Host: Good morning, this is Kentyn for DreamsCloud. Today we’re fortunate to have in our virtual studio with us Andrew Paquette. Good morning Andrew.

Andrew Paquette: Good morning Kentyn.

Host: Andrew’s work is summarized, I guess, to a degree in one of his books called, "Dreamer: Twenty Years of Psychic Dreams and How They Changed My Life." Andrew’s work, I started off with your direct experience, with your dreams, with your trying to understand how they affected your life and then you evolved over the years, your way of understanding; that led to the book and additional research. Can you tell us about your process and overview of how these twenty years have taken place?

Andrew Paquette: Yes, I would be happy to. Yeah, the thing is I, for quite a long time, I thought that the supernatural was impossible. I considered myself to be an atheist, I definitely did not buy the idea that there was anything to stories of ESP or precognition or any kind of psi, let alone dreams of the future, prophecies, that kind of thing. I thought the whole subject matter had no credibility whatsoever. And then, I met this young woman who, oddly enough, I recognized from a dream I had about a year and half or two years ago and I naturally put that out of my mind; you know, I was thinking, “This can’t be real.” I wound up marrying her and what happened was I had this habit of, when I woke up in the morning, I’d tell her my dreams and she had a habit of noticing that things that would happen a little bit later would correspond what I told her earlier about my dreams. So she was telling me on a, well, probably every few weeks, she would say, “You know Andrew, that dream you told me about has just happened. So you’re dreaming about the future.” And I have to say, I was pretty dismissive of that. I would say, “If you’re wrong; Its not that I think your wrong, I know your wrong. “ She was pretty insistent about it so I finally decided, “Fine, I will prove that you’re wrong and I started recording my dreams. And what I found out, to my great surprise, was that I was able to validate these dreams with experiences in the physical world, I guess we could say, very quickly after I had written the dreams down. Sometimes it took a while to validate and more often it happened very quickly within a day or a few weeks. So I started changing my opinion about whether or not that limited type of psi was occurring, whether or not it was possible to have precognitive dreams. That’s actually all I was looking at. I wasn’t thinking of any other kinds of interesting things happening with the dream. As far as I was concerned, they were either not interesting or precognitive. However, after a number of months, I found out that I was also dreaming about people in other locations. They were basically like visits where I would go to them and I would see what they were doing and then I would be able to confirm that with them by calling them up later on after I wake up and I was say, “does this dream sound familiar to you?” And they would say, “Yes, that’s what I was doing yesterday.” So those were, what I’m calling, “out-of-body experiences.” And then, by checking the dreams, actually very carefully, and writing them all down, I learned not only how to record the dreams pretty well-because there are a lot of things that get in the way of recording them accurately-but I also learned that it was very easy to validate many of them. And I, in fact, I had hundreds after a while that definitely had stuff what you would call psi in them. And as a result, I found my beliefs about other things changing a great deal. I found myself much more congenial to my wife which was very nice. And I’m no longer an atheist versus twenty years later-it took a while for that to work out but, the first dent in that particular piece of my armor was, well, psi is basically the same thing as some of the supernatural things we hear about that our associated with biblical events, and that was the primary basis for my not believing in god. And so, I had to admit-well, I’m seeing this stuff happen in my life every day, I’ve got the evidence for it-it’s really strong-so I’m going to have to drop my resistance to the idea of god. Initially, I was willing to accept that god might exist, and then that changed to probably existed, and then I was willing to say, “Alright, fine, there’s a god” But I wasn’t willing to say he’s personified in any way, not like in the Abrahamic tradition in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam and then I started dreaming about God himself and that’s what he looked like, so, so it was kind of stuck. And at that point, I was, I would say, I had completely changed my perspective from what I had started out as. The thing is that this perspective changed happened as the result of my carefully looking at this evidence, and I’ll tell you something that’s not in the book that you’ll probably enjoy is I used to play chess -this is a very little story so I hope you don’t mind-but when I was in art school and I was an atheist and they didn’t believe in all this stuff, I had a guy I used to play chess with and he was this absolute slob who was doing very badly in school etc, his house was a complete mess, and he was living with the woman he wasn’t married to. And one day, I went over, and everything was cleaned up and he said, “I’ve got really big surprise for you.” And I say, “What is it?” And he says, “I just became a Christian.” And I thought, “Great. I’m not going to be your friend anymore because I can’t talk to a Christian.” And he was like,“No, no, no. Wait! Don’t leave! You would make a perfect Christian.” And I’m like,
You know what, if God is as powerful as you say and he wants me to be a Christian, then he can show himself to me-he doesn’t need to go through you, because he’s powerful right?” And he agreed with me. And I was like, “Fine, okay. Let him do the work. You can stay out of this.” And it happened! -It really did. Although I would say I’m more non-denominational bit, but still, I completely accept God, and psi, and all the rest of this, but it’s based on evidence.
Host: It’s a fascinating story -at times, challenging to me- in reading your book and it definitely made me think. In fact, I was looking forward to today’s interview because of reading your book and kind of being challenged by that and starting to look at the evidence that you’re writing-and I appreciate your work so much. Let’s carry this interview forward and a few more, and let’s talk about your concepts of validating dreams, some of the issues of external, internal focus, and I’ll say goodbye for now and we’ll carry this forward, okay?

Andrew Paquette: That’s fine.

Host: Thank you so much.

Andrew Paquette: No problem, bye bye.