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preceded taking waking action to join the Nazi Party by several months. These
dreams were precognitive only in the sense that they predicted the future political
involvement of the dreamers, but they are more correctly viewed as examples
of prognostic dreams based possibly on subliminal perception. The intriguing
question remains as to whether the lethal designs of the Third Reich could have
been "dream detected" sufficiently early for constructive intervention
to have occurred? If the German people had paid attention to their dreams, discussed
them regularly with others, shared in speculations as to their composite meaning
(as in the "Dream Helper" experiment; see Sundance, Winter 1978,
pp. 100-111), could they have read the handwriting or "dream imagery
on the bedroom wall" and foreseen that the totalitarian state that was
appearing would lead to the disappearance of some twenty million civilians from
the face of the earth? (See the "Dream America" project,
Sundance, Fall 1976, pp. 126-131.)
There seemed to be some dim understanding that dreams might be viewed as enemies or antibodies that could destroy the poisonous venom of the Third Reich. Many individuals were openly fearful of discussing any dreams that might contain political overtones. The organization leader of the Nazi Party, Robert Ley, said in 1938: "In Germany there are no private matters anymore. If you sleep, that’s your private matter, but the moment you wake up and come into contact with another person, you must remember that you are a soldier of Adolf Hitler." But it seems that not even sleep became a private matter, and individuals became fearful that their sleeping behavior might be used against them. A woman milliner had this dream in 1933: I am talking in my sleep and to be on the safe side I am speaking Russian (which I don’t know) so I’d not even understand myself and so no one else could understand me in case I said anything about the government, for that, of course, is not permitted and must be reported. At about the same period of time, a young man reported a dream in which censorship had completely taken over the most private matter of sleep—his silent dream messages to himself: I dreamed, I no longer dream about anything but rectangles, triangles, and octagons, all of which somehow look like Christmas cookies—you see, it is forbidden to dream. Precognitive Dreams in the Laboratory
Hundreds of documented cases of precognitive dreams 181
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