Relative scarcity and actual scarcity in significant dream content

I started this SubStack a little over a month ago to share my more inspiring dreams. The dreams are important because of the nature of the messages they contain. One concern was that if I shared the more spectacular examples right away, they would have a small audience because the SubStack hadn’t yet gotten off the ground, and then would be buried by later posts.

Regardless, it was those dreams that convinced me to make the SubStack in the first place and I’ve already shared some of them. There are 13,467 dreams in my database today, which may sound like plenty of material, but there are only 39 that are as intense as the two I recently posted (Witness to Creation part I and II). There are another 980 coded as “spirit-related”, and 448 with veridical content of some kind. The actual numbers for the last two categories may be higher now, because the last time I coded the dreams was around 2015. Not only have I not coded the dreams in years, I stopped actively investigating them in 1991 or so. That means that all “veridical” codes after that year were verified passively. Compared to previous validation efforts, passive validation accounts for around 1% of the total.

The question in my mind is whether to continue with the blockbusters while the audience here is small. I’m inclined to do it because these are the most important dreams. Just be aware that there isn’t an endless supply. There may be more in the future but I cannot predict that and they are rare. At least, for me they are rare. That is the subject of this post. To me, they seem rare but compared to others, there may be more dreams of this type in my journals than anywhere else.

My dream journal began as a way to convince my wife that I was not having precognitive dreams. She thought I was, and regularly reminded me of this opinion. I thought she was wrong. The dream journal, I thought, would prove it. It didn’t. My wife, to her credit, was right. I was having precognitive dreams. Still, I thought I wasn’t having that many.

I’d read about “psychics” who seemed able to do amazing things on a daily basis pretty much whenever they felt like it. I didn’t believe the stories because I didn’t believe that psychic abilities were real. Despite that, I retained the impression that if psychic abilities were real, there would be no limitations on their use for people who had them. This meant that if a psychic had a dream of the future, or wanted one, it would happen every night. That was far more than the few I had captured in my journal.

A funny thing about that is a few months after starting the journal, in March of 1990, I did have a veridical dream (either precognitive or an Out of Body Experience (OBE) every single night for the entire month. Despite that, most of the dreams weren’t about newsworthy subjects. One was very newsworthy. It featured the collapse of the World Trade Center towers after bad men took hostages and somehow caused the collapse. When it happened, it caused what looked like a tidal wave of debris that coated everyone in its path with what looked like, but wasn’t, snow.

In March of 1990, there was no way to validate the WTC dream because the event it depicted happened eleven years later. The point is that the one very newsworthy event found in that month’s dreams, could not be verified during that month. The rest of the dreams that were verified either within March of 1990 or shortly thereafter were so mundane that they didn’t change my impression that “real psychics” would have much better results than me.

I lost interest in validating my dreams toward the middle of 1990. I continued to record them for a couple more years but didn’t make an effort to check them out as I had previously. I then took a seven year hiatus from recording dreams before starting up again around 1998 after a precognitive dream about a colleague at work. Over all this time and for some years afterward, as my journal grew in size and I kept racking up verified dream content, I retained the impression that there weren’t “very many” dreams of interest.

The reason is partly because of this impression I had of psychics who were supposed to be able to do amazing things at will. The other reason is that I might record five or ten of fifteen dreams before I had one that was interesting to me. Then, it might be a few days, a week, or a month before validation came my way. Quite often, the validation was for a dream I didn’t think was very interesting to begin with and only became interesting later because it was precognitive.

Precognition, I had discovered, was far from the only phenomena I was experiencing in my dreams. I was doing what some call “remote viewing” and others call an OBE or clairvoyance. I was interacting with ghosts and spirits, healing others, experiencing telepathy, and a few other things that are considered different types of psi by parapsychologists. To me, they were all “just dreams”. This changed a bit in 2004.

In 2004, my wife forgot to turn the water off before fixing a faucet in our bathroom. Before we could find the shut off valve and stop the water, our basement was flooded. My dream journals were in the basement. They were totally soaked. My wife and I used hair dryers to dry out the journals. As we did this, I couldn’t help but read some of the pages. It was something I hadn’t done before: read one dream after another. Until then, I wrote dreams down but didn’t look at them again unless I was noting a verification in the margin.

I had a huge collection of dreams. Among them was a fairly large number of interesting dreams. This, was surprising to me because until then, I’d thought I didn’t have “that many” interesting dreams. Another contributor to that impression were some of the parapsychology books I’d started reading.

When writing about parapsychology, one naturally does not write about other subjects. The effect is to concentrate the material in such a way that all non-parapsychology content is squeezed out of any book on the subject. I wasn’t thinking of these books as the best of the best examples found worldwide after scouring every culture for examples over the past 150 years. And yet, that is what those books contain. They take the tiny number of genuinely interesting cases, culled from thousands, and present them in concentrated form, one after the other.

Researcher Ian Stevenson was aware that presenting only solid cases could leave the impression that there are no weak cases, so he intentionally included weak cases in some of his published reports on his research. Despite his intention, the effect remains one of a large number of strong cases.

In 2004, I realized I had a larger quantity of material than I had until then thought possible. I had also started to realize that there is a difference between the material in my journal and the material used as subject matter for books on psi. My material had one source, while books on parapsychology have many sources. In many of those cases, the one case described for any given person might be the only such experience they’d ever had.

So, I started to accept that maybe my dream journal was more unusual than I thought. Another thing discovered in 2004 were dreams of God (15 of these as of today) or that had some kind of meaning related to spiritual issues. I had ignored those dreams because there was no way to validate them. How could I? They made no reference to the physical world, or “material reality” as some might say. They could be totally true but there was no way to prove it while awake on earth. Drying out the notebooks alerted me to the fact that I had hundreds of these spiritual dreams.

A little later, I joined an online forum called Skeptiko (www.Skeptiko.com) to listen to podcasts on parapsychology. I was an active member of the forum for a few years. I frequently made lengthy posts to explain my dreams and thoughts on related topics. Eventually, I realized that I was giving the same information over and over again. To save myself the trouble of writing the same thing over and over again, I wrote a few journal articles. It was at approximately this time that I realized how unusual my dream diaries are.

The first hint came from Stanley Krippner, who I met in Amsterdam. At the time, he said my dream journal was the highest quality such journal he’d encountered during his fifty years’ experience with dream research. He said that he knew of one other journal that might have more entries (Nancy Sondow) and another that might be about the same quality but with many fewer records but none with the same quality and quantity.

The literature review portion of my papers required a search of the literature. It was then that I realized how rare the material in my journal was. For instance, there is a website called “Sleep and Dream Database” maintained by resarcher Dr. Kelly Bulkeley. Bulkeley’s primary interest is religious dreams. The database has 40,737 entries from 15,798 participants. A search for the word “God” returns 182 records (0.45%). On closer examination, almost every occurence of the word “God” is in the phrase “Oh my God” or “Oh God”. Others were references to “the [Greek] God” followed by names like Zeus and Apollo. Those dreams were all from the same person. I counted 5 that could be described as dreams containing an appearance by God, though each of them was ambiguous. That is five out of 40,737 dreams (0.01%).

There are 15 dreams where God unambiguously appears in my journals (0.111%). Not a cloud of smoke, a deep voice, a burning bush, a feeling, Jesus, an angel, or anything else. Each is a clear dream of God. He is very tall (compared to me, three times taller or so), immensely old, immensely strong, and projecting an intensely bright light. Dreams like this are no more common in the literature of parapsychology than in the online dream database.

Spiritual dreams are also uncommon. there are 980 dreams coded that way in my journal but the code uses a “widest net” strategy designed to tag anything that could be considered “spiritual” including things that I don’t consider spiritual, like ghosts. Reduced to the material I do count as genuinely spiritual, the number goes down to 89. If I expand it a little bit by allowing spiritual information without an identified spirit, we get to 259. This is a very large number compared to the literature, even as a proportion of the total.

Likewise, the 448 dreams coded as veridical (likely less than the actual number due to lack of checking in recent years) is very large compared to other examples found in the literature.

And yet, it doesn’t feel like that much. The reason is that I don’t have special dreams like these every night.