Introduction

How would you feel if you found yourself reliving one of your dreams, detail for detail? Would you dismiss it as a strange coincidence, or question your sanity perhaps? You might conclude that your memory had played tricks on you, that there had been no such dream in the first place. Maybe the whole experience was an intense deja vu, an imbalance of brain chemistry leaving you certain that you had dreamed this very occasion before.

Or maybe the experience was genuine, leaving you questioning whether free will exists. If you can see your future before it happens, is it, after all, predetermined? Or did you create your future by seeing it in the first place? How would you feel if you dreamed or had a vision of a fatal accident, only to walk into the identical scene the next day? Was it an inevitable accident? Should you have warned the person concerned? Why did you get to preview it? What does it all mean?

The implications of each of these questions are huge, particularly in the areas of personal freedom, power and responsibility. Many precognitive dreamers and visionaries wrestle with these questions throughout their lives, not knowing where to turn for social acceptance let alone explanation.

Being a scientist, my reaction to these kind of experiences in my own life has been to record all my dreams shortly after waking, a discipline I have continued for six years. My family and those who know me well often witness my excited flourishing of my dream journal in evidence that some event we have all shared has been documented in advance. The awe never dwindles, even though I have now reached an understanding of the hows and whys behind the dramas of precognition. For that is where I now stand, paused at the milestone which marks not the end of my travels, but the conclusion of a three-year research quest which has led me on the most extraordinary journey.

There were many facets to this quest and I approached it from a variety of angles. While my own story interweaves the pages of this book, you will also meet others whose dreams have previewed specific future events, as well as those whose future insights have been received while awake. The stories of four esteemed professional clairvoyants are presented, documenting their experiences, hopes, fears and philosophies of precognition. All these people were interviewed in depth and many contributed additional experiences and thoughts during the three-year period. Each has read and edited his or her story as it appears in this book and each has agreed to publication, although some have chosen pen-names to maintain confidentiality. Several experiences were retold from my radio talkback programmes using transcribed tapes and these are acknowledged as they occur.

The most extraordinary part of the quest for me was the Hypnosis Project in which I was hypnotised into the future six times by John Suess, a well regarded professional hypnotherapist. Going under hypnosis as a scientist, recording and transcribing the sessions in secrecy and then living through the unfolding scenarios as objectively as I could, was exhilarating yet traumatic. The results of my experiments challenged me way beyond the boundaries of my previous thinking. I emerged from those months of headaches, confusion and disbelief with a completely new, yet rational, understanding of the way life is.

You will also travel, through these pages, the dimensions of quantum physics and relativity where reality as you think you know it will never be the same again. Imagery leads you over the bumpy bits to impart clear understanding of these insights without losing scientific accuracy.

The book is structured in three parts. The first, ‘The Body of Evidence’, presents the evidence for precognition (the 'what?'), through precognitive dreams, visions, professional clairvoyancy and the Hypnosis Project. The intention is to keep you questioning at this stage, to lead you along a similar journey to my own and to give you the opportunity to assess the evidence, reminisce your own experiences and come up with your own theories. Part One threads questions throughout the evidence, much as you might encounter when reading a detective novel. Indeed that was the idea behind this structure, to let you enjoy the book as a great mystery, allowing your conscious and unconscious mind to simmer and brew over the possibilities and the huge implications of areas of this research. While you might find the questioning frustrating and the evidence at times contradictory, you will enjoy the journey best if you enter into the 'detective' frame of mind.

The second part, ‘The Mind Questions 'How?’’, introduces science into the arena to answer some of the 'hows' and then progresses through further extraordinary experiences to arrive at a complete understanding of how precognition works. The only question then remaining is whether our ability to experience the future and then live through it again is merely a fantastic mechanism explicable by science and theory, or whether there is a deeper spiritual meaning behind it all.

And so the third part of the book ponders ‘The Soul Searches for Meaning’, completing the 'what?' and the 'how?' with the 'why?'. Spirituality enters the picture highlighting meaning, purpose and the role of personal power in addressing our individual responsibilities towards our personal and collective futures. The final practical component shows you how to apply the results of this research to gain maximum insight into the what, how and why of the shape of things to come.