by Colin Wilson
In my book Mysteries I record an equally remarkable example, taken directly from the person concerned, Mrs Jane O’Neill of Cambridge. In 1973 she was the first person to arrive at the scene of a serious accident, and helped injured passengers out of the wrecked bus. Later she began to suffer from insomnia, and the doctor told her this was due to shock. On holiday with a friend in Norfolk, she began experiencing “visions” – sudden vivid pictures that lasted just a few seconds. After one of these she told her friend, “I have just seen you in the galleys”, and the friend replied: “That’s not surprising. My ancestors were Huguenots and were punished by being sent to the galleys.”
But the most remarkable event took place on a visit to Fotheringay church. She stood for some time in front of the picture of the Crucifixion behind the altar. Later, when she commented on it back in the hotel room, her friend asked: “What picture?” A year later, when they revisited the church, the inside seemed quite different from the first visit, and there was no picture behind the altar. She wrote to Joan Forman, an expert on “time slips”, and through her contacted an antiquarian who was able to tell her that what she had seen had been the church as it had been before it had been pulled down in 1553.
Both Sanderson and Jane O’Neill were convinced that what they were looking at was real, not a hallucination, although the Sandersons felt dizzy when they tried to run. One of Jane O’Neill’s “visions” was of two figures walking beside a lake, “and I knew, though I don’t know why, that one of them was Margaret Roper”, the daughter of Sir Thomas More. Sanderson and his wife “knew” that they were looking at fifteenth-century Paris. So it seems clear that the vision was not some simple objective hallucination, like a mirage in the desert, but was due to some extent to their own minds. Sanderson and his wife presumably shared it because of some telepathic rapport of the kind that often develops between married couples. But this fails to explain why they saw Paris in Haiti. (Haiti was, of course, French, but not until the eighteenth century.)
In the mid-nineteenth century a theory of “time slips” was developed by two American professors, Joseph Rodes Buchanan and William Denton. Through his experiments with his students,24 Buchanan came to believe that human beings possess a faculty for “reading” the history of objects; he called this “psychometry” (see chapter 43). Denton tested his own students with all kinds of geological specimens, and found that the “sensitive” ones among them saw “mental pictures” that were closely related to the object they were holding (and which Denton wrapped in thick brown paper, so they could have no idea of what it was). A piece of lava brought “visions” of an exploding volcano; a fragment of meteor conjured up visions of outer space; a piece of dinosaur tooth brought visions of primeval forests. Denton was convinced that all human beings possess this faculty, which he described as “a telescope into the past”.
But while the “time slips” described by Sanderson and Jane O’Neill obviously have much in common with “psychometric” visions, they were unquestionably far more than mental pictures or impressions. Yet this is not to say that they were not mental pictures. After her experience of the accident, Jane O’Neill kept on “seeing” the injuries of the passengers; such visions are known as “eidetic imagery”. The scientist Nicola Tesla possessed it to such an extent that he could construct a dynamo in his mind and actually watch it running. After experimenting all day with images of the sun, Isaac Newton found that he could produce a visual hallucination of the sun by simply imagining it. Like the strange abilities of calculating prodigies (see chapter 26), this seems to be a faculty that all human beings possess, but that most of us never learn how to use. We may speculate that Jane O’Neill’s traumatic experience activated this dormant faculty, and that it somehow continued to operate spasmodically in the succeeding months. If the image of the sixteenth-century church was some kind of “eidetic image” floating in front of her eyes, there is no reason why she should have recognized it as a hallucination unless she tried to touch the picture above the altar; most of us accept the evidence of our senses without question. The same argument probably applies to the experience of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain at Versailles. They saw men and women dressed in the style of Louis XVI (and assumed it was a rehearsal for a costume drama) but naturally, they did not try to touch them, or even to speak to them. (Being English, they would have required an introduction!)
Another “time slip” collected by Joan Forman offers us a further clue. Mrs Turrell-Clarke, of Wisley-cum-Pyrford in Surrey, was cycling along the modern road there on her way to evensong when the road suddenly became a field path, and she seemed to be walking along it. She was wearing a nun’s robes, and she saw a man dressed in the peasant dress of the thirteenth century, who stood aside to allow her to pass. A month later, sitting in the village church, she suddenly saw the church change to its original state, with earth floor, stone altar, lancet windows, and brown-habited monks intoning the same plainsong chant that was at present being sung by the choir in the “modern” church. At this moment Mrs Turrell-Clarke felt she was at the back of the church, watching the proceedings. So it seems clear that what happened was that her viewpoint changed, and she found herself looking through someone else’s eyes – the eyes of a lady walking along the road and the eyes of a woman standing at the back of the church. When Jane O’Neill found herself looking at Sir Thomas More’s daughter walking by a lake she wondered whether there might be some “family” connection, since her own unmarried name was Moore. She may even have suspected that she had somehow slipped back into a previous incarnation. Again, it seems clear that she was seeing the scene through someone else’s eyes – which explains how she knew that she was looking at Margaret Roper. And since the Sandersons knew they were looking at fifteenth-century Paris, we may assume that they were also looking through “someone else’s eyes”.
The late T.C. Lethbridge, a retired Cambridge don who devoted the last years of his life to studying the paranormal, came to the interesting conclusion that “ghosts” are in fact a kind of “tape recording”: that powerful emotions can “imprint” themselves on some sort of magnetic field, and that these “recordings” can be “picked up” by a person who is sensitive to them – for example, by a good dowser. (Dowsing involves sensitivity to the electromagnetic field of water.) Lethbridge himself, for example, experienced a strange feeling of foreboding and depression in a spot where the body of a suicide was concealed in a hollow tree. Joan Forman has also expressed her conviction that time slips “have some connection with the human electromagnetic field”. She herself was standing in the courtyard of Haddon Hall in Derbyshire when she saw a group of four children playing on the steps and yelling with laughter. When she took a step forward the group vanished, but she later recognized one of the girls in an ancestral painting that hung on the walls. She also cites the experience of a Norwich teacher, Mrs Anne May, who was leaning against a monolith at the Clava Cairns, near Inverness, when she “saw” a group of men in shaggy tunics and cross-gartered trousers, dragging one of the monoliths over the turf; when a group of tourists walked into the glade the figures vanished; apparently Mrs May had caught a glimpse of the original bronze-age builders of the monolithic circle. Joan Forman believes that the contact with the monolith was the “trigger factor” that caused Mrs May to see her vision, and that in her own case it was the spot she was standing on.
Most students of the paranormal would admit another possibility: the notion that what is being “contacted” is the mind of someone who lived in the distant past. In 1907 the architect Frederick Bligh Bond was appointed by the Church of England to take charge of the excavations at Glastonbury Abbey. What his employers did not know was that Bond was interested in spiritualism. Together with a friend named Bartlett, Bond attempted “automatic writing”, the aim being to learn where to start digging in the abbey grounds. When they asked about Glastonbury the pencil – which they were both holding – wrote: “All knowledge is eternal and is available to mental sympath
y”. And soon a communicator who signed himself Gulielmus Monachus – William the Monk – began giving extremely detailed instructions on where to excavate, and as a result Bond unearthed two chapels, each of precisely the dimensions given by William the Monk. Another “communicator”, Johannes, made the following interesting remark:
Why cling I to that which is not? It is I, and it is not I, butt parte of me which dwelleth in the past and is bound to that whych my carnal self loved and called “home” these many years. Yet I, Johannes, amm of many partes, and ye better parte doeth other things . . . only that part which remembereth clingeth like memory to what it seeth yet.
Bond’s downfall came when he wrote a book describing how he had obtained the information that had made his excavations so successful; the Church of England dismissed him. But the book, Gate of Remembrance, remains an astonishing proof that a twentieth-century mind can apparently attain some kind of direct access to the past. “All knowledge is eternal and is available to mental sympathy”. And the comments of Johannes seem to imply that a “parte of me which dwelleth in the past . . . clingeth like memory to what it seeth yet”. It seems, therefore, remotely possible that some “time slips” may involve contact with a mind “which dwelleth in the past”.
Many writers describing time slips mention an odd sense of “crossing a threshold”. When Miss Jourdain returned alone to Versailles a few months after her “adventure” with Miss Moberly she suddenly felt “as if I had crossed a line and was in a circle of influence”, and saw oddly dressed labourers in bright tunics. A girl named Louisa Hand told Joan Forman how, when she was a child, she had entered her grandmother’s cottage, and been puzzled to find herself in a place with older furniture. Thinking she had entered the wrong place, she went out to check, then went back in; still the room was different. But when she went in a third time things had returned to normal. She also mentioned the sensation of “crossing a threshold”, and of a feeling of silence associated with it.
It would seem, then, that the “psychometric” theory of Buchanan and Denton could account for the time-slip phenomenon. But this is far from the truth. It is also possible to “slip” the other way, into the future. Joan Forman cites the case of a teacher from Holt, Norfolk, who while involved in a “traffic contretemps” in the town noticed that a launderette that had been under construction was now finished and in use. He told his wife, who went there the next day with a bag of soiled laundry, and found that the place was still half-finished. The teacher had seen the shop as it would be in six weeks’ time.
Most of the cases of “future visions” cited in The Mask of Time are involved with dreams. In 1927 J.W. Dunne’s book An Experiment With Time, with its study of “precognitive dreams”, caused a sensation. Dunne described a number of occasions on which he had dreamt of events that he would read about later in the newspapers. T.C. Lethbridge later had much the same experience; he carefully observed his dreams, and noticed how often he dreamt of some trivial event of the next day; for example, he woke up dreaming of the face of a man he did not know; the face seemed to be enclosed in a kind of frame, and the man was making movements with his hands in the area of his chin, as if soaping his face prior to shaving. The next day, driving along a country road, he saw the face of the man of his dream; he was behind the windscreen of an oncoming car – the “frame” – and his hands were moving on the steering wheel, which was directly under his chin. Joan Forman cites many similar cases. All tend to have the same “trivial” quality, as if the glimpse of the future is some kind of freak accident. One schoolteacher, lying in bed with a high temperature, had an odd hallucination involving hedgehogs walking round the bedroom floor, and building a high nest with sticks and straw. Three months later he was packing ceramic figures made by his pottery class to take them to the kiln; he packed them in a kind of layered nest, with straw between the layers. Several ceramic hedgehogs were on the floor around his feet. Suddenly he recognized his hallucination. Just before he began the packing operation, he experienced a feeling of “a peculiar mechanical inevitability”.
An Oxford scientist, Michael Shallis, has written a book on the nature of time,25 in the course of which he mentions two of his own odd experiences of “prevision”. As a twelve-year-old boy he went into the house one day and called out to ask his mother what they were having for dinner. As he did so he experienced a feeling of déja vu, and knew that his mother would reply that they were having salad for dinner which she did.
This kind of “prevision” is fairly common. Joan Forman quotes a letter she received from a man who often knew with absolute certainty that a cricketer would be bowled out before the ball left the bowler’s hand; he comments that this often annoyed the batsman, who felt that he had somehow caused it. One explanation for such an ability might be some kind of unconscious “computer” that swiftly assessed the whole situation – the stance of the batsman, the skill of the bowler – and “saw” that the loss of the wicket was inevitable. But another experience cited by Shallis suggests that the problem is rather more complex than this.
A few years ago I was teaching a student physics in an upstairs lecture room. I had reached the part of the tutorial where we were discussing radioactive half lives and I was again swamped with the deja-vu feeling. I knew I was going to suggest that I needed to show him some examples from a certain book in my office and then go and collect it. I resisted saying this to him, but the feeling it had all happened before was strong. I was determined to break the pattern of the event. I turned to my student and asked him if we had done this work before, believing that he might be sharing the experience. He looked puzzled and replied no. I struggled to avoid continuing the experience. I resolved not to go and fetch the book. Having made that resolution I turned again to the student and said: “I think I had better show you some examples of these. I will just pop down to my room and get a book”. My awareness of the experience itself did not make it go away, even when I tried not to repeat its pre-set pattern.
There is an alarming implication in the words “repeat its pre-set pattern”. Is it possible that we do what we “have” to do, whether we want to or not, and that our sense of free will is a delusion? Shallis goes on to say:
There is an element of precognition itself in the experience, because the situation is so “familiar” that one knows what will happen next. It is different from precognition, however, in that it is familiar; one is in a sense reliving a part of one’s life, not predicting or sensing a remote event.
J.W. Dunne’s explanation for such experiences involves what he calls “serial time”. Basically, he is suggesting that there are several “times”. When we say “time flows”, it means we are measuring it against something. That something must be another kind of time, “time number two”. And this in turn could be measured against “time number three”. We also have several “selves”. Self number one is stuck in time number one; but we have another self which is not the physical body, which can rise above self number one and foresee the future.
In his book Man and Time, J.B. Priestley tells a story that seems to illustrate the difference between the two selves. A young mother dreamed that on a camping holiday she left her young son by the river while she went off to get the soap, and that when she came back he was drowned. On a camping holiday some time later she was about to go off and get the soap when she suddenly recognized the scene of her dream; so she tucked the baby under her arm before she went off to the tent . . .
The implication here is important. We do possess a degree of free will, but it is hard to exercise in the material world of “time number one”. It is like swimming against the current. Our human problem is not to remain stuck in “time number one”, the material world, with its repetitious futility, but to learn to spend as much time as possible in the mental world, the world of “time number two”.
Priestley argues that Dunne is making things unnecessarily complicated in arguing for an infinite number of selves; according to Priestley, there are
only three. Self number one is simply involved in living; it might say, for example: “I feel depressed.” Self number two says: “I know self number one is depressed.” Self three says: “I know self two knows self one is depressed. But then, self one is a self-indulgent idiot.” Self one experiences; self two is conscious of experience; self three passes judgment on the experience. Priestley gives an example; in a plane accident, self one was hurled out of his seat; self two knew there was about to be an accident. Self three thought: “Now I shall know what it’s like to be fried alive.” It “does not really care; it is as if it goes along with the other two just for the ride.”
This is perhaps one of the most interesting and important observations to arise from these speculations about the nature of time; the experience of what seems to be a “higher self”. In his important book A Drug-Taker’s Notes, R.H. Ward describes his experience under dental gas:
. . . I passed, after the first few inhalations of the gas, directly into a state of consciousness already far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary waking consciousness, and that I then passed progressively upwards . . . into finer and finer degrees of heightened awareness. But although one must write of it in terms of time, time had no place in the experience. In one sense it lasted far longer than the short period between inhaling the gas and “coming round”, lasted indeed for an eternity, and in another sense it took no time at all.
Ward’s observation here emphasizes that the nature of time is essentially mental. It might almost be said that the sense of time is produced by the stress between the physical world and the “higher self”, and that when this stress vanishes there is a sense of timelessness. The stress vanishes as a result of a withdrawal inward, as if towards another level of reality inside us, an inner world with its own reality. Ward says that when he later tried to recall the essence of his experience he found himself repeating “Within and within and within . . .” like a recurring decimal.