many a times I have not known that a person has died and have dreamt of them, in my dreams they have communicated to me that they are fine. Only later I come to know that they have died. The dreams usually occur within a week of death.
Pls help me understand the connection

The day my brother’s best friend committed suicide, I dreamt of him committing suicide by electricuting himself with heavy duty open wires, at 4 am in the morning, in my dreams, and I woke up though feeling very sad, though didn’t reveal to anyone the dream. Later in the evening the news broke, and I realised my dream was accurate. with details and time. How could this be possible, that I dream of this death to the exact modus operandi simultaneously with the real action happening i.e. coinciding with the time of suicide. If it helps there was no such warning of this incident, he had gone for a job interview and had bagged it.
Please do help clarify, I have been seeking an answer to this for last 10 years.

-Tony Crisp 2011-04-15 11:59:16

Ann – One of the messages I am trying to communicate is that we are nearly all blind to the real would around us and what it means. Human evolution, like animal evolution, has fitted us so we are suited to a particular niche. In our case to as researchers have said a niche that only allows us to see a small spectrum of light and other things surrounding us; only suitable to see obvious dangers and procreate. University of London physicist David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein’s and one of the world’s most respected quantum physicists said that, “We are steeped in the conviction, because of our view of the world through the limited view of our physical senses that everything has a distinct location. But what Bohm arrived at was that at the quantum level, the idea of separation of location ceased to exist. There existed what physicists call ‘non-locality.’”

He was not saying that at the physical everyday level of the way we experience ‘reality’ that things do not have separate existence. But they are saying that underlying this appearance is non-separation. If one can begin to grasp this, the argument about the mind body separation loses its difficulty. How can there be separation when there is non-locality at the basis of our existence?

Okay that may take some digestion as we are, as he said, ‘steeped in our convictions’ of separation – separation of person from person; separation of things at a distance; separation from our mind from every other mind.

If you think of it as levels – and this is only a way of easier thinking of it – then at the level of our physical senses we are all separated in every way. Then in our dreams we tend to carry over this idea of separateness to some extent, only occasionally we breakthrough and have a dream that shows our view is all wrong. But of course it seems irrational as all our training has been in the view of life from an old paradigm.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a paradigm as – “A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.” We could say, in regard to the western mind, that many of us share ‘assumptions, concepts, values’ and prejudices that are at the base of how we believe life to be, and we consider to be reality. However, if we examine this ‘reality’ we see it is made up of a set of theories and beliefs that have become culturally and generally accepted. The imprisoning aspect of this is that we take these assumptions, these theories of what reality is, to be reality itself. We actually see and live in the world as if the shifting theories are concretely real.

As Richard Tarnas explains, “As with all powerful myths, we have been, and many perhaps remain, largely unconscious of this historical paradigm’s hold on our collective imagination. It animates the vast majority of contemporary books and essays, editorial columns, book reviews, science articles, research papers, and television documentaries, as well as political, social, and economic policies. It is so familiar to us, so close to our perception, that in many respects it has become our common sense, the form and foundation of our self image as modern humans.”

In its simplest form, the paradigm mentioned can be described as having arisen from the mechanistic ideas of Newtonian physics, in which the universe was seen as a huge mechanical device. As Newtonian physics developed, the fundamental particle of the universe was defined as the atom. Nothing in scientific research at the time could prove that anything existed beyond the atom, and the atom is a physical object. Therefore, nothing other than physical substance was ‘real’. This, so it appeared, disproved the possibility of personal awareness being anything other than some trick of chemicals, molecules and atoms in the brain and body. Personal awareness does not exist except as a product of the physical brain. There could be no spirit or life after death because, after all, we are only atoms! Nothing in our consciousness can exist unless it is produced by the brain.

But the most staggering thing about the new model was that it suddenly made sense of a wide range of phenomena so elusive they generally have been categorised outside the province of scientific understanding. These include telepathy, precognition, mystical feel¬ings of oneness with the universe, and even psychokinesis, or the ability of the mind to move physical objects without anyone touch¬ing them.

So I hope this long explanation makes some sense of your wonderful example that at a level of our being we share awareness. This is particularly true with people we know or are family. If it needs a simpler explanation I will give it, but I wanted it not be my own opinion.

As you have the ability to reach into a shared awareness, it might be worth your while developing it.

Tony