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Michael, as you know, Andrew's book is called Dreamer, and it's one of the best available on precognitive dreams. Andrew has been one of the key participants at Skeptiko over the years, and despite the extraordinary nature of some of his claims, his countless contributions at Skeptiko make it hard for me to doubt his intelligence or integrity.

(Though I do wish he would be more open-minded about psychedelics. :) )

David Ryback, by the way, whom you referred to in your post, wrote "Dreams that Come True," which was one of the very first books on parapsychology I ever read. It had an enormous influence on me 20 years ago, leading me to discovering my own precognitive dreams, which, in turn, became my essential first-hand proof of psi.

Not so strange: skeptics' brains are not open enough to accept anything that doesn't match with their inner beliefs!

Real interesting, and I believe him too. Randi's comments reveal more about him than anything. I have had two lucid dream incidents similar to Andrew's. Mine, however, both involved deceased individuals. In one (I posted about this one here before) my brother, who died several years earlier, visited me in a lucid dream and provided some almost irrefutable verifiable evidence that the experience was real. My second experience occurred while I was staying in Florida a few years ago. I had a lucid dream and found myself in a small grassy area near a highway. I was talking to a somewhat tired looking black man. He told me he was just killed in an accident on MacArthur Causeway. I looked towards the highway and saw a destroyed vehicle. He asked me to tell his family that he was ok. I awoke. I did some internet searching and found that an actual fatal accident had indeed occurred on MacArthur Causeway near Miami (I was in Daytona Beach at the time). The man who was killed was not “black”, but his last name contained the word "black" in Spanish. Maybe his being black in my dream was a play on his last name. I never did make an attempt to contact his family as I did not want to be taken for a lunatic. I, like Paquette, tried to run some statistical analysis on these incidents. Trying to be conservative I estimated the probability of each of these dreams to have been chance occurrences at 1 in 4000 and 1 in 350 respectively.

Michael, thanks for continuing to find these nuggets that you do. They are helping to validate many of your readers own experiences, although, I still remain a skeptic. I guess I just can’t get rid of the materialist brainwashing that goes with living in a western society.

Fascinating. Andrew's experience is very similar to my own (it's always nice to be confirmed, even if you pretend you don't need that).

As an aside, my wife and I have been using hemisync CDs - these are the actual Monroe Institute ones. For me, they just help relax and center my too often scattered mind. My wife, OTOH, has begun have some OBE(-ish?) experiences. Last night she "went to China" and was observing various transactions in a market place there. In these trips she has been making she has some level of access to what the people in the scene are thinking. Per Andrew's criteria, the people don't notice her or interact with her in any way. Around 5:00 am this morning she woke up and very excitedly told me about her having gone to China. What is coincidental in an interesting way is that later this morning, out of the blue as far as I know, my son posted on his facebook page that he is planning a trip to China and is looking for any old Army buddies that might want to go with him.

OBEs are, to my mind, the most fascinating aspect of the paranormal and, IMO, they can really end up challenging all preconceived notions of, well, just about everything.

Thanks to Andrew Paquette for sharing with Michael and then thanks Michael for sharing with us. Also, thanks Michael for the hemisync suggestion on the psychedelics thread. It appears to be doing good things for my wife, and, I have to admit, for me as well.

I have no reason to doubt Andrew Paquette, he seems a perfectly rational, normal guy. As you said, Michael if even just one of these OBE's is real that's enough to prove the point.
I already accept that the OBE during cardiac arrest is real, is this the same type of phenomena or is it more akin to remote viewing ?

Very interesting.

Great post, Michael!

I had never thought about the detail of people not noticing the NDEr before. I have had a couple dreams like that, but I believe I was in the Afterlife dimension and not 3D. I have had only a few 3D OBEs.

More or less on topic, I had an interesting dream a night or two ago in which I was reading text. Now one way to tell if you are in a dream (i.e., a lucid dream) is to try to read something. I have done this on purpose several times in a dream, and the effects can be quite interesting. You can get crystal-clear text, but it will not be stable on the page. It will change to something else.

But in this latest dream, the text did not seem to behave in this way. I was not fully lucid, so I could not test it completely, but I was reading some material about a woman who owned a business back in the 20s or so. (I think this was "just" a dream-dream and not an OBE with veridical content. But I wonder if this represents something new, perhaps 5D dreaming as opposed to unstable Astral 4D dreaming. My guides have been talking to me about dreaming in 5D, and the quality of my dreams has indeed changed a lot.)

Does Andrew have anything to say about reading in his book? It is a topic of great interest to me.

I find It baffling people doubt OBE Astral projection. If you do have a real fully conscious astral projection, there is no doubt you are not in your body and in a higher phased dimension. Same with NDEs really. People just don't accept it as their knowledge is extemely limited and brain washed their whole lives. We are multi dimensional beings that Merely inhabit a human body for a short while. It's really obvious basic spiritually 101 really, if you are experienced in spiritual matters. Science is stupid really everything is focussed on getting evidence in this physical earthly dimension. They are barely grasping the multi-dimensional nature of the universe and reality. If you put the effort in and achieve OBE you won't need any proof. I learnt to do it after tonne of research and real effort. The only way for the average person is to happen to have a NDE which is a bit drastic, or psychedelics. In my opinion if you think it's bullshit, it's doubtful you'll get there by OBE or lucid dreaming, so psychedelics is then only way to learn this and prove it to yourself. You don't look for proof, like just reading a book on how to swim and never swimming. Just fucking swim, you'll have the real experience and then understand. Just learn to OBE or take some real psychedelics! There will never be proof on this earthly dimension, as you concious soul does not exist on this physical dimension in the fist place, you are just fooled into thinking that your whole life, that's the whole point of earth, it's the perfect illusion and playground for body physical experience. Higher dimensions are where the real knowledge lies.

This is Random but I came across a paper linking Jung's synchronicity with QM theory, thought you'd appreciate it

http://www.academia.edu/1248055/Carl_G._Jungs_Synchronicity_and_Quantum_Entanglement_Schrodingers_Cat_Wanders_Between_Chromosomes

I suspect people doubt phenomena sometimes because they are simply beyond their 'boggle threshold'. I guess some things just have to be seen/experienced to be believed.

An experienced OBE'r can doubt it purely by experience.

I can only take from this that spiritual aspects/phenomena could be blended easier when in an unconsious state(sleep)

I assure you having had over 10 OBE's from mastering advanced lucid dream and sleep OBE techniques that you will be convinced of being out of your body at the start,but after time and experience there are too many inconsistencies with the real world too accept it at face value.

That aside,veridical OBE's from a sleep state are different from NDE Obe's though I could accept based on previous mentioned different perspective.Why does nature complicate things so much !

I find this interesting, but remain skeptical. Maybe it's possible. One thing to remember is that millions of people are having millions of dreams all of the time. Sooner or later, one of those dreams will prove "true" - it's like hitting the lottery. I've had a few myself, but all of trivial account. Even today, at church, for some reason, near the end of the service, I was thinking of that song, "Joyful, Joyful." A few minutes later, of all the songs the choir could have chosen, they played this song. But I think it's due to the law of averages.

On the other hand, at one time, the Soviet Union and U.S. government were both involved in remote viewing, which seems similar to OBEs. It's hard to find out what happened with the Soviet program, but from I've read, the U.S. program had some success, but it was basically laughed out of existence, no one could just take it seriously.

@kathleen
I guess the question is 'what is the difference between precognition, guessing and random occurrence?'.

Whilst I agree that some events may be down to sheer coincidence, I'm not sure that is the case for all situations eg people who have complex apparent precognitions or people who regularly experience precognition.

@Kathleen: Your "millions of people having millions of dreams" comment is easy to say but not easy to check. That said, I made a stab at checking it in my most recent paper. It is still in review, so I won't say too much here. However, though there are billions of people who can have dreams, and trillions (or more) if you include animals, on an individual level you are not talking about "millions" of dreams but thousands. When you look at the thousands as I have done, one thing that comes across very strongly is that very few of the thousands involved can be checked. That is to say, even if they were completely accurate in some objective way, there is no way to check their veridicality due to various factors such as unknown dream characters or lack of access to anyone who could verify the dream. Once you remove these from the group, you are left with hundreds--not thousands or millions.

You can contend that you still have your billions of individuals having dreams (the trillions of animals are excluded due to a lack of common language), so the number of potentially veridical dreams any individual might experience is irrelevant. No matter how small that number is, multiplied by the number of individuals it is still a big number. However, on examination dreams sort themselves into different types of content categories. This limits the "millions and millions" argument more because only certain categories are of interest to the field of parapsychology.

Then you need to look at how frequent veridicality occurs in any one person's dreams over a lifetime of record-keeping. If it happens quite often, the statistical edge no longer favors chance, but connection of some kind between dream content and objectively real events. Very few people have ever collected enough of their own dreams to make such comparisons. I have done this and can say that on a statistical level, randomness as an explanation does not match the data. Put another way, predictions by skeptics on this subject are exactly the opposite of what I find in my data. We are not talking about correlations in numbers that tend toward non-significance as the number of dreams increases, but the opposite.

I'll give one fast example, then refer to the paper later when it is out: In dreams of people who have died, though their death was unknown to me at the time I started the study, in most of the interesting cases they are people who either appeared exactly once in the journal (out of over 11,000 entries). or the first dream that mentions them and the subject of their death is meaningfully close to the actual date of their death (and usually is only one of two or three dreams that mention them). People who appear often, and there are people who appear in hundreds of dreams, have no dreams of death connected to them. In other words, the less often a person appears, usually once or twice, the more likely the death dream will be meaningfully near to their actual death date. The more dreams there are, in contradiction of skeptical pronouncements on this exact subject, the less likely any such correlation will be found.

AP

Randi's claim to have had his childhood sports predictions notarised is obviously a lie, the sort of casual lie you might expect of an inveterate BS-er.

Starting in 15 minutes from NOW:

Sun 08-03
First Half: Professor of medicine, Dr. David Casarett, joins George Noory to discuss his exploration of the cutting edge of resuscitation, and just how far science has come. He'll cover suspended animation, cryonics, and the future of resuscitation.

PS: That's on the Coast to Coast AM radio talk show.

Great comment, Paqdream. Now you might be getting closer to convincing someone like me if we're looking at an individual person and their dreams' rate of proving true.

I still wonder why this would occur, the only explanation would seem to be that everything is completely connected to everything.

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