Forewarned Is Forearmed

An exercise in forethought/foreseeing for me developed years ago, when I noticed that every time I would find myself stepping into a dream that I had had usually weeks or even months before, something disastrous would happen later that day. The dreams were not extraordinary, just run-of-the-mill social situations, but they were situations that would lead up to what was going to be a disaster in the later real (non-dream) world, such as sunstroke in one instance, a bad accident in another, and so on.

But once I got the gist of it, I knew if I suddenly seemed to be stepping into a dream I had had, it was time to reconsider my situation and perhaps deflect the imminent disaster. I first used this insight when I was about to deliver a lecture on astrology in New York City. When the dream déjà vu happened just before I went on stage, I went back and rechecked the material I was about to talk about. Sure enough, one of the charts I wanted to display was utterly wrong, which would have made me look like a fool for having used it to prove my lecture points.

Although it was rather central and it was too late to change it, I simply omitted it and danced around the subject from another approach, and it was at least okay and not a humiliation. Since then, I’ve found forewarning to work almost every time. When I walk into a part of a previous dreamscape, I go on alert, double-check my course and surroundings, make big room for error, and brace for potential impact. It has turned a lot of otherwise disasters into thankful near-misses, just by the use of slight sidesteps to avoid something that I had somehow seen coming in my sleep months ago.