Readers of this SubStack may notice I haven’t been posting as often as usual lately. This is because I have been working on a book about my dreams, tentatively titled “Soul Vision.” We’ll see if that title sticks, but that’s what it is for now.
I wrote a book about my dreams fourteen years ago, titled “Dreamer”, but I’ve never been satisfied with it, despite the good reviews and the tiny sales. First, I had only barely started my PhD by the time the book went to press, I hadn’t yet written any research articles, and didn’t understand how to do a literature review.
Learning how to do those things by actually doing them as part of the PhD process taught me a great deal about writing and research. Since then, I have wanted to rewrite the book to a more vigorous research standard.
At the same time, I wanted to focus more on the dreams that were the most interesting to me, the type found in this Substack, spiritual dreams. Dreamer was about providing evidence that various types of paranormal/psychic dreams are a genuine phenomenon, but frankly, I no longer find that very interesting. Yes, I had multiple dreams about the 9/11 disaster before it happened, but what is that compared to dreams of God in person?
The first step of the process was to identify the dreams I already presented in Dreamer, and flag them in my database. That allows me to replace them with similar dreams if available, to ensure the content in Soul Vision is as fresh as possible to readers. There will be some overlap because some of the dreams, also presented here, are too important to leave out.
Second, I had to look through all the dreams I’d already flagged for other reasons and determine which to exclude. Then, I had to go through everything else, to find dreams that should have been flagged, but weren’t. This meant reading over a million words of text multiple times, taking notes as I went, to identify the selection of dreams I wanted to work with.
In dreamer, 167 dreams are presented, in whole or part. For Soul Vision, I have identifed 774 candidates to discuss, some of which are the same as the 167 found in Dreamer. From this, I have to whittle the number down to between 100-150. This is the most time-consuming part of the process. The dreams have to be compared carefully, to retain what matters and exclude the non-essential.
I started with 13,593 dreams, though I have maybe a dozen sitting in my email inbox that haven’t been added to the database yet. This is progress, but it is slow. It is this work that has prevented me from making frequent posts here, but I hope to be done soon.
To talk about spiritual dreams, I intend to establish precognitive dreams, the existence of souls (spirits) and “independent agents” (other spirits). This will involve subjects that some people might be surprised by, but I believe in presenting the data I have, rather than the data other people believe is possible, so expect to see me talking about:
Precognition
Prophecy (different from precognition)
Out of Body Experiences (OBE): the term “OBE” is misleading, but is so commonly used, I will use it also
Reincarnation; I know there are people who don’t believe this as an article of faith, but in my view there is too much data supporting reincarnation to ignore it. Either it’s real, and the data shows that, or it isn’t, and the data must be explained.
Ghosts; these are controversial for some, for religious reasons, but like reincarnation, there is too much data on this to ignore. Besides, what is a ghost but a soul or spirit? To me, these are all synonomous.
God/Jesus/Angels/Satan/etc; even more controversy is attached to these names, but I will wade in regardless. They show up in my dreams, particularly very strong dreams, and must be discussed on that basis alone. However, of greater importance, some of these dreams contain information of value to all people.
“Personal meaning” and “spiritual journey”. These terms bother me because they are often used to deflect from or minimize the global importance of some dream content. I have dreams that are absolutely not designed purely for my benefit, and others that are, but even those have value to others because they illustrate some of the mechanisms of dreaming.
After I’ve settled on the dreams that will go into the book, I’ll have to figure out how to navigate the many minefields created by my reader’s beliefs. I won’t compromise the data to satisfy any group’s expectations, but will try to be mindful of differing belief systems so that discrepancies may be addressed.
So that’s my update for today, and here’s a bonus illustration from my journal:
I look forward to reading your book Andrew!