by Colin Wilson
Wright had no doubt that this was a genuine case of precognition — he had known other pilots who had accurately foreseen their own death. Years later, in Germany, he met an anti-aircraft gunner named Schwab who had been among those who were defending the Schwerin airfield that day. He told Wright that the Germans had been expecting the attack — they had all been awakened at four that morning and told to remain on the alert. (Wright thought that a double agent had betrayed them.) So Doug Worley’s dream could just have been some form of telepathy. But in that case how did he know that he would die and that Wilbur Wright would survive to hand over his possessions to his family?
After the war Wilbur Wright began to have his own experiences of telepathy. In 1946, 1948 and 1954 he dreamed the winners of three major horse-races. The dream always took the same form. He was at a race-course — although in fact he had never visited such a place — and some companion was standing beside him. In each dream he asked the companion, ‘What won the big race?’ and was told the name of the horse. In 1946, for example, it was Airborne. Wright would comment, ‘There’s no such horse running,’ and his companion would reply, ‘Well it won anyway.’
After that first dream Wilbur Wright learned that a horse called Airborne was running in the St Leger, but the odds were sixty-six to one and no one expected it to win. He mentioned the dream to a few friends on the base, but none of them took him seriously. Not being remotely interested in horse-racing, Wright did not bother to place a bet himself. But when Airborne won there were some dejected faces among his friends. Two years later, when the dreamcompanion told him that a horse called Arctic Prince would win the Derby, they hastened to place their bets: once again Wilbur Wright did not bother. His friends won a great deal of money — so much that the local booky came to see Wright to ask him where he got the tip.
The next dream occurred in 1954 when Wilbur and his wife were staying with a Mrs Cheesewright in Newark. The same procedure was repeated, but with a minor difference. When he found himself standing on the race-course beside his companion, Wright suddenly realized he was dreaming. He turned to his anonymous friend and said, ‘Oh no! Not you again!’ Then followed the usual procedure: ‘What won the big race?’ ‘Radar.’ ‘There’s no such horse running.’ ‘Well it won anyway.’ Then Wright woke up. He could remember quite clearly the look of annoyance on the man’s face, as if saying that he was ‘on duty’, just doing his job, and that he wasn’t there to be insulted.
It turned out that there was no such horse as Radar, but there was a Nahar running in the Cambridgeshire that day. Mrs Cheesewright was a racing enthusiast and she immediately rang her booky. Wilbur, as usual, did not bother. But Nahar won, and Mrs Cheesewright was obviously well satisfied with her winnings.
This was the last time the dream tipster made an appearance: possibly he was offended by Wright’s ‘Not you again,’ with its implied comment that he couldn’t imagine why the tipster was wasting his time. And Wilbur Wright has often wondered why the tipster bothered in the first place — announcing winners to someone who wouldn’t even take the trouble to place a shilling each way.
Dream winners are by no means a rarity. The present Earl Attlee has described how he had a vivid dream of being at a dog-meeting and suddenly knowing that he held in his hand the winner and second of the Grand National. The ticket contained two numbers. Like Wilbur Wright, Attlee was not a racing enthusiast, and he attached no importance to the dream. On Grand National day he was sitting in the office when he heard someone call out to ask if anyone else wanted to place a bet. He mentioned the two numbers and was told that the names were required. Someone fetched a paper and they looked up the horses who were running under the two numbers. Attlee placed a modest bet on each, and — as his dream had foretold — they came in first and second. In fact he had dreamed the numbers of the winners before the numbers had been allocated.*
In 1946 an Oxford student named John Godley, who later became Lord Kilbracken, woke up with the names of two horses running in his head: Bindle and Juladdin. A check on the newspapers revealed that both horses were running — in different races — that day, and Godley made over £100. A few weeks later he dreamed of a winner called Tubermor. The only horse with a similar name was Tuberose, running at Aintree: once again Godley won a respectable sum. Not long after he dreamed that he was ringing his bookmaker to ask for the winner of the last race: he was told it was Monumentor. He discovered that a horse called Mentores was running that afternoon at Worcester, and backed it: again it won. More winners followed in 1947: then he began to dream losers, and stopped backing them. But ten years later he dreamed that the Grand National had been won by a horse called What Man? In fact Mr What won, and Godley was better off by £450. He became the Daily Mirror’s racing correspondent on the strength of his fame as a ‘psychic punter’.*
Perhaps the most significant case of its kind was that of Peter Fairley, science correspondent for Independent Television. In a radio talk called ‘Halfway to the Moon’ Fairley described how, in 1965, a virus afflicted him with temporary blindness. One day, in a depressed state, he recollected his experiences of watching the space launches at Cape Kennedy and suddenly thought — with a desperate sincerity — ‘If only I could help other blind people to understand what it’s like.’ At that moment the telephone rang. It was someone ringing on behalf of the blind asking him if he would give a talk about space probes.
After this curious synchronicity, extraordinary coincidences began to happen all the time. One day, driving into London through a place called Blakeny, he heard a request on the car radio for a Mrs Blakeny; a few minutes later he heard a reference to another — totally unconnected — Blakeny. At the office he heard the name again; this time it was the name of a horse running in the Derby. He backed it and it won. From then on, he explained, he could pick winners by merely looking down at a list of horses: the winner would ‘leap off the page’ at him. Asked if he had won a great deal of money in this way, he admitted apologetically, ‘Yes.’ But as soon as he began to think about it and wonder how it worked, the faculty vanished.
In this case it seems that Fairley somehow activated the faculty by a feeling of sheer desperation and by wishing from the bottom of his heart that he could help the blind. But the first time he was able to pick a winner it was not through a premonition or a dream, but through synchronicities. This is highly significant because it suggests that whatever ‘agency’ can cause premonitions can also cause synchronicities; in fact in this case, a synchronicity was intended to be a form of precognition. The Blakeny experience cannot be dismissed as coincidence because it was followed by full-blown precognitions of winners. In the same programme Fairley described a number of odd synchronicities — too long to recount here — which seem to confirm that in his case at any rate, synchronicity became a method by which some ‘entity’ — or unknown part of his own mind — tried to communicate with him.
Wilbur Wright had two more experiences of dream-precognition. In 1972 he had a clear dream of an airliner crashing on a crowded airfield: the odd thing was that the plane was painted bright red. A few months later he saw the crash on television: it was the Russian Concordski airliner which crashed at the Paris Air Show. Yet although Wright recognized the airliner and the scene, he was puzzled that the airliner was not bright red but the usual silver colour. Then it came to him: the redness was symbolic; the unknown ‘dream producer’ in his unconscious mind was trying to tell him that the plane was Russian.
Here again the implication is clear. The ‘dream producer’ was trying to tell him that the airliner was Russian, just as his racing companion had been trying to tell him the names of winners. Again it looks as if we are dealing with May Sinclair’s ‘intelligent entity’, not merely with some accidental precognitive faculty.
Wilbur Wright’s other precognitive experience was curiously trivial. He dreamed of standing in jungle underbrush staring down at a large diamond-patterned snake that was flowing past a gap in the bushes: the drea
m was so vivid that he told his wife about it. That evening, watching a David Attenborough nature programme on television, he saw the diamond-patterned snake flowing across the screen. He and his wife looked at one another and said, ‘Snap.’
Both these dreams bring to mind the series of precognitive dreams described by J. W. Dunne in his famous book An Experiment with Time, whose publication in 1927 made him an international celebrity. Dunne was an aeronautics engineer who, ever since childhood, had been possessed by the conviction that he would bring an important message to mankind. He proved to be correct. Dunne’s book was the first to direct wide attention to ‘precognitive dreams’. In his twenties he dreamed that his watch had stopped at half-past four and that a crowd was shouting, ‘Look, look!’ He woke up and discovered that his watch had stopped at half-past four. The next morning he realized that the watch was still showing the right time, so he had awakened at the moment it stopped. The experience convinced him that it was worth paying close attention to his dreams, and he soon noticed that all kinds of minor events — newspaper headlines and suchlike — were clearly foreshadowed in them.
Dunne caused a sensation by suggesting that everybody has precognitive dreams, but that most of us fail to notice them simply because we forget them the moment we open our eyes. He made a habit of keeping a pencil and paper by his bedside and noting down his dreams the moment he awoke. Most of the precognitions were quite trivial: for example, he was reading a book describing a type of combination lock when he recollected that he had dreamed about it the previous night. A more ‘important’ dream concerned the great volcanic eruption on Martinique in 1902: Dunne dreamed that four thousand people had been killed. When he saw a newspaper headline about the eruption shortly afterwards it stated that forty thousand people had been killed, but Dunne misread it as four thousand and did not discover his mistake for fifteen years. This indicates clearly that his dream of the eruption was, in fact, a precognition of his own experience of reading an account of it in a newspaper, not of the event itself. (In fact the final figure for the dead was between thirty and thirty-five thousand.)
In 1969 Tom Lethbridge (whom we have already met in connection with dowsing) decided to try Dunne’s ‘experiment with time’, and began recording this dreams. His interest in the subject had been awakened five years earlier when a young cameraman named Graham Tidman accompanied a television team to Lethbridge’s Devon home. Something in Tidman’s manner made Lethbridge ask him if he had been there before. Tidman had — in his dreams. In the garden he was able to say, ‘There used to be buildings against the wall.’ There had — but many years before. Tidman had dreamed of the place as it had been before his birth. From plans more than half a century old, Lethbridge was able to confirm Tidman’s accuracy.
Lethbridge’s own experiments soon convinced him that Dunne was correct, and that precognitive dreams are far commoner than we think. (J. B. Priestley reached the same conclusion when he made a public appeal for precognitive dreams and received thousands of replies.) Again they were mostly very minor ‘glimpses’: the face of an unknown man seen a few hours later; items seen in newspapers the following day. Some of his correspondents had had dreams of catastrophes that had subsequently happened: a hotel fire; the collapse of a block of flats in a gas explosion. But once again it seemed clear that the dreams were of subsequent newspaper or television reports, not of the actual events.
Lethbridge reached the conclusion that there are other ‘levels of reality’ beyond our material level, and that they exist on higher ‘vibrational rates’. Immediately beyond the material level, he suggested, there is a ‘timeless zone’, in which the future is as real as the present or the past. It is, he thought, possible that the ‘spirit’ (or ‘astral body’) passes through this timeless zone immediately after sleep or immediately before waking, and that this explains precognitive dreams.
Dunne’s theory is altogether more ambitious. He began by pointing out that when we say time goes quickly or slowly we must be measuring it against some other standard, and that this standard must be some other kind of time — he called it Time 2. And presumably there must be another kind of time by which we measure Time 2, and so on ad infinitum. And there are also probably an infinite number of ‘me’s’ who correspond to each level of time.
In fact we tumble into this kind of speculation the moment we admit that time is something more complicated than a simple one-way flow. If any kind of precognition is possible then we must be capable of a kind of ‘time travel’. And time travel also implies that there are an infinite number of ‘me’s’. For example, if I could travel forward into tomorrow I could presumably encounter ‘me’ as I shall be in twenty-four hours’ time. And I could keep on doing that indefinitely, meeting dozens — or billions — of ‘me’s’. It was this kind of reasoning that led Dunne to conclude that our human time is in some sense an illusion. In a book called The New Immortality he compares human life to a long strip of film that contains everything that happens to us between birth and death. The ‘real you’ stands opposite that film, able to direct its attention to any part of the film. But along that strip of film there travels an entity he calls ‘Observer 1’, whose attention is usually taken up entirely with moment-to-moment impressions. If nothing much is happening, however, and he can relax, Observer 1 sometimes catches glimpses of other parts of the film. These are glimpses of the past and precognitions.
Dunne has a particularly poetic section which seems to be the crux of the book, and which was given as a television lecture in 1936. A pianist was told to play the whole keyboard, from bottom to top. That, says Dunne, is what everyday life is like — just ‘one damn thing after another’. In sleep the ‘pianist’ can jump back and forth, hitting keys at random — and creating a horrible cacophony. But after death the ‘Observer’ can choose what keys he likes and strike them so as to make them into a pleasant little tune or even a piano sonata. (At this point the pianist was instructed to play Mendelssohn’s Spring Song and Beethoven’s Funeral March.) It is a charming illustration, but still leaves us rather baffled as to Dunne’s basic beliefs about time. One point, however, emerges fairly clearly. Human beings, he says, mistake a ‘hybrid’ form of time for real time. The result is that we feel that life is a disappointing business, which opens with high hopes and sounding trumpets, moves on to frustration after frustration, and ends in a disillusioned crawl into the grave. If we can once grasp ‘real time’ and the ‘real me’, we shall realize that everything that is in existence remains in existence. ‘A rose which has bloomed once blooms for ever.’
In the last analysis what Dunne seems to be saying is that there is a ‘real you’ which exists up above time — roughly what the philosopher Husserl meant by the ‘transcendental ego’. It occupies a kind of permanent four-dimensional universe and possesses a kind of freedom that is unknown to the physical self.
Now this view certainly seems to echo some of the mystical insights we examined in the second chapter. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, says, ‘There never was a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these kings. Nor is there any future in which we shall cease to be … . That which is non-existent can never come into being, and that which is can never cease to be.’ It seems encouraging that Dunne believed he had arrived at these insights through purely scientific reasoning, even though no one I have ever met has succeeded in following his reasoning. But it still seems to leave us with the problem that worried Wilbur Wright. If my life is already ‘on film’, so to speak, then presumably everything that happens to me is predestined and my feeling of having free will is an illusion?
This was an aspect of Dunne’s theory that worried a successful young novelist named John Boynton Priestley who had achieved overnight fame with The Good Companions in 1929. When he began writing plays in the early 1930s he made an attempt to dramatize Dunne’s theory in a tense little play called Dangerous Corner, in which he splits time in two and tries to show what might have happened as well as what did happen.
This, and a second ‘time play’ called Time and the Conways, seemed to echo the fatalistic view that our lives are preordained. But by 1937 Priestley had discovered another theory of time in the work of P. D. Ouspensky, whose ‘experimental mysticism’ was considered in an earlier chapter (p. 47). Ouspensky argued that time, like space, has three dimensions: duration, speed and direction. So time is, so to speak, a cube rather than a straight line. We only see the straight line, because we are stuck in time, so to us it seems inevitable that one event follows another like the notes on a piano keyboard. But if time is a ‘cube’ and not a line, then its forward flow can go up or down or sideways within a three-dimensional space. And this obviously means that the next point on the line is not rigidly predetermined, for it might be up or down or sideways. Life is full of non-actualized potentialities, says Ouspensky in the ‘Eternal Recurrence’ chapter of his New Model of the Universe, and when it comes to an end it starts all over again, so we go on living the same life forever. (He used this idea in a remarkable novel called The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.) But it does not have to be exactly the same: only dull and lazy people live the same life over and over again. More determined people strive to actualize their potentialities, and although the events are predetermined, they can choose to pour more energy and determination into them. So their lives are changed infinitesimally each time.
In his chapter ‘Experimental Mysticism’ Ouspensky offers some clues about how these ideas were developed. He speaks of the curious feeling of a ‘lengthening of time’, so that seconds seem to turn into years or decades. He emphasizes that the normal feeling of time remained as a background to this ‘accelerated time’, so that he was — so to speak — living in two ‘times’ at once. Our ordinary time merely has ‘duration’, but the second time has ‘speed’. And since time has a flow from past to future, it would also seem to possess a third dimension — ‘direction’.