Editing An Experiment with Time (section)

===Dreams and the experiment===
Following a discussion of brain function in which Dunne expounds mind-brain parallelism and highlights the problem of subjective experience, he gives anecdotal accounts of precognitive dreams which, for the most part, he himself had experienced.

The first he records occurred in 1898, in which he dreamed of his watch stopping at an exact time before waking up and finding that it had in fact done so.<ref>{{cite book |last=Dunne |first=J. W. |author-link=J. W. Dunne |title=An Experiment with Time |publisher=Hampton Roads |year=2001 |orig-year=1927 |isbn=978-1-57174-234-6 |oclc=46396413}}</ref> Later dreams appeared to foretell several major disasters; a volcanic eruption in [[Martinique]], a factory fire in Paris, and the derailing of the [[Flying Scotsman (train)|Flying Scotsman]] express train from the embankment approaching the [[Forth Railway Bridge]] in Scotland.

Dunne tells how he sought to make sense of these dreams, coming slowly to the conclusion that they foresaw events from his own future, such as reading a newspaper account of a disaster rather than foreseeing the disaster itself. In order to try and prove this to his satisfaction, he developed the experiment which gives the book its title. He kept a notepad by his bedside and wrote down details of any dreams immediately on waking, then later went back and compared them to subsequent events in his life. He also persuaded some friends to try the same experiment, as well as experimenting on himself with waking reveries approaching a [[hypnagogic]] state.

Based on the results, he claimed that they demonstrated that such precognitive fragments were common in dreams, even that they were mixed up in equal occurrence with past memories, and therefore they were difficult to identify until after the event they foresaw. He believed that the dreaming mind was not drawn wholly to the present, as it was during wakefulness, but was able to perceive events in its past and future with equal facility.<ref name="priestley-mt" />