I Had A Dream

[I'm really not writing very well.  This is very much NOT how I wanted to approach this topic, but having started it a while back to avoid the boring and try to inch toward the entertaining aspects of my past few years, I feel I need to throw it out there.  The dream really happened.  My beliefs because of it are genuine and logically consistent.  Yet, I fear I made too many jumps for the concept to naturally evolve in the reader before explaining my deductions, which should be the goal of any well written piece, IMO, like how M. Night had everyone thinking what he wanted them to think when Bruce Willis got his realization.  So, forgive me or not, or just don't read.  There are some interesting principles to think about below.  I'm just finding it had to think lately, again.  You may have to do the thinking for me on this one if you hope to understand it.  SIGH.]

This is the only dream I know of that I have had which came true.  There may have been more.  I don't know.  But I do know it happened this one time.  I mean I KNOW it.  Read on and see.  The following is completely true.

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The premise -

I was 18 years old, a freshman living in the Clark Kerr dormatory at UC Berkeley, at the time, a physics major.  I had not yet begun to drink myself into trouble, academically or otherwise.  Understand, too, that in high school I was what I'd call semi-athletic.  I was fast, but thin.  I ran track for two years (reaching MHAL finals for the 400 with a 53.4, woohoo, never to be approached again).  I played golf on a Junior Golf team from age 9 to 21. 

I had a pool at my house, such that the older boys on the block would consider me a friend on hot summer days, and I was very "good" in the pool.  I was the guy that could tickle the foot of the person that was "it" in Marco Polo and would not get caught, even if the guy peeked.  I was faster than most at freestyle, but never swam competitively.  I had rarely even seen a competition pool, lanes in, as I ran track during that sport season.  I only saw them in passing a few times.  The relevence of this is upcoming.

So, a month or so into my freshman year, all of us newly thrown together 18 year olds nervous, it was quite common for the group of us that gathered at the same dining table in the morning to bring up our dreams, if we thought they were interesting.  Still learning how to socialize, I suppose.  I rarely contributed.

Then, the dream -

I was sitting on the top step of a set of bleachers that were painted white.  I was watching people swim back and forth in a pool that was directly in front of me.  The really odd part was that both the white bleachers and pool were inside of a large cave.  It wasn't exactly dark, but was definitely dank in feeling.

After some time, still sitting atop the bleachers, a woman came up from my right.  She was older, in her 40s, physically fit, and pretty good looking in her one piece (no easy feat from the judgement of an 18 year old).  She raised her hand, holding up a cassette tape, and said, "Can I rewind my tape in your cassette player?"

End dream.

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Clearly nothing special, but it was an intensly vivid dream.  I had not experienced such vivedness since childhood.  It was so vivid, I told my room mate about it while we got ready that morning, and later spoke up at breakfast about it, where, of course, the conversation quickly turned towards women in their 40s and whether this was evidence of a fetish on the part of myself.  I bring this up because, years later, I had the chance to ask a few of the people I had told about the dream if they remembered me telling them.  Two did, one being my former room mate, who then returned to the topic of my alleged fetish for older women.

Now, before skipping the likely more interesting tales of drunken misdeeds and their consequences, it should be noted that I left Cal after that first semester, to "grow up," as Sanford Paganucci, head of student discipline, had put it.  I returned home to San Jose, tail between my legs, to attend SJSU while I "matured" before returning to Cal two years later.

One of those "friends" from childhood (hot summer day "let's be nice to Mike he has a pool" friend), was also living at home.  He had a job at the Central YMCA, teaching swim lessons and lifeguarding, and he invited me to apply as well.  I did, and I can say with some pride that my experience working 40+ hours a week while taking a full load of classes at SJSU did help me "grow up" in a big way.

And so it came to pass, as I sat in a white life guardchair, as the lifeguard for morning lap swim (6-9am), that the attractive 40ish aqua aerobics instructor of my dream came up on my right hand side holding a cassette tape and asked, "Can I rewind my tape in your cassette player?"

In a moment of imediate recall, probably looking like a deer in the headlights, I softly said, "I dreamed this."

She tilted her head with a puzzled look.  "Can I rewind this in your player?"

"Yeah . . . , yeah."  And she walked away to prepare for her class, leaving me to sit, watching swimmers go back and forth, thinking about that dream.

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First, I just found this on line, a picture of the Central YMCA indoor pool.  The place has been upgraded since 1990, but you can still somewhat see the asbestos looking ceiling.  It used to come down the walls a few feet as well.  It had a dank feel to it in there, and it looked very much like a cave.  Most indoor pools share this effect (at least to me) I since learned, but the added visual cue of the grey, granulated ceiling really exacerbated the effect.  It wasn't until I told some co-workers of the dream that I learned the people at the front desk actually called the room "the cave."

Feel free to think it was coincidence.  I do not.

My intreige over the dream was significant.  I went on to become a Psychology major (perhaps, in part, because of my interest in this dream), going back to Cal, where I graduated with an emphasis in Cognitive Psychology.  I have read, with interest, all the reasons given to refute people who claim their dreams have come true, and I absolutely agree with most of said rebuttals in most cases, as likely alternatives to actual precognition.  They do not work here, however.

First, I could only dream what I knew.  I never saw a life guard chair up close, wooden or metalic, painted white or otherwise.  The YMCA chair was wooden and painted white.  Having spent much time watching football and basketball from bleachers in high school, the 18 year old me pictured white bleachers.  Also, I had never been to or seen an indoor swimming pool before that time, let alone one with a dull grey, asbestos looking ceiling, where even condensation dripped into pool make it feel like a cave when things were quiet.  So, if during the dream, my mind was witness to the Central YMCA's pool and me upon a white washed lifeguard stand, it makes sense that I would perceive myself upon a bleacher inside a cave instead.

This argument is much like what Ancient Alien believers point out (which I admit is not the argument to run with for credibility purposes, but oh well).  If a person of ancient times witnessed a single person flying saucer of some sort, his inability to understand what he witnessed, technologically speaking, would result in describing the event in terms he did understand, like an angel or a person upon a flying carpet.

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Ultimately, the sole purpose of this post is to provide why I am a believer in "precognition" in various forms.  I believe it can happen because I am certain it once happened to me.  I do not believe in every person that claims to tell fortunes, by any means, but I believe in the possibility. 

I resently rewatched the movie Dogma, and found a quote resonated with me.  Alan Rickman, as The Voice of God, explains that God's voice would explode the skull of any human that heard it, being overwhelmed.  So, in all of recorded history, anyone that reported having spoken to God, was in fact talking to Rickman's character instead, The Voice of God, or they were talking to themselves.

This is to say that I don't disregard Nostradamus out of hand (though many interpretations of his quatrains are suspect as all hell).  I find Edgar Casey incredibly interesting.  I think an awful lot more is going on around us then we are capable of consciously perceiving.  This makes for a great deal of interesting possibilities.  Would you necesarily have a clue if you were seeing the future in your dreams but your mind kept interpreting them in terms you found commonplace?

In later posts, I will introduce how much fun it can be to entertain such a position, how it can (and did in my case) help in times of trouble by entertaining one's self with such speculation.  As a precurser, consider:  If the subconscious is capable of picking up glimpses of the future, how much art, how much fiction, can actually be incorporating glimpses of the future, likely without even knowing it?  Could some of our fiction, from movie scripts to song lyrics, actually have future events incorporated within them, even the author unaware?

With that, similar to how I found an alternate meaning for the first lines of 19th Nervous Breakdown, give Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven a listen.