Parapsychology about prophetic dreams and the colossal capabilities of the brain

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Should we take them for fiction or as confirmation of the colossal possibilities that lie in our brains?

The Boston Globe reporter Ed Samson, at the end of August 1883, drank heavily after turning out the issue and, unable to get home, fell asleep in the office on the couch. In the middle of the night, he jumped up in a panic: Samson dreamed that the tropical island of Pralape was dying due to an incredible explosion of a volcano. Population disappearing in streams of lava, columns of ash, huge waves - it was all so real that he could not get rid of the vision. Ed Samson decided to write down his dream, and then, still in a drunken state, he brought out “important” in the margin - in order to think at his leisure what all this could mean.

And he headed home, forgetting the note on the table. The editor in the morning assumed that Samson had received a message from some news agency and put the information into the room. This "reportage" was reprinted by many newspapers before it was found out that there was no island of Pralape on the map and no agency had broadcast reports of the cataclysm. The case for Samson and The Boston Globe could have ended badly, but exactly at this time they received information about the terrible eruption of the Krakatoa volcano. To the smallest detail, it coincided with what Samson had dreamed in a dream. And moreover: it turned out that Pralape is the ancient native name of Krakatoa …

Today, of course, it is impossible to check how true this story was. However, there is quite a lot of evidence of prophetic dreams that one could simply declare all of them only fictions. Such dreams were witnessed by Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein, Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling and many thousands of people throughout the history of mankind, regardless of epochs, civilizations and cultures. Such dreams contain information that is not symbolic: the images are much brighter than in "ordinary" dreams, and the meaning is not covered with anything. And thus, in order to understand these dreams, there is no need to analyze them.

Since the inception of parapsychology at the end of the 19th century, which is trying from the point of view of science to investigate the supernatural abilities of a person, its adherents have tried to understand whether prophetic dreams are not a reflection of the process of "subconscious logic". Perhaps we are constructing future events on the basis of signs not fixed by consciousness? Indeed, without any of our conscious participation, the brain is able to register an incredible amount of the smallest details that are lost in the general array of information: barely audible sounds, images caught out of the corner of the eye, microvibrations, smells, scraps of random thoughts and words.

During sleep, the brain sorts and classifies these data, establishes connections between them and, perhaps, deduces from their totality the inevitability of events, the logic of which is not available to us in the waking state. Perhaps this could be an excellent explanation of some dreams. But not all of them. What vibrations and sounds could tell the same Samson in a Boston bar that at that very moment a volcano began to erupt on the other side of the world, and even tell the name of the island, which last appeared on maps in the middle of the 17th century?

Laboratory dreams …

Vadim Rotenberg, a psychophysiologist, once dreamed that he fell, slipping near the house, and his glasses broke on the ice. Of course, there was nothing special in this dream, but the next morning Rotenberg slipped near the house - in the very place that he saw in his dream. The glasses naturally fell and broke. But to think seriously about the strange dreams of Vadim Rotenberg was prompted not by this event, but by his scientific specialty - the psychophysiology of memory and interhemispheric relations of the brain, he has been professionally engaged for a long time. And I came across the theme of prophetic dreams more than once.

“When I began to take an interest in prophetic dreams, hypnosis and other mysterious phenomena, my colleagues predicted a complete obstruction of the academic world,” he says. “But that didn't scare me. I am sure that the topic deserves serious scientific study even today. Unfortunately, there are many difficulties along the way. The subjective ones are that the scientific community is indeed very skeptical of parapsychology.

“In academic science, the concept of accidental coincidences of dream images with future events prevails,” explains Vadim Rotenberg. "Such coincidences are statistically very unlikely, but they are the ones that are remembered because of their high personal significance." In other words, he can dream at least every night that a person close to us, for example, is stroking a cat: most likely, we simply will not remember such a dream. But if in a dream the same person sticks his head into the mouth of a tiger, then the dream will not be forgotten. And if something like this happens soon in reality, then we will completely believe in prophetic dreams. Although it will be just a coincidence.

There are also objective obstacles. How in general can you record dreams and the information received in them? Nevertheless, similar attempts are being made. Psychologists Montagu Ullman and Stanley Krippner, for example, recorded physiological parameters in the participants of the experiment during sleep: electrical activity of brain neurons, eye movements, muscle tone, pulse. Based on these data, the onset of REM sleep (sleep phase accompanied by dreams) was determined.

At this moment, one of the researchers, being in a separate room, focused on the "transmission" of certain thoughts and images to the sleeping person. After this, the subject was awakened and asked to recount the dream. In dreams, the information that was transmitted to the sleeping person was regularly present. Subsequently, the results of this study have been confirmed more than once.

Through space and time …

Vadim Rotenberg puts forward a hypothesis that could explain the results of these experiments. Its essence is that the left hemisphere of our brain is responsible for the analysis, rational explanation and critical perception of reality, which dominates while we are awake. But in a dream, the main role goes to the right hemisphere, which is responsible for imaginative thinking. Freed from conscious and critical control, the right hemisphere can manifest its unique abilities. One of which is the ability to pick up certain signals at a distance.

First of all, this concerns information about our loved ones, since it is especially important for us. “I had a friend who literally intimidated his mother: several times upon awakening, he said that it was necessary to contact one or another of their relatives or friends (sometimes living in another city), because he was not all right. And each time it turned out that something tragic had really happened,”says Vadim Rotenberg.

And yet, such dreams, although they impress us beyond measure, can hardly be called prophetic: after all, they contain information about events that occur with people separated from us in space, and not in time. Is there any way to explain dreams that clearly communicate

us about what has yet to happen? Perhaps yes. But for this we will have to revise no less than our fundamental ideas about the Universe.

"How can this be?" …

Physicist John Stuart Bell back in the 1960s mathematically proved what was later confirmed experimentally: two particles can exchange information at a speed exceeding the speed of light, as if reversing the flow of time in this way. Absolutely isolated from each other beams of photons behave as if each particle "knows" in advance how the other will behave. Bell himself, in popular lectures, illustrated this incredible fact with a simple example: let's say there is a man in Dublin who always wears red socks, and in Honolulu there is a man who always wears green.

Imagine that we somehow got a man in Dublin to take off his red socks and put on green ones. Then a person in Honolulu must immediately (without being able to find out about what happened in Dublin!) Take off the green socks and put on the red ones. How is this possible? Is information between them transmitted at superluminal speed through some secret channels? Or do both receive it from some future, really knowing how and at what point to act? Bell's theorem presented physicists with an unpleasant dilemma. One of two things is assumed: either the world is not objectively real, or there are superluminal connections in it, says Stanislav Grof, the founder of transpersonal psychology.

But if so, then the usual ideas about linear time, calmly flowing from yesterday to tomorrow, become extremely doubtful. Of course, it is difficult to admit that the world does not work the way we used to think. But here is what the outstanding physicist of the 20th century, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman wrote about our problems with understanding the Universe and its laws:

“The difficulty here is purely psychological - we are constantly tormented by the question:“How can this be?”, Which reflects an uncontrollable, but completely unreasonable desire to imagine everything through something very familiar. … If you can, do not torment yourself with the question "But how can this be?" Nobody knows how it can be”…