In the YA supernatural fantasy series, Super Human— think The Karate Kid meets Escape to Witch Mountain— teen Will Freeman learns about his super powers of the mind, and, in the process, has hard-to-explain experiences, like dreams that accurately predict future events, or dream-like experiences that helpers are watching over him, or any number of seemingly impossible happenings. As a character whose experiences are torn from those of the author, Will exemplifies the trope of the self-insert. For me, he is a character that gives me an opportunity to explore my own anomalous experiences and their possible implications.
My Precognitive Origin Story
The first precognitive dream I recall came in my twenties, and it was simple: the lit fuse on a cartoon bomb—which might have well been imprinted ACME— burns down to the stub and it explodes. At that exact moment, something happened in my neighborhood, and I woke to a loud boom. I quickly brushed off the astronomically unlikely coincidence as just that.
In a world that conflates disregard for the unconfirmed with reason, we gaslight ourselves out of our own lived experiences.
It took another couple of decades before I started a forthright inquiry into this phenomenon. What broke the Dam of Doubt for me was learning Remote Viewing. What’s that? A.k.a. Psychic Spying, Remote Viewing refers to a specific set of protocols developed by the U.S. Government in the 1970s to create a trainable, reproducible method for people to gain actionable intelligence about something remote to them in space or time. The government’s training manuals were declassified in 1995 and former military Remote Viewers began offering training for civilians.
Remote Viewing goes mainstream: Joe Rogan interviews one of the first scientists in Project Stargate, Hal Puthoff.
When I tried it for myself in 2013, I found it shockingly accurate, and it removed all doubts that we have far greater access to information than we commonly accept.
So, You’re Psychic. What Next?
Where attention goes, information flows
Remote Viewing, while powerful, is also a lot of work. I wanted something simple, and I found it in Russell Targ, Hal Puthoff’s peer and the other laser physicist at the start of the government’s Remote Viewing program. Targ recommends asking a question at bedtime. His fun, starter question is, “Tell me something I don’t already know about tomorrow.”
The first time I tried this, I was with my family at a beach resort in Mexico along with my father-in-law and his girlfriend. In the last dream I had before I woke, I was in the garage of my childhood home, but the floor was sand and I was raking it. When I woke, everyone else had been awake long before me; I stepped into our rental’s common area, and there was a new item on the sideboard outside my bedroom: a toy rake. My FIL’s girlfriend had brought my son to a store on the resort and bought him some toys to play with in the sand.
It actually worked … I was shocked. As if my subconscious wanted to be sure I remembered it, the dream didn’t occur until right before I woke.
The same way you don’t notice all the blue sports cars out there until you buy one even though they were there all along, our attention directs this ability and brings information that’s been there all along to our awareness.
I’ve adopted this strategy of asking a question at bedtime for the last decade, and successes continue to mount. For instance, I correctly predicted the shape of a stock chart 2 days in a row. (I rarely ask about stocks, so my success rate of ~20 attemts is ~70% success).
Will Freeman learns that attention is one of the three super powers of the mind. What the other two are and how they work together? Find out in Super Human.
I keep a dream journal of my own making so I can have fields for things like “question”, “precog confidence”, “date came to pass”, “notes”, etc. This has helped give me confidence that I’m not misremembering. Precognitive dreams can come to pass anywhere from instantaneously (ACME) to years after the dream. Most are banal … for instance, I dreamed of videoing a praying mantis. I told my son in the morning. In the afternoon, there was an odd bug on the door. I used a phone app to ID it … a mantidfly. I had no idea such a bug existed; never seen one before or since. In my 10 years of keeping records, “mantis” appears only 3 times. Only one is “mantis … caught on phone video first person”.
Recurring Dreams as Precognition?
A number of recurring dreams have come true for me. One example is I would dream my son and I were mining in a quarry, and every gem was cube shape. Six months later my son discovered Minecraft and became obsessed.
Recognizing a Precognition Before the Fact?
My current goal is to learn to identify precognitive dreams vs “regular” dreams.
I’ve dreamed of world events before they happened, like the 2025 Myanmar earthquake. I was reasonably confident it was precognitive, so I watched the news, and ten days later, the earthquake happened. The dream didn’t have enough information for me to know where or when, but I recognized the slanted-but-still-standing buildings instantly when I saw the first news footage.
I had a vivid dream that I felt was precognitive: I arrived by boat on a tourist island with a maze of buildings and a strong art community. About a week after, I watched a documentary, Monty Don’s Adriatic Gardens, and that was it! It was a let down that my dream was only about a TV show that I was about to watch. I’ve had other recurring dreams of travel; will I really travel or just watch travel shows? I suspect it will be the former, but only time will tell.
I strongly suspect precognitive dreams feel different … they feel meaningful. This is still a work in progress; I have a few good news dreams that I suspect are precognitive and I’m waiting for them to play out, but I’ve already seen indications they will play out as dreamt. It makes life a lot more interesting!
Other Anomalous Dream Types
Last night (at the time of writing) I had a long dream of house guests. The dream felt meaningul, but not precognitive. My first conversation of the day, a friend was telling me they have house guests. As I inquired, I noted the gist of the dream aligned with her current circumstance. If this were the only instance of me experiencing someone else’s emotions in my dreams, I might pass it off as a coincidence, but this isn’t the first time I’ve had a confirmation from someone else of my own dream content without their knowledge of my dream; I lean towards dream telepathy as the explanation.
The cartoon bomb was my subconscious trying to get me to acknowledge something about myself in a non-threatening, lighthearted way. In a world that conflates disregard for the unconfirmed with reason, we gaslight ourselves out of our own lived experiences. When we emerge from denial and into acceptance, the world will never be the same again, and for the better.
FINALIST: NH Literary Awards, Outstanding Work of Young Adult Fiction
At the crossroads of supernatural and human potential, a mystical world exists in each of us. One anxious teen found it.
“A well-paced novel with tension and mystery throughout.” —Reedsy review.
