Beyond Synchronicity: Prophetic Dreaming

Dreaming and prophecy (or psi, if you prefer) used to walk hand in hand. Ancient religious texts- The Bible certainly among them- are filled with prophets who spoke (or listened) to the gods in their dreams. Dreams weren’t dismissed as mere brain grafitti like they are today,  they were an honored part of the culture at large. 

Well, there’s a big caveat here; you damn well better have delivered if you claimed the gods sent you a prophecy in your dreams. If not, that was a time-honored way of booking yourself a ticket for the big sleep.

It’s not just the ancient world. One of, if not the, most famous psychics in American history was Edgar Cayce, the so-called “sleeping prophet.” Cayce had a great gig- he’d chillax on the couch and someone would ask him a question or list of questions, he’d take a nice nap and then wake up and recite the answers. Or better yet, he’d give the answers while actually sleeping.  He was also either the most gifted or the laziest prophet ever, the jury’s still out on that one. 

Cayce was certainly incredibly influential; a large organization (the ARE, or Association for Research and Enlightenment) grew up around his teachings and prophecies. The ARE had (or has) some connections to the Egyptian Antiquities Council through archaeologists like Mark Lehner and the infamous Zahi Hawass, both of whom received funding from the ARE.

Here’s a list of Cayce predictions that the ARE claim came true. It seems a bit slight to me but what do I know?

THE TERRIBLE BURDEN

There’s a connection to sleep prophecy and one of the worst aviation disasters in American history, the crash of an American Airlines DC-10 just outside of O’Hare Airport in 1979. You may not have heard of it but it was a pretty big deal back in the day.

The worst airline disaster in American history occurred May 25, 1979 when American Airlines Flight 191 carrying 258 passengers and a crew of 13 fell from the sky killing all 271 people onboard.  The DC-10, took off from Runway 32 Right at 3:02 p.m. for a non-stop flight to Los Angeles, California. 

At an altitude of 200 feet, while climbing and traveling a little more than 200 miles an hour, the left wing engine dropped onto or over the wing and bounced in flames along the concrete runway.  Witnesses said that after the engine fell off, the floundering craft went into a bank, nosed down and erupted into a pillar of flame as it hit the ground a half-mile northwest of the airport.

What’s remarkable about this particular prophecy is that it was reported to authorities before the crash. It was noted and logged in some detail, but the prediction just wasn’t specific enough. 

Before May 1979, David Booth had led an average life.  He was married and raising a family.  He had never had psychic-type dreams before.  But one morning, he was jarred awake by a dream of an impending airline crash. 

“On the morning of May 16th, I had a dream.  I’m looking out to my right over a field and there’s this great big jet and it wasn’t making the noise that it should…It just turns, with its wing up in the air, goes on its back and then it goes straight into the ground and explodes.   

When the explosion would begin to die out, that’s when I would begin to wake up,” he said…

Tuesday, May 22nd, David had the dream for the seventh night in a row.  He felt that he could have no peace until he did something.  David contacted the Cincinnati office of the Federal Aviation Administration and spoke to facilities manager, Paul Williams. 

“The first thing David described to me was the type of aircraft he thought it was.  First of all he identified it as an American Airlines plane.  I asked him if he knew specifically what type of aircraft it was but David didn’t know one type of aircraft from another,” says Williams.  

Williams asked David to search his dream in an effort to try to retrieve more information about the type of aircraft or any other details he could remember.  But each night it came back frustratingly the same.  All that week they spent hours reviewing the details.  He described an airplane with an engine on the tail rather than in the tail and Williams identified that as a DC-10. 

At the start of the Memorial Day weekend, David had the dream for the tenth time.  Somehow he knew he would never have the dream again. 

As it happens, David Booth wasn’t the only person who had a psychic premonition about this ill-fated flight. This person was in a position to do something about it though:

Among those who were supposed to be onboard Flight 191 were Lindsay Wagner (The Bionic Woman) and her mother. 

“My mother and I were booked on that American Airlines DC-10 that crashed shortly after takeoff at the Chicago airport,” she said.  “But 10 minutes before we were due to get on I had a psychic flash that warned me of disaster. 

“I begged my mother to change our flight and an hour later we learned that all 271 people onboard had been killed.  I haven’t doubted a single premonition since.

I can only imagine the torment Booth felt for not being able to deliver the information that could have saved those 271 lives. What a terrible burden to bear. But hey, no one ever said the paranormal was all sunshine and cotton candy.

There’s no shortage of stories like Booth’s. What we all do is turn away and pretend we don’t notice them. The burden of knowing such things are possible is too much for our myopic civilization, no matter how much you might be told otherwise.

UPDATE: Reader Professor Pan writes:

On January 13th, 1982, I awoke from a terrible nightmare in which people and coffins floated in icy water. I was really shaken by the dream—so much so that I told my mom about it. After I got home from school I was shocked to see what was on the TV—a plane had struck the 14th St. Bridge in D.C. and plunged into the icy waters of the Potomac. I watched, horrified, as a few people were rescued from the water, while others drowned.

SAVING FACE

You all know this image, Jack Kirby’s bit of prophecy from 1959. What you probably don’t know is that there’s actually a story attached to this splash page, one that has to do with dreams and visions and is itself a neat bit of prophecy as well.

A controversial paper by Dr John Brandenburg claims that life on Mars was wiped out by a nuclear attack. 

The idea that a civilization on the planet Mars was once decimated by a nuclear strike orchestrated by an advanced extraterrestrial race sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie, yet in a bizarre new paper plasma physicist Dr John Brandenburg has proposed that this scenario may have actually taken place. 

The propulsion technologies expert maintains that entities hostile to “young, noisy civilizations” may have taken exception to the planet’s inhabitants and could do the same to us here on Earth. 

His research, which is entitled “Evidence of a Massive Thermonuclear Explosion on Mars in the Past, The Cydonian Hypothesis and Fermi’s Paradox,” bases the claim on a combination of factors including the composition of the planet’s soil and the discovery of large concentrations of Xenon-129 in its atmosphere, something typically seen following a nuclear incident. 

“Given the large amount of nuclear isotopes in Mars atmosphere resembling those from hydrogen bomb tests on Earth, Mars may present an example of civilization wiped out by a nuclear attack from space,” Brandenburg wrote.

IT NEVER ENDS

I don’t have nearly as impressive an example as any of that but I’m fascinated by this odd bit of dream-logic prophecy, which was actually one of the earliest posts on this blog. 

Needless to say I was obsessed with The X-Files before it even aired so it’s not surprising that I’d be dreaming about it in 1994. This was actually a pretty incredible dream, one that I can still picture with almost cinematic clarity. And like the Kirby story it was one of those dreams where you watch the action then become the action. Here’s what I wrote in the original post:

This was in a old journal from 1994/5. Unfortunately I didn’t date it, since I wrote it in the dark in the middle of the night. But there’s a clue in there that pinpoints when it was written.* The chicken-scratch scrawl you see there says: 

X FILES

AGAINST SATAN

PUTS SCULLY IN DANGER

MULDER CRAWLS HOME

PULLS OUT PRAYER IN BOOK

FIRE APPEARS ON PICTURE FRAME+ HE IS REVIVED

Here’s what I remember: It was one of those dreams where you watch the action and then take part in it- you know, standard dream-logic. I was Mulder in the dream. I was very badly hurt and had put Scully in danger; Satan was after her. 

I was crawling through a front door in a house and the Sun was rising outside. In my jacket pocket I had a small book that had prayers in it. A small flame appeared on the bottom edge of a picture frame on a mantlepiece. I knew the flame was the Holy Spirit and that Scully had sent it. I rubbed my finger along the flame and I was restored.

In this episode (‘Provenance’) an FBI agent was sent to infiltrate a UFO cult but “went over to the dark side” and “became whacked out himself.” In essence he became Mulder, a straight arrow agent who becomes a believer in aliens.

As you see he is badly hurt, and is crawling. He’s ultimately on his way to Scully’s house, which is Mulder’s other house at this point in the series.

Here he pulls out a piece of a spaceship out of his jacket, which is emblazoned with religious texts, or prayers if you prefer. My jaw hit the couch when I saw this.

“Oh, but that’s not Mulder,” I hear someone saying, “what kind of prophetic dream is that?” Well, never mind that Mulder is a Massachusetts boy like myself, what really got my attention is that the actor who plays the FBI agent in “Provenance” was born the next town over from my own birthplace, 5 months and 19 days before my own birthday. 

That’s quite a fucking coincidence. Or Synchronicity, if you prefer.

What’s the significance of the birthdate? In the grand scheme of things I don’t know. But 19.5, a number significant to hyperdimensional physics, is also a number that Richard C. Hoagland claims is encoded into the ruins of Cydonia.   

Cydonia was also the theme of an early and unjustly maligned episode of The X-Files, “Space.” Looking back it does suffer from some pretty hairy production and direction issues, but back in 1993 I thought it was the goddamn raddest thing I’d ever seen on TV.

I should note that the story concluded on episode 9.11 and that the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen famously had a 9/11 prophecy. “Flight 191” also contains an anagram for 9/11 as well. Make of that what you will.

NOTE:  I should also mention that there were at least four X-Files episodes where Scully specifically was in danger from Satan or a demon (‘Irresistible’, ‘Revelations’, ‘All Souls’ and ‘Orison’, when Donnie Pfaster was retconned as a demon) and that it would be the ’94/’95 season when that would begin.