Precognitive Blues, Part 2: Guilt, Law of Attraction, and Meanings that Change Over Time

“Man needs reckless courage to descend into the abyss of himself.” ~ William Butler Yeats

This is Part 2, in what feels like a three part series. If you’ve not read “Precognitive Blues, Part 1: Dreams, Warnings and Blessings,” you can do so here. Today’s post deals with some of the other biggies that complicate precognition. According to “The Mystica“:

• Precognition is the direct knowledge or perception of the future, obtained through extrasensory means. Precognition is the most frequently reported of all extrasensory perception experiences, occurring most often (60 percent to 70 percent) in dreams seeing the future.
• It may also occur spontaneously in waking visions, auditory hallucinations, flashing thoughts entering the mind, and the sense of “knowing.” Precognitive knowledge also may be induced through trance, channeling, mediumship, and divination.

Because I’ve lived with “future memories,” psychic dreams, Cosmic Heads Up, and premonitions for my entire life, I’m no stranger to the challenges of precognition. I also coach and do readings for many highly intuitive clients, so these topics arise in sessions, too. This blog series attempts to provide a map or guideposts for what often feels like strange new territory.

Dealing with Precognitive Guilt

Tied with Precognitive Anxiety, aka pre-TSD, Precognitive Guilt weighs in as one of the biggest emotional challenges of seeing, sensing or dreaming future events. This guilt comes in a variety of forms. I’ll share some personal examples to illustrate.

In 2000, I had a vivid dream of a friend of mine who lived in New York City getting mugged. It was night, and someone tried to steal her bag. When she resisted, they attacked her and eventually got her bag anyway.

I awoke with a common dilemma for people whose dreams often do come true: do I tell my friend and feel guilty for needlessly scaring her? Or do I keep quiet and live with the guilt that my information might have saved her from getting mugged?

In these situations, I weigh the consequences of telling or not telling. If it seems like my information — though unproven — could help someone avoid trouble or make better choices, I share the information, with caveats. Depending on the dream or vision, I might tone it way down. Depending on the person, I might not even mention a dream or intuition. I might just call or email them and slip in a coded warning. It depends on how open the person is, how vivid the dream, or how urgent the message seems.

In my friend’s case, I called her the next morning and left a chatty message, trying to make my voice sound lighthearted while also saying, “I had a dream about you last night. Please be very careful walking home, and don’t walk alone at night.” I hadn’t spoken with her in awhile, but she knew I had a history of accurate dreams. When we both lived in Chicago, my dreams and visions had found her a roommate who became her very best friend, so she tended to pay attention to my dreams. Because of this, though, I didn’t want to drop an ominous voicemail: “Hey, you got mugged in my dream! They attacked you hard and stole your purse.” No need to panic her. Not all my dreams come true in the literal sense.

She called me back that afternoon, and said, “I wish you had the dream the night before last night! I got mugged exactly as you described. Too bad your warning didn’t come yesterday morning. I would have been more careful.”

Other times, I’ve shared a message with someone, because I would feel terrible not passing along information that seems very insistent, and that person got annoyed or doubtful when “nothing happened.” Either they avoided what I dreamed/saw, or — many times — I learn it happens years later. Why do I get the warning when I do? Why get a warning if it comes too late to do anything about it? Or so far in advance the person forgets about it? I don’t know. I don’t control the timing on these things, and neither do most people. History is filled with stories of people dreaming or seeing visions about the Titanic or 9/11.

The best books I’ve found for dealing with Precognitive Guilt are Dreaming True: How to Dream Your Future and Change Your Life for the Better, by Robert Moss, and Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation and the Unconscious, by Eric Wargo. If time bendy dreams, premonitions or precognitive “hits” cause you to doubt yourself or your character, I highly recommend these books.

But the Law of Attraction Says …

The most insidious, damaging and confusing Precognitive Guilt gets amplified by a growing acceptance of the Law of Attraction. Quoting from Wikipedia to show the most general understanding of it: “In the New Thought philosophy, the Law of Attraction is the belief that positive or negative thoughts bring positive or negative experiences into a person’s life.^[1][2] The belief is based on the ideas that people and their thoughts are made from pure energy, and that a process of like energy attracting like energy exists through which a person can improve their health, wealth, and personal relationships.”

Yes, positive thinking and visualization can bring about all sorts of wonderful things in your life, and fixating on negative outcomes tends to attract those very outcomes. Top athletes, business people, and meditation practitioners know this, whether intuitively or by name. I use the Law of Attraction a lot myself. It helps me manifest all sorts of fun things in life.

Here’s the thing, though: the subconscious mind, the heart, and the Mystery with a Capital M are bigger, deeper, wider and more powerful and more bizarre than comfy New Age Rules. Law of Attraction is one Law of Reality, but not the only law. Or if it is the only law, then sometimes it functions on bigger, deeper, wider, more powerful and more bizarre levels than we understand. There’s often a difference between habitual worrying and an actual premonition.

When in doubt, I ask for clarity. I love the Serenity Prayer in these circumstances, too, “God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.” Many times, I’ll ask for signs or dreams. Yay or nay? I spell it out clearly, “Tell me what I need to know. Tell me what I need to do.”

If it’s something good, I roll with it. If it’s something negative or potentially hurtful or disruptive, then I send up more Serenity Prayers. I try to visualize a different outcome. I ask for dreams to guide me to a different outcome. Sometimes those dreams or visions come, but there are times … very obvious times to precognitive folks … when those alternate visions or dreams just won’t come. Try as I might to avoid the message, it sneaks into the first 30 seconds of meditation, chases me in my sleep, comes at me through other people’s dreams or emails, or synchronicities unfold in such over the top ways that the “crazy” seems more real than the “real.”

I consider those cases exceptions to (or radically different expressions of) the Law of Attraction. For a long time, every time I wrote fiction, it would come true. This gave me writers block for years, because I was afraid to create any conflict on the page, lest something similar happen in real life. I felt like I was causing bad things to happen by writing stories. That’s where the Time Loops book really helped: it turns out writers are some of the most precognitive people out there. We don’t know whether this goes with the creative territory and mindset of writing, or if writers just keep better records than most people. Maybe everyone’s much more future-aware than they realize.

In any case, the Law of Attraction can throw a whole messa guilt and confusion on precognitive phenomena. It complicates the visions, and there’s no simple way of dealing with it. I find prayer and dreaming work best. I also send Reiki to future situations or to the people I sense approaching those situations. I continually ask for guidance in the here and now, and I listen with all my senses. I ask to recognize and receive the signs and guidance I request. Depending on the situation, I also find that the signs grow progressively more insistent the more I try to run, aka “Law of Attraction my way out of a situation.”

Life can get pretty absurd trying to box in a 4-planet Gemini with Virgo Rising. All my Mercury can transmute or wriggle out of almost anything. Almost being the operative word. Some things just “are,” and for whatever reason, the future sends that information back to us. Research into precognition, and my own experiences, indicate that time slippage or “future memories” tend to involve heightened emotions. Fear, sorrow, sexual arousal, joy, shock, disgust, horror, love: these feelings seem like the most common triggers. Sometimes information arrives to save our lives or correct our path. We might not feel intense emotion about the messages, but their consistency grows freaky. In those cases, I pay attention.

I’ve learned not to jump to conclusions, because some of these stories unfold over many years, even decades. Observing your own patterns and recording dreams and synchronicities helps to “learn your own comm’s.” It also helps you learn how the Universe speaks to you in quiet whispers or behind a megaphone. When you can, visualize, ask for and intend what you consider the most positive outcome, but don’t forget the mantra, “If not this, then something better.”

Because sometimes, you don’t know the most positive outcome — not yet, not from your current, limited perspective. That bump in the road you’re trying so hard to avoid, the one your dreams are telling you how to prepare for … that bump might be the gateway to something more wonderful than you can possibly imagine. I keep going back to another mantra given to me in a dream on Spring Equinox 2018: “In perfect love and perfect trust, perfect timing is a must.”

The Great Mystery operates by its own rules, miracles and paradoxes. Law of Attraction offers a useful map, but sometimes, “Here be dragons.” If you have potentially precognitive dreams, visions or inner knowing, keep your wits about you, and don’t feel guilty for receiving. In the Land of High Strangeness, this information could save your life or lead to hidden treasure.

Dream Meanings that Change Over Time

Today’s last topic deals specifically with dreams and their multiple layers of meaning. I’ll use personal examples again, to show rather than try to explain in abstract terms.

12/16/17

Dream:

All our floors have flooded, the new ones upstairs and the basement downstairs. They’re so saturated with water that each step makes a squishy sound, and the floors bow under our weight. My shoes feel wet and heavy, moving in slow motion. Everything is saturated and underwater in the basement. Walking feels like moving through a wall of water, lights distorted as in fog or rain.

I awoke that day with the phrase, “death of a Cancer male.” I thought it would be David’s 7/16 birthday dad, because he’s in his 80’s, but it turned out that our dear friend Tim Martin (with a 7/7/63 birthday) would die later that afternoon. Tim’s death rocked my foundation (floors) and saturated me with grief. I spend so much time in a shamanic state — in sessions and in regular life — that death doesn’t usually phase me much. But I have never grieved anyone’s death like I grieved Tim.

Loads of past life memories surfaced, and I realized I needed to process not just this death but earlier, even more traumatic times he died. In time, this Dark Night of the Soul led me to formalize 12 years of astrology studies, as well as massive breakthroughs on all levels, but I experienced his death as a devastating loss. A loss without normal, this-world context: we were just friends. Good friends, but only friends. My grief was real, raw, disproportionate and inappropriate. (Huge, huge thanks to Ann Kreilkamp for her book This Vast Being: A Voyage through Grief and Exultation, for her friendship and the astrology mentorship that helped me heal.)

I share all of this to confirm: the dream on the morning of 12/16/17 accurately predicted “death of a Cancer male.” It also foretold my private emotional state for the next eight months (until I led two memorial services on his birthday).

I’ve recovered from that loss, but this same dream came to mind a couple weeks ago. I kept thinking about it, kept feeling those squishy floors, and seeing our basement underwater. A sense of dread nagged at me. That’s not a dream I want to relive! I tried to find original emails I’d sent describing the dream. Searching for the dream led me down a bizarre rabbit hole of emails that confirmed all sorts of 2017 foretellings of Fall 2019 events, but I didn’t find the actual dream in emails. I only alluded to having had it the day Tim died. Still, this dream kept haunting me. I got out my old journals and waded through entries until I found a definitive rendition by cross-referencing my dream journal and regular journal.

Just at the moment I found the dream again, David happened to be under our kitchen sink, trying to fix a faucet issue. The water shut off valve would not turn off! Only after it sprayed all over the cabinet and floor did he manage to turn it almost off, with just a slight drip. Turning it to the full off position shot explosive water everywhere. I had been feeling a growing sense of anxiety as this dream haunted me, but when David told me about the literal water issue with the shut off valve, I suddenly felt calm. Ah, it’s literal this time — no imminent emotional flood.

We called plumbers and discovered that not only was this kitchen sink shut off valve corroded, but the one and only shut off valve to the entire house is almost as corroded as the one that broke. The plumbers cleaned what they could of the lines but showed me how corroded the pipes are, along with the whole house shut off valve that has no backup.

When they learned our neighborhood will be having major sewer and waterline work next year requiring full street water shut off, they showed me photos of a house they just worked on. When the water got turned back on at street level, it pushed sediment into those people’s pipes, which combined with the corrosion inside the pipes and exploded all over their basement. With no backup shut-off valve for our house, in a similar (likely) event here, water would continue to flood in until the city came out to turn it off again.

Because of the synchronicity with my dream and the faulty shut off valve — along with my nagging sense of plumbing issues — we’re opting to redo all our plumbing sooner rather than later. We would prefer to prepare rather than deal with shock and damage after the fact. We’ll add a whole house filter as water enters the house, along with a second whole house shut off valve. The plumbers think we have awhile before disaster strikes, but with the timing of my dream recall, intuition, and David synchronously working under the sink/sync, we feel good doing the upgrades now.

(I’ve also had uncanny dream and synchronicities around a septic repair in March and a recent garage door opener replacement. Those dreams, synchronicities and repairs are so precisely and weirdly intertwined that they blow my mind, but they’re too long and detail-upon-detailed to share here. I will say, “Pay attention to your house and car. Like dreams, they operate on multiple levels.”)

I shared the soggy floors dream as an example of how a dream can initially predict something symbolic — a flood of emotions that rocked my foundation, “death of a Cancer male.”  Yet nearly two years later, that same dream resurfaced in memory/fixation, alerting me to a real, tangible issue with our plumbing. If we leave that issue unattended, the results would be quite similar to the soggy floors and flooded basement of my dream.

While searching for that 12/16/17 dream, I discovered another dream, which seems significant, though I don’t know why. I pay attention when parts of a dream come true in real life, and I also pay attention to other dreams I had the same night of a verified premonition. Here’s the second one for 12/16/17:

Dream. Animals (coyote, cow? badger? groundhogs) in back left corner of yard. It was like a field with fence, not a shed. Two “badgers” came close to our house with sliding glass doors and used nails to cut through screens and then glass.

These “badgers” had like blue saucer plates of fur or feathers around their eyes, then some kind of red near mouth, almost like some kind of baboon. No idea what it is or what it means. [But I am clear they were “badgers” in the dream.]

This dream also caught my attention because that same sliding glass door appeared in The Lion Dream from May 6, 2019, which I shared this past July. I’ve since discovered many things through The Lion Dream and the astrological transits I had while dreaming it. When dreams echo other dreams, repeat symbols, or reference dates, I find it worthwhile to pay attention. I don’t always know how they relate, but over time, I learn they do. I just noticed that the next blog post after The Lion Dream is Foundational Shifts and Incremental Upgrades, which loops back to the idea of foundations from the soggy floors dream. It also underscores recent dreams that both Tania Marie and I have shared with each other.

Your own dream process may work differently than mine, but some things are easier to show than explain. 🙂 If you record dreams and cross reference them with later events in your life, you’ll learn your own process and language. When in doubt, think “Both/And.” Dreamtime is not limited to linear time, literal meaning, symbolic meaning or a single reality. It can reflect all of these things and more. Some dreams feel more mundane than others, but even “little” details can provide big clues.

Assume your dream means something. If you approach it with curiosity and non-attachment, you’ll find dream guidance extends in waking life synchronicities. If you find yourself in a period of intense dreams — or no dreams — look at situations in your life and symptoms in your body as possible symbols, too. Many times, something will click, and you’ll find the meaning that you need right now. Just realize that meaning might change five years from now. 🙂

Stay tuned for the final installment (I think), Precognitive Blues, Part 3.