8. ROAD/MAP Cogent dream. Approximate age: 48-50.

I dreamed I was driving a car on an unprecedented getaway trip from Kentucky to the faraway northwest coast of America, a place I have never yet visited in reality. I was alone. The idea of the trip put me in high spirits, I felt unusually free. This dream seemed especially significant because I experienced dual viewpoints simultaneously.

 

In one view I was inside the car, driving it, looking through my eyes at the road ahead. It felt exactly like driving a car normally feels. In the other view I was high overhead—miles up—looking down at the tiny speck that was my car, myself inside it, crawling northwestward along a great highway from Kentucky to the northwest. The countryside looked like countryside, but it also looked like a roadmap. I could see the various roads in colors—red, blue, black—as they would be on a printed roadmap. I saw my car as a tiny blip far below, advancing slowly across the map on an interstate highway.

 

The absolutely uncanny thing was that both of these views were happening at the same time. I saw fully and simultaneously from both vantage points. Even in the dream, and aware that I was dreaming, it felt amazing.

 

Interpretation: I would not know what to make of this dream had I not encountered the writings of Raymond Moody and other researchers affiliated with the International Association of Near-Death Studies. In years since the dream occurred, I have read about similar “double viewing” by people while having a near-death experience. A significant number of those resuscitated from clinical death, reporting what they experienced while “dead,” describe viewing places or situations from two different vantage points. What they have to say sounds remarkably like what I dreamed. I recently read of a case in which the experiencer viewed things from three different vantage points. As for my dreamed journeying to the great northwest (which never actually happened), it might be significant that my first (33-year) marriage ended not long after this dream occurred.

 

9. 300 YEARS: M’sippisea    Cogent dream.        Approximate age: 68-70.

I believe this dream to be of profoundest import, and not just for me alone. It occurred quite a while ago when I was approaching a mere age seventy. It is the one and only occasion in my life about which I am unarguably certain that I saw into the future.

 

The dream opens with awareness that I am standing in the gondola of a dirigible. There is no action other than my understanding that the dirigible is moving through the air. From beginning to end, the dream flows seamlessly as an unfolding series of understandings and realizations that enter my mind in the sequence here described.

 

I am accompanied by other people, a group of perhaps fifteen or twenty. We seem to be all men. I wear over my shoulders a robe-like garment that reaches almost to the floor. I “feel” that I am some sort of priest or leader among them, but my unclear status is unimportant in the dream’s context. The gondola is large, accommodating us without crowding. I don’t remember seats—we seem to be all standing, myself near the center. I am aware of being physically large and tall, attributes which seem normal, I take them for granted (unlike this dreamed self, I have always been of average size and height).

 

Once again, as in the roadmap dream, I experience two different perspectives simultaneously. I am both “inside myself” looking out through my eyes at the gondola’s interior, and “outside myself” observing everything including myself standing there among the other passengers. I have several times read that simultaneous dual viewing is not uncommon in certain extraordinary, paranormal or spiritual experiences, but in this dream it feels perfectly normal—I casually notice it but don’t think about it.

 

It is a beautiful sunny day under a cloudless pale blue sky. We seem to be high in the air—perhaps a whole quarter mile, which seems very high indeed. I feel slight anxiety at the unfamiliarity of being so very high with only the thin floor beneath my feet, though among us there is an overall feeling of wellbeing. Observation of the ground far below is excellent through outward-leaning windows that surround the gondola. Through them I see vast forest stretching to the horizon in all directions. Few fields, roads or villages are apparent, though I know they’re down there. The earth seems to float slowly past below, an endless green scroll unrolling in front, blending slowly into the distance behind.

 

I know we are on a quite major journey, though its purpose is not apparent. My dreaming mind simply knows we are making this long journey for some reason that is important—the importance being self evident in the fact that we are flying, which is a very rare way to travel. We go in a southeasterly direction. I understand that the area from which we come was once called southern Ohio, and we are heading southeastward over an area still known as Kentucky toward some destination in an area once known as West Virginia.

 

I name these places indirectly because I somehow understand we are 300 years in the future of my dreaming self—2300 something—and many old place names have changed by the 24th century. This sense of being 300 years in the future feels perfectly normal, taken for granted, something I “just know” without wondering how I know—it just is.

 

I, the big robed fellow, am coincidentally aware (here again with no inclination to question or think about it) that on our westward side, not so far way, the vast center of what used to be the United States is now an inland sea. This elongated sea reaches northward from what once was the old Gulf of Mexico, its waves lapping gently over what used to be the entire Mississippi Valley, plus a great deal more of the central plains northward to Wisconsin and beyond into Canada where it now connects into waters the people once called Hudson Bay.

 

This blue sea is nice, a placid body of water toward which I am favorably disposed. It feels familiar to me, I like it without knowing exactly why. I remember nothing more, the dream ends…

 

…and then the name M’sippisea flowed unbidden into my waking mind, and the name seemed natural and right. Awake now, I felt I had “remembered” 300 years hence—remembered M’sippisea, a pleasant water I seemed to have known since…some future childhood. While still in my dream I had felt a natural love of its salty waters—they felt normal to the dreaming me, like an at-home place I had often fished in, swum in, known long and well. A place that will feel “natural” to some future me. Ever afterward this strange dream enters my thoughts often, and every time it seems “real” all over again.

 

Interpretation: This dream just floored me at the time, and has had substantial impact on my thinking over subsequent years. It feels like something that could be true, as if I received a significant glimpse of myself in a future lifetime, after today’s environmental concerns have been resolved in the terms I saw in the dream. My strong visceral reaction to this particular dream made me rethink not only its content and implications, but also the cumulative, composite implications of all those preceding dreams described above.

 

For quite some time prior to this dream I was becoming increasing worried about our massively degrading environment, its exponential worsening as the consuming world population expands by yet more billions of mouths to feed, and the inevitable horrific consequences all this implies. The worry was generated by my scientific readings, including all the most knowledgeable authors and various reliable sources on global warming science and natural resource depletion everywhere.

 

Adding in the increasingly bad news from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Congress, skeptic nuts, and my complacent fellow man in general, as the years passed I was becoming quietly frantic. Vital tipping points were passing by. Civilization as I knew it could well fall. I felt deeply stressed with concerns for my own grandchildren, and all the rest of my fellow homo sapiens. Today, more than a decade later, I observe that comparable anxieties and stress are being expressed by increasing numbers of people around the world, speaking out about their concerns in news media.

 

But for me, this “future dream” laid that to rest. I am no longer frantic that civilization as I know it might degrade. I know it will degrade, the only question is how badly. The dream showed me that my chief worry—humanity might become extinct—is not going to happen. It told me that the next two centuries won’t be easy to live through, but we’ll survive, and will do so in some technological style. Cave men don’t build dirigibles.

 

This dream also constituted a sort of last straw. For decades I had questioned and equivocated over the slowly accumulating experiences in my life that I regarded as “psychic” or “paranormal,” and in any case certainly unscientific—not to be easily believed. I had long wondered about each of the experiences described above, singly and collectively—can that (dream or “contact”) have had any meaning in reality?

 

Entering my seventh decade, this “future” dream compelled me to pull it together. I put together a thoughtful definition of what I would now judge to be credible, valid science-worthy “evidence,” and concluded quite a few things I had long held in the agnostic category. Concluding the reality of matters both immaterial and spiritual was just the beginning of it. Having now entered my eighth decade, these conclusions make it much easier to continue learning about the things that truly matter. And not just for me.

 

*          *          *

A silver ribbon

Before proceeding to my tenth and final report below, I must share a near-death experience report that came to my attention in February 2016 when it was distributed to members of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS). The four paragraphs below are excerpts from a report by a woman who in 2005 was struck by lightning and subsequently reported a dramatic out-of-body spiritual experience.

 

Unusual for NDEs, her report includes a rare reference to the future. On a “guided tour” she was shown what she understood as events to occur in the future. Even more unusual and of course noticed only by myself, a key feature of what she was shown has uncanny correlation with my M’sippisea dream.

 

“…and they began showing me what looked like moving pictures of future events that would take place on the Earth. What was shown to me were the events surrounding the 911 attacks and other terrorist attacks against our country as well as our financial institutions crumbling or, better said, our money not being worth the paper it is written on. I was shown silver and gold coins being used to purchase things;  also they said that in time we would be going back to the barter system as we had done long ago in the past.

“They showed me many natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, and storms, and six huge waves of water covering the land. I saw the ones in Japan and Indonesia and also one in Chile. I also saw a woman in Canada who had a little boy in her car and her car went off the road because of flood waters and her car was immersed under the water and they were drowning. God sent angels in the form of people to pull them out but the boy had already passed away. They told me he would survive, however….

“They showed me the government and how they are destroying the peace in our world and how corrupt they are, and they showed me the darkness that surrounds them; they showed me different governments being overthrown and huge riots in the streets. They showed me one particular riot where someone, a man, was throwing something through a store front window and there was a building nearby that was on fire. I also heard the sound of gunshots.

 

“They showed me the pockets of light that are still left in small sections called “safe havens;” mostly these areas are in the mountainous regions. They showed me how to see the dark clouds around the lands to know where the safe havens are located and the last thing they showed me was a silver ribbon splitting the United States apart. I was given knowledge that this ribbon was a river. I am assuming it was the Mississippi River, but they gave me no explanation as to the meaning of this “ribbon” other than “the ribbon gets larger.”  [emphasis added]

– To be continued in one week –