by Eric Wargo
Packing to Leave
I’ll warn you right now: Precognition, prophecy, premonition, presentiment—I will use these overlapping terms somewhat interchangeably although generally remaining consistent with their specific connotations—is a touchy subject. People can react unpredictably when things go “the wrong way.” You’ve heard the woodsman’s advice, don’t get between a bear and her cubs? Well, don’t get between a modern, science-literate person and their beliefs about causality. The result is liable to be condescension, ridicule, or worse. Again, just go on Google or Wikipedia and you will see what I mean: Like the filthy brown cloud around the Peanuts character Pigpen, a cloud of epithets like “baloney” and “hogwash” and “pseudoscience” attaches itself to ESP, precognition, and related subjects wherever they appear in polite society, along with the implication that people who believe in or experience these things are sadly self-deceived. 6 The subject of precognition is, as physicist Daniel P. Sheehan puts it, “beyond the pale of polite discussion.” 7 The Dutch psychologist Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, upon reading Bem’s article, reported that he had to keep putting it away: “Reading it made me physically unwell.” 8
Thus, while researching and writing this book, I did not tell very many people what I was working on.
But on several occasions, friends and acquaintances who learned of my interests were eager to tell their own experiences. I ended up, unexpectedly, with a not-unimpressive dataset of experiences from my social circle in Washington, DC, and from readers of my blog The Nightshirt , who shared stories with me in emails. My rule in this book has been to use only public, published sources and not, for instance, any of my own precognitive dreams (with one exception in the Postscript); and most of the “ethnographic” material I collected is too personal, or too sad in a couple cases, to share anyway. But it feels appropriate to tell a couple anecdotes here (with permission) to set the stage for our journey through the topic of precognition and the “loopy” ways it influences our lives.
A Washington, DC, software engineer and artist in her mid-30s, whom I will call Anne, told me in an interview about a series of experiences that had occurred in her late teens and twenties, specifically dreams in which, she said, “I knew something I couldn’t possibly know—typically, that someone I knew had passed away.”
One of these dreams occurred the first few weeks of her freshman year of college. Anne dreamed of encountering her ex-boyfriend’s father on the steps of an academic building on her campus. “There was a big glass door, and he had just walked up the steps and was about to walk through the doors. He turned around and looked at me and looked down to where I was standing and said, ‘Well, bye!’ And he had his hands in his pockets and his glasses were on and he was really peaceful, and he walked through the glass door.” As soon as she woke up, she said she knew that this had been a symbol somehow. She found out later that day that her ex’s father had died. She knew that he had been a professor at a different university, and thus encountering him in her dream on her own campus made a kind of symbolic sense. She also knew that he had recently been diagnosed with a slow-growing cancer but that he was expected to live a few more years, so this death was not expected.
A few years later, after college, Anne recalled waking early one weekend morning to go to the bathroom and passing the open door of her roommate, who was busy packing his suitcase. She asked him what he was doing, and he said that he was going home to be with his family because his uncle had just died. Anne did not know her roommate’s uncle, but did vaguely know, from something her roommate had mentioned months earlier, that his uncle was ill. She said she was terribly sorry and went back to bed.
She awoke what felt like maybe an hour later and found her roommate still packing his bag, still on his bed, just as she’d seen him before. She was surprised that he had not already left to drive to his family’s house.
She said, “I’m so sorry to hear about your uncle, again,” and her roommate looked startled—he blanched—and said, “How did you know about that?”
She said, “You told me this morning, when I woke up earlier, that your uncle died.”
“We didn’t talk this morning,” he said.
Anne realized at that moment that she had only dreamed of awakening the first time.
In her late twenties, Anne also had a series of dreams of seeing the home of a close childhood friend, from above, as though approaching it in a hot air balloon. She had lost contact with the friend about a year earlier but felt that these dreams somehow symbolized that something was wrong in that house—perhaps an illness or death in the family. She later learned that her friend had died of an opioid overdose. Anne did not know that her friend had started using drugs and had become addicted during the last two or three years of her life.
In the course of corresponding about precognition and this book-inprogress with Jeffrey Kripal, a Rice University historian of religion and a leading scholar of the paranormal, Jeff shared with me an experience of his own that was remarkably similar to Anne’s dream about her roommate, although in Jeff’s case the context was more amusing than sad.
Jeff described how he had recently been compiling an archive at his university related to paranormal phenomena. In the course of this effort, he had received an envelope from a retired Pentagon employee who had accumulated a large library on UFOs and was planning to donate it to the archive.
Jeff wrote: “I opened it and saw that it was a brief essay he had written about his one and only paranormal experience. I did not have time to read the essay, so I tucked it into my schedule book.”
Jeff was too busy to read the essay because he was about to leave on vacation. When he returned, he found the envelope. Except … it was still sealed. “It had never been opened. I looked and looked at each edge, expecting to find a scissor cut. Nothing. More puzzled, I cut it open and found what I ‘remembered’—an essay on his one and only paranormal experience (a partial levitation). I was more puzzled by the memory than the levitation.”
Examples like this, especially since they are so trivial, will readily be ignored or dismissed by skeptics as false memories, hindsight bias, or simple déjà vu, an erroneous signal of familiarity attached to a novel experience. (Those of a more paranoid disposition may instead suggest that Jeff really did open the letter, just as he remembered, but that the trickster-like forces that really run the show re-sealed the envelope afterward.) I will be arguing that skeptics’ claims—about the biases that distort our perceptions, for instance—sometimes do not hold up against masses of compelling evidence, including laboratory evidence, that something about our cognition—or our consciousness, if you prefer that term—really transcends the present moment. Premonitory dreams, weird “memories” of things that haven’t happened yet, and other odd experiences in which we seem to overtake ourselves in time may reflect that we genuinely think across the fourth dimension , not unlike Asimov’s thiotimoline molecule.
Anomalous experiences frequently are reported in the context of stress. In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated coastal areas of Texas at the end of August, 2017, a Houston woman I will call Michele contacted me after reading an article I had written on precognition. She found my article when searching the internet for information that might illuminate something baffling she had experienced that day, as she and the rest of her city were trying to return to normal existence in the aftermath of the flooding that had ruined so many homes and lives.
Michele described how she had been feeling stressed and ungrounded when she went to run some errands, including a trip to the post office. The traffic was terrible, as a friend had even warned her before she left, but at the post office she found an empty parking space right in front of the building. But at that point, a voice inside her head said, “Don’t park here. You might hit a car when you back out.” She then had the thought, “Do I have my insurance card?”
Disregarding this warning voice, Michele parked in the spot anyway. Later, when she was backing out,
she collided with another car that was doing the same thing. She then discovered that, indeed, she did not have her insurance card.
It was not the first time Michele had failed to heed her own driving-related premonitions. She told me about a similar, weirdly fractal experience in which she had been driving with a friend and in fact telling that friend about another friend’s accurate premonition of a motorcycle accident, when she approached a red light. She had just finished telling the story, when her inner voice told her to run the red light. Although she safely could have done so, her “better judgment” censored the impulse to violate traffic safety rules, and she pulled to a stop … at which point her car was rear-ended. “So, there I was telling a story about the importance of heeding precognitive warnings, and then I didn’t heed my own! That is, assuming it was even possible for me to heed it.”
These puzzling experiences, among others, led Michele to question deeply our culture’s folk causality, and even the central dogma of free will: “I’ve been thinking that the future may affect the past or present and that perhaps free will is an illusion (or at least different than what we think).” Indeed, the collision in the post office parking lot led her to a conclusion very similar to what I will be arguing in this book: “What if the premonition of the accident was the direct result of the accident itself, especially the traumatic emotions I felt? In other words, if the accident never happened, then maybe I could not have been forewarned.”
A favorite story genre in books on ESP are “catastrophes averted” because of some premonitory warning such as a dream. 9 We will see in this book that premonitions that go unheeded or are impossible to heed are just as (if not more) common and raise troubling questions in the minds of those who experience them. “What’s the use of a premonition if it can’t be used to prevent or avert a disaster?” is an obvious one. I will be arguing that precognition, premonition, prophecy may not be what we think they are, and that even when they seem to warn us of traumas, accidents, or catastrophes on the road ahead, and may even prepare us for them, they are really about our future survival of events that throw our lives, or at least our emotions, into upheaval. They may even orient us toward subtle emotional rewards that can occur in the context of those upheavals.
After Michele backed into another car in the parking lot of the Houston post office, she got out and faced the other driver. “At first, his look was hard, maybe anger, maybe anguish,” she said. Even though she did not know who was at fault, Michele told him “I’m so sorry. There’s just so much stress with all that’s been happening.”
She said the other driver’s look softened. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “This will all be taken care of. I just lost my house and everything in the flood.”
“That’s when I started crying and couldn’t stop,” she said, and she and the other driver held each other’s arms—“a brief moment of loving acceptance. It was beautiful.”
I suggested to Michele that the voice in her head before taking that parking spot may not have been trying to warn her against a course of action but could, in some weird way, have oriented her toward that rewarding moment of human connection in the context of the stress everyone in her city was feeling. After all, a car accident easily remedied through insurance is small potatoes when set against the devastation of homes, and the net gain in this event was a needed moment of meaningful human connection—and at least for Michele, a fascinating precognitive experience.
Although precognition often surfaces to awareness in the context of stress and trauma, even death in many cases, I will argue that it really orients us ultimately to life, and to a renewed, intensified awareness of being alive.
In Part One of this book, we will see numerous examples of precognition and what I am calling time loops : baffling, causally circular situations in which a precognitive experience partly contributes to the fulfillment of the precognized event—what is sometimes called a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” In addition to anecdotal claims of precognition and a fascinating, semi-scientific investigation of the subject by a pioneer aeronautical engineer a century ago, we will also see how laboratory evidence strongly (in fact, overwhelmingly) lends support to the possible verity of the anecdotal claims: Information from our future somehow appears able to exert an influence over our behavior, albeit usually in oblique, non-obvious ways. That it so often seems to operate outside of conscious awareness suggests that precognition may be a very primitive, basic guidance system, one that could be shared widely in the animal kingdom.
In Part Two, we will examine the “how,” the physics and biology that might make such a thing possible. Not only is retrocausation being demonstrated in physics experiments like the one mentioned earlier, but various lines of evidence from fields like quantum computing and quantum biology make it increasingly plausible that biological systems may, within limits, be able to “pre-spond” to future stimuli. Exactly how it works is still speculative, but precognition is no longer absurd from a materialist scientific standpoint, the way it was even just a decade or two ago. The brain may well turn out to be an organ that extracts meaning from an otherwise noisy, but constant, informational reflux from the Not Yet .
The Not Yet is a term I use for the unknown-but-soon-to-be-known future: something that is on its way, about to arrive, and that brings with it understanding—such as the meaning of a baffling dream, or the confirmation of a hunch. Precognition, I will argue, is about our strange relationship to the Not Yet, orienting us toward increased understanding and meaning coming down the pike.
Even if such a possibility is increasingly scientifically thinkable (if not fully explainable), anything that upsets the one-way folk-causal order of things is really hard to wrap our heads around. When it comes to matters of time and causality, we are all a bit like A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh—we are “bears of little brain.” Besides being plain difficult, it is almost as if precognition has a force field around it, a dense and intimidating fog of taboo , tending to deflect even people who notice its operation in their own lives onto a course of denial or forgetfulness. When people experience dreams that relate uncannily to imminent experiences, for example, they will often grasp at other explanations—preferring even to think that they are just crazy or self-deceived—rather than actually cut through the thickets of illogic around these phenomena and try to understand them.
Because precognition is taboo, the perfect place to look for guidance in traversing the fog of unreason that surrounds it is the original science of unreason and taboos, psychoanalysis, the subject of Part Three. Since the psychoanalytic clinic is a context where real people’s lives, dreams, and thoughts are subjected to close scrutiny and have sometimes been written down in great detail, the case studies of Sigmund Freud and other pioneers in this controversial realm of human inquiry provide a rich trove of data on precognition. And interestingly, Freud himself turns out to have been, without knowing or acknowledging it, a “precog” par excellence . His most famous dream, for example, turns out to have startlingly foreshadowed the illness that would claim his life decades later. Freud’s own explicit denial of the possibility of precognition could even be seen as his tragic flaw, making his life a fascinating case study of a man haunted by time loops he could not or would not confront.
Precog was a term coined by the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who wrote a lot about precognition because it seemed to be a constant and baffling feature in his own life. To really understand precognition, we have to place these experiences within the context of the individual’s life story. Fortunately, both psychotherapeutic case studies and the world of letters provide countless examples of odd and interesting time loops caught in amber, enabling us in many cases to take a biographical approach to studying the phenomenon. Over the course of this book we will see several striking time loops from the lives of famous writers and other artists, and in Part Four, we will look closely at how precognitive experiences shaped the biographies of three people: Phil Dick, a turn-of-the-centu
ry sea adventure writer named Morgan Robertson, and a highly precognitive patient of Carl Jung named Maggy Quarles van Ufford (the until-recently anonymous woman at the center of the famous scarab story, the centerpiece of Jung’s writings on synchronicity).
What the psychoanalytic and literary cases all strongly suggest is that precognition is not seeing or getting some glimpse of future events “out there” in objective reality. Rather, it is an engagement with personally meaningful realizations or learning experiences ahead in a person’s own life. Sometimes those future realizations pertain directly to the circumstances in which a premonition or a dream first occurred, giving a genuinely loop-like structure to our lives and thoughts. I will even suggest that what since Freud’s day has been described as the neurosis- and creativity-generating “unconscious mind” may really be our waking consciousness displaced in time.
I began with a story about a lump of dissolving crystalline powder, so I will conclude with another one. Early in the last century, the philosopher Henri Bergson wanted to awaken his readers to the unfolding of matter in time. He argued that when we imagine living things and inert objects as existing totally in the present moment, having only spatial characteristics, we cannot understand them fully. In his masterpiece Creative Evolution , he used a lump of sugar in a glass of water to illustrate an altered, intuitive perception of matter in its durée , or continuous unfolding. The way the sugar presents itself at any given moment to our senses, he argued, is just a shadow of its full glory; to fully apprehend it, Bergson wrote, “I must wait until the sugar melts.” 10