Dreaming the Future, part II

A couple nights ago I had a dream about my friend and dance partner Jessica. I haven't seen her for probably a year, and it's been far too long since I've sent her an email or anything. Anyway, the gist of my dream is that she came back to the Bay Area and I was very glad to see her and to get a chance to dance with her again.

However, the really interesting thing about the dream happened after I woke up. It occurred to me that I really ought to write to her, see how she's doing and all that. I kept reminding myself to do that all day yesterday, though I never quite got around to it (busy day). So I was going to do it for real today, but guess what I found in my inbox this afternoon? An email from Jessica, completely out of the blue, saying she'll be back in the area for the summer and asking if I'd like to sign up for Waltz Weekend with her. Wow.

I think this is probably a good example to go along with my previous dream post, concerning knowledge of the future. A dream like this seems rather like a prediction of the future, or would have, if I had been trying to interpret it that way. But really, it's mostly present knowledge. Since it was only two nights ago, I'm sure Jessica already knew she'd be up here for the summer, and she most likely was already thinking about Waltz Weekend, and realizing it was full for women so she would need a partner to register. So that information existed already, though the question still remains of how exactly it got to me.

All I can say is, planetary alignment or whatever, there's definitely some sort of dream energy going around these days.

Planetary Alignment

We currently have an interesting alignment of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, all of which should be visible in the sky together for about the next four weeks. A similar thing happened in 2000, and also in 1954 B.C., when it was deemed significant enough that it caused the Chinese to restart their calendar at year zero.

I wonder what sort of effects these planets are having on us down here on earth today? So far I haven't found any astrological articles on it, but if anybody finds anything, let me know. I've definitely noticed a lot of dreaming and discussions of dreaming happening recently, among various people. That was how I found out about this in the first place. I wonder if that's related? Anything else interesting going on?

Narrating Attentive Pianos

I'm almost finished with my second audio book, The Piano Tuner. An interesting thing in reading or evaluating a book in its audio version is that another dimension comes into it. Alongside the usual questions of author, plot, writing quality, etc. we have the narrator. I'm glad to say that Richard Matthews has been doing a fantastic job of reading this book. His default, narrator's voice is pleasant to listen to (and appropriately British for the story) but he also does excellent voices and accents for all the different characters. There are at least a half-dozen of the major characters whose voices I think I could recognize even out of context, and all of the voices in any given scene are always easily distinguishable from each other. I've been very impressed with it. It also makes me want to do more read-alouds.

Something else I've been noticing about listening to audio books is the way in which I pay attention to them. I had thought I might miss a lot more, since when I'm reading, I'm often taking in a lot of words surrounding the ones I'm currently reading at any given second (a remnant of my speed-reading class a few years ago). That means that I absorb it rather less linearly than I do when listening to it, and I thought that I wouldn't be able to follow things quite as well in an audio book. But that doesn't seem to be the case so far, and I think, in this book at least, that my attention to it has been enhanced, if anything. It's probably a combination of two things. One is that the words go by slower, so I have more time to think about them. And another is that I think somehow having my vision free (i.e. not constrained to the pages of a book) frees up my thoughts as well. I'm not sure why that is, but it seems that way. I feel like I spend more time actually thinking about the words that go by and processing them more thoroughly, rather than just pushing them in one eye and out the other, as it were. I'll have to see if this is something I notice in other books as well.

Aside from all this, of course, The Piano Tuner is just a great book. If you've ever wondered why a 19th century piano tuner would be called on a military expedition to tune an Erard grand in the depths of a Burmese jungle (or even if you haven't, really) this is definitely worth a read.

A Very Good Painter

I watched Gigantic recently, a documentary about They Might Be Giants. One of my favorite parts was a short clip of an interview with a guy who just couldn't understand why they had written Meet James Ensor. He said he had questioned the Johns repeatedly about why they would bother writing such an odd song about an obscure Belgian painter, but the only response he could get out of them was "No, really! He's a great painter!" I found that highly amusing, especially since I thought the guy was getting way too worked up about it. For some reason, he just couldn't understand how that would be a legitimate song topic.

One of the things I really like about TMBG (and I think a lot of their fans agree) is the variety of things they write songs about. Belgian artists, ants, tiny doctors, stopped clocks, blue canary night-lights, whatever. I think it's delightful. Makes me wonder, though, what that guy thinks songs "should" be about. If you can't write about whatever inspires or interests you, then what's the point?

Dreaming the Future

At the Fletchers' last weekend, I talked a bit about dreams with John after he heard I was taking the Lucid Dreaming class. I mentioned at one point that I knew someone who had told me of a prophetic dream she once had. The details of the dream are uninteresting (her car was in the shop and she dreamt correctly of the part that was broken and the price to replace it, before finding it out the next day). The fact that it happened at all was fascinating. But John seemed to find the idea worrying as well, saying that if such things were true then it would have tremendous implications for the (non-)existence of free will.

To me, though, that doesn't seem to be a problem. Rabbi David J. Wolpe (in his book Why Be Jewish?) said that "Prophets do not foretell the future; rather, they see deeply into the present." I'd say that's the approach I take to thinking about this kind of thing.

Let's say I tell you what I'm going to do for the rest of the evening. I'm going to finish this blog entry, call my sister on the phone, and later on watch Whose Line is it Anyway? while I work out. This information will probably be a bit outdated by the time you read this, but you can see the concept. This is the present giving you very clear information about the future. It's not perfect, of course. I could get hit by a meteor, which would cancel the whole thing, or I could simply decide to read instead of watching TV. But it would be perfectly reasonable to trust me and assume that in all likelihood things would happen more or less as I described. And nobody's free will is affected by this at all.

So I believe this is the kind of knowledge that people get when they have prophetic dreams, or when they obtain information about the future in other ways. It isn't perfect or exact, and it doesn't plunge us all into determinism. But it could still provide enough information to be useful and/or interesting. Of course, it would raise lots of other questions as well. If you find that some of your dreams are predictive, you'd have to learn how to tell them apart from the ones that aren't. Notice also that I'm leaving aside the whole question of where this knowledge even comes from, simply because I have no clue. I think it would have a lot more to do with "seeing deeply," as Wolpe says, than with simply being told things, but there are probably lots of little mysteries inside us that would affect things like this.