by Eric Wargo
Right at the time Dunne was fighting in the Boer War, Einstein was formulating his revolutionary theory of relativity, based on thought experiments about observers, light beams, and trains on parallel tracks moving at different speeds or in different directions. Dunne’s dreams seemed to him evidence for what Einstein and other physicists and mathematicians were just beginning to assert: that since the present moment depends entirely on where you stand in relation to events—what might be in the past for one observer may still be in the future for another observer, and vice versa—then the future must in some sense already exist .
Einstein’s theory of relativity suggested that time was a dimension like space. To help visualize this, his teacher, Hermann Minkowski, pictured “spacetime” as a four-dimensional block. For the purposes of this book, let’s make it a glass block so we can see what is happening inside it. One’s life, and the “life” of any single object or atom in the universe, is really a line—a “world line”—snaking spaghetti-like through that glass block. The solid three-dimensional “you” that you experience at any moment is really just a slice or cross section of a four-dimensional clump of spaghetti-like atoms that started some decades ago as a zygote, gradually expanded in size by incorporating many more spaghetti-strand atoms, and then, after several decades of coherence (as a literal “flying spaghetti monster”) will dissipate into a multitude of little spaghetti atoms going their separate ways after your death. (They will recoalesce in different combinations with other spaghetti-strand atoms to make other objects and other spaghetti beings, again and again and again, until the end of the universe.) What we perceive at any given moment as the present state of affairs is just a narrow slice or cross-section of that block as our consciousness traverses our world-line from beginning to end. (If it helps envision this, the comic artist, occult magician, and novelist Alan Moore has recently revised the “block” to a football—one tip being the big bang, the other the “big crunch” proposed in some cosmological models. 32 I will stick with the term “glass block” since I am not a football fan and “glass football” sounds odd.)
Precognitive dreams, Dunne argued, show that at night, as well as other times when the brain is in a relaxed state, our consciousness can wriggle free of the present moment and scan ahead (as well as behind) on our personal world-line, like a flashlight at night illuminating a spot on the path ahead. This ability to be both rooted mentally in our body, with its rich sensory “now,” and the possibility of coming unstuck in time (as Vonnegut put it) suggested to Dunne that human consciousness was dual. We not only possess an “individual mind” that adheres to the brain at any given time point, but we also are part of a larger, “Universal Mind,” that transcends the now and that spaghetti-clump body. The Universal Mind, he argued, is ultimately shared—a consciousness-in-common—that is equivalent to what has always been called “God.” Universal Mind is immortal. The body-bound individual mind is, in some sense, a “child of God and Man.” 33
Thus, by wrestling with the problem of time and mind, Dunne managed to bring himself around to belief, just as he promised. But the belief was radically different from straightforward Pauline Christianity, and his promise had been made, he realized, not to some deity outside of and separate from himself—it was a promise to the immortal Universal Mind that he was as much a part of as everyone and everything else.
Throughout history, many mystics have arrived at more or less this same conclusion Dunne did, although surely few mystical writings in history are supported by as many graphs and equations—and are as difficult to follow—as Dunne’s writings on Serialism. (He followed up An Experiment with Time with four more books elaborating his theory with new metaphors and diagrams.) Equations or no, his view of consciousness as something transcendent of the body, shared by all creatures and actually “filling all space,” is one that has met with considerable agreement in New Age metaphysics. It has even become a popular explanation for psychic phenomena among some parapsychologists, who use updated quantum mechanics metaphors like “entanglement” and “nonlocality” to explain the mind’s connectedness to (or unity with) the rest of the universe. “Transcendent mind,” 34 “entangled minds,” 35 “One Mind,” 36 and so on are all terms widely used in the interesting margins where science meets philosophy and spirituality.
But for all his proofs and logic, many of Dunne’s readers, and even many of his admirers, have not been altogether convinced by his reasoning about time in its relation to consciousness. Ultimately, Dunne’s spiritual aim was to convince us of our immortality, of an undying God-like Universal Mind, but his theory of precognition does not actually support his own theory, based as it is on what appears very much like a kind of mirror of physical memory, rooted in an embodied experiencer. All of the precognitive experiences Dunne recorded centered on events his flesh-and-blood self, his “individual mind,” directly experienced or learned about during his lifetime. The only real difference between these phenomena and ordinary memories was that they defied the usual causal sequence. He seemed to “remember” certain experiences before they occurred.
In fact, it is this basic observation—that precognition is about our personal experiences, not about other people’s experiences or events in objective reality—that made Dunne’s experiment with time so distinctive and valuable in moving us closer to an understanding of how precognition may actually work. He was really the first thinker about precognitive phenomena to draw a strict distinction between foreknowledge of events in some generalized future time (i.e., “the future”) and previews of future personal experiences —the latter including learning experiences like reading about a major world event or disaster in the media. This distinction enabled him to discount most of the theories or models of psychical phenomena that prevailed at the time he was writing, including the notion of clairvoyance (seeing distant locales or hidden objects) and the Theosophical idea of “astral wandering” (the notion that consciousness can travel free of the body and witness distant events). Discrepancies between some real event and the way it was reported, such as the discrepancy of death tolls in the Mont Pelée example, served Dunne as what we might now call “tracers,” showing that a direct, clairvoyant connection to the distant event did not account for his dream. Nor did astral wandering. Even if, in the dream, he felt like he was at the location where it all was happening, those tracers revealed that his dreaming brain had just created its own images to dramatize facts he would soon read in a newspaper article.
Also inadequate as an explanation for his dreams was the popular, highly intuitive notion of telepathy , the English psychologist Frederic W. H. Myers’ theory of mental connection between people who share some emotional or familial bond. By the time Dunne was conducting his experiment, Myers’ Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and its American counterpart the ASPR had for two decades been collecting accounts of psychic dreams, premonitions, and other phenomena such as “crisis apparitions” or “phantasms of the living,” in which a person would see or encounter a relative or friend who was actually in trouble far away. People often reported having dreams of people they knew, finding out later that the subjects of their dreams had died or were undergoing some trauma at about the time they had the vision. 37
The quite natural assumption underlying telepathy was that the consciousness of the human being in crisis can reach across distances in space (and even, to some limited extent, time) and make contact with loved ones and friends. Metaphorically modeled on the telegraph and related technologies of the day, telepathy was believed to be “powered” by strong emotion, especially strong negative emotion. 38 Although a large percentage of Dunne’s dreams had an emotional component or centered on disasters of some sort, as predicted by Myers’ trauma theory, the emotion carrying the mysterious signal, when he really scrutinized it, seemed to be his own emotions in the future, not those of distant people in trouble.
The clearest proof of this came from a dream Dunne had in 1912 about a plane crash involving a te
st-pilot friend whom he referred to as “Lieutenant B.” Dunne was in Paris, inspecting an airplane being constructed there to one of his designs, and one morning he dreamed of his friend crashing a monoplane (rare in those days) in a meadow. In the dream, B. walked toward him out of the crash, unscathed, and explained that the crash had to do with the “beastly engine.” Two days later, Dunne read a bulletin that B. had in fact died the morning he had his dream, and at about the same time, along with another man Dunne did not know, when a test plane they were flying crashed in a meadow near Oxford.
Since Dunne often had aviation-related nightmares at around 7 or 8 in the morning when loud traffic was in the streets, he could not assign any significance to the coincidence of time. But more importantly, when he himself later investigated the cause of the crash of B’s plane—here note Dunne’s forensic detective mind on display—he found that the engine had nothing to do with his friend’s death: “the accident was due to the uncoupling of a quick-release gadget in one of the main ‘lift’ wires, and the consequent breaking upward of one wing.” 39 The point of this detail is, “there would have been no doubt in B’s mind that his wing had broken.” Had it actually been B’s “phantasm” visiting him upon his demise, that phantasm would not have attributed the crash to the plane’s engine. Thus, however seductive the notion of crisis telepathy, or the more familiar spiritualist notion of visitation from “the other side,” Dunne was able to readily falsify these explanations for his dream.
The timing of events is the critical thing: Dunne only investigated the crash and determined its true cause later on—this information was not yet known to him and was not contained in the paragraph in which he read of the incident. He thus determined that, at the time he read and reacted to the news , all his imagination would have had to go on was a comment the now-deceased pilot had actually made to Dunne’s sister some days earlier—and that his sister would have relayed to him—that he was worried about the engine in his plane . Thus, the dream could not have been “of” the crash itself, nor of B’s death per se, but “was associated with the personal experience of reading the paragraph.” 40 As in the volcano dream, it was a dream of his own future reaction to a personally affecting reading experience . What that reading experience could not answer, his dreaming mind filled in using other information in his memory (“frog DNA” again), even if those details proved false. And it presented this ensemble of true and false knowledge in a dramatic frame that was also very much an invention of his imagination. “The dreaming mind,” Dunne observed, “is a master-hand at tacking false interpretations on to everything it perceives.” 41
“I hope you won’t blame Dunne for what didn’t happen!”
So, if precognitive dreams really are “of” learning experiences and not “of” events as such, as Dunne argued, what exactly was the source of Captain Gladstone’s dream about Goddard’s plane crash on a rocky beach?
Gladstone, who was disguised with the pseudonym “Commander Dewing” in Goddard’s Saturday Evening Post article, shipped out in HMS Black Prince the same morning Goddard took off for Tokyo in Sister Ann , so he could not have learned of the crash when he was in Shanghai, and it was not reported in the press … until Goddard’s article in 1951. But when Goddard arrived in Tokyo, he felt duty-bound to write a long letter to his acquaintance describing the ordeal. Goddard closes his story with Gladstone’s reply, received months later:
I am horrified to hear about your crash, and so long after the event. I went off to the Med. in a roundabout way the day you left, and have only just got your letter.
I remember our meeting—you bet!—and I do vaguely remember that dream. But only very vaguely. You know what dreams are! No, I can’t say that I actually saw you dead, but I certainly thought the crash was a killer. Glad it wasn’t. And I hope you won’t blame Dunne for what didn’t happen! 42
Whether or not the crash itself was somehow influenced by Goddard’s state of mind (that is, whether Gladstone “doomed” the flight with his careless divulgence of his dream), Gladstone found out about the crash—and thus would have had his precognitive dream—because of Goddard’s letter .
So far, so good—it could indeed have been a full-on “Dunne dream,” stimulated by a later reading experience rather than by the crash-landing per se.
But here is where the Dunne theory, and in fact practically any theory of precognition, may for many readers run aground—or perhaps crash-land—on the rocky beach of illogic: Goddard only sent that letter to Gladstone because of Gladstone’s dream, and indeed that dream is the only reason they met in the first place, and the only thing that made the crash uncanny. The dream caused the letter, which caused the dream. It was—if the precognition explanation be believed—a causal loop, or what for convenience I call a time loop. The more familiar expression is “self-fulfilling prophecy,” but whereas that usually is used in a somewhat figurative sense, here it is meant quite literally.
Readers of science fiction may assume that such a causal tautology is somehow related to the “grandfather paradox” that attaches to time travel: The idea that if you went back in time, you could potentially kill your own grandfather, which would prevent you from ever having been born … so that you couldn’t go back in time and kill your grandfather (more on which later). That assumption would be incorrect. Although they often appear close to each other in pedants’ bestiaries of common faults of expression and logic, tautologies are not the same thing as paradoxes. 43 If the universe allows information to travel backward in time from an individual’s future in such a way that it actually leads the individual to “fulfill” a foreseen outcome (rather than thwart it), then such loops would have to be the rule when it comes to precognition, and not the exception. We will see later that this is precisely how “prophecy” works—it is always self-fulfilling.
I do not use the expression “time loop” to mean that the fabric of spacetime itself is literally somehow warped, as in cosmological exotica like black holes or wormholes. Many people who have prophetic dreams and “time slips” feel tempted to devise new theories of time that, they think, are necessary to account for their experiences, including notions like temporal spirals, additional temporal dimensions, and so on. 44 As I will argue in Part Two of this book, it may not be necessary to know exactly what time is, or even what consciousness is, to solve the problem of prophecy and precognition … other than to suggest what a number of mindblowing experiments in physics are now revealing: that information from the future does “travel backwards” to influence the present. The only “new” mental model we really need to help us navigate this weird territory of time loops is that (glass) block supplied by Minkowski more than a century ago. But its implications really are mind-bending and have only rarely been explored, either by philosophers or by parapsychologists who (at least in principle) accept the possibility of precognition.
To describe Gladstone’s dream, for instance, as simply “a prophetic dream about a plane crash” misses the really head-scratching, “impossible,” looping dimension of it. Gladstone didn’t dream randomly about some plane crash somewhere; he dreamed about a plane crash involving a man he was going to have a personal interaction with the next day because of his dream and then get a very startling letter from a few months later, describing the crash … and again, his dream was in all likelihood really caused by that letter, not the crash itself.
If we don’t dismiss this whole affair as a case of faulty memory or random happenstance, or chalk it up to the vague “acausal” fog of synchronicity offered as a compromise by Carl Jung, the only explanation is a complex causal loop involving a man precognizing his own future reactions to a learning experience about a (future) acquaintance. Gladstone’s encounter with Goddard only occurred because of his dream; he only got Goddard’s letter because of their encounter at the party; and his dream only occurred because of the letter . And as we will see later in Part Three, when we delve into precognitive dreams and how they work, there may be additional p
sychodynamic wrinkles to this time loop. It was a dream after all—what would Sigmund Freud have to say about this one?
3
Postcards from Your Future Self — Scientific Evidence for Precognition
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.
“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the Queen replied in a careless tone. “For instance … there’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”
“Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.
“That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?” the Queen said ...
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)
K urt Vonnegut frequently hinted in his fiction that he believed in some kind of psychic connection between people. It is a premise in his novel Cat’s Cradle , for instance, that we are linked to each other through networks of meaningful coincidences. When a writer on ESP phenomena named Alan Vaughan probed Vonnegut about whether these motifs sprang from anything in his own experience, the novelist volunteered an amazing, sad story of “telepathy or whatever” that occurred in 1958 and that happened to center on one of the most decisive turning points in his and his family’s life.
Vonnegut described how in the mid-morning of September 15 that year, he suddenly left his study and walked across his Massachusetts house to the kitchen, where for no reason—just a funny feeling—he placed a long-distance call to the office of his brother-in-law, James Carmalt Adams, in New Jersey. “I had never telephoned him before, had no reason to call then.” Adams wasn’t at the office, and he would never arrive. At 10:30, the first two engines and three passenger cars of a commuter train went off an open drawbridge over Newark Bay, drowning Adams and 47 other passengers.