by Rodney Davies

Our traditional view of time as a river inexorably sweeping us along like flotsam from the past towards an unknown future is wrong. Time, in fact, has no existence outside ourselves; rather, its presence is suggested to us by the positional changes of physical objects around us, most notably those that occur regularly, like the earth’s rotation which brings about the rising and setting of both the sun and the moon, and thus time’s seeming reality. In this respect we resemble the prisoners in Plato’s cave who mistook shadows for real things.

Indeed, what we call time is apparent only because our consciousness, informed as it is by our sense organs, is normally only aware of consecutive ‘moments’ in our lives, which we call ‘the present’. This naturally suggests that if our consciousness could be widened, we would be able to view what we call ‘the past’ and ‘the future’ now, because both are as much ‘now’ as now is.

Such widening of consciousness does sometimes take place, which brings about what are called pre-cognitive (or ‘known before’) and retro-cognitive (or ‘known afterwards’) experiences. These happen most commonly when we are asleep, during dreams. For while many dreams are created by the sleeping mind as a way of visually addressing the various problems and difficulties which are causing us anxiety, some – but perhaps no more than five to ten percent of them – show us either what lies ahead or takes us ‘back’ into the sometimes distant past. This is when consciousness may even travel along the interlinking ‘conduit’ of our respective lives to perceive events which belong to a previous, or to a forthcoming existence. In most cases, however, the dream consciousness tends to be focused on ‘looking ahead’ to future events of this life.

Unfortunately, our sleeping minds often cannot ‘look ahead’ as clearly as we would like, so such dreams of the future may appear ‘as through a glass, darkly’, their contents distorted or expressed in symbolic form, whereby they make no immediate sense on waking to us. Help may therefore have to be sought from a professional diviner or from a dream book.

One familiar Biblical example of such a dream was that had by an Egyptian Pharaoh, in which he saw seven fat kine or cattle coming up out of a river followed by seven lean kine, which ate up the first, and seven plump ears of corn growing on one stalk of wheat followed by seven thin ears, blasted by an east wind, which grew on another. The Pharaoh remained perplexed by the dream until Joseph, who evidently had an intuitive talent for dream interpretation, told him it meant his realm would enjoy seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine, and that the latter period would therefore need preparing for, which, following Joseph’s warning, is what was done.

A more recent and quite remarkable example of such a symbolic dream is recorded by John Beaumont in his Treatise on Spirits, Apparitions, Witchcrafts and other Magical Practices, published in 1705, and which is taken from a Latin account published almost two centuries earlier by Ioannis Pontanus. Beaumont writes,

“So Pontanus tells us, that a certain soldier of Genoa dreamt he was devoured by a Serpent, wherefore on a day, when the other soldiers were put on board ships to fight with the enemy, he kept himself at home; but a tumult casually arising in the city, he was killed by the ball of a sort of cannon, which we called a Serpent.”

Although Beaumont says nothing about the cause of the attack on Genoa, it was probably that which the French King Louis XII (reigned 1462-1515) mounted in 1507, following a revolt by the Genoese against his rule.

But notwithstanding the symbolism in this case, when an event dreamed of occurs in the near future, a dream can often provide the sleeper with an exact sight of it. This is particularly true in those dreams which ‘preview’ the dreamer’s own death or some other upsetting incident in which he or she, or a loved one, is the victim.

A tragic and touching example of such an unambiguous dream was had in January, 1844 by a young coal miner named John Gray, who worked at the Crump Meadow coal pit near Cinderford, in Gloucestershire, and who was the sole support of his widowed mother and his sister. At breakfast on the Monday in question, the young man told his mother that during the night he had dreamed of himself being killed in the pit by a large rock that fell on him. His mother, however, made somewhat light of the dream, and Gray, being half-persuaded by her, went off to work, although not without twice returning home to bid what he feared might be a ‘last goodbye’ to her.

And John Gray’s dream proved correct, for upon having labored underground for several hours, an enormous block of stone, which would take several men to move, suddenly tumbled from the gallery roof on to him, and crushed him, it was reported, ‘in the most frightful manner’. The poor fellow lingered on in the most indescribable agony for just under an hour, until ‘death released him from his sufferings’.

A similar foreshadowing of the accident which led to the dreamer’s own death, whose sad outcome took place even more quickly, was given to a young sailor aboard the London Merchant steamship which took George Borrow (1803-81) to Portugal in November 1835. The seaman’s dream and its aftermath are dramatically recorded by Borrow at the start of his autobiographical work, The Bible in Spain. He writes:

“On the morning of the 11th the sea was very rough, and a remarkable circumstance occurred. I was on the forecastle, discoursing with two of the sailors; one of them, who had but just left his hammock, said: “I have had a strange dream, which I do not much like; for,” continued he, pointing up to the mast, “I dreamed that I fell into the sea from the cross-trees.” He was heard to say this by several of the crew besides myself. A moment after, the captain, perceiving that the squall was increasing, ordered the topsails to be taken in, whereupon the man, with several others, instantly ran aloft; the yard was in the act of being hauled down, when a sudden gust of wind whirled it round with violence, and a man was struck down from the cross-trees into the sea, which was working like yeast below. In a short time he emerged; I saw his head on the crest of a billow, and instantly recognized in the unfortunate man the sailor who, a few moments before, had related his dream. I shall never forget the look of agony he cast whilst the steamer hurled past him.”

The ship’s forward motion was stopped as quickly as possible, but not before it left the young sailor a considerable distance astern, and the ensuing rescue attempt was hampered because the vessel’s single lifeboat lacked a rudder and had only two oars, which meant the seamen who manned it made agonizingly slow progress through the turbulent sea. Yet the sailor who had fallen overboard did manage to stay afloat until the lifeboat came within ten yards of him, but then he suddenly sank beneath the waves and was lost.

‘The poor fellow who perished in this singular manner,’ adds Burrows poignantly, ‘was a fine young man of twenty-seven, the only son of a widowed mother; he was the best sailor on board, and was beloved by all who were acquainted with him.’

However, although both dreams seem to have resulted from the two men concerned directly viewing while asleep their immediate future and the accidents which killed them, it might be objected that they were simply visualizing anxieties common to workers in their occupations. Coal mining and sailing were very hazardous jobs in the nineteenth century, yet those employed in them, through daily exposure to the risks involved, usually tempered or overcame their fears, just as people in dangerous jobs do today. In fact the dreams were troubling to the men precisely because they were so unusual and unexpected. This suggests that, rather than being coincidental anxiety dreams, they were indeed produced by an expansion of their sleeping consciousness, which allowed them to see the tragedy that was about to overtake them.

Equally hauntingly, the American writer Cotton Mather (1663-1728), who is best known for his torrid descriptions of alleged witchcraft at Salem, Massachusetts, records a similar preview of death by drowning in his Ecclesiastical History of New England. The tragic nocturnal display affected a neighbor of his, a doctor, who despite having such a forewarning in his sleep was unable to prevent the unfortunate accident from occurring. Indeed, the inability of the dreamer to stop what is shown to him from happening not only testifies to the ‘direct viewing’ nature of the experience, but suggests that our tomorrows have already happened and that our lives, at least where the major events in them are concerned, are following a prescribed pathway. Mather writes:

“A physician, who sojourned within a furlong of my house, for three nights together, was miserably disturbed with dreams of his being drown’d; on the third of these nights his dreams were so troublesome, that he was cast into extreme sweats, by struggling under the imaginary waters: with the sweats yet upon him, he came down from his chamber, telling the people of the family what it was that had so discomposed him. Immediately there came in two friends; that asked him to go a little way with them, in a boat, upon the water: he was, at first, afraid of gratifying them in it, but being very calm weather, he recollected himself, why should I mind my dreams, or distrust divine providence? He went with them, and before night, by a thunder storm suddenly coming up, they were all three drown’d.”

And yet ‘dream previews’ do not by any means feature only death and unpleasant accidents. Other occurrences, which may or may not be distressing, are likewise witnessed, although it is often those which are dramatic in nature, or of some importance or significance to the dreamer, that are seen and remembered.

For example, when I lived in Montreal in the 1970s, a Mrs M. W. of Lakeside, Quebec, wrote to me describing how one night she had the following unsettling dream:

‘I dreamt someone was trying to get into my home through my bedroom window. Being unsuccessful they went to the front door and I saw them using a piece of plastic to force open the lock. I woke up covered in perspiration.’

In fact Mrs W. was so startled and upset by the strange dream that she telephoned her sister the following morning to tell her about it ‘in case anything happens because she is the type who always laughs at my dreams,’ although she did not, as she might have done, alert the police. But then, after having spent most of the next day out of the house, she was even more startled and upset upon ‘arriving home at 4.30 p.m. to find that my home had been broken into and robbed.’ Her dream had in fact shown her a preview of exactly what disquieting event was going to happen to her.

Actress Gemma Craven had a precognitive dream of a far happier nature in 1985 and which featured the man she was to marry, David Beamish.

Gemma said that one night she dreamed she was out skiing, which she has never learned to do, and that she tumbled over in the snow. Suddenly a man’s hand reached down to help her up, which belonged to an unknown man dressed in a suit.

Two weeks later, she met up with some girlfriends at a London hotel, who told her they were waiting for a man to join them for tea. When he arrived, Gemma immediately recognized him as the fellow in her dream, wearing the same suit, and that, as he walked over to shake hands with her, she likewise recalled the hand he held out to her. His surprise appearance rendered Gemma speechless with astonishment for the first time in her life. Their attraction to each other was immediate, and she and David went on to date and eventually to marry.

The unusual thing about Miss Craven’s dream is that it interweaves fact with fiction. She remembered David, the hand he extended to her and the suit he was wearing, from the dream when she met him when awake. That part of the dream was certainly precognitive. However, their real meeting did not take place on a ski slope, but in a hotel restaurant.

This intermingling of fantasy with waking reality, which quite often happens in such dreams, is hard to understand, although the fact that the dream occurred two weeks before their actual meeting may mean that it happened on the border between what can be seen clearly and what cannot, beyond which point symbols tend to predominate. We might also postulate that the snow, the skiing and Miss Craven’s fall symbolized how she then felt about the state of her emotional life, from whose coldness and loneliness she was about to be plucked by her meeting with David Beamish.

But none the less a precognitive dream may still be strangely different from the waking event when it is either expressed in symbolic terms or when the person who dreamed it acts to change the suggested outcome, even when that occurs soon afterwards. An example of the second happened to me one morning when my Great Pyrenees dog was alive, and I made the following short note of the dream I had about her:

‘I dreamed that I saw my dog pick up some food she had found in the street. The food was covered with ants and they ran about in her mouth and over her tongue.’

What made this dream so fascinating is that when I took my dog out for a walk in the morning, we had not walked far when she stopped in mid-stride to smell at something, and glancing down I saw that she was sniffing at some vomit – and the vomit was covered with ants. My dream instantly came back to me and I hurriedly pulled her head away from the vomit before she could start eating it (which I knew from past experience, she would have done). No ants therefore, or at least as far as I could tell, got into her mouth.

Yet because virtually everything in the dream matches the waking scenario, with the exception of the final outcome, the dream was precognitive. The different ending, however, suggests that ‘the future’ may not be entirely set in concrete and that what is previewed in dreams can be changed in waking life, when the scenario is encountered, if the dreamer reacts quickly enough to what he or she sees.

But none the less a precognitive dream may still be strangely different from the waking event even when the latter occurs soon afterwards.

Another example from my own life is a case in point. One night I dreamed that the singer Elton John (of whom I had never been a fan or had ever dreamed about before) was involved in some fraudulent scheme which involved the building of an upright, chimney-like tunnel, about six to eight feet tall and rectangular in cross-section, and which started about two feet above the ground. The idea was that Elton John would climb up the tunnel to gain access to the place where he would get the money, but as the tunnel ended in the air, it was difficult to understand how any ‘fraudulent scheme’ could be accomplished. Moreover, before Elton could commit the crime he was arrested and was later sentenced to three years and three days in prison.

Two days afterwards I had to fly to Athens, where I booked into an hotel on Omonia Square, a choice made entirely at the recommendation of a fellow passenger on the flight. In the bathroom of the room I was given I found there was a window with mottled glass, which I later opened, expecting it to give a view outside, to the rear of the building. But in fact it opened into a rectangular shaft running up between the floors of the hotel, and as the only light entering it came from my bathroom, I looked up and down it into blackness, so that the section visible was about the same length as the upright tunnel of my dream.

It then occurred to me that in Canada, where I had been living for the previous ten years, a bathroom is normally referred to as a ‘john’ – and that ‘Elton’ is an almost exact anagram of ‘hotel’ (the letters n and h differ only by the short upward extension of the latter). The significance of my room number then became apparent: it was 303, which in the dream had been represented by the three years and three days’ term of imprisonment meted out to Elton John. My dream had therefore somehow shown me in a curiously roundabout and symbolic way my discovery of that strange rectangular shaft running up beside my hotel bathroom, although I never discovered what the background motivation of fraud in the dream signified. I certainly thought the hotel bill was very reasonable.

Another Quebec woman who wrote to me about the precognitive dream she had had concerning the death of her mother noted that distance is no barrier either to the ability of the consciousness to view remote events. The lady said: ‘In my dream my mother was hospitalized, had an operation, suffered very much and died. It happened exactly the same way in real life. This frightened me very much as I lived 800 miles away at the time and I didn’t know of her illness until after the operation.’

Dreams that take us back into the past are less frequent than those which portray future outcomes, although this may be more apparent than real. In such dreams we may encounter people clad in old-fashioned clothing or see scenes where horses are being ridden and other animals driven along, which suggest yesteryear rather than today. Such dreams are seldom of a dramatic nature but may display some oddity of life as it once was for the people of the time. The following dream of mine is an example of this, although the actual date of my brief entry into yesteryear is impossible to determine.

My dream visit to the past took place one night in 2011. I was part of a small group of about six men, none of whom I knew, who were all clad, as I was, in formal modern day attire consisting of sports jackets and trousers, shirts and ties, socks and shoes. Then suddenly, we found ourselves, quite unsurprised and rather like a party of tourists, amongst a large audience of people dressed in eighteenth century costume and seated outside around a gentle declivity in the ground, which formed a natural auditorium, into whose ‘past present’ we had somehow arrived.

We manifested in an aisle of the somewhat darkened area, down which we walked and began looking for somewhere to sit. The seats there being used were chairs, stools and cushions of the period, which must have been brought out for those attending, and upon which each party of friends and/or relatives sat, gathered as they were in somewhat uneven clusters separated from their neighbors by a gap of two or three feet, through which people could pass to speak with those they knew in other groups. In addition to those informal, chance passageways, there was also the main aisle in which we found ourselves and which led down towards a flat rectangular area of roughly the size of a basketball court, bounded by a low panel wall four feet in height. This central ‘stage’ formed the focus of the gathering, whose members were arranged around it, and thus each seated person was facing towards it.

The audience, which consisted of both men and women and numbering, I suppose, about two or three hundred, were dressed in clothes belonging to the early years of the eighteenth century, with the women wearing long, wide, colorful dresses, which seemed voluminous, especially as they were gathered at the waist, so that their upper be-sleeved bodies, with visible bare necks and upper chests, and gloves and hats, seemed to arise from an inflated puff of material, and sparkled with the glints of necklaces, ear-rings and brooches. The men wore wigs, elegant frock coats, pantaloons reaching to below the knee, and stockings and shoes.

Moreover, because the ground on which their chairs and other seats stood was gently banked, the people sitting further back were raised somewhat above those in front of them, thereby enabling everybody to get an unobstructed view of the rectangle, which was illuminated by flares, where some display or other was evidently arranged.

We modern intruders had apparently arrived just before that performance, as the auditorium was virtually full and most people were seated, although they were still talking together, eating various fruits like oranges, pears and apples, and looking around them. Two of my group then spotted some unoccupied seats and the rest of us followed them along that row to reach them, which led to us becoming somewhat separated from one another as the spare seats occurred singly or in pairs between different audience groupings, who fortunately did not seem to mind us sitting ourselves down upon them, and who, in fact, did not take any notice of us at all, which was odd because we were dressed so differently from themselves.

Our attention was then summoned by the blast of a trumpet from the rectangle, and I saw a man, who had stepped forward at one end, blowing the instrument. Almost immediately a group of about twenty young men, lightly yet romantically clad in Elizabethan tights of various colors, loose shirts and shoes, and holding rapiers, pushed passed him into the rectangle, while from the other end entered a second body of similarly dressed and armed youths, who, after standing and surveying each other for a short while, then began advancing towards one another, not in a straight line but with those at the center leading the way. When the leading men met they began fencing with each other, their foils clashing, which stimulated the watching audience to begin cheering and calling out words of encouragement.

I watched this strange ‘Elizabethan’ martial contest with surprise and puzzlement. I realized that the men within the rectangle were not real Elizabethans who had somehow dropped into what would be for them a ‘future present’ to fight one another, but rather were eighteenth-century youths wearing Elizabethan costumes, although I had no idea what was happening because there had been no prior announcement about it and there was no dialogue between the combatants to reveal what was going on.

The audience, however, obviously did know, which was why they were assembled there and had been waiting for the show to start. Their expectation of seeing people in different costumes helped explain, I thought, why they paid so little attention to us ‘moderns’ arriving amongst them, especially as the colors and cut of our clothes were muted and modest in comparison with their own and those of the performers.

The fight in the rectangle now became more general and seemingly more serious. Those towards the rear of each group came forward and began fencing with their opposite numbers, whereupon the shouting became louder and more boisterous, and amid the mêlée blood was shed. A man towards the front suffered a sword thrust and blood appeared immediately on his shirt, which increased when he staggered and took another thrust and then suddenly dropped to the ground. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Then another was wounded but gallantly fought on, raising shouts of approbation from the audience, until he too received another rapier thrust, bled profusely, and then also collapsed.

From then on the bloodletting increased as more and more men were wounded, some seemingly receiving rapier thrusts right through their bodies, which sent them immediately to the ground. I could hardly bear to watch such carnage, which had already brought me to my feet, and before I knew what I was doing I found myself running down the aisle towards the rectangle to make some sort of protest, although I hardly knew what, against such ghastly bloodletting. I could not understand how the participants in the fight were prepared to be wounded or killed to provide a show for others, who were cheering them on with such abandonment. It made no sense at all.

My arrival at the boundary of the rectangle brought me much closer to the action, however, and I soon saw that the fight was not real, despite appearances. The rapiers were all blunted, and the blood was red dye which came from small sacs hidden under the shirt of each combatant, on the front of their chests, and which could be broken to release their contents if prodded with a blunted rapier. Thrusts seemingly through the body had passed harmlessly between chests and arms, and the excitement of the audience came from a suspension of belief on witnessing the fighting and on hearing the shouting of the participants, rather than from any reality. And the costumed young actors did put on a good if grim show, with plenty of fencing, parrying and thrusting, whilst they bled, collapsed and died with a will.

It was initially horrible to watch yet once one knew it was theatrical pretense, one could savor the blood and the death without feeling guilty about it or at all shocked, which I suppose was the whole point of the spectacle. Professional wrestling, which has a similar capacity to rouse an audience, is, I suppose, the nearest modern equivalent to what I witnessed in the dream.

It was at that point that I woke up and so left the ‘past present’ of nearly three hundred years ago behind. I therefore had no chance of seeing how the entertainment of that evening ended or of finding out who my ‘modern’ companions were, or of talking to any of those who lived then. I had been too distracted and overawed by the spectacle provided by the audience and by the drama which then occurred on the rectangular stage to do so. It was, none the less, a wonderful experience and indeed the sheer number of people dressed in eighteenth century fashions gathered together in that outdoor theatrical arena, where we ‘moderns’ joined them to watch forty youths clad in Elizabethan costumes fighting with rapiers, suggests that I had somehow managed to project not just my consciousness but my whole self down my time line into that ‘past present’ rather than creating a dream fantasy with no foundation in fact.

I have no idea if such entertainments were held in the early eighteenth century, or even later, but if they were, they would have been quite easy and inexpensive to set up. It was, after all, an age when men still carried swords, and many young men enjoyed fencing and practiced the art regularly; and if the aristocrat (as I presume him to have been) who organised the display on his estate had provided the fighting group with Elizabethan costumes, which could be borrowed or hired, he really only needed to get his groundsmen to erect a low rectangular fence around a natural, flat, dry declivity on his land to make a suitable site for the mock contest to take place. And if the participants were the sons of some of those in the audience, they would both have gained an added thrill and pleasure from their performance.

As similar excursion into the past in a dream was described by Peter Ackroyd in an article published in The Times in August 1996. The dream not only took him back to the eighteenth century but into a particular year of the nineteenth too, and he was able to direct his consciousness into both past-presents, whereas my visits were chosen for me by my sleeping mind.

Ackroyd revealed that on the night in question, when he was asleep, he had a dream in which he realized that he was dreaming, which very seldom occurs, whereupon he quickly said to himself, ‘I want to be taken to the eighteenth century.’ His command to himself was instantly obeyed and without any sense of movement or hesitation, he suddenly found himself outside walking along a darkened roadway, with buildings on one side of it, and passing pedestrians who were clad in eighteenth century clothes.

In fact he could not help but notice that the houses he passed and the clothes of the people in the street were all noticeably redolent of the style of the early eighteenth century, and seemed, in this regard, to be entirely authentic.

He also had the wherewithal, unlike myself, to speak with one of those walkers and to ask him where he was. He was told that he was in Hendon, which today is a busy suburb in northwest London but which was then a small village in the county of Middlesex.

‘I asked to be taken to the pest-house or hospital – at which point someone laughed, and said that they were the same thing’. Just then Ackroyd suddenly saw the pest-house in front of him; he went into it, but found the odor there so strong and repugnant that it caused him to retch and to quickly dash out. It was then that his dream of that time ended.

This last detail, however, sounds unlikely because small villages in the early eighteenth century, like those today, did not have hospitals. Sick people were nursed at home by their parents or spouses, and if an apothecary or doctor was required, who might live in another village, he would have to be sent for. The apothecary would prescribe whatever medicine he thought was needed, which would probably have been an herbal remedy.

But while Peter Ackroyd’s dream visit to Hendon came thereby to a sudden conclusion, he did not wake up but found himself back in the earlier dream state that led to it, in which he was climbing some stairs, whereupon he said to himself, ‘I wish to be taken to 1858’.

As soon as he spoke, a door appeared in front of him, which he opened and, passing through it, found himself inside a large house whose decor, carpeting and fittings were recognizably mid-Victorian. He then went through a door on the landing which brought him into a study with the same Victorian ambience, and there he was quite soon joined by a woman, who was not only dressed in a costume of the period, but who appeared to know him very well and to be expecting him, although not, it seems, quite so early. He tried to explain his precipitate arrival by saying that he had needed some air and that, before he realized whither he had wandered, he was there with her. He then asked her to describe where the house they were in was situated, and she obligingly told him that it stood in West London, or more specifically, in Kensington.

He next left the house and found himself, to his bewilderment, in a street that was recognizably mid-19th century in style, the doors bearing letter-boxes and knockers, the buildings fronted by spiked railings, and the street illuminated by gas-burning lamp posts; although the dream terminated suddenly when, to his further astonishment, ‘a late-20th-century London taxi pulled up’!

Peter Ackroyd’s two dream sequences are made more surprising by the fact that he had some control over where he went, which is rarely attained, although this awareness naturally introduces a conscious directorial element into what then happened, allowing his mind do what was asked of it by perhaps creating two scenes one after the other that seemed to him entirely real. Indeed, they were so lifelike that he feared that he might not be able to get away from them.

I also sensed this possibility of becoming entrapped when I first arrived amid that large group of people, yet their apparent unawareness of me and my unknown ‘modern’ companions suggested that they could not perceive us, and that we were, in that respect, rather like ghosts from ‘the future’ amongst them.

Excerpt from Time-Slips: Journeys Into The Past And The Future