I have had one precognitive dream in my life, that I recollect. When I was in grade 8, before we moved from Ottawa to London, ON, I dreamed a man’s face.
He was middle aged, bearded, of benevolent mien, and wearing a straw hat. His face stayed before me in the dream long enough for me to get a fix on it, and I remember thinking who the hell is that? The biggest reason I remembered the face is that he had a very distinctive stripe in his beard.
Picture my surprise when I walked into my grade nine math class and it was my new teacher. I had to ask him. “Were you ever in Ottawa? Do you have a beaten up straw hat?” because even then I was smitten with fits of rationality and I wanted to believe I’d seen him and then incorporated him into my dream. Nope. No explanation. Just coincidence. But it was enough to get me thinking, and I have thought about it many times since. Why have just ONE precognitive dream? It’s like somebody was deliberately messing with me.
Since then, I have realized that the stuff we DON’T know about the brain is really amazing.
I believe a lot of things that aren’t true, because I haven’t learned the difference between my beliefs and reality. I believe a lot of things I can’t prove, because the evidence isn’t in, or I’m just plain wrong – but I’ll change those beliefs when I’m proven wrong. I believe a lot of things that I believe one day will be proven – and it’s happened to me lots, although I’m counting my hits more than my misses, as humans are wont to do.
I believe that a single peak (or traumatic) experience can permanently alter the wiring of your brain and in so doing trigger a cascade of ongoing hormonal, immunological and cognitive changes, some of which cannot be undone, although they can be ameliorated or dampened.
I believe that what other people think about you – literally what they think, and not what they do, say, or manifest physically – can have a very marked effect on you (externally, physically) even if you don’t know about it. I have spent more than twenty years trying to think what the hell the mechanism for such a bizarre phenomenon would be, but I personally experienced ‘distance healing’ and perhaps it was no more than my widdy brain being addled, but I believe that somebody sent me strength and pain relief during my first labour (thanks Anita!) and that it really helped. I am more than willing to admit that I was imagining it. But like Galileo, I’m gonna get up off my knees and say e pur si muove, baybee.
I believe with all my heart that string theory is the right track for the Grand Unified Theory, and that before humankind blinks out, we are going to get a glimpse of a cosmos SO weird and so complex that it will melt our minds like butter on a grill. I believe that the secret to making string theory work is figuring out why gravity is not consistent. I believe that gravity is ‘hiding’ in parts of physics that we think we already understand. I believe that gravity is ‘hiding’ in the as yet unseen other dimensions. I believe that matter very occasionally travels between the unseen dimensions but on a scale so small that even our best earthly detectors wouldn’t see it, or that we’d interpret it correctly right now even if we did have devices that could see it. Fundamentally, this is no different than believing in God.
I sure wish the faithful could say, “My deity/deities is/are not proven… but I believe in him/her/they/it anyway.” That at least would be intellectually honest. Even atheists believe a metric crapstack of things that just aren’t true. But that is INDIVIDUAL belief, not a godsent mandate to convert at sword point. I believe in a lot of things that are not only unproved, but unprovable. At least I know that’s the case. Like that line from Contact… I know my mother loves me, but I’d have a tough time proving it. You could ask her, of course, but she, alas, is a very biased witness.
