I was antagonistic to religion and defended atheism until at least 1990, when I turned 25 years old. The dream journal started in 1989, and that’s when my doubts began. It wasn’t until 2004, at age 39, that I found myself in the uncomfortable position of admitting to myself and others that God is real. More than that, God is more real than anything else. I was persuaded by my dreams. Nothing else.
About the time I started keeping track of my dreams, I realized that some were precognitive. I became curious about psi phenomena in general at that time and started researching it heavily. I wanted to know what other researchers had found in the field.
By happy coincidence, I lived near the Parapsychology Foundation’s library in Manhattan at the time. I went there every week and read as much as I could. After a few weeks of this, I realized that their library could be divided into three categories: 1) popular parapsychology, 2) parapsychology studies, and 3) spontaneous cases.
The popular parapsychology group consisted of popularized accounts of ghost stories, Bigfoot sightings, etcetera. This material was not very credible to me. It was often poorly sourced and contradictory. If neither of those things, it was sensationalized. The books in this section included the ghost sighting anthologies by Hans Holzer and Erich van Danniken’s famous “Chariots of the Gods” series. These are the books critics refer to when they criticize parapsychology. Speaking of which, most books that criticize parapsychology fit into this category as well.
The second group of books are mostly written by parapsychologists or other journalists with an interest in parapsychology. Each book covers either a single type of phenomenon, such as the reincarnation books by Dr. Ian Stevenson, or the field of parapsychology, like the work of Charles Tart. The first type of book gathers multiple cases or studies from disparate sources to analyze a phenomenon. The second group gathers books or research papers of the first type and anthologizes them to provide an overview of multiple psi phenomena. Colin Wilson’s study of the occult fits into this category.
Parapsychology books are credible in a way that popularized accounts are not. They are rarely referred to seriously in the literature of parapsychology criticism, possibly because the evidence they present is too strong to casually dismiss.
The last group of books concern individual case study experiences, often written by the person who had the experience. Robert Monroe’s “Journeys Out Of The Body”, J.W. Dunne’s “An Experiment in Time” and Betty Jane Eadie’s book about her near death experience, “Embraced by the Light” are examples of these. My own book, “Dreamer”, would have fit into this category if it had existed at the time I was visiting the Parapsychology Foundation’s library.
The personal experience books varied widely in quality, due to the writing ability of individual authors, many of whom had no previous writing experience. In my own case, I think it is fair to say that I first learned to write in an effort to record my dreams accurately and then to describe their meaning to others.
The last category of study material at the foundation is something I never took advantage of. They had an extensive collection of scientific journals and original articles in a roped off section of the library upstairs. It was for researchers only, though I’m sure I could have had access to seeing individual journals or articles if I’d asked. The parapsychology books were based in large part on the material contained in these papers. This was also the place to go to find the most serious criticism of parapsychology but I didn’t know that at the time.
My overall takeaway from my months of study at the Parapsychology Foundation was that Dr. Ian Stevenson’s reincarnation studies were the most convincing of all the material they had. On their own, they convinced me that reincarnation, or something very similar, must happen.
When I walked into the Parapsychology Foundation for the first time, I had no idea I would encounter Stevenson’s books, nor that I would read anything about reincarnation. My interest was precognitive dreams, a subject they had very little coverage of. As for reincarnation, I walked in believing that reincarnation was such a ridiculous theory that it wasn’t worth a moment’s consideration. It was not uppermost in my mind, or even a subject I paid any attention to. Stevenson’s books persuaded me otherwise.
Stevenson started his career as a child psychologist. In that context, he occasionally ran across a parent who complained that her child was claiming to have “lived before”. He heard this enough that his threshold of curiosity was eventually reached. Stevenson created a questionnaire designed to elicit similar experiences so that he could determine how common this type of claim was. The results of the questionnaire were promising, so he embarked on a decades-long inquiry into the subject.
Stevenson’s methodology involved talking to parents of children who remembered a past life, then to the children themselves, to create a list of statements that he could investigate and hopefully verify. For instance, if child “John Doe” remembers the life of previous personality “Steve Schmidt”, he obtains as many details as he can from Doe about Schmidt, then embarks on a search for Schmidt. If he finds records of a Schmidt, he then compares them to the child’s statements to see how closely they match.
Dr. Stevenson found so many examples of strong matches out of thousands of cases that I couldn’t pretend reincarnation was “out of the question”. Stevenson’s research knocked holes in every argument I was familiar with and then some. Unless he fabricated all of his evidence, he was right to say that reincarnation was a plausible explanation for his data.
After reading all of the Stevenson books then present at the Parapsychology Foundation, I was convinced that reincarnation did occur. Whether it always occurred, how it occurred, and why it occurred, remained open questions to me. That is as far as I was willing to go. As I studied my dreams, I became increasingly familiar with different types of psi phenomena. It was a challenge to accept each one. I accepted the reality of precognitive dreams because I had too many recorded in my journals to ignore them. Other phenomena took considerable effort to overcome my skepticism. No amount of acceptance of one subject carried over to the next. At least, not until I spotted how inter-related they all were.
God was the final frontier, the last of all the parapsychology, psi, spiritual subjects that I would accept. It was the most difficult because the existence of God implied all sorts of things that didn’t make any sense. First, if God is real, then the supernatural is real because God is supernatural. Since nothing is supernatural, God must not be real. That pillar of my argument fell when I realized I was having precognitive dreams, because they are “supernatural”.
My next argument against the existence of God was that there are no spirits. For all I knew, precognition might be supernatural because of some aspect of the physical universe that was poorly understood. All by itself, it might weaken my argument against God but if there are no spirits, or supernatural beings, then God could not exist.
Then, I had dreams that were Out of Body (OBE) experiences. Those implied a separation of mind and body but not necessarily a literal splitting of one non-physical body from another. However, I also dreamed of ghosts, one of whom I knew. I only met my aunt Rita once, in the year 1983. My family was moving from California to Maine and stopped in Minnesota to visit my grandparents. This one occasion included a short 20 minute meeting with Rita, who was about 25, and her fiancee. I never spoke to her again but I did dream of her.
Rita was killed in an automobile crash in 1986. In 1990, I had a series of dreams about Rita. In one of them, she told me to tell her brother Tom that she would not appear to him in his dreams any longer. I told him of the dream the following day, when I met him in Miami. He told me that on the same night, he’d dreamed of Rita and that she’d said “good-bye” to him. Until then, he’d dreamed of her several times after her death.
That dream, and others like it, gave me reason to think it was possible that we do have spirits. Stevenson’s reincarnation research carried me over the top on that issue. Thus fell my resistance to the idea of God on the basis that there was no such thing as a “soul”.
Even if precognition, OBE’s, ghosts, and reincarnation are real, I reasoned that God didn’t have to be an old man in the sky. Maybe there was an amorphous creative force that brought the physical universe into being. Maybe New Age philosophers were right to suggest that God is a force, not an individual. At the time I was thinking along those lines, I had made other observations that led me to believe our universe had to be the product of design. I won’t go into the details here but the idea that the complexity and interdependencies in our physical universe could occur absent any kind of intelligent direction was increasingly difficult to believe.
That was my position on God from about 1991-2004. In between, I became less antagonistic, even accepting, of people with religious beliefs. It seemed to me that maybe they had mistakes in their theology but they were looking in the right direction. On that basis, I felt they understood their world better than people who didn’t bother to look at all.
In 2004, I had a series of dreams and experiences that brought me all the way around to viewing God pretty much as he appears in the Abrahamic tradition. It was these dreams, dreams I will share in later posts, that left no doubt in my mind that God is real and is pretty much as advertised in the Torah and Old Testament. I am less convinced by the portrait painted in modern Christian doctrine, which is disconnected from the New and Old Testament in exactly the places I disagree.
Keep in mind that until I had the group of dreams previously referred to in 2004, I knew next to nothing about any religious literature. I learned a few things about it, not out of an interest in learning about God, but as a way to check if my dreams matched anything described in those books.
All of the foregoing is written from my perspective at the time. There is at least one person who disagreed. Her name is Beatrice Rich. I read about Beatrice Rich at the Parapsychology Foundation in 1990. She was described as a psychic who lived in New York. I suggested to my wife that we meet with her for a “reading”. I had never been to a psychic reading. For all I knew, Rich was 100% fraud, 100% genuine, or something in-between. I hoped she would be real but until I met her, there was no way to know. My wife, Kitty, and I met Rich at a restaurant called Garvin’s.
Most of Rich’s statements concerned some verifiable facet of our lives, things that no one else could have known in the pre-Internet days of 1990. The value of her statements is they confirmed she could describe things she’d never seen and could not have known about normally. That is also true of many of my dreams at the time. They didn’t concern anything important, except the fact they indicated our reality was very different than what we are taught in school.
One thing Rich said I can hear in my mind even now. There was a moment when she used the word “God”. I responded, “I am an atheist”. She took one look at me and with confidence I will likely never forget, said, “Yours is not the heart of an atheist!” I tried to convince her otherwise but she refused to accept the possibility that I was indeed an atheist.
Now, I realize she was not only right, she was probably right at the time as well. The reason is that my “heart” or “soul” knows things beyond my conscious awareness. For whatever reason, it was important that I experience atheism and approach God skeptically. Perhaps it was to familiarize myself with the skeptical perspective so that I could later argue against it. Regardless, Rich was right and I’m glad she was. I think I understand atheism better now also, and see it as a very narrow view of the universe.
I see religion slightly differently. Depending on the dogma in question, religion can be a way to seek greater knowledge. It can also be as narrow as atheism but focused on a different slice of the universe.