Dreamer: 20 Years of Psychic Dreams and How They Changed My Life

By Andy Paquette

Dictionaries say that dreams are a sequence of images from sleep. What is left out is that these images are recollections of something else. They are memories of experiences some fanciful some shatteringly real. When author Andrew Paquette first dreamed of the future he was able to avert a mugging that possibly saved his life. Over the course of the next twenty years he kept meticulous records of his dreams discovering in the process that future dreams are not only possible they are common. Even more importantly because of their quantity he was able to see that his dreams were not just isolated events but remembered snatches of a continuum of existence shared by everyone. In this groundbreaking book he destroys the myths of what dreams are how they are described what they mean and why they are or are not important.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Mar 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781846947285

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Introduction

Dreams are memories. They are not simply a series of thoughts, images, or emotions occurring during sleep, as Merriam-Webster’s dictionary describes them. Those things may be involved, but that is just another way to describe how the various elements of a dream are remembered. What happened to you today? Was it a collection of thoughts, images, and emotions? No. What happened to you today were a series of events that you participated in, either passively or actively. Your memory of your day, however, can be described using the dictionary definition for dream, apart from one thing: you weren’t asleep.

Why is there a special word for memories that originate from sleep, when there is no special word for memories related to waking activity? Because it is not generally accepted in western cultures that anything real happens during sleep, therefore, they are not memories, because there is nothing real to recall. Instead, the images themselves are the dream, like abstract paintings made by an artist without a model. This is like saying that the videotaped footage of a birthday party is the same as the party itself, except it denies the birthday party ever happened and accepts only the footage. From what is this footage supposedly created? According to Freud, repressed desires, combined with memories from our waking lives, are enough to fraudulently manufacture even the most vivid, magnificently detailed dream. More modern theories state that dreams are the by-product of chemical activity in the brain. It is wrong, but in academic circles, it is de rigueur to accept some permutation of this theory. Both of these ideas are dependent upon a wholly mechanical view of life, all of which is soulless, the random byproduct of purely physical forces.

To prove this wrong, one needs only one dream, one memory retained after sleep, that is demonstrably connected to something real but outside one’s own experience. There are reports of many such dreams throughout history. They are mostly isolated incidents, occurring on only a handful of widely spaced occasions in any given person’s life. Regardless of incidence, if any one of these are what they purport to be, then everything we’ve been told about dreams is wrong. In my own life, I have had hundreds of dreams that convincingly correspond with things that could not possibly be connected with anything I could be expected to know or imagine. These are dreams of future events, such as the 9/11 disaster, the Boxing Day tsunami, the Gulf War (both of them), of people at distant locations, friends, family, and strangers, people at the moment of death or severe distress, dreams of future Time magazine covers, and many more things. They are so numerous that to somehow retain a belief that dreams are literally some kind of accidental byproduct of brain activity or repressed desire would make no sense. How does random brain activity or a repressed desire create a dream of a future plane crash?

Over the last twenty years, I have made an effort to record, analyze, and understand my dreams. This avocation of mine was inspired by the social friction I encountered every time my knowledge of what dreams truly are came into conflict with daily life. This happened far more often than one might think, because so many beliefs are dependent on other core beliefs. If a person does not believe in the existence of a soul, for instance, then their perspective on all things related to death will be affected by it. Beyond that, it can have a pronounced effect on other life decisions, such as divorce, money, and career. It can affect one’s taste in poetry, music, film, and books. It touches so many aspects of one’s life, that a difference of opinion may be noticed in myriad ways. I found myself constantly confronted with contrary attitudes on this subject, as well as great curiosity. It is for this reason that I have decided to put down on paper a description of my experiences, and an explanation of what they mean.

My records are extensive, and the wealth of information they contain has proven enough to suggest some very intriguing possibilities. At the very least, certain dreams completely destroy commonly held skeptical arguments against precognition, telepathy, and out-of-body-experiences, among other things. That is the small stuff, however. Our sleep memories are more than the occasional intersection of the supernatural with our physical environment. They are a continuum of shared experience, something we all participate in at some level, whether to a weak degree or strong. They are memories of our other life, lived in another place, and with each other. Our memories may be fragmentary and riddled with mistakes, but if you make the effort you will see that they are not just images, they are recollections. If you know this, you can begin to work on improving your memory, and then you too will see that a dream is not a dream, it is something much, much, more.

Andrew Paquette

Part one:

Earthbound

Mundus Limus

Chapter One

Amsterdam

Two people come up from behind me. One flanks me on the right, the other walks directly behind me. They want me to go into an alley with them, an alley I now see to be less than a hundred yards away. I want to cry out, to get the attention of some of the people I see crossing the street, but one look from the man on my right and I know I’d better not. They want my money, but want to take it in private. I can’t run to the left because of a brick wall. I can’t run to the right because I am flanked on that side. I can’t stop walking because whoever is behind me keeps pushing me forward. Running forward would bring me to the alley. I decide that the situation is completely out of my hands. I will go in the alley, give them my money, and leave. With any luck, they’ll let me keep my passport.

The alley is deeper than it looked from the street. Inside, it is nearly empty, almost clean. The man behind me comes around to my side and brandishes a pistol. He waves me to the back of the alley, well away from any prying eyes on the sidewalk outside. There is what at first looked like a pile of rags lying on the ground at the rear of the alley. Another look and I realize it is a person. A corpse. At that moment, I know these men in front of me are responsible. I lose all my strength then, my knees buckle, and I sink to the ground.

The two men pause for a moment and exchange a few phrases in Dutch. They seem to think I am funny, kneeling on the ground, terror stricken. The man with the gun doesn’t pay attention to me for a moment. He holds the gun carelessly by his side, inches from my nose. I’m not going to get a better chance than this. I bring my hand to the gun as quietly as I can, intent on grabbing it. Neither man pays any attention to me. Emboldened, I feel the cool metal beneath my fingers when I touch the barrel. I am scared. I hesitate, and this is a mistake.

The gunman looks at me with sad, smirking eyes as if to say, too bad, and shoots me in the neck. The pain is intense. Every nerve I have screams from the overload of sensation. I want to yell, but can’t. My throat doesn’t work. Warm blood washes down my neck and soaks my shirt. I know I am dying. I don’t care about the muggers anymore. I forget they are there. I try to crawl to the street, but it is too far. Every beat of my heart pumps more of my blood into the alley, and with every beat the distance to the street seems to double. It takes an eternity to crawl ten feet. I am still an eternity away from safety and know I will die right there in that alley.

I feel my life slipping away. I grow faint to the point that I barely feel pain. I want to hold on, but can’t. I think of my girlfriend, Kitty, in New York. I love her, and can’t imagine leaving her this way. Even as I think all these things, I feel my spirit leave my body. My bloody, empty shell lies in the alley, fifteen feet from the sidewalk. Already the muggers are moving towards it to pull it back out of sight. I don’t care anymore. I want to see Kitty.

Now I am looking down on Kitty in her mother’s New York City apartment. I float near the ceiling. Kitty is alone. She sits at the kitchen table sipping tea. She hasn’t heard of my death yet, and probably won’t anytime soon. I want to scream at her, to tell her what has happened, that I am right there, that I am dead but not gone. She is completely oblivious. I know there is nothing I can do to attract her attention. I look at her mother’s ceiling for a while and wonder. So this is what it is like to be dead. I can’t believe it. I am really dead.

I have no idea what I should do next. I think about how I have died and how my spirit left my body. I realize then that it was thinking of Kitty that brought me to her. In this new state, I feel more aware of my surroundings than I ever was when alive. There isn’t much to do, but it is interesting that death is not only a rather peaceful event, but I feel more awake when outside of my body than in it.

Some colors on the ceiling attract my attention, pink and blue. I stare at them for what seems like a long time, but time doesn’t exist any longer, not for me anyway. There is something about these colors that is familiar. They are like the colors of a neon sign outside my apartment window in Amsterdam. My gaze travels down the wall to a window, where I see the sign. This is my apartment! And then I have another shock: I am alive! I am sitting upright in my cot; with my eyes already wide open. I must have been looking at my own ceiling with my eyes open while convinced of my death, but it was all a dream.

Full of adrenalin, I got out of bed to call Kitty. It was four in the morning in Holland, but would be a slightly more reasonable nine P.M. in New York. She couldn’t talk for long, but it was enough to work out the idea that it was time for me to return to the states. Clearly, the loneliness of living in a foreign country had taken a toll on me, or I wouldn’t have had such a frightening dream.

Kitty and I made arrangements to share an apartment in New York. Two weeks after the call, I went to the Verinigde Spaarbank and closed out my account. I then walked over to the post office, called Kitty, and told her I would leave in twenty-four hours. My third stop was the travel agency in Amsterdam’s diamond district. I picked up my one-way ticket to New York City, and turned south on the street for what I knew would be my last walk on these paving stones.

Overhead, the sky was a brilliant blue, just as it had been in my dream. It was then that I realized I was on the street from my dream. I had been on this street before, but it was months earlier. I was uneasy. I had fifteen hundred dollars in cash, a six hundred dollar one way ticket to New York City, and my US passport on me. I felt silly to be so unnerved by a dream, but I was worried anyway. I knew from earlier visits that there wasn’t an alley on this street, but I walked faster nevertheless.

The people around me calmly went about their business. They were distributed on the street exactly the way they were in my dream. Or were they? I couldn’t be sure; it had been a few weeks already. It seemed the same. And then a big, dark, muscular arm stretched out around my neck from behind.

Hey man, it’s good to see you again. How much money you got wit’ you today?

At the same time, another muscular man flanked me on my right.

Is it in US dollars? Is yo’ money in dollars, hey?

The man behind me held my head in a viselike grip, but continued walking forward, forcing me to do the same.

In heavily accented English the man on the right continued with his banter, alternating between fake friendly comments about the weather and questions about the cash I had on my person. I couldn’t get the dream out of my mind. I had never been mugged before, let alone in a manner so similar to my dream. They kept talking about my money, but I could focus on only one thing: was this my dream? It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be, because I knew that this street didn’t have an alley. The dream was similar, but it had to be a coincidence. Yet try as I might, this man kept my head in his unwanted grip, holding it so that passersby would think he was a friend with his arm around my shoulder, but for me it was a prison.

Then I saw the scaffolding neatly piled on the sidewalk about fifty feet in front of me. On every occasion I’d been here before, the scaffolding had been assembled into an impenetrable wall, no different from any of the other similar structures erected all over town as various old buildings had their facades worked on. I’d never paid much attention to it, other than to cross the street to avoid the construction mess. I couldn’t take my eyes off it because I could see that all this time it had covered up an opening in the street, an alley.

At that moment I decided that nothing was going to get me into the alley. I didn’t care if it was stupid, and I didn’t care if I got hurt. All this time the two muggers were saying things to me in poor English, trying to make it look to others on the street as if we were old friends out for a stroll. But they didn’t stop pushing me forward.

I didn’t have the raw muscle power to fight them, but it occurred to me that the man behind me might relax if I could confuse him, and that would be my opportunity, if it worked. They thought of me as a tourist, not a local. I’d been living in Amsterdam for three months, long enough that I could speak some Dutch. Meanwhile, they weren’t Dutch, as their accents proved. I decided to suddenly start speaking in Dutch and claim to be an Amsterdammer, a local.

Ik ben Amsterdammer! Ik wonen in Amsterdam voor drie jaren! Mijn geld is guilders!

(I’m an Amsterdammer! I’ve lived in Amsterdam for three years! My money is in guilders!)

It was bad Dutch, but it worked. Both men slowed momentarily, a puzzled look came over the face of the man on the right, and most importantly, the man behind me did relax his grip, exactly as I wanted. I pushed his arm from me and ran to the newsstand across the street. I yelled at the man behind the counter to get his attention. I told him two men had just tried to mug me. When I pointed to show him where they were, they had already turned tail and were running as fast as they could in the other direction. I stayed there abstractedly paging through Dutch magazines for a half hour, not wanting to leave the safety of this public place. My heart was pounding so loudly that I could barely hear anything else, and every beat felt like a huge machine trying to burst loose from my chest.

The first half of the dream matched the events I’d just experienced almost perfectly, but then the dream and the real mugging forked, exactly when I decided to change the outcome by doing something to free myself. If it had forked anywhere else, it would be easier to suggest that the differences between the dream and my encounter on the street indicated that they were not related. Because they did correspond perfectly up until then, an argument could be made that I had just avoided my fate by changing the future.

If it was a simple dream of the future, then it was in error because it didn’t show the outcome of my decision to escape from the muggers. Instead, just like Scrooge’s Ghost of Christmas Future vision in A Christmas Carol, I experienced a vivid possible future as a warning. I was given an opportunity to decide for myself whether I live or die, and the crux of that decision was my ability to recognize and act on the warning in this dream. But the decision didn’t just save my life, it changed my life. At the time of the dream, I did not believe that a dream could predict the future. I was an atheist. I derided religious people for fun because of my low regard for their superstitious belief in the supernatural. When I decided to distract the muggers and make a run for it, I was, even if just for that moment, joining those people upon whom I had heaped so much scorn. For that moment, I was superstitious too.

This assumes that the men were prepared to kill me. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were trying to borrow money in a particularly aggressive manner. Maybe they didn’t intend to push me into the alley, but to go past it. I’ll never know the answers to those questions, but what I do know is that because of my choice, for the first time in my life I was willing to dip my toe into the supernatural and to trust it, even if temporarily. As I calmed down in the newsstand and the adrenaline faded, I thought about other aspects of the dream, from the part that didn’t happen.

For instance, when I was taken into the alley and shot in the throat, the pain and other associated sensations were specific to the injury in a way that I found difficult to imagine. I remember wondering what the warm sensation on my chest could be, then realizing it was my blood. I thought I would be able to yell, and was surprised that I couldn’t. I wondered about it, and then understood the mechanical impossibility of speech or sound coming from my ruined throat. The pain was expected, but not the amount of it. It makes sense that my blood would be warm, that I wouldn’t be able to talk, and that the pain would be beyond anything I’d ever experienced, but for all these sensations to arrive right on time without forethought on my part, and to be exactly appropriate didn’t make sense to me. How did I know what it felt like to be shot in the neck? I remember feeling the exact shape of one edge of my torn throat as parts of it pressed against other anatomical features and stuck there because of fluid blood between them.

More disturbingly, as I died in the dream, I lost consciousness of my body and left it behind. I felt every phase of this in great detail, even though I didn’t believe in the existence of a soul. Yet right there, whether I believed it or not, I clearly experienced my soul separating from my body. Because of my upbringing and personal aversion to the subject, I could not have known that what happened to me in the dream was exactly what some would expect, based on their religious or spiritual beliefs.

After being shot, I fully expected to be snuffed out like a candle, but then my soul left my body and I was still conscious. I was amazed because it was so unexpected. Just like the pain of my wounds, the process of leaving my body was realistic and natural. Previously, I imagined that a soul was an invention created by people frightened by death. When it happened in the dream, it was nothing of the sort. I wasn’t hoping for an afterlife or thinking about it at all. As far as I was concerned, it was over, but then it wasn’t.

Looking down on Kitty from her mother’s ceiling had to be the strangest experience I’d had up to that point in my life. I was fully conscious that I had just died a violent unreported death several thousand miles away, yet managed to zero in on Kitty’s exact location and travel there at the speed of thought. I had time to consider what had happened as I tried to find a way to communicate with Kitty. I thought about the mugging, the shooting, the pain, then the cessation of both pain and life and the continuation of my consciousness and identity. I reflected on how I slipped out of my body, like a hand from a glove, and then came to the apartment, all the while re-evaluating my beliefs about life and death. Mostly, I wondered what I was going to do next. I seemed completely helpless to do anything but observe, and that was boring. And then I was awake in bed.

When I first awoke from the dream, I was grateful to be alive, but I did not even consider the possibility that the dream might be a warning of some kind. As soon as I woke, I snapped out of it, like I’d been temporarily under the thrall of a very good hypnotist. Some hint of menace remained as a side effect, and the realism of the dream remained a curiosity, but both were soon absent from my thoughts. Later, after having just had a run-in with two would-be muggers on the same street as in the dream, I was thinking the thoughts that less prejudiced people might have had as soon as they woke from the dream. I wondered if the dream had been connected to the encounter with the two men a few weeks later. I decided it had to be a coincidence.

That decision was the sensible one to make, and I can hardly be blamed for evaluating it that way. It is exactly what would be expected of any intelligent, properly educated person; but was it correct?

Chapter Two

By force of numbers

Although I have always remembered my dreams, I never saw a need to record them. Even after the Amsterdam dream, I would only mention a dream now and then to Kitty, and consign the rest to the delete pile in my memory. A series of events in 1988 and 1989 changed that.

June 20 1988, New York City

Suddenly, I know that I am dreaming. This is a dream of the future! I think, and simultaneously realize that I need only shift my attention from the ten losing lottery tickets in my right hand to the list of winning numbers in my left to use this dream to my advantage. The problem is, I can feel myself waking. I want more time, I keep looking at the wrong hand, I have to look at the list...why is it so hard? I just need to focus... Some of the tickets have winning numbers, but not enough...

Then I woke. I grabbed a pen and wrote down what I remembered: two definite winners: 6 and 44, and five others that I thought might be winners, but I wasn’t sure. Kitty wanted me to run out and buy tickets, but I resisted. Not only did I not remember all the numbers, but I didn’t believe it was possible to dream of the future. Kitty insisted, and I went.

I bought five games instead of ten. This was the first time I’d ever bought lottery tickets, and didn’t want to waste ten dollars. This attitude was vindicated when the results came out and none of my tickets won. Then, Kitty surprised me and pulled out five tickets of her own.

You had ten tickets in the dream, so I bought five more, she said. Hers were losers also, but my dream hadn’t predicted anything different. My dream predicted I would have ten Lotto tickets (correct, despite my attempt to thwart this by purchasing five), we didn’t win any money (correct), that I would have a ticket with three winning numbers (correct, 6,17, and 44), that 6 and 44 would definitely be winners (true), and that I had four winning numbers in my ‘pool’ of seven possibilities (also true; 6, 17, 23, and 44). The dream was correct on every point.

The Amsterdam dream is a warning because it showed me a negative outcome if I did nothing. This dream is an opportunity because it suggests a positive outcome if I do something. Ironically, the events in both dreams could not have happened without the dreams that preceded them. In Amsterdam, the dream frightened me into moving back to the US, thus putting me on the street in the dream. With the lottery, I would not have played without the encouragement of the dream.

Were these messages directed at me specifically? Or were they neutral, like passing features of a landscape seen through a car window, there for anyone to see? If neutral, then it is just a dumb feature of some unknown aspect of nature, but if it is directed, then communication is involved, and that implies the presence of another party.

It is easy to see how either event might have been neutral - if they are mere possibilities, two of many others, then there is no reason to suppose they are meant for any specific person. I do not, however, have multiple dreams of these events with variable outcomes. There are only these two dreams, and the dreams themselves are required in order to be realized. In other words, the communication of the information contained in the dream is a part of the event.

What is the point of communicating this information to me? Not to win the Lottery, or I would have won in the dream and after I woke. The dream did perform a job, though maybe not the one I would have liked at