Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  Some cautious but fascinating beginnings have also been made toward studying precognition and time loops in literature and the arts. Malcolm Guite’s 2017 book Mariner , to cite one recent example, is a moving examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the ways his masterpiece poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner uncannily precognized (although Guite doesn’t use that term) the poet’s tortured life after he wrote the poem. 30 In the efforts of Guite, of Kripal on sci-fi and comic book authors, 31 or of Anthony Peake on Phil Dick, 32 we may be seeing a dim adumbration, like a gravestone rubbing, of a future precognitive cultural studies, a psychic deconstruction . Unlike traditional literary criticism, which often looks for unacknowledged prior influences on a writer’s ideas, this would attend to possible subsequent influences. 33 It would also be highly biographical, necessarily placing literary or artistic creation within the overall context of the creator’s life experiences even after the work was created.

  In short, the effects of time loops could be—and would have always been —pervasive across many or most aspects of human social and cultural existence. We are only now evolving the eyes to see it. It could require radical revision of the guiding theories and paradigms in many fields that study humans and the meanings they make—“The textbooks,” as they breathlessly say in movies, “will need to be rewritten.” (Textbooks are lucrative, I hear, so why should professors object?) Among the many new questions culture historians and critics will need to ask is: Could especially prolific and influential writers, artists, and other shapers of culture—the Phil Dicks, the Freuds and Jungs, the Jeff Kripals, and so on—be literally shaping the past, almost like inadvertent alchemists of history, via their readers’ precognitive gift-slash-curse of precognition?

  Like today’s quantum physicists parsing the effects of measurement in their retrocausation experiments, future investigators of meaning’s retrograde effects will no longer be able to ignore their own possible past as well as ongoing entanglements with their objects of study. They will be forced to attend closely to how each one of their own articles and books (and textbooks) in the present may have acted back on the past to co-create what they are studying and writing about. How coherent and how deep the effects of present writing and scholarship are on prior literary or cultural history is at this point anyone’s guess, but if there are still cultural historians in the 22nd century, they may well be kept busy mapping the subtle effects on knowledge and human experience of a “geist”—literally a zeit-geist —that moves through history in temporal retrograde. Through it all, skeptics will, somewhat justifiably, become apoplectic at the difficulties of separating truth from wish-fulfillment in this (as Kripal puts it) hyper-looping “super story.”

  Obviously, though, time loops have implications beyond academia and science. They are relevant to our everyday lives and relationships. For one thing, it may no longer be just a mushy New Age platitude to suggest that humans really do share an “invisible connection” with each other, as anti-materialists since Frederic Myers have always maintained; there is also a very good reason why any trace of such a physical connection vanishes when scientific spotlights are trained on the spaces between us. Instead of traversing the present, as some kind of invisible telepathic bridge across space, or some nonlocal Platonic collective unconscious, our “occult” interhuman connection traverses the fourth dimension, the Not Yet, as the real, physical encounters and interactions with other people and ideas awaiting us on the road ahead. I like to think of the secret psychic structure of social life as a kind of four-D lattice: Our precognitive, presentimental unconscious orients us to those confluences where our individual world-lines snaking through Minkowski space-time meaningfully entwine and intersect. Bernard Beitman describes it as “connecting with coincidence.” 34 It’s an apt phrase, and we no longer need invoke some “acausal” synchronistic field stage-managing significant moments, or archetypal meaning-machines doing the connecting. We connect, we stage-manage, via our own amazing tesseract brains.

  By paying closer, more thoughtful attention to her dreams, synchronicities, and passing thoughts, the precog ranger of tomorrow may learn to detect the bent twigs of her own passage ahead of herself in time and recognize them for what they are. She will understand how to follow them along a mostly unknown, obscure path, trusting that they orient her toward meaningful rewards (and “survival”), but she will also know that those meanings cannot be known in advance. If the traces of our future passage are like bent twigs, a “spoor” to be followed (or like cryptic notes in our own handwriting), the time loops they leave behind in our lives are in some ways even more interesting: They are like astonishing geological formations or imprints, bearing the traces of past intentional behavior by precognitive beings (ourselves) who didn’t yet realize they were precognitive, and who were thus groping for meaning in other culturally available directions. Even if the past is not subject to change, we can excavate those fossils, brush them off and hold them up for scrutiny, and come to appreciate the ironic, looping paths our lives and desires and enjoyment took through the glass block. We may find that our past, even our distant past, is a kind of mirror, and see in it ourselves, winking back knowingly, across those instantaneous years.

  POSTSCRIPT

  A Ruin from the Future

  If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

  — The Gospel According to Thomas (1st or 2nd century)

  L ike many who become interested in so-called psychic phenomena, it is dreams that have been my entry point to the topic and that, more than anything else, have convinced me of their reality. I have been interested in dreams since I was a teenager, and since my late 20s—since my first Epson portable computer circa 1994 (a heavy gray tank, by today’s razor-thin laptop standards)—I have always kept a dream journal open in whatever word processor I happened to be using at the time. At this point I have recorded thousands of dated dreams and dream fragments. Early exposure to Freud and then other psychoanalytic schools (Jungian, Lacanian, and so on) as well as later adventures in Buddhist dream yoga and lucid dreaming equipped me, over time, with a brimming toolkit to apply to my dream-work. Despite all these tools, my recognition that dreams could be precognitive was only a very belated one, yet exploring precognitive dreaming has surpassed, in both its power and its fascination, any other hermeneutic approach.

  With a handful of puzzling exceptions that I swept under my mental rug (including a dream seemingly anticipating the events of 9/11, which I have described elsewhere 1 ), I had never noticed the phenomenon of dream precognition until I began reading the literature of parapsychology around 2010. It had simply not occurred to me to go back to my dream records after a day or two had passed and examine them in light of events and thoughts during that interim. I had generally spent time interpreting my dreams right when I wrote them down, and if I returned to them, it was usually weeks or months later, long after the events in my life proximate to the dream were forgotten. It was only after reading J. W. Dunne that I began following Dunne’s guidance and was astonished by how frequently my dreams did correspond to some experience or train of thought over the next couple of days.

  Some correspondences to subsequent experiences are oblique enough that a degree of free-associative unpacking is necessary to clarify the relationship, and thus would not hold evidential weight with anyone skeptical of Freudian methods, even if they were not doubtful of dream precognition in principle. Others are so clear, striking, and specific that they beggar belief as “just coincidence” or the law of large numbers at work. Sometimes a dream will show me the cover of a previously unknown book I’ll find the next day at a used bookstore, or it will wittily represent a mishap like a sink backing up at work, or falling down a flight of icy steps, or something I wished I’d said to a friend but failed to. Mostly they relate to striking items encountered in the media—often stories on Twitter, since that is how I
preferentially engage with the news. I have described several examples (out of, by now, a couple hundred Dunne dreams that I have recorded) on my blog The Nightshirt . 2 I am increasingly persuaded, on the basis of my own experience and its consistency with what many others have also reported, that precognition is a regular aspect of dreaming, not a rare occurrence at all.

  Dunne wrote that if you notice a precognitive referent in a dream, it will typically be over the next day or two. If I notice a dream correspondence, it is generally within one or two days of the dream, although sometimes as much as a week. Another recent writer replicating Dunne’s experiment, Bruce Siegel, found that his dreams often matched things that happened within such a time frame, and often even in the first few minutes on waking, 3 and that has sometimes been my experience as well. But this narrow temporal window between a dream and its “fulfillment” may to some extent reflect a kind of file-drawer effect, the fact that it requires more time and resources to compare dreams to events at a greater distance in time. Living in a day of paper records that took up space, Dunne recommended actually discarding dream records after two days, since the returns on the effort of comparing one’s daily dream journal with events at greater remove diminish beyond that radius. You need to set limits, simply for practicality’s sake. But the fact that it may not be worth the effort of actively looking for more distant future referents in dreams does not mean such referents don’t exist. (This, in fact, was the precise confusion over which Victor Goddard corrected Captain Gladstone in their brief, bizarre conversation in Shanghai in 1946, the day before Goddard’s crash on a Japanese beach.)

  In my case, years of keeping detailed electronic dream records, even without any thought of checking for precognitive referents, has proven on at least one occasion to be of immense and startling value in my personal hermeneutic “paleontology.” The dream appeared (in hindsight) to pertain directly to the completion of this book, and thus makes an appropriately “loopy” personal example of everything I have been arguing. Apologies in advance—there is nothing less interesting than someone else telling you their dream. Yet the dream, I believe, contained a signal that I should tell it, so here goes.

  The dream in question had occurred in the summer of 1999, and it excited me greatly on waking—in fact it felt like one of the most “significant” dreams I had ever had at that point, even if I couldn’t say why or how it was significant. The description of the dream’s manifest content ran to nearly two single-spaced pages in my journal, but here’s the short version: An old high-school teacher of mine named Thomas (playing the role of a kind of initiatory guide, or what Carl Jung would call a “psychopomp”) stood before a chalkboard in a classroom on the Emory University campus, where I was then completing my PhD, and asked me to reflect on the “loss of Dick” in the context of the alchemical motif of the androgyne , a hermaphrodite that appears in many 17th -century alchemical books. Such books were an interest of mine at the time. This teacher then led me outside, past a stone fountain around which the nerdy blond-haired kid Martin on The Simpsons was running in circles, and then, beyond it, to the door of an impressive old ruined tower, circular in plan. On descending into the basement of the old building, I found myself in a dimly lit room, also a kind of classroom, where I had to step over a man lying unconscious on the floor between a coffee table and a couch in order to approach a blackboard with a long row of circular or semicircular symbols—the first one composed of three interlocking Omegas , the last being a kind of stylized letter A , formed from a swooping curl on the left, a flat top, and a descending straight line. This was somehow a very important lesson; the precise flow of meanings of these symbols, one to the next, needed to be “fussily” preserved without damaging them. I then went into a more brightly lit antechamber where I inspected a broken speaker on the wall by the door and realized with some anxiety that there may be no way to repair it. Lastly, I went back out the front door of the building, having made a kind of looping path through the basement of the old tower. As I walked back out into the light, I turned and looked again at the edifice and realized, with a kind of excited delight, that it was actually brand new, but just “made to look old.” It seemed like a profound and significant realization. I wondered who the “builder” of this tower was, and realized it was, in some weird way, me.

  I mulled over the possible meanings of this dream for days, thinking and writing about its images and symbolism, because it had such an exciting sense of promise. I had just read Jung for the first time, in fact (one of his books on alchemy), and I was excited by the dream’s alchemical-seeming elements, such as a fountain placed outside a ruined circular tower, as well as by the time-reversing implications of the “Omega(s) -to-Alpha ” progression of the rounded, vessel-like symbols. However, given my years of interest in Freud, certain elements, like the “loss of Dick,” as well as the ruined tower itself, also seemed like obvious castration symbols—standard Freudian stuff. Among the many thoughts I had about this dream, I noted my intuition that the tower somehow represented the dream itself. A small, amateurish watercolor, “The Ruined Tower,” still sits on a bookcase in my home—a relic of brief, Jung-inspired efforts to commemorate my dream life. It is one of only two dreams I ever painted.

  Fast forward to a Sunday in July, 2017. I was sitting at my computer struggling with some difficult decisions about chapters and sections to cut from the first draft of this book so it would flow better, when a strange feeling of familiarity, and of “pieces falling into place,” came over me. It took me back to that well-remembered dream, the elements of which suddenly assumed startling new, clear meaning in light of what I was just then doing.

  First of all, with some chagrin, I had just cut a section about the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge that had centered on his possible precognition of later-published details about fountains in his poem “Kubla Khan.” I cut it because I discovered I had been wrong on a date, and my specific argument about Coleridge as a precog now held less weight. 4 (When I had free-associated on the Simpsons character Martin, who was circling the fountain in my dream, I found I associated him with a single squeaky pedantic utterance: “Highly Dubious! ”—a remark that would precisely apply to what I now thought about what I had written about Coleridge.)

  I had also decided, with some difficulty, to excise the section on Philip K. Dick’s dream about his own death and its significance as a kind of castration complex in his own life, centered on his name—although I later changed my mind about this cut. At the time I had the dream, in 1999, Phil Dick would have never entered my mind as an association to this dream. I knew virtually nothing about that author and had read only one of his books many years before as a teenager (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep , the basis for the movie Blade Runner ). I certainly had no idea that the writer had been found unconscious on the floor between a coffee table and a couch after the first of the strokes that killed him in 1982, let alone that he himself had dreamed of that very scene seven years before (reporting it to Claudia Bush in the February 1975 letter I mentioned in Chapter 13: “a stark single horrifying scene, inert but not a still: a man lay dead, on his face, in a living room between the coffee table and the couch” 5 ).

  I had two associations to my teacher, Thomas—the first was an inspiring-slash-ominous quote from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas , which I had just come across in another book: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” 6 (Hence my sense that I should “bring forth” this dream, despite how personal, and perhaps boring, it may be to readers.) But I also somehow knew, probably from the same book, that Thomas means twin . People we are not especially close to often appear in dreams to supply some pun having to do with their name, and so this struck me at the time as possibly significant—although I did not know how. I had no reason at that point in my life to be thinking about twins, and of course did not know that Phil Dick had lost his twin siste
r, Jane, in infancy, let alone the significance of that fact in the writer’s life.

  On the day I suddenly thought back to this old dream, I was experiencing frustration about the sequence of chapters I had written. I needed to find the best way to present a lot of (I thought) interesting material about time loops in a manner that flowed linearly, one idea to the next, to make my argument, but the structure was not right yet, and I’d maddeningly wasted a lot of time shuffling chapters and sections around. In fact, I had my black notebook open in front of me on my desk, with the chapters arranged side by side, in different orders, so I could think through the problem. These pages, I suddenly saw, were very much like the blackboard in my old dream, where a sequence of circular or semicircular symbols (i.e., loops) was represented, as an illustration of getting things in the right order. Successfully completing the Great Work in alchemy, I later learned, is all about getting sequences right, but indeed, a book project is itself a “great work” that requires the same sort of care and “fussiness,” and creates similar frustrations about arranging things in the proper sequence. I was now feeling anxious that more things would need to be cut in order to work. Besides cutting the fountain section and (temporarily) “losing” the part about Dick’s death, I was also wrestling with the material on the gender-swapping prophet Tiresias (now in Chapter 12). Tiresias, it should be noted, was not unlike the alchemical androgyne , who is simultaneously male and female, showing both sexual characteristics at once. (Again, at the time, I mainly saw this in Freudian terms, as castration symbolism.)

  There’s more. The same day I thought back to this old dream, when I was grappling with these editorial questions as well as finally feeling like I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, I was additionally preoccupied with something very specific and unrelated: recent sore throats that I worried might reflect some serious health problem involving my larynx … that is, my “speaker.” In fact, I was using my work to avoid thinking about this latest health scare, and vacillating, as hypochondriacs often do, about whether or not to make an appointment to see my ear, nose, and throat doctor the following Monday. (I eventually did see my doctor, and the sore throats turned out to be nothing serious.)