8

Sometimes a Causal Arrow Isn’t Just a Causal Arrow — Oedipus, Freud, and the Repression of Prophecy

Of all the frameworks in which the need to magically manipulate time can be discerned, the oedipal situation stands in a class by itself. The fixed, irreversible generation gap separating mother from son, father from daughter, becomes the symbol of all that is cruel and unalterable about fate .

— Jule Eisenbud, Paranormal Foreknowledge (1982)

T he thin membrane of the present, which seals off the knowable past from a future that by definition isn’t knowable (yet), is one of our most important conceptual boundaries. The anthropologist Mary Douglas showed in her classic 1966 study Purity and Danger that objects and phenomena that violate conceptual boundaries are not only distasteful but are even regarded as threatening. ¹ Life-giving soil from out-of-doors (Nature), for instance, becomes dirt when tracked into the home (Culture), and especially neurotic souls may devote their lives to abolishing the latter. The ancient Hebrews regarded pigs as unclean because they had hooves, like ungulates, yet did not chew a cud—another category violation, around which a whole, notoriously fussy system of dietary regulations (the Book of Leviticus) was constructed. But every culture has such rules, and such fussiness, about its categories. And the rules governing where our knowledge comes from—or epistemology—matter as much to us as the rules governing what we can put on our plates.

Any kind of retrocausation or precognition throws an epistemology founded totally on memory and inference into disarray, a bit like tracking the dirt of the future into the clean home of the present. (Boundary crossing, or liminality , characterizes most paranormal phenomena, in fact. ² ) Consequently, skeptics who have not really looked at the evidence for precognition, who assume (because they do not know better) that physics regards it as impossible, or who feel especially threatened by epistemic violations, are quick to ridicule or ostracize those who try to fairly consider the topic. While there are good reasons to be skeptical of unusual or extraordinary claims, purely closed-minded reactions may have everything to do with deep-seated taboos about things that penetrate other things in a culturally non-sanctioned fashion.

I’m speaking delicately here. We are about to dive headlong into the interesting messes time loops make of our lives, as well as into our strange psychodynamic investments in linear causality. We will see that heightened expression of precognitive ability is sometimes weirdly entangled with transgressions of sex, gender, and desire. It may be no accident that the shrill reactions of skeptics to ESP are so similar to the shrill reactions of cultural conservatives to alternative sexual practices and identities. Personalities who take comfort in a neat, orderly, well-defined world are bound to be threatened by causal arrows that pierce time in the wrong direction, or information that leaks in ways it shouldn’t. But the fact is, causality, like Nature herself, is not tidy. It does not obey our personal preferences, however fussy and prudish they may be.

No story better displays the entanglement of sexual taboos and retrocausation than Sophocles’ Oedipus the King , the great tragedy about a royal heir who brings a curse on his city because he has accidentally usurped his father’s throne and married his own mother (oops!). How is this about retrocausation? The ancients reckoned historical time through generations—the ever-forward-moving structure of marriage and reproduction and royal succession. Kinship and kingship were for the Greeks more or less equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics for us: inexorable and irreversible, moving in a single direction, never flowing backwards, and always basically getting worse. Thus, Sophocles’ tragedy is really about a kind of time travel and the kind of calamity that could result from upsetting the usual causal order. You might say Sophocles was ancient Greece’s Ray Bradbury (or Philip K. Dick).

Although the play itself centers on Oedipus’s downfall, the prophetic backstory would have been well-known to Sophocles’ audience, since it was based on an older myth. An oracle had warned King Laius of Thebes that he must not have a son, or he would die by his son’s hand and his son would marry his wife. So, when his wife Jocasta gave birth to a boy, he ordered her to kill the baby. Unable to do the deed herself, the queen had a servant take the infant to the wilderness and stake him out on the ground to die of exposure. Of course, when you delegate a grim task like that, it always fails, and in this case the infant was found by a shepherd and adopted and raised by the King of Corinth. And like father, like son: When the Delphic oracle prophesied that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother, the young man fled from the city where he grew up, Corinth, to make sure no harm came to his parents. He didn’t know they weren’t his real parents and that Corinth wasn’t his real hometown. In a chance encounter at a crossroads, Oedipus killed Laius, not knowing who the guy was, and then answered a Sphinx’s riddle to become king of Thebes … and husband of his real mother, Jocasta.

The Greeks were way ahead of us in grasping that prophetic foresight is allowable and even expected in the tragic (read: thermodynamic) universe—it just needs to be oblique, and to operate in the shadows of our self-ignorance. And it inevitably produces what I have called time loops as a result. The fact that Oedipus’s transgression was prophesied and that he fulfilled the prophecy precisely by trying to evade it makes the events of the story a causal tautology. Tautologies are the ultimate no-nos for pedantic gatekeepers of classical logic—you don’t support a premise by appealing to the conclusion you’ve drawn from it. But this offense in the world of term papers and rhetoric is the opposite of the grandfather paradox that stands in the way of people seriously considering precognition. As I’ve argued previously, there is no rule that says we need to allow self-defeating prophecies in our picture of precognition. The common assumption that people could (and would) “use” precognitive information to create an alternative future flies in the face of the way precognition seems to work in the real world. It is largely unconscious (thus evades our “free will”), and it is oblique and invariably misrecognized or misinterpreted until after events have made sense of it. Laius and his son both fulfill the dark prophecies about them in their attempts to evade what was foretold; their attempts backfire precisely because of things they don’t know (Laius, that his wife failed to kill his son, as ordered; Oedipus, that his adopted family in Corinth was not his real family). The Greeks called these obliquely foreseen outcomes, unavoidable because of our self-ignorance, our fate .

Any mention of Oedipus naturally calls to mind Sigmund Freud, whom I am recruiting as a kind of ambivalent guide in my examination of the time-looping structure of human fate. Making a central place for Freud in a book on precognition may perplex readers given (a) his reputed disinterest in psychic phenomena, and (b) the fact that psychological science long since tossed psychoanalysis and its founder into the dustbin. In fact, (a) is a myth, as we’ll see, and (b) partly reflects the “unreason” of psychological science around questions of meaning. Although deeply flawed and occasionally off-the-mark, the psychoanalytic tradition—including numerous course-corrections by later thinkers who tweaked and nuanced Freud’s core insights—represents a sincere and sustained effort to bring the objective and subjective into suspension, to include the knower in the known without reducing either pole to the other.

More to the point, it was Freud, more than probably any other thinker of the modern age, who took seriously and mapped precisely the forms of self-deception and self-ignorance that make precognition possible in a post-selected universe. The obliquity of the unconscious—the rules Freud assigned to what he called “primary process” thinking—reflect the associative and indirect way in which information from the future has to reach us. We couldn’t just appear to ourselves bearing explicit messages from the future; those messages can only be obscure, hinting, and rich in metaphor, more like a game of charades, and they will almost always lack a clear origin—like unsigned postcards or letters with no return address. Their import, or their meaning, will never be fully grasped, or will be wrongly interpreted, until events come to pass that reveal how the experiencer, perhaps inadvertently, fulfilled the premonition. It may be no coincidence that Freud’s theory maps so well onto an understanding of precognition if the unconscious is really, as I suggested, something like consciousness displaced in time. It so happens that Freud’s clinical writings are full of likely “Dunne dreams” as well as other precognitive anomalies that have gone largely or totally unnoticed for over a century because he was so successful at reframing these occurrences in other, less causally repugnant terms.

I called Freud an ambivalent guide. Freud was open to paranormal phenomena, but he strictly rejected the possibility of precognition. Some seemingly precognitive phenomena he explained away as false memory—still the standard resort of modern skeptics—and some he explained by attributing extraordinary but not physically unthinkable sensory and inferential abilities to the unconscious. When those explanations wouldn’t work, Freud appealed to the psychical (but still non-time-defying) mainstay, telepathy. I suggest that all of these tactics were ways to deny, evade, or just paper over a possibility that was deeply threatening to him: that our fate may not be written in our past—the basic premise of his entire theory of human nature—so much as in our future.

What adds an even more fascinating dimension to this is that Freud himself shows striking evidence of having been a “precog,” foreseeing/foretelling some of the most significant moments in his later life in his dreams and neurotic symptoms. Thus, we cannot mine psychoanalysis for guidance in exploring precognition and time loops without simultaneously examining and deconstructing Freud’s own defenses against—or you might say repression of —the whole possibility of information refluxing from our future. Repression of prophecy was intrinsic to Freud’s own “Oedipus complex” and is a side of one of the most influential men of the 20^th century that has gone largely unexamined.

The Medallion

Oedipus the King was Freud’s favorite ancient drama long before psychoanalysis or the mysteries of infantile sexuality were even glimmers in his eye. When he was a medical student at the University of Vienna, the young Freud would stroll among the busts of great scholars who had taught at the institution and fantasize that his own bust would one day be among them, inscribed with a line from Sophocles’ tragedy: “Who divined the famed riddle and was a man most mighty.” Even as a young man, Freud had tremendous ambition and a sense of his own greatness.

Over three decades later, in 1906, on the occasion of his 50^th birthday, the increasingly well-known explorer of human self-ignorance was presented with a medallion by a small group of his Viennese followers. On one side it showed his face in profile; on the other, it showed Oedipus standing before the Sphinx and was inscribed with that exact line from Sophocles … even though the honoree had never told anyone of the quote’s significance to him.

Freud’s friend and official biographer, the English Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, recorded that when the father of psychoanalysis read the inscription, he “became pale and agitated and in a strangled voice demanded to know who had thought of it. He behaved as if he had encountered a revenant …” ³

Peter J. Rudnytsky, reflecting on the importance of that moment for Freud, writes that “Freud’s loss of composure upon being honored by his followers is attributable to the blurring of the boundary between inner and outer worlds, as fantasy unexpectedly becomes reality.” ⁴ Standard psychoanalytic thinking holds that our desires for success are linked with early childhood ideas of taking the father’s place, which are retained in the unconscious like ancient bugs trapped in amber. Like Oedipus himself, Freud unexpectedly got the forbidden thing he had wished for—or was well on the way to getting it—and he suddenly felt great trepidation at the realization. The cost of getting our deepest wishes is punishment for our crimes: for a boy, castration; for a man, death. ⁵ A man’s 50^th birthday is never really a happy milestone anyway; it merely highlights the inevitability of aging and mortality. As a student, he had wished for fame and honor like those inscribed busts, but now, did he really want to be a dead man memorialized by the living?

The possibility that Freud’s youthful “fantasy” had really been a premonition, and that realizing that fact is what really threatened Freud so deeply at his birthday celebration, is never even suggested by Freud scholars, because Freud himself effectively banished any whiff of prophecy from psychoanalysis. When he homed in on the Oedipus story and elevated it to the key archetype of the human psyche in his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams , it was enough for him that children fall in love with their opposite-sex parent, feel jealous of their same-sex parent, and never quite resolve these feelings. He consciously disregarded the fact that Oedipus’s killing his father had been prophesied and that it was precisely in trying to avoid fulfilling the prophecy that the Theban prince did end up committing those acts. Freud assured his readers that it was only the universality of the incestuous desires depicted in Sophocles’ tragedy that made the work so enduring. Myriad other ancient stories about fate and the prophecies it makes possible have been forgotten, he asserted, because they just offend our modern, less superstitious sensibilities. ⁶

In a brief paper called “A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled” written in 1899, the same year J. W. Dunne dreamed about his stopped watch in a Sussex hotel room, ⁷ Freud devoted his considerable forensic intellect to debunking an ostensibly precognitive dream of one of his female patients, “Frau B.” Her dream was a typical Dunne dream, but pretty vanilla stuff. This “estimable woman who moreover possesses a critical sense” told Dr. Freud that she once, years earlier, dreamed she encountered her old family doctor and friend, “Dr. K.,” in a specific spot (“in the Kärntnerstrasse in front of Hiess’s shop”), and the next day she ran into Herr K. at the precise spot she had dreamed. ⁸

It was convenient for Freud that the alleged incident had happened well in the past, that Frau B. had not written down her dream, and that she said she had not actually recalled having the dream until after she had her real-life encounter with Dr. K. Treating her notion that she’d had a premonitory dream instead as a fantasy, Freud delved into the patient’s past for a psychoanalytic reason, a “justification,” for confabulating her dream-memory after her encounter with Dr. K. It was easy for him to come up with a plausible-enough story—at least, if you accept the sometimes-Byzantine inner-world soap operas that characterize Freudian interpretations.

It turned out that 25 years before this event, when pining for a gentleman with whom Frau B. had been having an extramarital affair—also coincidentally a “Dr. K.”—the object of her secret affections paid her a visit at her home, and this at the time seemed to her uncannily coincidental. (Freud correctly remarks here that the fact that she was always thinking of the man, and that he was always visiting her, made it inevitable that one of his visits would coincide with her thoughts of him; “accidents which seem preconcerted like this are to be found in every love story.”) Fast-forward to the time of the dream, when the now-twice-widowed Frau B. was able to see her still-paramour Dr. K. openly. Based on the past history, Freud argued that his patient’s encounter with the other Dr. K. on the street triggered a fantasy that she had already dreamed about it , and that this effectively masked a wish related to her lover. Freud needed a lot of “frog DNA” to justify his reframing. “Let us suppose,” he writes,

that during the few days before the dream she had been expecting a visit from [Dr. K.], but that this had not taken place—he was no longer so pressing as he used to be. She may then have quite well had a nostalgic dream one night which took her back to the old days. Her dream was probably of a rendez-vous at the time of her love affair, and the chain of her dream-thoughts carried her back to the occasion when, without any pre-arrangement, he had come in at the very moment at which she had been longing for him. She probably had dreams of this kind quite often now; they were a part of the belated punishment with which a woman pays for her youthful cruelty. ⁹

Frau B. then ran into the other Dr. K, whom “we may suppose … had been used in her thoughts, and perhaps in her dreams as well, as a screen figure behind which she concealed the better-loved figure of the other Dr. K.” ¹⁰ This would have jogged a vague memory of the nostalgic dream Freud supposed she really had had, which was then mostly forgotten. Since the present situation (a “rendez-vous”) was similar to that supposed real dream, she substituted the present Dr. K., and the place where she ran into him, in place of the other Dr. K. and their romantic dream-rendezvous.

“Let us suppose … She must have … She may have … ” As a spokesman for the unconscious, Dr. Freud spun a nice just-so story, one that is supported by nothing Frau B. actually told him about her dream. It is a tapestry of supposition, not unlike Martin Gardner’s “explanation” of how Morgan Robertson might have come by the name Titan for his fictional doomed ocean liner. Nevertheless, Freud writes that Frau B. “was obliged to accept [his] account of what happened, which seems to me more plausible, without raising any objection to it.“ ¹¹ He concludes, confidently, that “the creation of a dream after the event, which alone makes prophetic dreams possible, is nothing other than a form of censoring, thanks to which the dream is able to make its way through into consciousness.” ¹²

Are Freud’s strained “must haves” and “probablys” really more plausible than the far simpler notion that Frau B. did in fact dream of Dr. K. the night before she met him, just as she reported?

Collecting the Bricks

Freud’s objection to the possibility that Frau B.’s dream was really precognitive was not out of a rejection of psychical mechanisms operative in human life. Over the course of his career he became increasingly open to other “occult” phenomena like telepathy (or what he called “ thought transference”). But in 1899, the familiar folkloric notion that people sometimes have prophetic dreams could only be an unwelcome gnat, distracting attention from his bold new theory that all dreams, whatever their surface appearance, are really disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes , often wishes of a sexual nature. It did not occur to Freud, in 1899 or ever, that dreams could both show us our wishes and show us the future, or that they could even do the one in service of the other. It did not occur to him, for example, that Frau B.’s wish to encounter her lover might have primed her to precognize running into his namesake in the street on the night before it happened.

Dunne was well aware of Freud’s theories about dreams, and unlike Freud he saw no conflict between the wish-fulfillment theory and the idea that dreams can also predict the future. In fact, it seemed plain to him that dreams may reach into the future for the props and characters and stage sets to create tableaux that serve whatever purpose dreams serve, as much as they reach into our past.

Many people, I hear, suppose that there is some clash between serialism and the ‘wish-fulfillment’ theory of dreams. There is none. ‘Wish-fulfillment’ theories are concerned with explaining why the dreamer builds a particular dream edifice: I am interested in the quite different question of whence he collects the bricks. ¹³

A famous dream that opens Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams is a concise and heartbreaking example of the wish-fulfillment idea, and perhaps because of that, no one seems to notice that it was also a very typical Dunne dream about an alarming discovery in the dreamer’s imminent future:

A father had been watching beside his child’s sickbed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them. ¹⁴

Freud argued—sensibly, as far as it goes—that the dream enabled the father to continue sleeping for a few precious seconds with this dream image of his beloved child rather than make him rise immediately to put out the fire that had started in the next room:

The dead child behaved in the dream like a living one: he himself warned his father, came to his bed, and caught him by the arm, just as he had probably done on the occasion from the memory of which the first part of the child’s words in the dream were derived. For the sake of the fulfillment of this wish the father prolonged his sleep by one moment. The dream was preferred to a waking reflection because it was able to show the child as once more alive. If the father had woken up first and then made the inference that led him to go into the next room, he would, as it were, have shortened his child’s life by that moment of time. ¹⁵

But when we ignore the precognitive possibility, other aspects of the dream become hard to explain. If dreams are wish fulfillments that help us prolong sleep, as Freud contended, what actually woke the sleeping man, catapulting him back into the terrible reality of his grief and a fire he needed to put out? This dream has proven a favorite headscratcher for Freud’s later commentators, and among the mysteries is how exactly the man’s sleeping mind “knew” what was happening in the next room. Even assuming he was able to tell there was a fire (i.e., perhaps from glare detected through his shut eyelids or a subtle smell of cloth burning), how would his unconscious have determined that it was his child’s sleeve that had caught fire and not something else in the room? Why did the smell of smoke not wake the man sitting watch right next to the child, if it was able to wake the father? We are simply to accept from Freud’s account that the grieving father’s super-sensitive and superintelligent unconscious drew a remarkably correct inference based on sense data received while asleep in another room.

The unconscious has been regarded since Freud, and even before, as far more sensitive than our conscious mind; it somehow “knows” more and can infer more from available information. In his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , Freud deployed the super-abilities of the unconscious to explain away many familiar superstitions and the kinds of meaningful coincidences Jung later called “synchronicity,” such as the familiar experience of thinking about some random person just before running into them. For instance, Freud reports having had a sudden fantasy, while walking along a Vienna street, about a couple who had rejected his services for their daughter months earlier—the fantasy was that they would now respect his authority since he had just been named Professor. Just then he heard himself addressed, “Good day to you, Professor!” It was the very couple he had just been thinking of, coming down the street. To explain this coincidence, Freud supposes that he had looked up to the street ahead just before his fantasy and unconsciously recognized their approach but blotted out the conscious awareness through “negative hallucination” while his mind could prepare his little wish-scene—analogous to the notion that the sleeping father’s mind preferred to remain with the fantasy of his son for a few seconds rather than respond to a fire in the next room. ¹⁶ Again, his explanation substitutes a rather elaborate and convoluted cognitive mechanism for the more parsimonious idea that he simply “pre-sensed” an encounter with the couple just before it happened. Freud’s explanation has the advantage, however, that it does not fly in the face of our commonsense understanding of causal order.

The super-sensitivity of the unconscious was not original to Freud. By the time he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams , Victorian psychiatrists had long been wrestling with the paradoxically enhanced perception, memory, and intelligence sometimes displayed by hysterics when under hypnosis and, especially, displayed by hysterical patients with secondary, split-off personalities (a common symptom seen in the last quarter of the 19^th century, an early form of what is today called multiple personality disorder). ¹⁷ Interestingly, psychical researchers of the day played an important role in the evolving psychiatric and psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious mind as super-sensitive and, in its own way, superintelligent. Like hypnotized hysterics, spiritualist mediums in their self-induced trances were often able to access seemingly impossible information, even when trickery was ruled out through careful observation. It was explained that their subliminal sensitivities were so acute that they could “read” a sitter and extract cues that appeared to most witnesses like accessing information from some occult source. ¹⁸ Already in 1886, Charles Richet had proposed the existence of an unconscious part of the intellect sequestered from conscious awareness, and he made his proposal specifically in the context of providing a physiological explanation for table turning and other feats of spiritualists. Because unconscious thoughts and muscle movements originate outside of conscious awareness, he argued, they feel alien and are readily interpreted as originating with spirits or other entities. ¹⁹

The unconscious, as an “other” inside, is, when you think about it, really a very “occult” idea. Freud’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” ²⁰ naturally invited a suspicious rationalist skepticism in return. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, could not abide an unconscious formation in the psyche. To him, it smacked of bad faith , inauthenticity, the failure to take responsibility for our actions. For instance, he pointed out the contradiction inherent in the idea of a “censor” in the mind that could be aware enough of what it was censoring to form a judgment yet also be completely alien to our conscious experience. The “resistance” that impedes patients from developing self-insight implies a similar non-aware awareness: “the patient shows defiance, refuses to speak, gives fantastic accounts of his dreams, sometimes even removes himself completely from the psychoanalytic treatment. It is a fair question to ask what part of himself can resist.” ²¹ There is no unconscious, Sartre argued, just the avoidance of responsibility.

Claims of an unconscious mind that could only be explored through a highly subjective process of interpretation also offended the philosopher of science Karl Popper, one of Freud’s harshest critics. How would you test claims about an unconscious? Psychoanalysis is not a science, Popper contended, not only because its claims cannot be falsified but also because the clinical situation, with suggestible patients in a kind of trance-like thrall to their doctor, is an echo chamber—a machine for producing evidence in support of its premises (the usual meaning of “self-fulfilling prophecy”). ²²

Although 20^th -century psychological science and neuroscience rejected Freud (and ignored Freud’s contemporaries in psychical research), it ultimately came around to embracing some notion of an unconscious—or what came to be called “implicit processing”—as a domain of cognitive functioning that is hypersensitive to subliminal signals and much quicker at making inferences and judgments than the conscious mind. Abundant experimental evidence shows implicit processing’s overriding dominance over anything like conscious will. A large school of thought, much of it inspired by Benjamin Libet’s work described in the preceding chapter, holds that we are mere spectators of our lives and that conscious will is an illusion, a kind of overlay. If the unconscious was for Freud the submerged majority of the iceberg, for some contemporary cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, it is all submerged—the tip is a mirage. We are unaware of the bulk of what seems to occur in our heads—there is thinking, sensing, and feeling that is not thought, sensed, or felt, and our non-experience of this huge domain is much more than a matter of bad faith (although there is that also). As with Freud’s unconscious, you can only probe the implicit domain indirectly, obliquely, via tools and paradigms such as priming tasks, like the ones Daryl Bem inverted in some of his “feeling the future” experiments.

The super-abilities of memory are another problematic, even paradoxical inheritance of Victorian psychology. In 1900, the French psychiatrist Theodore Flournoy coined the term cryptomnesia to describe the ability of the mind to retain intact, and in detail, information that a person may have even briefly encountered earlier in life. ²³ A medium Flournoy worked with named Hélène Smith claimed to travel to Mars during her trances and even wrote in the Martian language; it became clear to Flournoy that much of what Smith said about the Red Planet came from material she had read in popular books about Mars when she was a child (and that “Martian” was strangely similar to French). It was central to Freud’s theory too that everything we experience in our lives, even in our early childhoods, remains preserved whole and intact in our memory. He wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, for instance, that “in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish.” ²⁴

Even if the unconscious is no longer scientific no-man’s land, the idea of a memory that preserves all our experiences has been firmly and roundly debunked by a century of solid research. Memory is extremely fragmentary, and it is constantly morphing and shifting. Little or nothing from the first few years of life is preserved, and even later “memories” are mostly constructs or fictions. Yet strangely, scientist-skeptics like Martin Gardner will nevertheless unhesitatingly invoke something like cryptomnesia when it suits them to debunk ostensible psychic claims—a paradoxical and untenable, “bad faith” position. Since any notion of precognition or presentiment is scientifically heretical, though, such a mechanism is seldom proposed to help resolve questions of how people know things they shouldn’t be able to, even on the stigmatized fringes (“para-“) of psychology. But reconceiving the unconscious as the way behavior and experience are perturbed or shaped by future conscious experience has greater parsimony than the orthodox Freudian picture, or even the picture painted by some mainstream neuroscience and psychology. For one thing, it would unburden the unconscious of needing to be so “super.” Much of the extraordinary sensitivity and inferential ability of the unconscious (or the sleeping brain), as described by Victorian psychiatry and as assumed in today’s behavior and brain sciences, would simply be an illusion produced by our nonawareness of the brain’s ability to be influenced by its future states and to draw on its processing power over larger swathes of time.

For instance, in the “father can’t you see I’m burning” example, we could simply say that the grieving patient was awakened by a Dunne dream—one that fulfilled a wish, to be sure, that his son was still alive—but that also alerted him to a situation he was about to discover in the next room: that his child’s sleeve had caught fire. Although the occasion was far sadder, this dream is in other respects very similar to Dunne’s dream of his stopped watch. The very common experience of elaborately plotted dreams that culminate in an event corresponding to some sudden noise or shock that wakes the dreamer—and thus seem “temporally impossible” (because the whole “plot” of the dream is built around that terminal event)—would be examples of the same “presponding” to imminent shocks. ²⁵ We would no longer need to posit some kind of retroactive memory distortion, as has always been assumed to be operative, along with all the other convolutions Freud invoked. The dreaming brain would simply be feeling its future.

Although it can only be a hypothesis until it is tested, some of the knee-jerk inhibitions against taking such an idea seriously are easily dispensed with. One is that it remains hard not to think of precognition as somehow difficult or strenuous—perhaps like climbing up some impossibly steep temporal or thermodynamic hill. To someone trying to grapple with the mind-bending implications of retrocausation, “computing over the brain’s timeline” will seem vaguely like a big “ask” of an already overwhelmingly busy organ. But if precognition is based on anything like the quantum biological mechanisms proposed in the last chapter, it should not be thought of as something added to our cognitive load but as something basic to its functioning. In fact, precognition, as something like James Carpenter’s “first sight,” ²⁶ would really make things easier on the brain than the effortful picture painted by Newtonian cognitive psychology, with its superpowers of implicit processing and the like. Rapid, instinctive predictive processing, for instance, would seemingly be hugely resource-demanding if that processing is limited to the present moment; drawing on wider temporal swathes of brain activity, and post-selecting on optimal outcomes ahead, would simplify things. Similarly, how much of our resource-intensive memory “storage” might instead be the ongoing ability to orient toward needed information our experience is soon to supply? It would enhance our picture of ecological cognition, the offloading of cognitive tasks onto our physical, social, and cultural environment. At this point, there is no telling where mundane memory, inference, and other basic psychological processes end and precognition begins—again, it remains for future researchers to examine the question with an open mind and design experiments to test this hypothesis. But precognition would allow the mind to be “flatter,” not deeper, than in most other psychological frameworks. ²⁷

The bottom line is: Let us not confuse how difficult precognition is to wrap our heads around with how difficult the brain actually finds accomplishing it. If it is at all within the nervous system’s capabilities, there’s no reason not to think that it might be the easiest thing in the world, and maybe even the very basis for our spontaneous, improvisational, yet amazingly successful (most of the time) engagement with reality.

Mister Foresight

Freud is sometimes simplistically contrasted with Carl Jung as a resolute skeptic on matters psychical. This was not the case. Although he was cautious of writing publicly about these topics lest it taint the reputation of psychoanalysis in its early years, he privately was curious and open-minded about occult phenomena his whole life. He was aware of superstitions of his own and was even fond of quoting Shakespeare’s “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (from Hamlet ) to his more skeptical friends. In the 1910s, Freud attended séances with a somewhat open mind. Much to the horror of his skeptical friend Ernest Jones, Freud engaged in telepathy experiments with his daughter Anna and the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, the results of which persuaded him that there was a “kernel of truth” to the phenomenon described three decades earlier by Frederic Myers, the ability of people to transmit and receive thoughts. ²⁸ And throughout his career, he also could not fail to observe coincidences in his patients’ dreams and symptoms that were unexplainable even through the super-functioning of the unconscious as he had described it in his earlier writings.

In the 1920s, when Freud felt more secure about the status of his new psychiatric approach, he felt safer to reflect on these topics in public than he had earlier, and did so in a handful of papers and lectures. ²⁹ In a 1932 piece called “Dreams and Occultism,” he described several cases of apparent telepathy—or what he called “thought transference”—in his patients. ³⁰ One concerns an “obviously intelligent man … not in the least ‘inclined toward occultism’” ³¹ who wrote to him that he dreamed on the night of November 16-17 that his wife had given birth to twins. In reality, his wife (his second) was not pregnant and the patient had no intention or desire of having children with her, finding her unsuitable for raising children; the couple no longer had sexual relations, in fact. But a day later, on the 18^th , the man received a telegram informing him that his daughter, who lived in another city, had given birth to twins on the same night he had had his dream. He had known she was pregnant but also knew she was not due to give birth for another month. So it seemed to Freud a case of possible dream telepathy. What clinched it was the man’s feelings for the two women who seem conflated in the dream:

I feel sure, ladies and gentlemen, that you have been able to explain this dream already and understand too why I have told it to you. Here was a man who was dissatisfied with his second wife and who would prefer his wife to be like the daughter of his first marriage. The ‘like’ dropped out, of course, so far as the unconscious was concerned. And now the telepathic message arrived during the night to say that his daughter had given birth to twins. The dream-work took control of the news, allowed the unconscious wish to operate on it—the wish that he could put his daughter in the place of his second wife—and thus arose the puzzling manifest dream, which disguised the wish and distorted the message. We must admit that it is only the interpretation of the dream that has shown us that it was a telepathic one; psychoanalysis has revealed a telepathic event which we should not otherwise have discovered. ³²

Freud notes that his patient merely thought his dream’s correspondence to the news of his daughter’s delivery was coincidental—he did not suspect that it was a telepathic dream. But Freud says this man would not have been surprised to find it was telepathic. He was devoted to this daughter, and he even felt certain she “would have thought particularly of him during her labour.” ³³ We have no evidence of how Freud’s patient reacted to the news of his daughter’s delivery, but there is no reason not to think this was in fact a precognitive dream of getting the telegram announcing the birth, rather than a telepathic message sent across space by his daughter—a daughter who her father liked to think was thinking only of her dad during the pains of giving birth. (The man clearly needed Freud’s help.)

Another, even more striking case described in the same piece concerns a male patient in his forties, identified as “Herr P,” who had been seeing Freud on a temporary basis in the summer of 1919 to address unspecified sexual difficulties. ³⁴ The men shared a mutual interest in things English, including English literature, and this served as a touchstone in their conversations. Late in the summer, P. lent Freud a copy of a new book in John Galsworthy’s series of stories collectively known as The Forsyte Saga , which Freud enjoyed and they discussed. A few days later, Freud was visited in the morning for the first time by an eminent London psychiatrist, Dr. David Forsyth, freshly arrived from England to begin a period of training in psychoanalytic technique. P. did not yet know anything about Forsyth or his visit, but it was a high priority for Freud, who was eager to spread his technique to England. In fact, it was partly Dr. Forsyth’s training that would require Freud to terminate his analysis of P. soon thereafter. His patient then arrived at 10:45 for his session, during which he discussed his inhibitions about sex with a woman he was courting, who was a virgin. Freud writes,

He had often talked of her before but that day he told me for the first time that, though of course she had no notion of the true grounds of his impediment, she used to call him ‘Herr von Vorsicht’ [Mr. Foresight]. ³⁵ I was struck by this information; Dr. Forsyth’s visiting card lay beside me, and I showed it to him. ³⁶

Freud then provides background on his and his patient’s shared literary interests and the Galsworthy novel P. had just shared with him. Then Freud explains:

Now the name ‘Forsyte’ in these novels differs little from that of my visitor ‘Forsyth’ and, as pronounced by a German, the two can scarcely be distinguished; and there is an English word with a meaning—‘foresight’—which we should also pronounce in the same way and which would be translated ‘Voraussicht’ or ‘Vorsicht’. Thus P. had in fact selected from his personal concerns the very name with which I was occupied at the same time as a result of an occurrence of which he was unaware. ³⁷

Freud then adds two other previous coincidences in P.’s therapy, which also centered on visiting Englishpersons, and proceeds to unpack the psychoanalytic meaning of his patient’s uncannily timed disclosure. Freud had warned P. at the outset that the analysis would have to terminate when his regular patients returned to Vienna in the aftermath of the First World War and foreign students (like Dr. Forsyth) arrived, but P. naturally felt jealous, owing to the transference , the powerful and possessive attachment a patient may develop toward the doctor (the latter having been put in the role of a parent or other important figure in the patient’s life). Freud interprets P.’s coincidental mention of being called “Mr. Foresight” by his girlfriend as a message addressed to him by P.’s unconscious:

The remarkable fact was that he brought the name into the analysis unheralded, only the briefest time after it had become significant to me in another sense owing to a new event—the London doctor’s arrival. But the manner in which the name emerged in his analytic session is perhaps not less interesting than the fact itself. He did not say, for instance: ‘The name “Forsyte”, out of the novels you are familiar with, has just occurred to me.’ He was able, without any conscious relation to that source, to weave the name into his own experiences and to produce it thence—a thing that might have happened long before but had not happened till then. What he did say now was: ‘I’m a Forsyth too: that’s what the girl calls me.’ It is hard to mistake the mixture of jealous demand and melancholy self-deprecation which finds its expression in this remark. We shall not be going astray if we complete it in some such way as this: ‘It’s mortifying to me that your thoughts should be so intensely occupied with this new arrival. Do come back to me; after all I’m a Forsyth too—though it’s true I’m only a Herr von Vorsicht [gentleman of foresight], as the girl says.’ And thereupon his train of thought, passing along the associative threads of the element ‘English’ went back to two earlier events, which were able to stir up the same feelings of jealousy. ³⁸

Here, the unwillingness and/or inability to countenance real prophetic foresight prevented Freud from seeing what might have been obvious to J. W. Dunne: the fact that just after P. made his utterance, Freud expressed surprise and showed him Dr. Forsyth’s calling card. In other words, rather than telepathically mucking about in his doctor’s Forsyth-obsessed brain, P. could just as easily have been “pre-sponding” to that imminent rewarding (but also unsettling) disclosure and reaction by his doctor. ³⁹ Dunne’s friend J. B. Priestley would have called this a clear instance of the future-influencing-present effect. Had Freud omitted this little, crucial detail, it might have been hard to deconstruct his thought-transference argument, and indeed most case descriptions of ostensible telepathy (or clairvoyance for that matter) leave such details out. Writers on these topics think it is enough to state whether or not a psychic subject correctly produced veridical information without clarifying how the psychic found out he or she was correct. I am arguing that the latter element of feedback is the crucial piece of the story.

Interpreting P.’s case in terms of precognition has the advantage of making sense of his whole prior history of book-lending to Freud, which preceded Dr. Forsyth’s visit and Dr. Freud’s preoccupation with the Englishman. ⁴⁰ We might indeed call all of P.’s behavior leading up to the divulgence of Dr. Forsyth’s calling card a kind of precognitive symptom taking the form of a time loop. Freud would not have shown P. Dr. Forsyth’s card (or expressed gratifying amazement at the coincidence) had P. not spoken of being called “Mr. Foresight.”

One wonders whether P.’s girlfriend gave him the nickname “Mr. Foresight” because he had some kind of natural precognitive habit. There is no way of knowing, as Freud provides no other information about this patient. But Freud’s omission of any mention of the meaning of the nickname is telling. The girl did not call him “Herr von Telepathie,” after all. Herr P.—or at least, his unconscious—was announcing quite loudly the psychical modality that was operative, but Freud ignored this, reframing the events to better suit his theory.

The “No” of Father Time

Like the Theban King he so identified with, Freud was blind to prophecy—even tragically so, as we will see in the next chapter. But the clinical setting has also provided other, more open-minded psychotherapists with ample evidence of psychic functioning on the part of their patients, including ample evidence of precognition. ⁴¹

No Freudian psychoanalyst has considered the question of precognition and its role in psychotherapy more fully than Jule Eisenbud, who keenly noted in his 1982 book Paranormal Foreknowledge that the two issues Freud was so intent to keep segregated—the precognitive habit and Oedipal sexual issues—actually go hand in hand. Eisenbud argued that whatever else they do, episodes of precognition, such as a precognitive dream, fulfill a wish to transgress time; for some of his patients, this need to defeat time was distinctly related to a wish to cross the generation gap. Securing some vision of the future provided, by implication, an ability to surmount that generational barrier—which constitutes, he wrote, a “symbol of all that is cruel and unalterable about fate.” ⁴²

Note that the man “untainted by the occult” who dreamed of his wife giving birth to twins a day before his beloved daughter did that very thing precisely fits such a template. There is also an interesting Oedipal dimension to the “Mr. Foresight” story, not explicitly elaborated by Freud but readily inferred from the details he gives us. A classic symptom of unresolved Oedipal issues is falling in love with or marrying partners very different in age—in either direction. ⁴³ From the fact of Herr P.’s age (“between forty and fifty”) and the fact that the “pretty, piquant, penniless girl” he wanted to sleep with but couldn’t was a virgin, there was most likely a sizeable age gap between them. And we can infer that P.’s problem (since the girl was a virgin) was his own impotence. Reluctance to deflower a virgin was a common sexual inhibition back then, and it was no doubt coupled in this case with guilt, some fear of being punished for “robbing the cradle.” Did his precognitive behavior represent a gambit to transgress time but also circumvent the inhibition wrought by his guilt?

The Oedipal predicament is not only an incestuous sexual wish but also an expectation of punishment in retaliation for this wish. Consequently, those with unresolved “Oedipus complexes” elicit inhibition from their world, like a castrating father always lurking over them and their achievements. This alerts us to an added, and very important, Oedipal implication in the Herr P. episode, in connection to his nickname and its similarity to that of the arriving English doctor. Forsyth/Foresight is here, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would later put it, the “name of the father.” The arrival of “Mister Foresight’s” namesake Dr. Forsyth was like the arrival of the father which, in this case, was specifically and literally going to “cut short” the patient’s treatment (treatment that might have enabled his sexual relations to proceed, had it continued), and thus is every bit like the arrival of the castrating father to punish or at least say “no” to the child’s Oedipal wishes.

In French, le nom du pere , “name of the father” sounds just like le non du pere , “the no of the father,” a pun obviously lost in translation. Resolution of the Oedipal phase of development, according to Lacanian thinking, entails internalizing this “no” as part of identification with one’s surname, the otherwise arbitrary signifier that establishes one’s identity or place in the system of cultural symbols he called the Symbolic order. While on the one hand acceptance of this “no” buys us normative mental health, the relatively neurosis-free life, it also tends to inhibit us from even imagining anything other than ordinary, billiard-ball causality. By submitting to the rules of language, we submit ourselves also to its (linear) grammar. By the same token, failure to fully identify with one’s name (and the limiting refusal it entails) is tantamount to coming unstuck in the linear-causal signifying chain of language, thus in some at least figurative sense, unstuck in time. In short, you might even say that the expression of precognition reflects an active, unresolved Oedipus complex, while denial of precognition represents the “healthy,” non-neurotic internalization of, or identification with, the phallic-patriarchal Symbolic order.

Given this, isn’t it interesting that the ultimate argument generally deployed against the existence of precognition by skeptical guardians of Enlightenment rationalism is the famous grandfather paradox—effectively, a variant of the Oedipus myth that emphasizes how impossible it is to transgress time because it would mean negating in some fashion one’s own forefathers?

Consider the following case of one of Eisenbud’s patients—a typical Dunne dream in which the man seems to have precognized a comic strip he was about to read in his newspaper:

A patient dreams that he is shooting arrows with or at a childhood playmate in a scene reminiscent of his childhood. His father is present. The only affect experienced by the dreamer is a sense of frustration because his aim is not accurate and he cannot control his shots.

On the following day the patient is surprised to see that a character in one of the comic strips he is in the habit of reading insures the accuracy of his aim by shooting an arrow and afterward painting the target circles around the spot where it had struck to give the impression that the shot had been a bull’s-eye. ⁴⁴

Like other precognitive dreams, this one fractally involves a “time gimmick” in the form of the comic itself—Johnny Hart’s then-popular strip B.C. :

The precognitive effect in this instance is suggested not only by the patient coming upon such a specifically fitting resolution for his dream situation after the dream but also by the very format of the element in question. The comic strip, titled B.C. , itself suggests the idea of a time gimmick, dealing as it does with the often anachronistic doings of a prehistoric people. It suggests that Time and the past, which to the patient represent threatening memories from his childhood, are only comic situations which, insofar as they are subject to this kind of re-creation and revision, are not real or really dangerous. ⁴⁵

In other words, the time gimmick, as well as the very precognitive “format” of the dream, enable the dreamer to retroactively defeat the Oedipal “phallic inhibition” that is so beautifully represented right in the dream: being unable to hit a target with an arrow when in the presence of his dad. The comic strip expresses the patient’s Oedipal wish: By being “before” in time, the man is able to redefine his sloppy shooting post hoc yet also before the whole psychosexual saga. Put simply, a way to “kill the father” is to be on the scene before him.

The Oedipus complex, it is becoming clear, is the flip side of the coin of the grandfather paradox. The implied threat that transgressing the causal/temporal order will negate/annihilate the would-be Oedipus is the threat hanging over his head, the “no” that “cuts off” any speculation about foresight. But as I argued earlier in this book, the grandfather paradox is really an empty scarecrow. There is nothing requiring retrocausation to lead to a self-cancelling paradox; in fact, paradoxes are prevented by physical law. ⁴⁶ As the Greeks knew, all prophecies are self-fulfilling. They operate outside of conscious awareness (in other words, “in the unconscious”), and thus we only become aware of a prophecy when the prophesied event has come to pass. Precognition and other forms of “time travel,” and thoughts of the grandfather paradox that they invite, are perhaps ways of fulfilling that wish of eliminating competition with the father, the ultimate way of having one’s cake and eating it too. Even by calling that scarecrow the “grandfather paradox,” we miss the target by one generation, overshooting into the past the real aim, which is the safe elimination of the father while still existing.

An arrow, of course, is not only a standard phallic symbol; it is also our most basic cultural symbol of causality. The above example from Eisenbud expresses recursively, within itself, the doubts about causality and coincidence that hover over all precognitive dream reports. Drawing a bullseye around wherever one’s arrow happens to hit is precisely the selection bias accusation that is used to “shoot down” (so to speak) most psi claims; it was the precise metaphor used by Richard Wiseman to debunk the Aberfan dreams (Chapter 1), for instance. ⁴⁷ It is also the number-one criticism that will be aimed at many of the dreams and other ostensibly prophetic phenomena discussed in this book, and not without some justification. Precognition is only visible in hindsight, since it must be confirmed as such by events. Thus, in many cases it is very hard to distinguish it from simple hindsight bias, the adjustment of our perception of the past based on new data.

But the dreaded coin (or medallion) of hindsight has a welcome flip side: It is the same thing as post-selection , the very principle that allows time travel—including time-traveling information—to exist without producing causality-offending paradoxes. Post-selection just means we live in a possible universe, the only possible universe, and again reflects a kind of causal-informational Darwinism. The only information that “survives” being sent into the past is information that does not contribute to its own foreclosure in the future. For instance, you are never going to have a completely accurate and clear dream about a future outcome you would or could intercede to prevent. It’s not necessarily that the causality police will swoop down in their flying saucers to stop you ( although Igor Novikov’s self-consistency principle and quantum-mechanical theories of closed-timelike curves do predict that improbable events may occur to prevent paradoxes ⁴⁸ ). It’s mainly that, from a future vantage point farther along your world-line in the block universe, it didn’t happen . No amount of searching in hindsight will find spent causal arrows for an impossible event. Thus all “prophecies” can be included somehow, if only very obliquely, in the backstory of what was foreseen.

In a sense, Wiseman is right. Precognition is a matter of drawing bullseyes around where our arrows happen to hit; what we are precognizing is ourselves drawing those bullseyes in the future. What could be a better depiction of this, and the concept of post-selection, than the arrow dream of Eisenbud’s patient and the B.C. comic it seems to have precognitively “targeted”?

After Dunne’s An Experiment with Time , Eisenbud’s Paranormal Foreknowledge may be the most thoughtful and interesting book ever written on precognition. Yet even this bold para-psychoanalyst, who had gone out on several limbs in his career writing about other psi phenomena, was hesitant and cautious in his traverse of the epistemological quagmire created by this one. Although he had written and circulated the bulk of his book privately to colleagues as early as 1953, “Cartesian doubt” ⁴⁹ made him delay publication for almost three decades (until 1982). And even then, he only recognized precognition as a possible explanation for coincidental phenomena in the clinic when less causally taboo explanations like telepathy, clairvoyance, or PK would not suffice. The arrow dream, for instance, did not for him meet the stringent criteria of true precognition, simply because the comic strip “was already in print at the time the patient had his dream and it required nothing more than ordinary (that is, telepathic or clairvoyant) psi percipience for him to apprehend it.” ⁵⁰

But is it really easier to imagine that the patient’s sleeping mind somehow scanned the still-folded newspaper outside on his driveway (or in the delivery truck, or in the print warehouse) and located within it a comic strip suiting his particular psychodynamic purposes than to suggest his brain could simply have reached into its own (near) future to find a reading experience suiting the same need? Let’s pause on this question, as the exact impediment to precognitive thinking and theorizing displayed here by Eisenbud is encountered again and again in the literature, and various fallacies lie at the heart of it. It is another of those bugbears that it is time to slay, once and for all.

To Eisenbud, as to many parapsychologists open-minded to other psi phenomena, precognition is so unnatural to our common-sense way of thinking that nature, too, must somehow find it difficult—the problem I mentioned earlier in this chapter. But if his patient’s brain (or consciousness, if you prefer) could search across space as well as time for a suitable “brick” to build his dream edifice, how coincidental that it happened to be one that he was going to physically read in an hour or so anyway! The clairvoyant explanation thus still rests on foreknowledge that he would read the comic when he woke up, so “ordinary psi percipience” really simplifies nothing. The precognitive hypothesis is vastly more parsimonious, cutting out an unnecessary explanatory middleman.

Let me reiterate: We should not confuse how difficult we find imagining a thing with how difficult nature finds accomplishing it . Were we to do that, we would make the mistake of seeing quantum mechanics itself, with its famously “spooky” characteristics, as applying only to a few subatomic particles here and there, rather than being the very substrate of our physical existence. If precognition exists at all, there is every reason to think that it is not only common but probably a constant in our lives. It would not have evolved just to be used as a rare trump card by a few especially gifted (or cursed) individuals in a few remarkable circumstances, or just by neurotics oppressed and inhibited by their Oedipal complexes. It is far more likely that we are, all of us, fully four-dimensional, precognitive creatures and that our time-binding capabilities simply have found many interesting ways to fly under the radar—partly because of all those cultural no-sayers, the “castrating fathers” who take every opportunity to explain away our anomalous experiences in some chaste, unoffensively Newtonian way. If there is any “ordinary psi percipience” we should default to, it is more likely to be precognition, not any of the other commonly invoked modalities like telepathy or clairvoyance. ⁵¹

Denial and condescension are the default reaction of those castrating cultural fathers to reports of anomalous experience. But when this tactic doesn’t work or is not really believed, our attention will be redirected instead in culturally safe directions, including toward the past, making us assume that those experiences represent some sublimely strange deviation of memory and desire. This is one reason why the psychoanalytic tradition is so interesting: It has always represented a kind of halfway house to the acceptance of anomalies that the rest of science rejects out of hand. Instead of rejecting, it reframes.

The entire construct of the unconscious may really be a kind of reframing, a compromise formation between Enlightenment mechanistic psychology with its manly world of linear causation—picture a bunch of fathers hanging out at the pool hall playing billiards —and a converse awareness that something about us is transcendent. Instead of allowing a rich temporal transcendence, which would be the ultimate Oedipal scandal, Freud offered the world a less causally perverse compromise: “Here, you can have the mind’s spread-outness in space , and even a few superpowers. Just don’t look in that other direction (the future) for the causes of your dreams and your inexplicable actions.”

The closing lines of Freud’s landmark work, The Interpretation of Dreams , sound almost desperately insistent, when read in this light:

And the value of dreams for giving us knowledge of the future? There is of course no question of that. It would be truer to say instead that they give us knowledge of the past. For dreams are derived from the past in every sense. Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth. By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past. ⁵²

Note how Freud keeps rerouting our attention to the past, almost like he is afraid of something in that other direction. There was indeed a lot to be afraid of, as we will see. But I am arguing that it is precisely there, that taboo direction, the future, that might contain many of the answers to the deeply weird behavior of humans and the anomalous situations we experience. Dreams offer the key.