Reviews
Ian Wilson, posted here on YouTube
Excerpts:
"So I’m back with an exciting book review. I just came across this today and it deals with déjà vu. If you’ve ever had déjà vu, when you link that familiarity to a memory you have from a past dream you’ve had days, weeks, months or years, this book covers that explicitly in great detail.
What’s so exciting is here you have Paul Kalas who has written The Oneironauts and it is an outstanding approach to this phenomenon. Now, if you’ve had this experience, I highly recommend this book. His approach looks at it from a scientific perspective. I have always appreciated people who are academic and have this experience and then write about it, and I’m always impressed because I find so many common themes in their writing. The last time I came across a book that takes a person’s personal experience and writes about it scientifically is J.W. Dunne’s “An Experiment with Time” which was published back in 1927. "
"It [déjà vu] is not uncommon. In fact frequency studies done by Dr. Art Funkhouser and many other scientists that have investigated this show a really high percentage of people have this experience. So I think it’s really healthy to open up about it and Paul’s book is fantastic."
Dr. Art Funkhouser
Instructor in dreamwork, C. G. Jung Institute, Küsnacht, Switzerland (with a long time interest in déjà experience research https://deja-experience-research.org/).
"The Oneironauts is especially valuable in that it provides his data consisting in a longitudinal study of how déjà experiences can develop as one ages. Additionally, it manages to be an amazing romp! Wow! I thoroughly enjoyed all the speculation and the visions of possible futures. This book expands the mind and broadens horizons. I recommend it unreservedly."
Professor Carlyle T. Smith
Lifetime Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Trent University, Canada
“The Oneironauts” is an excellent book describing the precognitive dream experiences of Paul Kalas, an astrophysicist at UC Berkely. He is famous for his discovery of the exosolar planet Formalhaut b that orbits the star Formalhaut. One of his most remarkable dreams (which he recorded and also sketched), showed the exact details of this undiscovered planet 9 years before it became technically possible to view it through the Hubble telescope. He provides examples of many other precognitive dreams as well. While he is thorough in his quest to rule out other explanations and to suggest how science might explain this phenomenon, he also manages to make it a book full of fun and humour. The author envisions a future world where we are all oneironauts. The writing style makes it very readable for all ages and levels of education.
Dr. Kalas is a true scientist, meticulously describing precognitive events that he has observed, even though his findings seem to contradict the basic physics that many rely upon. It is individuals like this that truly advance our understanding of how the universe works. For those who have had a dream that seemed to preview a real life future event, as well as those who have not yet had the experience, this is a must read.
Groundbreaking exploration of our dreams of future experiences, and how to harness them.
December 5, 2018
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
This book is groundbreaking in a parallel fashion to The Tao of Physics, which back in 1975 converged the worlds of mysticism and modern physics. Kalas, an active and accomplished astronomer, delves into his personal experiences with dreams of the future, and explores the possible scientific and biological mechanisms for this phenomena. Those who have memories of dreams of future experiences he denotes as Oneironauts, and he is one of them.
Early on, Kalas acknowledges that many readers may have deep skepticism about the reality of reliably dreaming of future experiences. But as I read, my own skepticism started melting away, as Kalas skillfully addressed a huge number possible objections, including the many that could be self-deceptive on his part.
Of course if the oneironaut phenomena is real, that has broad implications for our concepts of time and space. Kalas addresses this area in depth. His chapter titled “The Physics of Time Using Nature’s Swiss Army Knife” explores some of the basic concepts of modern physics— such as the nature of light, gravity, and relativity—in a quest to explain how the oneironaut phenomena may operate.
Another chapter examines the hippocampus of the brain as the seat of memories, navigation and time keeping, and its probable role in future-dreaming. Kalas outlines many of the scientific experiments on the hippocampus, including research into the “place cells” and “time cells” of the hippocampus and how they relate to dreaming and the déjà vu phenomena.
In the final chapter, Kalas examines the practical aspects of the oneironaut phenomena. He gives practical advice for those interested in building their dream recall; outlines how groups of people—even whole societies—can build a “Dreamnet” using a giant database akin to big data and use it to determine future events; and he examines the huge moral and legal implications should the prediction—or rewriting—of future events become commonplace. Have you seen the movie Minority Report about a future where people are arrested for crimes they have contemplated but haven’t yet committed? This chapter is Minority Report on steroids.
You might think such a book would be ponderous, but Kalas keeps the style light and entertaining, with many creative analogies and metaphors to assist the reader in understanding what might normally considered dense going.
I’m going to read The Oneironauts again, and linger as I contemplate the deep significance of this phenomena. Predicting the future has always been the holy grail. What if we could not only predict the future but manipulate it as well? Sounds like science fiction, but Kalas brings such things much more into the realm of possibility. As Kalas concludes, “I think we are active participants in what we call destiny. On top of this, I am claiming that we haven’t even realized the full extent of how this works to date, and how it could work in the future.”