Dreamtime with Gary Lachman

Gary Lachman is the author The Return of Holy Russia: Apocalyptic History, Mystical Awakening, and the Struggle for the Soul of the World as well as over twenty other books about the influence of esotericism on politics and society. He has written biographies of Carl Jung, Aleister Crowley, Rudolf Steiner, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Emanuel Swedenborg, P. D. Ouspensky, and Colin Wilson. His newest book is Dreaming Ahead of Time: Experiences with Precognitive Dreams, Synchronicities and Coincidences. Here he describes the fascinating precognitive dreams reported by J. W. Dunne in his 1927 book, An Experiment with Time. Lachman discovered he could replicate Dunne's findings by examining the lengthy records he had kept of his own dreams. He maintains that this is a repeatable effect that can be tested by anyone who has kept careful dream journals. It is not necessary to interpret such dreams. Dunne found that future and past information occurred about equally in his recorded dreams. He also discusses related phenomena such as hypnogogic states and synchronicity.

Keeping a dream journal and not trying to interpret dreams are very useful advice.  I haven't done it for many years but it revealed some interesting stuff concerning consciousness.  The difficult bit is that you have to write down as much detail as possible as soon as you wake up and remember the dream.  This means short periods of not sleeping throughout the night and keeping a bedside lamp next to you or a reading lamp of some kind and a pen and paper.  I would heartily recommend it for anybody who is curious about this subject.

In my experience, dreams come in many categories. Some may be precognitive, others may offer wisdom or insight, while some seem a jumble of recent experience regurgitated with little sense.

I had one dream which predicted my own personal future, but it did so with a storyline about alien spacecraft. It was so many years ago that any literal interpretation would not fit, while a symbolic one definitely did.

I agree that keeping a dream journal is a good practice, though I tend not to follow it rigorously, only recording dreams which have a powerful impact on me. Some of those linger through the day and I may write it down hours or days later. Leave it too long and details as well as nuance and emotion may fade.

One impact of paying attention to my dreams is that I get more of the meaningful kind and fewer of the jumbled-up mess type. I actually considered the reason for that was that since I was actively listening and paying attention, other consciousnesses felt it worthwhile to communicate with me. If I'm not listening, the proportion of 'noise' increases as I think the 'others' are not wasting their time trying to send anything, except when it is exceptionally important.