Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  The Oedipal predicament is not only an incestuous sexual wish but also an expectation of punishment in retaliation for this wish. Consequently, those with unresolved “Oedipus complexes” elicit inhibition from their world, like a castrating father always lurking over them and their achievements. This alerts us to an added, and very important, Oedipal implication in the Herr P. episode, in connection to his nickname and its similarity to that of the arriving English doctor. Forsyth/Foresight is here, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would later put it, the “name of the father.” The arrival of “Mister Foresight’s” namesake Dr. Forsyth was like the arrival of the father which, in this case, was specifically and literally going to “cut short” the patient’s treatment (treatment that might have enabled his sexual relations to proceed, had it continued), and thus is every bit like the arrival of the castrating father to punish or at least say “no” to the child’s Oedipal wishes.

  In French, le nom du pere , “name of the father” sounds just like le non du pere , “the no of the father,” a pun obviously lost in translation. Resolution of the Oedipal phase of development, according to Lacanian thinking, entails internalizing this “no” as part of identification with one’s surname, the otherwise arbitrary signifier that establishes one’s identity or place in the system of cultural symbols he called the Symbolic order. While on the one hand acceptance of this “no” buys us normative mental health, the relatively neurosis-free life, it also tends to inhibit us from even imagining anything other than ordinary, billiard-ball causality. By submitting to the rules of language, we submit ourselves also to its (linear) grammar. By the same token, failure to fully identify with one’s name (and the limiting refusal it entails) is tantamount to coming unstuck in the linear-causal signifying chain of language, thus in some at least figurative sense, unstuck in time. In short, you might even say that the expression of precognition reflects an active, unresolved Oedipus complex, while denial of precognition represents the “healthy,” non-neurotic internalization of, or identification with, the phallic-patriarchal Symbolic order.

  Given this, isn’t it interesting that the ultimate argument generally deployed against the existence of precognition by skeptical guardians of Enlightenment rationalism is the famous grandfather paradox—effectively, a variant of the Oedipus myth that emphasizes how impossible it is to transgress time because it would mean negating in some fashion one’s own forefathers?

  Consider the following case of one of Eisenbud’s patients—a typical Dunne dream in which the man seems to have precognized a comic strip he was about to read in his newspaper:

  A patient dreams that he is shooting arrows with or at a childhood playmate in a scene reminiscent of his childhood. His father is present. The only affect experienced by the dreamer is a sense of frustration because his aim is not accurate and he cannot control his shots.

  On the following day the patient is surprised to see that a character in one of the comic strips he is in the habit of reading insures the accuracy of his aim by shooting an arrow and afterward painting the target circles around the spot where it had struck to give the impression that the shot had been a bull’s-eye. 44

  Like other precognitive dreams, this one fractally involves a “time gimmick” in the form of the comic itself—Johnny Hart’s then-popular strip B.C. :

  The precognitive effect in this instance is suggested not only by the patient coming upon such a specifically fitting resolution for his dream situation after the dream but also by the very format of the element in question. The comic strip, titled B.C. , itself suggests the idea of a time gimmick, dealing as it does with the often anachronistic doings of a prehistoric people. It suggests that Time and the past, which to the patient represent threatening memories from his childhood, are only comic situations which, insofar as they are subject to this kind of re-creation and revision, are not real or really dangerous. 45

  In other words, the time gimmick, as well as the very precognitive “format” of the dream, enable the dreamer to retroactively defeat the Oedipal “phallic inhibition” that is so beautifully represented right in the dream: being unable to hit a target with an arrow when in the presence of his dad. The comic strip expresses the patient’s Oedipal wish: By being “before” in time, the man is able to redefine his sloppy shooting post hoc yet also before the whole psychosexual saga. Put simply, a way to “kill the father” is to be on the scene before him.

  The Oedipus complex, it is becoming clear, is the flip side of the coin of the grandfather paradox. The implied threat that transgressing the causal/temporal order will negate/annihilate the would-be Oedipus is the threat hanging over his head, the “no” that “cuts off” any speculation about foresight. But as I argued earlier in this book, the grandfather paradox is really an empty scarecrow. There is nothing requiring retrocausation to lead to a self-cancelling paradox; in fact, paradoxes are prevented by physical law. 46 As the Greeks knew, all prophecies are self-fulfilling. They operate outside of conscious awareness (in other words, “in the unconscious”), and thus we only become aware of a prophecy when the prophesied event has come to pass. Precognition and other forms of “time travel,” and thoughts of the grandfather paradox that they invite, are perhaps ways of fulfilling that wish of eliminating competition with the father, the ultimate way of having one’s cake and eating it too. Even by calling that scarecrow the “grandfather paradox,” we miss the target by one generation, overshooting into the past the real aim, which is the safe elimination of the father while still existing.

  An arrow, of course, is not only a standard phallic symbol; it is also our most basic cultural symbol of causality. The above example from Eisenbud expresses recursively, within itself, the doubts about causality and coincidence that hover over all precognitive dream reports. Drawing a bullseye around wherever one’s arrow happens to hit is precisely the selection bias accusation that is used to “shoot down” (so to speak) most psi claims; it was the precise metaphor used by Richard Wiseman to debunk the Aberfan dreams (Chapter 1), for instance. 47 It is also the number-one criticism that will be aimed at many of the dreams and other ostensibly prophetic phenomena discussed in this book, and not without some justification. Precognition is only visible in hindsight, since it must be confirmed as such by events. Thus, in many cases it is very hard to distinguish it from simple hindsight bias, the adjustment of our perception of the past based on new data.

  But the dreaded coin (or medallion) of hindsight has a welcome flip side: It is the same thing as post-selection , the very principle that allows time travel—including time-traveling information—to exist without producing causality-offending paradoxes. Post-selection just means we live in a possible universe, the only possible universe, and again reflects a kind of causal-informational Darwinism. The only information that “survives” being sent into the past is information that does not contribute to its own foreclosure in the future. For instance, you are never going to have a completely accurate and clear dream about a future outcome you would or could intercede to prevent. It’s not necessarily that the causality police will swoop down in their flying saucers to stop you ( although Igor Novikov’s self-consistency principle and quantum-mechanical theories of closed-timelike curves do predict that improbable events may occur to prevent paradoxes 48 ). It’s mainly that, from a future vantage point farther along your world-line in the block universe, it didn’t happen . No amount of searching in hindsight will find spent causal arrows for an impossible event. Thus all “prophecies” can be included somehow, if only very obliquely, in the backstory of what was foreseen.

  In a sense, Wiseman is right. Precognition is a matter of drawing bullseyes around where our arrows happen to hit; what we are precognizing is ourselves drawing those bullseyes in the future. What could be a better depiction of this, and the concept of post-selection, than the arrow dream of Eisenbud’s patient and the B.C. comic it seems to have precognitively “targeted”?

  After Dunne’s An Experiment with Time
, Eisenbud’s Paranormal Foreknowledge may be the most thoughtful and interesting book ever written on precognition. Yet even this bold para-psychoanalyst, who had gone out on several limbs in his career writing about other psi phenomena, was hesitant and cautious in his traverse of the epistemological quagmire created by this one. Although he had written and circulated the bulk of his book privately to colleagues as early as 1953, “Cartesian doubt” 49 made him delay publication for almost three decades (until 1982). And even then, he only recognized precognition as a possible explanation for coincidental phenomena in the clinic when less causally taboo explanations like telepathy, clairvoyance, or PK would not suffice. The arrow dream, for instance, did not for him meet the stringent criteria of true precognition, simply because the comic strip “was already in print at the time the patient had his dream and it required nothing more than ordinary (that is, telepathic or clairvoyant) psi percipience for him to apprehend it.” 50

  But is it really easier to imagine that the patient’s sleeping mind somehow scanned the still-folded newspaper outside on his driveway (or in the delivery truck, or in the print warehouse) and located within it a comic strip suiting his particular psychodynamic purposes than to suggest his brain could simply have reached into its own (near) future to find a reading experience suiting the same need? Let’s pause on this question, as the exact impediment to precognitive thinking and theorizing displayed here by Eisenbud is encountered again and again in the literature, and various fallacies lie at the heart of it. It is another of those bugbears that it is time to slay, once and for all.

  To Eisenbud, as to many parapsychologists open-minded to other psi phenomena, precognition is so unnatural to our common-sense way of thinking that nature, too, must somehow find it difficult—the problem I mentioned earlier in this chapter. But if his patient’s brain (or consciousness, if you prefer) could search across space as well as time for a suitable “brick” to build his dream edifice, how coincidental that it happened to be one that he was going to physically read in an hour or so anyway! The clairvoyant explanation thus still rests on foreknowledge that he would read the comic when he woke up, so “ordinary psi percipience” really simplifies nothing. The precognitive hypothesis is vastly more parsimonious, cutting out an unnecessary explanatory middleman.

  Let me reiterate: We should not confuse how difficult we find imagining a thing with how difficult nature finds accomplishing it . Were we to do that, we would make the mistake of seeing quantum mechanics itself, with its famously “spooky” characteristics, as applying only to a few subatomic particles here and there, rather than being the very substrate of our physical existence. If precognition exists at all, there is every reason to think that it is not only common but probably a constant in our lives. It would not have evolved just to be used as a rare trump card by a few especially gifted (or cursed) individuals in a few remarkable circumstances, or just by neurotics oppressed and inhibited by their Oedipal complexes. It is far more likely that we are, all of us, fully four-dimensional, precognitive creatures and that our time-binding capabilities simply have found many interesting ways to fly under the radar—partly because of all those cultural no-sayers, the “castrating fathers” who take every opportunity to explain away our anomalous experiences in some chaste, unoffensively Newtonian way. If there is any “ordinary psi percipience” we should default to, it is more likely to be precognition, not any of the other commonly invoked modalities like telepathy or clairvoyance. 51

  Denial and condescension are the default reaction of those castrating cultural fathers to reports of anomalous experience. But when this tactic doesn’t work or is not really believed, our attention will be redirected instead in culturally safe directions, including toward the past, making us assume that those experiences represent some sublimely strange deviation of memory and desire. This is one reason why the psychoanalytic tradition is so interesting: It has always represented a kind of halfway house to the acceptance of anomalies that the rest of science rejects out of hand. Instead of rejecting, it reframes.

  The entire construct of the unconscious may really be a kind of reframing, a compromise formation between Enlightenment mechanistic psychology with its manly world of linear causation—picture a bunch of fathers hanging out at the pool hall playing billiards —and a converse awareness that something about us is transcendent. Instead of allowing a rich temporal transcendence, which would be the ultimate Oedipal scandal, Freud offered the world a less causally perverse compromise: “Here, you can have the mind’s spread-outness in space , and even a few superpowers. Just don’t look in that other direction (the future) for the causes of your dreams and your inexplicable actions.”

  The closing lines of Freud’s landmark work, The Interpretation of Dreams , sound almost desperately insistent, when read in this light:

  And the value of dreams for giving us knowledge of the future? There is of course no question of that. It would be truer to say instead that they give us knowledge of the past. For dreams are derived from the past in every sense. Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth. By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past. 52

  Note how Freud keeps rerouting our attention to the past, almost like he is afraid of something in that other direction. There was indeed a lot to be afraid of, as we will see. But I am arguing that it is precisely there, that taboo direction, the future, that might contain many of the answers to the deeply weird behavior of humans and the anomalous situations we experience. Dreams offer the key.

  9

  Wyrd and Wishes — Metabolizing the Future in Dreams

  Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall find the truth . . . but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.

  — Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, speech on his dream-discovery of the ring structure of benzene (1890)

  T he inevitability of things prophesied is one factor that has always made prophecy so taboo, something not to be toyed with, and thus somewhat fearful. After all, it is from the future that death and downfall ultimately arrive—nothing good. Thus in a world gripped by fate’s time-looping iron law, writers of tragedies did not depict the ability to see the future as a possible “superpower” or as a way of improving an individual’s fortunes, the way modern writers about “developing your ESP powers” or “honing your intuition” might. Stories like that of Oedipus highlight the tragic folly of trying to evade or avoid something foreseen by an oracle, and those prophecies are generally ominous. Getting a preview of the future, like meddling in the past (for instance, tampering with royal succession), comes at a cost, or else is a consolation prize for some grave loss. It cannot liberate us from our fate because there is always something we don’t know about ourselves, and that thing is bound to be our undoing.

  The Anglo-Saxons of Northern Europe had their own word for a fate or destiny that can only be seen in hindsight because of the obliquity of foresight. Wyrd is one of a large and fascinating family of w-r words still found in our language connoting change and exchange, turning and turning-into, but also (along with this) the twisting both of objects and of minds and souls. Wyrd comes from weorthan , “to become,” but with a sense of turning or spinning—as in the “spinning” of the thread of our life. Thus it embeds a fan of connotations ranging from a man’s worth to the writhing and wriggling of worms , and the wrath of wraiths . Wyrd, as becoming and as turning, represents “what has turned out” or “what will have turned out” or “what you will have turned into.” It is a kind of future-perfect tense, a retrospective view from a future vantage point that can turn, look back, and survey the ironic (or even warped ) paths a life has taken. Hindsight, in other words. Post-selection by another name.

  Other than through a co
mmon appearance in fantasy novels, including the Discworld series of Terry Pratchett, the word wyrd survives now in English solely via the wonderful word weird , and this is thanks entirely to Shakespeare’s Macbeth . The “weird sisters” whose prophecies captured the mind of an ambitious young Scottish general and his wife were three witches living alone in the wilderness. They were inspired by the Norns of Norse mythology, the three sister-goddesses—analogous to the Greek Fates—who together wove a man’s destiny and could thus foretell it. Even up to Shakespeare’s day, weird didn’t simply mean “strange” as it does now; it meant more the inevitability of things prophesied as well as prophecy’s cunning misdirection. It is always one step ahead of us and speaks a deceptive language that, by luring us with our wishes, tricks us into fulfilling it. 1

  The weird sisters’ first prophecy that Macbeth would be made king seems like a good thing, but weirdly, neurotically even, instead of just letting it come to pass in whatever way the world wills, Macbeth actively pursues this outcome—goaded by his even-more-ambitious wife—and finds that the “positive outcome” foreseen is fraught with paranoia and guilt. The later prophecies conjured for Macbeth by the sisters are far more oblique—that Macbeth will be safe until Birnam Wood marches on Dunsinane and that he will not be harmed by anyone “of woman born.” These Macbeth takes as reassurances. But clearly, when outcomes are dark, “weird” (i.e., wyrd ) speaks a figurative language similar to dream, and the prophecies about Macbeth’s downfall come to pass: Malcolm’s army attacks Dunsinane Castle under cover of boughs cut from Birnam Wood; and Macduff, who fights and kills Macbeth at the end, turns out to have been “untimely ripp’d” from his mother’s womb (Caesarean section, in other words), not birthed in the usual way. Here, just as in the Oedipus story, foresight operates in the shadow realm of our self-ignorance.