A long dream, forgotten now except for the climax:

Someone turns on the radio, it warms up a moment, then a loud horn section rings out. A rich fanfare.

I wake in instant shock--because the horn chorus isn't just in my dream ears but my physical ones! A melodious shifting chord. Well, sounds like horns, but isn't: turns out to be a huge truck that strayed onto our quiet residential street! Its brakes rubbed, vibrating the whole chassis into a fanfare Debussy would be proud of.

But the dream set it up BEFORE the sound began. The dream character turned the knob a tiny but noticeable fraction of a second before the music started--in either world!

How?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

Last night I dreamed a scene that seemed predictive of a TV show I saw the next evening; but I thought "it could have been coincidence". Denial, minimizing. So my dreams come back with a prediction fulfilled undeniably just a moment later, so I CAN'T evade the issue!

You can argue my sleeping mind subliminally heard preliminary truck-brake squeaks, and had just enough time to whip up that radio before the music went full-volume; but some such anticipatory dreams are harder to explain this way. In 1865, dream researcher Alfred Maury famously dreamed he was led to the Guillotine--just as it beheaded him, he woke to find the headboard had fallen and hit his neck just where the dream-blade had struck! Yet the dream build-up to his beheading had been long, his execution perfectly timed.

Maury concluded his whole dream must have been instantaneous, a reaction to the blow on the neck before he'd consciously registered it. His model--that all dreams are instantaneous--survived nearly a century till the discovery of REM disproved it. Without instantaneity, the only current explanatory models for dreams like Guillotine are coincidence or ESP.

33 YEARS LATER...

Both Maury and I were researching dreams, and we both had stimulus/response models assuming time's one-way. Our dreams may have been challenging that model! Maury's dream is especially strong--even if his headboard creaked before it fell, that's no subliminal tip-off of a beheading. How'd the dream know not to turn a croak or a groan into a ship at sea, burglars upstairs, or a giant frog on his head? Instead, as the climax of an epic dream, his dream neck and physical neck are struck simultaneously. Response, then stimulus.

Knowing Maury's notorious dream makes me slow to assume my own was subliminally prompted.

For a similar feverdream apparently running several seconds ahead of our time, in which the dreamer was aware of both times at once, see FIP 4, by A Midlands Mum, reported (like so many time-anomalies) by JB Priestley.

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