In this detailed and wide-ranging book, the author is primarily concerned with the phenomenon of precognitive dreams—that is, the study of dreams which contain a premonition or subconscious inkling of something which has yet to be but does, in fact, take place in the future. The future, as it were, may be less than 24 hours later, days or weeks later, and may even range into years. The closeness in resemblance between the event, object, person, etc. in the dream and its real-life waking counterpart can vary widely, from a vague symbolic resemblance to more extreme cases of actual equal identification. Additionally, sometimes dreams of precognition can be on a personal level (which is the more common type, such as one dreaming a relative will pass away and then precisely that happening in real life), or of a collective nature (such as precognitive dreams involving natural or man-made disasters, airplane crashes, and the like).

Intertwined with the author’s engaging analysis and exploration of the primary subject matter at hand, he positions the phenomena—and why we generally, in the Western world are reticent to accept such a concept as precognition via dreaming—in the larger context of a comprehensive analysis of scientific thought and general worldview assumptions over the millennia (including especially our accepted understanding of time and space), focusing primarily on the history and tendencies of science and Western thought over the past few centuries. Necessarily, various intellectual disciplines and scientific pursuits are examined, along with many key players in the various fields, in positing the author’s argument that there are large cultural forces at work which have over time led us, collectively, to a place where any such mention of the questionable realms of telepathy, extra-sensory perception, precognitive dreaming and the like are at once dismissed by society at large as paranormal gobbledygook and as downright blasphemy by mainstream intellectual heads of thought in the “accepted” sciences.

Perhaps the most enjoyable section of the book appears a bit less than halfway through, where Kiritsis shares with the reader detailed results and commentary on an experimental study he conducted on the subject of precognition in dreaming. Fifteen subjects (five males, ten females) were provided with participation forms gathering personal information and detailing a simple set of steps for their transcription of dreams alongside the identification of any self-perceived associated waking-life experiences. Participants were asked to self-manage their own trials for four or five consecutive days and returned the data to the author via email. “Subsequently,” writes Kiritsis, “the correlational quality of each dream-associative waking experience set was determined using a unique categorization system with precise diagnostic valuations for very powerful correlations (‘excellent’), powerful correlations (‘good’) and some correlation (‘average’).” The complete report was then subjected to statistical analysis. For each entry, summaries of the dreams were described by the subjects, followed by the corresponding real-life experience(s). Based on certain relevant criteria, the resemblance (if any) between the dreams and characteristics of events unfolding in reality for the dreamer were examined, and each example placed into one of the three above-mentioned corresponding categories.

Kiritsis happily notes that there was indeed some consistency across the 51 precognitive dream fragments collected in his 2014 study, wherein the primary and most potent extrapolation one can glean is that “precognition isn’t the prerogative or exclusive dominion and property right of mystics and seers. In fact, it is enabled by our neurocognitive hardware and woven into our dream tapestry—an ordinary feature of human consciousness.” In other words, despite the naysayers and skeptics, the author maintains such dreaming is actually happening, to one degree or another, all the time for much of the population. We simply often fail to make the connections because we are not on the lookout for them.

While the marketplace is saturated with plenty of books on dreaming, dream interpretation, and interpretation of symbols and artifacts that are present in dreams, Kiritsis’ book is unique in that the focus is specifically on the study between events, objects, people, conversations, etc. that people have reported having dreamt about, with a later manifestation of the same phenomena in waking, day-to-day life. Kiritsis has dedicated his research to such precognition dreaming, and the resulting book, without doubt, provides a unique, well-researched academic study of this most interesting of windows into the human psyche.

RECOMMENDED by the US Review

Next Focus Review
Previous Focus Review

Return to USR Home