by Colin Wilson
Wilbur Wright, whom we met at the beginning of this chapter, was understandably obsessed by this problem of dream precognition and in the early 1980s decided to undertake the kind of exhaustive study of parapsychology and modern physics that might provide him with the answer. The results of his study challenge comparison with Dunne and Ouspensky and establish him as one of the major time-theorists of the twentieth century.* He writes:
I was obliged to recognize that events yet to happen, of which we gain knowledge by paranormal means, must, per se, have existence in some domain outside our three-dimensional universe.
What sort of universe, I wondered, could accommodate a Time mechanism in which events existed permanently in potential, but were activated only when matter in motion integral with the advancing Present Moment coincided with their spatial location? And given such Fixed Time Events, how was it possible for a facet of our human subconscious to view them?
Wright underlines his point by citing the case of Robert Morris snr, an American agent for a Liverpool shipping firm, whose son, Robert Morris jnr, was one of the framers of the American Constitution. The story of his father’s peculiar death is told in the biography of Morris jnr. On the night before the arrival of a ship in the harbour of Oxford, Maryland, Morris snr dreamed that he received a mortal wound from a salvo fired in his honour. But when he told Captain Mathews of the Liverpool that he had decided not to come on board, the captain accused him of superstition. Morris replied that his family was reputed to have the gift of precognition. So the captain assured him that no salute would be fired. However, when Morris was enjoying the party on board, the captain told him that the crew felt upset at not firing the customary salute. Morris replied, ‘Very well, but do not fire until I or someone else gives the signal.’ In due course Mathews accompanied Morris in the boat that was to row him ashore. A fly settled on his nose, and he brushed it off. The gunner, thinking this was the signal he was waiting for, fired the salute. The wadding from one of the guns struck Morris’s elbow, breaking the bone: a few days later, he died of the infection.*
The story seems to add support to the case of Doug Worley who, you will recall, was convinced that he was due to die whatever he did. Yet as Wilbur Wright points out, such a view involves us in contradictions. Morris did his best to avoid his death: were these attempts also part of his fate? Was his precognitive dream also predetermined?
Wilbur Wright’s solution is that there must be ‘a series of versions of each individual event, differing only in detail while preserving the main ambient flow of the events… . All future human events, we can postulate, exist as possibilities …’ unlike the future of the heavenly bodies, which is routinely predictable. And since any future possibility will either be advantageous or inimical to us, we could say that our problem is to decide which to choose. The I Ching, Wright points out, could be regarded as a binary computer whose purpose is to decide which of two possibilities we should choose: in other words a kind of do-it-yourself ‘timetable of the future’. He then goes on to suggest, like Ouspensky, that time has three dimensions, of which we are aware of only one: duration. These three dimensions constitute what he calls the ‘Fixed Time Field’. He believes that a ‘migratory’ aspect of our minds can catch glimpses of this ‘Fixed Time Field’ in the same way that an astronaut can look down on both sides of the earth at once.
In fact most writers on time, from Dunne onward, have tried to solve the mystery by evoking the notion of other ‘dimensions’, with which they usually associate the name of Einstein, with his four-dimensional ‘space-time continuum’. Wilbur Wright points out that if we could see the sun from this four-dimensional point of view it would look like a golden cylinder stretching through space, rather like those photographs of a horse in motion which show a whole series of overlapping horses.
There is a great deal to be said for this theory of other dimensions. At the very least it helps us to break some of our bad old habits of thinking. There is an astonishing experiment in modern physics that helps to underline the point. Human beings are accustomed to the fact that if they turn round through 360° (through a full circle) they find themselves facing in the direction they started from. Not so an electron. By passing it through a certain kind of magnetic field its ‘axis of spin’ can be tipped through 360°, which ought to restore it to its original position. But it doesn’t. The electron has to be turned through yet another full circle before it behaves as it did before. We cannot distinguish the difference between the two circles: the electron can. Which seems to suggest that in the sub-atomic world, a ‘full circle’ is not 360°, but 720°. In our world we have somehow lost half the degrees we ought to have. Or to put it another way, there may be another dimension in the sub-atomic world.
And while we are speaking of physics, this may be the place to mention another paradox: the fact that electrons behave like practical jokers with a warped sense of humour. And this could offer an important key to the whole field of the paranormal. If I shine a beam of light through a pinhole it will form a circle on a screen (or photographic plate). If two pinholes are opened up side by side the result — as you might expect — is two overlapping circles of light. But on the overlapping portions there are a number of dark lines. These are due to the ‘interference’ of the two beams — the same effect you would get if two fast streams of traffic shot out on to the same roundabout. Now suppose the beam is dimmed so that only one photon at a time can pass through either of the holes. When the image finally builds up on the photographic plate you would expect the interference bands to disappear. Instead they are there as usual. But how can one photon at a time interfere with itself? And how does a photon flying through one hole ‘know’ that the other hole is open? Could it possess telepathy, as Einstein jokingly suggested … ? Perhaps the photon splits and goes through both holes? But a photon detector reveals this is not so; only one photon at a time goes through one hole at a time. Yet, oddly enough, as soon as we begin to ‘watch’ the photons, they cease to ‘interfere’ and the dark bands vanish. The likeliest explanation is that the photon is behaving like a wave when it is unobserved, and so goes through both holes and interferes. The moment we try to watch it, it turns into a hard ball. Of course we know that this is because our photon detector affects the photon itself: you cannot literally ‘see’ something as small as a photon but have to detect its presence by making it collide with something else and cause a flash. The odd thing is that this apparently makes it curl up into a ball like a hedgehog. Wilbur Wright even suggested that the photon behaves as if it is alive. The physicist Niels Bohr did not go that far: he merely said that we should regard photons and electrons as ‘waves of probability’.
It may seem that the particle’s odd behaviour is simply due to the clumsiness of our experimental methods, which could be compared to trying to pick your teeth with a broom handle. But according to Bohr this is not so: the ‘uncertainty’ is inherent in the very nature of these sub-atomic levels. And it is certainly true that electrons seem to behave in a wildly unpredictable manner. At one point physicists thought that they might be able to pin the electron down a little more precisely by measuring the direction of its spin — for, like the earth, electrons seem to spin on an axis. The experimenter had to begin by setting up a ‘reference direction’ to measure it by — just as, if you were about to set up a signpost at a crossroads, you would need to know the direction of at least one of the places it pointed to. He chose an electric field. And he discovered that the spin seemed to point exactly along the line of the field. No matter how many times the direction was changed, the electron changed too.
Electrons show the same unpredictability if they are fired at a barrier — an electric field or an array of atoms. Sometimes electrons with more than enough force to break through the barrier bounce off it; sometimes electrons without enough force go straight through it. They seem to behave according to how they feel at the moment. It begins to look as if Nature is indulging in a leg-pull. It seems to be sayi
ng, ‘I decline to pander to your conceited view that reason can explain everything. When you look at the night sky you are confronted by the mystery of where space ends. And when you look inside the atom you are confronted by another insoluble mystery, to which I flatly refuse to yield the answer.’
Einstein grew very irritable about this casual behaviour of the electron — particularly about what Heisenberg called ‘the uncertainty principle’, which means simply that you cannot measure both the speed and the position of an electron. ‘God does not play dice,’ said Einstein indignantly. And he and two colleagues called Rosen and Podolsky thought up an experiment conclusively to disprove the uncertainty principle. Let us, they said, shoot two electrons at one another so they fly apart at the speed of light in opposite directions. What is to stop us from measuring the speed of one and the position of the other? And since they are behaving as mirror-images of one another, we should then be able to establish both the speed and position of the same electron.
We have already mentioned — on p. 239 — the astonishing experiments that revealed that Einstein was wrong. They were performed at Berkeley in 1974 by Stuart Freedom and John Clauser, and in the early 1980s, with much more precision, by Alain Aspect at the University of Paris. They showed, in effect, that the particles were ‘telepathic’, and that no matter how far they flew apart, an alteration in the direction of one would cause a similar alteration in the direction of the other, thus confirming a theorem known as Bell’s Inequality.
The result of all this is that in experiments involving quanta of energy, the scientist can never actually pin down the particle he is interested in. He knows where it is when it leaves his electron gun and where it is when it hits a screen at the other end of the apparatus, but in between there is only a haze of probability that cannot, by the very nature of things, be resolved into something more definite. Niels Bohr compared it to a huge, smoky dragon whose tail is in the mouth of the apparatus and whose head is at the other end of the laboratory, but whose body is merely a kind of shimmering cloud.
Some modern physicists have even gone so far as to say that we help to create the particle by observing it. And one of them, John Wheeler, has gone even further and suggested that perhaps we play some role in creating the universe itself. (He calls it ‘the participatory anthropic principle’, and we shall consider it in the last chapter of this book.) Oddly enough it was this same John Wheeler who caused a stir at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1979 by demanding that the paranormal researchers — whom he called ‘pseudos’ — should be ‘driven out of the workshop of science’. Yet it can be seen that his suggestion about the mind helping to ‘create’ the universe is in accord with the Jungian notion of synchronicity — that is, the idea that our minds somehow interact with the universe to cause apparently preposterous coincidences and other anomalies.
We can underline the point by an illustration used by Dr Danah Zohar in her book on precognition, Through the Time Barrier. To explain Bell’s inequality theorem, she asks us to imagine identical twins who have not met since birth, one living in London and the other in New York. If Einstein were told that each of them had been injured playing football at the age of sixteen and smashed his car at twenty-five, he might suspect that there was some unknown connection between them. Bell has suggested, in effect, pushing one twin downstairs in London to see whether the New York twin would also fall downstairs. In fact Aspect’s particle experiments show that there is such a connection between identical-twin electrons. And we have already seen that there is evidence for some equally odd connection between identical-twin humans. So the odd coincidences that seem to befall identical twins may not be, after all, a violation of the laws of common sense, but simply the expression of some basic law of nature.
This digression on physics is, for the time being at least, at an end, and we can ask, ‘How far does it help us to understand paranormal events?’ In the sense of providing some exact and logical explanation, hardly at all. Yet it begins to show us a glimmering of light in the darkness. Consider, for example, the following curious case of ‘time-retrocognition’.
In the summer of 1954 a couple who prefer to be known as Mr and Mrs Allan set out for a day in the country. Both had been overworking recently, and they badly needed a break. They woke up feeling oddly depressed, although neither mentioned this to the other. They took a bus in Dorking, but went past their stop and alighted at Wotton Hatch, near the village of Wotton, birthplace of diarist John Evelyn. Instead of walking back they decided to go and look at the Evelyn family church. And when they finally came out of the churchyard they turned right and found themselves facing an overgrown path with high bushes on either side. It led uphill to a clearing with a wooden seat. There they had a view over the valley, and they decided to sit down and eat their sandwiches. They could hear the sound of a dog barking, and someone chopping wood. But Mrs Allan felt oddly uneasy.
Suddenly a silence descended and the birdsong ceased. Mrs Allan was overcome by a sense of foreboding and went icy cold. At that moment she became aware that three men had entered the clearing behind her: although she had her back to them she could ‘see’ them quite clearly. All three wore what looked like clerical garb. The man in the middle had a round, friendly face, but the other two seemed to ‘radiate hatred and hostility’. When Mrs Allan tried to turn round she found she was paralysed and unable to move. Then the experience passed. She asked her husband if it had gone cold, and he touched her arm and said she felt like a corpse. They got up and left hastily. Neither is clear about what happened next except that at some point, they fell asleep on the grass. Then they found themselves in Dorking, both in a state of confusion and unable to remember clearly how they got there. They took the train home for Battersea.
Two years later Mrs Allan decided to return. She went into the church without looking around outside. When she emerged she turned right, expecting to find the path uphill. Then she was surprised to discover that there was no ‘uphill’: the countryside was quite flat. She went home and told her husband, who thought she was being ‘silly’. The following Sunday he made the same journey — only to find that his wife had been telling the truth. There was no overgrown path, no clearing, no wooden seat. A local woodman told him there was no wooden seat on the whole estate.
It was at this point that the couple decided to report their experience to the Society of Psychical Research. They told their story to its Honorary Secretary, Sir George Joy, and to a senior Council member, G. W. Lambert. But the Society was in process of changing its premises and their account seems to have been mislaid. In 1973 they again told their story, this time to a solicitor, Mary Rose Barrington, who was also a member of the SPR and who delivered a paper on it to the Society in 1974. By this time she and a member of the SPR Council had spent some time investigating the area around the church and verified that there was no hill and no bench. But in John Evelyn’s diary for 15 March 1696 they discovered an entry in which Evelyn mentions his approval of the sermon that morning and then speaks of the recent execution of ‘three wretches’, one of them a priest, who had been involved in a plot to assassinate King William. But that, of course, still fails to explain how Mrs Allan could have seen the three men on a hill that did not exist.*
The ‘information universe’ theory, according to which everything that has ever happened is ‘on record’, suggests that the Allans experienced a ‘time-slip’ of much the same nature as those experienced by Jane O’Neill and the two English ladies at Versailles. But the ‘information universe’ theory also involves the assumption that these ‘recordings’ are like images on film — merely a ‘picture’ of the past. Mr and Mrs Allan undoubtedly climbed a real hill and sat on a real bench before Mrs Allan experienced her unpleasant vision of the three men. But — and this will remind readers of the two ladies at Versailles — they actually spoke to some of the people they saw and received replies, and crossed a small bridge which later proved not to exist. We may
also note that Jane O’Neill took it for granted that the church she had entered was real. It seems that ‘time-slip’ cases often involve a sense of tactile reality. And this is completely unexplainable in terms of a ‘tape-recording’ theory of ‘time-slips’.
But in the subatomic world there is no difference between the sense of sight and the sense of touch: both involve a collision of basic particles with our nerve-ends. And throughout this book we have observed that ‘psychics’ and clairvoyants seem to have a more direct method of grasping reality than through the nerve ends. If the study of quantum physics serves no other purpose, it reminds us that we should not accept materialistic common sense as a touchstone of reality. Wheeler’s belief that we play a part in creating reality suggests that there are other possible realities that our minds might ‘tune in to’. But even if one rejects Wheeler’s theory as too extreme (as I do), quantum physics still offers a vitally important insight. We cannot know exactly what goes on at the subatomic level because our observation interferes with what we are observing. This is not, of course, true of everyday life: a rock is too big to be affected by the light that bounces off it. The result is that we take it for granted that we are mere observers of the world around us. Moreover the development of left-brain awareness, with its detached, sanitized quality, encourages a sense of helplessness and passivity. We come to take it for granted that the world takes no account of us.
Synchronicities suggest that this is simply untrue. They suggest that even in the perfectly ordinary world that surrounds us, there is some sense in which we interact with reality and affect it in the same way that the ‘observer’ affects subatomic events. The level at which this happens is obviously not the level of the everyday self. But it is, presumably, the level that is able to ‘read’ the information encoded in the reality around us. And this in turn reminds us that it is not entirely true to say that a rock is too big to be affected by the light that bounces off it. If psychometry is not a delusion, a rock can record information exactly like a photographic plate. And there is a level of the human mind that can decode it.