“Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.”
Steven Wright
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to whoever asks, I do not know.”
St Augustine
What really is time? Most of us think of it as some kind of flow of events from the past through the present and into the future. We remember the past, live in the present, and the future is unknown. Precognition, however, makes a nonsense of that common definition, suggesting that the future can be glimpsed in the now.
A thought-provoking story sent to Theresa by a woman named Rachel illustrates that this kind of “remembering the future” is possible.
On the evening of her daughter’s fourth birthday, Rachel had a dream that was so vivid she woke up thinking it had actually happened.
“A lot of my dreams are a collection of random images, but this dream felt like a story with a beginning, middle and an end. In my dream I was playing with my daughter in a house made entirely of glass. We were playing catch with a ball and laughing and going from room to room. When we got to a room at the front of the house I heard birds singing – the sound was so loud it distracted me and I missed catching the ball my daughter threw to me. The ball flew into the glass and the house shattered with splinters and shards everywhere. I heard my daughter screaming. I woke up absolutely terrified and covered in sweat, with screaming still echoing in my ears. I was so unnerved I went into my daughter’s bedroom to check she was sleeping safely. The memory of that dream stayed with me strongly.”
A few weeks later, her daughter was invited to a friend’s house to play.
“The mother seemed keen for me to drop my daughter off and return a few hours later to pick her up. I would normally do that, but something made me hesitate. Perhaps it was because this was the first time my daughter had played at this particular friend’s house? Whatever it was, I told the mother that if it was okay with her I would stay while the children played. The mother invited me in. My daughter rushed off with her friend to play in the conservatory where there was a doll’s house. The mother brought me a cup of tea and asked if I wouldn’t mind watching the girls while she went to the shops. I said that was fine and took my cup of tea into the conservatory. The moment I entered I felt like I had been there before. It was like the glass house of my dream, as it had huge glass windows on three sides from ceiling to floor. I heard birds singing loudly. My dream flashed into my mind and without hesitating I told the girls to come with me into the kitchen.
“A few moments after we left the conservatory I heard this almighty shattering sound. I rushed in and a cricket ball had been thrown through the window of the conservatory right above where the doll’s house was positioned. It had come from the garden next door, where two teenage boys had been larking about. There was glass splintered everywhere and I shudder to think what might have happened if the girls had still been playing there.”
Precognitions like Rachel’s complicate our everyday definitions of past, present and future, as they suggest that it is possible to know or remember specific details about the future even before it happens.
All the time in the world
Even though philosophers and scientists have a difficult time defining time, one thing is for sure – if we could discover a way to make more time, we might be able to solve every mystery and cure every disease. We would have all the time in the world to heal broken hearts, learn about every subject, correct all mistakes and become infinitely wise in the process. Life would feel unending, and without the pressure of the ticking clock to motivate us, we could succumb to boredom and complacency, or we might learn to enjoy the luxury of having more time – that is, after we put in all the hard work understanding how to create more time.
Today, scientists who study time generally don’t focus on ways to create more of it. But there is another approach that offers some of the same consequences of “making time”, and that’s being able to access information about the future before something happens. With such forewarning, it would then sometimes be possible to do something to either bring that future event to pass or to avoid it. Perhaps in this way, Rachel was able to help two children avoid a traumatic, and potentially fatal, experience.
But it can work in the opposite way as well. We’ll illustrate a precognition of something positive with an example from Dr Mossbridge’s life.
When Julia was a young divorced mother and still in graduate school, she was looking for an apartment to rent that would be right for her and her son. She dreamed that a neighbour, Maureen, had decided to rent out the bottom floor of a duplex she owned. Maureen said that Julia could take a tour of the upper floor to help her visualize how Maureen would refurbish the bottom floor. To entice her to agree to rent the place, in the dream Maureen said Julia could choose the colour of the walls if Julia signed the lease that day.
Julia woke determined to bring this event to fruition, so later that week, when she bumped into her neighbour Maureen, Julia told her she was looking for a place to rent and asked her if she knew of anything. Her neighbour said sure. She had decided to rent out a duplex – and the bottom floor would be available in about a month. Maureen apologized that they weren’t yet done renovating the bottom floor. Just as in the dream, she offered to give Julia a tour of the top floor, and then at the end of the tour, Maureen sweetened the deal by saying that Julia could pick the colours to paint the walls if she signed the lease right then. Julia did exactly that, and lived in the apartment with her son, very happily, for three years afterwards.
Coincidence? Seems doubtful. Actual precognition? More likely, but we can never be sure. If you had this experience, would you wonder about how such accurate information about the future could be predicted in a dream? You bet you would!
Somewhere in time
To understand how getting information from the future might make sense, we need to understand how the flow of time works and how the present relates to the future. Unfortunately, neither of these things is well understood. So here we’ll talk about what we know, and what we do not.
Let’s begin with the physicists. They don’t seem to agree on whether the flow of time exists at all. Some physicists think that the flow of time is a complete illusion and we live in a series of ‘nows’ that are static and not flowing in any sense of the word,a while others feel time is so essential to the workings of the universe that it is like a fundamental force.b To make things more confusing, for most physics equations, time can go in either direction (forward or backwards, +t or -t). This doesn’t really match with our everyday experience, even though the equations work out. Suffice it to say that so far, physicists have not been super helpful in improving our everyday understanding of the flow of time, although they are working hard on it.c
What about philosophers? If you think time is completely subjective or mental and does not or cannot exist in the physical world, you are in good company with the likes of John McTaggartd and St Augustine.e In contrast, if you feel that time is both a physical fact as well as a mental experience, you will be in good company with most present-day philosophers, who think of time as the thing that describes how change happens; the thing that we try to measure by using a clock.f That’s not really clear either, but it seems a bit ahead of the physicists – maybe.
How about the psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists? Most of them focus their investigations on the mental experience of time as opposed to physical time. People generally agree that there is a kind of order to the events we experience in our lives, which, when put together, we call the flow of time, temporal flow, or the “stream of consciousness” as psychologist William James famously put it.g Many psychologists and neuroscientists studying time and time perception try to understand this mystery by trying to figure out how the mind and brain create a sense of temporal flow.h The subjective sense of temporal flow is all very interesting, but it won’t get us precisely where we want to be, which is to understand how precognition of actual physical future events might actually be possible.
Understanding the science of precognition can be thought of as understanding how we might access information about events that occur in the future of our own personal temporal flow, relative to our own personal “now”. This sounds like mental time travel rather than physical time travel, and that is a reasonable way to think about it. It could even be completely accurate. But you can also think about the science of precognition in physical terms, as trying to understand how future physical events can influence past physical events. Either way, when we have premonitions, it feels as if the future is pulling us forward both physically and mentally. This is how it felt for Jo, who was two months shy of her 44th birthday when she found out she was pregnant.
“I was warned that at my age my baby was at a higherthan-normal risk for developmental abnormalities and severe disability,” she recalls. “Every parent wants a healthy and happy child and the very idea of knowing that from the start your child may be limited or held back in some way by the judgements and prejudices of society is a nightmare.”
About a month after she found out she was pregnant, her doctor strongly advised her to have an amniocentesis test to help determine whether the foetus had a chromosomal defect, like Down’s Syndrome or spina bifida. “He told me that the procedure was simple and relatively painless. I didn’t even need medication or an overnight stay in hospital. The procedure was relatively simple, as my doctor had said it would be, but by far the worst part was the week-long wait for the results to come through. Before I got pregnant a week seemed to be no time at all, but now, with this burden hanging over me, it seemed like for ever. I’ve been a good sleeper most of my life but during that week I don’t think I got more than a few hours each night. I tossed and turned, longing for the seven days and nights to pass but also wishing they would never come.
“One night a couple of days before my test was due, I eventually managed to fall asleep around midnight. For the first and only time in my pregnancy, I actually dreamt of giving birth. My doctor delivered my baby – which was unusual because I had already been informed of my midwife delivery team – and then handed him to me. I remember looking down at his tiny face and seeing a dimple on his cheek. Then I heard my doctor pronouncing him healthy. My sister came in and she was carrying an enormous cuddly blue elephant with ‘It’s a boy’ written on one of its paws and ‘angel’ written on the other. I handed my baby to my husband and lay back in my bed, taking in the details of the delivery room. When I woke up the next morning, my anxiety had gone completely. I felt calm and in control. Back in real life, my husband held my hand and told me that whatever the results were, we would get through this. I hugged him and told him that I was fine. I wasn’t just saying this to comfort him – as I knew how nervous he was – I really meant it. I knew that everything was going to be fine.
“I really can’t explain why or how, but I know that my dream was a premonition, a vision of my future. I have never felt so peaceful and calm in my entire life before or since, and although we wanted the sex of our baby to be a surprise when I gave birth, I also knew that it was going to be a boy.
“I surprised everyone, including myself, over the next two days with my resilience and calm. I slept like a baby (well, how babies are supposed to sleep). As my dream had predicted, the results of my test were negative. Five months later I gave birth to a gorgeous baby boy with a dimple on his cheek. Giving birth for the first time is a scary experience, but for me it felt like I had done it all before in my dream. The delivery room was the same and, most eerily of all, it was my doctor who delivered the baby, rather than my midwife, who was unexpectedly out of action that day due to a bout of flu. The only detail that wasn’t accurate was when my sister walked in. She was carrying a tiny bunch of flowers and not a cuddly blue elephant. As for my baby, his face, his tiny hands and his beautiful blue eyes were exactly as they were in my dream.”
After a few days in hospital, Jo returned home with her son held tightly in her arms. “There was a surprise waiting for me when I got home. While I was recovering in hospital, my sister and my husband had completed the nursery and there, sitting in the cot – you guessed it – was the blue elephant of my dreams, with ‘angel’ on one of its paws. I hadn’t told anyone about my dream, but there it was.”
How can this kind of “pull” from the future actually work? Time now to discuss some hardcore scientific concepts related to what we mean when we talk about the future pulling us forward.
Backwards in time
Part of why time seems as if it can only flow in only one direction is that we tend to have a lot of very rigid ideas about how one event can affect another event. These ideas are based on a really good source – it’s the way the physical world seems to work.j One of the most basic ideas we have as a result of our observations of the world is causality – the idea that thing A causes thing B if thing A happens before thing B and if thing A is necessary for thing B to happen. For example, to create B (an omelette) we first of all need A (the eggs) to be broken and cooked.
From when we are six months old, we can see that there is a normal order of events, and we start to develop ideas about the rules of causality and time. Six-month-old infants get bored when they repeatedly watch a video of one ball moving toward and hitting another ball, which rolls away as if it was launched by the first ball. They look away as if to say, “Okay, I got that. First ball hits second ball. Now show me something interesting!” When the researchers then play the video in reverse, the babies become captivated again – as if they are saying, “Wait, that is interesting. The second ball is now going backwards in time!”k
Of course, interpreting baby behaviour is difficult, and it could just be that the babies get excited about any new video they are shown. So, the researchers doing that study also showed a very similar video in which they put a space between the balls, so that the two balls didn’t hit each other. The first ball still moves and comes to a stop, and the second ball still rolls away after the first one stops, but there’s a space in between them, so it doesn’t look like the first ball causes the second ball to roll away. Again, babies looked at this until they got bored. And when the researchers reversed this video, the babies didn’t care. It wasn’t interesting in reverse, probably because there was no sense of the oddness in the reverse sequence of events, because causality was missing in the first place.k
Even though we use the concept of “cause” all the time in daily life, it turns out that the physical reality of causality cannot actually be proven. You can hit one ball with another ball trillions of times, and you will show that as ball A comes to a rest, ball B moves in the direction that ball A was going. But proving that there is anything more than a correlation between these two events has not been possible. Mathematician John von Neumann stated it like this: “We may [still] say that there is at present no occasion and no reason to speak of causality in nature – because no experiment indicates its presence…”m The problem is that any time you want to try to prove causality between balls A and B, you always end up with the counter-argument that instead of ball A causing movement in ball B, it’s just that ball A always stops at the point at which it touches ball B and ball B always moves away. There’s definitely a correlation between the two events, but not definitely causation.
Without any way to prove that one thing actually causes another, but with the desire to talk about causes and time, we are going to just make an agreement about what we mean when we talk about one thing causing another. And we have to leave it at that, without insisting that our agreement is some kind of reflection of physical reality. So here we’re going to say that event A causes event B when event A is necessary for event B to occur. Notice that the order of events is not mentioned in this definition. That’s on purpose! Event A causes B if event B needs event A in order to happen, period.n
Assuming event A causes event B (according to our definition), then if event A comes before event B, we can say event A pushes event B. But event A could also come after event B. In that case, we say event A pulled event B from the future. Of course, both pushing and pulling could be going on simultaneously.
For an example of this simultaneous push/pull idea, let’s take Dr Julia’s precognitive dream when she was a graduate student looking for a suitable place to live. In her waking life, she had the experience of remembering a dream about a nice apartment. Because she didn’t realize her neighbour Maureen had any rental properties available, and because she didn’t know this neighbour very well, Julia would have been unlikely to ask Maureen about apartments if she had not had the dream. So, we might think the dream pushed her to ask about apartments and eventually sign the lease.
Okay, but the dream itself sure seems to have been caused by an event in the future. This event seems to be the real-life experience of learning about the bottom floor of the duplex, touring the top floor, and being told about the ability to choose paint colours if she signed the lease that day. So, we might think this future experience in waking life pulled Julia toward having the dream.
And there we have it. Once you start looking at events in time this way, almost every experience, precognitive or otherwise, can be seen as both a push and a pull – in both directions in time. You drop a coffee cup and it shatters on the floor. If you hadn’t dropped it, it wouldn’t have shattered. But it’s shattered on the floor, so you must have dropped it. Did the shattering pull you to drop it? Or did your dropping push the shattering? Or both? It’s almost like the classic who came first – the chicken or the egg – question.1
Our long explanation about causes and all things A and B is here for a few important reasons. First, we want you to let go of the idea that just because time flows in one direction according to your daily waking experience, it must flow in that direction in the physical world. Second, we want you to recognize how hard it is to figure out the difference between pushes toward the future vs. pulls from the future. And finally, we want you to realize that every single event you experience – from brushing your teeth, to doing a presentation at work, to scolding your children for leaving their bedrooms untidy – could exist as a causal loop in which the past and future seem to be pushing and pulling simultaneously.
Wait, you might now ask – what exactly is a causal loop?
1. Human beings are not closed systems and neither is our experience of the world per se, so this law does not have anything to do with our psychologically perceived arrow of time and may have nothing to do with our experience of the physical arrow of time either.
2. Physicists don’t agree on whether the flow of time exists outside of human experience, and if the flow of time is only a psychological phenomenon, it is unclear why a physical law should be used to justify it.
3. About half of the physicists contributing to a recent volume published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science about the Second Law of Thermodynamics do not support the traditional interpretation of the Second Law (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-007-9164-2).
4. The Second Law has been reversed by “trading off” quantum correlations for a decrease in entropy (https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03323).
Circles in time
A causal loop (also known as a closed time loop or predestination paradox)2 is a sequence of looped events where an event causes another event, which in turn seems to cause the first event. In a nutshell, each event in the loop is one of the causes of the next event and at least one of the later events causes an earlier event.p
It is possible that understanding the general idea of causal loops is absolutely essential to understanding how precognition might work. But the problem with causal loops is that you may start to think of everything as a causal loop, and that can drive you nuts. Let’s take the coffee-cup dropping example. Sure, we can say that one event is dropping the coffee cup and the other is the shattering of the cup on the floor. But what about the initial act of picking up the cup? And then there’s the sweeping up of the shattered remains. Maybe those are really the pushing/pulling events? Oh, but go one more step back into the past and one more step forward into the future, and now let’s look at the idea that you wanted coffee and the disposal of the shards of ceramic followed by finding an unbreakable, plastic mug in your cabinet. Maybe the plastic mug search pulled forward the original desire for coffee?
This kind of game is never-ending, and in time you start to go a little crazy and see that your birth pushes your death and your death pulls your birth. You can take any point in time and choose events on the left and the right of the timeline, centred around that event, and create a causal loop, depending on how you think of things. This kind of thinking leads quickly to what we call “fantasy thinking”.
When you are engaging in fantasy thinking and at the same time trying to understand precognition, you can take every dream and every thought that you have and try to find the future event that is pulling that dream or thought. For example, you dream you are in a plane crash the night before you go on a flight, and the next day you feel lucky that your flight doesn’t crash. But you decide your dream was precognitive, and you start obsessively combing the news for a plane crash. Within about four months, a plane crashes. So you decide that plane crash was the one you were dreaming about, even though there were no other correspondences between your dream and the crash. While fantasy thinking is vitally important to creativity, it is not helpful when developing your precognitive skills. Even in the forward direction in time, most causes and effects are not understandable in a simple way. Trying to figure out possible causal loops for everything is futile, and, more importantly, unnecessary.
We will address fantasy thinking and how to avoid it much more in Part 2, but for now it is safe to just say that while understanding the general concept of causal loops can help you think about the possibility of precognition, genuine precognition is not the same as a causal loop. If you were in a causal loop, you could think of yourself as being pulled from the future but without being aware of it. During a genuine precognitive experience, in contrast, some part of you is aware of the pull. It’s not just a causal pull alone – it’s like a message from the future. So, when you are having a genuine precognition, you have thoughts, feelings or behaviours that reveal that some part of you has received something like a message from the future. This message makes all the difference, because if you can communicate from the future to the past, even just to yourself, you might be able to at the very least prepare for – if not influence – the future.3
To illustrate how precognitions can help you prepare for the future, Dr Mossbridge has interviewed two professionals who work with dreams, both of whom described dreams about the impending death of a loved one. Dr Stanley Krippner, who is well known for his work on telepathic and precognitive dreams, shared two precognitive dreams about his father’s death that he had when he was in his forties. In the first dream, he saw a hearse pulling up to his childhood home. The driver took away his father, his nextdoor neighbour, and the father of a grade-school classmate. The first two – his father and his next-door neighbour – died a few months after the dream. The father of the grade-school classmate died within a year of the dream. The second dream was only a few weeks prior to his father’s death, and a month after the first dream. Dr Krippner says he can still recall the vivid images of this second dream, which showed his mother in the rocking chair in the living room looking forlorn. He had recorded both dreams in his dream diary, because at the time he had the dreams, he already knew the power of precognition as a preparation tool. His father had undergone his annual medical examination shortly before his fatal heart attack and was told that he was in perfect health.
And here’s an example from another dream-journal keeper. Magloire Aguirre has an MA in transpersonal psychology and is a certified coach in Bogota, Colombia. At least 11 of her dreams relate to her perfectly healthy father’s death from a bicycle fall in 2010. They range from seeing her father without a head; going to a family gathering with lots of relatives but feeling dread and not seeing her father again; comforting her family because her father had died; having strong emotions and a feeling that she’d lost a loved one; her mother giving her four black blouses to wear; seeing a bicycle rider falling and having concern for him; and seeing her father’s room in his house as dark and empty. Magloire sent Julia all the dates of the 11 dreams she had portending her father’s death.
After speaking with Magloire about her dreams, Julia made a graph of the number of relevant dreams in each month leading up to her father’s death on 3 July 2010 (Figure 1). This wasn’t a thorough scientific study. Julia didn’t record the dreams when they happened. And Magloire told Julia that she found these dreams by going back into her dream journals once her father died – when she had them, she did not think her father would die, so she interpreted them as meaning something else. But if we take Magloire’s retroactive dream analysis at face value, we can see that the relevant dreams generally increased in frequency as the date of her father’s death approached. This is exactly what is reported in studies of both spontaneous precognitive dreaming as well as laboratory tests of precognition – the frequency of precognition increases as the event being predicted nears.r
Magloire is happy she had her dreams, because she feels they helped prepare her for her father’s death, at least subconsciously. She wants to share her experience with the world so others will take their dreams seriously and connect the dots, if only to prepare for something important when it is out of their control.
When we dive into the work of becoming a Positive Precog (Part 2), we will discuss in more detail the importance of recording precognitions of all types. For now, it’s just important to point out that, in this case, it was as if the future was pulling both Dr Krippner and Magloire forward so that they could receive the helpful message that it was time to prepare for an emotional and difficult event.
Figure 1 Magloire Aguirre’s dreams in five three-month periods leading up to the date of her father’s death. This was not a controlled study; she determined dream relevance after the fact. The figure is only to illustrate her experience of an increased frequency of related dreams as her father’s death approached.
Pulls from the future, in the lab
We’ve been talking about causal loops as a conceptual idea. But an example of something that looks like a causal loop – one that has been shown in the lab – is something called a quantum delayed-choice experiment. This is not a book about physics, and we’re not physicists, so we’ll be very brief in describing this.s
Imagine you’re a physicist. You make a decision about how to measure a particle only after that particle seems to have already travelled along a path that would normally make it land in a certain place. The weird thing is, this “delayed choice” in how you measure the particle actually seems to influence where the particle ends up appearing. What makes this a causal loop is that your decision is made after the particle is able to turn back and change its course. In other words, your future decision seems to influence the past of the particle. It’s as if the particle “knows” that in the future you’ll make a particular decision, and it travels accordingly.t
One group of physicists who showed this so-called “retrocausal” effect over a large distance in space said, “No naïve realistic picture is compatible with our results. … It is therefore suggestive to abandon such pictures altogether.”v In other words, we should give up the idea that causes are always going in the forward direction in time and also that causes can only occur when other objects are in the same area of space. How do we leap from a physics lab to humans having precognitive experiences? Well, you can take the idea of giving up our usual notions of space and time and combine this with the idea that some biological processes rely on quantum effects that are consistent with the possibility of this kind of retrocausality.w We’ll leave the full-fledged argument to the academic journals, but if you didn’t already think so before reading our brief summary of these ideas, hopefully now you are starting to realize that maybe physical time isn’t exactly what we once thought it was.
What does this kind of thinking mean for those of us who aren’t quantum physicists? It means that although our waking daily experiences tell us that causes generally move in the “pushing” or forward direction in time, when you look closely enough, you see that there seem to also be hidden physical pulls from the future. And it is possible that we might already be harnessing these pulls right now, in our own bodies.
So, are we saying that maybe we can listen to physical clues in our waking lives or use a dream “memory” about being in an accident to help avoid it? Yes, we are. But wouldn’t that mean the causal loop would break down? The future event wouldn’t happen, because we would have avoided it as a result of our precognition!
We agree – this is an apparent paradox. Luckily for all of us, there are at least two ways around it: the many-futures approach and the near-miss approach. No one knows if both, one, or none of them are how causal loop paradoxes are resolved, but given that causal loops occur, the apparent paradoxes must be resolved somehow. So, we’ll talk now about the many-futures approach and the near-miss approach, both of which originated in physics – but we’ll discuss how they apply to precognition, not physics.
Many futures
First, there’s the many-futures approach to precognition, which is taken from the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.x If you’ve ever watched the movie Sliding Doors, you’re thinking along the right lines: alternative futures. Here’s the idea. Imagine that at each point in your life, a new future splits off, so while a pull might be coming from a future in which you actually do have a car accident, by responding to this pull you might be able to enter a new future in which you do not have a car accident. By your actions in the present, you influence the future you enter into, and leave behind a parallel future that is less desirable.4
If things worked like this, we would only say that we experienced precognition in those cases where we actually have the future experience corresponding to the past precognition. Assume that we split off from the car-crash universe after having a dream about it, because we are more careful as a result of the dream. It could be a minor split (the car crash almost happens) or a major split (there’s no car crash at all). In the latter case, we wouldn’t call the original dream precognitive at all – there would be no event in our alternate future that corresponded to the original experience. While it’s true that we only say that a dream about a car accident was precognitive if the car accident occurs or “almost happens”, that’s not proof that the many-futures solution is correct. It just shows that we have a definition of what “precognitive” means, and it means that the many-futures solution is consistent with our definition.
Near misses
The idea that a car crash can “almost happen” and still be consistent with a precognition about the car crash brings us to the second way to resolve the apparent paradox. This “nearmiss” idea is taken from physics as well. It’s akin to the idea that many different routes can result in arriving at the same place.y If the important outcome is surviving a car crash, there are many different ways to get to that result.
For example, let’s say that after you dream about being in a bad car accident with a truck, you become extra careful and observant of trucks when you drive. As a result of your heightened awareness, you see a truck just before it hits your car, and you swerve to avoid it. The truck only sideswipes you, and you interpret your dream as a warning sent from the future of something worse that could have happened if you weren’t being careful. You still had a very minor accident, you were not hurt by it. So, the dream makes sense (the bad accident almost happened), the important outcome happened (you survived), and the push/pull loop is complete.
If things worked like this, then when we used any of our conscious precognitions to avoid bad events, we would always end up changing the events our dreams showed us. But, in a way, this kind of difference between our dreams and reality is unavoidable! As soon as we have an idea about something happening in the future, we necessarily alter what happens without even trying to alter it, because now we experience something happening that we predicted earlier … not something happening in a way that surprises us. So the differences we see between a dream of a car crash and the actual near-miss don’t really prove that this theory is true. They also don’t prove it isn’t true.
An example of the near-miss phenomenon is a story from UK parapsychologist Serena Roney-Dougal. In a conversation with Dr Mossbridge, Serena shared a dramatic car-accident dream that might have helped her survive a potential accident. An interesting element of this dream, and one that makes it very convincing as a genuine precognitive experience, is that Serena doesn’t own a car. Serena rarely drives, so she generally borrows or rents cars when needed. That means that compared to a person who drives every day and is much more likely to be in a car accident, it is more difficult to chalk her dream up to coincidence.
Serena dreamed that she was driving on a six-lane highway in the fast lane. All of a sudden, her car was spun around and she was going the wrong way, meeting the traffic going in the other direction. She woke up panicked. She realized it was a strong, scary dream, but could be symbolic of something else in her life. Anyway, when would she be driving in real life?
Ten days later, she’d forgotten the dream. She was due to take her completed PhD thesis into her university, and she’d arranged to use a neighbour’s car. For a short part of that journey, she would have to take a six-lane highway. She had her daughters in the backseat, as her supervisor wanted to celebrate the completion of her thesis and her daughters decided to join her. Serena was driving in the fast lane, going about 80 mph, when a stone shattered her windshield into a glass web. She was temporarily blinded by the shattered glass windshield. Somehow, she moved the car safely across three lanes of traffic to the shoulder. That was when she remembered the dream from ten days previous.
According to the near-miss approach to resolving causal loop paradoxes, it is possible that Serena’s subconscious mind remembered the dream, and as a result, it gave her the presence of mind to guide her car to safety. The idea is that some of her was prepared and as a result of this preparation, loss of life was avoided.
Our discussions of the many-futures and near-miss approaches, as well as everything we have been talking about in this chapter, are meant to prepare you for the very real possibility of precognition being a kind of mental time travel into the future to get information about physical, actual events.
What dreams may come
In the next chapter, we’ll describe some of the types of scientific evidence for precognition, and we’ll talk about what you need to know in order to judge if any of your experiences are likely to be precognitive. After that, we’ll move onto helping you master your precognitive skills using the tools and techniques for your controlled precognition practice in Part 2.
Understanding the science and how it can potentially validate premonitions is important, but before fast forwarding to the next science-packed chapter, we’d like to acknowledge that there may be a spiritual dimension to precognition. For the spiritually minded, there seems to be an eternal part of us that is separate from our bodies and our conscious minds, and which can travel across space and time. An example is a dream that a young man named Rory sent to Theresa about his life purpose calling him in the night.
When Rory was about ten years old, he went to his first concert. “From that day on I longed to be able to learn to play the piano with a teacher who visited my school for private lessons every Tuesday. My mum died when I was only a baby and my father was struggling to raise me and my two other brothers alone. Money was always tight. I loved my father deeply and didn’t want to add to his burden, so I never mentioned my musical ambitions to him. I knew we couldn’t afford lessons or a piano.
“One night in my final year of junior school, I had a dream. In it, I had my first lesson with the piano teacher who visited my school. In the lesson we did nothing at all but I loved every minute. I looked outside the window and saw that it was dark outside. Then my teacher started to play the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”. When I woke up, the haunting melody was still running through my head. The music fired me up so much that I knew I had to talk to my headmistress. She was very supportive. I don’t know how it happened but I was granted six months of free tuition, which would only continue in senior school if I showed promise. And, true to my dream, in my first lesson my piano teacher simply wanted me to listen and be inspired by an exquisite piece of piano music, and the piece he chose was “Moonlight Sonata”!
“Far from being stressed that my piano playing would cost too much, my father came home one night with a secondhand electronic keyboard so I could practise every night. Since I listened to my dream I haven’t looked back. Music is everything to me, and ten years later my hope is to work in the music industry. I think that dream was heaven sent.”
Rory believes his dream was from the spiritual realm, but he also believes that his dreaming mind wasn’t showing him the future in the dream. The future was his to make, but he believed the dream showed him a potential future that would happen if he followed a certain course of action. This is like the many-futures idea. If he hadn’t plucked up the courage to ask for lessons, his dream may never have come true.
Is this precognition? Perhaps. But more importantly to those of us with a spiritual bent, stories like this suggest there may be an invisible power or consciousness in the universe that you can tap into with your thoughts and dreams to help yourself and others thrive. Whether you are spiritually inclined or not, precognitive experiences, and learning how to understand and interpret them, can give you the inspiration and power to create the future of your dreams.
We hope this chapter has helped you make sense of premonitions from Julia’s scientific perspective. We’ve quickly breezed through some very heady topics – causality, causal loops, quantum effects, and different ways to resolve the paradoxes that seem to emerge from causal loops – and you can find out more by checking out the books and scientific journal articles referenced in the notes at the back of this book. The basic point of all the scientific ideas we threw at you is that there is a lot of disagreement about how the flow of time works and how or whether one thing causes another. If you take home one idea out of all of these, make it that the everyday feeling that the future has no effect on the present is not necessarily true. As a result of the current uncertainty about time and causality in philosophical and scientific circles, it is not at all unreasonable to talk in a serious way about the possibility of genuine precognition.
We also hope that our brief mention of spirituality has opened your mind to the idea that there may be a spiritual perspective as well. Both Theresa and Julia treasure the spiritual aspects of precognition, because premonitions can act as reminders that there may be an eternal part of us that exists outside of time and space. There may well be a scientific explanation for this eternal part, and if one is found, science and spirituality will become happy partners. Much of Part 2 will be devoted to the spiritual and wellbeing components of becoming a Positive Precog, and we will continue to marry those elements with scientific research as we go.
1 Here, physics buffs might chime in with some concerns about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Okay, physics rock stars! As you know, the Second Law states that in a closed system, disorder is very unlikely to decrease – and as such, you may believe this means that there is an “arrow of time” that is set by the Second Law, and this arrow goes in only the forward direction. As a result, you might also think that any talk of a future event influencing the past is bogus. We would ask you to consider four ideas.
2 Here we are not specifically talking about closed timelike curves, but causal loops in general.
3 For those concerned that the idea of messages from the future suggests such a message would be travelling faster than the speed of light, a few thoughts: 1) “message” here is used colloquially to mean “information” – essentially a correlation between present and future events that can’t be explained by deduction or induction but is not necessarily a signal; 2) recently it has been suggested that superluminal signalling is not actually prohibited by special relativity (Weinstein, S, “Superluminal signaling and relativity”, Synthese, 148(2), 2006: 381–99); and 3) the no-signalling theorem(s) may actually be logically circular (Kennedy, J B, “On the empirical foundations of the quantum no-signalling proofs”, Philosophy of Science, 62(4), 1995: 543–60.)
4 Note that in the movie Minority Report, the future was considered set in stone, which was part of the problem of the Pre-Crime Programme. However, at the end of the movie it becomes clear that the future envisioned did not occur, suggesting the idea that futures unfold probabilistically rather than definitely.