Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life by Robert Moss

Author:Robert Moss [Moss, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, General
ISBN: 9780307555342
Google: QRo4aDLxrY8C
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2010-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

THE CASE OF THE BISHOP’S PIG

The scientific investigation of dream precognition begins, in modern times, with the case of the bishop’s pig. Frank Podmore, an indefatigable researcher of paranormal phenomena in Victorian England, investigated a dream report sent in by Mrs. Atlay, the wife of an Anglican bishop. The bishop’s wife dreamed that a jolly fat pig was stuck between the table and the wall in her dining room. Over Sunday breakfast, she regaled her family with this comical episode, which she took to be nothing more than a nonsense dream. The family then set off for church. On their return, they were astonished to discover a large-as-life pink pig jammed between the dining table and the wall. While they were out, a neighboring farmer’s pig had escaped and managed to run inside the bishop’s house.3

I like this story because it is a humorous antidote to the false impression, widespread among people with mediocre dream recall, that dreams of the future mostly involve death and disasters beyond the dreamer’s control. This impression has been reinforced by the fact that the prophetic dreams that are mentioned in history books usually involve the impending death of famous men. When the classics were still a common inheritance, every schoolchild knew that Calpurnia, the wife of Julius Caesar, had two dreams in a single night—one symbolic, one entirely literal—that both warned of her husband’s assassination. That the message was repeated the same night would have been taken by any Roman dream interpreter worth his olive oil as a signal that it was to be taken with the utmost seriousness, Caesar failed to heed the warning, with notorious results. Most American schoolchildren know that Abraham Lincoln dreamed he saw his own body, laid out in a coffin in the East Room of the White House, two weeks before he was shot and killed in Ford’s Theatre. Lincoln believed in dreams and discussed this one with his wife and friends, but was unable to avoid its fulfillment—partly because he chose not to hide himself away from the public, partly also (perhaps) because his dream message was not sufficiently specific.4

It is also widely known that many people have dream precognition of mass disasters: the sinking of the Titanic, a coal mine tragedy in Wales, an earthquake in California, a civil war in Africa or the Balkans.

When we dream about world events that do not directly involve us, sometimes we are given a dream preview in the form of a TV news report or an advance copy of a newspaper. J. W. Dunne, the British scientist and Army officer who logged his own precognitive dreams with military rigor, noticed this phenomenon back in 1902, when he was on campaign in South Africa during the Boer War. He dreamed he was standing on a volcano on an island threatened with imminent disaster. He tried desperately, inside the dream, to persuade French colonial officials on a nearby island to gather ships to evacuate the people who were at risk. He heard an ominous message repeated over and over: “Four thousand people will be killed.

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