by Eric Wargo
We could apply this logic to interpreting one of the best-known premonitory dreams, Mark Twain’s dream about his brother Henry lying dead in a metal casket. In his Autobiography , which he dictated to a stenographer in 1906 at the age of 70, Mark Twain recounts that when he was a young man, age 23—at that point just Samuel Clemens—he had been in training to be a Mississippi River steamboat pilot, and he persuaded his 19-year-old brother Henry to come work with him as a “mud clerk” aboard a boat called the Pennsylvania . 16 The writer told how one night in May 1958, while they were ashore and staying with their older sister Pamela and her husband and daughter in St. Louis, he dreamed of Henry lying in a metal casket, which was placed on two chairs. Henry wore a suit of his own (Samuel’s) borrowed clothes, and on his chest was a bouquet of white flowers with a single red rose. The dream was so vivid, he recalled, that he actually arose and went outside to collect himself before viewing the body, which he expected was on display in the house. During his walk, he realized that it had only been a dream. He told Pamela about it, with her six-year-old daughter Annie present.
A few days later, the brothers shipped out in the Pennsylvania on its run south to New Orleans. There, Samuel had the most violent in a series of ongoing clashes with the boat’s pilot and was made to stay ashore when the boat made its run back north to Memphis. Two or three days later, he received news that Henry had been badly injured in a boiler explosion that had taken the lives of many of the Pennsylvania ’s passengers and crew. Samuel took the next boat to Memphis and sat with his severely burned brother in the hospital, but Henry ended up dying of an overdose of morphine that the inexperienced doctors administered to kill his pain. The writer recalled that the next day, when he arrived at the building where the dead were laid out in caskets, he was stunned to behold the exact scene he had seen in his dream. Henry’s body was laid out in a suit he had borrowed from Samuel when they were in St. Louis. Some women volunteers, impressed by Henry’s stoicism enduring burns over his whole body, had pitched in to buy him a metal casket, whereas the rest of the bodies were laid out in caskets of white pine. Just then an elderly volunteer nurse entered and placed a bouquet of white flowers, with a single red rose in it, on Henry’s chest. 17 A few days later, when the coffin was brought to their sister Pamela’s house in St. Louis, it was laid on two chairs, also as Samuel had seen in his dream. 18
In a Freudian reexamination of this case, religion scholar David Halperin notes that a submerged death wish could have accounted for what only seemed in hindsight like a precognitive dream about Henry’s death. 19 The young Samuel Clemens felt a good deal of resentment toward his younger but much more upstanding brother, who appears as the “goody-goody snitch” ‘Sid’ in Tom Sawyer , for example. Henry could do no wrong in their mother’s eyes, Twain later recalled, whereas he himself could do no right. 20 From these clues, Halperin deduces that Clemens would have harbored unconscious murderous wishes for Henry, as siblings typically do, and thus would probably have had many dreams over the years involving his death. It thus might not actually be too strange a coincidence, Halperin argues, for Samuel, upon seeing his brother in a coffin, to recall having dreamed approximately that scene at some point and formed the notion that he had had a recent premonitory dream about it.
The testimony of Twain’s niece Annie Moffett somewhat undercuts this argument, however. According to Moffett, the dream occurred while napping in daytime, when Samuel and his siblings, including Henry, were at home, and that Samuel actually came rushing into the room where they were all sitting to tell them about it. 21 It shows that his confused rising from bed to view Henry’s casket could well have been a consummate storyteller’s later embellishment. But the discrepancy lends some support to the basic core truth of the story: that Samuel did indeed have a dream of Henry’s dead body before his death, and that it made enough of an impact on the dreamer that he shared it right away with his family. Presumably he did not go telling his family about dreams of his dead brother all the time—that might have stood out in Annie Moffett’s memory as remarkable for different reasons. (She also noted that others in the family were amused at how seriously Samuel evidently took this dream.)
Even if we accept Samuel Clemens’ dream as a bona fide case of dream precognition, Halperin has hit on an important dimension of this story that should not be ignored: the fact that there would have been more to his reaction to his brother’s death than simple grief. There was guilt, first of all. Twain felt guilty the whole rest of his life for inviting Henry to work on the Pennsylvania and for not insisting his brother remain with him in New Orleans. 22 And there would have been even more to it, as once again, the death of another person always contains, by implication, a small but important piece of news that some basic animal part of us takes reassurance in—I survived, I’m still here, it didn’t happen to me . Given the singular circumstances of Henry’s death—dying as a result of a boiler explosion after Samuel had been made to stay on shore—how can such a sense of luck or fate favoring Samuel over his brother not have crossed the future writer’s mind, leading to an unconscious sense of relief commingled with that guilt? For Samuel’s unconscious, if not his conscious reflection, the meaning of this story would have been “it could just as easily have been me.” 23 I suggest that it is precisely this equivocally rewarding signal that might have been “displaced in time” to spark a dream some days earlier.
Calling Samuel Clemens’ dream a “dream of his brother’s death” is really as inaccurate and misleading as calling Elizabeth Krohn’s dreams ( Chapter 1) “plane crash premonitions.” His dream was about being alive to witness his brother lying dead in a coffin, including the singular and significant detail of his brother wearing his own borrowed suit. It was a dream about the viewing of Henry’s body, a kind of wake, and a wake is an event in which the living—those who have survived—pay respects to the dead. Samuel Clemens’ dream was not a premonition of his brother’s death, but a premonition of his own survival.
Entropy and Sublimity
The concept of jouissance , particularly as it relates to scenes of destruction and ruin, provides an alternative, psychodynamic explanation for the prominence of explosive, entropic occurrences in precognitive phenomena. The reader will by now have noticed that many premonitory experiences center not just on death but on chaotic and explosive events like car and plane crashes, terror attacks, calamitous sea disasters, and devastating volcanic eruptions—in other words, things moving rapidly from a state of order to a state of disorder. Physicist Edwin May noted that psychics in the U.S. military Star Gate program were much more accurate at describing “hot” targets (explosions, nuclear reactors on aircraft carriers, etc.) than other targets. The prophetic halo around 9/11 or many of J. W. Dunne’s dreams would be consistent with May’s hypothesis that psychically sensitive individuals may somehow, through some as-yet-undiscovered “psychic retina,” be detecting large, rapid changes in entropy as bright beacons on the landscape ahead in time. 24
May’s argument makes a certain amount of sense given the classical equivalence of time’s arrow with entropy. Things that are very rapidly dissipating heat, such as stars and nuclear reactors and houses on fire, or even just a living body making the ultimate transition to the state of disorder called death, could perhaps be seen as concentrated time. But steep entropy gradients also represent a category of information that is intrinsically interesting and meaningful to humans and toward which we are particularly vigilant, whatever the sensory channel through which we receive it. An attentional bias to entropy gradients has been shown for the conventional senses of sight and hearing, not just psi phenomena. Stimuli involving sudden, rapid motion, and especially fire and heat, as well as others’ deaths and illness, are signals that carry important information related to our survival, so we tend to notice and remember them. 25
Thus, an alternative explanation for the link between psi accuracy and entropy is the perverse pleasure—that is, jouissance —aroused in people by sign
s of destruction. Some vigilant part of us needs be constantly scanning the environment for indications of threats to our life and health, which means we need on some level to find that search rewarding. If we were not rewarded, we would not keep our guard up. Entropic signals like smoke from an advancing fire, or screams or cries from a nearby victim of violence or illness, or the grief of a neighbor for their family member are all signifiers, part of what could be called the “natural language of peril.” We find it “enjoyable,” albeit in an ambivalent or repellent way, to engage with such signifiers because, again, their meaning, their signified , is our own survival. The heightened accuracy toward entropic targets that May observed could reflect a heightened fascination with fire, heat, and chaotic situations more generally, an attentional bias to survival-relevant stimuli. Our particular psychic fascination with fire may also reflect its central role as perhaps the most decisive technology in our evolutionary development as well as the most dangerous, always able to turn on its user in an unlucky instant. 26
The same primitive threat-vigilance orientation accounts for the unique allure of artworks depicting destruction or the evidence of past destruction. In the 18th century, the sublime entered the vocabulary of art critics and philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to describe the aesthetic appeal of ruins, impenetrable wilderness, thunderstorms and storms at sea, and other visual signals of potential or past peril, including the slow entropy of erosion and decay. Another definition of the sublime would be the semiotic of entropy . As Kant described:
Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunder clouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne long with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like, make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might. But, provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the heights of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature. 27
Landscape paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries by artists like J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich often display this aesthetic appreciation of violent nature, disasters, and especially ruins. If there is any one painting that has always exemplified the sublime—the painting that stands as its exemplar in many Freshman Art History textbooks—it is Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice , also called The Wreck of Hope , created in 1823 or 1824. Jagged slabs of ice pile in a rough pyramid in a cold Northern ocean, and if you look carefully, the stern nameplate of a ship can be seen about to disappear in the water bearing the name HMS Griper . (The work was inspired by the explorer William Parry’s 1819 expedition to the Pole, although in fact the Griper survived the expedition.) There is a remarkable similarity between this and other paintings by Friedrich and the iconic photos of the twisted wreckage of the World Trade Center towers rising from the gloom soon after their collapse on 9/11.
Originally, the sublime was elevated above the merely beautiful as something that mainly men were able to savor and enjoy (women were believed to prefer pleasant domestic scenes, flowers, and other images that were not so existentially challenging). Today we find the sublime aesthetic dominant in disaster cinema and post-apocalyptic science fiction. Films like Alien or Planet of the Apes (with its famous final scene of the Statue of Liberty rising from a far-future beach) exemplify the mood of enjoyment-in peril as much as the bleak haunted landscapes of Friedrich or the sweeping destructive visions of Turner. The common element that links these works is that they stage the same pleasure at annihilation-and-return, losing and finding again, that Freud observed his grandson Ernst engaging in with his spool, albeit on a far grander scale. The basis of the aesthetic sublime is precisely in its reinforcement of the thought “but I survived,” an enjoyment of the fact that I’m still here, even amid these signs of ruin . If you’re able to witness and even be traumatized by some sign of destruction, then you’ve survived it. “Your position is secure,” as Kant put it.
The aesthetic of the sublime may help us understand the many premonitory dreams and visions and artworks related to disasters like 9/11. It ought to be evident that, for most Americans, who did not live in Manhattan or Washington, DC, and who did not lose loved ones or friends in the attacks, the “trauma” of that day was really a mélange of complex and conflicting emotions that went way beyond the obvious shock and horror of the destruction. As philosopher Slavoj Žižek has noted, 9/11 fell into a fantasy space that had been prepared for it by decades of disaster cinema as well as growing social antagonisms in American society. It represented the fulfillment of a repressed wish on the part of many Americans, not only to be gripped by an unfolding cinematic disaster happening elsewhere to other people, but specifically to see massive icons of Establishment power and wealth destroyed in such a daring, David-vs.-Goliath way—this indeed was the genius of the attacks, to give Americans “what we wanted” on several unspeakable levels.
It sounds terrible to say, but the result was that Americans enjoyed the news coverage of 9/11. It was a spectacle, it inspired awe at its audacity, and certainly for most Americans, it provoked an enormous sense of relief that the terrorists hadn’t targeted their particular place of work or that of their loved ones. If you were watching it on television, it was probably not happening to you; it thus created a nation of grateful survivors, united by love and patriotism in its aftermath, as well as survivor’s guilt. This mix of guilt and gratitude, horror and relief, is the essence of jouissance .
Freud wrote that “if we are to be judged by our unconscious wishes, we ourselves are nothing but a band of murderers.” 28 According to the logic of jouissance , it is more that we are vampires, deriving an unspeakable pleasure from signs of suffering and death. Žižek has likened jouissance to the drive that propels the undead in horror stories; it is a kind of life beyond life, an excess or surplus of life that cannot be contained in the living. 29 Again, it sounds terrible, totally amoral, but it could be said that the Lacanian framework restores a bit of our moral dignity that Freud’s logic of narcissism and his talk of death drives seemed to take away. We do not really thrill to others’ losses or suffering out of ill-will or malice toward our fellow humans; it is simply that if death and suffering are seen to befall others—if we are in the position of witness —then those fates are not (at least not yet) happening to us . In his classic study The Denial of Death , Ernest Becker paraphrases Aristotle: “Luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.” 30 It may be that feeling our fate most exquisitely depends on these kinds of sublime close calls. Obsessively re-watching the planes crashing into the towers, dwelling endlessly on news images and photographs for months and years afterward, re-living the destruction and our own reactions to it in our conversations was very much like a neurotic symptom, a “compulsion to repeat,” and a way to enjoy our own survival. It expressed a morally unacceptable “life drive,” rather than a death drive as Freud would have framed it.
What Freud seems to have overlooked in his interpretation of his grandson Ernst’s fort-da game was the child’s point of view—that even though the spool was “gone,” Ernst himself was still there, and the spool’s gone-ness may have highlighted or intensified his budding awareness of self. More than the birth of symbolism, playing gone with transitional objects might be the birth of self-consciousness in relation to void. The spool is serving as a symbol for the child, but the symbol’s referent is not the mother—it is the child’s own persistence in the world, his survival (again by contrastive opposition). The aesthetic love of destruction and decay is similarly a way of playing “gone” and thereby bringing our survival into sharper relief. By extension, what traumatized people may be enjoying, what they anxious
ly cannot get enough of (in their traumatized state), is their own being-there or da-sein . If our prophetic unconscious orients us toward our future survival, we might expect it to similarly focus on chaotic upheavals that serve as a backdrop for an “I survived” signal—a context in which the persistence of the post-selecting self makes sense as “good news.” 31
Whether or not it is the real or only substance addressed by psychoanalysis, as Lacan argued, jouissance seems to be the real substance of prophecy. We are connected to our future by a resonating string of ambivalent enjoyment. Even when they seem darkest, the oblique messages carried on that string often have to do with our own survival in the Not Yet.
“Use the Luke, Alec!”
In a 1977 interview on the BBC talk show Parkinson , Alec Guinness remarked that his “very spooky” premonition of James Dean’s death in Little Bastard had been unique in his experience. 32 He was mistaken. We know from his memoir that it was at least the second time such a thing had occurred in his life within the span of a few years in the early 1950s. The first, because it did not involve such a long time delay and had a more “haunting” quality—and perhaps because it did not involve such a famous celebrity—did not fall for him in the same mental category. Yet, in fact, it seems very much like an example of the same future-influencing-present effect at work around learning of the untimely death of another artist with whom he had just made some connection. In this case, the death itself had taken place exactly a year before the experience; the connection was via one of the dead man’s paintings. What Guinness failed to recognize was that it also may have been premonitory of his role in one of the most iconically entropic scenes in cinema history: the destruction of the Death Star.