Analyzing John Brooks Dream about the winning goal in the US World Cup match

Analyzing John Brooks’ Dream About Scoring The Winning Goal

United States' John Brooks celebrates after scoring his side's second goal during the group G World Cup soccer match between Ghana and the United States at the Arena das Dunas in Natal, Brazil on June 16, 2014.Ricardo Mazalan—AP

• Alice Park @aliceparkny
 

June 17, 2014

Two days ago, US soccer player John Brooks dreamed about the game-winning he goal he made. Here’s what science says about that

Wouldn’t it be nice if our dreams were like a crystal ball that foretold our future? That every night as we slumbered, we’d learn if we’re going to get a raise, or win the lottery, or, if you’re like soccer player John Brooks, find out you will use your head to score a last-minute goal in a World Cup game?

Last night, the soccer player scored a goal in the 86th minute, which was an unlikely turn of events because he was not a starting player—in fact, he’s a back-up defender, and defenders hardly ever get substituted. When asked about the goal, he said he dreamed it—even the part about it being after the 80-minute mark and using his head to get the ball in the goal.

Of course his dream was not literally “predictive” but it begs the question: Can dreams prime us for success in waking life?

THIS IS NOT ACCURATE. HIS DREAM WAS 'LITERALLY PREDICTIVE.' HE DREAMED HE WAS GOING TO BE SUBSTITUTED. (HE WAS) HE DREAMED HE WAS GOING TO WIN THE GAME WITH A HEADER. (HE DID) HE DREAMED HE WAS GOING TO DO IT IN THE 80TH MINUTE (IT WAS THE 86TH). HE TOLD HIS FRIENDS ABOUT IT (WITNESSES).  IF THIS ISN'T PREDICTIVE, THEN WHAT IS?

Dreams (are) a combination of what we have already experienced and the things that occupy our minds during the day, says Antonio Zadra, professor of psychology at University of Montreal who studies dreams. “People have dreams related to their current concerns and preoccupations,” says Zadra. “In all of these players’ cases, [playing in the World Cup] is an ongoing drive, so it’s not surprising that it impinges on their dreams.” 

MIGHT HAVE ASKED MARIO BEAUREGARD, NEUROSCIENTIST AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MONTREAL, AUTHOR OF "BRAIN WARS" IF CONSCIOUSNESS IS RELEGATED TO THE BRAIN; HIS RESEARCH SHOWS THAT IT IS NOT. SAME AS DR. BRUCE GREYSON AT UVA. SCIENCE SHOWS THAT CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT NECESSARILY CREATED IN THE BRAIN.

And Brooks, like any good player, would likely want to prove his prowess on the field, making it likely that would show up in his dreams. And it makes sense that he dreamed of making the goal in the 80th minute, late in the game, since he isn’t part of the starting lineup.

HE COULD HAVE CHOSEN ANY MINUTE UP TO THE 90TH TO WIN THE GAME. WHY CHOOSE THE 80TH? THE QUESTION SHOULD BE - WHY WAS HE SIX MINUTES OFF? NOT "WAS HIS DREAM PREDICTIVE?"  IT WAS. THIS SCIENTIST QUOTED IS INACCURATE. ARTICLE DIDN'T FACTOR IN THAT IT WAS RARE HE WAS SUBSTITUTED, AND NO SUB HAS EVER SCORED A GOAL IN THE HISTORY OF THE US TEAM.

Still, says Zadra, dreams can be self-fulfilling. Similar to the way that visualization works, Zadra says that having positive dreams can feed into real-life outcomes. “During REM sleep, all the areas of the brain responsible for controlling motor behavior are activated as if you were awake,” he says. “If you are dreaming of skiing or scoring a goal or playing the piano, your brain is actually commanding all the motor areas as if you were awake.” Part of the brain stem inhibits the actual movement so you don’t hurt yourself while you sleep, but as far as your brain is concerned, you “live” whatever you dream.

“If Brooks dreamed that he scored the goal, all of that feeds into his instinctive reactions, and it’s one more positive thing going into the instinctive and instantaneous decisions that he makes on the pitch.”

Of course, the flip side is that negative experiences in dreamland can have make you feel less confident and potentially less capable in waking life. So while it’s not exactly “scientific, “what your first coach and your parents always told you is probably good advice: think positive, and good things will happen. Maybe.

'HOW DID JOHN BROOKS KNOW HE WAS GOING TO WIN THE GAME?' IS THE QUESTION. I WISH IT HAD BEEN ASKED.

Okay, that's Time Magazine's version.

They didn't address the dream AT ALL.

This athlete, who was the least likely man to score a winning goal in this game - a team HE'D NEVER PLAYED WITH THE US TEAM IN A MATCH.  Let me repeat that. It was his first time playing with this team in a match.

He dreamed it was a HEADER. Not a kick with his foot. Not a bicycle kick, or something really spectacular like Pele's many winning kicks.  It was EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED.
He dreamed it was in the 86th minute. He was 6 minutes off.

The point is - this is an one more FLIPSIDE example - ABSOLUTE PROOF - that consciousness isn't created by the brain.  This event happened two days prior in his head. He witnessed the future - or the future presented itself to him in some manner, like the slice of a hologram.

I myself have had the exact same thing happen to me.  When I was going to school in Rome in 1975 I dreamt I met Lina Wertmuller on an elevator and she was wearing white framed glasses. I told my friends. I had never met her, but knew of her films.  Two years later, I saw she was in San Francisco where I was working and asked a magazine if they wanted me to interview her. (I remembered the dream). They asked me to interview Giancarlo Giannini instead. So I did. But the day I went to meet him in the lobby of the hotel, I was in the elevator when it stopped on her floor and she got on wearing white framed glasses. EXACTLY AS I'D DREAMED IT TWO YEARS BEFORE.  Not kind of. It was not my desire to know her, to meet her, to have anything to do with her at that point in time. I had yet to be in film school.  But after the interview, I did pursue a career in film, which I've been doing for the past umpteen years.  So - the dream occurred, it eventually did have an effect on my life. BUT IT WAS NOT WISHFUL THINKING.

How could John Brooks have created this dream in advance and then it occurred? Modern materialist science has no answer for it.  And within this Time Magainze article, they don't offer one.

Well - there is an answer. It's in the research done by Bruce Greyson at UVA. It's in the research done by Gary E Schwartz at University of Arizona. It's in the research by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard. and it's in the research I've done for the book and film FLIPSIDE.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT NECESSARILY CREATED BY THE BRAIN.

Let me say it again. Consciousness isn't necessarily in our brains in the first place.  John Brooks dreamt he was going to score the winning goal, with a header, after being substituted into the game, in the 80th minute. He told his friends about the dream. They can corroborate what he said.  HE SAW THE EVENT IN ADVANCE.

It was not WISHFUL THINKING.  There's nothing wishful about it. Why not wish for a running kick? Why not for a "Bend it like Beckham" goal? Why the 80th minute? Why after a substitution? 

No sub in the history of the United States team has EVER SCORED A GOAL during match play.  So there's no reason for him to have dreamt it, because it had never, ever happened. And the likelihood of his being called upon to score the goal is extremely small.  The odds of this happening are not calculable.

So why not say so?  Why pretend that it's something in the realm of possiblity when it's not?

The answer is that if you examine the data, the research behind NDEs and LBLs, you'll find that consciousness may not be created by the brain.  If you want a scientist lecturing about it, WATCH THIS.  If you want to learn about it for yourself, then READ THIS.

Happy to say that I will examine this case and many many others in the next installment of FLIPSIDE

IT'S A WONDERFUL AFTERLIFE.

Thank you. (Oh, and nice goal John. Thanks for sharing your dream as well!!!!)

Impeach Sarah Palin? Ouch!

Palin's Troopergate Moves Getting Bad Reviews in Alaska

By NATHAN THORNBURGH / ANCHORAGE Wed Sep 24, 1:15 PM ET

On Monday, Sarah Palin's lawyers announced the Alaska governor's intention to cooperate with the Troopergate investigation.

Sort of.

Palin won't actually cooperate with the original investigation - the one approved unanimously by a majority Republican committee in the state legislature this summer, which Palin welcomed in a spirit of transparency and accountability before she became the Republican Party's vice-presidential nominee. The Alaska Senate Judiciary Committee had started the inquiry when former public safety commissioner Walt Monegan alleged that he might have been dismissed for not firing the allegedly loutish state trooper Mike Wooten, who was in a bitter custody battle with Palin's sister Molly McCann and was accused of threatening members of the governor's family. The investigation has since been painted by John McCain and Palin backers as a purely partisan exercise, particularly because the committee chair, state senator Hollis French, is an Anchorage Democrat who made several seemingly prejudicial statements to the media early on, including that the probe could yield an "October surprise" right before the election. Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton says French has already made up his mind about the governor's guilt and at this point is "just leading people into an ambush."

Instead, Palin plans to cooperate with an investigator from the state personnel board. That investigator is a Democrat, but the board's three members are political appointees who ultimately answer to the governor herself. (One was appointed by Palin, the other two by her predecessor.) They got involved only after Palin took the unusual step of filing an ethics complaint against herself in early September to spark an investigation that her lawyers hoped would overshadow - and effectively kill - the legislature's inquiry.

But the Alaska senate inquiry is moving ahead. Last week, after many of Palin's aides and associates, as well as her husband, reversed their positions and refused to testify in front of the legislative committee, French said the senate investigator would issue findings on the matter in early October with or without their testimony. As if to parry that move, Palin's lawyer, Thomas Van Flein, met with the personnel board's investigator on Monday and promised that he would furnish a list of who would be interviewed on Tuesday. The McCain campaign told the Associated Press that after Tuesday, the entire personnel board process would be confidential and that the campaign would have no further comment. The Alaska personnel board is "the only legal forum in the state for the Monegan inquiry," Palin's spokeswoman explained.

For many Alaskans, all this maneuvering is a bit too clever. Palin's jockeying doesn't just clash with her previous image as a good-government reformer. It strikes some here almost as a matter of state sovereignty. There was grumbling when the McCain campaign brought in a high-powered cheechako (that's an outsider), former federal terrorism prosecutor Ed O'Callaghan, to dictate the governor's strategy and deal with the media. Spokeswoman Stapleton says O'Callaghan is in Alaska because she and Van Flein need the extra help, and that the media have made this a national issue, so bringing in advisers from outside of Alaska is only appropriate. But the campaign's public bashing of Monegan, a widely respected, longtime public official in the state, didn't help its case. Now that O'Callaghan's hardball tactics are becoming clearer, the complaints have grown louder, from all sides of the political spectrum.

(See photos of Sarah Palin on the campaign trail here.)
(See photos of Sarah Palin's rise here.)

As the Anchorage Daily News wrote in a blistering op-ed over the weekend: "Is it too much to ask that Alaska's governor speak for herself, directly to Alaskans, about her actions as Alaska's governor?" One longtime observer - a Palin fan who says she's done "brilliant" things in the state - worried aloud to me over coffee in downtown Anchorage that allowing the McCain campaign to antagonize both parties in the legislature on Palin's behalf could even lead to her eventual impeachment, if her bid to become Vice President fails and she returns to the state with a little less political luster.

That seems far-fetched, but the whole affair is a rarity in Palin's charmed career: a political miscalculation. To many observers, the underlying accusations in Troopergate are not all that damning. Many Alaskans have sympathy for the anxiety and frustration the Palins felt over Wooten's continued employment. In Anchorage, I've heard time and again that Palin could have avoided further scrutiny with a single convivial mea culpa at the outset, apologizing in particular for her initial inaccurate denial that anyone in her administration, including herself, had contacted Monegan about Wooten. Stapleton says the firing was a personnel matter that the state attorney general advised Palin not to comment on initially. But still, Alaskans say that if Palin had ignored that advice and spoken openly to the public, she could have defanged any investigation and signaled to Alaskans that even as the vice-presidential nominee, she would still be the same supposedly straight-talking Sarah they had voted for overwhelmingly.

But almost every move she has made related to Troopergate since she was named McCain's running mate has damaged her credibility and standing. Most recently the shifting public explanations for why Monegan was fired have looked shaky - at one point, it was that they didn't share the same general law enforcement priorities, at another it was that he hadn't done enough to crack down on rural bootlegging, and most recently it was for his unauthorized travel to Washington to lobby for federal dollars. After many Democrats complained that the McCain campaign appeared to be trying to run out the clock on the investigation, the campaign's announcement that Palin would work with the personnel board is designed to blunt such criticism and show voters nationwide a renewed openness in the case. But it's unclear whether the board will actually reach any findings before the Nov. 4 election.

Even in iconoclastic Alaska, there are rabid Democrats and rabid Republicans who now view Troopergate only through the lens of national politics. But far more people, on both sides, see this as a more nuanced situation, and one that may end up costing Palin more here than it ever should have.

(See photos of Sarah Palin on the campaign trail here.)
(See photos of Sarah Palin's rise here.) View this article on Time.com