked! I got up and tentatively went to the old sorority house, found the realtor’s lock gone and went in to discover the house perfectly representing the dream I’d just had, right down to the scaling white-wash paint and the crumbling dutch tile siding. Only problem was, from that vantage point, I could not see the porch swing across the street.
Wow, Bruce! That’s a powerful and intriguing dream…or maybe an OBE?
I love that line about time not being a linear tyrant. How true that rings to me! 🙂
Amen!
Maybe it’s that old belief ‘thing’ again. If we believe in precognition – in dreams or at other times – we may get them, but if we don’t believe, then we won’t. Sometimes perhaps we over complicate life.