From time to time I have had dreams which seemed to be a future event or setting. Later, fully awake, I suddenly encounter something which brings up the dream so vividly the effect is deja-vu, as if I am living something I already experienced. Once I seemed to be in the city of Savannah where I was born but at some distant time in the future when the city is more like Venice, a place with canals and riverine housing along these canals. I was somehow inside one of these houses looking out a window-like French door with muslin curtains. I saw a courtyard next to a canal with elaborate garden landscaping and a fountain in the center, the focus of the garden area surrounded by wrought iron fenching and an ornate gate. I woke up thinking I had dreamed of the city when global warming brought the sea into the streets, a time many decades in the future. The next year I was walking around Savannah on a vacation trip and passed by a courtyard very much like the dream images. I was stunned. I could hardly believe the evidence of my own sight. It was just one luxurious house behind wrought iron gates. There were no canals. At least not yet. But the house and the courtyard with the fountain were much as I dreamed them. So, are dreams sometimes a kind of memoir of future times?
There are future possibilities I would rather not envision for my city or that of anyone else. In Grade Seven we used to have Civil Defense drills for possible nuclear war--about 1956. We had to leave the school and walk to a railroad location nearby where, presumably, we would be taken far away from a possible Ground Zero. Even then I knew the timing was all wrong. We would never have such a luxury of time to escape incoming bombers or ballistic missiles. But it was a beautiful spring day and I was flanked by two beautiful young girls who enjoyed my shyness and who insisted on holding my hand all the way to the railroad tracks. What a way to go! If I was going to die it was a wonderful sight to have as my last view on this planet. I can still see them vividly, one with reddish blonde hair and the other black gypsy-like tresses. They both leaned over my desk with their loose blouses before the walk, talking to me and letting me glimpse treasures far beyond my shy imagining. (I turned red but also felt an intense and mysterious exhiliration.) Their smiles in the spring air made the excursion one of the most pleasant in my school career. On a later visit to my old school I saw a sign on the outside of the nearby post office building to mark an air raid shelter, the familiar radiation symbol with black and yellow triangles and the letters CD for "Civil Defense." I tried to remove one for a souvenir of the official craziness that regarded such places as safe from nuclear weapons. It held fast. It would remain long after even bureaucrats were faced with the brutal reality of how inadequate such shelters were.
Fortunately, I have had many dreams which did not come to pass so I don't have to panic whenever I have a terrible dream that seems "pre-cognitive" or prophetic. I dreamed of being on a large airplane that crashed right into downtown Savannah. I can vividly remember how the buildings looked as I gazed out the window just before the crash into the area near Forsyth Park and toward the City Hall. John Allen Paulos in his book, Innumeracy, says we all have dreams which project the future so it is hardly surprising if some predictions occasionally come true. Scientifically trained, I was quite willing to take his rational explanation at face value. But my dreams that have been true are incredibly detailed and hardly likely to be mere coincidental events. I once dreamed that a friend I had not seen in a long time had moved and I saw vividly the place she moved to. I called her and told her about a rose trellis in her garden. She said it didn't exist. A few weeks later I visited and found the rose trellis for her to see. That is only one of many dreams I have had over the forty years I have known her and often they are remarkable accurate. How does one explain that?
Once, many years after we had not seen each other and she was somewhere in Europe, I dreamed I saw her in a place in Austria called the Goethehaus Restaurant. I saw the interior vividly down to the sawdust on the floor in the deli area. Just before waking I remembered seeing her in Cambridge, England. Later that morning I called a mutual friend who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She nearly dropped the phone when I related the dream. She was flying out to meet the person I saw the following day--in Cambridge, England. Later after I did really see the woman of my dreams again, it took her a few years to tell me she had eaten in a restaurant that was like the one I described. Black Elk, the Sioux Elder, was in Europe and very homesick when he dreamed of flying over his village out in the American West. He saw the people vividly. Later when he returned he was able to verify that what he saw was accurate. There are no simple explanations for such dreams. Come to think of it, there are no simple explanations for life itself. Dreaming and waking have always been a little hard to distinguish at times. For those who go mad perhaps they become equivalent.
When I taught on a Mohawk Reserve I learned to take "synchronicity" (or "meaningful coincidence") as a normal mode of perception. Indians often meet without any explicit plan. Once I wanted to give a present to a Mohawk woman who had drawn a beautiful owl for me, one in the act of transforming into a person. I had no idea where to find this woman and was living in Montreal. I had two crystals to give her, a piece of amethyst and a piece of clear quartz. I was walking down the street when I saw a postal employee who delivered mail in my neighborhood. I told her my story. She said, without surprise: "Oh, I know her--I will deliver your gift to her." I gave her the crystals. Later I learned that they were roommates. But with Indians such matters as "meaningful coincidence" are not considered at all unusual. In fact I got the job there not long after consulting a palm reader and astrologer with my last fifty dollars of unemployment benefits. He said I would be working soon with a totally different culture and language. (He was from India himself.) I asked if he meant French and he said he did not. I was astonished later when I reviewed what he saw in my palm. I have no explanation for all this. It is a different way of looking at what we call "reality."
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