by Eric Wargo
12 Ibid., 51.
13 Dunne, 1952[1927]), 207.
14 Freud, 1965(1899), 547-548.
15 Ibid., 548.
16 Freud, 1965(1901), 336. In a later edition of the book, Freud added another similar case reported by psychoanalyst Otto Rank in 1912: Rank had been approaching a bank to change some bank notes for silver coins to give as Christmas presents and, when he saw a long line in front of the bank, mentally rehearsed how he would try to be quick about his request: “Let me have gold, please.” Rank immediately noted the error in his thoughts—that he meant silver, not gold—when suddenly he encountered a school friend of his brother’s, named Gold; Gold’s brother, in turn, was a publisher who had failed to help Rank years earlier in his career, preventing a degree of material prosperity he had hoped for. Rank explained this with a typical psychoanalytic “must have,” augmented by what in modern psychological parlance would be called “priming”:
While I was absorbed in my phantasies, therefore, I must have unconsciously perceived the approach of Herr Gold; and this was represented in my unconscious (which was dreaming of material success) in such a form that I decided to ask for gold at the counter, instead of the less valuable silver. On the other hand, however, the paradoxical fact that my unconscious is able to perceive an object which my eyes can recognize only later seems partly to be explained by what Bleuler terms ‘complexive preparedness’ (Ibid., 337-338).
17 Luckhurst, 2008.
18 Luckhurst, 2002.
19 Richet wrote: “All powers considered supernatural are but human powers, muscular or psychic, but since they are removed from awareness they appear to have arisen from outside ourselves” (quoted in Wolf, 1993, 59-60).
20 Ricoeur, 1970.
21 Sartre, 2002, 211.
22 Popper named this evidential loop the “Oedipus effect,” and even noted how strange it was that the whole business of prophecy was left out of Freud’s writings: “[I]t will be remembered that the causal chain leading to Oedipus’ parricide was started by the oracle’s prediction of this event. This is a characteristic and recurrent theme of such myths, but one which seems to have failed to attract the interest of the analysts, perhaps not accidentally” (quoted in Borch-Jacobsen & Shamdasani, 2012, 125).
23 Flournoy, 2007(1900).
24 Freud, 1961(1930), 16.
25 Siegel (2017) calls these “lead-up dreams.” The Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky discussed these types of dreams at length in his Iconostasis , regarding them as proof that “Dream time is turned inside out ” (Florensky, 1996[1922]).
26 Carpenter, 2012.
27 On why a “flatter” picture of the mind is (counterintuitively) more appealing and realistic than depth psychologies, see Chater, 2018. Chater argues that most of what has been misconstrued as mental depth really reflects the essentially improvisational nature of cognition.
28 See Luckhurst, 2002.
29 Jones, 1957; Luckhurst, 2002.
30 The essay was published in his 1932 volume New Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis , although none of the pieces were ever actually delivered as lectures.
31 Freud, 1965(1932), 46.
32 Ibid., 47.
33 Ibid.
34 This case was the most important of three to be included in a 1921 presentation to his inner circle, called “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy,” but Freud accidentally left this case behind; he himself interpreted this as a parapraxis, “omitted due to resistance” (Luckhurst, 2002, 272).
35 In fact, nowhere in the article does Freud specify the “grounds of his impediment,” so his “though” is curious—what does her nickname for P. have to do with his sexual problems? Possibly a lot, as we will see.
36 Freud, 1965(1932), 60.
37 Ibid., 61.
38 Ibid., 62-63.
39 This case later intrigued the French poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida, who made it the focus of his typically inscrutable, and arguably misnamed, piece, “Telepathy” (Derrida, 1988).
40 Although Freud goes on to examine potential counterarguments to this as a genuine case of thought transference, he ultimately comes down favoring the “occult” explanation, and only laments that a physical explanation is not yet forthcoming for such phenomena. He sees his own theory of the unconscious as perhaps paving the way to such an explanation:
The telepathic process is supposed to consist in a mental act in one person instigating the same mental act in another person. What lies between these two mental acts may easily be a physical process into which the mental one is transformed at one end and which is transformed back once more in to the same mental one at the other end. The analogy with other transformations, such as occur in speaking and hearing by telephone, would then be unmistakable. And only think if one could get hold of this physical equivalent of the psychical act! It would seem to me that psycho-analysis, by inserting the unconscious between what is physical and what was previously called ‘psychical’, has paved the way for the assumption of such processes as telepathy. (Freud, 1965(1932), 68.)
41 Carpenter, 2012; Ehrenwald, 1954; Eisenbud, 1970, 1982.
42 Eisenbud, 1982, 56.
43 The more one studies prophecy and the lives of precogs even outside of the psychoanalytic literature, the more one realizes that sexual and generational transgression is weirdly entwined with the whole topic. For whatever it may (or may not) be worth, J. W. Dunne, precognitive dream pioneer and the guiding light for this book, married late in life, at the age of 53; his bride, with the impressive English name Cicely Marion Violet Joan Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, was 28—she was 25 years his junior, in other words. Maggy Quarles van Ufford, who “precognitively seduced” her doctor, Carl Jung, via her dreams as well as “Tantric” physical symptoms (see Chapter 11), was 19 years Jung’s junior. Philip K. Dick, whose remarkable precognitive life has been examined by several writers, married a string of successively younger women—his fifth wife, Tessa, who was 18 when they met, was less than half his age (see Chapter 13).
44 Eisenbud, 1982, 7.
45 Ibid., 7-8.
46 Echeverria et al., 1991; Friedman et al., 1990; Lloyd et al., 2011; see also Dobyns, 2006.
47 “To say that this group’s dreams are accurate is like shooting an arrow into a field, drawing a target around it after it has landed and saying, ‘wow, what are the chances of that!’” (Wiseman, 2010, 153).
48 Echeverria et al., 1991; Friedman et al., 1990. Physicist Nick Herbert (personal communication) suggests calling the quantum forces that protect self-consistency “Novikov Forces,” in analogy to the quantum forces that prevent two electrons from occupying the same quantum state (the Pauli Exclusion Principle).
49 Eisenbud, 1982, 7-8.
50 Ibid., viii.
51 Marwaha & May, 2016.
52 Freud, 1965(1899), 659-660.
9. Wyrd and Wishes—Metabolizing the Future in Dreams
1 Frank Herbert keyed in on this ancient usage in his Dune series, where “weirding words” had a compelling force over the hearer.
2 Freud, 1965(1899), 139-140.
3 Ibid., 140.
4 See discussion of the issue of Freud’s feelings about responsibility and the Irma dream in Forrester, 1990.
5 Freud, 1965(1899), 154.
6 The Irma dream has been subject to countless reanalyses, with some psychoanalysts arguing that it really focuses on the Fliess situation and Freud’s wish that his friend be blameless in the various malpractice incidents that were tarnishing his reputation and tainting Freud by association. In this respect, Slavoj Žižek (Žižek, 2006a, 32) makes the amusing observation:
The interpretation [of the dream of Irma’s injection] is surprisingly reminiscent of an old Soviet joke: ‘Did Rabinovitch win a new car on the state lottery?’ ‘In principle, yes, he did. Only it was not a car but a bicycle, it was not new but old, and he did not win it, it was stolen from him!’ Is a dream the manifestation of the dreamer’s unconscious sexual desire? In principle, yes
. Yet in the dream Freud chose to demonstrate his theory of dreams, his desire is neither sexual nor unconscious, and, moreover, it’s not his own.
7 Freud, 1965(1899), 154.
8 Mavromatis, 1987, 193.
9 Anzieu, 1986.
10 Barad, 2007.
11 Žižek, 2006b.
12 Hobson & McCarley, 1977.
13 Crick & Mitchison, 1983.
14 Valli & Revonsuo, 2009.
15 Rock, 2004.
16 Winson, 1986.
17 Hobson, 2002.
18 Llewellyn, 2013.
19 See Wargo, 2010.
20 This may have to do with how dreams not only encode memories but also preserve a rudimentary sense of chronology in our lives. Chronology can only come from a sense of experiences occurring in proximity and thus remaining associated closely with each other in our long-term-memory store. There is no fixed objective temporal yardstick in our brains (or anywhere) but only a cross-correlation of events, somewhat the way tree-rings corroborate and calibrate Carbon-14 data and vice versa. Chronology, ultimately, is an echo-chamber of self-reference, in our individual biographies as much as in the study of human and geologic (pre)history.
21 Wargo, 2010.
22 Other paradigms in memory research point to the same “associative halo” principle: For instance, in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, participants are shown lists of words that share some connection to another word that is not on the list (for instance “sheet,” “pillow,” “bed,” and “dream,” but not “sleep”); when tested later, participants generally falsely remember reading the absent word (“sleep”). (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deese–Roediger–McDermott_paradigm )
23 McNamara, 2013.
24 Hobson, 2013, 621.
25 One writer and investigator of his own dreams, Bruce Siegel (Siegel, 2017), recently estimated that a quarter of his sample of 241 dreams was precognitive, most “coming true” within hours of the dream, some within minutes of awakening. My own experience with precognitive dreaming, although less systematic, has been similar—but see this book’s Postscript.
26 Dunne, 1952(1927), 62.
27 Krippner, Ullman, and Honorton, 2002(1971).
28 Graff, 1998, 2000, 2007.
29 Paquette, 2016. Paquette writes that he was told the purpose of (relatively rare) dream symbolism—to facilitate the dream message making the transition to waking consciousness—by a “nonlocal character” encountered in a lucid dream. Thus, he believes dreams may access a real alternative reality rather than being solely a representation of his own thoughts or memories. This raises an interesting problem: Any claim for what is a “symbol” standing for some latent meaning, versus a simple association, or versus a literal representation of some real alternative reality would require already knowing (or presupposing) what the rules governing the transformation of experience into the language of dreams consist of. Any claim about the meaning of a dream in relation to external reality has some degree of circularity, as it will always be predicated on accepting some particular theory of dreams and dreaming. It is a version of what in philosophy and criticism is sometimes called the hermeneutic circle , and it is one reason any claim about meaning is ultimately unfalsifiable. (What Freud-bashers fail to recognize is that a claim of no meaning in a dream is also unfalsifiable, for the same reasons.)
30 Siegel, 2017. This has been my own experience as well—see Wargo, 2015c, 2015e.
31 See Ehrenwald, 1954; Eisenbud, 1970, 1982.
32 Eisenbud, 1982, 57.
33 Ibid., 108.
34 Siegel, 2017.
35 Dossey, 2009.
36 Krohn & Kripal, 2018.
37 “Dew” is an old, probably ancient esoteric symbol for dreams and dreaming. Dreams, like dew, evaporate quickly with the morning sunrise (Wargo, 2015d). It is conceivable that Goddard was aware of this when he chose the pseudonym “Dewing” for his Navy dreamer, Gladstone.
38 This part of the conversation, as recorded by Goddard (1951, 102), was:
“Well,” said the commander, “this will seem rather stupid to you. But I’ve just been reading a book by a philosopher bloke called Dunne, An Experiment With Time . He had discovered that some dreams, or some bits of dreams, come true. But if they are going to come true, they come true within the next two days. He builds up rather an interesting philosophy out of it all. Guess I’ve got a bit dream-conscious. Still, if I were you—”
Inclined to argue with the commander, I said, “Dunne makes out, doesn’t he, that when the subconscious mind is released from the duty of serving the conscious mind—because the conscious mind has gone off duty, too; gone to sleep—then the subconscious can dash off into space and time and have a wonderful spree making sequence pictures to taunt the sleeping conscious mind’s eye, mixing up past and future events? And isn’t it his point that this is what we call dreaming?”
“Yes, that’s the idea. You must have read his book.”
“I have,” I said, “and it didn’t say that two days is the limit for coming true. What it did say was that Dunne found out, once he had begun to get dream-conscious, he had such a collection of dreams to record, and had to watch so closely for bits of them coming true, that if something didn’t happen within two days he would discard his dream records more than two days old and concentrate on newer dreams.”
“All the same,” said the commander, “if I were you, I’d stay on the ground for a couple of days.”
39 Jones, 1957.
40 Resnik, 1987.
41 Schavelzon argued that probably complications and illnesses peripheral to the cancer per se killed him, at age 83, and not the cancer itself—which may in fact have been spurred by the radiation treatments and surgeries he received (Ibid.).
42 Moss, 2009; see also Dossey, 2009.
43 Jones, 1957.
44 Anzieu, 1986, 155.
45 Fichtner, 2010.
46 See Forrester, 1990.
47 Jones, 1957, 96.
48 Fichtner, 2010, 1153.
49 Jones, 1957, 95.
50 Of course, psychoanalysis itself, which Freud had been in the process of developing when he had the dream, is all about speech and the difficulties of speaking, the impediments—resistances—to honest disclosure (Forrester, 1990).
51 Anzieu, 1986.
52 There is some question whether Kekulé actually told dream account to his audience at the Benzolfeier event or only added it to the text of his speech in the published proceedings (Wotiz & Rudofsky, 1993).
53 Ibid.
54 If there was any truth to Kekulé’s dream story, cryptomnesia cannot be ruled out—that is, a dream-representation of an idea in an article that the dreamer had previously seen but consciously forgotten (or as Freud might have said, “repressed”).
55 Freud, (1965[1899]), 660.
56 Anzieu, 1986.
57 Freud, 1961(1930), 17.
58 Ibid., 17-18.
59 Ibid., 18.
60 Ibid.
10. Prophetic Jouissance —Trauma, Survival, and the Precognitive Sublime
1 Guinness, 1985.
2 Ibid., 34-35.
3 See Gurney et al., 2007(1886); Kripal, 2010, 2014.
4 Forrester, 1990.
5 Ibid. See also Luckhurst, 2008.
6 Luckhurst, 2008.
7 Laplanche, 1993, 41.
8 Quoted in Rudnytsky, 1987, 12.
9 Forrester, 1990, 197.
10 Jones, 1957.
11 Winnicott, 1971.
12 Freud, 1984(1920).
13 Freud may have gotten a dose of inspiration for his concept of “death drive” from one of his students, the Russian analyst Sabina Spielrein. In her 1911 paper “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” (Spielrein, 1994[1911]), which she read to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society shortly after her admission to Freud’s group, Spielrein identified the paradoxical or counterintuitive relationship in the unconscious between generation and destruction, sex and death—an equival
ence for which evidence could be found not only in patients’ dreams but also throughout mythology. Her linking of the diametrical forces of creation and destruction was influential on both Freud’s and Carl Jung’s work. Unfortunately, history has preferred to focus on Spielrein as Jung’s patient-turned-lover, and her contributions to psychoanal ysis were mostly forgotten after her death in the holocaust (Launer, 2014).
Freud’s death drive is not exactly the same thing as what Spielrein was offering: Hers was an observation that creation entailed a giving up of the ego and self—a notion that mystics would understand readily but that Freud would have considered narcissistic and regressive.
14 Interestingly, in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow , the process speculated to be behind Tyrone Slothrop’s premonitory erections was an extinction of some initial conditioned response “beyond the zero,” to a “transmarginal” realm virtually identical to jouissance as it figures in Lacan’s work, or to the substitution of negative reinforcement for positive reinforcement in drug addiction.
15 Lacan, 1998; Daly, 2014.
16 Twain, 2010; Charman, 2017.
17 Twain did not write down his dream when it occurred, which might have provided objective basis for verifying it. He dictated it to his stenographer in the context of relating an 1885 meeting of the “Monday Evening Club” in Hartford, Connecticut when he told the dream to several other esteemed gentlemen (mostly clergymen) over cigars, by which point, he estimated, he had told it upwards of 80 times to different people. This gave his memory and his verbal artistry ample opportunity to sort and rearrange events into a seamless narrative of psychic connection. One of Twain’s companions that evening, Reverend Dr. Nathaniel Burton, pointed out, via an example of his own, that a dream retold often enough becomes “one part fact, straight fact, fact pure and undiluted, golden fact, and twenty-four parts embroidery” (Twain, 2010, 277). Twain writes that, although he did not really doubt the dream’s salient points, Burton’s argument compelled him to stop telling the dream thereafter, lest it further alter in the telling.