Dreaming Is Free:Inside The Mind Of A Precognitive Dreamer.

"Dreaming, dreaming is free" - Dreaming, Blondie

Gary Lachman (then known as Gary Valentine) didn't write Dreaming. Or play on it. He wasn't even in the band when they released it. Though he had been, and he'd written one of their other big hits - of which more later, but it seems dreaming, and the power of dreams, was a major subject for him even back then.

Unfortunately, as many have said before, there are few things more boring than somebody telling you about their dreams - I know because I used to share mine, to much derision, on Facebook. Not that Lachman's talk, Precognitive Dreams:Synchronicity and Coincidence, was massively boring. It was quite boring but, more than that, it was overlong, rambling, took in far too many digressions, and, worst of all, seemed to be built on a premise that was, quite frankly, a complete load of horseshit.

Lachman's former band straddled the worlds of pop and punk and both those genres know that less is more, that brevity is powerful. Now well into his middle age, Lachman seems to have forgotten those lessons. Which is a great shame because when he spoke about dark magick in the age of Putin and Trump at the Conway Hall he was brilliant.

What's happened to him in the last four years? I have no idea. It was also a shame because it was my first London Fortean Society event in an actual pub - The Miller, and outside of the online sphere, for over two years (since I attended A New Magic at the Old Mill at The Bell in Whitechapel before the first lockdown). It was nice to see old Fortean friends again and nice to have a draught pint during the talk. Though hearing lots of dreary emo shit, and the halfway decent The Middle by Jimmy Eat World, bleeding through from the kitchen during the talk hardly improved matters.

Matters that began promisingly enough with Lachman talking about hypnagogia, that liminal space we inhabit when we are neither fully awake nor fully asleep. They fell away pretty quickly though when he told us about a talk he'd done in Brompton Cemetery where a lady had told him she'd had a dream about a hedgehog and later that day, you guessed it, she saw a hedgehog.

Most people would mark this down as a fairly uninteresting coincidence and though Lachman did consider many of his precognitive, or precog, dreams to be mundane, he didn't mark them down as coincidences. Even though almost all of them surely were. Some of them truly unremarkable. 

Many years ago, Lachman had read J.W.Dunne's 1927 tome An Experiment with Time and this had turned him on to the world of precog dreaming, of having dreams that predicted, or even shaped, the future. The key, Lachman said, was to write your dreams down as soon as waking. Returning to them later, he asserted, would prove that we all have precognitive dreams.

I once had a dream that there was a minor misprint in the newspaper - and later that same day I did indeed spot a minor misprint when reading the paper. I never put this down to me having paranormal powers but if this event had happened to Gary Lachman he most certainly would have done.

Some of his own dreams, he claimed, which had come true involved dreaming about gun and then, later that evening, watching an episode of Inspector Montalbano which featured a gun and having a daydream (they count too, apparently) while walking along Rosslyn Hill in Hampstead about a friend of his who lived there. Soon enough, his friend appeared.

I'm not sure a gun appearing in a cop drama or seeing someone on the road they live on count as precog and I don't even think they register as coincidences. They're exactly the kind of things you'd expect to happen. What next? Claiming you have precognitive powers because you had a dream that you ate cereal for breakfast and then woke up and had a bowl of Coco Pops?

There were other equally unimpressive anecdotes - or what Lachman called "meaningful coincidences" or even "synchronicities". Many featuring the woman that Lachman rather charmlessly used to call his future ex-wife (perhaps that's one of the reasons she is now his actual ex-wife). While on his way to do a talk about Colin Wilson and his book The Outsider he spotted a copy of Vogue in Waitrose on Finchley Road which had the word "outsider" on its cover, he was on his way to Kensal Green to deliver a talk about notions of hell and saw a fashion advert on the tube that read "hell yes" and, once, when he and a group of friends had an Indian meal the bill came to £123.45.

Yep, that's it. A fairly standard priced tandoori bill had a sequence of numbers in the right order. In his dreams, it seems that Lachman has predicted the plot of both Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula (yeah, nobody knew that story before that film, eh) and the 1994 Alec Baldwin superhero film The Shadow. 

There was even a dream that he was joyfully dancing, and playing with a ball of yarn, with some Tibetan monks. The next day somebody showed him a picture of a Tibetan monk that he supposedly looked like. That one, at least, is a noteworthy coincidence.

He talked about other people having precognitive dreams and they ranged from predictions of a pig in the living room (strange, but less so when he revealed it was in a farm), to people having "stay at home" dreams in the run up to Covid, and on to Charles Dickens dreaming about a Miss Napier the day before he met a Miss Napier.

There were, of course, dreams that predicted the results of the Epsom Derby and those that foresaw horrific disasters like 9/11, Aberfan, and a volcano in Martinique that killed 28,000 people in 1902. None of these, you'll not be surprised to learn, were verified and, of course, it's hard to verify a dream which makes Lachman's statement that not only is precognitive dreaming a scientific fact (one that scientists refuse to admit, he said with his conspiracy theorist head on) but that stats are in that are undeniable.

We weren't shown any. But we were told that there is a whole precog economy based on these precognitive dreams. Again, no evidence of how or why this works. It was just one of many dead ends in a talk that took in such disparate subjects as William Morris, Henri Bergson, Christmas puddings, Proust, cats that can walk backwards, HG Wells, pendulums, Fortnum & Mason, Marie Antoinette, dowsing, deja vu, JB Priestley, David Crosby, and Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky competing for the World Chess Championship in Reykjavik in 1972.

As well as Arthur Koestler, something called symbolic distortion, the I Ching, Carl Jung (whom Lachman did a somewhat dubious impersonation of), Beethoven's pastoral symphony, and a quick rant about Radio 3 going downhill as well as so many mentions of his 'future ex-wife' you started to think that Lachman hasn't quite come to terms with the breakup with the woman he wrote (I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear for and who was once his dream sharing soulmate.

Which all make the talk sound more interesting than it actually was but, sadly, most of these subjects were conversational cul-de-sacs that Lachman struggled to reverse out of. During a spell of the talk which involved Lachman raging against Newton and the concept of time and measurement, Lachman proposed that there were three different times happening all the time.

Before asking how long he'd got left. Which timescale did he want the answer in? He was given it in the way most of us would expect and told twenty five minutes. But he responded, quite clearly, using another timescale and spoke for another full hour in which I had to go for a piss at least once and was bordering on a second toilet visit when he finally wrapped up and performed a Q&A to a noticeably smaller audience.

At one point during the cranky talk, Lachman suggested that if any of the audience had slipped into a hypnagogic state they might have got more out of it. It's true we're more susceptible if we're half asleep but Lachman was lucky half the audience hadn't changed into their pyjamas and poured themselves a cup of Ovaltine by the end.

Such a shame because the subject had the potential to make for an interesting talk. Gary Lachman's absolute belief in precognitive dreaming in tandem with the very very flimsy evidence he presented for it made for a talk that felt like being cornered by a pub bore and having to listen to their badly thought out theories on everything.

Which is not something you pay for. Dreaming is free but London Fortean Society talks, though pretty cheap, aren't. Thanks to David V Barrett and the LfS, especially Dewi and Sid who kept me company in the bar afterwards, for a pleasant evening and thanks to Gary Lachman for his time, which he was overly generous with, but I can safely say I won't be buying his book. Or writing down my dreams. I once had a dream in which a girl did a massive poo in my mouth. That's not come true yet and nor has the one in which I had sex with Serena Williams.

A woman in a speedboat in Washington state once said to me, "follow your dreams". Gary Lachman clearly does. I'll consider to see mine as weird little things that have no more significance than your brain decluttering itself.