by Eric Wargo
It may not be coincidental that I had at that point been actively pondering Sigmund Freud’s “Irma” dream (Chapter 9)—a dream which, I was coming to see, was an “old dream” by the time in Freud’s life when a dire otolaryngological condition gave it new meaning. I had no way of suspecting that my own dream journal would just then supply a striking example of a similarly time-looping “old dream that was really brand-new” related to the completion of the book you now hold in your hands. If any of my original, mostly unimpressive insights about the dream held water so many years later, it was the sense that the “ruined tower” at least partly represented the dream itself. I could not have known, in 1999, what the “made to look old” phrase I had written down could have possibly meant.
When I opened my dream journal from 1999 to inspect the details of this old dream, I found something else striking: The date of that dream was just two days from the current date—in other words, it had occurred 18 years earlier, almost to the day. If the dream was a human, it would have been exactly old enough to vote. 7
My discovery of this distant dream connection to my life in the summer of 2017 was a kind of hermeneutic comeuppance, reinforcing the slight regret I already felt at all those years of interpreting my dreams through some simplistic Freudian or Jungian lens, gently contorting dreams to mean something about my past or childhood complexes or imposing some picturesque but toothless archetypal framing before forgetting them and moving on. The “great men” of 20th century depth psychology, who had so authoritatively pronounced on what dreams mean and how dreams mean, encouraged specific varieties of engagement with the dreamworld that would naturally reinforce their own favorite theories, always directing attention elsewhere than toward the simple question Dunne asked: What comes after the dream? What comes next? (It would have been far worse, of course, to have been led astray by the “great men” of scientific dream science—the Hobsons and the Cricks—who would have us turn away from seeking meaning in our dreams altogether. I cannot imagine a sadder fate than to believe, because one had never heard otherwise, that dreams are meaningless.)
Discovering this “ancient” dream connection also reinforced for me that the things seen in dreams are not about possible futures, the safe suggestion made by nearly all contemporary writers on precognition. That no longer seems to me plausible, and it makes little sense of the evidence. (It doesn’t even seem appealing, for reasons I have discussed elsewhere. 8 ) By the laws of chaos, the butterfly effect, any deviation in my actions over the course of those intervening 18 years would have scrambled the events in my life, leading to a completely different Sunday, one that would not have included this exact list of actions and preoccupations: wrestling with the proper sequence of interlinked chapters in a book on time loops, regretfully jettisoning a “dubious” chapter about a fountain, thinking about the death of Phil Dick and his twin sister Jane and how much “phallic” speculation to dis-include (i.e., “lose”), and getting scared about the health of my larynx—and then at the end having a stunning realization in which I looked back at an old dream with the excited realization that it only looked old but was really, in some sense, brand new. That last part, you will note, makes it into a time loop: My “turning back” to this dream in hindsight was included in the dream itself.
Oh, and there’s one more thing … That stylized A that completed the symbol series on the chalkboard in my dream? The one with the swooping curl on the left? Look at the publisher’s imprint on the spine of this book. 9
Am I just crazy, like many said Phil Dick was, making everything connect up to form a vast paranoid pattern? Am I like Morgan Robertson. nursing some deep need for absolution in and by the block universe of Minkowski? Am I simply the victim of common fallacies in judgment, perception, and reasoning, seeing nonexistent faces in the random clouds of causality?
Other people’s dreams, and synchronicities, and visions, and so on never seem as compelling as they do to the experiencer, simply because meaning is always an individual, personal thing. If you have not yet experienced a troublingly specific premonition that “came true,” or a dream that corresponded too precisely to a subsequent event to accept as coincidence, then why would you bother to question the one-wayness of folk causality? The specificity and precision of an individual’s mnemonic associations (and thus dream symbolism) cannot be adequately conveyed to a stranger, and this alone puts dream meaning beyond the reach not only of scientific consideration, but of public consideration more generally. And since precognition mainly enters our life through the oblique doorway of our personal associations (and often our dreams), it is very hard to really convince others, even if their minds are not closed to the possibility. “You had to be there,” as the say. But the fact that you had to be there does not mean there’s no there there.
Adding to the difficulty, psychology supplies ever more reasons why your seemingly anomalous experiences cannot be trusted—those hundreds of cognitive biases you can find listed on Wikipedia. There are good reasons to worry over and address biases in science, and important reasons to address racial, gender, and other biases that affect how fairly people are treated; and ever-vigilant self-doubt is part of wisdom. (As Richard Feynman said, “It is imperative to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature” 10 —the best possible case for neurosis.) But bias is well on the way to becoming the new sin for a secular age that takes its gospel from TED talks and the popular science press. Somehow our unique and subjective point of view has become an intractable, ever-morphing stain on the soul that we can endlessly self-flagellate over, as well as use to justify policing others—or just not listening to them—when it suits us. This is why we should be very wary of “your unconscious biases”-style pop psychological science; it may sound like a tool of greater tolerance, but it can easily become a lever of intellectual conformism. For the reasons I argued at the beginning of this book, the imperfect nature of our perceptions and judgments is by itself no disproof of phenomena or experiences that fall outside Enlightenment science’s explanatory scope, yet it is really the only thing the self-appointed skeptical guardians of that already obsolete worldview have to build their case on. Only reason can help us judge who’s right.
In our collective “de-biasing,” we must not disparage and denigrate the singularity of the individual viewpoint, for it is that viewpoint that ultimately lets meaning into the world. Without it, all is just noise, information but without value, the number “42” echoing in the dark. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best in “Self-Reliance”: “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.” 11 It is one of the most profound sentences in one of the most profound essays ever written. And it takes on a sublime new meaning in a participatory and transactional universe, such as that described by John Cramer, where our gaze goes out to meet a distant star and shake hands with it deep in the past. I think Emerson would wholly approve of the “experimental metaphysics” being done in today’s physics labs. It reveals in such a stark new way that we are not randomly thrown in the world, mere “absorbers” of whatever comes at us—we create the world, including the past, by giving meaning to what we see. And when what we “see” is a memory, for instance of a dream, we actually might—if we are lucky (and especially if we have a written record to show we aren’t crazy)—even glimpse our own presence in that past, our looping intervention in our own history.
I’m here to tell you this: When you catch a glimpse, in a recorded dream, of your own turning back and visiting that dream after some time has passed, you are seeing something truly rare and sublime, the most exquisite butterfly in the precog ranger’s life list. “Time gimmicks” in dreams are the tip-off. They are not some smuggled, oblique signal by your unconscious to you—they are you, a representation of your peering, right now , into that dream, your peering into your past. It can give you chills. You’ll never know the pleasure, though, unless you keep a dream diary. (If you take nothing else away from this book, tak
e away this: Keep a dream diary .)
Among the many things I could say about the ruined tower dream, winking at me from 18 years ago like it is just inches from my face, is that it steered me down a path that, through many twists and turns, ultimately led to my interest in parapsychology and precognition over a decade later … and thus, this book. It played some role, however small, in leading me to the place where I could look back on it with radically new eyes and see it as something brand new, despite its appearance of antiquity. Had I not looked back on the dream, I would not have had the dream in the first place; the dream was , quite literally, my looking back. And my completion of this book is literally the completion of a circle, a loop.
As T. S. Eliot wrote in his 1943 poem “Little Gidding”—which was influenced, incidentally, by Dunne’s An Experiment with Time —
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. 12
NOTES
Introduction: Beyond Folk Causality (or, One Damn Thing Before Another)
1 Asimov, 1948, 1953, 1960.
2 Dixon et al., 2009; Popescu, 2009. See Chapter 6 for more detail on this experiment.
3 Bem, 2011.
4 Ibid.
5 Judd & Gawronski, 2011.
6 The pioneering parapsychology researcher Dean Radin writes: “Sometimes skeptics offer constructive critiques [but] many critiques are bizarrely irrational and positively drip with emotion. … [T]here’s something peculiar about psi that seems to push otherwise calm, rational scientists beyond civil discourse and into rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth frenzies” (Radin, 2018, 15).
7 Sheehan, 2015, 86.
8 Engber, 2017.
9 Dossey, 2009; Feather & Schmicker, 2005; Rhine, 1961.
10 Bergson, 1944(1907), 12.
11 That paranormal events of all kinds must be thought of as stories (specifically human stories) is an argument made forcefully by Jeffrey Kripal (see especially Kripal, 2010, 2017).
1. The Size of the Impossible—Disasters, Prophecy, and Hindsight
1 The 2012 film Chasing Ice shows a Jakobshavn calving event, the largest ever seen or filmed: a piece of ice the size of Manhattan breaking off the glacier.
2 Brown, 1983.
3 Rodgers, 2014.
4 Stevenson, 1974(1960), 1974(1965).
5 Stevenson, 1974(1960), 87.
6 Ibid., 89.
7 Ibid., 88. Charles Francis Potter, who reported his wife’s premonition in his 1939 book Beyond the Senses , went on to become an outspoken Unitarian theologian and prominent humanist; he advocated against supernaturalism in religion, crusaded for the right of euthanasia, and advised Clarence Darrow on the subject of evolution in the lawyer’s 1925 defense of John Thomas Scopes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Francis_Potter ).
8 Stevenson, 1974(1965), 109-110.
9 Ibid., 108.
10 Stevenson, 1974(1960), 90.
11 The relevant part of Stead’s novel is reprinted in Gardner, 1998.
12 Stevenson, 1974(1960), 90-91.
13 One of the psychics Stead consulted, “Count Harmon,” told him in 1911 that mortal danger “would be from water, and from nothing else”; and in a letter dated June 21 of that year, Count Harmon warned him that travel would be dangerous in April, 1912. Another psychic, Mr. W. de Kerlor, predicted Stead would go to America, but this was accompanied by a strange vision: “I can see … the picture of a huge black ship, of which I see the back portion; where the name of the ship should be written there is a wreath of immortelles … I can only see half of the ship …”, which he took to mean “limitations, difficulties and death.” Later Mr. de Kerlor related a dream that he felt was about Stead: “I dreamt that I was in the midst of a catastrophe on the water; there were masses (more than a thousand) of bodies struggling in the water and I was among them. I could hear their cries for help.” (Ibid.)
14 Gardner, 1998. When Robertson’s story was reprinted in 1912, with the new title The Wreck of the Titan , some of these statistics of the Titan were changed to bring them even closer (in most cases) to those of the Titanic . Numbers here reflect the 1898 version.
15 Eisenbud, 1982.
16 Gardner, 1998, 33.
17 Hand, 2014.
18 Gardner, 1998, 35
19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
20 Gardner (1998) notes that in May, 1912, an American pulp variety magazine, Popular Magazine , ran a short story called “The White Ghost of Disaster,” by a writer named Mayn Clew Garnett, about the loss of an 800- foot ocean liner named Admiral and over a thousand of its passengers after hitting an iceberg, going 22.5 knots (the same speed as the Titanic ), on a run between New York and Liverpool. Although published after the Titanic sank, the story had been written earlier and was already in press at the time of the disaster. Unfortunately, little is known about the author.
21 Ibid., 3.
22 Ibid., 4.
23 The relationship between Kubrick’s film and the Hilton brand, an early example of product placement, may have even made the property attractive to Hilton Hotels when the hotel’s original developer Peter Kalikow went into bankruptcy shortly after its construction and was forced to sell it.
24 Pearlman, 2016.
25 Dannatt, 2001.
26 Cotter, 2001.
27 Recalled Comics , 2017.
28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Music
29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen
30 Mossbridge & Radin, 2018.
31 See Feather & Schmicker, 2005, for some interesting examples.
32 See for instance, Bernstein, 2005; Dossey, 2009; McEneaney, 2010.
33 Loftus, 2010, 211.
34 Hollywood special effects technician Andrew Paquette kept a 20-year database record of his dreams, which he says he initially started compiling to disprove his wife’s belief that his dreams were precognitive. He came around to agreeing with his wife. Among numerous examples recorded in his book Dreamer (Paquette, 2011), he notes recording a cluster of dreams more than a decade before 9/11 that seemed to foreshadow the events of that day. None specifically involve the World Trade Center, and most are vague enough (as well as distant enough in time from 9/11) that a skeptic could easily attribute them to natural fears of terrorism striking that city. But Paquette also notes that two weeks before the attack, in late August 2001, he found himself in Legoland theme park in California with a terrible headache, trying to explain to his daughter why a big brick cityscape of Manhattan was missing the twin towers: “Maybe it was too big to build it to scale” (Ibid., 215), he suggested, but immediately told his wife he thought his disaster dreams about Manhattan were about to come true. He says the headache went away at that instant.
35 9/11 is just the most famous of the disasters Mandell allegedly foresaw in dreams and depicted in paintings. In 1993, Mandell painted an explosive event involving a car near an airport, noting it was possibly Heathrow; it cor responded exactly to an IRA mortar attack there in March 1994. His drawing of three cars side by side matched exactly a news headline photo, including the striking detail of the exact same radiator grille in the car that had launched the mortars, and identical damage to the adjacent car. He reported that a voice in his dream said to him, “This is what you’re going to see in the newspapers when this event happens.” In June of 1997 and then again in April of 1999, Mandell dreamed of a Concorde in France with its engines on fire; again, his depictions (and very specific details like the pilot’s attempt to reach a nearby airport) matched news of the crash of Air France flight 4590 after taking off from Charles de Gaulle airport on July 25, 2000. It was the only fatal incident in the history of the Concorde. For more on Mandell, see Peake (2012) and Channel 5 (2003).
36 White, 2017. White also manages to debunk some old myths, such as that President Lincoln dreamed of
seeing his own dead body laid out on a catafalque—the story was probably made up by one of Lincoln’s bodyguards. But several members of Lincoln’s cabinet did independently record that on the morning before his fateful visit to Ford’s Theater, Lincoln reported to them a strange and compelling dream about being on a great ship, “some singular, indescribable vessel” (Ibid., 151) rushing through the water to an indefinite shore; he had had such a dream before at various momentous turning points, and thus thought it meant some great moment was at hand for his country.
37 Larry Dossey’s The Power of Premonitions (Dossey, 2009) is an excellent summary of this topic.
38 Ibid.
39 Wiseman, 2010, 153.
40 Ibid.
41 On the arbitrariness of defining an “event,” see Braude, 1997, and Chapter 5 of this book.
42 Peake, 2012, 260.
43 See Llewellyn, 2013.
44 When they do keep such databases, as Andrew Paquette did, it often supports dream precognition (Paquette, 2011). See also Siegel, 2017.
45 Canales, 2015.
46 Fitzgerald, 1936.
47 Priestley, 1989(1964), 194.
48 See Strieber & Kripal, 2016.
49 Gardner, 1998, 32.
50 Priestley (1989[1964], 194) observes:
It is true, as the representatives of common sense hurry to tell us, that we like to deceive ourselves. But this cuts both ways. Certainly there is self-deceit in favor of appearing unusual, strangely sensitive, “psychic,” and the rest. But there is also self-deceit, of a much safer sort, in favor of conformism, sturdy common sense, rationality, and no nonsense. And we need hardly ask ourselves which of these attitudes is the more fashionable, the easier to adopt, the one more likely to bring good dividends and a sound reputation.
