Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  Then, before the dinner was over, Ogden received a second telegram. This time it was from the British representative in Tokyo, asking if they could bring along a stenographer. Goddard was sweating. Ogden asked Goddard if that was alright. “I can take him,” Goddard said stoically, not betraying his trepidation, “… if he’s a man.”

  “He’s bound to be a girl, I’m afraid,” Ogden replied.

  Again, what could Goddard do but agree with this new passenger list, which now would match precisely what Gladstone said he had dreamed? The only stenographer available of course was a woman: a 20-year-old Englishwoman, Miss Dorita Breakspear. He wrote: “As an air marshal, how could I possibly say that I’d been warned supernaturally? Or by extrasensory perception, if that is the more fitting expression?” 7 Nevertheless, he felt he may be taking all of these passengers, including a young woman who had never flown before, to their deaths … all because of the dream of the odd Navy man he’d met earlier that evening.

  As they took off the next morning, Goddard had to conceal his emotions.

  My depression was due to a foreboding that I was about to carry into mortal danger all who flew with me, and to the knowledge that I could not, for want of justification—or of moral courage—bid passengers other than myself remain behind. Here seemed a destiny which had to be risked, a destiny which could be averted not by delay, but only by a change which I could not force myself to make—a change of passengers. 8

  The story of the flight fills several big pages of the May 26, 1951, issue of The Saturday Evening Post , but the short version is this: Sister Ann departed Shanghai the next morning at 6:30 with her Air Force crew and three civilians. Despite good initial weather reports, the plane encountered a snowstorm over the Japanese coast, and after unsuccessfully trying to fly over the storm bank—the civilian passengers were not able to endure the thin oxygen at that altitude—and with too little fuel to reach an airstrip, Goddard’s pilot was forced to crash-land the plane on a remote rocky beach on the West coast of Japan, 200 miles West of their intended destination of Tokyo.

  The details of the incident were just as Gladstone had dreamed—with the exception that Goddard and all his passengers survived the ordeal. Their survival was largely thanks to the scrupulous preparedness of Goddard and his flight crew: removing the rear door of the plane while still in flight, so they wouldn’t be trapped after the crash-landing, and padding the passengers in all available blankets and seat cushions to protect them on impact. Goddard refused to accept that his passengers, especially the civilians, would die in the “hell of a crash” his acquaintance had foreseen in his dream. Although the hard landing was harrowing, everyone was unhurt, and they were assisted afterward by friendly Japanese villagers. Thanks to the discovery of a Japanese-French dictionary at the local inn, they were able to communicate, in a limited way, with their hosts.

  A skeptic might suggest that the crash was somehow a product of “suggestion”—that Goddard’s superstitiousness about the dream influenced his own decisions and perhaps, via him, his crew. But Goddard did his utmost not to reveal Gladstone’s dream, or his doubts, to his crew who were actually flying the plane. 9 Nor could suggestion account for how exactly Gladstone’s dream matched the other details, such as the fact that the plane was carrying two civilian men and one woman.

  Even a Stopped Clock Tells the Right Time Twice a Day

  To make some sense of Victor Goddard’s remarkable story, we must understand the discoveries and theories of J. W. Dunne, the English soldier-turned-engineer and philosopher whose book, An Experiment with Time , had persuaded both Goddard and Gladstone of the reality of precognitive dreams.

  Dunne was born in Ireland in 1875, when his father, a British army general, was stationed in that country. During a long illness as a child, which kept him confined to bed, he did a lot of reading and thinking, even forming the beginnings of a new theory of time that, decades later, he would call Serialism. 10 He also read the novels of Jules Verne, which instilled in him a fascination he would later pursue as a career: aeronautical engineering. He reported several ecstatic religious experiences as a child, and brushes with “prophecy” as a teenager, but his interest in precognitive dreams dates mainly to the year 1899, when the 24-yearold Dunne was asleep in a hotel room in Sussex, England, dreaming he was having an argument with one of the waiters at the hotel about the time of day. 11

  Dunne’s dream-self insisted it was half past four o’clock in the afternoon, but the stubborn waiter held firm that it was in fact half past four in the morning. Dunne began to wonder, in the dream, if his watch had stopped and whether he was the one in error, so he pulled it from his pocket to check—finding that indeed, its hands were motionless, frozen at half past four. With typical dream illogic, he concluded that he was radically confused about whether it was day or night simply because of his stopped watch. Also, as the image of the frozen watch in his hands faded, Dunne became aware of a din of a multitude of voices shouting in unison, “Look! ... Look! ... Look!” He awoke with these voices ringing in his head, 12 and obediently lit a match to have a look at his watch. It was not by his bedside, where he usually placed it before retiring; he had to rise and go looking through his things. He found it on a chest of drawers across the room from his bed ... and it had stopped, the hands frozen at half past four.

  No answer for this coincidence of finding his watch stopped at 4:30 just after having dreamed of it came to Dunne’s skeptical mind. Since his only timepiece had stopped, Dunne had no way of knowing the real time, of course, so he simply rewound it and went back to sleep, waiting to reset it against the hotel’s clock the next morning.

  When he descended to the hotel lobby for breakfast, he was surprised to find that his watch was only a couple minutes behind the hotel’s clock. It suggested either that the watch had stopped right when he had his dream—perhaps the dream was stimulated when his sleeping brain ceased hearing the watch’s faint ticking—or that it had stopped exactly 12 hours earlier but had (quite improbably) gone unnoticed by him the whole evening. 13 In either case, he was perplexed: How had his sleeping self been able to know exactly what time it was? Nearly three decades later, he wrote in his famous book on precognitive dreams, An Experiment with Time :

  If anyone else had told me such a tale I should probably have replied that he had dreamed the whole episode, from beginning to end, including the getting up and rewinding. But that was an answer I could not give to myself. I knew that I had been awake when I had risen and looked at the watch lying on the chest of drawers. Yet, what was the alternative? ‘Clairvoyance’—seeing across space through darkness and closed eyelids? Even supposing that there existed unknown rays which could effect that sort of penetration, and then produce vision—which I did not believe—the watch had been lying at a level above that of my eyes. What sort of rays could these be which bent around corners? 14

  Alone, it is a mundane dream, presaging an event as trivial as the sinking of the Titanic or 9/11 were momentous. But it proved to be the first of many seemingly precognitive dreams Dunne experienced and recorded over the subsequent years.

  Soon after his watch dream, Dunne enlisted as a soldier in Britain’s war with the Dutch-speaking Boers in southern Africa, where he himself had lived for a period during his teens. Two of his most striking precognitive dreams occurred during and after his two stints fighting in this conflict. In January 1901, he had been invalided with typhoid fever. While recovering on the Italian Riviera, Dunne dreamed he was in a town on the Nile near Khartoum in the Sudan, where he met three white men, faces burned almost black from the sun, dressed in khakis he associated with his treks in South Africa. How had they gotten all the way to North Africa from South Africa, his dream-self wondered? The next morning, he read in The Daily Telegraph of precisely such an expedition arriving in Khartoum—a newsworthy event, as it was the first time the “Dark Continent” had been traversed by white men on foot. 15

  Then in 1902, while camped out with his regime
nt in Orange Free State during his second stint in the African conflict, Dunne had what he described as “an unusually vivid and unpleasant dream” 16 of being on a volcanic island about to erupt: Steam issued from vents in the ground, reminding him (in the dream) of the Krakatoa eruption. In that eruption, he knew, seawater had seeped into the lava chamber, creating superheated steam that acted as a bomb to destroy that island. Something similar was clearly about to happen in this dream, and the dreamer also knew that 4,000 people living on the island were going to perish in the explosion. The dream scene changed (as they often do), and the next part was a maddening bureaucratic nightmare set on a neighboring island, in which he went from office to office, trying unsuccessfully to convince French authorities of the peril so that the threatened 4,000 people could be rescued by boat. He noted that the “4,000” figure was repeated again and again.

  When the next batch of mail arrived at his camp, it included a copy of The Daily Telegraph , in which Dunne read of the catastrophic eruption of Mont Pelée on the French island of Martinique in the Caribbean, with (it said) “probable loss of over 40,000 lives.” An eyewitness at sea reported seeing the mountain literally split apart and explode. And it was reported that ships were busy trying to remove survivors to neighboring islands. It seemed to be another stunning confirmation of an event experienced in a dream. When reading the article, Dunne mis-read the figure as “4,000,” and he records that he even kept repeating that erroneous figure to people in conversation for a long time afterward. It was only 15 years later, he says, when copying the news story, that he caught his mistake (that in his reading, and his dream, he had been “out by a nought”). 17

  Even though the Wright Brothers’ historic flight at Kitty Hawk was still a year away and his own career as an aeronautical engineer was just a glimmer in his eye at this point, Dunne already possessed a keen engineer’s mind, which he applied scrupulously to the problem of figuring out just what these dreams were. A crucial piece of evidence, in this and several other cases, came from the ways his dreams deviated from the real-life event he had dreamed about.

  The final death toll in the Mont Pelée eruption turned out to be in the neighborhood of 30,000 people, 18 “nothing in common with the arrangement of fours and noughts I had dreamed of, and gathered from the first report.” 19 The more Dunne reflected on this dream, as well as the previous one about the expedition to Khartoum, the clearer it became that they were both somehow triggered by his reading experiences, not by the events being reported: “[I]n each case, the dream had been precisely the sort of thing I might have expected to have experienced after reading the printed report—a perfectly ordinary dream based upon the personal experience of reading.“ “For whence , in the dream, had I got that idea of 4,000? Clearly it must have come into my mind because of the newspaper paragraph .” 20

  This raised a fresh doubt in his mind: “How, then, could I be sure that those dreams had not been false memories engendered by the act of reading?” 21 —in other words, the skeptical position most often voiced in response to claims of “prophetic” dreams. The only way to answer that was, from then on, to record his dreams immediately upon waking, or tell them to another person, to establish that retroactive memory distortion—or what was at the time called “identifying paramnesia”—was not the explanation.

  After Dunne was diagnosed with heart disease in 1903, his military career effectively ended and he devoted himself in earnest to studying his true passion, aeronautical engineering. He was a bold experimenter, designing several innovative tailless biplanes, including recognizable precursors to later “flying wing” designs. His own planes did not end up being used in the First World War or after, but as a manufacturer with military connections and a member of an industry delegation to Parliament, Dunne played an important behind-the-scenes role in winning military support for the young British aerospace industry. 22

  When he was not designing and building bizarre aerial contraptions, Dunne turned his interest in dreams into a more rigorous experiment—recording or telling his dreams after he had them, and comparing them systematically to events in his life that followed. He was soon rewarded with data points that helped him reject the less causally problematic notion that he had simply invented dream memories after the fact of reading interesting news stories. His new data from his “experiment with time” also helped further clarify the nature of this astonishing phenomenon of precognitive dreaming, and the way information from his own future intermingled with, or in some cases was represented by, material from ordinary memory.

  In 1904, for example, he had a nightmare of people choking on suffocating smoke behind a railing and a kind of moving “lath” visible dimly through the smoke. The latter image he recognized upon waking as something he had seen in an early motion picture: the jet of water from a fire engine. He carefully reflected on the dream and its details before reading any newspapers. There was nothing similar to this in the morning paper, but the afternoon news brought a story of a fire at a rubber factory in Paris that suffocated a large number of female workers with thick smoke even after many had retreated outside to a balcony, where they were all pressed together—exactly the terrible scene he had witnessed in his dream. 23

  A few months later, on a fly-fishing trip to Austria with his brother, Dunne had a nightmare of a horse behaving crazily behind a fence, which initially alarmed him until he realized the animal could not get out from its confinement. He walked away, but then turned and saw the horse had somehow gotten out and was barreling toward him. The next day, while fishing with his brother, he saw nearly the exact scene—a horse behaving crazily—across the river, along with some other details such as a wooden walkway that he had distortedly seen in his dream. This prompted him to begin telling his dream to his brother—pausing midway in his story to make sure there was no gap or gate where the animal really could escape.

  Satisfied, I said, ‘At any rate, this horse cannot get out’, and recommenced fishing. But my brother interrupted me by calling ‘Look out!’ Glancing up again, I saw that there was no dodging fate. The beast had , inexplicably, just as in the dream, got out (probably it had jumped the fence), and, just as in the dream, it was thundering down the path toward the wooden steps. It swerved past these and plunged into the river, coming straight towards us. We both picked up stones, ran thirty yards or so back from the bank, and faced about. The end was tame, for, on emerging from the water on our side, the animal merely looked at us, snorted, and galloped off down a road. 24

  Dunne noted that all these dreams were exactly like one might expect of dreams triggered by events of the day before, containing the same mix of real events and distortions. “No, there was nothing unusual in any of these dreams as dreams. They were merely displaced in time .” 25

  Dunne’s 1899 dream of the stopped pocket watch was not his first brush with “prophecy.” As a teenager he had spent some time living as a student on a South African farm, and like many angsty teens, his emotions sometimes got the better of him. At 17, disappointed and angry at a choirmaster who persisted in making him sing alto long after his voice had deepened, and just generally outraged at the unfairness of it all, he ceased believing in God and deliberately started acting out in ways he was loath to specify even near the end of his life, when he wrote of this period. “How I cursed that master, and how I longed to curse the God in whom I no longer believed.” 26 Alarmed at the “strange bouts of savagery” this otherwise decent chap found himself capable of (whatever they were), he decided that there were two “diametrically different” personalities in him, one good, one evil, vying for control of his body, and that he may have no choice but to take the latter path in life: “Goodness was nonsense: there was neither good nor evil: my so-called ‘evil’ personality was by far the freer of the two, and there were no limits to what it might achieve. Reason said: give it rein.” 27

  No sooner had the teenager made this awesome decision to follow the dark side than he rode his horse to the closest town,
Stellenbosch, to exchange his library book for a new one. This lover of adventures had already exhausted everything they had of that nature, unfortunately, including most of the titles by one of his favorites, Robert Louis Stevenson ... except one: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . Dunne knew nothing about it, but the fact that it was by Stevenson bode well, so he took the book home with him.

  Picture me at ten o’clock that night, reading by the light of a single candle, my hair standing on end. God! What I had escaped! My evil self, I saw clearly, would never have remained the Superman I had pictured it. Like Hyde, it would have sunk lower and lower as it threw off the trammels of its Jekyll.

  But (I thought) what a marvellous coincidence! At the very moment when I have decided to give my Hyde the mastery, I pick up the grimmest story ever written—the story of a man who did that very thing. 28

  He decided it could be no coincidence, as the chances were a million to one. “There was a God! And He had intervened in the promptest and most effective way possible.” 29 This prompted in the young rebel a provocation and challenge to God that proved unwise. Capping his disappointments up to that point, a short story he had submitted to a Cape Town periodical two months earlier—his first attempt at writing for publication—had not gotten him a response and, he presumed, had been rejected outright. So he made a promise:

  I promised that, if the despaired-of letter would arrive by the next post, I would believe ‘the whole thing’, by which words I meant ‘Pauline Christianity’. And next morning that letter arrived! My story was accepted! And … I found, a little later, that I could not believe what I had promised to believe. 30

  His rational mind balked at literal belief in the Gospels, and the fact that he’d made a promise to a God to believe in a dogma that he couldn’t rationally countenance put him in a kind of Catch-22 that dominated the next ten years of his life. In fact, it was his new theory of time, Serialism, for which his later precognitive experiences provided evidence, that helped resolve his dilemmas about God and the rest. 31