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The Size of the Impossible — Disasters, Prophecy, and Hindsight

[I]f we collect enough seemingly “anecdotal” or “anomalous” experiences from different times and places and place them together on a flat and fair comparative table, we can quickly see that these reports are neither anecdotal nor anomalous. We can see that they are actually common occurrences in the species.

— Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Super Natural (2015)

T housands of years ago, in what is now called Greenland, a gentle snow fell on a vast silent white desert, a bitter cold, and totally uninhabited plain. The ice crystals from that snowfall left a thin layer on the landscape and merged with it. Hour by hour, day by day, year by year, century by century, subsequent snowfalls fused with the ones underneath (as they had done for hundreds of thousands of years), building up the ice to a thickness of two miles in places. The enormous weight of the ice pressing downward forced it to extrude sideways, through the gaps in the mountain range that rings the land. One of these ice rivers is called Jakobshavn Ice-Fjord, on Greenland’s West coast, and it flows at a rate of about 65 feet a day, toward the cold gray arctic water of Baffin Bay.

Where Jakobshavn presses out into the sea, at low tide, the unsupported weight of the six-mile-wide, half-mile-thick glacier causes it to give birth—the process is called calving. Enormous mountains of ice crash into the roiling water, ponderously roll over, and then spend weeks, months, sometimes even years in a sort of traffic jam of their iceberg siblings before gradually drifting off into deeper waters. ¹ They slowly melt as they follow the currents carrying them counterclockwise around Baffin Bay, up past Ellesmere and Devon Islands, then south past Baffin Island. The larger ones make it farther, dying in the relatively warm waters of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream. ²

The year 1910 was a particularly good one for calving in Greenland because of a stretch of warm wet weather two years earlier. High snowfall in 1908, coupled with increased melting, weakened the glaciers structurally, leading to many more icebergs being birthed at the beginning of the century’s second decade. ³ One of the many icebergs that crashed into the water during low tide one day in the spring of 1910—made of snow that may have fallen as long ago as when the boy king Tutankhamun was reigning in Egypt—was big enough to survive the journey around Baffin Bay and south past the coast of Labrador and the Grand Banks of Newfoundland over the next 18 months.

Its journey was slow and lonely. Ships avoid those waters and the icy perils they contain, so only a few hardy humans, hunters from the arctic and Norway, had gazed on it; it was seen mainly by whales and seals and seabirds. But then in April, 1912 this still-massive predator—a couple million tons, but much smaller than it had been at birth two years earlier—drifted at its leisurely pace into the shipping lanes that linked Great Britain and the United States. At this point, its original underbelly, blackened from millennia of scraping across Greenland soil, was now uppermost, jutting about 90 feet into the air in a high central peak flanked by two smaller ones, almost like a great bat. At 11:40 PM on the night of April 14, this big black bat loomed out of the darkness a mile ahead of the biggest ocean liner in history, making its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York, via Cherbourg, France, with 2,224 souls aboard. The Titanic was then about 1,000 miles short of its destination, Manhattan.

The huge ship was moving fast, at an overly confident 22.5 knots, and when the lookout spotted the black shape dead ahead, the quartermaster was unable to swerve the ship’s massive bulk to avoid a collision. The crew watched horrified as the iceberg scraped across the starboard side of the hull. The vessel was so massive that few passengers even felt the collision, and those on the bridge who knew what had happened were initially optimistic. Systems like automatic electrically powered seals that partitioned the damaged compartments from the rest would keep this “unsinkable” ship afloat. But six of the ship’s sixteen compartments were rapidly filling with water, and gradually a grim reality set in: The ship was sinking. And due to a combination of hubris and just plain corner-cutting, the White Star Line, the company that had built this ship, had only provided enough lifeboats to save a third of the passengers.

The decorous pandemonium that ensued has been famously depicted in movies, from Roy Ward Baker’s 1958 A Night to Remember to James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic . The women and children who took to the available lifeboats, who watched the floating city up-end in the water and finally break in half, remembered vividly the screams of their husbands and fathers drowning in the water. What was more terrible was the sudden silence when the stern of the ship finally slid into the blackness, less than three hours after the collision, in the early morning hours of April 15.

You could hardly ask for a more definitive demonstration of Newtonian physics than the Titanic ’s fatal encounter with that iceberg. Objects travel well-understood, predictable paths through space dictated by their own inertia; when they collide, both objects are changed by the energy they bring to the encounter. What happened to the Titanic after the collision has been described in countless books and stories and movies, and the wreckage can still be seen on the ocean floor. The iceberg did not come out unscathed either. It was seen and photographed in subsequent days by ships searching the area for survivors. How it was damaged below the waterline is unknown, but above, it sported a great red stripe along its side, which you could imagine was a scar from its battle with the steel leviathan, or blood of the Titanic ’s passengers. Actually it was fresh red paint, applied in the Harland & Wolff shipyard of Belfast, Ireland, where the ship had been completed nearly a year earlier, and now carried off with the ice.

But those predictable paths through spacetime leading to that event were also predictably un predictable. The causal arrows leading to any event are, for practical purposes, infinite. In the vast cosmic ocean of causes and effects—particles intersecting with other particles and changing each other’s course—what counts as an “event” at all is purely arbitrary. We could tell the story of any individual snowflake in that multimillion-ton iceberg, the vast majority of them oblivious to the metal object it struck, just as we could tell the story of any rivet in the ship, or any passenger, or the story of any molecule of paint that was transferred from the latter object to the former over the minute they were in contact. That inconceivable multitude of bits of matter, their countless vectors, makes it impossible for anyone besides God—and probably even God—to have predicted the event or precisely how it would unfold.

Quantum physicists, who live in a world of delicate measuring instruments and fundamental particles of matter, call every physical interaction a “measurement.” You might say the Titanic performed a measurement of that iceberg. The New York Times ’ headline the next day, “TITANIC SINKS FOUR HOURS AFTER HITTING ICEBERG,” was the printed, published result.

But almost as if to thumb its nose at physicists and their measurements, a dense fog of “impossible” coincidence hovers over that resolutely Newtonian disaster, making it a perennial object lesson in studies of paranormal or psychic phenomena. A psychiatrist and parapsychological researcher named Ian Stevenson compiled 20 accounts of such coincidences in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in the early 1960s. ⁴ I will cite a handful of examples.

Ten days prior to the Titanic ’s departure from Southampton, an English businessman who had booked passage on it, Mr. J. Connon Middleton, slipped into a depression. Ordinarily he was not a person who remembered his dreams at all, but he awoke on the morning of March 30 and related to his wife a distressing dream that the ship he was going to be sailing on in ten days’ time was “floating on the sea, keel upwards and her passengers and crew swimming around her.” His mood darkened further when he had the exact same dream the following night. Not one to change his plans because of a dream or two, no matter how distressing, he simply allowed the matter to gnaw at him. So imagine his relief when he received a cable from his American associates suggesting he postpone his trip. It gave him the excuse he needed to cancel his booking … and saved his life. Friends testified later that he had told them of his dreams and his relief at not traveling on the Titanic , prior to the disaster. ⁵

In the early evening of April 14, the night of the collision, a Methodist minister in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Reverend Charles Morgan, was making a list of hymns to be sung at his service that night. He nodded off momentarily, and in the hypnagogic half-awake, half-dreaming state that, history shows, produces a remarkable number of creative epiphanies as well as perhaps glimpses of the future, the minister saw the number of a hymn from the hymnal in front of his eyes. The number, and the hymn, were unfamiliar to him, but he took it as a sign and added it to his list. Later, reading from their hymnals, the congregants sang “Hear, Father, While We Pray to Thee, for Those in Peril on the Sea.” They had no way of knowing that, at roughly the same time, thousands of miles away in the North Atlantic, passengers in the Titanic ’s second-class dining room were also singing this same hymn begging God’s protection for the souls of seafarers, at the request of one of the passengers, Reverend Ernest Carter. It was a weirdly portentous choice for both ministers, as this was still two hours before the Titanic ’s collision with the iceberg. ⁶

Later that same night, a Massachusetts woman named Clara Cook Potter awoke her husband, Baptist Minister Charles Francis Potter, to tell him of a vivid, terrifying dream. “I saw what seemed to be a high structure,” she said, “something like an elevated railroad. There were people hanging on the outside of it as if they were holding on by their hands to the top rail of a guard fence. Many of them were in their nightclothes, and they were gradually losing their hold and slipping down the inclined sides of this structure. I felt they were dropping to certain death.” The terror they felt, she said, was enough to jolt her awake. Days later, after news of the Titanic ’s sinking flooded the press and artists reconstructed the scene of the ship’s terrified passengers clinging to its tilting rails, Mrs. Potter reported that these depictions where exactly like what she had seen in her dream. ⁷

An anonymous member of a traveling acting troupe performing a comedy in a small Northern Illinois town reported to the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) that the troupe’s manager, Mr. Black, could only be roused from sleep with great difficulty on the morning of April 15. After his worried companions applied towels soaked in cold water to his face, he finally woke “with a wild look in his eyes,” and announced: “Folks, something terrible has happened! I saw a large ship sinking and hundreds of people being drowned. You will find it is true because I saw the San Francisco earthquake and fire this same way at the time it happened.” When the group arrived at the train depot to depart to their next town, the station agent said, “Folks, I just received word over the telegraph that the big ship Titanic , on her maiden voyage, hit an iceberg and sank, drowning hundreds of people.” Mr. Black reportedly told his troupe “I told you so,” but the witness said none of them ever mentioned another word to each other of the strange affair. (If the account is accurate, the station agent was misreporting the news or had mis-heard it. On the morning of the 15^th , it was being reported in the press only that the ship had hit an iceberg. Some reports even said it was being towed to Halifax, Nova Scotia.) ⁸

Some people reported peculiar visions related to relatives who had been working or traveling on the Titanic . A Vancouver woman, Mrs. Henderson, reported a strange waking dream two days after the Titanic ’s loss: a vision of her sister-in-law and niece, the wife and daughter of her brother Willie Simpson, who (she then thought) was working on another White Star liner. In a letter to her sister on April 19, she wrote: “I saw Bessie and Nina crying and clinging to one another. I seemed to be in a kind of dream and yet I was wide awake and had not even been thinking of them.” Henderson had no way of knowing when she wrote her letter that her brother Willie had been offered and accepted a job on the Titanic just before its departure and had perished. She only learned her brother’s fate (and the impact of the news on his family) after she sent her letter. ⁹

Several seeming prophecies centered on and/or issued from the pen of a distinguished English journalist and avid spiritualist, W. T. Stead, who unlike Mr. Middleton did not cancel his booking on the Titanic ’s maiden voyage despite several forewarnings. In the 1880s, as editor of The Pall Mall Gazette , Stead printed a fictional article about the death of many passengers of a doomed ocean liner, along with his editorial warning: “This is exactly what might take place, and what will take place, if liners are sent to sea short of boats.” It certainly could be chalked up to ordinary safety concerns; although in 1892, he wrote another story describing the fatal collision of an ocean liner with an iceberg, after which a sole passenger (the narrator) is rescued by another ship, the real White Star liner Majestic , captained by its real captain, Edward J. Smith. ¹⁰ Stead turned this story into a novel, From the Old World to the New , which was published the following year, in 1893. ¹¹ The real Captain Smith, nearly two decades later, became captain of the Titanic , and, of course, went down with his ship. In 1900, Stead also described a premonitory vision of his own death that may have corresponded to the reality in the early morning hours of April 15, 12 years later: “I had a vision of a mob, and this had made me feel that I shall not die in a way common to the most of us, but by violence, and one of many in a throng.” ¹² Two psychics Stead had been fond of consulting also reported to him premonitions of death or disaster at sea, although he ignored them. ¹³ (After Stead’s death, fellow spiritualists reported communicating with the dead journalist; his spirit allegedly informed one of them that he had asked the ship’s orchestra to play “Nearer My God to Thee,” but it is known that that tune was not played. It makes a nice story, though.)

Stead was not alone in writing about an ocean liner tragedy involving an iceberg. The most famous Titanic “prophecy” by far was a short novel published 14 years earlier, in 1898, by a then-popular sea adventure and science-fiction writer named Morgan Robertson. His novel Futility depicts the collision of a remarkably similar luxury liner called Titan with an iceberg. Robertson’s Titan was also making a run between England and New York (returning to England from New York, in the Titan ’s case), also striking an iceberg on its starboard side, around midnight on an April night in the North Atlantic, and with great loss of life due to an insufficiency of lifeboats. Like the Titanic , Robertson’s Titan had three propellers and two masts and was the largest ocean liner ever built. Whereas 1,520 people perished on the Titanic , all but 13 of the Titan ’s 3,000 passengers perished in Robertson’s story. Apart from their names and passenger capacities (the Titanic too could hold about 3,000 people), numerous details between the real and fictitious ships align closely:

	RMS Titanic	“Titan ” 14
Length	882.5 feet	800 feet
Water-tight compartments	16	19
Displacement	66,000 tons	45,000 tons
Gross tonnage	45,000	46,328
Horsepower	46,000	40,000
Lifeboats	20	24
Speed at impact	22.5 knots	25 knots

Because of its closeness in so many particulars, Robertson’s Futility is the best known of all disaster prophecies, and thus naturally the most debated. One writer, Jack W. Hannah, an Evangelical Christian attempting to prove that Robertson’s novel was “a piece of literature that contains a word of God,” calculated that the odds were one in four billion that the coincidences between Robertson’s story and the Titanic disaster could be due to chance. Revisiting the case in the early 1980s, psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud basically agreed that some sort of “paranormal foreknowledge” was likely involved but found enough flaws with Hannah’s statistics and reasoning that he lowered the odds to a more modest one in 1,024. ¹⁵ Skeptic Martin Gardner on the other hand, in a book compiling many uncanny predictions of the Titanic disaster in order to debunk ESP claims, argued that “There is no way to estimate, even crudely, the relevant probabilities.” ¹⁶

Gardner is right. There is no way of objectively calculating the likelihood or unlikelihood of a correspondence between a novel—or a dream, or a vision, or some other premonitory inkling—and a later historical event. Rare events are commonplace, and human beings are terrible at grasping this, runs the refrain of professional statisticians and psychologists in the face of paranormal claims. ¹⁷ Because of the “law of large numbers,” an impossible, once-in-a-lifetime event is probably happening to someone somewhere at any given time, and will likely happen to you too. And anything can be sliced and diced to yield startling coincidences. Gardner points out the following, by way of comparison to the Futility -Titanic case:

It seems incredible … that in Psalm 46 of the Bible the forty-sixth word is “shake” and the forty-sixth word from the end is “spear,” and that Shakespeare was 46 when the King James translation was completed. Taken in isolation, such coincidences seem paranormal. But we must realize that in a book as vast as the Bible the probability is high that some astounding word coincidences would occur. It is like finding a long run of consecutive digits in the endless decimal expansion of pi. ¹⁸

In addition to being unable to calculate the odds of oddities, we are also swayed in a million different directions by our biases. There are lots of them. The psychologists’ bias bestiary grows more massive by the year; at the time of this writing, Wikipedia’s “List of Cognitive Biases” page listed over 180. ¹⁹ Thus every claim of the paranormal is met with an eye-roll and a named bias to explain why your perception of the situation has been distorted by expectation or wishful thinking (confirmation bias ) or failure to take some factor into account in your reasoning. One of the most interesting and perilous, and one I shall be returning to again and again throughout this book, is hindsight bias—the distortion of our memory by later events, making past events seem predictable when they really weren’t. It has a close cousin, selection bias , or what is known in science as the “file drawer effect”—the tendency to discard data that don’t conform to our desires or expectations. These are related because hindsight is itself a kind of selection, a narrowing of the frame in which we view the past.

An event like the Titanic ’s sinking gives us new frames of reference, and after it happens, individual and cultural memory will suddenly discern specific chains of ordinary causation leading up to it that would otherwise have remained invisible or drowned out by noise—causal arrows emerging from the clouds of chaos. In this process of selection, hindsight will inevitably turn up some apparent anomalies, like sharks and dolphins caught in a tuna fisherman’s nets. According to the law of large numbers, in a universe of thousands of novels and stories, one or a few of them are bound to match the sinking of an ocean liner closely enough to seem “prophetic”—particularly when we extend our allowable timeframe out by years and decades, as we must in the case of Robertson’s Futility or especially W. T. Stead’s From the Old World to the New .

Gardner also shows that when you put the prophecies in context, at least some of the impossibility of the coincidence between Robertson’s novel and the Titanic disaster dwindles. The size, passenger complement, speed, etc. of the ship, for instance, were predictable. Any writer who knew anything about ocean liners would have extrapolated realistically from the existing ships of the White Star Line and other shipping firms of the day and arrived at a “biggest-ever ocean liner” more or less matching the Titanic’s stats. As we saw with journalist Stead, the fear of fatally hitting icebergs in the North Atlantic was a very real one at the time and for decades beforehand, having claimed countless smaller ships, and thus it was natural fodder for writers of sea yarns. Several novels and stories from the years prior to the Titanic ’s sinking used such collisions as plot devices. ²⁰ Those collisions commonly happened in the spring, so it was natural for Robertson to sink his Titan in April. And any writer wanting to inject the dramatic elements of hubris and corporate negligence into such a story might naturally give his ocean liner too few lifeboats. Here again, Robertson was not the only one to use this plot device. For Gardner, the fact that Robertson was not alone in writing a story with this premise weakened, rather than strengthened, the case for prophecy.

The coincidence of names, too, Gardner found less than compelling. He called attention to an obscure science-fiction novel called A 20^th Century Cinderella or $20,000 Reward , written just a couple years after Robertson’s Futility by an otherwise unknown writer named William Young Winthrop and set in the year 1920; the novel makes reference to an ocean liner called the Titanic , built (like the real Titanic ) by the White Star Line. It was published in 1902. “It seems to me entirely possible,” Gardner wrote, “that the White Star company, as early as 1898, when Robertson wrote his novel, had announced plans to construct the world’s largest ocean liner and to call it the Titanic .” ²¹ Gardner could provide no evidence for this notion, although he cited an 1892 news item from The New York Times about the White Star Line’s plan to build a huge ocean liner—similar in stature to the eventual Titanic —called the Gigantic (which was never actually built). “It seems clear now what happened,” Gardner wrote:

Knowing of plans for the Gigantic , Robertson modeled his ship on this proposed mammoth liner. After the use of such names as Oceanic, Teutonic, Majestic , and Gigantic , what appropriate name is left for such a giant liner except Titanic ? Not wishing to identify his doomed Titan with the White Star line, Robertson dripped the “ic” from the name. The White Star’s later choice of Titanic for its 1910 ship was almost inevitable. The company was surely aware of Robertson’s Titan , but perhaps did not mind adopting a similar name because it was firmly persuaded that its Titanic was absolutely unsinkable. ²²

This scenario makes a fine “just so” story to explain why Robertson might have named his fictional ocean liner Titan , but it is not actually based on any evidence, only an assemblage of individually plausible might-have-beens. Some degree of supposition is unavoidable when trying to make sense of the past—we never have all the data we’d like, so the available facts are always supplemented with “frog DNA” in our reconstructions of events (to use a metaphor from the movie Jurassic Park , where cloning dinosaurs from fragmentary genetic material was made possible using DNA of living animals). I too will be resorting to a little supposition in this book. But while sometimes fraudulent mediums, fortune tellers, and psychics have been exposed by detection of cheating, most “debunking” of alleged psychic or paranormal experiences reported by ordinary people only amounts to supplying some alternative explanation, one that typically invokes the fallibility of human perception, memory, and reasoning. It is up to the reader to assess whose story is really more reasonable or believable, the psychic claimant’s or the debunker’s.

Questions of precognition and other “paranormal” occurrences are certainly a quagmire—Gardner is absolutely right in this. If you don’t like quagmires, don’t read farther, because with the whole topic of precognition you are stepping in a very big one. But the skeptics are as easily made to look foolish flailing in this quagmire as the true believers are.

We will return to Morgan Robertson and Futility later in this book. There are more potentially precognitive dimensions to the novel than Gardner admitted and that even proponents of its “prophecy” have realized.

Touching the Slab

On the other hand, coincidences that may look outrageously uncanny at first glance do frequently have a way of evaporating on closer examination. Readers of my blog, The Nightshirt , shared with me a number of coincidences around the events of 9/11—an event with an even bigger halo of alleged paranormal events and premonitions than the Titanic disaster. One that stood out to me initially for its strangeness concerned the Millenium Hilton, a 55-story slab of dark glass built in 1992 immediately adjacent to the World Trade Center. It appears to have been consciously modeled by the architect Eli Attia on the enigmatic slab in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey . In the film, the slab first appears among starving man-apes on a savannah, subtly—psychically—giving them the idea of killing and enabling their evolutionary uplift. Millions of years later, on the way to the Moon, Haywood Floyd stops at the iconic double-ringed space station in orbit, which features a Hilton hotel, and then proceeds to the Moon, where he is shown a slab that has just been excavated in Tycho Crater. After the World Trade Center towers fell to the violent attack, photographs of the site, with the stark black slab-like Hilton Hotel now exposed in the background by the vast pit being cleared of rubble in the foreground, looked a lot like the second slab in the movie, rising from the lunar dust where it had been excavated, surrounded by floodlights.

This coincidence seemed “synchronistic” to some—as though some archetypal pattern having to do with violence and cosmic transitions imprinted itself on historical events. But zooming in on this case, the strangeness and even the coincidence quotient dwindles. The real year 2001 fast approaching naturally would have invited thoughts of Kubrick’s film to supply some design idea for the first hotel to be named for the millennium. ²³ And while the slab in the film is associated with violence (among other things), there is hardly anything unique about that—indeed, the violence committed by the hijackers on 9/11 was not really the kind of violence shown at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey , killing with some brand-new technology as part of our species’ cultural evolution or uplift. Moreover, violence of all kinds, literal and metaphorical, occurs on the streets of Manhattan, and in the offices above, all the time.

Pictures of the Millenium Hilton (the developer intentionally misspelled it with one n to make it more distinctive) looming above the ruins of the World Trade Center are still fun to look at side-by-side with stills from 2001 , but the more you pick this “synchronicity” apart, the more it mainly boils down to the coincidence of the year 2001 and a suggestive photo-op. Selecting a framing of a scene or an event to make it meaningful is precisely what photography—and cinema—is all about, after all. From an almost infinite number of angles, pictures of the Hilton after 9/11 do not seem meaningfully coincidental in the slightest. Photographers may even have been unconsciously or consciously guided by iconic images like those in 2001 when photographing the building with the rubble in the foreground. In short, what at first seems strangely coincidental quickly loses much of its uncanny grandeur, the “size of the impossible” when examined with a critical eye.

But the fact that in the infinite universe there will be myriad coincidences that only seem impossible, or meaningful, from a certain point of view is no kind of argument that our commonsense understanding of causality is complete, or that there aren’t real “synchronicities.” Who are skeptics to say that people might not sometimes be right when they detect the operation in their own lives, or in history, of some principle that has not yet been given mainstream psychology’s stamp of legitimacy, such as premonitions of future events? We know our understanding of physical reality is not complete—physicists are clear on that—and we will see in Part Two that new advances at the intersection of physics and biology are radically revising our understanding of living systems too. Among other things, they raise the possibility that the brain may have properties that could even be time-defying. Given the certainty that science is not finished and that new revolutions await us, is it reasonable to insist that there are no undiscovered realms of human capacity awaiting to be catalogued and investigated?

Consider another coincidence related to 9/11: a bronze 1999 sculpture by Jamaican-American artist Michael Richards, called Tar Baby vs St. Sebastian. It is one of a series of sculptures Richards created in the late 1990s in which he depicted himself as one of the Tuskegee Airmen—the African American aviators who distinguished themselves during and after World War II yet were still subject to segregation and racism. In Tar Baby , Richards depicts himself in bronze, standing rigidly erect (one might say tower-like) in an aviator’s suit and helmet, being pierced by numerous planes—similar to how the early Christian martyr St. Sebastian is depicted in countless Renaissance paintings, as a pincushion of arrows. The eerie detail here is that Richards died on 9/11 in his studio, which was on the 92^nd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, where he had spent the night.

Much has been made of this one seemingly prophetic sculpture. Does it add to the case for prophecy, or subtract from it, that aviation-related destruction and martyrdom were themes that had come to obsess the artist during the five years leading up to his death? His sculptures include many objects being impaled by planes, planes hitting bullseyes, and planes crashing to the ground. ²⁴ Two of his final pieces, according to friends who had visited his studio in the days before the disaster, were also of himself being impaled by planes, surrounded by fire and meteors. ²⁵ Another was of himself as a Tuskegee airman riding a meteor. ²⁶

The arguments of skeptics can be anticipated: Tar Baby vs St. Sebastian is one of billions of artworks created by Americans in the years leading up to 9/11, and one of perhaps thousands created in those years just by people who were killed in or who survived the disaster. Among them, we know of only one work in which a person (the artist) is “martyred” specifically by planes impaling his body. Thus (the argument would run), our focus on this one apparent correspondence to the terror attacks ignores the vast denominator, all the other artworks that never even entered into our calculations because they don’t seem relevant. Our desire to make sense of the traumatic event on 9/11 causes us to find meaning in this one uncanny and heartbreaking case and see Richards’ sculpture as somehow prophetic in hindsight.

But such arguments contain biases of their own, and in a way are just as arbitrary. No two people respond exactly alike to the same stimulus, and in fact many people around the world did produce artworks or write stories that seem uncannily prophetic in light of the events of 9/11. Issue #596 of The Adventures of Superman , released on September 12, 2001 (but obviously drawn and written sometime in the weeks preceding the disaster), shows the twin “LexCorp” towers smoldering after being attacked in a superhero conflict. The issue was promptly recalled by the publisher, DC Comics, making it now something of a collector’s item. ²⁷ In June, 2001, Oakland, California, hip hop artists The Coup created a cover for their upcoming CD Party Music showing the towers exploding; after 9/11, the CD release was delayed until the band could create a new cover. ²⁸ On March 4, 2001, the pilot episode of a spinoff of the X-Files called The Lone Gunmen centered on a government plot to hijack a jetliner by remote control and fly it into the World Trade Center. This seemingly too-prescient-to-be-coincidence episode supplied fodder for conspiracy theorists claiming that the government had foreknowledge of or planned the attacks. ²⁹ A quick Google search turns up many more artworks and pieces of cultural ephemera that seem to have anticipated 9/11 in one way or another.

And most people do not create art at all but respond to inspiration in different ways. For one thing, everybody engages in the nightly internal sculpture called dreaming. Dreams seemingly corresponding to some future event or upheaval in the dreamer’s life are probably the most common paranormal experiences (reported by 17-38 percent of people in surveys ³⁰ ). And as might be expected, many people reported dreams and other premonitions of the 9/11 events. The Rhine Center in Durham, North Carolina, which collects disaster premonitions, received more calls about dreams and other premonitions of 9/11 than any other disaster. ³¹ Again, a quick Google search turns up pages and pages of stories, including stories of people who perished in the attacks and whose loved ones recalled their doomed visions in dreams in the days and weeks before. ³²

Skeptics are particularly dismissive of claims of premonitory dreams, noting that in the vast majority of such cases, the dream has been recalled and recorded after the event it supposedly predicted. They can point to the well-established fact that memory is a malleable thing, easily selecting among its vast and ever-shifting contents to create apparent coincidences in hindsight. Dream memories are vague and fleeting in the best of circumstances, so alleged prophetic dreams are particularly suspect. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, a pioneer of false-memory research, writes: “One person may swear that the details of a tragic accident were forecast in his dream. Later, after an accident does occur, he checks his dream diary, he may discover that the emotion of the dream was unpleasant but the details only had a vague resemblance to the accident.” ³³ He may, true enough; but in fact, the opposite is very often true. ³⁴

There is, for instance, the case of a retired art professor named David Mandell in the London suburb of Sudbury Hill. A 2003 British TV documentary profiled Mandell and his astonishing record of seemingly precognitive dreams, which he depicts the next morning in drawings or watercolors and then photographs under the calendar clock at his local bank to provide a time stamp and forestall accusations of fakery or faulty memory. On September 11, 1996—five years to the day before the attacks in Manhattan—he reported awakening from a terrifying dream and sketched his vision of two tall towers crashing down in a disaster that he said felt to him like an earthquake. Six months later, he had the dream again, and painted it in watercolor—the towers in his painting are flanked by a shorter building with a pyramidal top. Nine months after that dream, he sketched a third dream in which two twin-engine planes crashed into a pair of buildings, from opposite directions. Mandell recalled feeling terrible shock, “shuddering and shaking,” on the day of the terror attacks in Manhattan when he saw the pictures on television, and how stunningly they matched his dreams. Revisiting his watercolor, it exactly matched the New York skyline with the burning towers flanked by the pyramid-topped American Express Building. Because of his method of date-stamping them with photographs at his bank, he was able to verify the coincidental date of the first dream as well. ³⁵

As common as they are, in our culture presentiments and premonitions are seldom shared publicly, because of those eye-rolling skeptics (and every family and workplace has one)—but they are the kinds of things people do sometimes share with partners or close friends. Private divulgences of such things in letters or journals are commonly uncovered by biographers, although as isolated occurrences they will carry little evidential weight. Recently, historian Jonathan W. White, researching a history of sleep, sleep deprivation, and dreams during the Civil War, stumbled on a rich trove: hundreds or thousands of premonitory dreams in letters between soldiers and their spouses, girlfriends, and mothers. While not having intended to write a book on psychic phenomena, White cites in his book Midnight in America numerous accurate (often sadly accurate) precognitive dreams by ordinary Americans during that incredibly uncertain and stressful period of American history. ³⁶ Such dreams, White argues, provided ordinary Americans with meaning in the face of overwhelming loss and fear, often confirming their belief in God or providence.

It is precisely that fact—that “prophecy” might give meaning and consolation in the face of trauma and a heartless universe—that fuels skeptics’ claims that people are simply biased; they want something like precognition to be real. That we are biased to find evidence for our preferred worldview is an argument that cuts both ways, though, as we will see. The fact that prophecies and premonitions are most often reported around traumas of one sort or another is no kind of argument against their existence. It only makes sense that some ability to pre-sense future events—if it exists—would orient us specifically toward meaningful upheavals, and experiences of death and loss are some of the most meaningful in our lives. ³⁷

Usually it takes some kind of public solicitation of premonitory dreams by researchers sympathetic to their mere possibility to elicit them in sufficient numbers that they can be examined as anything more than one-off occurrences. No modern discussion of the topic fails to consider the case of the tragedy that struck the small South Wales village of Aberfan on October 21, 1966. Just after the pupils at the village school had finished singing “All Things Bright and Beautiful” in the assembly hall and taken their seats in their respective classrooms, half a million tons of mine debris, piled on an adjacent mountainside and undermined by recent heavy rains, gave way and flowed into town, destroying the school. Rescuers were only able to pull out a handful of children alive. In all, 144 people were killed. ³⁸

Thinking that large numbers of people may have had premonitions of such a disaster, a paranormal investigator named John Barker solicited readers of the Evening Standard newspaper to report any dreams or visions they may have had before the event. The paper received 60 letters, most reporting premonitory dreams about trapped children, children being buried in coal, children dying in avalanches, and so on. One of the premonitions came (indirectly) from one of the victims of the disaster: The day before the event, a 10-year-old student at the school, Eryl Mai Jones, told her parents she dreamed that the school was gone because “something black had come down all over it.” In all, 24 of the letters included some kind of evidence of the premonition being recorded or told to someone before the disaster and thus could not be readily explained away as simple memory distortion.

Skeptic Richard Wiseman, in his book Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There , devotes a chapter to debunking prophetic dreams, including the many dreams of the Aberfan disaster. For instance, he notes that for several years before the disaster, local authorities had been worried about the danger posed by the mine debris piled on the hillside. Three years before the event, a local engineer wrote that residents of the village shared this apprehension. So, Wiseman writes, “it is possible that the young girl’s dream may have been reflecting these anxieties.” ³⁹ It is possible, certainly, but even if 10-year-old Eryl Jones was cognizant of the worries of grown-ups in her community, how would she have formed such a precise image of the mine debris destroying her school, specifically on the day before it did in fact happen? Unless the girl had similar dreams constantly—a possibility, certainly, but also a supposition—then Wiseman’s suggestion is rather desperate-sounding, and hardly convincing that this was “just chance.”

As for how so many people reported such dreams, Wiseman resorts to the law of large numbers argument. He estimates that, given 365 nights of dreaming, each year for an adult lifetime (15-75) of about 60 years, a given adult will experience 21,900 nights of dreams, and that he may dream of an event like the Aberfan disaster once in that time. Statistically, the chances of having that dream on the night before an event roughly matching it would be one in 22,000, he says. But given that there were 45 million people in Britain, all subject to the same odds, about 2,000 people in every generation would have the amazing experience of dreaming about an event like Aberfan closely before a real event like it. “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!’” ⁴⁰

But the question of the likelihood versus unlikelihood of a coincidence between a dream or an artwork and a supposedly predicted event, as Gardner put it in his book on the Titanic , is “not well formed” and can never be, for precisely the same reasons that the event was unpredictable in the first place: How do you isolate the relevant causal factors behind any event, or any two events that seem to coincide? Any calculation depends on how you define an event, how you draw lines around pieces of data, how much weight you attach to which causal arrows, decisions that in the end must be arbitrary or guided by your particular interests and biases. ⁴¹ Also, it is just as impossible to estimate the “rarity” of motifs in dreams as it is to estimate the rarity of events in real life. As a result, it is just as easy to use the law of large numbers to make the opposite argument from that of Wiseman. Writer Anthony Peake, countering Wiseman’s debunking of the Aberfan disaster dreams, offers the following calculation:

[L]et us assume that there is a million-to-one chance that when a person has a dream about a plane crash a plane crash happens the next day. There are seven billion people on this planet. Now, according to a researcher called Hines, each human being has around 250 ‘themes’ in any one night. … So, by extrapolation, that is 1,750,000,000,000 dream themes every night. Assuming our one-in-a-million chance that somewhere in the world a plane will crash after a person dreams of a plane crash, then up to 1.75 million people may experience such a clairvoyant dream. This is 1.75 million for every disaster that takes place [and] a minimum of 547 million people every year will experience an absolutely stunning precognitive dream that will come true the very next day. Strange how quiet they all are! We can all play with this law of large numbers … ⁴²

In cases like 9/11 or the Titanic or the Aberfan disaster, we must also remember that massive loss of life is in a sense its own file drawer, taking away a vast and highly relevant sample we can never consult. We’ll never know how many victims of the Titanic or people who were working in the World Trade Center or children in that Welsh school had dreams or premonitions of the disaster that they failed to report to anybody (or heed as warnings). Consequently, the n we are left with may only be a fraction of the total. History does not have a control group.

There is also a more basic problem, and that is that all these calculations rest on the prior presumption that dream contents are random. That has been the preferred position of many scientists over the past century, who have been as hostile to psychoanalytic and other interpretive approaches to dreaming as they are toward alleged psychic phenomena. But the idea that dreams are simply meaningless, random productions of the overactive brain is no longer borne out by the evidence of mainstream dream research, as we will see later. Even leaving aside the question of precognition in dreams, many researchers now would agree that dream content relates to an individual’s life experiences, possibly consisting of mnemonic associations to events in waking life. ⁴³ Dreams are not random images, in this view, but are meaningfully linked to the dreamer’s biography and priorities.

Consequently, any argued correspondence or non-correspondence of a dream motif to an actual rare event rests on establishing the rarity of that motif in the individual’s own dream life, not its rarity in the world of possible (random) dreams. Without knowing a great deal about the former, there is no way to calculate the “odds” of a particular idea or image showing up in an individual’s dreams, let alone in the dreams of any large sample of people. Wiseman estimates that people will dream of an event like Aberfan once in a lifetime; there is no basis to make such a claim. Some people dream of disasters nightly. But people being people, they are unlikely to keep extensive databases of their dreams. ⁴⁴ Even when dreamers do keep computer-searchable records, since dream elements are drawn from an individual’s life history, subjective judgment plays a huge role in any interpretation of dream content or any assessment of dreams’ correspondence to events, whether in the past or future; thus such assessments stand little chance of swaying someone who will only listen to a claim that can be supported with statistics. It is this fact—that the dreamer is an n of 1 and that dream significance cannot readily be quantified and replicated—that has hindered the experimental study of dream content for decades and has biased many researchers against meaning-centered dream theories of whatever sort.

Dreams lie on the unstable fault line between the objective and subjective. On one hand they are natural phenomena, probably reducible to physical processes in the brain; on the other hand, they have to do with meaning, which is ultimately the unique value of some image or symbol to an individual, based on his or her unique life experience. There may be no objective meaning in dreams, or objective way to assess their meaning. Thus, even if dreaming is every bit as natural and as biological as the process of digestion and its underlying processes can be studied scientifically, dream interpretation is largely beyond the pale of the methods used in science. It ought to be obvious that both approaches might be necessary and may even complement each other. Yet as we will see later, dream scientists have often been intolerant of hermeneutic approaches, to the detriment of making much progress toward understanding an extremely interesting, probably functionally crucial activity that humans spend about ten percent of their lives engaged in.

* * *

Time itself is another subject, not unrelated to dreams, whose notorious two-facedness has polarized thinkers for a century. On April 6, 1922, the physicist Albert Einstein, who insisted time was an objective, purely measurable, scientifically knowable framework, squared off at the Société française de philosophie in Paris with the philosopher Henri Bergson, who insisted that time was something rich in subjective meaning and could not be reduced to spatial terms (as Einstein’s relativity theory implied). ⁴⁵ The event left intellectuals across Europe and America profoundly divided. It would be silly, in hindsight, to say that only one of these geniuses was right and the other wrong. They simply approached a profound problem from two very different avenues, both of which may be equally valuable and important. A decade and a half after this debate, F. Scott Fitzgerald observed in Esquire magazine that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” ⁴⁶ Some never seem to get Fitzgerald’s memo, unfortunately.

Academic disciplines that find themselves straddling the fault line between objective science and interpretation because they study the meaning-oriented behavior of human beings historically face unique difficulties, and often end up divisively fractured as a result. Psychology, which has long been polarized between an experimental/scientific mindset and the intuitive clinical approaches originally pioneered in Victorian Europe, is the clearest example, but there are others. My own graduate training was in anthropology, a field similarly riven between a more objective and materialist orientation and a more interpretive/hermeneutic pole. The most interesting thinkers in these fields—the “first-rate intelligences”—have been the ones best able to “flicker” between alternative perspectives on the same problem, paying attention to the objective and subjective while recognizing that neither can be collapsed into the other.

Precognition, as a time- and dream-bound phenomenon, firmly straddles the fault line between the objective and subjective. I will be arguing on one hand that it is probably a neurobiological function related to memory, and thus we can expect a physical, material explanation in years or decades to come (in Part Two, I sketch what such an explanation might look like in its broad contours). But like a person’s memory, precognition is highly personal and centers on personally meaningful experiences. Thus, except for its defiance of the usual causal order, precognition is little different from anything else in a person’s biography—it needs to be understood within a life context and is subject to the same hermeneutic methods that are familiar to psychoanalysts and literary critics and philosophers. The tools of both the sciences and the humanities must be brought to bear, and neither should be favored over the other. The best we can do is flicker from one perspective to the other.

Larger, Wilder, Stranger

Wiseman, like most skeptics, repeats the argument that people believe in precognitive dreams and premonitions because they want something like prophecy to be real, that it confirms some preferred view of the world. Here he is certainly right. But he omits mentioning that the same thing is true for skeptics. The playwright J. B. Priestley, in a 1964 book on precognition and related questions called Man & Time , acknowledges that we cannot help but be biased in one direction or the other: “either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we wish to cut it down or to build it up.” ⁴⁷ Many parapsychologists and other writers on the subject of precognition, who may likely fall in the “larger, wilder, stranger” camp, are susceptible to confirmation bias, but skeptics are just as commonly driven by conservatism bias, an unwillingness to consider new data. The bias-accusation game, like the “law of large numbers” game, is one that can be played by both sides.

And while it is easy for skeptics like Wiseman to shoot down any one “impossible” anecdote with a volley of familiar biases and errors, divide and conquer must be seen for what it is: A wish to cut the affront down to size by isolating individual cases and making them seem like one-offs. ⁴⁸ The file-drawer effect, too, cuts both ways. Compelling but “impossible” coincidences, dreams, premonitions, and so on are experienced by many, many people around many life events, and those who actually report them publicly or tell them to researchers represent only a tiny fraction of a larger unknown N . Most do not feel safe to divulge such experiences, given the stigma against the impossible that persists in our culture.

The notion that people ought to be announcing their precognitive dreams from the rooftops whenever they have them, and that they must be the rare product of erroneous thinking since they are publicly disclosed so infrequently, runs exactly counter to the reality of human conformism. When most people in our culture do experience what they think could be a prophetic dream, they will tend to disbelieve it. Because social norms so powerfully inhibit sharing such dreams, there is no ready stock of public examples to validate one’s individual experience, thus the denial and skepticism are self-perpetuating. Cognitive dissonance is likely to boot the anomalous datum right out of awareness or memory. Martin Gardner claims that “there is a curious type of person, anxious to gain recognition in a community” ⁴⁹ by falsely claiming to have predicted some event like the Titanic in a dream. But the opposite “type,” the conformist deeply fearful of being stigmatized as a kook and thus unlikely to notice let alone share anomalies, is surely far more prevalent. ⁵⁰

Priestley solicited viewers of a BBC television program called Monitor to send him their own accounts of precognition and premonition to be included in his book. He was overwhelmed at the response, writing that he stopped counting after 1,000; the total (according to a later researcher) was in the ballpark of 1,500 ⁵¹ and included several hundred precognitive dream accounts. One thing that became clear from this enormous pile of correspondence was how taboo the whole subject was regarded, at least in mid-1960s Britain, and what barriers letter-writers had experienced against according their experience much, or any, validity. “Women especially, often mentioning scoffing ‘down-to-earth’ husbands, confessed their eagerness to write to somebody who might believe them.” ⁵² The gender breakdown of acceptance versus non-acceptance of anomalous experience may have shifted slightly in the past half century, but the basic division between “down to earth” skepticism and open-mindedness on such questions probably has not.

Certain vocal skeptics notwithstanding, this invalidation is generally much subtler than even the kind of condescension Priestley’s female letter-writers reported getting from their husbands. What he found even more interesting and significant than overt resistance to the idea of precognitive dreaming was the more common experience of what might be called “simple ignoral”:

in most instances, when a dream had been told to husbands or (less often) wives or other members of the family or friends or workmates, and this dream had come true, these other people might marvel for a little while but always left it at that. The prevailing notion of Time was not then challenged. Our contemporary idea of ourselves was not questioned. Something odd had happened, that was all; it could not be fitted into the accepted pattern, so it was ignored. ⁵³

People who experience anomalies like a dream that “comes true” afterward will tend not to shout it from the rooftops; they will sweep the experience under the rug, just remain silent, or feel obliged to accept an alternative framing of their experience. Those alternative framings may come from skeptical authorities like no-nonsense spouses and doctors or from writers of books like Why People Believe Weird Things ⁵⁴ (by skeptic Michael Shermer, who clearly never heard of the benefits of believing six impossible things before breakfast) or books with subtitles like Why People See Things that Aren’t There (i.e., Paranormality , by Wiseman). ⁵⁵ Science is not finished—it is never finished—so can we really consider what is and isn’t there a settled matter?

Throughout history, there has been one diplomat who can shuttle across the divide between the objective science of causes and the subjective study of meanings and barter a truce between the disputants. That diplomat is reason —in the old-school sense, the kind of thing that prepostmodern philosophers still debated but that seems somehow quaint in our day. Since even the most reasoned skeptics like Martin Gardner admit there is no way to even approach the problem solely with numbers and statistics, all sides in the debate must supplement their arguments with appeals to this arbiter. How reasonable is the “it’s just coincidence” argument in any particular case, or the bulk of the cases, versus some other explanation more in line with the existence of something like precognition? This book will present many examples that will appear more or less persuasive, depending on your point of view. There are no smoking guns, but for very interesting reasons having to do with the nature of time and information, there cannot be smoking guns. This is why I find the topic so fascinating: Precognition operates in the shadow realm of uncertainty. Some things that look very much like precognition may indeed be just coincidence, and there is no way to know for sure. By the same token, I will show that many examples of likely bona fide precognition have been hiding in plain sight, for instance in psychoanalysts’ clinical writings, yet have been overlooked because they have been given alternative, less causally offensive—but also less parsimonious and I think less believable—theoretical framings.

To provide reasonable (if not strictly scientific) proof of precognition’s reality, one could do no better than cite a modern case recently brought to light by Rice University historian of religions Jeffrey J. Kripal. He has done more than perhaps any other scholar in our time to legitimize psychic phenomena and the paranormal (he prefers the less pejorative term “super natural” ⁵⁶ ) not only as valid topics for academic inquiry but also as things that are just plain real—even if we do not yet have an adequate understanding of how they work. His recent case is a Houston woman named Elizabeth Krohn, who began experiencing frequent and distressing dreams after surviving a lightning strike in the parking lot of her synagogue in 1988. ⁵⁷ Often these dreams corresponded to imminent plane crashes or other disasters reported in the news, and she learned to authenticate them by recording them in emails to herself, providing a time and date stamp and a kind of electronic paper trail. For example, on January 15, 2009, at 2:57 PM, Israel time—this occurred during a trip to Jerusalem—Krohn awoke from an afternoon nap and emailed herself the following dream:

MID-SIZE COMMERCIAL PASSENGER JET (80-150 PEOPLE) CRASHES IN NYC. MAYBE IN RIVER. NOT CONTINENTAL AIRLINES. NOT AMERICAN AIRLINES.

IT IS AN AMERICAN CARRIER LIKE SOUTHWEST OR US AIRWAYS. ⁵⁸

Her husband, who had been napping by her side, remembered that she told him that the passengers seemed to be standing on the wing of the plane , even though this detail seemed absurd to both of them at the time. Six and a half hours later, at 8:57 Eastern time in the United States, US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing in the Hudson River after it struck a flock of Canada geese and lost engine power. Thanks to the expert piloting of its captain, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, all 155 passengers survived. Memorable photos that appeared in the news around the world showed the plane floating in the water with its lucky passengers spread out along both wings, awaiting rescue by nearby boats.

On February 2, 2015, at 5:52:15 AM, Central time, Krohn emailed herself the following:

PASSENGER PLANE WITH PROPELLERS. PLANE IS WHITE. FOREIGN AIRLINE—MAYBE ASIAN. CRASHES IN A BIG METROPOLITAN CITY RIGHT AFTER TAKEOFF. RIGHT WING OF PLANE IS POINTED STRAIGHT UP RIGHT BEFORE CRASHING. MOST ON BOARD KILLED, BUT SOME SURVIVORS.

Sent from my iPad ⁵⁹

A day and a half later, on February 4, TransAsia Airways Flight 235 crashed in the Keelung River near Taipei, Taiwan, right after takeoff; 43 were killed but there were 15 survivors. Crucially, a driver’s dashboard video camera captured the crash and shows the right wing of the plane, propeller prominently visible, pointed straight up as it crossed over the highway ahead of the car, exactly matching Krohn’s description of her dream. Like the pictures of the survivors of the Hudson River emergency landing, the dashboard camera video of Flight 235 was widely shown in the media and went viral on the internet.

I will state my own position plainly (lest it is unclear): In both of Krohn’s stunning dreams (and several others cited in the book she and Kripal co-wrote, Changed in a Flash ), claims of “mere coincidence” or the kind of “law of large numbers” calculations a skeptic like Wiseman might supply simply fail most any test of reasonableness. These dreams, like those painted by Mandell, were not reported by random members of the public as once-in-a-lifetime occurrences. They were part of a pattern in the life of an individual who had begun to notice dreams corresponding to imminent news events and did her best to record and authenticate them, at least to allay her own doubts that something extraordinary and inexplicable was occurring in her life. Moreover, that pattern happens to perfectly support a coherent and counterintuitive theory about precognitive dreams and other prophetic phenomena that an aeronautical engineer named J. W. Dunne adumbrated in a remarkable 1927 book called An Experiment with Time , which we will examine in the next chapter.

The theory, briefly, is that precognition is not a matter of seeing or knowing objective events in some generalized future time but is the accessing of knowledge a person will acquire in his or her own future, often directly related to some rewarding or troubling learning experience ahead. Although Krohn’s dreams will typically be described as “premonitions of plane crashes,” she was, as Kripal points out, clearly dreaming about her future experience of seeing news stories about those crashes, not the events as such. It is a crucial distinction. In fact, the idea that dreams focus intimately, or one might even say “myopically,” on our own future experiences and the thoughts and feelings they provoke—not on events per se—is one thing that helps move the topic of precognition out of the murky realm of the “occult” or “supernatural” and into the realm of physical plausibility. It very much suggests an embodied, brain-based origin for these phenomena; they seem to be linked to memory and to meaning-making processes that have been studied in psychology and related fields for well over a century.

Cognitive biases and human clumsiness with statistics do often make people see illusory faces in the clouds of causality—that much is undeniable. But it also must be underscored that no one has ever actually shown that biases explain purported precognitive dreams. Nor can such arguments disprove the existence of “prophetic” artworks such as Robertson’s Futility or Richards’ Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian . In every case, skeptics can only cite the possibilities of bias and memory distortion as more or less plausible alternative explanations, easing the minds of those troubled by the idea of information flowing from the future to the past. In the end, reason must be the arbiter of any particular case. Did Morgan Robertson actually receive some kind of paranormal foreknowledge of the Titanic disaster and weave it into his novel Futility in 1898? Were Mr. Middleton’s dreams of the Titanic sinking just coincidences, or false memories confabulated after the disaster? There is no way of knowing for sure. No one case can offer definitive proof, for reasons that will be addressed at length. But one of my hopes in the next few chapters is to show that that idea—that information from the future “refluxes” to influence us in the present—is actually a very reasonable one, having increasing scientific support and plausibility.