Some extraordinary books about precognitive dreams

There are several must-read books about precognitive dreams, which I will review briefly below.

John William Dunne, An experiment with time, 1927

Dunne (1875-1949) was a British aeronautical engineer who made several innovative aircraft designs; nevertheless, he became famous not for them but for his philosophical books and especially for "An experiment with time". The title of the book refers to an experiment that consists of keeping records of dreams and looking for correlations between them and subsequent events. He describes and analyzes with the pedanticism of a scientist a number of amazing coincidences between dreams and real posterior events, and proposes a theory to explain them. That theory, called serialism, suggests that there are multiple nested universes, having different timelines and while our brains inhabit only one of them, our consciousness can travel among them, thus obtaining information from different timelines. Serialism has had a great repercussion among philosophers, physicists, psychologists, writers, etc. You can read a free copy of the book or download it from Amazon.

 

Bruce Siegel, Dreaming The Future: How our dreams prove psychic ability is real, and why it matters, 2017

Bruce Siegel tells the story of a person (himself) who was skeptical about all kinds of paranormal phenomena, until around the age of 40 when he began to realize that many of his nightly dreams not only came true but did so with incredible accuracy, impossible to attribute to mear coincidence. The book is a kind of modern and pragmatic analog of Dunne's "An experiment with time. Bruce relates a series of dreams and the corresponding events that occurred afterward and proposes a methodology for their study and analysis similar to that proposed by Dunne 90 years earlier. It is worth noting his observation that the events he dreams about in many cases seem to be his brains’ interpretation of future news (often from the immediate future) that he usually reads on the internet rather than images of real events. Dunne draws an identical conclusion in his book. Other interesting topics in the book:

- Guidelines for recognizing precognitive dreams such as discarding recurrent dreams, dreams about routine events, dreams related to recent past events, and being aware of strange dreams and vivid dreams, with some force or intensity.

- Meditation as a very efficient way to achieve premonitory visions.

- Dreams that predict more than one future event.

- Fear of premonitions.

-Why precognitive dreams are difficult to be detected by the unversed people

 

You can get the ebook from Amazon.

You can also visit Bruce Siegel’s blog and his youtube channel (he is a talented pianist).

 

Paul Kalas, The Oneironauts: Using dreams to engineer our future, 2018

Dr. Paul Kalas (Born 1967) is a Berkeley-NASA astronomer, well known for having recorded the first image of an exoplanet in 2004 using the Hubble Space Telescope. On Paul’s Berkley profile page one can see a sequence of photos showing clearly the planet called Fomalhaut b orbiting its star. What is extraordinary about that image is that he got a glimpse of it 9 years before the actual discovery and drew it in his dream diary (in the book the two images are shown side by side, so that the reader can appreciate the striking similarity). According to Kalas, the image was absolutely unique and unexpected, so there was no place for a chance or a self-fulfilling-prophecy explanation. 

Update: In December 2025, Kalas and and the Fonalhaut system appeared in the news again due to their report on the detection of asterioid collisions in that star system.

In his book, Kalas also reports several other extraordinary matches between dreams and reality (out of hundreds he has had) and discusses the effect of his actions on future events. These, and many other explanations, are full of subtle humor, which makes the reading very entertaining.

Nevertheless, the book is an almost scientific treatment of the phenomenon of precognitive dreams, with a very detailed and rational discussion, bibliographic references, theories, statistics, and so on. It also contains some very interesting thoughts about parallel universes and quantum entanglement as possible explanations of their occurrence, the hippocampus as the part of the brain, which is most probably involved in precognition, and the modern physical theories about the nature of time. The last chapter of the book is dedicated to a hypothetical future, in which precognition is accepted as something normal, forming part of our lives and in which there is a powerful computer system predicting the future based on inputs from millions of dreamers (the Oneironauts).

You can get the ebook from Amazon

You can also check out the book's website and that interview with Paul Kalas by the Dream Train.

 

Vikas Khatri, Dreams and premonitions, 2006

This is an extremely entertaining compilation of over 130 premonitions, many of which belong to famous persons such as Gerald Gladstone, Winston Churchill, Otto von Bismarck, John William Dunne, Mark Twain, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Graham Greene, Abraham Lincoln, and Adolf Hitler.

Published: 2020-06-18