Host: Good morning. This is Kentyn for DreamsCloud. Today we’re back in the studio with Andrew Paquette. Good Morning Andrew.

Andrew Paquette: Good Morning Kentyn.

Host: Kentyn and I have been discussing through three previous interviews here his work with dreams. We covered introduction to Andrew’s work, validation of dreams, and then dreams with internal/external focus. So today we’re going to start the topic of a mixture of dream-which is a both a physical dimension to it and a spiritual dimension -and that’s probably enough from me. I’ll let Andrew take the topic.

Andrew Paquette: Okay, well, as we were saying earlier, I managed to figure out that I was having dreams of things that could be validated in a physical sense, that is to say, a dream of a future event and then I could go check my dream journal and see that, indeed, it had enough specific details that it was convincingly predictive of this other event or, for instance, I would dreams of things that were happening at a remote location, at a house of a friend or something like that, and I discovered that I could validate those things. Now those are all what I would call purely physical-focused dreams because they’re all things that can be validated at a physical level. But then, I’ve had other dreams that really can’t be validated at all, like for instance, I’ll give you two examples-they both have to do with ghosts. So I have a dream that my grandmother is leaving her body and I see here ora and its really beautiful and I know that this means to me that she’s died so then I check and I find out that she’s died -so that’s something that I can validate on a physical level but let’s look at a different version of something pretty similar. When my grandfather died, her husband, he started appearing to me in my dreams-now I didn’t know either one of my grandparents very well in life because I live 1500 miles away and my parents didn’t get along-let’s just leave it at that-so he started coming to me in my dreams and he said, “Now that I’ve died, I’m waiting for your grandmother. When she dies, we’re going away and you won’t be seeing us anymore.” So he showed up in a number of dreams and would tell me various things about his wait for my grandmother and he told me that she was very confused and essentially gave me a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s which later was confirmed a little while later in the family, but apart from that, most of the things he told me really couldn’t be confirmed like, for instance, he had with him the spirit of my cat, Porky, who had died- well, I can’t, there’s no one I can ask about that to see if that’s real-that’s one type of dream about a ghost that can be verified and another that cannot be-and yet, they are connected because, later on, when my grandmother does die, I have a dream right after that where my grandmother, my grandfather are together and they say goodbye and they leave and then I don’t see them anymore. So that’s the linkup where I take the ones that can’t be validated with the one that can and, all of sudden, they are connected and that makes me wonder, “well, alright, what about the other ones? What about the ones I couldn’t verify before? Should I accept those as real or shouldn’t I? Another example of this, which is probably a little bit more extreme because instead of just going from physical to non-physical or from physical to a non-physical that actually has religious connotations. I once had a dream just before Kuwait was invaded by Iraq, before I knew who Saddam Hussein was, where a, you could say, it was either a spirit guide or an angel came to me, and showed me Saddam Hussein and showed me the damage that was going to occur as the result of this war that was, would be caused [ ] and the people that would be killed and the environmental damage that would happen. Curiously enough, she told me that the environmental damage was going to be just horrendous –which turned out to be true. But the thing is, is that this is an angel telling me all this stuff or a spirit guide and –so I wake up from this dream, I write it down, I write down all the details, I make my little portrait of this guy I’ve never seen before that looks just like Saddam Hussein and then two weeks later, all that stuff happens, or it just starts happening because obviously it covers a span of time -but what am I supposed to make of the way the message was delivered? It comes through an angel or a spirit guide –is this really an individual spiritual entity? Or isn’t it? I have verified part of this dream so you would think that lends credence to the way the message was delivered –and in my mind, that seems like a fair thing. If I have a telegram that says, you know, you just won the lottery-let’s just pretend for the sake of optimism that actually happened- am I supposed to think that the person that gave me the telegram doesn’t exist? -that is was just a figment of my imagination?-it doesn’t make any sense to me-the telegram itself was real and the event related to it is real as well. Now this can actually get to be fairly tricky fairly quickly depending on your beliefs because if you believe, for instance, that all spirits are evil which in some religions you would be forced to accept or that they’re all sleeping in Abraham’s [booths] or they’re doing something else, that they have specific roles they have to play and it does not involve coming to people and telling them things, it’s going to be difficult. If, on the other hand, you don’t believe in ghosts, you don’t believe in spirits, you don’t believe in God, it’s also going to be difficult because then what’s going to happen is your getting religious/spiritual information that resembles very closely things you’ve heard about coming out of churches and that’s going to make you uncomfortable and that’s the position I found myself in because I started out as an Atheist and, all of sudden, I’m having dreams of angels, I’m having dreams of God, I’m having dreams of Jesus, I’m having dreams of all these spiritual characters -most of which I don’t have names for, some of whom I do -saints from all sorts of different cultures and so on and they’re telling me spiritual messages. Now, the messages themselves, in my mind, made sense -they were simple, they were easy to understand, they were really hard to contest actually because they made so much sense. So, for instance, I have a dream of a spirit guide coming to me and he said, “Now, I’ve been noticing in your thoughts and you’re wondering why is it that we have people who commit this certain quantity of evil in their lives, and then you have some who commit less, and then you have some who, pretty much, don’t commit any evil. Why don’t you just have the people who don’t commit any evil? Why do you have all of these in the same place?” And he gave me this analogy to the refinement of ore into metal into processed metal into something that’s part of a finished product. He says, “You don’t get the finished product unless you start with the ore and the ore’s meaningless without the refining process.” And he showed me how if you took any part of that process away, you lose the end product that you want and he was likening that to the experience of a lifetime on Earth or a series of spiritual experiences where you learn to go from a less-finished state to a more-finished state, or a less-pure state to a more-pure state -and that just made sense to me as an idea, as a concept and there are a lot of dreams like that. Now, the thing is though, when they get to looking really religious, it starts really bothering me a great deal –now it’s not like I’ve never been to church -in fact, I -although I didn’t go to church at all until I was almost forty years old – I then did start going to church-primarily because of my dreams-and I went pretty regularly for a couple of years- I really enjoyed it. I have quite a few conflicts with the doctrines of major religions –one of the reasons I was kicked out of my Bible study group –I’m afraid to say. But listen to this dream and you tell me what you think about this because, I’ll tell you, it gave me really quite a lot to think about. So I have dream that mixes, pretty effectively, something that can be verified physically with something that absolutely can’t be and contained within the dream is an awareness on the part of the entity that gives me this information that I can verify one half and not the other and that’s why I’m getting both. So I get this angel/spirit guide who comes to me and he says, “#1, you’re dreaming. 2, there’s this great religious event that’s going to happen and I want you to know it’s going to happen, I want you to believe it’s going to happen and to give you some trust in that I’m going to show this great calamity that will also happen but it’s going to happen first and this a physical thing that you,” – by the way, I’m giving you a lot more detail so this the idea that was contained in what he was saying to me, “so I’m going to show you this calamity that will happen soon as a sign that this other thing, this more spiritual thing that you really can’t verify until it’s on top of you, will also happen. Okay?” He says, “I’m going to show it to you three times so that you know this is true,” and I expect also he did that so that it would make it easier for me to remember so what he shows me is this–and this happened in November of –I think it was November 23rd of 2004-and he shows me this huge amount of coastline -it was more than you could actually see if you were in an airplane looking at the Earth because of the curvature of the Earth even from an airplane’s point of view it would have blocked parts of coastline because it was so much-and he showed me this huge wave, just a gigantic wave, a tremendous wave, heading towards this tremendous amount of coast and I saw all these hundreds of thousands of people standing around, or lying down, or just in some way they were near the coast or in boats or whatever –and then this wave came and they all saw it and they got up and they were starting to run or–some of them didn’t even have time to do that-and the wave just engulfed them all and they drowned and I saw hundreds of thousands of people getting killed in this giant wave. And now this angel/spirit guide comes back to me and he says, “Now I’ve shown this to you once. I’m going to show you this two more times and I’m showing it to you so you know that this great, big religious event that I’ve told you about,” –I’m being quite here about that – I really shouldn’t do it –it’s just because it even makes me uncomfortable talking about it here but I’ll just say it outright-he said, “This is a sign that Jesus is coming back to Earth. Okay? So this calamity is a sign of that.” Now obviously, if he thinks that’s anytime soon, well its already been seven years, so their idea of time is a little different from ours but, in any event, so he shows it to me again, and then when it’s done -and he’s showing a consciousness of how many times he’s shown it to me-he says, “Now I’ve show it you twice. Now I’ll show it to you a third time, so you know that this is real,” and then he shows it to me the third time and then I wake up and I’ve got this to write down, okay? And then, a few weeks after that, I have another dream-this is, it had no angel or spirit guide at all- I was just in a Japanese seismography station, and I was observing a print-out of just dozens and dozens of very high-powered earthquakes –they were all, I think, at the bottom end in the 7-range of the Richter scale and at the high-end, they were very, very low 9’s or very high 8-and none of the people looked perturbed in the seismography station which made me curious so I said, “Why aren’t you bothered by this?”I would imagine you would be running around like Godzilla was in Tokyo right now. And one of the guys, in response to that, he looked over at a globe at the part like the Indian Ocean area and he said, “Because it’s not happening here. It’s happening there.” And then I woke up and it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 hours after that dream that the Boxing Day tsunami occurred in the Indian Ocean area and killed several hundred thousand people. Now, that’s the only event that really matched either one of those dreams and it was really close in time to it so I consider that to be a validation, a physical validation of the part of that first dream that was given to me to have confidence in the other half. It’s kind of like earnest money –so you’re going to buy a house, you say you’re going to buy a house, the realtor doesn’t trust you so he says, “I need to have a twenty-thousand dollar down payment. Give me that and then I’ll trust you’re really going to buy the house.” And that’s kind of what that was. So this spirit guide comes to me and says, “Here’s your earnest money. Here’s the calamity that’s going to happen. You can trust me for the other half of this.” Okay, so I have this dream –and I’m not coming from a background where I know a great deal about Christian ideas –in fact, my background of reading the Bible –which I did much later in life – explicitly rejects the idea of Jesus as the messiah, of coming back. I prefer the idea of Judaism and the idea that if there was a messiah of any kind, he came and went thousands of years ago but this dream is telling me something else. It’s telling me something that I don’t believe, something that I’ve already, on the intellectual level, rejected, and at the same time, it’s combining it with something I can validate and I know is real. So what am I supposed to make of a dream like that? And it’s not the only one –I’ve had several others like it, all of which are very powerful, and all of which, I think, raise a very serious question. Now, the thing is, ultimately, the question resolves itself into the following idea: do you have an interest in improving the quality of your life and the quality of your actions right now or would you rather wait until it’s too late to anything about it? And that, I think, is actually the crux of every religious type of communication that’s ever been made in the history of man or philosophic or even rational, atheistic, that if you have a idea that you could do something better, more honestly, more moral, that you should just do it. You shouldn’t question whether or not it’s the right thing to do because you know it’s the right thing to do but there’s no time like the present to go ahead and do it. And the idea embedded in all of these dreams that have this kind of religious subject matter is exactly that –which I think is a very important thing to get across – but it is combined with, in this particular case, something that, I would think, comes across as rather fanciful. And I’m sorry to say, that’s what my dreams said and that’s all there is to it.

Host: Well, I think, no matter how you look at it, the value of the message of how to live life and how to proceed is what we take away from it and I appreciate that message and I appreciate your work. Let’s carry this interview forward one with our final interview of dreams of a pure spiritual nature. I appreciate your time today. One last question: inside of your kind of resource, web site here, there are a lot of illustrations and drawings you’ve done of these dreams which, to me, really helped as I read your book and as you and I have talked I’ve kind of used your website to dig into your work and to see your illustrations. I think we’re fortunate that Andrew is a great illustrator, graphic artist because it gives us an insight into those dreams. Any comment on your illustrations and how over the years you’ve taken your talents of an artist to help bring these dreams forward?

Andrew Paquette: Well first off, you can thank Jacquie Lewis for the fact that I’ve gotten some pretty nice illustrations. She’s a researcher at the Saybrook Institute right now working with Dr. Stanley Krippner and the reason I want to give a thanks to her is because although I’ve always illustrated my dreams in the journal, typically this would happen in the middle of the night with the lights out with me trying to be very quiet so that I don’t wake up my wife so some of the early journal illustrations are fairly messy and, shall we say, of lower quality than they have become. And gradually, over the years, I started making more careful drawings but then it was a couple years ago, Jacquie contacted me and she wanted to-she was making a presentation about a dream I had about the -or a series of dreams I had about the 9/11 events before they happened and she wanted to see if I had an illustration from my dream journal that corresponded to one of the dreams of that series-which I did not have. And, I thought, well, you know what, as long as I make it clear that I’m just illustrating something after the fact, I guess it’s fair to go ahead and do it –and that was something that had held me back for quite a long time –I felt like well, I don’t want anybody to get confused between the dreams that were actually made at the time and dreams that were made later but that was really easily resolved by just putting the date of the dream on the paper and then the date of the illustration as well and restricting it to dreams that really weren’t meant to be used for evidential purposes and that was the case here. So I made a watercolor of a part of the dream that had, strangely enough, had symbolic content and from there I realized, “Wait a minute! I’ve got all these other dreams that I would love to illustrate,” -so I went ahead and started doing it but I restricted myself to the spiritual dreams where there’s no physical content to verify so that none of them are meant for evidential purposes but just meant purely for illustrative purposes so that people can have an understanding, some kind of idea, of what they may have looked like or to get a feeling for the quality of the dream.
Host: I think they’re a great companion to your work and your website, the illustrations -I really recommend that people dig into both simultaneously. I got a tremendous amount by correlating your illustrations with pieces of your book.

Andrew Paquette: Well now your- you see, I wanted to illustrate the book that you have but my published didn’t want me to because he said it would make it very difficult but now you’re making me want to insist for the sequel.

Host: I hope so and I look forward to that. We have one more interview to go and thank you Andrew.

Andrew Paquette: No problem, it was my pleasure. Good night.