Come and see what is written of Daniel, “The mystery was revealed to Daniel in a night vision” (Daniel 2:19), and it is written “Daniel saw a dream and a vision of his mind in bed; afterward he wrote down the dream.”
—The Zohar in Elliot Wolfson’s A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream
As I have lectured on Elizabeth’s experiences over the last two years, audiences are often taken aback by the apparent empirical nature of the time-stamped emails. They are used to hearing stories about religious experiences, but they have generally never heard a story or vision that interacts so clearly with the physical and historical world. In the question-and-answer sessions that follow the lectures, I am often asked the same two questions about the emails. How many precognitive dreams did not come true? And could Elizabeth have faked the date and time stamps? Both questions really boil down to the same question: Do these emails constitute scientific evidence for precognition?
I once thought I would write an extensive appendix on these matters, but such an appendix quickly “got into the weeds” of the nature of scientific evidence, the differing methods of the humanities and sciences, and, in particular, the complexities of digital forensics, about which I know next to nothing. It also quickly became obvious that we had neither the time nor the financial resources to do real justice to the latter forensic research, which can be exceptionally expensive.
Not that we avoided the question. We spoke to three computer professionals, including a computer security expert with experience in government, academic, and industrial settings. These conversations and an initial series of forensic tests (for the knowing, a DKIM) that the latter professional ran on Elizabeth’s home computer (at her invitation) convinced me of the following tentative conclusions:
In short, we could neither disprove nor prove the authenticity of the emails. It was a draw. Much of this nonconclusion was a function of the unfortunate historical fact that as Elizabeth has used and retired various devices and computers over the years (specifically, an old iPad, two very old BlackBerry phones, three old iPhones, two different laptops, and now a desktop computer), she has forwarded the precognitive emails to herself in order, she thought, to preserve them. But as she did this, the Yahoo server appears to have lopped off the metadata of the forwarded emails. For most of the emails, then, we simply lacked a sufficient digital train to authenticate them. At least one precognitive dream email (of the Tokyo earthquake) could be authenticated in a very weak way, but again, we lacked the full metadata to be sure.
This does not mean that I think that the emails are fraudulent. I am convinced that they are genuine for reasons that I will explain below. But what this does mean is that nothing involving the emails can or should be read as scientific evidence for precognition. We simply lack such evidence. The email data as it stands at the moment is extremely suggestive for those who are already open to the possibility that precognition is a real thing, but they do not constitute scientific proof of precognition, and the data certainly will not convince the committed skeptic. I want to be very clear about that.
In the end (and we are at the end), these are very technical conversations, and this is not a technical book (nor is it a book about precognition or the emails). Allow me, though, to make a few general observations about these particular matters for those who might be interested in such questions. What follows is what I wish I had time to say to my audiences but never do.
Allow me to begin on a personal note. I have had probably a few hundred thousand dreams in my life, but only one that I remember as precognitive, and only then after the fact. That is, I recognized it as precognitive only after the events that it encoded in symbolic form played out the following day. In light of Eric Wargo’s work, I strongly suspect that my later interpretation of the dream as precognitive of the day’s forthcoming events was what retrocaused the dream from the future to the previous night. It was an extremely important dream. Indeed, this particular dream (interpretation) helped me to respond to these events in a way that would prove crucial for my family’s well-being and my own professional survival. The symbolic dream actually encoded the answer to a series of events and an urgent moral question that would not arise until later that day and the next. My realization that it was all encoded in the dream allowed me to respond correctly and precisely to the situation.
But here is my point. If I set this single, life-changing dream and its message in the context of all of my other dreams, it would be statistically meaningless. It would disappear. Statistical approaches effectively “erase” such remarkable moments, which is, I believe, precisely why they are used by professional debunkers. In other words, I think that statistical approaches to paranormal phenomena are privileged in order to deny the phenomena in question, which is inherently anomalous and so, generally speaking, statistically insignificant. I am extremely skeptical of this statistical approach when it comes to assessing the presence and importance of anomalous or rogue spiritual phenomena, then, since the method erases that which we are trying to understand.
Let me push this further. I think that sometimes an extremely rare event, or an absolutely unique one with no corroboration or confirmation in a broad set of experiments, can be deeply significant from a religious, historical, or philosophical perspective. Indeed, a singular anomaly—that is, something that happened, and will happen, only once—can be the most meaningful event of a person’s or community’s life. I understand perfectly well that this is not how science works, but it is exactly how religion, history, and life often work. It is the anomalous that so often changes history and determines the shape and direction of a life or even an entire civilization.
When assessing a question like “How many of the dream precognitions did not come true?” we have to be very aware of these historical matters and what method we are using to determine their significance and meaning. I do not personally think that the statistical approach is the best method here. Moreover, I think the question about “how many” is understandable but is finally both distorting and unanswerable.
It is distorting for the reasons articulated just above.
It is unanswerable because we do not have all of the dream emails to work with and arrive at an accurate statistical answer, and this for two perfectly reasonable reasons. First, many of Elizabeth’s precognitive dreams are of a deeply personal nature or involve family members. She is understandably reluctant to share these with anyone. I fully understand that moral decision, since I just hid most of the details of my own precognitive dream to protect a number of living individuals. So already we are missing a good number of them, including, no doubt, many of the “hits.” Second, Elizabeth has had more dreams than she can remember over the last three decades, and many, if not most, of these would have occurred before she landed on her email verification method in 2008. The 1989 San Francisco quake dream falls here, for example, but so do no doubt dozens of others. So we are missing all of those as well.
One email that did pass the forensic test and did preserve the metadata was the 2009 Captain Sully landing in the Hudson River. This is a very good example of just how complicated things can get, and how quickly.
Recall that we have a third-party witness of this dream description and its afternoon occurrence in Jerusalem. Matt Krohn listened to the dream seconds after it happened and watched Elizabeth type out the email to herself. He also reported that she was immediately talking about “people standing on the wings.” The email was sent, with Matt as a witness, at 2:57 in the afternoon in Jerusalem, or at 7:57 a.m. in the morning in New York City. The plane went down at 3:31 p.m. New York time, which would have been at 10:31 p.m. in Jerusalem, that is, roughly seven hours after the dream. So we seem to have a very clear example of precognition here.
Still, we lack any hard scientific evidence. Despite Matt’s unequivocal confirmation of when the email was composed, the date stamp on it in the metadata shows that it went through the Yahoo server twenty-six minutes after the actual crash in the Hudson. This would have been enough time for the floating plane image to appear on the internet and on television, but barely. To be specific, the metadata shows that it went through the Yahoo server at 12:57 Pacific Standard Time or at 3:57 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (New York time). Eric Wargo has done some initial research on the internet history of the Sully river landing. He observes that the first image actually appeared on a Twitter feed at 3:36 p.m., just five minutes after the landing. The first news stories began to appear about fifteen minutes after that.118 So the times are all extremely close, and almost anything is possible here. But one can certainly not rule out from the digital evidence that Elizabeth composed the email after the crash. That is one possible reading.
In the end, what we have with this single email is an apparent conflict of evidence. We have Matt’s eyewitness account and Elizabeth’s own sworn story, which agree with one another in every detail. But then we also have the computer metacode, which does not agree. This contradiction can be resolved in two ways. First, one could simply posit fraud on the part of Elizabeth and Matt. This would resolve the contradiction. Perhaps the technologies would have allowed Elizabeth to change the time stamps on her emails by changing the clocks on her different computers. But then why would she have taken such care to preserve such fraudulent emails and have forwarded them to herself for years? That makes little sense. Still, it is possible that she is some kind of pathological liar, a perpetrator of a long-meditated fraud. Recall that fraud is one of the four options with which I began the book. There it is, if you choose to take it.
Second, we could posit that the email sat in her computer for about seven hours before it “decided” to send it to the Yahoo server, oddly enough, immediately after the crash began appearing on the internet. Most readers have probably experienced this frustrating phenomenon, particularly when they are traveling (which she was) and dealing with various kinds of Wi-Fi signals and computer systems: the email just will not go out until one gets a better signal. It has certainly happened to me, many times. This is Elizabeth’s theory of the time delay. She finds the whole thing eminently frustrating.
I do not find the first fraud explanation plausible, and for two reasons.
First, it seriously violates my own two-year sense of the honesty and integrity of these two individuals, whom I know quite well. Such a moral charge simply does not “ring true.” I recognize that this cannot satisfy the skeptic, who will say that this is no proof. I recognize that, but again, I am making no such scientific claims.
There is a very profound point to make here. In the humanities, we sometimes call this a “hermeneutic of trust.” A “hermeneutic” is an interpretive stance or method that—and this is the key—will shape or even largely determine how a phenomenon appears, or does not appear. We saw this earlier with Elliot Wolfson and his nuanced notions of how an interpretation of a dream might determine the meaning of the dream, much as an observation in a quantum physics experiment appears to determine the nature of a particle or wave. “Interpretation,” then, is much too weak a translation here. A hermeneutic is more like a “conjuring,” an “enactment,” or a “cocreation,” that is, a state of consciousness that evokes whatever it is attempting to understand. A hermeneutic of trust, then, is an interpretive state of consciousness that trusts the report or individual with the understanding that this trust will reveal information and insights, even conjure phenomena that a more suspicious or doubting approach would not and could not produce.
This is not naiveté. This is a very serious claim about how we arrive at knowledge in the humanities, and in particular in the humanistic study of paranormal phenomena. The same claim also resonates deeply with something called the “sheep-goat” effect in parapsychology, namely, the well-known phenomenon that a trusting experimenter (the “sheep” in this case) will tend to find positive results with respect to the presence of psi, whereas the doubting or suspicious experimenter (the “goat” in this case) will tend to find negative results. Put more simply and less technically, I am convinced that my own attitude toward Elizabeth matters a great deal. The simple truth is that Elizabeth would not have shared what she shared with me were it not for this trust and this collaboration. Nor would have I learned what I learned. And, of course, there would have been no book. Everything in fact hinged on that trust and what it revealed and made possible.
And this, of course, is the very opposite of the scientific method, which would seek objectivity and emotional distance from the subject being studied, and, as a result, could have never produced this book. That is not a criticism of the scientific method. It is simply an observation about how the sciences and the humanities work in very different ways.
The second reason I reject the fraud charge is that I think of Elizabeth’s precognitive experiences in the larger context of the historical record, which is chock-full of hundreds, indeed thousands, of other cases and incidences like hers (including my own precognitive dream). Elizabeth’s dreams fit seamlessly into a much larger pattern. It is for these larger historical reasons that I am convinced that precognitive phenomena are real and intimate, if largely invisible expressions of the natural world in which we all live.
I recognize that for the skeptic such “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” but I have never understood that claim, mostly because it is obvious to me that “extraordinary” is entirely relative to one’s worldview and philosophical assumptions. Such things are certainly not extraordinary in the world I inhabit and the assumptions I think out of. I live in a “glass-block universe” in which the past, present, and future all exist right now (again, just watch Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe or read Eric Wargo’s Time Loops).
Moreover, I know that divination is one of the oldest and most common human practices and experiences on the planet. For these two reasons, there is nothing especially extraordinary or even surprising about precognition for me. Such phenomena are all quite natural and to be expected in such a (perfectly scientific) cosmology and (massively documented) history of religions. Hence the burden of proof for me is on the skeptic, not on those who honestly report precognition with the consistency and detail that Elizabeth does. Still, I recognize this is a reasonable difference and is ultimately a function of differing worldviews and philosophical assumptions.
There is possibly something much stranger afoot here, though. If one chooses to believe Elizabeth and Matt about the Jerusalem plane crash dream, the late time stamp of this particular email may well be the most valuable part of the entire email story. After all, it almost looks like the computer was waiting for the internet to report the crash before it would send the email and so prevent us from having any clear and hard evidence of precognition. This is called the “trickster effect” in parapsychology. The trickster is a mythical name for the often observed phenomenon that psi or paranormal events appear to have their “own minds” and seem nearly omnipotent at avoiding clear detection.119
I recognize, of course, that this will be much too much for those who will opt for the fraud answer. So be it. That is their choice. That is the world they choose to live in.
Finally, I should add that this book is not a finish line but a snapshot of an ongoing conversation and living experiment. The security expert recommended that Elizabeth switch email accounts to Google, since Google has a very reliable date- and time-stamped system that would give us strong and reliable evidence for any future precognitive dreams. As of November 6, 2017, Elizabeth has agreed to send me any emails about her precognitive dreams through a new Gmail account. And the security expert has offered to look at new data. So we are moving forward now with those instructions and that promise.
I frankly worry a bit about this as well, though. I happen to think that we are scared to death, terrified, of our own human potentials and our own paranormal powers. We all share in the Superman, but we want to pretend that we are only Clark Kent—you know, put on a pair of glasses and go write boring stuff for the Daily Planet. Apparently, that’s the reality in which we want to live. The ruse works. Accordingly, paranormal effects happen precisely when we are not looking, or better, when we are not taking responsibility for them. In a word, they work best when they work unconsciously.
The séance worked in the nineteenth century, for example, because it involved a dark room and many people sitting around a large table. Since it was never clear who was responsible for what psychical effects (tables floated, apparitions appeared, minds were read), the individuals around the table could “let loose.” In parapsychological speak, they became “disinhibited.” They could manifest psi effects while at the same deny their own responsibility for these effects. They could act like Superman but still pretend to be Clark Kent. This is why the séance ritual worked. This is also, of course, what made fraud possible under the cover of darkness and under the table (literally). There is the trickster again.
Put bluntly, it is my own position that scientific focus on paranormal effects has an inhibiting effect on them. It makes them go away. But then this was one of the reasons Elizabeth wanted to write this book anyway: to make the terrifying vision-dreams go away. I am not sure this book will do that, but I am pretty sure an ironclad scientific test will. In any case, we are open to whatever comes. We are game. Let us see what happens in the future, or perhaps better, what has already happened in the future.