I really am going to get to the topic of what we can do towards the end goal of living in a sustainable manner. It is important to provide background so that you can understand my thoughts and motivations. This post deals with dreams. If you are not interested, skip to newer posts. If there are none newer this this, come back later, there will be!

About the time of my strange encounter, from about ten years old up until current times, I have had dreams of future life. I do not know if these dreams are the result of something planted in my mind during that encounter, some sort of psychic phenomena, or mental extrapolation. In at least in some cases, mental extrapolation is not a plausible explanation.

These dreams are qualitatively different than most other dreams. Most of my dreams are not logically consistent, time is not contiguous, and space is not contiguous. An ordinary dream might start out in the third party where I am watching a character in the dream and then somehow morph into first person where I become the character. A normal dream will jump from time to time with no intervening period, or from place to place without transversing the space inbetween. The space itself may even be impossible.

When I have dreams involving the future they are qualitatively quite different from ordinary dreams. Predictive dreams are logically consistent. I always experience them first person. They are experienced exactly as waking life.

The point in the future may be anywhere from hours to multiple decades, maybe even longer as I do not know how far out some of the events I’ve dreamt will occur.

Infrequently, I will have lucid dreams. Lucid dreams are dreams in which you become aware that you are dreaming. Usually once I become aware that I am dreaming, I can go anywhere or anywhen, just by thinking about it.

Lucid dreams started in my teens. They were relatively common through my mid 20’s. They have been exceedingly rare since that time. I have never been able to intentionally induce them. I have tried many techniques suggested by people who claim they do so regularly.

I wanted to know if I could get valid information via lucid dreams. I intentionally went some place I had not been but that I could easily drive to. I observed the area in the dream and tried to remember unique aspects of the area. The next day I drove to the location to find it to be 100% exactly as I had seen it in the dream.

I didn’t immediately realize I could go places in time as well as space. In one lucid dream I thought, I wonder if I can go back in time? I experienced something different than I ever had experienced.

As soon as I thought about going into the past, I felt this tremendous backwards acceleration as if I were falling backwards rapidly. Ordinary things in the world flew past me. I experienced traveling backwards in time as if I was falling backwards through a physical dimension. I saw things go by in three dimensions in addition to the motion of travel through time. I saw the universe in four dimensions as if time were a physical dimension. I was able to comprehend my vision of it this way even though I’ve never experienced anything like it. Sounds also passed by as I fell backwards through time.

After what seemed like fifteen seconds, I found myself standing on a brick road at night. There was a telephone pole with a large clear glass incandescent light with a metal reflector over it. To the right on the side of the road a chain link fence with old bi-plane prop planes behind it. They were painted aviation orange and white. To the left a brick building with a light over the entrance that was a small version of the street light.

I feared I may not be able to return to my own time. As soon as I had this thought, I felt myself rushing forward through time. It was just like falling backwards except in the opposite direction and I woke up in my bed.

After I realized I could travel backwards in time, I wondered about going forward. It took a long time to get up the courage to go into the future. I feared seeing my own or humanities demise. The first time I went into the future one week. I looked in the financial section of the newspaper for stocks or commodities that had taken a sudden change in value. When I opened it to the page with the stock numbers were, the numbers changed dynamically as I looked at them.

The next time I went farther into the future. I found myself standing in this big cement plaza of sorts which had stores around the border and some sort of railed transport. In order to determine the date, I tried to look at the date on a newspaper in a paper stand. Like the stock market numbers, the date kept morphing continuously, even the written month kept changing. The headline, rock solid, clear, and bold was:

Great Quake Devastates Berlin, Germany

This was before the Berlin wall came down. Berlin was never referred to as just “Berlin” but rather “East Berlin” and “West Berlin”. Germany was referred to as East and West Germany. The ramifications were clear, German re-unification was going to happen sometime prior to a large earthquake hitting Berlin.

When I related the dream to people, they all said that re-unification of East and West Germany would not happen in our lifetime. Not long after the wall came down. The great quake has not happened, but I believe that it will. The headline was solid and fixed.

That was the last lucid dream in which I traveled in time. I did have lucid dreams after that but traveled to other planets. I went to the moon, Mars, a planet that was 40,000 light-years from earth, and to a planet with two suns.

On the moon, I was surprised that I could breath even though the moon has no air. I wondered why I needed to breath without my body. The moon looked more beautiful than I expected. The stark contrast between the bright surface and the darkness of space was surreal.

On Mars I discovered an old adobe building similar to structures in Arizona. It had open windows and open doors and a dirt floor and no furniture. Outside this building appeared to be high enough for two floors. The door opening appeared to be a normal human height.

Inside, the ceiling appeared to be perhaps seven feet high. I went to the end of the room furthest from the door and wondered how they used the second floor since there was no stairs inside and no openings outside.

I felt myself dissolving as if in a Star Trek transporter beam. I thought to myself, “Aha! This is how they get to the second floor”! The room faded and I was in a dark void. I realized that they were intentionally holding me in this state. I became very angry, “You bastards!”… And with that thought I awoke, or rematerialized, in my bed.

On the next lucid dream, I wanted to explore a planet that had intelligent life. I knew I was going to a planet 40,000 light-years away. Unlike going to relatively nearby places like other planets in the solar system, this was not instantaneous. As with traveling in time, this seemed to take a period of about 15 seconds to go 40,000 light years.

Travel in lucid dream over great distances takes time. I call this speed the speed of thought, and I have calculated that it is approximately 8.4 x 10 to the 10th power times the speed of light. Traveling at the speed of thought takes approximately the same amount of time to travel 40,000 light-years distance as it does to travel 40 years in time.

I found an ecologically devastated planet with ground covered with a short perfect grass like a golf coarse green. There was only one species of trees similar to oak or maple in structure.

Circular huts were scattered. Walls looked like corrugated aluminum. The roof was blue-black and had the same appearance as a monocrystaline contiguous conical solar cell.

An intelligent technologically advanced species destroyed the natural ecology but created a simple primitive ecology that sustained them. They, grass, and the trees, were all the life that remained. I felt great sadness for a dying planet being kept alive artificially.

In the last lucid dream I have had, I visited a nearby planet with two suns. They appeared red and blue in the sky. They were a close binary star system with a planet orbiting their center of gravity. This planet was very dry and desert like with extreme day/night temperature swings. I saw no animal life, only cactus like plants. The cactus cast two shadows, one red and one blue.

I had one waking OBE that was very similar in quality in that I could go places just by thinking about it. I was trying a relaxation technique which works like this: Start with your toes. Feel your toes and be aware of them. Clench them tight as you can and feel the tension, then release and feel the relaxation of the muscles in your toes. Work your way up your entire body, even up to the muscles in your scalp.

I went unaware that anything extraordinary had happened. I stood up and walked down the hall, past my daughters room. I said something to her and she did not acknowledge me. I thought that was very odd, then I looked back at the bed I was sitting on, and I was still sitting. I became aware I was out of my body. I had not experienced an this in the waking state. I had read a about it and heard other people describe being able to go somewhere just by thinking about it, and so I decided that I wanted to go find intelligent life on another planet.

Uncomfortable with the idea of going that far on the first excursion out of my body, I found myself in a sunken basement with windows near the top of the wall in window wells. There was a man sitting on the carpeted floor at a coffee table meditating. There was a telepathic conversation and I knew that he wanted to do the same thing. Next, I am hovering over the fourth planet around Alpha Centauri at a distance similar to the distance of a geosynchronous satellites from earth.

Similar to earth in appearance, it was about three quarters ocean and one quarter land. It did not have polar caps. It had clouds like earth but the planet was much larger, three to four times the size of earth. When you look at a view of the earth from space, the atmosphere appears paper thin. But on this planet the visible atmosphere was perhaps 5% of the apparent diameter of the planet. Clouds at various heights took on a very three dimensional appearance.

I wanted to go to the surface and see what life forms were there, but I felt something calling me back and so returned home to my body. I returned in a sitting up position and my daughter was fighting with my youngest son. A fight which I had to intervene in before blood was spilt.

I wanted to know if Alpha Centauri might be capable of hosting such a planet and life. Alpha Centauri is about 1.05 solar masses. It is believed to be about a billion years older than our sun, and has nearly identical surface temperature and spectral distribution.

Alpha Centauri is part of a two or three star system. The third star is far away and small. It is not known if it is gravitationally bound to Alpha and Beta Centauri. The orbits of Alpha and Beta Centauri are sufficiently distant that stable orbits out to about the distance mid-way between Mars and Jupiter where liquid water, considered necessary for life, can exist.

My next post will deal with the specifics of dreams set in future times.