Throughout the summer of 2014, a group of dreamers from all over the globe participated in a revolutionary dream initiative called Project August. Hosted by the National Dream Center (NDC), this 3.5 month collective project was designed to see how well a group of dreamers could intentionally see the future.
Each participant accomplished a specific incubation protocol prior to going to sleep. Basically, the dreamer would positively affirm that they would dream about a big headline in August 2014. When they woke up, the dreamer would then go to the NDC’s dream database to input whatever they dreamed that night, even if the dream had seemingly nothing to do with potential world headlines.
Although most of the dreamers were from the United States, we did have several from Canada, Europe, India, the Middle East, and more locations. Ages of the individuals ranged from 22 to the mid-70’s. Other personal data was not collected, such as race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, etc.
Precognitive ability was not a requirement to participate. In fact, the NDC cordially welcomed individuals with poor precognitive ability because they wanted to test whether the incubation process could inspire future-oriented dreams. The team also was testing out a brand new field of research called dream linguistics, which harnesses the growing body of evidence that future events are actually contained in our everyday speech.
What makes this particular project stand out from all the other dreaming projects (including precognitive dream testing) is that the dreams themselves were never tested against future reality. Instead, the NDC actually tested whether a team of humans could analyze the incubated dreams and make accurate predictions about August 2014 using the dream content in combination with the dream linguistics. Thus, knowing how bizarre and incoherent dreams can be, the team had to wade through all the symbols, metaphors, emotions, etc. and figure out what was future-oriented content versus what was irrelevant gibberish.
An August to Remember
Predictive headlines were published about every two weeks throughout the summer, and the last batch was completed and published just before August began. All six reports were 100% free but were issued only to Project August participants before August 2014 began. They are now freely available to the public at this link. In the end, the team generated 114 headlines, and over 100 of them “came true.”
Certainly, the predictive headlines themselves involved varying types of news genres, and even varying levels of importance. There were some that involved impossible odds of coming true. For example, the first report in July spelled out a prediction that a Spanish official would step down “amid an extramarital affair.” Just a couple of days later, the Spanish King, Juan Carlos, announced that he would step down and abdicate the thrown to his son. Although the king cited health issues as the reason for stepping down, there were a plethora of articles (both before and after the abdication) that revealed Carlos’ extravagant outings with several different popular women.
There were numerous examples of these types of unlikely predictions that actually came true, and several of them came from no actual dream image or interpretation, but rather straight from dream linguistics. For example, “Looking house white man small going” from the linguistics was easily translated into the published prediction that “President’s cabinet member resigns from office.” Within a week, the White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, surprised the world by announcing that his position was putting a strain on his family life and decided to leave.
Another growing meme that began in the earliest dreams (back in April 2014), produced this strange linguistics phrase: “Earth food hard ice.” Within a few weeks, another linguistics phrase cautioned that “Arrived vague becoming beginning enjoy ice liked,” and there was an inordinate amount of people dreaming about cold weather that just did not belong in a typical August month in the United States (these dreamers were from the US). Therefore, the predicted headline was “Unexpected cold front freezes major August crop harvest,” which actually came true within a month in the Summer 2014 Polar Vortex. That historic ‘cold front’ wiped out almost all of the northern US states’ grape harvest for the year.
Some dreams pointed to large headlines that few people would care about, such as “Rare species of birds moving towards extinction,” but that dream came true with an eye-watering headline right on August 1st: “87 new bird species considered threatened with extinction.”
Other dreamers received glimpses of large scale catastrophes that came true. Also on August 1st, the dreamer who witnessed a Virus going Viral about two months prior was shuddering when world news broadcasted the ebola virus breaking out in Africa. Another dreamer correctly saw the exact number of people who would be saved from a sink hole exactly on the predicted date.
There are, quite literally, too many dreams and predictions to discuss in a final summary. The actual headlines are all documented here, complete with scores and linked news feeds to substantiate those scores. This collection of predictive headlines represents most, if not all, of the biggest stories in and around August 2014. The headlines correctly predicted US Treasuries that would see a period of difficulty in the world markets. Also, the dreamers picked up an unprecedented drought that eventually affected all the southwest US states, even to the point of discussing evacuation of those regions.
From a wall of fire taking out neighborhoods to an infiltration of illegal immigrants and dozens of other big stories, the dream incubation process was surprisingly accurate about showing the dreamers the biggest headlines to come. Dream material picked up on:
– F-22’s being scrambled to intercept Russian planes
– The exact number of ebola casualties in August
– China overtaking the US in size of economy
– Big financial issues for Argentina
– Bus crashes and train delrailments
– A big ship being hit by a missile
– and so much more.
A Summary of Results
The reader can find much more exhaustive detail about our statistical results by going to this link; however, let’s at least summarize the major points here. By actively interpreting and analyzing both the dreams and dream linguistics, we were able to take away a plethora of lessons learned from this amazing project.
First, the sooner the prediction comes true, the more accurate it tends to be, which means it will be prone to a higher DreamSeer score (the DreamSeer scoring is an objective standardized scale that allows people to grade the accuracy of their precognition). The highest accuracies were found within one week of the dream. There are several implications for this revelation that are covered in Section 1 of the Final Report.
Next, the researchers found that the most accurate predictions come from clear and congruent dream overlaps. In other words, instead of just guessing at what will come true, we found that one can simply look for clear overlaps in dream material. In fact, the highest success rates and highest accuracies were both found in the dream content that overlapped. Furthermore, if the redundant dream content also overlapped with linguistics, then that proved even more accurate still. This triangulation method has proven to be the most reliable method for divining dream-based predictions. An in-depth discussion of this can be found in Section 2 of the Final Report.
Finally, our stats demonstrate that when a person incubates a dream for a specific target date, this moves the “typical” precognition window towards the intended time period, but it does not guarantee that the dream was for that date window. In this particular data section, we demonstrate a bell curve result, where the peak of the bell (which represents the highest proportion of manifested headlines) is inside the target month, but the lower tails fall outside of August to both sides. In other words, most of those predictions, if they are to come true, will do so inside the target month, but not all them. This is a very important topic and is discussed in much more detail here: Section 3 of the Final Report.
Parting Words
Project August was a phenomenal initiative that revealed quite a bit about our reality. Dreamers can, in fact, dream about the future if they choose to do so. It might take specialized training and practice, but the NDC has demonstrated that it is possible to do so.
One of the biggest factors for a successful dream incubation is the dreamer’s embedded belief system. If a person believes they can dream the future, it doesn’t guarantee positive results right away. However, if a person doesn’t believe they can dream the future, their chances of experiencing are drastically diminished. Please note that the impact of the person’s belief system was simply a byproduct observation of the bigger process in Project August and was a result of hermeneutic and qualitative discovery during the project.
To all the participants of Project August, I can’t thank you enough for the time you donated and for sharing with us your most intimate and private experiences of all….your dreams. Although this is the end of a fantastic and successful project, it merely marks the beginning of even more great ways to explore our world and to figure out how our reality really works. Stay tuned and keep dreaming!
