Psychic Dreams

Today I’m going to talk about two kinds of spontaneous psychic dreams. First I’ll give some examples from the Telepathic Dream Group that I was in for 4 years. Then I’ll touch on dreams and visions people had before 9/11 that they sent to the ASPR.

The Dream Group

When Montague Ullman was president here, he started a dream group at the ASPR to look at psychic dreams in real life, looking at natural ways ESP might happen when it wasn’t limited by an experimental set up. The group lasted 7 years, and I was in it for the last 4 years.

A small group met once a week. We wrote down our dreams during the week, and made copies for each other to read. When we met, we looked for psychic connections between our dreams, between our dreams and each other’s lives, and sometimes, later, we also noticed things in the future that related to our dreams.

I’m just going to show you the dreams I had when I first entered the dream group.

The bucket of ice water

The first time I went, it was a trial run to see if I was a good fit for the group. I wasn’t very prepared. I had brought only one dream from the night before. It was a food dream. The dream:

Food and fish stores, four men with swords — the 4 Musketeers — all speared the same red fruit…. I had to make dinner. I was cutting up vegetables. I cut a carrot in 4 pieces, white and sweet potatoes, I had some trouble measuring barley…and then… someone brought in a bucket of ice water.

There were also themes of disappointment. I was worried about wilting flowers I had picked. I didn’t like the fish store. There was an incompetent Batman. When the bucket of ice water appeared, I thought of asking Batman to put it in the refrigerator but figured he wouldn’t be able to… Robin was disappointed with Batman. One of the four swordsmen who speared the fruit said “sorry” about being clumsy with the sword.

In that first dream group meeting, someone said the dream meant something to her. She said she had to make dinner the night before my dream. She had cut up vegetables to make vegetable tempura. She used a new recipe, which didn’t use ice water. She said she usually used a bucket of ice water for vegetable tempura, to get the vegetables very cold first. The tempura didn’t work too well without the ice water. She was disappointed — sorry she hadn’t used ice water.

What my dream and her life had in common — making dinner, cutting up vegetables, and disappointment — are all common things that could be coincidence. But the bucket of ice water is interesting.

Before hearing her association, the bucket of ice water was an odd intrusion in the dream that made no sense to me. Her association would never have occurred to me, it was outside my experience. I never made vegetable tempura and never heard of using ice water for it. The image of the bucket of ice water appearing in my dream looks like a psychic link to her — and her disappointment with a new recipe missing a bucket of ice water the night before. In the dream I am worried about wilting flowers; her vegetables wilted when she cooked them without the ice water.

Four keeps repeating in this first dream: the four Musketeers, cutting the carrot in four pieces, the four spears in the single fruit, and there were now four women in the Dream Group, counting me. Did the dream suggest we were the four Musketeers with Monte as our D’Artagnan? “All for one and one for all” might be one way of characterizing the telepathic intimacy we were attempting to explore.

Brother and sister clowns

My second week, I had three dreams for the group, on consecutive days, the days closest to the second meeting, culminating in what was almost a “shared dream” between Monte and me from the morning of the day the group met. On Tuesday, I dreamed:

A racehorse “6 hands high” — we were going to enter him in a race… There were two people who were either brother and sister or an entertainment team, like a circus act…. An entrepreneur-announcer said to get them for his show. Just then one of them happened by, entered the race. When I first saw this couple, they were in a large room with beat-up tables and chairs, and an area splattered with water on the grey concrete floor — a hotel lounge — a mess because people had been fighting. The man and woman, dressed like circus people or ancient Romans, went up the staircase to their room. There was some long tedious task…it involved…one at a time….

After reading this dream, a woman in the group said that in her real life, since we had last met, her friend had said to her “I lost my brother and sister clown” and had asked her to be a partner in a clown act. It was the time of gas shortages and there were very long lines of cars waiting to buy gas, one at a time, with drivers’ tempers sometimes flaring during the wait. She agreed to join the act and the two of them dressed as clowns and did shows by the roadside to entertain the motorists sitting in the long lines of cars waiting for gas so the drivers wouldn’t get so angry and frustrated.

She also mentioned that she worked in a hotel for ex-mental patients who were always having fights in the lobby and breaking the furniture. There were never enough chairs in the lobby because of the fighting. She had just had to order 6 more tables and chairs because of a commotion. The lobby was a large room, the furniture was beat-up and the floor was concrete, just as in my dream.

The number “six” of the height of the racehorse (six hands high) in the dream matched the number of six tables and chairs she ordered in real life. The “brother and sister clown” in real life is very close to the “brother and sister or an entertainment team, like a circus act” in the dream, and the beat-up furniture in the large hotel lounge with grey concrete floor and a mess because of people fighting is almost exactly the same in my dream and her life. The clowns in real life are clowning to change the irritable mood and stop the fighting that was breaking out among the motorists in the gas lines, and there is more fighting to be stopped in the lobby of the hotel.

The juxtaposition of the pair of images in both dream and life — “the brother and sister clown” with the “beat-up furniture in the large hotel lounge with grey concrete floor where people had been fighting” — is unexpected, rare and surprising, and highly likely to be a psychic interaction between my dream and her life.

Dream images for everyone

On Wednesday, I dreamed:

Herb Schulman (a Mathematician I knew) was with some black-haired woman — they were sitting in a sort of rowboat or canoe. Something about two enormous cigarettes full of thyme.

One of the women in the dream group, with black hair, who looked a little like the dream woman, said that she met her cousin the day before this dream — her cousin wanted to fix her up on a blind date with a (different) Herb Schulman. Another woman in the group said she had just found a canoe trip for her sister to go on. The third woman dreamed the night before about “a cigar to pass the time.” If this is a psychic connection and not a coincidence, this word-play joke (pass the time and pass the thyme) stretches between two people’s dreams, and could only be enjoyed as a joke because the two dreams were going to be read together side by side in the future by both dreamers.

This brief dream seemed to have connections to all three of the other women in the group at the same time, as if I wanted to show to all of them at once that I belonged with them.

Mirrored dreams

Here are two very ordinary dreams that only became interesting because we shared them in the dream group. Taken together they suggest an extraordinary connection between Monte and me while we were both asleep the night before my second dream group. My dream:

We (women and kids — including a friend and her daughter) were trying to get a bus, saw a bus coming, ran and jumped on. It was going the wrong way. I was fishing in my purse for money, hadn’t paid yet, we got off the bus. Got a bus in the other direction. I went to the driver to buy a ticket. I had strange foreign money… Paper bills, one started with a K (something like Kronin). I gave the driver a choice of different colored bills. The bills were larger than normal. He took one that I thought was the biggest denomination, maybe like a 20. He gave me some bills back, then some nickels and dimes…

Monte’s dream:

Lucy and I and her friend are in a taxi… The fare was $20 and I was looking at my bills trying to get $20 together in fives and singles. I finally decided to give him 4 fives and a dollar tip. The money seemed smaller than usual (colored money)…. Something about…having gotten wrong directions…

In the first dream group I ever attended, on June 14th, 1979, Monte had mentioned that in real life, some Swedish Kronor had been stolen from his house that week, and later recovered from the thief. In my dream the next week, the strange foreign colored money called “Kronin” is the clue that the dream has something to do with Monte. I had never been to Sweden and didn’t know Swedish money, and in the dream, I didn’t quite remember what the currency was called that I heard Monte talk about; I dreamed it was called Kronin rather than Kronor. Here is a list of the correspondences between the two dreams:

We are both traveling somewhere with others in a group, including a daughter. Both of us try to pay the driver. Both of us look at our money trying to figure out how to pay the right amount, with bills that are unusually colored and the wrong size. We are both concerned about going in the wrong direction.

Look at the symmetrical differences as well as the similarities between the two dreams. I was only a student and I am on a bus; Monte, a professional at the height of his career, is in a taxi. For me the money was larger than usual, for him the money was smaller than usual. I don’t understand the money and let the driver choose a bill for me (I have no control); he chooses which bills to give to the driver (he has control). I give a 20 to get back smaller bills. He gives smaller bills to make 20. In his dream there are fives and singles; in mine there are nickels and dimes. The symbolism of money can be about status, power, or position in life — his dream shows a higher status and my dream shows a lower status, which is exactly what our relationship is in the group I’d just joined. I was there to learn from him and he was there to teach me.

Psychic intrusions into dreams may happen for more than one reason. Specific people may be somehow important. In these dreams when I started going to the dream group, I may have wanted, unconsciously, to psychically scan the others in the group, to show that I belonged there. Another reason, maybe more important: psychic imagery entering a dream may be used as building blocks to construct dreams as metaphors to reflect current unresolved issues, problems or concerns — just like day residue from the day before a dream can be used in dream formation.

Precognition

I started to notice things happening that I remembered from a dream I had typed in the past, and I wrote notes in the pages of my typed dreams when these future events seemed related to a past dream.

Marsha parachute-jumping

Marsha was part of a group I went to once a week. I never dreamed about her before or since, but one night I had a dream:

There was a tall girl with glasses who was a parachute jumper…going up to jump…She made me think of Marsha.

About a month later I heard Marsha say she had just gone up in a plane to parachute jump. I was startled. I asked her when she had first thought of doing such a thing — I wondered if I had somehow heard her talking about the idea before I dreamed it — She said she had just met a man who had invited her to go up with him over the weekend. I pulled out the dream and showed everyone.

Marsha went up in a plane to parachute jump 24 days after I dreamed about it. She never imagined parachute jumping until ten days after my dream, when she met someone who suggested she come with him to try it. I had the typed dream with me when I heard her story.

Precognitive dreams from the dream group

I kept notes about these precognitive experiences for the four years I was in the dream group, writing my dreams down every day. In 50 months and 943 dreams, I had 96 examples (about 10%). I used two criteria to call a dream precognitive:

• At least 2 unusual elements that are not usually found together happen in both dream and future. For instance, Marsha and parachute jumping were both unusual — neither appeared in any other dream in the four years, and they aren’t usually found together.
• The future event must be completely unexpected. Inference or likelihood of guessing the event had to be excluded. For instance, if someone is sick, and they die, it might not be completely unexpected.

I noticed that most of the future events happened soon after a dream, but some didn’t appear until a lot of time had passed after the dream. I plotted the number of future events that happened as the time from the dream increased, and found this very regular fall-off. Most happened within a day of a dream, but some happened far in the future, with fewer and fewer as more time passed from the dream. I found that this pattern has always been found if you look at other collections in the literature.

I thought the fall-off over time might be just an artifact of forgetting old dreams, and mostly only noticing the future events that matched closer in time before a dream was forgotten — call it the Memory Artifact Hypothesis. But I had a way to check whether this was the reason for the fall-off. Because I had been typing my dreams and getting so excited by the psychic correspondences I was seeing, I carried my typed dreams around with me for months and showed them to anyone who would look. So I had about three months of very over-learned dreams because I kept reading them over and over. The memory artifact shouldn’t show up in these over-learned dreams because they were always fresh in my memory. But when I plotted the graph for only these three months, the fall-off was still there, it was no different. So whatever the fall-off was, it wasn’t about forgetting older dreams.

I also noticed that the matches between dream and future that were very far from each other in time were not more blurry or vague. There were fewer, but they weren’t less detailed.

If possible futures branch out like a tree

I realized that one idea that could explain the fall-off was if there were points in time where possible futures split off, and we saw various possible futures, but only one time line would actualize for us. We would never reach what we might have seen on the other branches of possible futures. There would seem to be fewer and fewer pre-seen things on our timeline because our view had been like a fan through the possibilities — like climbing a branching tree where you may glimpse many branch ends ahead of you, but only get feedback about the one path you end up on.

Before September 11

This is a picture of the number of 9/11 premonitions over increasing time spans from the dream to the event. Same pattern again.

A dream heard before 9/11

How do we know that the dreams actually happened before 9/11, since they were sent in afterwards?

We can’t always know. I asked people if they wrote the dream down before the event, and if they discussed it with anyone else beforehand. When I could, I contacted some of the people they talked to and asked for their memories of the conversation. A few were published or were mentioned in letters that had been mailed; some was art that had been shown before 9/11.

I’ll tell you about one from someone who I knew personally, who told various people about his strange dream the summer before, about planes hitting buildings in Manhattan and a feeling of war. I was among several people who heard about his dream beforehand. No one guessed the dream was about to happen. A few weeks before 9/11, David Vila from NYC had a dream:

…at the beginning of the dream I boarded a commercial jetliner…at an airport that seemed to be…in Manhattan… I was inside…and it took off. Seconds after taking off we were flying about 10 meters over a bridge that could have been one of several NY bridges… As we flew over the bridge, the plane started to have mechanical problems and fell to the bridge. As we were falling…I remember seeing other planes that were also falling.

The second scene was in a city that felt…like New York… I was in…Queens, and was looking over to the skyline of Manhattan. I could see the river separating me and Manhattan. …several…big commercial jetliners fell and crashed against the Manhattan skyline. I had a feeling of horror and confusion. In my dream I couldn’t believe what was happening and was horrified at the number of people who must have died.

Then…I remember seeing, and also just knowing, that the city became a situation of chaos. In my dream I didn’t know the cause… The reason…wasn’t just the crashing planes: there was a feeling of war and civil unrest. …I didn’t see anyone fighting. …I did see army trucks and police everywhere, as if we were in a state of war. The dream ended. I woke up feeling horrified and scared.

Since at the time I was living in Colombia, I interpreted my dream to be about my concern with the local safety risks. I thought that my dream had taken place in New York simply because that’s where I had lived most of my life. However, when a couple of weeks later New York was attacked, I felt that I had already lived it in my nightmare.

A waking vision two days before 9/11

I had a long correspondence that lasted for years with someone who’d like to be called DP from Michigan. He had an aunt who lived far away, and he felt she had died as he stood on his porch Sunday morning, two days before 9/11, then he had 3 visions. This is what he wrote:

A family member passed away on September 9th, about 300 miles away…. I always seem to know either ahead of time or immediately that a family member has died. I see it, feel it, know it, it climbs into my head without warning. I had just stepped out on the porch when it hit me and I knew she was dying that day; I felt my Aunt like she passed through me, took my breath away.

I placed my hand on a post to steady myself when I saw 3 images: a silver rocket hitting the world trade center, the pentagon in flames, and the White House standing untouched with the flag flying. I remember saying right out loud, why do so many innocents have to die.

In March I had premonitions of a disaster in September and being in a war by October but I didn’t understand who we would be at war with.

He told me that he discounted the premonition at the time because he told himself, you can’t shoot a rocket into the side of the trade towers. He told me:

I’ve had premonitions, visions, dreams since I was a kid, sometimes I’m awake, sometimes dreaming, sometimes I touch something and it happens, or just hear a news report on the radio or on TV. It’s always spontaneous, usually triggered I think from people, places or things in some fashion. My wife and the kids accept it because they’ve seen enough of it over the years but there is still…isolation, I keep a lot to myself…

He told me that he sometimes felt that a dream might be precognitive because there was a different quality to it, and offered to send me some of those as he dreamed them.

The Columbia shuttle disaster

One of the first dreams he sent, on January 29, 2003, was a premonition about being in a shuttle surrounded by flames, 3 days before the disaster happened. Dream:

I was on the space shuttle looking at the planet, and it was in flames; everything I could see was on fire.

Three days later, on Feb 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas and Louisiana when it reentered Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crew members. He told me more about his shuttle dream:

I was standing inside the shuttle looking at the planet below us, there were flames everywhere, and the middle east looked like it was being consumed by flames. I said (to myself) are they all going to die? A voice to my left said no, WE are going to die. I looked over and saw the shuttle crew in the front of the craft and one pointed to the back of the shuttle; when I looked the fire was coming in from the outside, and when I glanced back out the window the shuttle was engulfed in flames. The shuttle dream had a lot of the same emotional feelings as I had with the 9-11 visions.

Some people had never had a psychic experience before their 9/11 dream but others had a lot of psychic experiences. Some were comfortable with them and accepted them; others didn’t like having them and felt isolated by them. One reason for the difference may be whether there was an accepting and supportive place they could share the experiences in a positive way. Some had family or friends who also had similar experiences. Others felt they scared people, or that other people thought they were crazy if they mentioned them.

DP felt isolated by his psychic experiences. He first told me, “I want total anonymity, I struggle with this enough, but I am tired of struggling alone.” He became more comfortable with them over the years we corresponded — he finally had someone to talk to who found them normal and interesting.

Snow or ashes

Some dreams mentioned the unexpected detail that everything was covered with snow, ashes, or dust. Here’s one from someone with a personal connection to someone near the WTC. In February, Susannah A from Canada dreamed she was led downstairs out of her building:

I am told it’s an emergency and we should go quickly… We get outside and we are in the middle of an empty city — there is no one around and it is eerily quiet. There seems to be three feet of snow everywhere and it is not winter. I am told there has been a plane crash and I realize that the snow is, in fact, ashes. I’m confused because I don’t understand how a plane crash could cause so much ashes.

This dream was so vivid I thought it was going to happen on the day I woke up. After 9/11 she found out her sister’s friend was living near the World Trade Center and had to be evacuated from her building. Her dream begins with being led out of her building.

P.A. from WV had recurring dreams for two weeks before, and she told them to her husband and mother:

One dream was of planes crashing and burning…straight down into the Earth. The recurring dream was: people running covered with ash like from a volcano, charred people falling from the sky…. I told my husband of seeing three women crying, running and covered in ash. On 9/11…my mother called many times to say “your dream, your dream.” My husband finally got through on the phone and he said the women from my dream were on CNN…

Seeing through others’ eyes

There were about 40 dreams from people who seemed to be experiencing what happened to someone else. A few specifically said it felt like they were seeing through others’ eyes. Here’s one that also mentions snow — B.L.H., from Illinois, said:

…often when I dream…it is as if I can see through someone else’s eyes (as well as touch, feel, etc.). 3 days prior to 911 I dreamed I was in a city, surrounded by skyscrapers. Something like huge gray snowflakes were falling all around me from the sky. I realized that it was ashes… I was…led to an area where all around me were dead people in body bags… After that all I remember is…overwhelming grief.

A mother wrote about the repetitive nightmares her daughter had for months before 9/11. She said:

My young daughter’s best friend was on one of those planes on September 11. Starting in about May or June, my daughter started having terrible dreams. For years, she had been prone to night terrors, when she would wake up terrified but not remember having woken up, but these dreams were different. These dreams were the same each time and she remembered them. She woke up completely after each one, absolutely terrified. It would take many minutes to calm her down. They occurred…every two weeks, sometimes more often. By the middle of July, I began getting concerned. I asked her about them. She told me she felt like she was being crushed. I suddenly had an overwhelming sense that something terrible was going to happen. An image of an airplane fleeted through my mind. I was convinced that she was going to die, on an airplane or a car or something else. The dreams went on. She had the last the week before September 11. They have never reoccurred… But I feel sure she has never made a connection with the September 11 events.

In her dream, she remembers being in a group of people — she couldn’t tell where. The group was the same each time. A few other people — she says they were people but they reminded her of cartoon characters — were telling her and the other people what to do. They were being ordered around, and my daughter was terrified she wouldn’t do what she was told. Then, she remembers being in the middle of the group of people. This is where she felt crushed, but she felt also safer. Then the terror, and she woke up. I look at this not only as a premonition but as a testament to the power and strength of friendship. My daughter was the “rock” for her friend, who was a very emotional child. Perhaps in sharing the terror of that day, she was taking some of the burden away.

MSgt William F. Farrar Jr. USAF (AMC), Ramstein Air Base, Germany, wrote:

It was the Sunday night prior to that Tuesday’s disaster that I woke up from the following nightmare: I was standing, body pressed and partly hunched down against a copper-plated and large glass window facade…at the corner of the building. Peeking around the corner I could see a large courtyard and one of the large trade tower buildings rising up through grainy, gray-black haze. Just then a woman pulled up to the curb in a large new SUV. I was about to run when I saw that she was about to get out of the car. I stayed to shout at her to get back inside the vehicle (since there were fragments of stone flying/whizzing by horizontally the speed of bullets and hitting all around us). It was then I looked up and saw the boiling black cloud rushing towards me and thought “too late…I’m dead” (no chance to outrun it). I woke up in a sweat and told my wife about it first thing that morning.

He added that in the dream he felt he might have been a NYC police or fireman on the ground when he shouted, get back inside the vehicle.

A woman woke up screaming two days before 9/11. She told her husband she dreamed she was choking in black smoke, feeling a combination of running, being shoved and falling, with hundreds of other people, in a stairwell, everyone screaming. She knew she was somewhere floors above ground but not somewhere she’d been before. She felt a blow to the side of her chest from something large enough to kill someone and woke up feeling the pain in her side, which lasted for more than a week.

KM from Phoenix described many fragmentary dreams over two years, and said: one thing that I have come to realize is that although at first I thought that it was me in these dreams, I think now that somehow I was looking through the eyes of somebody else.

I had dreams of the World Trade Center tragedy for 2 years prior…several fragmented dreams. They began…with a simple dream of being on top of one of the towers on a beautifully clear day and feeling the fear/exhilaration of being up so high. The next dream I had of the WTC, I was again on top of it or…near the top — I was with someone else and we were jumping off the tower… the dream ended just before impact. The other dreams…had to do with either being on a plane that was in turmoil prior to crashing, or witnessing a plane crashing into a tall building… These dreams did not have any sequence to them. They were very fragmented… After 9/11 the pieces seemed to come together. I haven’t had any similar dreams since.

Scott R. Scribner, Ph.D. from Long Beach, CA, woke agitated from a vivid and alarming dream three days before 9/11. On Saturday, September 8, 2001, he says:

In the dream, I was in an unfamiliar office with co-workers I did not recognize. Suddenly the office shuddered violently. All present began asking what had happened. I asked “Did we just have an earthquake?” After some time passed, the office lurched sideways and began to fall. I went to the window and looked out to see that we were above a very large city. I turned to someone who had a telephone and said “This is it. We are gone. Please tell my wife that I love her.”

Another had a vivid, horrifying dream almost a week before. Saw the two towers, and saw people on the plane through the eyes of a hijacker. Feeling fear everywhere, feeling the speed of the plane, hardly had time to think before hitting one of the towers. Felt head thrust forward, body shifted out of its seat, hit a curtain and a wall. Then a sky view of the towers — saw one of them fall. Felt regret without knowing why. Heard someone scream oh my god, and the dream ended.

In the early summer of 2001 Kat McMath from NJ dreamed she was in a multistoried building in NYC:

I knew that I was up on about the 9th or 10th floor and that there were many floors above me… Suddenly, there was a very loud noise that shook the building. At first I thought we were having an earthquake and I ran to the doorway frame to hold on. But as I looked around the room…with more deafening noise, the whole side of the wall was ripped out and some of the people in the room were sucked out…with great force. I thought to myself that it was as if an airplane had crashed into the building. I…headed for the stairwell. I was running down flights of stairs and I could now smell smoke and feel the building shaking and crumbling from above… I woke up with my heart racing so fast I was shaking. I called my sister the day after I had the dream and described it in detail. The day of the attacks, I immediately called my sister…and she said that all she kept thinking about was my dream.

S. M. from Bourne, MA, worked in aviation security at Boston Logan International Airport as a security inspector at the time of the hijackings:

About six months before the hijackings, I had two dreams within three weeks of each other. In the first dream, it seemed I was standing inside a cockpit, while the pilots flew the plane. The only vivid thing I remember is we were flying BETWEEN two very tall buildings and I knew we were going to crash; I woke up very frightened. The second dream was more detailed. Again I was inside the cockpit, but I knew it was a UAL airplane and we were rolling up and down over hills very close to the ground… and again knew we were going to crash, and again woke up very frightened. I have tried to rationalize these dreams away for a very long time, but can’t seem to forget… The only thing that makes any sense to me at all (and it doesn’t really) is that I somehow picked up on the energy of one of the hijackers while I was working at the airport.

Richard Melko from Fairfield, CT, began 9-11 with a nightmare:

I saw hundreds of people with their faces covered with cracked sheet-rock falling off to reveal burnt and bloody faces. They all looked the same with patterned cracks appearing on their faces. Everyone knew they were going to die. The people were all seated in long rows as in an aircraft and there were terrorists walking up and down the aisles… A few people were trying to escape out of one of the gaping holes of the structure. I could see through one large opening that I was high up in a building overlooking water, then more land beyond… The only thing is there was no escape… Later, while having breakfast just before 9:00 a.m. I was watching the news and saw the first plane strike the tower… The moment I saw people running from the buildings with their faces covered with cracked sheet-rock and dust, and some were burnt and bloody underneath, was the point I connected my bizarre dream to the day’s events. My dream occurred just hours before. I was WITH all those people in the plane that struck one of the towers.

Joan Baxter, Salem, OR, said:

I had a psychic dream…a week before the attack. I remember being on a plane and seeing a Middle Eastern man blocking the aisle. I was bracing myself for an impact. I had a tremendous sense of feeling like I had no control of where the plane was going. I remember seeing a building. After that I was in a very bright tunnel. I was being pulled down the tunnel and the force was so great that I couldn’t stop it… At that point, it wasn’t a dream anymore, but very real and frightening. I woke up clinging to my bed — white knuckles — and still upset… I was in a state of shock that morning. I knew that the towers were going to collapse before the people could get out.

She told me later: I still think about this experience from time to time because of the tremendous force on my physical body being pulled into the death tunnel. She also described a childhood experience: when I was four years old, our family was camped in Yellowstone Park… When I got out of the car, I began to have a crushing sensation on my head. My head hurt so bad I was crying and went back to our car. Our family decided to stay in a motel that night instead. The next day, I overheard my parents talking about what had happened at that campground the night before. There was a great earthquake in the night and the entire mountain came down over the campground. This was the Hebgen earthquake in 1959.

Charmaine Valdez, Albuquerque, NM, dreamed she was a man:

I was sitting…in my living room when…I drifted off… I was in my office and saw myself raise my right arm to brace myself from the falling ceiling tiles. What struck me is that I was wearing a starched, white dress shirt and cufflinks. I felt I was mid-thirties, a white male with dark hair. I was not alone. Many, many people were there. I WAS THERE… I knew I had been in an office. “I saw a lot of concrete falling in on many, many people.” Got up the next morning to see the second plane hit.

The medium

Susan Maxwell-Trumble is a medium from Long Island:

In January of 2001, I did a reading for a client who recorded our session… once I am done doing a reading, I generally forget it. During the day of 9/11/2001, I kept feeling as if I did a reading for someone who was in the Twin Towers, but couldn’t recall the person or the reading. That evening at 6:00pm I got a call from someone who without introduction said to me, “You told me I’d be safe, you told me I’d be safe!” Back in January she recorded me asking her if she worked at the World Trade Center. When she said yes, she told me I grabbed her wrist and said I saw terrible destruction to the Twin Towers, people were falling out of windows, fires and bodies everywhere, total destruction — but her deceased grandmother wanted her to know that she would survive this! She had to run, run, run, but she had to know that she would be safe! Of course, at the time of this reading in Jan. (9 months before) this sounded crazy, it just didn’t make any sense!

On the morning of Sept. 11th, my client was coming out the subway and entering her building… she entered the building just as the plane hit Tower One. In the chaos of the moment, people were walking around wondering what to do, when the other plane hit Tower Two. As she left the building, there was flaming debris everywhere. According to my client, suddenly the reading we had had back in January clicked in. She remembered her grandmother told her to run and that she would be safe. As she began to run as fast as she possibly could, she felt as if her grandmother’s presence was with her. She ran and ran all the way to Little Italy. At the end of the conversation I had with her, my hair was standing on end. I totally forgot the reading until she reminded me of it the evening of 9/11.

Koren from LI was the client. I contacted her, she confirmed it. Koren first went to Susan for a reading after the death of a friend; before she even sat down, Susan started speaking about her deceased friend who saw Koren’s future — there would be a big disaster in New York but that she would be safe, it wasn’t her fate to be hurt in the massive destruction. Koren said she saw the medium about twice a year since 1998, and taped Susan’s predictions of mass destruction in New York in many readings over the years. She had another reading in January 2001:

The medium said that my deceased Grandmother came through. My Grandmother saw me running through disaster and destruction. She described it like it was a movie. She saw my Grandmother hold my arm and that she would be with me during this time like a “guardian angel,” who would guide me out to safety.

September 11, 2001 came. Koren worked in building #4 attached to WTC #1. She came in from the subway that morning to find agents screaming to get out of the building. No one knew what was happening and there were crowds trying to get up the stairs but people at the top were frozen in shock. By the time she pushed through and got to the top, the first plane had hit. There were people falling and jumping out. She thought the top of the building would topple and fall on them so she started running as fast as she could… The second plane hit and it sounded like a bomb. She dropped the phone and ran as fast as she could… She kept running to Chinatown. It was empty — she remembered when she was young her father would take her into barbershops in Chinatown where there were old pay phones in the back. She found one. It didn’t work with money or a credit card, but miraculously it put her through to her family with a collect call. She found out what was happening then.

She thought she was going to die, tried to find a church, couldn’t, so she kept running to Little Italy, where she sat in a café for 5 hours. She said: only then did I realize that I was most fortunate to have found my way to a pay phone to contact my family and let them know I was safe — because pay phones or cell phones weren’t working or had long lines. I knew someone was with me, I could feel the presence. A couple of hours later, I was still in shock but I picked up the phone and called Susan. I told her she was right that I would be safe, and I know someone was with me guiding me through this whole day.

Dreams from more than thirty years before the towers were built

Bob W. was a policeman in the 9/11 rubble. He told me he had three dreams that all happened in the 1960s — six months, and three years apart, respectively. He had a fourth experience that was not a dream, but a voice in his head four days before 9/11. His first dream was when he had moved to a temporary place in Manhattan in September of 1965. While he was there he dreamed:

I am hurrying through…a large airline terminal… I know only that I must “catch” a specific plane and the faster I run to get to the boarding gate the longer the passageway becomes. Like a special effect in a movie the terminal increases in length in proportion to my effort. Finally I can just see part of the plane as it starts to taxi away. I get a good look at the tail of the plane. On the rudder are two large red letters that overlap somewhat, they appear to be two capital letters AA. …an airline attendant…says “that will never work…here take this flight.” Suddenly I am climbing a flight of stairs… As I climb… I can only see the tail section of the plane that I am about to board. On the rudder are large blue markings looking…like a letter in the alphabet, but not quite… The scene changes: somehow I am looking out the cockpit window and I can see the tail section of the plane that I just missed…. suddenly it disappears into what appears to be a silver grid of some kind and just before I wake up, all I can see is a bright orange light. I wake up in a cold sweat.

By July of 1966 he had moved to his own apartment. He had dinner with a few friends — one had flown in from Boston. He asked what airline his friend took. His friend answered “American Airlines” and showed the ticket envelope with the AA logo. Then Bob felt cold and even though it was summer he just couldn’t get warm. He excused himself and went home. Then he had a second dream: exactly the same dream as the one he had 6 months before. He says: the only difference was at the end of the dream, as I am looking from the cockpit window at the first plane, I seemed to be suddenly imbued with magic. With my right hand I was able to reach through the glass of the window and grab hold of the tail section of the plane ahead of us. Just as I got hold of it, it disintegrated into dust in the palm of my hand. Again I woke up in a cold sweat.

His third dream happened three years later. In the summer of 1969, he invited some friends down from Boston again. They were supposed to come on United Airlines, but they missed their flight. He had a vivid nightmare that night:

I found myself standing on the side of a volcano. Only this was no ordinary volcano. As I climbed to the top of it I was joined by many other people each dressed in different ways. Some were in business suits, some in a kind of uniform, some in construction clothing and some, like myself, in dungarees. We were all looking for something on the side of the volcano, which for some unexplained reason had large shafts of metal sticking out from all parts of the sides… There was a lot of smoke… All at once the scene changed to black and white. Everything now appeared in black and white and it was snowing. I asked someone “how could it be snowing in the summertime?” and received no reply. I then find myself walking in…a curved alleyway…paved in brown marble…highly polished. I look up and see the image of a large grid made of silver and ripped and jagged on the top of it. As I get closer, in one of the boxes of the grid I see a venetian blind pulled halfway up and gently swaying in the breeze… As I turn I am now walking up the wide steps of a plaza. Suddenly as I look up at the top level of the steps I see a large frame in black — and within the frame are three men in black and white, dressed in business suits, standing silently, motionless, side by side. I wake up feeling very, very cold. I only had this dream once; it never occurred again in any part or form.

His concluding experiences. On Friday September 7, 2001 he had finished work for the New York City Police Department. The new bike path from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge was now complete, and it was a beautiful day. He decided to ride the entire length of the new path:

As I approached the World Trade Center I looked up and the view was spectacular! I thought “I must bring my camera on my next ride to photograph this.” At the same time I heard a voice inside (I NEVER hear voices in my head) saying “this will not be here for that.” Then later, “this will all be destroyed.” Without thinking I replied out loud “That’s ridiculous!” “It will not be here” was the reply.

On September 11, 2001 the United States was attacked. American Airlines flight 11 from Boston slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center — the last fleeting image of the collision was the image of the AA on the tail of the aircraft as it plunged into the tower. United Airlines flight 175 from Boston slammed into the south tower of the World Trade Center, disappearing into the grid of the building’s face in a huge orange ball of flame.

On September 13, Bob joined a rescue detail and arrived at the site:

I found myself climbing a “mountain” of rubble, smoking and made of the shattered beams and columns of the destroyed buildings. There were a large number of people working at the site, many of them dressed according to the job they were doing — construction, investigation, fire rescue, police rescue. When I reached the top I could see within the twisted steel, at the very bottom, molten metal from the fires that still raged within. White ash was still raining down making it seem like it was snowing, as I made my way across a marble surface that was now bounded by the frames of two burning buildings. I looked up and saw what has now become the iconic image of the remaining framework of the lobby and mezzanine level of the south tower. As I got closer to a portion of the outer framework of the south tower that had landed close to Church Street I saw a venetian blind shade, still attached to its broken window and left hanging at about half the window’s height. I then turned and started to walk up the steps to One Liberty Plaza. When I got to the top step I noted that all the windows had been blown out by the collapse of the two towers. The ground floor was occupied by Brooks Brothers. There were three male manikins dressed in business suits, and covered in white ash making them appear to be black and white figures.

His first two dreams were in 1966, the year the WTC groundbreaking began. Before one of the dreams his friends had flown from Boston on American Airlines; before the last dream in 1969 they missed a flight on United. Groundbreaking began in 1969 for One Liberty Plaza — construction began in 1969 and it opened in 1973.

Final thoughts

I’ve given some examples of spontaneous psychic dreams in real life — some from the dream group, some from people who had 9/11 premonitions; some about familiar people, some about strangers, some about the future.

There are differences between most of the ESP in the dream group and the 9/11 premonitions. In the group, we were TRYING to see evidence of psychic connections between us. We were a cohesive group with a common focus and interest in psychic events. The group dynamic may have encouraged and even enhanced our psychic focus on each other — it might have helped make us more sensitive or aware of each other. Maybe we became more psychically connected to each other because we wanted it and allowed it to happen.

The people who connected to the 9/11 events had their attention drawn to the enormity of the event waiting for them in the future. They did not want to be connected to it, they did not know about it. It drew their attention to the future moment — maybe sometimes because their future selves were so affected by it emotionally. They did not want to be open to it; it intruded into their dreams and visions without being welcome. Bob W. got glimpses of his own future at an overpoweringly traumatic moment that would happen decades later. Others seemed to share the future consciousness of those who were there, like the young best friends where one seemed to experience the other’s last moments to come, until the moment arrived. DP had the visions of 9/11 at almost the same moment he felt his aunt pass through him and knew she had died. None of those who had 9/11 premonitions wanted them.

Some of the precognitive elements from my dreams in the dream group were also just glimpses of the future. It may be that we are connected to the future, or possible futures, just as we are connected by memory to the past.

My final thoughts are mostly questions. An unanswered question is what draws attention to these future glimpses. For the 9/11 dreams, it was enormous trauma. For at least some of mine, there were images that were meaningful dream metaphors about my current unresolved concerns. Is there some kind of hidden psychic web between all of us that can sometimes show up in dreams? Are we all connected? Or sometimes connected? How are we connected to the future? If people can get glimpses of their own future or someone else’s, does that mean the future can’t be changed? Like in A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge asks: are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only? This is the old question about free will versus determinism — can making a choice change what comes next, or is the feeling of having a choice just an illusion?

Some people said they felt guilty because they couldn’t prevent what they saw. Maybe 9/11 was unstoppable and inevitable. Bob W.’s vivid dream in 1969 had specific details he only recognized more than 30 years later, in 2001, when he was in the 9/11 rubble and in front of One Liberty Plaza’s blown-out windows. He was stopped in his tracks recognizing the images he had dreamed decades before — the images were meaningless when he had the nightmare; he had the dream before the buildings had even been built.

Psychic information can come in dreams or visions, but it is important to remember that even the most “psychic” people are often wrong — what they see shouldn’t be given too much weight unless the future shows they were right. DP, for instance, the man who sent me his dream about the shuttle disaster three days before it happened, had many psychic experiences. But he also sent me lots of dreams that he thought might possibly be psychic but didn’t happen. He couldn’t tell, ahead of time, which were which — and he knew he couldn’t.

A final thought I would like to leave you with is that this seems to be an ability that we ALL may have. Keeping a dream journal or discussing dreams with people we dream about sometimes allows us to see these connections happening that we would otherwise probably never notice. Now and then, if we share a dream with someone we dreamed about, we may learn that we got psychic information about something happening in that person’s life while we were dreaming. Paying attention to our own fleeting thoughts and feelings may also reveal these hidden connections. We may sometimes move in and out of each other — sometimes what we believe to be our personal thoughts may not totally be our own.