Chapter 1 |
Chapter 8 (Excerpt):
BINDING THE WOUND OF TIME
We think we know Time. What we've done in the past stay done --you can't unfry an egg. The present is palpably now. The future is down the road, and not ours to see: Que sera sera. But the picture given by Healing Dreams is markedly, wildly different. For here the straight time-line along which we wend our way is but a narrow path, hemmed by a blind fence, surrounded by a vast, mysterious landscape. To explore it is to risk life never again looking quite the same. If Healing Dreams can be said to have a purpose, it is to personally include us in the wider business of the universe. It is fairly likely that if you watch your dreams closely, you will find they occasionally contain instances of outright prediction. These may be titanic, or, as seems to more frequently be the case, oddly trivial--- you dream about a friend you haven't seen in ten years and she calls the next day; an image from a dream shows up in a movie you see a week later, and you're certain it wasn't in the previews. Often the dream will pick an element of the coming days that stands out as an exception to your usual routine. Karl tells me that when he was ten, he dreamed: I go to my school superintendent's house to collect the weekly fee for my paper route. As I walk up to the porch, I noticed that the windows are completely black, and I hear a woman crying. "I didn't think much of it, other than that it felt strange," he says. He did in fact have a paper route that included the superintendent's home. A few weeks later, as he went to collect his money, he was shocked to see "the house was exactly like my dream--the black curtained windows, a woman's piercing cries. I knocked, and someone I didn't recognize opened the door and asked me to come back another time. When I got home, I found out the superintendent had died of a heart attack that morning." Karl has had similar dreams throughout his life, but finds their purpose, if they have any, puzzling. Although they tend to have a recognizably eerie feeling, he is never sure that they will be predictive until the events they foretell actually happen. "I've never been able to figure out what it is I'm supposed to do with them, if anything,” he says. “I guess they're there to show me there's more to life than meets the waking eye."
I have always regarded so-called precognitive dreams with an almost urgent fascination. How amazing it would be to be able to peer around time's corner, to know the future outcome of a choice facing us in the present. But the first instances in my life, too, were trivial. In my early twenties, ... |
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More, indeed: If such dreams are real, they batter our very idea of time in a hailstorm of insoluble paradox. They force a revision of our most hallowed axioms concerning causality itself, by which it is generally assumed that if cause A (an event) produces effect B (a memory ), A must have preceded B in time. But here, B precedes A. The law of cause and effect is mocked by what amounts to "backwards causation."