Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  16 Eisenbud, 1982, 111.

  17 This raises the possibility, not mentioned by Eisenbud, that the forbidden, not-acted-upon desire in Robertson’s life may instead have been some kind of pedophilia. Note that Futility , for instance, is a rescue fantasy centered on a child; at the end of the story a court absolves Rowland of guilt for abducting her.

  18 Eisenbud writes that “nowhere has [the Oedipus story] been told and retold as plainly as in Robertson’s works” (Eisenbud, 1982, 104).

  19 Robertson, 1915a.

  20 See Hansen (2001) for in-depth discussion of liminality and its relation to the paranormal.

  21 When H. G. Wells’ Time Traveler in The Time Machine visits the distant future, he finds that a great Sphinx structure has been erected on the site of his laboratory; after his machine is stolen by the Morlocks, he must penetrate that Sphinx to find it and continue his travels.

  22 Robertson, N.D., 262-263.

  23 Francis, 1915, 101.

  24 Eisenbud, 1982, 106.

  25 See Forrester, 1990.

  13. “P.S. What Scares Me Most, Claudia, Is That I Can Often Recall the Future ”—The Memetic Prophecies of Philip K. Dick

  1 Since both the invention of radar and Pearl Harbor occurred over two decades after Robertson’s death, his stories possibly anticipating these developments would not fit the precognitive hypothesis advanced in this book.

  2 Davis, 1998.

  3 See Peake, 2013; Sarill, 2014; Wargo, 2015a.

  4 Dick’s 1956 story “Minority Report”—which Steven Spielberg made into a movie starring Tom Cruise in 2002—still stands as one of the great sci-fi considerations of precognition and how it might be exploited as a social predictive tool. In the story, multiple psychics’ impressions of the future are pooled for greater precision; today a version of this method called “associative remote viewing” is being used in attempts to beat the stock market and Las Vegas (see Broderick, 2015; Targ, 2012). Dick, like Thomas Pynchon, was prescient about prescience.

  5 Peake, 2013, 177.

  6 The relevant passage (Dick, 2012, 224) is:

  “What is Ubik?” Joe said, wanting her to stay.

  “A spray can of Ubik,” the girl answered, “is a portable negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are given a counter-clockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than dissipate. A negative ion field diminishes the velocity of anti-protophasons normally present in the atmosphere; as soon as their velocity falls they cease to be anti-protophasons and, under the principle of parity, no longer can unite with protophasons radiated from persons frozen in cold-pac; that is, those in half-life. The end result is that the proportion of protophasons not canceled by anti-protophasons increases, which means—for a specific time, anyhow—an increment in the net put-forth field of protophasonic activity ... which the affected half-lifer experiences as greater vitality plus a lowering of the experience of low cold-pac temperatures. So you can see why regressed forms of Ubik failed to—”

  Joe said reflexively, “To say ‘negative ions’ is redundant. All ions are negative.”

  7 Sarill, 2014.

  8 Dick’s 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly may be another example of channeling popular science writing Dick was soon to encounter in his voracious magazine reading. The novel, based partly on his own experiences during the worst depths of his amphetamine addiction in 1970-1972, concerns a group of characters in Orange County, California who are addicted to a new synthetic drug called Substance D. One of the characters experiences complete dissociation between two sides of himself—his job as a narcotics cop and his real life as a Substance D addict, and even “informs on himself” because the drug has destroyed the connection between his two brain hemispheres. Dick was set to deliver his finished manuscript in early 1974, but wrote to his publisher asking for an extension because he had just seen an article on the new science of split-brain phenomena in Psychology Today ; he realized his literary device was a “real thing” and that he needed to do additional research on the topic in order to sound better informed. Was he somehow precognizing the Psychology Today article when he wrote his novel? Again, there is no way to know for sure, but it fits a characteristic pattern in his life. (See Dick, 1991, 9; Peake, 2013.)

  9 According to his wife at the time, Anne R. Dick, in her book The Search for Philip K. Dick , her husband was heavily influenced by the early 20th Century existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger (Anne R. Dick, 2010). Binswanger’s definition of “schizophrenia” encompassed disorders far less severe than the currently accepted definition of psychosis.

  10 Apel, 2014, 29. Although both his biographer Lawrence Sutin and his wife at the time, Anne R. Dick, assumed the story must have been written after seeing the exhibit (Sutin, 2005; Anne R. Dick, 2010), neither evidently knew that the exhibit did not go on display until two years after Dick wrote (and submitted) his manuscript. Chronology makes it impossible that Dick could have gotten the idea from Disney (Peake, 2013). It also would make little sense: Why would a writer intent on being original to the point of mind-bending base a story on something he had seen at Disneyland on a visit?

  The visit to Disneyland took place late in Dick’s marriage to Anne (as Anne records, it was her idea, as an apologetic gesture for an angry outburst during a fight; “I loved the rocket to the moon. Phil was fascinated by the Lincoln robot” (Anne R. Dick, 2010, 62). Anne and Phil divorced in 1965, so the visit probably took place in 1964 or 1965, at least two years after Dick had written “First in Our Family.”

  11 Initially Dick lived in an apartment building in Fullerton, not far from Anaheim, then from 1973 to 1975 in a house he shared with his fifth wife Tessa; when he and Tessa split in 1975, he moved into an apartment building in Santa Ana, just south of the park. So, he could have been referring to either the apartment in Fullerton or the one in Santa Ana.

  12 Apel, 2014, 29-30.

  13 This young woman, “Pris,” is herself cold and robot-like, and unable to return the narrator’s affections—a deliberate contrast to the deep warmth and humanity (and ultimately, madness) of the robotic Lincoln. As Sutin (2005) notes, Pris is probably the most extreme exemplar in Dick’s fiction of the “dark haired girl” type that he repeatedly became infatuated with in real life. In some ways “A. Lincoln Simulacrum” can be seen as a prequel to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep , later filmed as Blade Runner . In the latter story, “Pris” is one of the simulacra—now called “replicants” (and as one of the characters in the film describes her, “a basic pleasure model”).

  14 Dick, 1969, 37.

  15 Ibid., 39-40.

  16 Other characters in Dick’s writings similarly resembled people he would meet later. A woman he met in 1971 named Kathy so resembled a character of the same name in his novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said , published the previous year, that he said he worried she might sue him (Dick, 1991).

  17 See Arnold, 2016; Peake, 2013; Tessa B. Dick, 2010.

  18 Peake, 2013.

  19 From an interview with Gregg Rickman, quoted in Arnold, 2016, 13.

  20 Arnold, 2016, 12.

  21 Sutin, 2005, 56.

  22 Arnold (2016, 13) quotes from a 1971 journal entry, where Dick writes, “I can only be safe when sheltered by a woman … It is that I fear that I will simply die. My breath, my heart will stop. I will expire like an exposed baby. Jane, it happened to you and I am still afraid it will happen to me. They can’t protect us …”

  23 Rudnytsky, 1987.

  24 Arnold, 2016, 193.

  25 Arnold (2016) makes a strong case that, just like might happen in a Phil Dick novel such as A Scanner Darkly , Dick really did break into his own house, perhaps in a dissociative state, and pry open his own safe, destroying specifically years of cancelled checks that could have been used against him as evidence by the IRS. He had not paid taxes in years.
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  26 In her memoir, Tessa (Tessa B. Dick, 2010) claims that “2-3-74” referred to March 2, 1974, the European day-month notation, and indeed in some of his letters he refers to his experience merely as “3-74.”

  27 Wilson, 2016.

  28 Arnold, 2016, 174.

  29 Krenz, 2000.

  30 Krenz, N.D. (“Philip K. Dick Words Project”)

  31 Ibid.

  32 Dick, 2011.

  33 Krenz, N.D. (“Philip K. Dick, Dear Claudia Letter, May 9, 1974”); see also Dick, 1991.

  34 Dick, 1991, 157.

  35 Ibid.

  36 Krenz (N.D., “Words Project”) argues that Dick’s letters to her were intended for public consumption all along.

  37 Dick, 1991, 165. Unfortunately, without Krenz’s side of the correspondence, we cannot tell whether Dick was in some cases precognizing her letters to him. He frequently waxes effusive at how aptly she has put something or how uncannily she seems to understand him—in one case he expresses shock at the uncanniness of a drawing of the sibyl she sent him based on his brief dream description. Was his dream image informed by her subsequent depiction, and did this account for its uncanniness, or was he just complimenting her as part of his epistolary flirtation?

  38 Phil Dick’s visionary experience of seeing the Orange County of gas shortages and the fall of Nixon as a shimmering overlay on the Roman Empire is of course strikingly similar to Freud’s vision of ancient Rome flickering in the landscape of the modern city.

  39 Dick, 1991, 298.

  40 Although Spielberg’s film is widely considered a masterpiece, some viewers—and later, Spielberg himself—have been put off by Neary’s lack of hesitation at leaving behind his wife and children to join the extraterrestrials—a possible resonance with Dick’s own familial ambivalence.

  41 Tessa B. Dick, 2010.

  42 Tessa Dick (personal communication) confirmed that Phil read some Vallee books in 1977; the book in question, The Invisible College (1975), would have been his most recent book at that point.

  43 Wargo, 2015a.

  44 This may be a further precognitive detail. The piece of technology the “shy and gentle creatures” showed him was, he wrote, “based on a concept buried in a basement and forgotten, [a] twin-drive opposed rotary assembly [in which] torque was passed back and forth from left to right in some way by a clutch system…” (Dick, 1991, 298). This description very closely matches descriptions and drawings of a proposed antigravity device (“the Laithwaite engine”) that appeared six years later in a briefly popular 1981 book called How to Build a Flying Saucer (and Other Proposals in Speculative Engineering) by an inventor named T.B. Pawlicki (Pawlicki, 1981).

  45 Dick, 1992, p. 91.

  46 Dick could well have learned how he had been found, as according to Tessa he was awake and lucid in the hospital afterward (Tessa B. Dick, 2010). In that case, he would certainly have felt great relief to be alive. If we take his dream eight years earlier as a premonition, it would not have been “a premonition of his own death” (even though this is how it will typically be described), but a premonition of a disturbing mental image of his own near-death he would have formed in the hospital—in other words, a kind of terrifying dream about his own survival. Unfortunately, he would suffer further strokes soon thereafter, and not regain lucidity.

  47 Kripal, 2011.

  48 Ibid.

  49 Krohn & Kripal, 2018.

  50 Di Corpo & Vannini, 2015.

  51 Dick was certainly aware of this—he was not above making double enten dres about his name. But as a Jungian and not a Freudian, he does not seem to have been aware of how deep “Dick” went. Any dream about his own death could not help but also be a dream about castration, and vice versa. For instance, he precognizes a thick (Dick) book about Warren HARDing, “in the shadow of B—Groves” (meaning, in the shadow of death, as Will Durant’s sentence about the sibyl leading good people through “blissful groves” in the afterlife reveals). These dreams used the “bricks” of his impending reading experiences to fashion a promise of immortality “with all the good people” as a consolation prize for the death of (a) Dick. Dick dies but goes to Heaven , in other words.

  52 Bloom, 1993.

  53 Dick, 2011, 421.

  54 See Davis, 1998.

  55 Arnold, 2016; Davis, 1998.

  14. The Arrival of Meaning and the Creation of the Past

  1 Chiang, 2002, 132.

  2 Another film that comes close to getting precognition right is Don’t Look Now , the 1973 supernatural thriller by Nicolas Roeg (see Wargo, 2015b). Protagonist John Baxter is a “precog” who, as a materialist skeptic, doesn’t believe in his own abilities. Consequently, when he has a vision of his wife in the company of some black-clad acquaintances, he thinks she has been abducted by them, not realizing that it is a precognitive vision of his own funeral. His attempt to find his wife ends up leading him to his death at the hands of a serial killer. The only thing “mistaken” about the film, I argue, is that since precognition centers on learning experiences during our lifetime, he would not have precognized the scene of his funeral but some event leading up to his death.

  3 Otto Rank (Rank, 1968) called this resolute past-centrism “ideological.” Even when it appears to involve delving into some already-existing past, any hermeneutic enterprise like interpreting a dream in the consulting room or curing a neurosis by illuminating its hidden sense is at bottom a making of meaning, not simply a finding of it. By situating traumas in the personal past of childhood (Freud) or deeper in some undead racial/species past (Jung), psychoanalysis and its offshoots were ways of directing attention away from this making, making it look like a finding—because things found always seem to have much more authority and authenticity than things newly made.

  4 Note that, although I have taken inspiration from Bergson and his writings on time and duration, he would have fundamentally disagreed with the larger argument I am making in this book, that we can “spatialize” time as a glass block, per Minkowski and Einstein. Bergson’s famous debate with Einstein was over this precise question (Canales, 2015). Yet his point about “waiting for the sugar to melt” applies whether or not the future is fixed and “already present”: Meaning is not contained or enfolded, complete, in present objects and situations but must be awaited. Our present understanding of any process can only ever be partial and provisional.

  5 I would argue that such a quantum psychoanalysis already exists: Zen Buddhism. Elsewhere I have written about the block universe and its unexpected spiritual satisfactions from the standpoint of Zen (Wargo, 2017).

  6 Niels Bohr made a similar observation, noting in a 1938 lecture that “I’m sure many of you will have recognized the close analogy between the situation as regards the analysis of atomic phenomena … and characteristic features of the problem of observation in human psychology … In introspection it is clearly impossible to distinguish sharply between the phenomena themselves and their conscious perception …” (Bohr, 2010, 27).

  7 Feynman, 1985.

  8 Gleick, 1993, 250.

  9 Gleick, 2018.

  10 In an explanation of rubber bands on a BBC show called Fun to Imagine , Feynman joked that it was lucky for our sanity that we do not have to keep track of all those bouncing-around particles: “The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things if you look at it right. And if you magnify it, you can hardly see anything anymore, because everything is jiggling and they’re all in patterns, and they’re all lots of little balls. It’s lucky that we have such a large-scale view of everything, that we can see them as things, without having to worry about all these little atoms all the time.” The clip is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/​watch?​time_​continue=​1&v=​XRxAn2DRzgI

  11 Aharonov & Tollaksen, 2007.

  12 Barad, 2007.

  13 Lacan, 1988, 159.

  14 Žižek, 2014.

  15 Žižek, 2006b.

  16 See, e.g., Žižek, 1989.

  17 Kripal, 2017.

/>   18 Kripal, 2011.

  19 Kripal, 2007.

  20 Strieber & Kripal, 2016.

  21 Krohn & Kripal, 2018.

  22 Elizabeth Krohn, personal communication.

  23 Jeff doesn’t think he knew that story about Phil Dick prior to this experience, but is not certain (Jeffrey Kripal, personal communication).

  24 Weber, 1962.

  25 Geertz, 1973, 5.

  26 Questions of symbolic motivation were at the forefront of cognitive anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a graduate student: How do symbols and cultural meanings become powerful and salient for individual social actors, and how does individual action in turn shape culture? (See, e.g., Shore, 1996.)

  27 Although he does not discuss precognition or related phenomena, Alexander Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science does apply quantum physics to social science and even discusses “changing the past” (Wendt, 2015). Jack Hunter (Hunter, 2018) has opened up discussion of parapsychological phenomena in anthropology with the journal Paranthropology .

  28 There is Daryl Bem (Bem, 2011), most obviously, but Julia Mossbridge and Imants Barušs are other examples (Barušs & Mossbridge, 2017). See also Carpenter (2012) and Kelly et al. (2010).

  29 Since Mutants and Mystics , Kripal has spoken of a “looping” relationship between paranormal experience, pop culture, and religion/spirituality. His most startling and radical argument in Changed in a Flash is that individual experiencers like Elizabeth Krohn (and those who write about them) are actually “changing the afterlife.” Lifesaving biomedical technologies are bringing more people back from the brink of death, thus there are more people to share in their experiences. The growing literature on near-death experiences, which would necessarily include Changed in a Flash , is actually shaping what people expect, and thus what they experience, at least in the immediate term, when they die (Krohn & Kripal, 2018).