A Ruin from the Future
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
— The Gospel According to Thomas (1st or 2nd century)
L ike many who become interested in so-called psychic phenomena, it is dreams that have been my entry point to the topic and that, more than anything else, have convinced me of their reality. I have been interested in dreams since I was a teenager, and since my late 20s—since my first Epson portable computer circa 1994 (a heavy gray tank, by today’s razor-thin laptop standards)—I have always kept a dream journal open in whatever word processor I happened to be using at the time. At this point I have recorded thousands of dated dreams and dream fragments. Early exposure to Freud and then other psychoanalytic schools (Jungian, Lacanian, and so on) as well as later adventures in Buddhist dream yoga and lucid dreaming equipped me, over time, with a brimming toolkit to apply to my dream-work. Despite all these tools, my recognition that dreams could be precognitive was only a very belated one, yet exploring precognitive dreaming has surpassed, in both its power and its fascination, any other hermeneutic approach.
With a handful of puzzling exceptions that I swept under my mental rug (including a dream seemingly anticipating the events of 9/11, which I have described elsewhere 1 ), I had never noticed the phenomenon of dream precognition until I began reading the literature of parapsychology around 2010. It had simply not occurred to me to go back to my dream records after a day or two had passed and examine them in light of events and thoughts during that interim. I had generally spent time interpreting my dreams right when I wrote them down, and if I returned to them, it was usually weeks or months later, long after the events in my life proximate to the dream were forgotten. It was only after reading J. W. Dunne that I began following Dunne’s guidance and was astonished by how frequently my dreams did correspond to some experience or train of thought over the next couple of days.
Some correspondences to subsequent experiences are oblique enough that a degree of free-associative unpacking is necessary to clarify the relationship, and thus would not hold evidential weight with anyone skeptical of Freudian methods, even if they were not doubtful of dream precognition in principle. Others are so clear, striking, and specific that they beggar belief as “just coincidence” or the law of large numbers at work. Sometimes a dream will show me the cover of a previously unknown book I’ll find the next day at a used bookstore, or it will wittily represent a mishap like a sink backing up at work, or falling down a flight of icy steps, or something I wished I’d said to a friend but failed to. Mostly they relate to striking items encountered in the media—often stories on Twitter, since that is how I preferentially engage with the news. I have described several examples (out of, by now, a couple hundred Dunne dreams that I have recorded) on my blog The Nightshirt . 2 I am increasingly persuaded, on the basis of my own experience and its consistency with what many others have also reported, that precognition is a regular aspect of dreaming, not a rare occurrence at all.
Dunne wrote that if you notice a precognitive referent in a dream, it will typically be over the next day or two. If I notice a dream correspondence, it is generally within one or two days of the dream, although sometimes as much as a week. Another recent writer replicating Dunne’s experiment, Bruce Siegel, found that his dreams often matched things that happened within such a time frame, and often even in the first few minutes on waking, 3 and that has sometimes been my experience as well. But this narrow temporal window between a dream and its “fulfillment” may to some extent reflect a kind of file-drawer effect, the fact that it requires more time and resources to compare dreams to events at a greater distance in time. Living in a day of paper records that took up space, Dunne recommended actually discarding dream records after two days, since the returns on the effort of comparing one’s daily dream journal with events at greater remove diminish beyond that radius. You need to set limits, simply for practicality’s sake. But the fact that it may not be worth the effort of actively looking for more distant future referents in dreams does not mean such referents don’t exist. (This, in fact, was the precise confusion over which Victor Goddard corrected Captain Gladstone in their brief, bizarre conversation in Shanghai in 1946, the day before Goddard’s crash on a Japanese beach.)
In my case, years of keeping detailed electronic dream records, even without any thought of checking for precognitive referents, has proven on at least one occasion to be of immense and startling value in my personal hermeneutic “paleontology.” The dream appeared (in hindsight) to pertain directly to the completion of this book, and thus makes an appropriately “loopy” personal example of everything I have been arguing. Apologies in advance—there is nothing less interesting than someone else telling you their dream. Yet the dream, I believe, contained a signal that I should tell it, so here goes.
The dream in question had occurred in the summer of 1999, and it excited me greatly on waking—in fact it felt like one of the most “significant” dreams I had ever had at that point, even if I couldn’t say why or how it was significant. The description of the dream’s manifest content ran to nearly two single-spaced pages in my journal, but here’s the short version: An old high-school teacher of mine named Thomas (playing the role of a kind of initiatory guide, or what Carl Jung would call a “psychopomp”) stood before a chalkboard in a classroom on the Emory University campus, where I was then completing my PhD, and asked me to reflect on the “loss of Dick” in the context of the alchemical motif of the androgyne , a hermaphrodite that appears in many 17th -century alchemical books. Such books were an interest of mine at the time. This teacher then led me outside, past a stone fountain around which the nerdy blond-haired kid Martin on The Simpsons was running in circles, and then, beyond it, to the door of an impressive old ruined tower, circular in plan. On descending into the basement of the old building, I found myself in a dimly lit room, also a kind of classroom, where I had to step over a man lying unconscious on the floor between a coffee table and a couch in order to approach a blackboard with a long row of circular or semicircular symbols—the first one composed of three interlocking Omegas , the last being a kind of stylized letter A , formed from a swooping curl on the left, a flat top, and a descending straight line. This was somehow a very important lesson; the precise flow of meanings of these symbols, one to the next, needed to be “fussily” preserved without damaging them. I then went into a more brightly lit antechamber where I inspected a broken speaker on the wall by the door and realized with some anxiety that there may be no way to repair it. Lastly, I went back out the front door of the building, having made a kind of looping path through the basement of the old tower. As I walked back out into the light, I turned and looked again at the edifice and realized, with a kind of excited delight, that it was actually brand new, but just “made to look old.” It seemed like a profound and significant realization. I wondered who the “builder” of this tower was, and realized it was, in some weird way, me.
I mulled over the possible meanings of this dream for days, thinking and writing about its images and symbolism, because it had such an exciting sense of promise. I had just read Jung for the first time, in fact (one of his books on alchemy), and I was excited by the dream’s alchemical-seeming elements, such as a fountain placed outside a ruined circular tower, as well as by the time-reversing implications of the “Omega(s) -to-Alpha ” progression of the rounded, vessel-like symbols. However, given my years of interest in Freud, certain elements, like the “loss of Dick,” as well as the ruined tower itself, also seemed like obvious castration symbols—standard Freudian stuff. Among the many thoughts I had about this dream, I noted my intuition that the tower somehow represented the dream itself. A small, amateurish watercolor, “The Ruined Tower,” still sits on a bookcase in my home—a relic of brief, Jung-inspired efforts to commemorate my dream life. It is one of only two dreams I ever painted.
Fast forward to a Sunday in July, 2017. I was sitting at my computer struggling with some difficult decisions about chapters and sections to cut from the first draft of this book so it would flow better, when a strange feeling of familiarity, and of “pieces falling into place,” came over me. It took me back to that well-remembered dream, the elements of which suddenly assumed startling new, clear meaning in light of what I was just then doing.
First of all, with some chagrin, I had just cut a section about the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge that had centered on his possible precognition of later-published details about fountains in his poem “Kubla Khan.” I cut it because I discovered I had been wrong on a date, and my specific argument about Coleridge as a precog now held less weight. 4 (When I had free-associated on the Simpsons character Martin, who was circling the fountain in my dream, I found I associated him with a single squeaky pedantic utterance: “Highly Dubious! ”—a remark that would precisely apply to what I now thought about what I had written about Coleridge.)
I had also decided, with some difficulty, to excise the section on Philip K. Dick’s dream about his own death and its significance as a kind of castration complex in his own life, centered on his name—although I later changed my mind about this cut. At the time I had the dream, in 1999, Phil Dick would have never entered my mind as an association to this dream. I knew virtually nothing about that author and had read only one of his books many years before as a teenager (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep , the basis for the movie Blade Runner ). I certainly had no idea that the writer had been found unconscious on the floor between a coffee table and a couch after the first of the strokes that killed him in 1982, let alone that he himself had dreamed of that very scene seven years before (reporting it to Claudia Bush in the February 1975 letter I mentioned in Chapter 13: “a stark single horrifying scene, inert but not a still: a man lay dead, on his face, in a living room between the coffee table and the couch” 5 ).
I had two associations to my teacher, Thomas—the first was an inspiring-slash-ominous quote from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas , which I had just come across in another book: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” 6 (Hence my sense that I should “bring forth” this dream, despite how personal, and perhaps boring, it may be to readers.) But I also somehow knew, probably from the same book, that Thomas means twin . People we are not especially close to often appear in dreams to supply some pun having to do with their name, and so this struck me at the time as possibly significant—although I did not know how. I had no reason at that point in my life to be thinking about twins, and of course did not know that Phil Dick had lost his twin sister, Jane, in infancy, let alone the significance of that fact in the writer’s life.
On the day I suddenly thought back to this old dream, I was experiencing frustration about the sequence of chapters I had written. I needed to find the best way to present a lot of (I thought) interesting material about time loops in a manner that flowed linearly, one idea to the next, to make my argument, but the structure was not right yet, and I’d maddeningly wasted a lot of time shuffling chapters and sections around. In fact, I had my black notebook open in front of me on my desk, with the chapters arranged side by side, in different orders, so I could think through the problem. These pages, I suddenly saw, were very much like the blackboard in my old dream, where a sequence of circular or semicircular symbols (i.e., loops) was represented, as an illustration of getting things in the right order. Successfully completing the Great Work in alchemy, I later learned, is all about getting sequences right, but indeed, a book project is itself a “great work” that requires the same sort of care and “fussiness,” and creates similar frustrations about arranging things in the proper sequence. I was now feeling anxious that more things would need to be cut in order to work. Besides cutting the fountain section and (temporarily) “losing” the part about Dick’s death, I was also wrestling with the material on the gender-swapping prophet Tiresias (now in Chapter 12). Tiresias, it should be noted, was not unlike the alchemical androgyne , who is simultaneously male and female, showing both sexual characteristics at once. (Again, at the time, I mainly saw this in Freudian terms, as castration symbolism.)
There’s more. The same day I thought back to this old dream, when I was grappling with these editorial questions as well as finally feeling like I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, I was additionally preoccupied with something very specific and unrelated: recent sore throats that I worried might reflect some serious health problem involving my larynx … that is, my “speaker.” In fact, I was using my work to avoid thinking about this latest health scare, and vacillating, as hypochondriacs often do, about whether or not to make an appointment to see my ear, nose, and throat doctor the following Monday. (I eventually did see my doctor, and the sore throats turned out to be nothing serious.)
It may not be coincidental that I had at that point been actively pondering Sigmund Freud’s “Irma” dream (Chapter 9)—a dream which, I was coming to see, was an “old dream” by the time in Freud’s life when a dire otolaryngological condition gave it new meaning. I had no way of suspecting that my own dream journal would just then supply a striking example of a similarly time-looping “old dream that was really brand-new” related to the completion of the book you now hold in your hands. If any of my original, mostly unimpressive insights about the dream held water so many years later, it was the sense that the “ruined tower” at least partly represented the dream itself. I could not have known, in 1999, what the “made to look old” phrase I had written down could have possibly meant.
When I opened my dream journal from 1999 to inspect the details of this old dream, I found something else striking: The date of that dream was just two days from the current date—in other words, it had occurred 18 years earlier, almost to the day. If the dream was a human, it would have been exactly old enough to vote. 7
My discovery of this distant dream connection to my life in the summer of 2017 was a kind of hermeneutic comeuppance, reinforcing the slight regret I already felt at all those years of interpreting my dreams through some simplistic Freudian or Jungian lens, gently contorting dreams to mean something about my past or childhood complexes or imposing some picturesque but toothless archetypal framing before forgetting them and moving on. The “great men” of 20th century depth psychology, who had so authoritatively pronounced on what dreams mean and how dreams mean, encouraged specific varieties of engagement with the dreamworld that would naturally reinforce their own favorite theories, always directing attention elsewhere than toward the simple question Dunne asked: What comes after the dream? What comes next? (It would have been far worse, of course, to have been led astray by the “great men” of scientific dream science—the Hobsons and the Cricks—who would have us turn away from seeking meaning in our dreams altogether. I cannot imagine a sadder fate than to believe, because one had never heard otherwise, that dreams are meaningless.)
Discovering this “ancient” dream connection also reinforced for me that the things seen in dreams are not about possible futures, the safe suggestion made by nearly all contemporary writers on precognition. That no longer seems to me plausible, and it makes little sense of the evidence. (It doesn’t even seem appealing, for reasons I have discussed elsewhere. 8 ) By the laws of chaos, the butterfly effect, any deviation in my actions over the course of those intervening 18 years would have scrambled the events in my life, leading to a completely different Sunday, one that would not have included this exact list of actions and preoccupations: wrestling with the proper sequence of interlinked chapters in a book on time loops, regretfully jettisoning a “dubious” chapter about a fountain, thinking about the death of Phil Dick and his twin sister Jane and how much “phallic” speculation to dis-include (i.e., “lose”), and getting scared about the health of my larynx—and then at the end having a stunning realization in which I looked back at an old dream with the excited realization that it only looked old but was really, in some sense, brand new. That last part, you will note, makes it into a time loop: My “turning back” to this dream in hindsight was included in the dream itself.
Oh, and there’s one more thing … That stylized A that completed the symbol series on the chalkboard in my dream? The one with the swooping curl on the left? Look at the publisher’s imprint on the spine of this book. 9
Am I just crazy, like many said Phil Dick was, making everything connect up to form a vast paranoid pattern? Am I like Morgan Robertson. nursing some deep need for absolution in and by the block universe of Minkowski? Am I simply the victim of common fallacies in judgment, perception, and reasoning, seeing nonexistent faces in the random clouds of causality?
Other people’s dreams, and synchronicities, and visions, and so on never seem as compelling as they do to the experiencer, simply because meaning is always an individual, personal thing. If you have not yet experienced a troublingly specific premonition that “came true,” or a dream that corresponded too precisely to a subsequent event to accept as coincidence, then why would you bother to question the one-wayness of folk causality? The specificity and precision of an individual’s mnemonic associations (and thus dream symbolism) cannot be adequately conveyed to a stranger, and this alone puts dream meaning beyond the reach not only of scientific consideration, but of public consideration more generally. And since precognition mainly enters our life through the oblique doorway of our personal associations (and often our dreams), it is very hard to really convince others, even if their minds are not closed to the possibility. “You had to be there,” as the say. But the fact that you had to be there does not mean there’s no there there.
Adding to the difficulty, psychology supplies ever more reasons why your seemingly anomalous experiences cannot be trusted—those hundreds of cognitive biases you can find listed on Wikipedia. There are good reasons to worry over and address biases in science, and important reasons to address racial, gender, and other biases that affect how fairly people are treated; and ever-vigilant self-doubt is part of wisdom. (As Richard Feynman said, “It is imperative to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature” 10 —the best possible case for neurosis.) But bias is well on the way to becoming the new sin for a secular age that takes its gospel from TED talks and the popular science press. Somehow our unique and subjective point of view has become an intractable, ever-morphing stain on the soul that we can endlessly self-flagellate over, as well as use to justify policing others—or just not listening to them—when it suits us. This is why we should be very wary of “your unconscious biases”-style pop psychological science; it may sound like a tool of greater tolerance, but it can easily become a lever of intellectual conformism. For the reasons I argued at the beginning of this book, the imperfect nature of our perceptions and judgments is by itself no disproof of phenomena or experiences that fall outside Enlightenment science’s explanatory scope, yet it is really the only thing the self-appointed skeptical guardians of that already obsolete worldview have to build their case on. Only reason can help us judge who’s right.
In our collective “de-biasing,” we must not disparage and denigrate the singularity of the individual viewpoint, for it is that viewpoint that ultimately lets meaning into the world. Without it, all is just noise, information but without value, the number “42” echoing in the dark. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best in “Self-Reliance”: “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.” 11 It is one of the most profound sentences in one of the most profound essays ever written. And it takes on a sublime new meaning in a participatory and transactional universe, such as that described by John Cramer, where our gaze goes out to meet a distant star and shake hands with it deep in the past. I think Emerson would wholly approve of the “experimental metaphysics” being done in today’s physics labs. It reveals in such a stark new way that we are not randomly thrown in the world, mere “absorbers” of whatever comes at us—we create the world, including the past, by giving meaning to what we see. And when what we “see” is a memory, for instance of a dream, we actually might—if we are lucky (and especially if we have a written record to show we aren’t crazy)—even glimpse our own presence in that past, our looping intervention in our own history.
I’m here to tell you this: When you catch a glimpse, in a recorded dream, of your own turning back and visiting that dream after some time has passed, you are seeing something truly rare and sublime, the most exquisite butterfly in the precog ranger’s life list. “Time gimmicks” in dreams are the tip-off. They are not some smuggled, oblique signal by your unconscious to you—they are you, a representation of your peering, right now , into that dream, your peering into your past. It can give you chills. You’ll never know the pleasure, though, unless you keep a dream diary. (If you take nothing else away from this book, take away this: Keep a dream diary .)
Among the many things I could say about the ruined tower dream, winking at me from 18 years ago like it is just inches from my face, is that it steered me down a path that, through many twists and turns, ultimately led to my interest in parapsychology and precognition over a decade later … and thus, this book. It played some role, however small, in leading me to the place where I could look back on it with radically new eyes and see it as something brand new, despite its appearance of antiquity. Had I not looked back on the dream, I would not have had the dream in the first place; the dream was , quite literally, my looking back. And my completion of this book is literally the completion of a circle, a loop.
As T. S. Eliot wrote in his 1943 poem “Little Gidding”—which was influenced, incidentally, by Dunne’s An Experiment with Time —
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. 12