NOTES

Introduction: Beyond Folk Causality (or, One Damn Thing Before Another)

¹ Asimov, 1948, 1953, 1960.

² Dixon et al., 2009; Popescu, 2009. See Chapter 6 for more detail on this experiment.

³ Bem, 2011.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Judd & Gawronski, 2011.

⁶ The pioneering parapsychology researcher Dean Radin writes: “Sometimes skeptics offer constructive critiques [but] many critiques are bizarrely irrational and positively drip with emotion. … [T]here’s something peculiar about psi that seems to push otherwise calm, rational scientists beyond civil discourse and into rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth frenzies” (Radin, 2018, 15).

⁷ Sheehan, 2015, 86.

⁸ Engber, 2017.

⁹ Dossey, 2009; Feather & Schmicker, 2005; Rhine, 1961.

¹⁰ Bergson, 1944(1907), 12.

¹¹ That paranormal events of all kinds must be thought of as stories (specifically human stories) is an argument made forcefully by Jeffrey Kripal (see especially Kripal, 2010, 2017).

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

¹ The 2012 film Chasing Ice shows a Jakobshavn calving event, the largest ever seen or filmed: a piece of ice the size of Manhattan breaking off the glacier.

² Brown, 1983.

³ Rodgers, 2014.

⁴ Stevenson, 1974(1960), 1974(1965).

⁵ Stevenson, 1974(1960), 87.

⁶ Ibid., 89.

⁷ Ibid., 88. Charles Francis Potter, who reported his wife’s premonition in his 1939 book Beyond the Senses , went on to become an outspoken Unitarian theologian and prominent humanist; he advocated against supernaturalism in religion, crusaded for the right of euthanasia, and advised Clarence Darrow on the subject of evolution in the lawyer’s 1925 defense of John Thomas Scopes (https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Charles_​Francis_​Potter ).

⁸ Stevenson, 1974(1965), 109-110.

⁹ Ibid., 108.

¹⁰ Stevenson, 1974(1960), 90.

¹¹ The relevant part of Stead’s novel is reprinted in Gardner, 1998.

¹² Stevenson, 1974(1960), 90-91.

¹³ One of the psychics Stead consulted, “Count Harmon,” told him in 1911 that mortal danger “would be from water, and from nothing else”; and in a letter dated June 21 of that year, Count Harmon warned him that travel would be dangerous in April, 1912. Another psychic, Mr. W. de Kerlor, predicted Stead would go to America, but this was accompanied by a strange vision: “I can see … the picture of a huge black ship, of which I see the back portion; where the name of the ship should be written there is a wreath of immortelles … I can only see half of the ship …”, which he took to mean “limitations, difficulties and death.” Later Mr. de Kerlor related a dream that he felt was about Stead: “I dreamt that I was in the midst of a catastrophe on the water; there were masses (more than a thousand) of bodies struggling in the water and I was among them. I could hear their cries for help.” (Ibid.)

¹⁴ Gardner, 1998. When Robertson’s story was reprinted in 1912, with the new title The Wreck of the Titan , some of these statistics of the Titan were changed to bring them even closer (in most cases) to those of the Titanic . Numbers here reflect the 1898 version.

¹⁵ Eisenbud, 1982.

¹⁶ Gardner, 1998, 33.

¹⁷ Hand, 2014.

¹⁸ Gardner, 1998, 35

¹⁹ https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​List_​of_​cognitive_​biases

²⁰ Gardner (1998) notes that in May, 1912, an American pulp variety magazine, Popular Magazine , ran a short story called “The White Ghost of Disaster,” by a writer named Mayn Clew Garnett, about the loss of an 800- foot ocean liner named Admiral and over a thousand of its passengers after hitting an iceberg, going 22.5 knots (the same speed as the Titanic ), on a run between New York and Liverpool. Although published after the Titanic sank, the story had been written earlier and was already in press at the time of the disaster. Unfortunately, little is known about the author.

²¹ Ibid., 3.

²² Ibid., 4.

²³ The relationship between Kubrick’s film and the Hilton brand, an early example of product placement, may have even made the property attractive to Hilton Hotels when the hotel’s original developer Peter Kalikow went into bankruptcy shortly after its construction and was forced to sell it.

²⁴ Pearlman, 2016.

²⁵ Dannatt, 2001.

²⁶ Cotter, 2001.

²⁷ Recalled Comics , 2017.

²⁸ https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Party_​Music

²⁹ https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​The_​Lone_​Gunmen

³⁰ Mossbridge & Radin, 2018.

³¹ See Feather & Schmicker, 2005, for some interesting examples.

³² See for instance, Bernstein, 2005; Dossey, 2009; McEneaney, 2010.

³³ Loftus, 2010, 211.

³⁴ Hollywood special effects technician Andrew Paquette kept a 20-year database record of his dreams, which he says he initially started compiling to disprove his wife’s belief that his dreams were precognitive. He came around to agreeing with his wife. Among numerous examples recorded in his book Dreamer (Paquette, 2011), he notes recording a cluster of dreams more than a decade before 9/11 that seemed to foreshadow the events of that day. None specifically involve the World Trade Center, and most are vague enough (as well as distant enough in time from 9/11) that a skeptic could easily attribute them to natural fears of terrorism striking that city. But Paquette also notes that two weeks before the attack, in late August 2001, he found himself in Legoland theme park in California with a terrible headache, trying to explain to his daughter why a big brick cityscape of Manhattan was missing the twin towers: “Maybe it was too big to build it to scale” (Ibid., 215), he suggested, but immediately told his wife he thought his disaster dreams about Manhattan were about to come true. He says the headache went away at that instant.

³⁵ 9/11 is just the most famous of the disasters Mandell allegedly foresaw in dreams and depicted in paintings. In 1993, Mandell painted an explosive event involving a car near an airport, noting it was possibly Heathrow; it cor responded exactly to an IRA mortar attack there in March 1994. His drawing of three cars side by side matched exactly a news headline photo, including the striking detail of the exact same radiator grille in the car that had launched the mortars, and identical damage to the adjacent car. He reported that a voice in his dream said to him, “This is what you’re going to see in the newspapers when this event happens.” In June of 1997 and then again in April of 1999, Mandell dreamed of a Concorde in France with its engines on fire; again, his depictions (and very specific details like the pilot’s attempt to reach a nearby airport) matched news of the crash of Air France flight 4590 after taking off from Charles de Gaulle airport on July 25, 2000. It was the only fatal incident in the history of the Concorde. For more on Mandell, see Peake (2012) and Channel 5 (2003).

³⁶ White, 2017. White also manages to debunk some old myths, such as that President Lincoln dreamed of seeing his own dead body laid out on a catafalque—the story was probably made up by one of Lincoln’s bodyguards. But several members of Lincoln’s cabinet did independently record that on the morning before his fateful visit to Ford’s Theater, Lincoln reported to them a strange and compelling dream about being on a great ship, “some singular, indescribable vessel” (Ibid., 151) rushing through the water to an indefinite shore; he had had such a dream before at various momentous turning points, and thus thought it meant some great moment was at hand for his country.

³⁷ Larry Dossey’s The Power of Premonitions (Dossey, 2009) is an excellent summary of this topic.

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ Wiseman, 2010, 153.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ On the arbitrariness of defining an “event,” see Braude, 1997, and Chapter 5 of this book.

⁴² Peake, 2012, 260.

⁴³ See Llewellyn, 2013.

⁴⁴ When they do keep such databases, as Andrew Paquette did, it often supports dream precognition (Paquette, 2011). See also Siegel, 2017.

⁴⁵ Canales, 2015.

⁴⁶ Fitzgerald, 1936.

⁴⁷ Priestley, 1989(1964), 194.

⁴⁸ See Strieber & Kripal, 2016.

⁴⁹ Gardner, 1998, 32.

⁵⁰ Priestley (1989[1964], 194) observes:

It is true, as the representatives of common sense hurry to tell us, that we like to deceive ourselves. But this cuts both ways. Certainly there is self-deceit in favor of appearing unusual, strangely sensitive, “psychic,” and the rest. But there is also self-deceit, of a much safer sort, in favor of conformism, sturdy common sense, rationality, and no nonsense. And we need hardly ask ourselves which of these attitudes is the more fashionable, the easier to adopt, the one more likely to bring good dividends and a sound reputation.

⁵¹ Price, 2014.

⁵² Priestley, 1989(1964), 193.

⁵³ Ibid., 193.

⁵⁴ Shermer, 1997.

⁵⁵ Although Shermer and Wiseman assume a reasoned tone in their writings, reading books by some earlier leaders of the skeptical community like Gardner or magician-debunker James Randi can often be a sad and distressing experience, given the virulent hostility and undisguised condescension they routinely displayed. Gardner, in his book on the Titanic , casually calls psi-believers “idiotic,” books on ESP “lurid” and “atrocious,” and the topic of ESP “hogwash.” Hannah’s books he derides for being “privately printed.” Randi condescendingly lists ESP alongside “unicorns” in the subtitle of his 1982 book Flim-Flam (Randi, 1982), as though the topics are on par with each other, and calls two serious physicists who led a major, government-funded ESP laboratory at Stanford Research Institute “the Laurel and Hardy of Psi.” In a cultural climate where scientific rationalism is policed by such partisans, it is thus all too clear why ordinary people who experience something anomalous in their lives have been hesitant to share their experiences.

⁵⁶ Strieber & Kripal, 2016.

⁵⁷ Krohn & Kripal, 2018.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 75.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 77.

2. “If I Were You, I’d Stay on the Ground for a Couple of Days”—Victor Goddard, J. W. Dunne, and the Block Universe

¹ Goddard, 1982, 251.

² Goddard, 1975.

³ The most well-known “time slip” was the strange encounter with Marie Antoinette and her courtiers reported by two English ladies, Miss Annie Moberly and Miss Eleanor Jourdain, in 1901 in the Petit Trianon garden at Versailles. See MacKenzie, 1997.

⁴ In his retirement, Goddard also became a thoughtful defender of and writer on the UFO phenomenon; see Goddard, 1975.

⁵ Goddard, 1951.

⁶ Goddard’s 1951 account in The Saturday Evening Post uses the pseudonym “Commander Dewing” of the “HMS Crecy.”

⁷ Goddard, 1951, 25.

⁸ Ibid., 24.

⁹ One of the dramatic embellishments of the 1956 film The Night My Number Came Up , based on Goddard’s story, was that the Naval officer also told his dream to the pilot of the plane, and the pilot thus felt gripped by an awful fate as he was attempting to keep the craft in the air.

¹⁰ Childhood illness is a common feature in people who later experience psychic or paranormal phenomena.

¹¹ Dunne, 1952(1927).

¹² Dunne relates this part of the story in his posthumously published, autobiographical work Intrusions? (Dunne, 1955).

¹³ “The improbability of my having dreamed of half-past four at half-past four must be multiplied by the improbability of my having been bothered by a stopped watch on the previous afternoon without retaining the faintest recollection of such a fact” (Dunne, 1952[1927], 38).

¹⁴ Ibid., 39.

¹⁵ Ibid., 40-41

¹⁶ Ibid., 42.

¹⁷ Ibid., 43.

¹⁸ https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Mount_​Pelée

¹⁹ Dunne, 1952(1927), 44.

²⁰ Ibid., 44. Dunne doesn’t add that he could have been primed to misread the number of zeros in the news article because of his dream, but because of the similarity of the digit 4 (and a string of zeros) in both numbers, his main point would still hold in either case.

²¹ Ibid., 45.

²² Inchbald, 2017. On his blog, Dunne scholar Guy Inchbald writes: “Without [Dunne’s] intervention there would probably have been no Sopwith Camel in the coming war, no Bristol Fighter, no Handley Page bomber, just whatever the state-owned Farnborough and the French could turn out.”

²³ Dunne 1952(1927), 46-7.

²⁴ Ibid., 49.

²⁵ Ibid., 50.

²⁶ Dunne, 1955, 87

²⁷ Ibid., 88.

²⁸ Ibid., 88-9.

²⁹ Ibid., 89.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ What happened to Hyde? Dunne writes: “That fellow was ‘sublimated’ quite easily. I discovered that beneath his savagery lay a nasty streak of cowardice—probably the cause of his existence. So I turned him into a bantamweight boxer fighting dogged and gory battles with any middle-weight he could find. That cured him, and he grew up to be a soldier and a pioneer of aviation” (Ibid., 91).

³² Moore, 2016.

³³ Dunne, 1955, 71.

³⁴ Barušs & Mossbridge, 2017.

³⁵ Radin, 2006.

³⁶ Dossey, 2013.

³⁷ The history of trauma as a psychological construct, and of telepathy as an outgrowth of the Victorian sciences of trauma, is a vast topic wonderfully charted by Roger Luckhurst in his writings The Invention of Telepathy (Luckhurst, 2002) and The Trauma Question (Luckhurst, 2008). For the role trauma may play in precognition, see Chapter 10.

³⁸ Kripal, 2014.

³⁹ Dunne 1952(1927), 52.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Ibid., 67.

⁴² Goddard, 1951, 118.

⁴³ Dobyns, 2006.

⁴⁴ See for instance Dick, 2011.

3. Postcards from Your Future Self—Scientific Evidence for Precognition

¹ Vaughan, 1973, 18. See also Shields, 2011.

² Vaughan, 1973, 18.

³ Quoted in Shields, 2011, 161.

⁴ Vonnegut, 1973, 64.

⁵ Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment (Josephson-Storm, 2017) critically examines the “disenchantment” idea in European thought.

⁶ See Kripal, 2010; Luckhurst, 2002.

⁷ Rhine, 1967.

⁸ Carington, 1940.

⁹ Rhine, 1967, 128.

¹⁰ Krippner et al., 2002(1971).

¹¹ Schnabel, 1997.

¹² Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977).

¹³ See Graff, 2000; May et al., 2014; McMoneagle, 2002; Schnabel, 1997; Smith, 2005.

¹⁴ See Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977).

¹⁵ Smith, 2005.

¹⁶ See Warcollier, 2001(1948).

¹⁷ May et al., 2014.

¹⁸ Utts, 1995.

¹⁹ Utts, 2016, 1379. She continues: “I have asked the debunkers if there is any amount of data that could convince them, and they generally have responded by saying, ‘probably not.’ I ask them what original research they have read, and they mostly admit they haven’t read any! Now there is a definition of pseudo-science—basing conclusions on belief, rather than data!”

²⁰ Dunne & Jahn, 2003.

²¹ Honorton & Ferrari, 1989.

²² See Radin, 2013, for a good description of Honorton and Ferrari’s study and background on meta-analysis in general.

²³ See Radin, 2009.

²⁴ See Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977).

²⁵ See Marwaha & May, 2016 for a discussion; see also Targ, 2004.

²⁶ Feinberg, 1975.

²⁷ Ibid., 63-64.

²⁸ Kaiser, 2011.

²⁹ May & Marwaha, 2015; Marwaha & May, 2016.

³⁰ May and Marwaha’s “multiphasic theory” of psi (May & Marwaha, 2015) distinguishes a “physics domain” from a “neuroscience domain.”

³¹ Marwaha & May, 2016, 78.

³² May & Marwaha, 2015.

³³ One of Carington’s five experiments (Experiment II) was conducted somewhat differently from the other four. All ten drawings in this experiment were made in the course of a single hour by members of a Cambridge psychology class, and the participants received feedback at the end of the class by matching each other’s drawings to the group of targets. Results here were similar to the first experiment—a pattern of matches to the ten-target group, rather than to the individual intended target (i.e., displaced hits). But it is not surprising, as the effect of the final matching exercise would have functioned similarly as if feedback were acquired by reading the published results: Participants would have been influenced by the set of target drawings as a whole (and each other’s drawings of them), rather than receiving feedback on a trial-by-trial basis.

³⁴ Carington, 1946, 36.

³⁵ See for example Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977); Sinclair, 2001(1930).

³⁶ Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977).

³⁷ I am not aware that the possibility of participants in ESP experiments precognitively accessing the “answer book” in the form of the published results has ever been studied. Such studies could be conducted readily, for instance by comparing the results of two remote viewing experiments in which participants’ only possible feedback is in the published articles later. In one experiment, the “answers” published would actually be different from what the experimenter had assigned them to view.

³⁸ See for instance the consideration of feedback as a necessary component of skill learning in ESP research in Targ & Puthoff, 2018(1972).

³⁹ May et al., 1996

⁴⁰ Marwaha & May, 2016.

⁴¹ Honorton & Ferrari, 1989.

⁴² McMoneagle, 2002.

⁴³ McMoneagle, 1993, 226.

4. The Psi Reflex—Presentiment and the Future-Influencing-Present Effect

¹ Pynchon, 1973.

² Slothrop’s premonitory sexual response was a daring premise for an ambitious, literary novelist like Pynchon. One of the unwritten rules of literary fiction has always been: Thou shalt not use ESP seriously as a plot device . Writers openly breaking this rule quickly get relegated to the ghetto of SF, which until relatively recently remained what Pynchon’s contemporary Philip K. Dick called a “trash stratum.” The genre gods exist to serve the prevailing materialistic beliefs about causality. Pynchon, like his similarly ESP-curious contemporary Kurt Vonnegut, cunningly avoided Dick’s fate by always keeping his commitment to the reality of such phenomena (which crop up in most of his works) ambiguous, and surrounding characters who display or experience them with materialists who devote considerable cognitive effort to explaining these phenomena away in rational, linear terms (like Gravity’s Rainbow ’s “Dr. Pointsman”—as in, points on a graph). Pynchon thus didn’t need to commit himself to “believing in” ESP.

³ Carpenter, 2012; Mossbridge & Radin, 2018.

⁴ Radin, 1997.

⁵ Spottiswoode & May, 2003.

⁶ Bierman & Scholte, 2002.

⁷ Mossbridge et al., 2012; Tsakiris, 2017.

⁸ Mossbridge et al., 2012.

⁹ Mossbridge et al., 2014.

¹⁰ Bem, 2011.

¹¹ Mossbridge & Radin, 2018.

¹² Open Science Collaboration, 2015.

¹³ Bem et al., 2016.

¹⁴ Kripal, 2010.

¹⁵ See Radin, 2013.

¹⁶ Sheldrake, 2011.

¹⁷ Alvarez, 2016.

¹⁸ Sheldrake, 2003. Sheldrake sees the sense of being stared at as an aspect of the “extended mind.” But is the mind extended in space, or in time? Here we confront the power of the language we use to describe phenomena in biasing or constraining how we think about their possible causes (known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). What is called a “sense of being stared at” could instead be a presentiment of meeting another’s gaze . A woman has a funny feeling, looks up, and finds that a man happens to be looking at her; she may naturally assume that the man had already been looking at her—“staring”—but that is just an assumption (i.e., the man could have turned to look at her at the same moment).

¹⁹ Carpenter, 2012.

²⁰ Ibid., 85.

²¹ Carpenter, 2015a, 255.

²² Radin, 2013.

²³ Mavromatis, 1987.

²⁴ Wargo, 2016b.

²⁵ Rick Strassman (Strassman, 2014) for instance links “prophecy” to dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful hallucinogenic compound and, he argues, a neurotransmitter naturally produced in the body in small quantities.

²⁶ Murphy, 1992.

²⁷ Beidel, 2014.

²⁸ Geiger, 2009.

²⁹ Goddard, 1975.

³⁰ Nasht, 2005.

³¹ Cochran, 1954.

³² Atkinson, 2010.

³³ Caidin, 2007.

³⁴ Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977). Bach came to the attention of the SRI parapsychologists because his bestselling inspirational book seemed to be about an out-of-body experience, something commonly reported in the lives of the most gifted psychics they had studied (Targ, 2004).

³⁵ Given its link to spontaneous and even frenetic, uncritical engagement, it would be interesting to systematically record improv performances and compare them to news headlines over the following day or two. Improv is a very Zen activity that rewards not thinking, just doing, and may also capitalize on the group effects known to facilitate psi.

³⁶ See Wargo, 2016c.

³⁷ Kripal, 2010.

³⁸ For instance, the Israeli performer Uri Geller, who impressed many of the scientists who actually worked with him that some of his abilities were genuine (Margolis, 1999, 2013), nevertheless also used trickery in stage performances, which made it easy for pseudoskeptics like James Randi to call him a fraud (Randi, 1982). One personality trait typical of psychics as well as performers is extroversion (Carpenter, 2012).

³⁹ Wargo, 2015a.

⁴⁰ Marcus, 1988, 90.

⁴¹ Murphy, 1957.

⁴² Marcus, 1988, 90.

⁴³ It is tempting to think Pynchon may have been precognizing these developments, but his novel probably was inspired to a great extent by the insight and/or wild imagination of the French spy and sci-fi fan Jacques Bergier. Many ideas in Gravity’s Rainbow , such as the Nazi interest in the occult and the existence of secret societies pulling the strings during the war and its aftermath, seem to have come straight from Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s early-60s blockbuster The Morning of the Magicians (Pauwels & Bergier, 1963), as did the idea of a psychic being able to predict bomb strikes during wartime.

⁴⁴ Taylor, 2007.

⁴⁵ A future neurobiology of prophecy may pay special attention to the neurotransmitter dopamine and structures known as the basal ganglia that are involved in reinforcing rewarding behaviors. The brain’s reward circuits govern the conditioning process, our learning from experience, by signaling the anticipation of reward or punishment from cues. It is small constant dopamine bursts in these circuits that keep attention focused on “the next thing”—on new and possibly important information. Adaptations of the reward circuit associated with addiction are the neurobiological correlate of the psychoanalytic construct of jouissance (Bazan & Detandt, 2013), which I argue is central to precognition (see Chapter 10).

⁴⁶ See Barušs & Mossbridge, 2017; Dossey, 2013; Radin, 2006; Sheldrake, 2003; Targ, 2004. A notable exception is Edwin May, who argues the phenomenon will have a fully materialist explanation, probably rooted in classical, not quantum, physics (see Marwaha & May, 2015).

⁴⁷ See for example Barušs & Mossbridge, 2017; Kelly et al., 2010; Sheldrake, 2012; Targ, 2004.

⁴⁸ Carpenter (2015b, 5) writes:

As Plato thought, meanings exist beyond the person and are not simply constructed by the person or by groups of people. In psi, we engage meanings that supersede any physical connection to the self. Yet we engage them, we are affected by them, we express implicit references to them. It seems that we find them much more than make them, and we find them far beyond the normal bounds of the body and the current moment.

⁴⁹ Carpenter, 2012.

⁵⁰ My thinking on culture and meaning is strongly influenced by Geertz, 1973; and Shore, 1996.

⁵¹ On the distinction between meaning and information, and why the emergence of a scientific information theory in the 20^th century required eliminating questions of meaning, see Gleick, 2012. This topic is addressed also in Chapter 6.

⁵² That paranormal phenomena of all kinds are meaningful phenomena that cannot be understood without considering the personal, anecdotal dimension is an argument made strongly by Jeffrey Kripal throughout his work. See Kripal, 2017; Strieber & Kripal, 2016.

⁵³ Edwin May argues that misrecognized precognition, or what is also called “psi-mediated instrumental response,” unconsciously guides and thus “augments” decisions made by experimenters, and that this may give rise to illusory mind-over-matter or psychokinetic (PK) effects in parapsychology experiments using random number generators (May, 2015). This would have implications well beyond psi research: If something like precognition or presentiment is really operative, unrecognized, in laboratories, it could account for experimenter expectation effects in everything from psychology to biomedicine. Whether some form of precognitively mediated “decision augmentation” could even account for some part of the current replication crisis remains for some future team of bold researchers to investigate.

⁵⁴ Priestley, 1989(1964), 201.

⁵⁵ Ibid.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁸ Ibid.

⁵⁹ The future-influencing-present effect, Priestley writes, “is apt to work for intimate relationships that most people prefer not to discuss” (ibid., 200).

5. Catching Precognitive Butterflies—Chaos, Memory, and Premory in the Thermodynamic Universe

¹ Flieger, 1997; White, 2018.

² Nabokov, 2018.

³ Boyd, 1991, 366.

⁴ Nabokov, 2018.

⁵ See, e.g., Price, 1996; Sheehan, 2015.

⁶ Gleick, 2016.

⁷ See White, 2018.

⁸ Kaku, 2009.

⁹ Buonomano, 2017.

¹⁰ Price, 1996.

¹¹ Radin, 2013, 131-132.

¹² Bradbury, 1952.

¹³ Gleick, 1987.

¹⁴ Ibid., 8.

¹⁵ Hilborn, 2004. When later asked about the origins of the butterfly metaphor, the scientist who came up with the “butterfly” title for Lorenz’s session did not recall being influenced by Bradbury’s story, but that would not preclude him having read the story and forgotten about it. However, even assuming a straightforward causal reason for the coincidence, it would not preclude Bradbury from having precognized developments in 1970s systems science—or more likely, Gleick’s 1987 book. In fact, there are passages in Bradbury’s story that are stunningly similar to later writings on the butterfly effect. For instance, Bradbury writes: “Crushing certain plants could add up infinitesimally. A little error here would multiply in sixty million years, all out of proportion” (quoted in Ibid., 425).

As an added note, it is likely that Michael Crichton was thinking of Bradbury’s story and its (possibly illusory) connection to Lorenz’s butterfly effect when he included a “chaotician” (the character Ian Malcolm) in his bestselling 1990 novel Jurassic Park , about a theme park of cloned dinosaurs.

¹⁶ Braude, 1997, 239.

¹⁷ Ibid., 241.

¹⁸ Ibid., 243.

¹⁹ See Dossey, 2009.

²⁰ Kripal, 2014, 366. W. Somerset Maugham’s short 1933 tale “An Appointment in Samarra” (allegedly based on an old Mesopotamian legend) is a famous example of the same ironic logic: A terrified servant borrows his master’s horse to flee to another town, Samarra, after encountering Death, who gestures threateningly at him in the local Baghdad bazaar. Later, the master goes to the bazaar himself, sees Death, and asks why he made a threatening gesture to his servant. Death replies: “That was not a threatening gesture … it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra” (quoted in Žižek, 1989, 58).

²¹ See, e.g., Dossey, 2009; Feather & Schmicker, 2005; Rhine, 1961.

²² Rhine, 1961.

²³ See for instance Dossey, 2009; Marwaha & May, 2016; Targ, 2004.

²⁴ Feather & Schmicker, 2005.

²⁵ Braude, 1997. See also Eisenbud, 1982, who makes a similar argument.

²⁶ Also, appealing to possible, alterable futures ultimately forecloses any possibility of studying precognition scientifically. As long as you can say of a putative precognitive dream that doesn’t come true that, “well, it was a possibility that didn’t come to pass,” then you really are beyond the pale of science. By that reasoning, any random thought could be precognition of an alternative future.

²⁷ Braude, 1997; Carpenter, 2012; Radin, 2006, 2009, 2013, 2018.

²⁸ Eisenbud, 1982.

²⁹ See e.g., May, 2015.

³⁰ The psychoanalyst and parapsychologist Jule Eisenbud, who was generally open to PK as an explanation and even favored it over retrocausation, keenly noted that if our unconscious wishes were really that powerful, none of us would have survived our childhoods (Eisenbud, 1982).

³¹ In term’s of Sonali Bhatt Marwaha and Edwin May’s “multiphasic theory” (Marwaha & May, 2015), this would put the “physics domain” fully within the “neuroscience domain,” rather than retaining them as separate and distinct. As I will describe later, the new field of quantum biology is raising many exciting possibilities in this regard.

³² The possibility that mind or some aspect of it exists independently of the body is part of most religious traditions, and it has obvious appeal. If consciousness can fly free of the body, for instance while asleep, it raises the possibility that it might survive the death of the body too. Survival of bodily death is the ultimate hope that arguably biases everyone in one way or another, whatever their stated philosophical or scientific position, yet science may never be able to address that question. Whatever the ultimate fate of Dunne’s consciousness after his death, I argue that his dream experiences were tied to his lived, embodied experience. (For a discussion of the spiritual uses readers found for Dunne’s ideas, see White, 2018).

³³ Feinberg, 1975.

³⁴ Jon Taylor (Taylor, 2007, 2014) also makes this argument.

³⁵ See, e.g., Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977); Warcollier, 2001(1948).

³⁶ Feinberg, 1975. Admittedly, it would be hard to prove this is universally true: How would the individual ever know if they had precognized something after their death? This is of course to leave aside speculations about obtaining precognitive information from one’s spirit in the afterlife; I am also leaving aside the question of historical prophets like Nostradamus, who are claimed to have foretold events occurring long after their deaths. Many such “prophecies” are too ambiguous to really evaluate and their provenance is too uncertain.

³⁷ It is precisely such tracers that could be used to test the “precognition-only” hypothesis for ESP—that is, manipulating feedback in telepathy or remote viewing experiments by adding fictitious details to a target or omitting salient details (Feinberg, 1975). Other than studies simply controlling the presence/absence or intensity of feedback (e.g., May et al., 1996), I am not aware of studies that have actively deceived participants about “what it was” they were viewing, which could be used to identify the information channel operative.

³⁸ Takeuchi et al., 2014.

³⁹ See Carington, 1946; Carpenter, 2012.

⁴⁰ Carpenter, 2012.

⁴¹ Wargo, 2015e.

⁴² Llewellyn, 2013.

⁴³ Dunne, 1952(1927); Kripal, 2010; See also Carpenter, 2012; Taylor, 2014.

⁴⁴ Foer, 2011; Yates, 1996(1966).

⁴⁵ Llewellyn, 2013; Wargo, 2010.

⁴⁶ Wargo, 2016c. Like time slips, some ghost encounters could involve precognizing subsequent exposure to an interesting/unsettling story about an event such as a violent death that occurred in a specific location.

⁴⁷ Buonomano, 2017.

⁴⁸ Ramachandran et al., 2016; see also Buonomano, 2017.

⁴⁹ Loftus et al., 1995.

⁵⁰ Taylor, 2007, 2014.

⁵¹ Loftus et al., 1995.

⁵² Buonomano, 2017, 172.

⁵³ Silberer, 1959(1909); Mavromatis, 1987.

⁵⁴ Friedman et al., 1990.

⁵⁵ Echeverria et al., 1991.

⁵⁶ Dobyns, 2006, 276. Dobyns does not favor the block-universe interpretation, however; he argues that retrocausation can be accommodated within a more open-ended view of future (and even past) history.

6. Destination: Pong (or, How to Build a Quantum^TM Future Detector)

¹ Kaiser, 2011, 99.

² Levi-Strauss, 1966.

³ Barad, 2007. For highly readable descriptions of the double slit and other basic experiments in quantum physics, see also Herbert, 1985.

⁴ Barad, 2007. As Barad describes, the weirdness even goes deeper: The experimenter does not actually have to collect the “which path” information—just the physical possibility of doing so is enough to change the behavior of the particles being measured. It suggests a complex entanglement between the “agencies of observation” and the object being observed (the photon).

⁵ See Herbert, 1985.

⁶ Barad, 2007.

⁷ See Rosenblum & Kuttner, 2011; Stapp, 2011.

⁸ Barad, 2007.

⁹ Herbert, 1985; Rosenblum & Kuttner, 2011; Stapp, 2011.

¹⁰ Barad, 2007; Zurek, 2009.

¹¹ Sheehan, 2015.

¹² See Price, 1996.

¹³ Cramer, 2006; Price, 1996.

¹⁴ Quoted in Rosenblum & Kuttner, 2011, 212-213.

¹⁵ Price, 1996, 2012; Price & Wharton, 2015, 2016; see also McRae, 2017.

¹⁶ Price & Wharton, 2015, 2016.

¹⁷ Price & Wharton, 2016.

¹⁸ Dixon et al., 2009. A hundredfold amplification may sound like a lot, but it was an extremely tiny deflection of the mirror—a few hundred quadrillionths of a radian.

¹⁹ The retrocausal implications of the Dixon et al. (2009) experiment are discussed in Merali, 2010, and Popescu, 2009.

²⁰ Musser, 2014.

²¹ Stapp, 2011.

²² Feynman, 1985; Gleick, 1993.

²³ Aharonov et al., 2017.

²⁴ Price, 1996.

²⁵ Aharonov & Tollaksen, 2007, 3.

²⁶ Merali, 2010; see also Shoup, 2015.

²⁷ Barad, 2007.

²⁸ Scully et al., 1991; Barad, 2007.

²⁹ Barad, 2007, 315.

³⁰ Barad does not privilege any particular “human” locus as a decisive part of “spacetimemattering”—she sees her project as radically post-humanist in the tradition of feminist thinkers like Donna Haraway. She could be contrasted with political scientist Alexander Wendt, who applies the popular consciousness-centric interpretation of quantum mechanics to social theory in his book Quantum Mind and Social Science (Wendt, 2015).

³¹ Price & Wharton, 2015, 7.

³² Price, 1996; Price & Wharton, 2015. Many have pointed out that randomness or “quantum uncertainty” cannot offer anything like free will. It’s just that mainstream interpretations of quantum physics do not appear to foreclose it with the same finality that the block universe does. In the block universe, as York H. Dobyns puts it, “all of space and time must take on the immutability of the past” (Dobyns, 2006, 274).

³³ See for instance Aharonov et al, 2015; Merali, 2010.

³⁴ Becker, 2018.

³⁵ Ball, 2017; Chiribella et al., 2009; Castro-Ruiz et al., 2018; Oreshkov et al., 2012; Rubino et al., 2017.

³⁶ Vedral, 2018.

³⁷ Palus, 2017.

³⁸ Gleick, 2012.

³⁹ Barad, 2007.

⁴⁰ Lloyd, 2006.

⁴¹ Gleick, 2012.

⁴² Lloyd, 2006.

⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ Gleick, 2012.

⁴⁵ On the interesting question of whether the user of information, the meaning-maker, needs to be conscious (or in any way human-like), see Barad, 2007.

⁴⁶ Kaiser, 2011.

⁴⁷ Remember what I said though about a healthy knowledge ecosystem de pending on error. While the natural excitement of hippie physicists to maybe use entanglement for faster-than-light communication proved a pipe dream, their work and their mistakes directly paved the way for some incredibly exciting technical applications that are only recently coming to fruition. One is quantum cryptography : Entanglement can work like a wax seal on a regular, slower-than-light message, revealing a third party’s effort to read the message (Ibid.).

⁴⁸ Barad, 2007. This was demonstrated in “which-path” versions of the double-slit experiment. In 1979, two physicists at the University of Texas at Austin, William Wootters and Wojciech Zurek, found that the interference pattern on the screen was not too badly washed out even when there was near-certain (but not completely certain) information about which slit each photon had traversed.

⁴⁹ Kaiser, 2011.

⁵⁰ See Moldoveanu, 2010.

⁵¹ Tamblyn, 2017.

⁵² Lloyd et al., 2010. For an explanation of Lloyd’s proposal, see Moldoveanu, 2010; Zyga, 2010, 2011.

⁵³ Moldoveanu, 2010.

⁵⁴ Lloyd et al., 2011, 3.

⁵⁵ Lloyd’s is only one among several proposals for creating closed timelike curves; see Moldoveanu, 2010, for discussion.

⁵⁶ Zyga, 2015.

⁵⁷ Asmundsson, 2017.

⁵⁸ Moskvitch, 2018.

⁵⁹ Ball, 2017; Chiribella et al., 2009; Castro-Ruiz et al., 2018; Oreshkov et al., 2012; Rubino et al., 2017.

⁶⁰ Procopio et al., 2015.

7. A New Era of Hyperthought—From Precognitive Bacteria to Our Tesseract Brain

¹ L’Engle, 2007(1962). Mrs. Who and her strange companions Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Which are clearly descendants of Shakespeare’s “weird sisters” from Macbeth (see Chapter 9), as well as being a clear inspiration for the Time Lords in Doctor Who , which debuted on the BBC the year after L’Engle’s story was published.

² See White, 2018.

³ Hinton, 1888, 99.

⁴ Ibid., 49.

⁵ See, e.g., Dunne, 1955, 70.

⁶ More recently, MIT physicist Jeremy England has argued that entropy inevitably produces lifelike physical properties, and thus life itself in many cases—a radically counterintuitive idea (see Wolchover, 2014).

⁷ Jantsch, 1980.

⁸ See Davies, 2013; Walker & Davies, 2017.

⁹ Bergson, 1944(1907).

¹⁰ Koestler, 1972. Kammerer’s seriality influenced Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity, which represented an attempt to supplement physical causation with meaning as the glue connecting events (see Chapter 11).

¹¹ Sheldrake, 2009.

¹² See Dunne & Jahn, 2017.

¹³ Sheldrake, 2012. The term “promissory materialism” was originally used in this context by the philosopher of science Karl Popper.

¹⁴ Di Corpo & Vannini, 2015.

¹⁵ Philosophy Bites , 2012.

¹⁶ Davies, 2004.

¹⁷ McFadden & Al-Khalili, 2014.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Quantum computing theorist Seth Lloyd and others are examining how to use the natural quantum tunneling properties of viruses to design an efficient energy-transport system that could lead to more efficient and cheaper solar cells (Chandler, 2015).

²⁰ See also Sheehan (2015), who speculates on the possibility of living systems peering into their future by subverting the second law of thermodynamics.

²¹ For example: If a move to the left sends an “I survived” message back a fraction of a second in time, for example by causing some detectable perturbation or deviation in one group of measured particles, whereas a move to the right causes no such a deviation, and if the organism is wired to automatically favor the option with the deviation, then this system—multiple precognitive circuits or time eyes linked together to guide behavior—will tend to produce “the correct answer” at a greater than statistically random frequency. The time eye could thus also be called a right-answer detector .

²² Craddock et al., 2012.

²³ Volk, 2018.

²⁴ Hameroff, 1998.

²⁵ Craddock et al., 2014.

²⁶ Margulis, 2001.

²⁷ Margulis, 1999; Margulis & Sagan, 1986.

²⁸ Jantsch, 1980.

²⁹ Ramón y Cajal, 1989, 363.

³⁰ NPR , 2013.

³¹ Kelly et al., 2010.

³² Sheldrake, 2012.

³³ Grosso, 2015; Kripal, 2017.

³⁴ Kripal, 2017.

³⁵ Kastrup, 2015; Kelly et al., 2010.

³⁶ The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, for instance, sees the question of consciousness as the mysterious Real of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, a kind of spectral presence that returns or persists precisely to the extent that reductive materialist neuroscience tries to exclude or marginalize it (Žižek, 2006b). More comfortable with the philosophical idiom of “subjectivity,” Žižek has advanced an ontology that has come to be called “transcendental materialism,” in which subjectivity emerges from fundamental instabilities in the material world (which he argues is really insubstantial, per mainstream quantum physics), but is not reducible to the latter (Žižek, 2013).

³⁷ Atmanspacher et al., 2004.

³⁸ Brainerd et al., 2013.

³⁹ Wendt, 2015.

⁴⁰ Penrose, 1994.

⁴¹ Hameroff & Penrose, 2014.

⁴² Physicist Henry Stapp (Stapp, 2011, 2015) has also focused on these cellular pores as the sites where consciousness takes charge of the brain. He does not view consciousness as a product of brain quantum processes but as a kind of “experimenter,” steering the brain’s activity by making observations (i.e., measurements) of the quantum behavior of calcium ions traveling through ion channels.

⁴³ Walker, 1970; see also Hansen, 2001; Walker, 2000.

⁴⁴ In their survey of the emerging field of quantum biology, Life on the Edge , Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili (McFadden & Al-Khalili, 2014) pro pose that the answer to quantum consciousness may lie with the brain’s electromagnetic field. That field may couple to quantum-coherent (entangled) ions moving through ion channels and thereby synchronize them, enabling the “binding” of multiple cortical processes.

⁴⁵ Chalmers, 1995.

⁴⁶ Dent, 2017.

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Adamatzky, 2017.

⁴⁹ My “time eye” should thus not be confused with the “psychic retina” proposed by Edwin May and Joseph G. Depp (May & Depp, 2015), which would be a receiver of information traveling to the brain from external future events.

⁵⁰ Feinberg, 1975.

⁵¹ Taylor, 2007, 2014.

⁵² This suggests some role for subcortical circuits that handle learning from rewarding experiences and the formation of habits based on them. It is another reason why conditioning processes like those described by Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow may be important for understanding our ability to “post-select” on future rewards.

⁵³ Wargo, 2016a.

⁵⁴ McFadden & Al-Khalili, 2014.

⁵⁵ A physicist named Matthew Fisher, for instance, has discovered that phosphorus atoms bound in clusters around calcium ions (called “Posner clusters”) may retain their coherence, even in the brain, for hours or days at a time; he proposes that the spin of these phosphorus atoms may serve as qubits in the brain’s quantum computer (Fisher, 2015; Ouellette, 2016).

⁵⁶ Andreae & Burrone, 2018.

⁵⁷ Although I am proposing a different mechanism based on post-selection, the idea that precognition focuses on rewards is not that different from how precognition is explained in the “syntropy” theory of di Corpo and Vannini (2015). They suggest that in humans and other sentient organisms, emotion acts as a signal current from future attractors: Love is a signal of being on a harmonious, life-conducive path, whereas anxiety signals deviation from it. Thought, by the same token, reflects signals from the past, based on learning and experience. See also Taylor, 2014.

⁵⁸ For a summary of Libet’s discoveries, see Libet, 2004.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Wegner, 2002.

⁶¹ Ramachandran, 2011.

⁶² Clark, 2016.

⁶³ Wolf, 1989, 1998. See also Penrose, 1994; Wendt, 2015. Physicist Henry Stapp (Stapp, 2015) has proposed that Libet’s findings reflect consciousness collapsing the wavefunction of readiness potentials in the nervous system, thereby giving the illusion that action precedes consciousness rather than vice versa.

⁶⁴ Buonomano, 2017.

⁶⁵ See e.g., Dossey, 2013; Dunne, 1952(1927); Targ, 2004.

⁶⁶ See Barušs & Mossbridge, 2017.

⁶⁷ Deary et al., 2012.

⁶⁸ Bem, 2011.

⁶⁹ Costa de Beauregard, 1975, 92.

⁷⁰ Dean Buonomano’s Your Brain Is a Time Machine (Buonomano, 2017) is a good summary of the topic.

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

¹ Douglas, 1966.

² George Hansen’s The Trickster and the Paranormal (Hansen, 2001) is a comprehensive study of the liminal nature of paranormal and parapsychological topics and the taboos that surround them.

³ Jones, 1955, 14.

⁴ Rudnytsky, 1987, 6.

⁵ Anzieu, 1986.

⁶ Freud, 1965(1899).

⁷ 1899 was also the year Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published, although “A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled” was not included in that text. It has been appended to some later editions.

⁸ Freud, 1974(1899), 49.

⁹ Ibid., 50.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid., 49. Frau B.’s acceptance of her doctor’s account seems to reflect the same kind of deference to (usually male) authority that has often allowed skeptical reframings of anomalous experience to prevail without challenge. She may have either altered her own beliefs about the matter, or just kept silent about them—there is no way to know.

¹² Ibid., 51.

¹³ Dunne, 1952[1927]), 207.

¹⁴ Freud, 1965(1899), 547-548.

¹⁵ Ibid., 548.

¹⁶ Freud, 1965(1901), 336. In a later edition of the book, Freud added another similar case reported by psychoanalyst Otto Rank in 1912: Rank had been approaching a bank to change some bank notes for silver coins to give as Christmas presents and, when he saw a long line in front of the bank, mentally rehearsed how he would try to be quick about his request: “Let me have gold, please.” Rank immediately noted the error in his thoughts—that he meant silver, not gold—when suddenly he encountered a school friend of his brother’s, named Gold; Gold’s brother, in turn, was a publisher who had failed to help Rank years earlier in his career, preventing a degree of material prosperity he had hoped for. Rank explained this with a typical psychoanalytic “must have,” augmented by what in modern psychological parlance would be called “priming”:

While I was absorbed in my phantasies, therefore, I must have unconsciously perceived the approach of Herr Gold; and this was represented in my unconscious (which was dreaming of material success) in such a form that I decided to ask for gold at the counter, instead of the less valuable silver. On the other hand, however, the paradoxical fact that my unconscious is able to perceive an object which my eyes can recognize only later seems partly to be explained by what Bleuler terms ‘complexive preparedness’ (Ibid., 337-338).

¹⁷ Luckhurst, 2008.

¹⁸ Luckhurst, 2002.

¹⁹ Richet wrote: “All powers considered supernatural are but human powers, muscular or psychic, but since they are removed from awareness they appear to have arisen from outside ourselves” (quoted in Wolf, 1993, 59-60).

²⁰ Ricoeur, 1970.

²¹ Sartre, 2002, 211.

²² Popper named this evidential loop the “Oedipus effect,” and even noted how strange it was that the whole business of prophecy was left out of Freud’s writings: “[I]t will be remembered that the causal chain leading to Oedipus’ parricide was started by the oracle’s prediction of this event. This is a characteristic and recurrent theme of such myths, but one which seems to have failed to attract the interest of the analysts, perhaps not accidentally” (quoted in Borch-Jacobsen & Shamdasani, 2012, 125).

²³ Flournoy, 2007(1900).

²⁴ Freud, 1961(1930), 16.

²⁵ Siegel (2017) calls these “lead-up dreams.” The Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky discussed these types of dreams at length in his Iconostasis , regarding them as proof that “Dream time is turned inside out ” (Florensky, 1996[1922]).

²⁶ Carpenter, 2012.

²⁷ On why a “flatter” picture of the mind is (counterintuitively) more appealing and realistic than depth psychologies, see Chater, 2018. Chater argues that most of what has been misconstrued as mental depth really reflects the essentially improvisational nature of cognition.

²⁸ See Luckhurst, 2002.

²⁹ Jones, 1957; Luckhurst, 2002.

³⁰ The essay was published in his 1932 volume New Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis , although none of the pieces were ever actually delivered as lectures.

³¹ Freud, 1965(1932), 46.

³² Ibid., 47.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ This case was the most important of three to be included in a 1921 presentation to his inner circle, called “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy,” but Freud accidentally left this case behind; he himself interpreted this as a parapraxis, “omitted due to resistance” (Luckhurst, 2002, 272).

³⁵ In fact, nowhere in the article does Freud specify the “grounds of his impediment,” so his “though” is curious—what does her nickname for P. have to do with his sexual problems? Possibly a lot, as we will see.

³⁶ Freud, 1965(1932), 60.

³⁷ Ibid., 61.

³⁸ Ibid., 62-63.

³⁹ This case later intrigued the French poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida, who made it the focus of his typically inscrutable, and arguably misnamed, piece, “Telepathy” (Derrida, 1988).

⁴⁰ Although Freud goes on to examine potential counterarguments to this as a genuine case of thought transference, he ultimately comes down favoring the “occult” explanation, and only laments that a physical explanation is not yet forthcoming for such phenomena. He sees his own theory of the unconscious as perhaps paving the way to such an explanation:

The telepathic process is supposed to consist in a mental act in one person instigating the same mental act in another person. What lies between these two mental acts may easily be a physical process into which the mental one is transformed at one end and which is transformed back once more in to the same mental one at the other end. The analogy with other transformations, such as occur in speaking and hearing by telephone, would then be unmistakable. And only think if one could get hold of this physical equivalent of the psychical act! It would seem to me that psycho-analysis, by inserting the unconscious between what is physical and what was previously called ‘psychical’, has paved the way for the assumption of such processes as telepathy. (Freud, 1965(1932), 68.)

⁴¹ Carpenter, 2012; Ehrenwald, 1954; Eisenbud, 1970, 1982.

⁴² Eisenbud, 1982, 56.

⁴³ The more one studies prophecy and the lives of precogs even outside of the psychoanalytic literature, the more one realizes that sexual and generational transgression is weirdly entwined with the whole topic. For whatever it may (or may not) be worth, J. W. Dunne, precognitive dream pioneer and the guiding light for this book, married late in life, at the age of 53; his bride, with the impressive English name Cicely Marion Violet Joan Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, was 28—she was 25 years his junior, in other words. Maggy Quarles van Ufford, who “precognitively seduced” her doctor, Carl Jung, via her dreams as well as “Tantric” physical symptoms (see Chapter 11), was 19 years Jung’s junior. Philip K. Dick, whose remarkable precognitive life has been examined by several writers, married a string of successively younger women—his fifth wife, Tessa, who was 18 when they met, was less than half his age (see Chapter 13).

⁴⁴ Eisenbud, 1982, 7.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 7-8.

⁴⁶ Echeverria et al., 1991; Friedman et al., 1990; Lloyd et al., 2011; see also Dobyns, 2006.

⁴⁷ “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!’” (Wiseman, 2010, 153).

⁴⁸ Echeverria et al., 1991; Friedman et al., 1990. Physicist Nick Herbert (personal communication) suggests calling the quantum forces that protect self-consistency “Novikov Forces,” in analogy to the quantum forces that prevent two electrons from occupying the same quantum state (the Pauli Exclusion Principle).

⁴⁹ Eisenbud, 1982, 7-8.

⁵⁰ Ibid., viii.

⁵¹ Marwaha & May, 2016.

⁵² Freud, 1965(1899), 659-660.

9. Wyrd and Wishes—Metabolizing the Future in Dreams

¹ Frank Herbert keyed in on this ancient usage in his Dune series, where “weirding words” had a compelling force over the hearer.

² Freud, 1965(1899), 139-140.

³ Ibid., 140.

⁴ See discussion of the issue of Freud’s feelings about responsibility and the Irma dream in Forrester, 1990.

⁵ Freud, 1965(1899), 154.

⁶ The Irma dream has been subject to countless reanalyses, with some psychoanalysts arguing that it really focuses on the Fliess situation and Freud’s wish that his friend be blameless in the various malpractice incidents that were tarnishing his reputation and tainting Freud by association. In this respect, Slavoj Žižek (Žižek, 2006a, 32) makes the amusing observation:

The interpretation [of the dream of Irma’s injection] is surprisingly reminiscent of an old Soviet joke: ‘Did Rabinovitch win a new car on the state lottery?’ ‘In principle, yes, he did. Only it was not a car but a bicycle, it was not new but old, and he did not win it, it was stolen from him!’ Is a dream the manifestation of the dreamer’s unconscious sexual desire? In principle, yes. Yet in the dream Freud chose to demonstrate his theory of dreams, his desire is neither sexual nor unconscious, and, moreover, it’s not his own.

⁷ Freud, 1965(1899), 154.

⁸ Mavromatis, 1987, 193.

⁹ Anzieu, 1986.

¹⁰ Barad, 2007.

¹¹ Žižek, 2006b.

¹² Hobson & McCarley, 1977.

¹³ Crick & Mitchison, 1983.

¹⁴ Valli & Revonsuo, 2009.

¹⁵ Rock, 2004.

¹⁶ Winson, 1986.

¹⁷ Hobson, 2002.

¹⁸ Llewellyn, 2013.

¹⁹ See Wargo, 2010.

²⁰ This may have to do with how dreams not only encode memories but also preserve a rudimentary sense of chronology in our lives. Chronology can only come from a sense of experiences occurring in proximity and thus remaining associated closely with each other in our long-term-memory store. There is no fixed objective temporal yardstick in our brains (or anywhere) but only a cross-correlation of events, somewhat the way tree-rings corroborate and calibrate Carbon-14 data and vice versa. Chronology, ultimately, is an echo-chamber of self-reference, in our individual biographies as much as in the study of human and geologic (pre)history.

²¹ Wargo, 2010.

²² Other paradigms in memory research point to the same “associative halo” principle: For instance, in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, participants are shown lists of words that share some connection to another word that is not on the list (for instance “sheet,” “pillow,” “bed,” and “dream,” but not “sleep”); when tested later, participants generally falsely remember reading the absent word (“sleep”). (See https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Deese–Roediger–McDermott_​paradigm )

²³ McNamara, 2013.

²⁴ Hobson, 2013, 621.

²⁵ One writer and investigator of his own dreams, Bruce Siegel (Siegel, 2017), recently estimated that a quarter of his sample of 241 dreams was precognitive, most “coming true” within hours of the dream, some within minutes of awakening. My own experience with precognitive dreaming, although less systematic, has been similar—but see this book’s Postscript.

²⁶ Dunne, 1952(1927), 62.

²⁷ Krippner, Ullman, and Honorton, 2002(1971).

²⁸ Graff, 1998, 2000, 2007.

²⁹ Paquette, 2016. Paquette writes that he was told the purpose of (relatively rare) dream symbolism—to facilitate the dream message making the transition to waking consciousness—by a “nonlocal character” encountered in a lucid dream. Thus, he believes dreams may access a real alternative reality rather than being solely a representation of his own thoughts or memories. This raises an interesting problem: Any claim for what is a “symbol” standing for some latent meaning, versus a simple association, or versus a literal representation of some real alternative reality would require already knowing (or presupposing) what the rules governing the transformation of experience into the language of dreams consist of. Any claim about the meaning of a dream in relation to external reality has some degree of circularity, as it will always be predicated on accepting some particular theory of dreams and dreaming. It is a version of what in philosophy and criticism is sometimes called the hermeneutic circle , and it is one reason any claim about meaning is ultimately unfalsifiable. (What Freud-bashers fail to recognize is that a claim of no meaning in a dream is also unfalsifiable, for the same reasons.)

³⁰ Siegel, 2017. This has been my own experience as well—see Wargo, 2015c, 2015e.

³¹ See Ehrenwald, 1954; Eisenbud, 1970, 1982.

³² Eisenbud, 1982, 57.

³³ Ibid., 108.

³⁴ Siegel, 2017.

³⁵ Dossey, 2009.

³⁶ Krohn & Kripal, 2018.

³⁷ “Dew” is an old, probably ancient esoteric symbol for dreams and dreaming. Dreams, like dew, evaporate quickly with the morning sunrise (Wargo, 2015d). It is conceivable that Goddard was aware of this when he chose the pseudonym “Dewing” for his Navy dreamer, Gladstone.

³⁸ This part of the conversation, as recorded by Goddard (1951, 102), was:

“Well,” said the commander, “this will seem rather stupid to you. But I’ve just been reading a book by a philosopher bloke called Dunne, An Experiment With Time . He had discovered that some dreams, or some bits of dreams, come true. But if they are going to come true, they come true within the next two days. He builds up rather an interesting philosophy out of it all. Guess I’ve got a bit dream-conscious. Still, if I were you—”

Inclined to argue with the commander, I said, “Dunne makes out, doesn’t he, that when the subconscious mind is released from the duty of serving the conscious mind—because the conscious mind has gone off duty, too; gone to sleep—then the subconscious can dash off into space and time and have a wonderful spree making sequence pictures to taunt the sleeping conscious mind’s eye, mixing up past and future events? And isn’t it his point that this is what we call dreaming?”

“Yes, that’s the idea. You must have read his book.”

“I have,” I said, “and it didn’t say that two days is the limit for coming true. What it did say was that Dunne found out, once he had begun to get dream-conscious, he had such a collection of dreams to record, and had to watch so closely for bits of them coming true, that if something didn’t happen within two days he would discard his dream records more than two days old and concentrate on newer dreams.”

“All the same,” said the commander, “if I were you, I’d stay on the ground for a couple of days.”

³⁹ Jones, 1957.

⁴⁰ Resnik, 1987.

⁴¹ Schavelzon argued that probably complications and illnesses peripheral to the cancer per se killed him, at age 83, and not the cancer itself—which may in fact have been spurred by the radiation treatments and surgeries he received (Ibid.).

⁴² Moss, 2009; see also Dossey, 2009.

⁴³ Jones, 1957.

⁴⁴ Anzieu, 1986, 155.

⁴⁵ Fichtner, 2010.

⁴⁶ See Forrester, 1990.

⁴⁷ Jones, 1957, 96.

⁴⁸ Fichtner, 2010, 1153.

⁴⁹ Jones, 1957, 95.

⁵⁰ Of course, psychoanalysis itself, which Freud had been in the process of developing when he had the dream, is all about speech and the difficulties of speaking, the impediments—resistances—to honest disclosure (Forrester, 1990).

⁵¹ Anzieu, 1986.

⁵² There is some question whether Kekulé actually told dream account to his audience at the Benzolfeier event or only added it to the text of his speech in the published proceedings (Wotiz & Rudofsky, 1993).

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ If there was any truth to Kekulé’s dream story, cryptomnesia cannot be ruled out—that is, a dream-representation of an idea in an article that the dreamer had previously seen but consciously forgotten (or as Freud might have said, “repressed”).

⁵⁵ Freud, (1965[1899]), 660.

⁵⁶ Anzieu, 1986.

⁵⁷ Freud, 1961(1930), 17.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 17-18.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 18.

⁶⁰ Ibid.

10. Prophetic Jouissance —Trauma, Survival, and the Precognitive Sublime

¹ Guinness, 1985.

² Ibid., 34-35.

³ See Gurney et al., 2007(1886); Kripal, 2010, 2014.

⁴ Forrester, 1990.

⁵ Ibid. See also Luckhurst, 2008.

⁶ Luckhurst, 2008.

⁷ Laplanche, 1993, 41.

⁸ Quoted in Rudnytsky, 1987, 12.

⁹ Forrester, 1990, 197.

¹⁰ Jones, 1957.

¹¹ Winnicott, 1971.

¹² Freud, 1984(1920).

¹³ Freud may have gotten a dose of inspiration for his concept of “death drive” from one of his students, the Russian analyst Sabina Spielrein. In her 1911 paper “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” (Spielrein, 1994[1911]), which she read to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society shortly after her admission to Freud’s group, Spielrein identified the paradoxical or counterintuitive relationship in the unconscious between generation and destruction, sex and death—an equivalence for which evidence could be found not only in patients’ dreams but also throughout mythology. Her linking of the diametrical forces of creation and destruction was influential on both Freud’s and Carl Jung’s work. Unfortunately, history has preferred to focus on Spielrein as Jung’s patient-turned-lover, and her contributions to psychoanal ysis were mostly forgotten after her death in the holocaust (Launer, 2014).

Freud’s death drive is not exactly the same thing as what Spielrein was offering: Hers was an observation that creation entailed a giving up of the ego and self—a notion that mystics would understand readily but that Freud would have considered narcissistic and regressive.

¹⁴ Interestingly, in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow , the process speculated to be behind Tyrone Slothrop’s premonitory erections was an extinction of some initial conditioned response “beyond the zero,” to a “transmarginal” realm virtually identical to jouissance as it figures in Lacan’s work, or to the substitution of negative reinforcement for positive reinforcement in drug addiction.

¹⁵ Lacan, 1998; Daly, 2014.

¹⁶ Twain, 2010; Charman, 2017.

¹⁷ Twain did not write down his dream when it occurred, which might have provided objective basis for verifying it. He dictated it to his stenographer in the context of relating an 1885 meeting of the “Monday Evening Club” in Hartford, Connecticut when he told the dream to several other esteemed gentlemen (mostly clergymen) over cigars, by which point, he estimated, he had told it upwards of 80 times to different people. This gave his memory and his verbal artistry ample opportunity to sort and rearrange events into a seamless narrative of psychic connection. One of Twain’s companions that evening, Reverend Dr. Nathaniel Burton, pointed out, via an example of his own, that a dream retold often enough becomes “one part fact, straight fact, fact pure and undiluted, golden fact, and twenty-four parts embroidery” (Twain, 2010, 277). Twain writes that, although he did not really doubt the dream’s salient points, Burton’s argument compelled him to stop telling the dream thereafter, lest it further alter in the telling.

¹⁸ See Charman, 2017.

¹⁹ Halperin, 2014.

²⁰ See Twain, 2010, 350-352.

²¹ Ibid., p. 561.

²² Charman, 2017.

²³ It may be precisely such thoughts that are pushed not only out of awareness but actually into the past, where they “recur” in advance (or “precur”) as premonitions and dreams that make no sense at the time. It reminds me of the original series Star Trek episode “All Our Yesterdays,” about a planet where political undesirables were exiled via time machine into various times in the planet’s history, where their voice could have no meaning.

²⁴ May & Depp, 2015; see also Graff, 2000.

²⁵ Larry Dossey, commenting on Twain’s dream about seeing his brother dead, notes that from May’s entropy gradient theory alone we might have expected the writer to dream of the boiler explosion itself and not the scene at the wake, when the nurse placed a single red rose on Henry’s chest. But “for Twain, who loved his brother deeply and blamed himself for his death for the rest of his life, it was probably Henry’s death itself that was the most entropic, not the boiler that blew up” (Dossey, 2009, 118).

²⁶ Dale E. Graff, who directed the military remote-viewing project Star Gate, makes this point in his memoir River Dreams : “Fire, even the threat of fire, is a bright beacon in our emotional landscape—for this reality and for psi space” (Graff, 2000, 37).

²⁷ Kant, 2008, 91.

²⁸ Freud, 2015(1918).

²⁹ Cathy Caruth, in her essay “Traumatic Awakenings: Freud, Lacan, and the Ethics of Memory” (in Caruth, 1996) clarifies the crucial link between Freud’s “death drive” and survival.

³⁰ Becker, 1973, 2.

³¹ Paradoxically, the logic of jouissance may also apply to many people’s premonitions related to their own death. Most of those who perished in the World Trade Center, for instance, would have had time to be aware of what was happening, and formulate hope for rescue. Their premonitory dreams may have conveyed this intensified awareness of their own mortality in the context of a mortal crisis. Could this explain sculptor Michael Richards’ obsession with being “pierced by planes” in the years and months leading up to his death on 9/11, for example? There is no way of knowing for sure, but it is very possible that he did not die in the initial impact of American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower. His studio was on the 92^nd floor, the floor struck by the lowest wingtip of the jet. The artist may well have had time to be aware that a plane had crashed into his building, perhaps even to learn that a second plane struck the other tower. Similarly with William Stead’s possible premonitions of his death aboard the Titanic ; the uncertainty of the Titanic passengers’ fate must have extended up until the end as some dim hope for rescue that their premonitory unconscious may have interpreted as survival.

³² The clip is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/​watch?​v=​ZUe30aXjS20

³³ Guinness, 1985, 34.

³⁴ Again, the well-established fallibility of memory will of course not prevent psi-skeptics from invoking cryptomnesia to account for anomalous experiences when it suits them to do so.

³⁵ Ibid.

11. A Precognitive Seduction—Maggy Quarles van Ufford, Carl Jung, and the Scarab

¹ Jung, 1985(1937), 332.

² Forrester, 1990.

³ Jung, 1973(1951), 109.

⁴ Ibid., 110.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ De Moura, 2014.

⁷ Unless otherwise noted, biographical information on Madeleine Quarles van Ufford in this chapter, apart from what is stated or implied by Jung himself, comes from de Moura’s article, “Learning from the Patient” (de Moura, 2014). De Moura refers to Maggy by her married surname Reichstein, but because most of the events discussed in this chapter probably preceded her marriage in 1925, I have opted to use her maiden name or, in most cases, simply “Maggy” to avoid confusion. Besides Jung’s writings and de Moura’s article, other sources adding minor but interesting biographical details on Maggy Reichstein née Quarles van Ufford, although without awareness that she was the famous patient who dreamed of a scarab, include Broda (2013) and Jansen (2003).

⁸ Broda, 2013.

⁹ De Moura, 2014.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Jung (1996, 104) describes: “She could not adapt to European conditions because her instincts refused all along the line; she would not marry, she would not be interested in ordinary things, she would not adapt to our conventions. She was against everything, and so naturally she became very neurotic.”

¹² Jung, 1985(1937).

¹³ Jung, 1996.

¹⁴ According to May B. Broda (Broda, 2013), Maggy and her sisters had taken lodging at the house of Mrs. Gustawa Reichstein, a non-observant Polish Jew who ran a boarding house for young emigres (later, in the 1930s, she took in Jewish refugees) and was a friend of Jung’s. Particularly difficult cases frequently stayed with her, and she is said to have assisted with their treatment. She was also a protective mother figure for her various young lodgers, tolerant of their political activism and sexual behavior.

¹⁵ Ibid.; https://it.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Ignaz_​Epper

¹⁶ De Moura, 2014.

¹⁷ Jung, 1996, 104.

¹⁸ Jung, 1985(1937).

¹⁹ Noll, 1994, 1997.

²⁰ Jung, 1973(1952).

²¹ Describing them as “exteriorizations” of course obscures the possibility that the cracks had a mundane explanation but that Jung pre-sensed these startling noises in that emotionally charged context. This seems more likely, given that the noises continued to be heard by Freud afterward. In a letter dated April 16th, 1909, Freud wrote to Jung:

I do not deny that your comments and your experiment made a powerful impression upon me. After your departure I determined to make some observations, and here are the results. In my front room there are continual creaking noises, from where the two heavy Egyptian steles rest on the oak boards of the bookcase, so that’s obvious. In the second room, where we heard the crash, such noises are very rare. At first I was inclined to ascribe some meaning to it if the noise we heard so frequently when you were here were never again heard after your departure. But since then it has happened over and over again, yet never in connection with my thoughts and never when I was considering you or your special problem. (Not now, either, I add by way of challenge). The phenomenon was soon deprived of all significance for me by something else. My credulity, or at least my readiness to believe, vanished along with the spell of your personal presence ... The furniture stands before me spiritless and dead, like nature silent and godless before the poet after the passing of the gods of Greece. (In Jung, 1965a, 361-362.)

²² Jung, 1973(1951), 109-10.

²³ Jung, 1973(1952), 23-24.

²⁴ See, e.g., Hand, 2014.

²⁵ Falk, 1989, p. 477. In the same way and for the same reasons, the “synchronicity” of the Millenium Hilton and the rubble of the World Trade Center after 9/11 (Chapter 1) was also a product of taking a very singular point of view, a particular photo-op.

²⁶ Jung, 1973(1952), 19.

²⁷ Jung, 2015, 344.

²⁸ Main, 2007.

²⁹ Koestler, 1972.

³⁰ Tart, 1981. Tart argues that by implying that there’s no cause to be found, the synchronicity concept facilitates “being intellectually lazy and dodging our responsibilities” (i.e., as scientists).

³¹ Jung, 2015, 541.

³² Noll, 1994, 1997.

³³ Not surprisingly, Freud’s clinic was also an echo chamber; see Borch-Jakobsen (1996) and Borch-Jakobsen & Shamdasani (2012).

³⁴ Beitman, 2016, 120.

³⁵ See, e.g., Carpenter, 2012.

³⁶ Radin, 2018; see also Radin, 2006, 2009, 2013.

³⁷ Jung, 1973(1952), 23.

³⁸ Despite Jung’s parenthetical claim that Maggy “did not happen to know” the rebirth symbolism of scarabs, it is quite possible she did have some idea. Scarabs were popular at that point, and Maggy was a highly educated and curious woman who could have encountered discussion of scarab symbolism in any number of then-current sources, including her own doctor’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido . Even if she had not encountered the idea in a book at some point, she is likely to have known the symbolism of scarabs via the decorative arts. Scarab jewelry, of the sort the dream-figure gave her, had been popular since the Egyptian Revival of the mid 19^th century, its ancient meaning of rebirth or metamorphosis reasonably well understood in that context. The Parisian jewelry designer Lalique, for instance, was famous for his Art Deco, Egyptian-style scarabs, as well as for other art jewelry that depicted the surreal metamorphosis of women into insects. As a woman from a wealthy aristocratic family, Maggy would have known the language of jewelry and high fashion, whatever she knew or didn’t know about ancient Egypt. (Scarabs would enjoy a second wave of popularity after 1922, with the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb—although I am inferring that the episode in Jung’s clinic probably preceded that.)

³⁹ Jung, 1965b, 179.

⁴⁰ Jung, 2012, 253.

⁴¹ Jung, 1985(1937).

⁴² Noll, 1997, 151.

⁴³ Noll, 1994, 1997.

⁴⁴ Beitman, 2016, 120.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Priestley, 1989(1964).

⁴⁷ Freud, 1974(1899), 50.

⁴⁸ ESP phenomena have frequently been observed to manifest especially in conditions of impeded connection. Jule Eisenbud (Eisenbud, 1982) also noted that the over-expression of precognitive abilities seemed linked to socially repressed sexual orientations and desires, literally “forbidden love,” as we will see in Chapter 12.

⁴⁹ It now appears as an appendix to the volume The Practice of Psychotherapy (Jung, 1985[1937]), and a less detailed version of the story appears in Jung’s notes to a 1932 seminar on Kundalini Yoga (Jung, 1996).

⁵⁰ Jung, 1985(1937), 330.

⁵¹ Ibid., 331 (italics in original).

⁵² Broda, 2013.

⁵³ Jung (1996, 105) describes: “At the same time she really loved a man but could not think of marrying him. And then the thought entered her head that I, or circumstances, might persuade her to marry and have a baby, but that was impossible.”

⁵⁴ Jung, 1985(1937), 332.

⁵⁵ I dreamt that I was walking along a country road at the foot of a steep hill. On the hill was a castle with a high tower. Sitting on the parapet of the topmost pinnacle was a woman, golden in the light of the evening sun. In order to see her properly, I had to bend my head so far back that I woke up with a crick in the neck. (Ibid., 332.)

⁵⁶ According to Baynes’ daughter, Baynes himself had a short extramarital affair with Maggy (who also was by that point married, with children) and called the Dutch artist a “devotee of eros” (Jansen, 2003, 225). It is when Baynes described to Jung the “extraordinary impression” Maggy had made on him that Jung described her as “the ideal anima woman. It is her vocation” (Ibid.). When Baynes was involved with Maggy, Jung inexplicably became coldly distant, and Baynes surmised that it was because of Jung’s feelings for her: “I have a feeling that his coldness to me now is very largely on account of [Maggy]. He is very attached to her and feels her great value because it developed literally under his hand” (Ibid., 245).

⁵⁷ Douglas, 1993.

⁵⁸ See, e.g., Bair, 2003; Launer, 2014; McLynn, 1996; Noll, 1997. It was in the context of the scandal that erupted during Jung’s intense relationship with Sabina Spielrein, a 19-year-old Russian patient he had treated at Zurich’s Burghölzli mental hospital, that Freud first used the term “countertransference” in a letter to Jung. Whether or not that relationship was physically consummated has been a matter of considerable, often acrimonious debate among Jung’s followers, biographers, and critics; some of the latter, like Noll, argue that Jung actively preached the virtues of polygamy to his patients (Noll, 1994, 1997; see also Heuer, 2017). In contrast, Lance Owens (Owens, 2015) cites some evidence that the relationship with Spielrein remained sexually unrequited. (Owens argues that Jung sublimated his desires into a higher mystical gnosis, a mysterium coniunctionis. )

⁵⁹ Jung, 1985(1937), 333.

⁶⁰ In his “On Synchronicity” lecture, he writes, “This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results” (Jung, 1973[1951], 110).

⁶¹ The similarity of the two narratives raises some question how accurate either one may really have been: On one hand, they seem like stereotyped vignettes of therapeutic breakthrough and could have been based as much on Jung’s fantasies about the efficacy of his method as on reality. In addition, both narratives were written decades after the incidents they described, and he clearly didn’t take notes (since de Moura remarks that Jung wrote to Maggy in 1949 asking for her recollections of the scarab incident, so he could write about it; de Moura, 2014). On the other hand, the fact that Maggy was indeed moved if not transformed by some of her experiences in Jung’s consulting room is not in doubt, given her continued correspondence with Jung about events in her therapy.

⁶² Jung, 1985(1937), 333-334.

⁶³ The meaning of these symptoms wending their way up his patient’s chakras—the secret thought the bird was releasing—was, Jung asserted once again, a very conventional-bourgeois desire for a child, which Jung says his patient was compelled disappointingly to own up to:

For as soon as the kundalini serpent reached manipura, the most primitive centre of consciousness, the patient’s brain told her what kind of thought the shakti was insinuating into her: that she wanted a real child and not just a psychic experience. This seemed a great let-down to the patient. But that is the disconcerting thing about the shakti: her building material is maya, “real illusion.” In other words, she spins fantasies with real things.

This little bit of Tantric philosophy helped the patient to make an ordinary human life for herself, as a wife and mother … (Ibid., 336-337.)

⁶⁴ De Moura (2014) notes that Mischa later sent Maggy her notes of the lecture, with references to the fantasies Jung didn’t understand until he read Arthur Avalon’s book underlined.

⁶⁵ Freud and his colleague Josef Breuer encountered and recorded many such seductions, also with appropriate clinical detachment, in their 1895 volume Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1957[1895]; see also Forrester, 1990). It would be interesting to revisit those cases with an eye to any possible precognitive symptomatology.

⁶⁶ This same mechanism might also have accounted for the tendency of Freud’s patients to produce Oedipal material, as well as for the general tendency of patients to produce dreams and symptoms that match the theoretical orientation of their therapist.

⁶⁷ De Moura, 2014, 405.

⁶⁸ Ibid.

⁶⁹ Coincidentally or not, Jung does cite Phantasms in his Synchronicity monograph, just before the scarab narrative; we know that he read it and that it was an influence on his thinking, at least insofar as the authors had made an attempt to cover the same ground of meaningful coincidence.

⁷⁰ Jule Eisenbud is one exception. He chronicled numerous manifestations of “psi” behavior on the part of his patients, often intended (albeit unconsciously) to elicit his approbation, approval, or sexual interest (Eisenbud, 1970, 1982).

⁷¹ Jung was clearly wrong when he wrote in his 1952 Synchronicity monograph that “nothing like [the scarab incident] ever happened to me before or since, and … the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience” (Jung, 1973[1952], 22).

⁷² De Moura, 2014, 391.

⁷³ See Forrester’s (1990) discussion of the question of payment and contracts in relation to “free speech” in psychoanalysis.

⁷⁴ The peril of active hermeneutic engagement with symptoms or dreams is that they will turn out to be precisely that engagement that is precognized, resulting in the kind of vertiginous hall of mirrors that will, not without justification, nauseate a scientist-skeptic. A reader of my blog, The Nightshirt , proposed that some dreams might be precognitive of the very act of recalling or writing the dream down upon waking (or by extension telling it to a spouse over breakfast, or reflecting upon it in some way later). If thoughts sparked by the act of recording the dream are emotionally salient in some way, this could indeed be the case; falsifying that hypothesis in any given case would be extremely difficult—although again, difficulty of falsification is not in itself evidence of falsehood.

⁷⁵ Eisenbud, 1970.

12. Fate, Free Will, and Futility —Morgan Robertson’s Tiresias Complex

¹ Eisenbud, 1982, 75.

² Ehrenwald, 1954.

³ Jule Eisenbud’s chapter “Is There A Merciful God in the House?” in his book Paranormal Foreknowledge (Eisenbud, 1982), gives essential insight into Robinson’s life and works, and is a touchstone for my thinking in this chapter.

⁴ Robertson, 1974(1898), 23-24.

⁵ Kripal, 2011.

⁶ Francis, 1915, 100.

⁷ In Gardner, 1998, 2.

⁸ Robertson, 1905, 88.

⁹ In a short autobiographical piece called “My Skirmish with Madness” (Robertson, 1915b), he describes a few weeks he spent in Bellevue Hospital undergoing detoxification—and his ultimate return to drinking. In another autobiographical piece he wrote and published anonymously a year before his death, “Gathering No Moss,” he describes a visit to a hypnotist, ostensibly to help with his writing, but likely in fact to help with his drinking.

¹⁰ Robertson, 1915a, 29.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid., 29-30.

¹³ Žižek, 1989, 71. Something similar obviously can be said about the ruins of the World Trade Center, or the ruins of Auschwitz/Birkenau, or a Civil War battlefield; they all represent sites of trauma yet are also repeatedly revisited and “enjoyed” in a kind of obsessive-ritualistic way.

¹⁴ Žižek writes, “even before it actually happened, there was already a place opened, reserved for it in fantasy space. It had such a terrific impact on the ’social imaginary’ by virtue of the fact that it was expected” (Ibid., 69).

¹⁵ There is, of course, a whole can of worms here for psychoanalytically inclined parapsychologists who take seriously the possibility of psychokinetic or PK effects—or the effects of intention. Despite their disturbing overlap with regressive ideas of the “omnipotence of thought,” Eisenbud (1982) considers PK and other “active hypotheses” more realistic than true retrocausation. Again, it’s a topic way beyond the scope of this book; but a good case can be made that at least some of what looks like PK is really misrecognized precognition (see, e.g., May, 2015).

¹⁶ Eisenbud, 1982, 111.

¹⁷ This raises the possibility, not mentioned by Eisenbud, that the forbidden, not-acted-upon desire in Robertson’s life may instead have been some kind of pedophilia. Note that Futility , for instance, is a rescue fantasy centered on a child; at the end of the story a court absolves Rowland of guilt for abducting her.

¹⁸ Eisenbud writes that “nowhere has [the Oedipus story] been told and retold as plainly as in Robertson’s works” (Eisenbud, 1982, 104).

¹⁹ Robertson, 1915a.

²⁰ See Hansen (2001) for in-depth discussion of liminality and its relation to the paranormal.

²¹ When H. G. Wells’ Time Traveler in The Time Machine visits the distant future, he finds that a great Sphinx structure has been erected on the site of his laboratory; after his machine is stolen by the Morlocks, he must penetrate that Sphinx to find it and continue his travels.

²² Robertson, N.D., 262-263.

²³ Francis, 1915, 101.

²⁴ Eisenbud, 1982, 106.

²⁵ See Forrester, 1990.

13. “P.S. What Scares Me Most, Claudia, Is That I Can Often Recall the Future ”—The Memetic Prophecies of Philip K. Dick

¹ Since both the invention of radar and Pearl Harbor occurred over two decades after Robertson’s death, his stories possibly anticipating these developments would not fit the precognitive hypothesis advanced in this book.

² Davis, 1998.

³ See Peake, 2013; Sarill, 2014; Wargo, 2015a.

⁴ Dick’s 1956 story “Minority Report”—which Steven Spielberg made into a movie starring Tom Cruise in 2002—still stands as one of the great sci-fi considerations of precognition and how it might be exploited as a social predictive tool. In the story, multiple psychics’ impressions of the future are pooled for greater precision; today a version of this method called “associative remote viewing” is being used in attempts to beat the stock market and Las Vegas (see Broderick, 2015; Targ, 2012). Dick, like Thomas Pynchon, was prescient about prescience.

⁵ Peake, 2013, 177.

⁶ The relevant passage (Dick, 2012, 224) is:

“What is Ubik?” Joe said, wanting her to stay.

“A spray can of Ubik,” the girl answered, “is a portable negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are given a counter-clockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than dissipate. A negative ion field diminishes the velocity of anti-protophasons normally present in the atmosphere; as soon as their velocity falls they cease to be anti-protophasons and, under the principle of parity, no longer can unite with protophasons radiated from persons frozen in cold-pac; that is, those in half-life. The end result is that the proportion of protophasons not canceled by anti-protophasons increases, which means—for a specific time, anyhow—an increment in the net put-forth field of protophasonic activity ... which the affected half-lifer experiences as greater vitality plus a lowering of the experience of low cold-pac temperatures. So you can see why regressed forms of Ubik failed to—”

Joe said reflexively, “To say ‘negative ions’ is redundant. All ions are negative.”

⁷ Sarill, 2014.

⁸ Dick’s 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly may be another example of channeling popular science writing Dick was soon to encounter in his voracious magazine reading. The novel, based partly on his own experiences during the worst depths of his amphetamine addiction in 1970-1972, concerns a group of characters in Orange County, California who are addicted to a new synthetic drug called Substance D. One of the characters experiences complete dissociation between two sides of himself—his job as a narcotics cop and his real life as a Substance D addict, and even “informs on himself” because the drug has destroyed the connection between his two brain hemispheres. Dick was set to deliver his finished manuscript in early 1974, but wrote to his publisher asking for an extension because he had just seen an article on the new science of split-brain phenomena in Psychology Today ; he realized his literary device was a “real thing” and that he needed to do additional research on the topic in order to sound better informed. Was he somehow precognizing the Psychology Today article when he wrote his novel? Again, there is no way to know for sure, but it fits a characteristic pattern in his life. (See Dick, 1991, 9; Peake, 2013.)

⁹ According to his wife at the time, Anne R. Dick, in her book The Search for Philip K. Dick , her husband was heavily influenced by the early 20^th Century existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger (Anne R. Dick, 2010). Binswanger’s definition of “schizophrenia” encompassed disorders far less severe than the currently accepted definition of psychosis.

¹⁰ Apel, 2014, 29. Although both his biographer Lawrence Sutin and his wife at the time, Anne R. Dick, assumed the story must have been written after seeing the exhibit (Sutin, 2005; Anne R. Dick, 2010), neither evidently knew that the exhibit did not go on display until two years after Dick wrote (and submitted) his manuscript. Chronology makes it impossible that Dick could have gotten the idea from Disney (Peake, 2013). It also would make little sense: Why would a writer intent on being original to the point of mind-bending base a story on something he had seen at Disneyland on a visit?

The visit to Disneyland took place late in Dick’s marriage to Anne (as Anne records, it was her idea, as an apologetic gesture for an angry outburst during a fight; “I loved the rocket to the moon. Phil was fascinated by the Lincoln robot” (Anne R. Dick, 2010, 62). Anne and Phil divorced in 1965, so the visit probably took place in 1964 or 1965, at least two years after Dick had written “First in Our Family.”

¹¹ Initially Dick lived in an apartment building in Fullerton, not far from Anaheim, then from 1973 to 1975 in a house he shared with his fifth wife Tessa; when he and Tessa split in 1975, he moved into an apartment building in Santa Ana, just south of the park. So, he could have been referring to either the apartment in Fullerton or the one in Santa Ana.

¹² Apel, 2014, 29-30.

¹³ This young woman, “Pris,” is herself cold and robot-like, and unable to return the narrator’s affections—a deliberate contrast to the deep warmth and humanity (and ultimately, madness) of the robotic Lincoln. As Sutin (2005) notes, Pris is probably the most extreme exemplar in Dick’s fiction of the “dark haired girl” type that he repeatedly became infatuated with in real life. In some ways “A. Lincoln Simulacrum” can be seen as a prequel to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep , later filmed as Blade Runner . In the latter story, “Pris” is one of the simulacra—now called “replicants” (and as one of the characters in the film describes her, “a basic pleasure model”).

¹⁴ Dick, 1969, 37.

¹⁵ Ibid., 39-40.

¹⁶ Other characters in Dick’s writings similarly resembled people he would meet later. A woman he met in 1971 named Kathy so resembled a character of the same name in his novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said , published the previous year, that he said he worried she might sue him (Dick, 1991).

¹⁷ See Arnold, 2016; Peake, 2013; Tessa B. Dick, 2010.

¹⁸ Peake, 2013.

¹⁹ From an interview with Gregg Rickman, quoted in Arnold, 2016, 13.

²⁰ Arnold, 2016, 12.

²¹ Sutin, 2005, 56.

²² Arnold (2016, 13) quotes from a 1971 journal entry, where Dick writes, “I can only be safe when sheltered by a woman … It is that I fear that I will simply die. My breath, my heart will stop. I will expire like an exposed baby. Jane, it happened to you and I am still afraid it will happen to me. They can’t protect us …”

²³ Rudnytsky, 1987.

²⁴ Arnold, 2016, 193.

²⁵ Arnold (2016) makes a strong case that, just like might happen in a Phil Dick novel such as A Scanner Darkly , Dick really did break into his own house, perhaps in a dissociative state, and pry open his own safe, destroying specifically years of cancelled checks that could have been used against him as evidence by the IRS. He had not paid taxes in years.

²⁶ In her memoir, Tessa (Tessa B. Dick, 2010) claims that “2-3-74” referred to March 2, 1974, the European day-month notation, and indeed in some of his letters he refers to his experience merely as “3-74.”

²⁷ Wilson, 2016.

²⁸ Arnold, 2016, 174.

²⁹ Krenz, 2000.

³⁰ Krenz, N.D. (“Philip K. Dick Words Project”)

³¹ Ibid.

³² Dick, 2011.

³³ Krenz, N.D. (“Philip K. Dick, Dear Claudia Letter, May 9, 1974”); see also Dick, 1991.

³⁴ Dick, 1991, 157.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ Krenz (N.D., “Words Project”) argues that Dick’s letters to her were intended for public consumption all along.

³⁷ Dick, 1991, 165. Unfortunately, without Krenz’s side of the correspondence, we cannot tell whether Dick was in some cases precognizing her letters to him. He frequently waxes effusive at how aptly she has put something or how uncannily she seems to understand him—in one case he expresses shock at the uncanniness of a drawing of the sibyl she sent him based on his brief dream description. Was his dream image informed by her subsequent depiction, and did this account for its uncanniness, or was he just complimenting her as part of his epistolary flirtation?

³⁸ Phil Dick’s visionary experience of seeing the Orange County of gas shortages and the fall of Nixon as a shimmering overlay on the Roman Empire is of course strikingly similar to Freud’s vision of ancient Rome flickering in the landscape of the modern city.

³⁹ Dick, 1991, 298.

⁴⁰ Although Spielberg’s film is widely considered a masterpiece, some viewers—and later, Spielberg himself—have been put off by Neary’s lack of hesitation at leaving behind his wife and children to join the extraterrestrials—a possible resonance with Dick’s own familial ambivalence.

⁴¹ Tessa B. Dick, 2010.

⁴² Tessa Dick (personal communication) confirmed that Phil read some Vallee books in 1977; the book in question, The Invisible College (1975), would have been his most recent book at that point.

⁴³ Wargo, 2015a.

⁴⁴ This may be a further precognitive detail. The piece of technology the “shy and gentle creatures” showed him was, he wrote, “based on a concept buried in a basement and forgotten, [a] twin-drive opposed rotary assembly [in which] torque was passed back and forth from left to right in some way by a clutch system…” (Dick, 1991, 298). This description very closely matches descriptions and drawings of a proposed antigravity device (“the Laithwaite engine”) that appeared six years later in a briefly popular 1981 book called How to Build a Flying Saucer (and Other Proposals in Speculative Engineering) by an inventor named T.B. Pawlicki (Pawlicki, 1981).

⁴⁵ Dick, 1992, p. 91.

⁴⁶ Dick could well have learned how he had been found, as according to Tessa he was awake and lucid in the hospital afterward (Tessa B. Dick, 2010). In that case, he would certainly have felt great relief to be alive. If we take his dream eight years earlier as a premonition, it would not have been “a premonition of his own death” (even though this is how it will typically be described), but a premonition of a disturbing mental image of his own near-death he would have formed in the hospital—in other words, a kind of terrifying dream about his own survival. Unfortunately, he would suffer further strokes soon thereafter, and not regain lucidity.

⁴⁷ Kripal, 2011.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Krohn & Kripal, 2018.

⁵⁰ Di Corpo & Vannini, 2015.

⁵¹ Dick was certainly aware of this—he was not above making double enten dres about his name. But as a Jungian and not a Freudian, he does not seem to have been aware of how deep “Dick” went. Any dream about his own death could not help but also be a dream about castration, and vice versa. For instance, he precognizes a thick (Dick) book about Warren HARDing, “in the shadow of B—Groves” (meaning, in the shadow of death, as Will Durant’s sentence about the sibyl leading good people through “blissful groves” in the afterlife reveals). These dreams used the “bricks” of his impending reading experiences to fashion a promise of immortality “with all the good people” as a consolation prize for the death of (a) Dick. Dick dies but goes to Heaven , in other words.

⁵² Bloom, 1993.

⁵³ Dick, 2011, 421.

⁵⁴ See Davis, 1998.

⁵⁵ Arnold, 2016; Davis, 1998.

14. The Arrival of Meaning and the Creation of the Past

¹ Chiang, 2002, 132.

² Another film that comes close to getting precognition right is Don’t Look Now , the 1973 supernatural thriller by Nicolas Roeg (see Wargo, 2015b). Protagonist John Baxter is a “precog” who, as a materialist skeptic, doesn’t believe in his own abilities. Consequently, when he has a vision of his wife in the company of some black-clad acquaintances, he thinks she has been abducted by them, not realizing that it is a precognitive vision of his own funeral. His attempt to find his wife ends up leading him to his death at the hands of a serial killer. The only thing “mistaken” about the film, I argue, is that since precognition centers on learning experiences during our lifetime, he would not have precognized the scene of his funeral but some event leading up to his death.

³ Otto Rank (Rank, 1968) called this resolute past-centrism “ideological.” Even when it appears to involve delving into some already-existing past, any hermeneutic enterprise like interpreting a dream in the consulting room or curing a neurosis by illuminating its hidden sense is at bottom a making of meaning, not simply a finding of it. By situating traumas in the personal past of childhood (Freud) or deeper in some undead racial/species past (Jung), psychoanalysis and its offshoots were ways of directing attention away from this making, making it look like a finding—because things found always seem to have much more authority and authenticity than things newly made.

⁴ Note that, although I have taken inspiration from Bergson and his writings on time and duration, he would have fundamentally disagreed with the larger argument I am making in this book, that we can “spatialize” time as a glass block, per Minkowski and Einstein. Bergson’s famous debate with Einstein was over this precise question (Canales, 2015). Yet his point about “waiting for the sugar to melt” applies whether or not the future is fixed and “already present”: Meaning is not contained or enfolded, complete, in present objects and situations but must be awaited. Our present understanding of any process can only ever be partial and provisional.

⁵ I would argue that such a quantum psychoanalysis already exists: Zen Buddhism. Elsewhere I have written about the block universe and its unexpected spiritual satisfactions from the standpoint of Zen (Wargo, 2017).

⁶ Niels Bohr made a similar observation, noting in a 1938 lecture that “I’m sure many of you will have recognized the close analogy between the situation as regards the analysis of atomic phenomena … and characteristic features of the problem of observation in human psychology … In introspection it is clearly impossible to distinguish sharply between the phenomena themselves and their conscious perception …” (Bohr, 2010, 27).

⁷ Feynman, 1985.

⁸ Gleick, 1993, 250.

⁹ Gleick, 2018.

¹⁰ In an explanation of rubber bands on a BBC show called Fun to Imagine , Feynman joked that it was lucky for our sanity that we do not have to keep track of all those bouncing-around particles: “The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things if you look at it right. And if you magnify it, you can hardly see anything anymore, because everything is jiggling and they’re all in patterns, and they’re all lots of little balls. It’s lucky that we have such a large-scale view of everything, that we can see them as things, without having to worry about all these little atoms all the time.” The clip is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/​watch?​time_​continue=​1&v=​XRxAn2DRzgI

¹¹ Aharonov & Tollaksen, 2007.

¹² Barad, 2007.

¹³ Lacan, 1988, 159.

¹⁴ Žižek, 2014.

¹⁵ Žižek, 2006b.

¹⁶ See, e.g., Žižek, 1989.

¹⁷ Kripal, 2017.

¹⁸ Kripal, 2011.

¹⁹ Kripal, 2007.

²⁰ Strieber & Kripal, 2016.

²¹ Krohn & Kripal, 2018.

²² Elizabeth Krohn, personal communication.

²³ Jeff doesn’t think he knew that story about Phil Dick prior to this experience, but is not certain (Jeffrey Kripal, personal communication).

²⁴ Weber, 1962.

²⁵ Geertz, 1973, 5.

²⁶ Questions of symbolic motivation were at the forefront of cognitive anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a graduate student: How do symbols and cultural meanings become powerful and salient for individual social actors, and how does individual action in turn shape culture? (See, e.g., Shore, 1996.)

²⁷ Although he does not discuss precognition or related phenomena, Alexander Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science does apply quantum physics to social science and even discusses “changing the past” (Wendt, 2015). Jack Hunter (Hunter, 2018) has opened up discussion of parapsychological phenomena in anthropology with the journal Paranthropology .

²⁸ There is Daryl Bem (Bem, 2011), most obviously, but Julia Mossbridge and Imants Barušs are other examples (Barušs & Mossbridge, 2017). See also Carpenter (2012) and Kelly et al. (2010).

²⁹ Since Mutants and Mystics , Kripal has spoken of a “looping” relationship between paranormal experience, pop culture, and religion/spirituality. His most startling and radical argument in Changed in a Flash is that individual experiencers like Elizabeth Krohn (and those who write about them) are actually “changing the afterlife.” Lifesaving biomedical technologies are bringing more people back from the brink of death, thus there are more people to share in their experiences. The growing literature on near-death experiences, which would necessarily include Changed in a Flash , is actually shaping what people expect, and thus what they experience, at least in the immediate term, when they die (Krohn & Kripal, 2018).

³⁰ Guite, 2017.

³¹ Kripal, 2011.

³² Peake, 2013.

³³ The few cases I have discussed in this book are just the tip of the iceberg. Time-reversals in the world of literary influence, or “altered states of reading,” is a topic I have examined on my blog (Wargo, 2015a). In a more tongue-in-cheek vein, the French literary critic Pierre Bayard (Bayard, 2009) writes about how great authors “plagiarize” from writers who come after them. For instance, he argues that Sophocles plagiarized from Freud when writing Oedipus the King .

³⁴ Beitman, 2016.

Postscript: A Ruin from the Future

¹ Wargo, 2015c.

² Wargo, 2015c, 2015e, 2016b

³ Siegel, 2017.

⁴ Although see Guite, 2017.

⁵ Dick, 1992, 91.

⁶ Pagels, 1979, 126.

⁷ On one previous occasion, I had been stunned to discover a lucid dream referring specifically to an upheaval in my life exactly a year removed in time (I wrote about that dream on my blog; see Wargo, 2016b.). But this “ruined tower” dream now took the proverbial cake. I suspect based on many temporal coincidences like this in my own and others’ dream lives that there may be some way in which calendrical dates “resonate” in our biographies, possibly related to hippocampal spatial calendars that give basic structure our internal chronology, as discussed in Chapter 5.

⁸ Wargo, 2017.

⁹ On the Sunday in question, when I was wrestling with the rough draft, I was trying to meet a self-imposed deadline for sending it to my editor at Anomalist Books.

It was just after I discovered the correspondence of my 18-year-old dream to my current concerns, excited and a little bit awe-struck at the possibility that my old dream may have pointed to that very afternoon in my life, that my wife’s friend “Anne”—the software engineer quoted in the Introduction—arrived at our apartment so I could interview her about her precognitive dreams. I did not share the discovery I had just made about my own dream, but I did have the thought, as she was talking, that I might use her stories as a kind of introduction or preface to my book. The fact that she told me three stories about death, and that the first symbol on my dream chalkboard consisted of three interlinked Omegas , struck me only later, as did the possible significance of the stylized A at the end of the series.

¹⁰ Popova, 2015.

¹¹ Emerson, 1951, 32-33.

¹² Eliot, 1971(1943), 59.