Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  Having uncannily “foreseen” the imminent death of “4,000” people on a French island volcano in a dream, Dunne could not have read the bold Daily Telegraph headline about 40,000 dead in Martinique with idle detachment. Besides the usual shock people feel learning of some disaster that claims the lives of many innocent (though anonymous) people far away, he would have also felt excitement that he had just dreamed about such an event—including, he thought, the exact same number dead; he notes that he misread the estimated death toll in the headline as “4,000” (and remembered it that way for several years thereafter). But tempering such excitement (or at least curiosity), how could he not have also had the thought as he read the news story that, if he’d dreamed about it, there ought (pun intended) to have been some way of using this foreknowledge to intervene and save those lives?

  There is no way to get inside Dunne’s head and know for certain that this thought process went through his mind when he read the Daily Telegraph article. It didn’t occur to him to record his reactions in greater detail, and why would it? So to some degree we are playing a game of suppositions here. But the whole second part of the dream appears to represent anguished frustration at being unable to avert a catastrophe that only he knew was imminent. This part of the dream is particularly interesting because it seems to represent a set of emotions that many people do report upon learning that something tragic or sad that they have dreamed about has come true.

  Physician Larry Dossey, in his book The Power of Premonitions , cites several examples of people who failed or were unable to act on a premonition of death or disaster and then were stricken by guilt. One, a patient of Dossey’s, was a radio dispatcher at a police station who had a history of accurate premonitions. At work one morning he had a distinct sense that a toddler was walking near a pool and was about to fall in. It had a vividness that he had learned to trust over the years, but because he had no way of knowing when or where the event was going to occur, what could he do about it? Less than an hour later, a police unit reported finding a child who had drowned in a nearby apartment complex; the dispatcher was devastated, requiring counseling over the following months. 35 Elizabeth Krohn, the Houston woman who began experiencing accurate precognitive dreams of plane crashes following a near-death experience (Chapter 1), initially felt her new ability was a curse rather than a gift, because these depressing previews of death and catastrophe seemed to be without purpose—or, at least, the purpose was not to avert those catastrophes or save lives. 36

  If vaguely guilty thoughts did cross Dunne’s mind upon reading the Daily Telegraph article, reason would quickly have stepped in to absolve the young soldier of too much hand-wringing. Even if he had not been camped out far from civilization or communication, “warning someone” would never have occurred to him at the time he actually had the dream, since until he read the headline he had no idea the dream was actually a premonition. And even if he had had some sense of the dream’s premonitory nature, he could not possibly have known where and when the eruption might occur, and thus whom to warn. But if Freud’s work has taught us anything, it is that humans are not rational creatures, and that the unconscious has no sense of time and logic. Thoughts of using prophecy to improve our outcomes or save others, and a guilt when others fall victim to outcomes we have seen in our dreams, may be—indeed, must be—inevitable. This is a big part of the confusion and taboo that surrounds the whole topic of precognition and part of what deflects most people away from thinking too deeply about the subject.

  Dunne’s dream seems to have represented precisely this emotional mélange. In other words, it does not seem to have been merely a dream about a news story; it seems to have been a dream about a very particular train of thought as well as associated emotions (a sense of frustration and even guilt) that would have arisen in him because of the fact that he had dreamed about it beforehand . This time loop would also make sense of the matter of the missing “nought.” A less prophecy-averse Freud would certainly have insisted that Dunne’s misreading of the terrible death toll of 40,000 as the less terrible (by a factor of 10) 4,000 would have reflected a bit of wish-fulfillment to offset his guilt, or at least cut it down to a slightly more manageable size.

  The more we scrutinize cases of precognitive dreaming, the more we find this self-similar or fractal structure, including sometimes even a representation of the shock at having dreamed of the event, or of the value of the dream to the dreamer, within the body of the dream itself. (We will see a particularly striking example of this later—the famous “scarab dream” of one of Carl Jung’s patients.)

  The Wyrd of the Air Marshal

  Another example of a precognitive dream that seems to contain fractal spirals of self-reference and onion-like layers of possible psychodynamic significance is Captain Gladstone’s dream about Victor Goddard’s plane crash.

  Remember that it was Goddard’s letter to Gladstone, and not the crash itself, that would have been the source of Gladstone’s dream, setting the whole time loop in motion. Presumably the contents of Goddard’s letter consisted of an abbreviated version of what he wrote nearly a decade after the incident in his Saturday Evening Post article. Our only direct evidence of how Gladstone reacted to the story—his “reader response”—is the testimony of his cordial reply, reproduced at the end of that article (Chapter 2). It is all very “how do” and “cheerio”—very British and very polite … and also very brief, even curt (in contrast to what Goddard said was a lengthy letter). Again, it expresses regret at the incident and relief that no one was hurt—what one would expect him to say. But when he received Goddard’s letter, how could Gladstone not have also felt a mix of complex emotions, not unlike what Dunne would have experienced upon reading about Mont Pelée in the newspaper?

  Freud enlightened us to the dark side of human feelings where the lives of others are concerned, especially others who aren’t close to us. Apart from the ordinary and expected sentiments expressed in the letter, Gladstone would also, and probably even mainly, have felt excited to learn that the event had happened, because it meant he really had had a Dunne dream. That confirmation would also have effectively undone some of his embarrassment at the party months earlier, when he had assumed that its honoree, Goddard, was dead and then was immediately proved wrong and subtly shamed by the revenant Goddard himself.

  Goddard’s narrative in The Saturday Evening Post does not at all flatter “Dewing” (the pseudonym given to Gladstone) 37 —it makes him out to be a bit of a fool, albeit a fool surreally vindicated by fate. Goddard very thinly conceals his lack of respect for the bold but evidently not-too-bright naval officer—first because of the man’s absurd confidence that he, Goddard, was actually dead, based solely on a dream he couldn’t even place in time (when pressed, he didn’t know if he’d had the dream the previous night versus that afternoon), but also for what turned out to be Gladstone’s somewhat limited grasp of Dunne’s book. Clearly irritated, not to mention slightly unsettled, Goddard admits he was inclined to argue with Gladstone about how Dunne meant readers to conduct his “experiment with time” in their own lives. 38 So, added to his embarrassment at his mistake, Gladstone would have felt chagrined at how this eminent RAF hero so coolly and condescendingly schooled him on the finer points of the book that he himself had just been enthusiastically reading.

  It is thus irresistible to psychoanalyze Gladstone’s dream and the one discrepancy from the real outcome that is evident in it: that in his dream it had been a fatal crash. Freud, even if he would have found some way to deny the whole matter of dream prophecy (let alone time loops), would eagerly point out that this error was a death wish. At least as Goddard reports it, there is a bit of glee in Gladstone’s certain pronouncement to the other unnamed man at the party that Goddard was dead. Gladstone’s slip-of-the-tongue reaction to seeing Goddard alive, again if accurately reported, is telling: “I’m terribly sorry! I mean I’m terribly glad …”

  Like Dunne’s presumed guilt upon reading the headl
ine about Mont Pelée, such ill will on Gladstone’s part would have been temporally “impossible.” It could not have come from any prior experience of Gladstone’s, since at the time he had his dream he had not yet met Air Marshal Goddard let alone been talked down to by him. Thus, such a death wish (if true) would have been based on ill will he would only feel later, after their conversation at the party, thus adding further twists to the time-looping nature of the whole weird—or, wyrd—affair.

  So much for Gladstone’s being “sorry.” “I’m terribly glad ” could additionally be Goddard’s subtle, clever hint to the reader about the real identity of “Dewing.” And this raises the further interesting question: Was Gladstone’s dream based only on Goddard’s letter, or could it have been based also, or instead, on a future reading of the Saturday Evening Post article itself?

  The Saturday Evening Post was an American magazine, but it is not impossible that Gladstone would have read it, and this is made much more likely by the fact that the article was made into an acclaimed 1956 British film, The Night My Number Came Up , starring Michael Redgrave as the air marshal. If Gladstone saw the film, its depiction of the harrowing flight and the crash in a snowy valley near the Japanese beach, in which the plane ends up nearly face down in the snow, could have supplied his precognitive imagination with the vivid images in his dream and the sense that it had been a fatal crash. The film depicts his character (“Commander Lindsay,” portrayed by Michael Hordern) as amiable and innocent. It is not insulting toward his intelligence and even adds the embellishment that his dream helps the authorities locate the crash at the end. But Gladstone might well have also sought out the article to see how he had been portrayed by Goddard there, and if so, he would easily have taken offense at Goddard’s portrayal of him, for the reasons given above. This would have added insult to the injury of his embarrassment at the party and perhaps compounded his retroactive “death wish” for the RAF hero.

  Here, again, we veer very far into speculation, as all this is would be impossible to verify without actually putting Gladstone on the couch or knowing whether and when he read Goddard’s article and/or saw the film based on it. But when we add the possibility of time loops to the Freudian picture—or when we add Freud to the Dunnean theory of precognition—it alerts us to the possibility that people may be subject to conflicted feelings and guilt about situations that haven’t occurred yet in the flow of time, as well as pre-experience feelings that will arise later because of their premonitory experiences. More basically, it also underscores that what dreamers are precognizing, when they precognize, is neither events per se nor even the way they hear about them, for instance in the media. What they are precognizing are their own thoughts and emotions triggered by those learning experiences. They even seem to precognize their memories , again in a true fractal spiral.

  Close but No Cigar

  Lastly, we come full circle. There is no more stunning and ironic example of the fractal nature of dream precognition than the very dream that started it all, Freud’s “specimen dream” about “Irma” (Anna Hammerschlag) on the night of July 23-24, 1895—the dream that, he believed and asserted, had given him the precious key to dreams. Freud claimed that this dream concealed, through various tropes (substitutions, puns, etc.), a wish that he be blameless in his patient’s treatment. He had quite naturally assumed it reflected wishes relevant to his life at the time he had his dream; indeed, what else did he have to go on but his own memories? But the benefit of time and hindsight reveals a very different, premonitory interpretation, one that Freud himself could hardly have failed to detect but that he nevertheless kept silent about.

  In early 1923, Freud found that he had leukoplakia, a patch of precancerous white tissue inside his mouth, on his right cheek and spreading to his palate. It was the result of a life of indulging in his famous cigars, which his friend Wilhelm Fliess had already advised him to quit smoking at the time of the dream. Though his doctors in 1923 were not fully frank with him, it was plain that they were concerned that the tissue had already become cancerous. After handwringing and frank consideration of suicide, Freud grudgingly subjected himself to a series of awful and life-changing surgeries. First the affected tissue was removed. Then, after a few months, when his doctors determined the cancer was more invasive than previously thought, a surgeon removed a large section of Freud’s upper jaw and palate with a chisel—with the patient only under local anesthetic—leaving a gaping hole between his mouth and his nasal cavity that had to be fitted with a prosthetic. Afterwards, scabs formed where the tissue had been cut away. Several courses of radiation therapy also followed, along with several more surgeries over the remainder of his life—16 more years—and the contraction of tissue inside his mouth left Freud with limited ability to open his mouth or talk. 39

  In 1982, an Argentinean psychoanalyst and cancer surgeon named José Schavelzon, who studied the histopathology of Freud’s cancer, noticed that the description of the lesion in “Irma’s” mouth in Freud’s dream strikingly matched the course of Freud’s own disease and the complications from its treatment. It begins with his leukoplakia (the white patches), then the scabs produced by the surgery, then the nasal cavity visible inside his mouth upon removal of the palate (i.e., a feature in the mouth reminding Freud of the turbinal bones in the nose, which in fact are just over the palate), as well as the reluctance or inability to open the mouth due to a prosthesis (i.e., the notion that Irma was like a woman shy to open her mouth because of dentures). 40

  It is a startling discovery, and deeply ironic—indeed, deeply wyrd . How strange that of all his dreams, this one dream, his number-one “smoking gun” for the wish-fulfillment theory—what could be considered Freud’s equivalent of Darwin’s famous finches—would match so closely the illness that, Freud believed, and his doctors believed, was going to take his life three decades hence. 41

  Was the dream a “warning unheeded”? Robert Moss (and following Moss, Larry Dossey) reads it that way and contrasts Freud with Carl Jung, who allegedly gave up smoking after a dream. 42 Moss, clearly unwilling to countenance precognition in the sense being advocated here, proposes that a single cancer cell already lurking in 1895 might have sent some kind of chemical alert to Freud’s brain that manifested as a specific and uncannily correct dream-warning. Such a notion seems like another evasion of prophecy by granting inferential superpowers to the unconscious (and in this case, the body’s tissues), although the question of any intentionality in the unconscious is somewhat paradoxical in any case. The precognitive hypothesis proposed here assumes no “intent” to send messages to oneself backward in time—the postcards we get from our future selves are sent automatically, even if the thoughts they represent are conscious ones. Rather than warning his younger self, it seems very much as though Freud’s dreaming brain used various elements of his life in 1895 as “bricks” to pre-present significant thoughts—including wishes—he was going to have 28 years later.

  What would Freud’s thoughts and wishes have been in 1923?

  It’s not hard to answer this question. Firstly, and most obviously, Freud would undoubtedly have wished that he had heeded his friend Fliess’s warnings to him all those years ago about his cigar use. Freud notes in his own interpretation of the dream that some anxiety about his health was already on his mind in 1895, yet it clearly had not been enough to break him of his smoking habit. The doctors—both the rhinologist who performed the initial surgery and his personal physician, Felix Deutsch—kept Freud in the dark about the true, dire extent of his cancer, per standard medical practice at the time, but they both made it clear to him that his cigar smoking was the cause. 43 Recall that his first reaction to Irma’s complaint in the dream is that “it’s really only your fault .”

  Freud noted that dreams often swap and transpose attributes of people and situations, and they often disavow undesired qualities of the dreamer, or undesired situations, by giving them to other figures. It very much seems like his specimen dream transposed
his own medical condition in 1923 to his friend and patient Anna Hammerschlag in 1895 and that his telling her it was her own fault was really a kind of self-reproach. Interestingly, all the other symptoms displayed by dream Irma or identified by the dream doctors examining her have been identified as Freud’s own illnesses prior to or at the time of the dream—including intestinal symptoms (Irma’s “dysentery”) and rheumatism (a “dull area” the doctor’s note on Irma’s left side). Freud biographer Didier Anzieu notes that the examination performed by the trio of doctors mirrored Fliess’s recent examination of Freud’s chest for heart trouble, which Fliess had attributed to Freud’s nicotine addiction. “Freud is the patient he himself examines in the dream,” Anzieu asserts. 44

  Very significantly, at the time of the dream, Freud had just resumed smoking after a period of abstinence, and he was specifically worried about what Fliess would think of that lapse. Did this specific concern resonate with his situation in 1923, sparking a kind of temporal short-circuit?

  When interpreting the dream, Freud had unsurprisingly attached sexual meaning to the “injection” that he surmised was somehow responsible for Anna/Irma’s condition. In life, Freud was feeling anxious about his advice to Anna that she seek some sexual release—the “solution” that he initially blames her for not accepting. Freud attributed Anna’s hysteria to her (by then) nine years of widowhood; she had evidently become reclusive and depressed following her husband’s death in 1886, just a year after her marriage. It is likely Freud also felt some anxiety about his own attraction to her. Freud had known her since they had been teenagers, as she was the daughter of his Hebrew teacher, and she had been a great beauty in her youth. Freud’s fondness for her continued through his life, and he always used the intimate du form of address with her (instead of the more usual Sie ). 45 The “probably not clean” syringe he imagined had caused her disease in the dream is easily seen, among other things, as a phallic symbol standing in either for his own desires or at least for his own advice that she seek some sexual outlet—advice that he was now forced to doubt (since as Dr. Rie had pointed out, she was “better but not fully recovered”). 46 But in hindsight, from the vantage point of his 1923 realization that his smoking habit really had been fatally toxic to his health, does the unclean syringe not take on an even more compelling and also straightforward, totally un-Freudian meaning as … just a cigar ?