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their preternatural clarity. These are not wish fulfillment nor anxiety dreams. For example, if you are unprepared for an exam, and dream about failing it, we would not consider that to be precognition. On the other hand, if you have taken hundreds of plane trips, and then have a frightening dream about a crash, you might like to rethink your travel plans.
One of our CIA contract monitors was in Detroit with his colleague, overseeing another project. Although they had gotten to bed very late on their last night there, my friend had a hard time getting to sleep. When he finally did fall asleep, he had a frightening dream in which he was in a fiery airplane crash. Throughout the next day he was concerned about the dream, since he was scheduled to fly out of Detroit that evening. Because the dream had been so realistic, he tried to avoid having that experience in real life. He told his partner that he was going to stay over in Detroit for another day. Of course, he thought that it was very unlikely that his plane would actually crash, but, on the other hand, he had seen enough psychic events in our SRI laboratory to give him pause. Since he, like most of us, did not want to appear to be silly or superstitious, he didn't tell his buddy why he was delaying his departure. And in certain branches of the government, you are taught not to ask too many questions. Later that day, as our friend was driving away from the airport along the frontage road, he heard a muffled explosion. It was the crash of his airplane, killing many passengers, including his partner. Our friend was in shock for a week.
What can we conclude from this true story? First of all, everyone is probably a little anxious about flying, but I, for one, have never had a dream of being in a crash, and neither had my friend. In his business, he was a very frequent flyer. So, we can consider, without conducting a survey, that to dream of being in a plane crash is an unusual event. "But," I hear you saying, "he wasn't in a plane crash. He just witnessed one." This deals with one of the most interesting questions in all of psychic research: Can you use precognitive information to change a future that you perceive, but do not like? The problem comes, of course, from the idea that if you change the future so that the unpleasant thing doesn't happen to you, where did the dream come from? There are two fairly sensible answers to that question, both of

 
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