My quest to understand precognition has been an extraordinary experience, although I no longer know where the journey first began. As a child living on the south coast of England I was fascinated by Scotland, a country I had not visited. One year my primary school teachers were concerned because I always crayoned the same picture in art: a cottage with Scottish mountains in the background. I wore an enamelled highland dancer brooch, which I still have tucked away in a little treasure box. Years later the family moved to Scotland and I felt at home. I spent eleven years there, married a Scot and gave my children Scottish names. Yet as a tiny child I also recall digging in a hole in the back garden with an old dessert spoon, claiming I was tunnelling my way to Australia. I have lived here for fourteen years and have married an Australian. Were these childhood notions of the reality of the shape of things to come the true beginning of this quest for understanding precognition?

Perhaps I ignited the adventure as a child when I discovered that the best way to fall asleep was to close my eyes and imagine the beginning of time. I pictured myself floating in space looking at Earth, then orbiting round and round, backwards, through the years. I encountered coffins, which seemed to indicate death, yet still I orbited ever backwards. When I couldn't find the beginning, I'd circle in the opposite direction to search for time's end, but along the way I'd fall asleep and my dreams would take over the unresolved business of identifying the nature of time.

Was my inadvertently conscious choice of dream material the beginning of my journey? Or was it my first precognitive dreams and visions, or the day I fell from a mountain and thought my end had come until I had a preview of a future I wanted and vowed to live and accept it? Or was it the day I walked out of formal scientific research, knowing I was heading for something more relevant and just trusting that I would find it? Did acceptance and trust in my future mark the shape of things to come?

Or was it the day the elm tree in our back garden, which must have been over a hundred years old and which I admired every morning, mysteriously uprooted the week my first husband and I separated? Or the people and situations I subsequently met which reinforced the astounding clarity of life's symbolism. Was this the beginning of my journey?

Or did the real quest begin the day I made my interests public and professional, researching dreams, discussing dreams on the radio, meeting, interviewing and talking with people from all walks of life, each with their own extraordinary experiences to share? Or was it the moment I took a deep breath and sat in the hypnotist's chair, instantly redefining both my quest and the shape this book would take?

We can all look back over our lives and see the strange circumstances, risks, trusts, insights and links which have led us to where we stand today. If we are happy with our progress we may look back in wonder, imagining that each event, each meeting along the way, was purposefully placed to bring us towards our destiny. If we are unhappy we may conjure up a picture of negative karma and atonement, of a fixed destiny based on lack of personal choice. If our life experiences have included precognitive dreams, precognitive visions or clairvoyant readings which came true, then it is sometimes hard to believe that life is not predestined, at least in some aspects.

Yet for all the wonder, all the awe of apparent divine miraculous intervention to keep us on our predestined paths, my quest has revealed to me that it is we who are divine, we who are the magicians of synchronicity, dreams, visions, manifestations, mirrored meaning and, once we acknowledge the fact, total creation of the illusory world we each see. It is we who must take the final bow and accept responsibility for the drama that we, as both part and whole of the divine, have created. And when we open our eyes and awaken from the dream, we will finally know why we needed such experience.

The beauty of understanding that while we are individuals we are also interconnected as part of one whole unity is that we can draw on the collective wisdom of that greater part of our total being to help us make our individual choices. While some people prefer to rely on the authority of others through adhering to religious doctrines or by following codes laid down by cult gurus, freer spirits seek to absorb a greater sense of insight and empowerment without debt. Some call on God by name, some on Buddha, some on guardian angels, some on spirits and guides, some address Infinite Spirit, Divine Love or call upon the White Light. What works best for me is the sense of rejoining to a Divine Love from which I have separated. Each to their own.

Accurately foreseeing someone's death or an accident in great literal detail terrifies many first-time precognitive dreamers and visionaries. Living through a traumatic situation once in a dream (or more than once in a recurring dream) and then through the actual experience itself sends many people into exhausted spins of 'Why me?'.

A natural reaction, for first-time experiencers, is to question whether the dream or the vision caused the situation. As experience grows, the dreamer generally becomes aware that previewing an event, even though they may not understand why it happens, helps them to be more prepared when the event occurs. Knowing that a person is likely to die at a particular time, or that the sickness which seems innocuous is likely to deliver a fast and fatal blow, allows the literal precognitive dreamer or visionary to spend quality time with the person, to say goodbye in their own way and to come to terms with the coming bereavement. Many dreamers feel spiritually uplifted by the experience, deeply sensing meaning and purpose through the demonstration of privileged preview.

This book has erased the question of cause and effect in such situations and replaced it with the picture of the ever-reflecting now, where the outer world mirrors our strongest inner thoughts. We have already dealt with dreams and visions of death as symbolic of change in the experiencer's inner world, and with how such people might expect to meet synchronicities in the shape of death and endings in their outer world mirror. However, it is important to realise that the person who is about to die or to have an accident is immersed in their own life process too.

Their accident or their passing out of materialised physical form is a reflection of their own inner thoughts. The person may be consciously unaware of the emerging unconscious thoughts which will express as death or accident, but as an individual they are totally responsible for their own drama, their own shape of things to come. The precognitive dreamer has simply overlapped, through the shared metaphor of death which symbolises change or endings, with that person.

The dreamer may be going through, for example, the death of old attitudes, whereas the person about to die is expressing endings in a different way. With accidents, the symbolic dreamer may be dealing with inner conflicts over direction, or the need to change direction, while the person involved in the accident has either remained consciously unaware of her own inner conflict or has chosen to ignore it. Either way the unresolved conflict finally emerges into the outer world, screaming loudly via the physical pain of the accident.

Dreaming or having a vision of an accident at a certain location but involving unknown people is also a fairly common experience. Here the accident is, again, an outer world expression of the dreamer's inner world: it is a synchronicity. Without the inner conflict, the dream or vision would not have occurred. At the same time, however, the people involved in the accident were experiencing their own outer world dramas, reflecting their own inner thoughts. If the dreamer had not passed by at the time of the accident, or had not heard the news, the event would still have occurred and the dreamer may never have realised the dream was precognitive. It would have remained symbolic of her inner conflict.

Literal precognitive dreams and visions, or those believed to be conveyed by spirits and deceased family members, may also suggest, however, that the dreamer shares with genuine clairvoyants the ability to access the 'tuning fork' of the collective unconscious (see Chapter 12): the ability to sense the subtle beyond the range of one's own matching thoughts.

Although we may not be responsible for the fate of others, if we are privileged to preview, should we warn them? My experiences, which I have always been able to match to my own inner processes, frequently reveal accurate details of a death but hide the exact identity. The person in the dream will either be a brother or sister of the person about to die, or will be someone else I know of the same name. In retrospect the connection is obvious, but at the time of the dream, even if I wanted to warn, I wouldn't know who to inform! This has made my life easier and I believe it emphasises that our dreams highlight our responsibilities towards our own issues. Our dreams and our visions are primarily for us, they reflect our own thoughts and supply our own needs. Telling someone straight out to avoid a car journey because you have foreseen an accident may deter the event in the short run, but that person's thoughts will continue to be reflected back to him in his outer world. Without corresponding inner change, the accident is likely to re-present.

In all cases, start by analysing your dreams and visions and apply what you learn about yourself. If you feel that you have had a precognitive dream about a specific person who does not understand outer world symbolism, and you wish to warn them, use some detective work to deduce their possible inner thoughts which are on the verge of materialising, then gently test the issues in conversation. Acknowledgment may be all it takes to change their outer world reflection, but it is they who take ultimate responsibility for that change, not you.

We each have total responsibility for the shapes of our lives, yet a tiny baby or child needs our love and support because, in human terms, he cannot take responsibility for himself. Within his spiritual domain the story may be quite different. He too is thought materialised as a physical body, implying that he existed as thought before he existed in human form. As he grows and learns about his environment he forms his own perceptions of his illusory world. He interacts with his parents and perceives his identity, his personality and his individuality, but these qualities are all measures of his own thoughts, just in the way that you and I are reflections of our strongest thoughts. His parents' actions may challenge his development along specific routes, but it is he who responds. He has the final response-ability.

So it is that we all have the ability to respond to the challenges of the world according to free will. It may be difficult sometimes to swim against the current of mass consciousness, but history lights the way with inspirational stories of pioneering thinkers and doers who have made the difference by breaking the mould. Just as the Yin and Yang pendulum eventually swings when we move into extremes of thought, so history has reflected the same readiness to change at critical points of overload. We are a part of the whole just as much as we are individuals and as such we hold responsibility for that whole, but we cannot exercise that response-ability by denying other individuals the freedom to respond in their own ways. Instead we must each be responsible for shaping our own inner worlds according to our wisdom, while allowing others to arrive at their own understanding.

Put aside your precognitive dreams of world disasters and concentrate on applying the symbolism to your own life. The way to change the world is to first change yourself. Take responsibility for your own emotional tidal waves, floods, earthquakes, wars, fires, droughts and famines and watch your changed inner thoughts reflect in a changed outer world. Step by step, everything changes on the road towards waking from the dream.

We may be responsible for the shape of our lives in every single way, but it would be incredibly tedious to analyse and check each thought and word. It is enough to step back from time to time and take stock of the patterns of our lives and see how these relate to our inner worlds.

Everything we need to know is right there in front of us if we take the time to look. We can sit back and accept the future before us, or we can turn the tide and change the rules. The choice is up to us. Until now we have not known how to make that choice.