I'm teaching a class in cultivating extrasensory perception, especially predictive dreams.

I help a short slender girl with a funny accent--part Cockney, part Appalachian! She's cute and seems smart to me, but her classmates all treat her as barbaric--some kind of hick. Feels to me like accent prejudice!

This week, we focus on sending dream messages back through time to your earlier self to warn you of dangers or opportunities ahead. This is the explanation of some predictive dreams--they're not radar looking ahead, but the future you shouting back...

But not all predictive dreams are this sort. I know of many cases where a clearly predictive dream pans out correctly but the dreamer doesn't try to send a warning back. And in some cases it's hard to see how anyone could, consciously or even unconsciously. If you die in your sleep of unknown causes, what warning would you know to send? Even if you postulate an afterlife, do souls read coroner's reports?

So this technique doesn't explain all precognition, let alone the other types of apparent ESP. But sending back-messages IS a teachable and useful trick--even lifesaving, now and then.

And surely most students want useful techniques more than comprehensive theory!

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• ESP in dreams: I'm studying Louisa Rhine's Hidden Channels of the Mind. She argues that the quite mundane content of nearly all ESP reports suggests it's nothing mystical, just one more sense we evolved along with our others--its mechanism is presently inexplained, but we use it like our other senses.
• Girl shunned for Cockneyish accent: Sen of the Airish, in Ian McDonald's book Planesrunner. In Sen's parallel world, the Airish are a minority facing strong prejudice. The fact that Sen appears in our class hints that my dreams support the many-world or parallel-world theory. Its model fits ESP findings better than one-track physics models.
• Short girl's predictive dreams: my friend Priscilla emailed me some dreams she thinks may be predictive--some of her earlier ones were.
• "How can ESP be useful?" I did think about this today. "You discover a psychic hit when the envisioned event happens, right? So you've already failed to change or prevent it! Useless!" Well... depends on your definition of 'you'. Maybe you sends back a warning to past you, who acts differently, creating a new timebranch with a happier you. You don't benefit, but you (and its successor you) does. And your good deed could easily rebound; unless your timeforks diverge a lot, you, in your future and your present, can send you useful crosstime warnings too.
  Not exactly instant karma, but reciprocal guardian angels--telepathy with yourselves! Complex, but this model does eliminate the paradoxes implied by precognition. And there are enough solid cases suggesting precognition to need some such model. The dream more than agrees; it advocates cultivating and teaching the technique!
• ACTION: after I finish the antibiotic treatments I'm doing and I have my energy back, propose to my friends Cory the shaman and Patricia the dream-scholar that we co-teach a class on psychic dreams. Yeah, we're all specialists, but we've each researched different and useful types and techniques. Why wait for a comprehensive theory? Real life doesn't need a Theory Of Everything!

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