Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
—Albert Einstein on the death of his friend Michele Besso (1955)
The dreaming brain is simply feeling its future.
—Eric Wargo, Time Loops
Elizabeth’s problem with watches may be more than simply electronic. It may also be symbolic. Many of her exceptional experiences, after all, clearly violate our ordinary experience of time, that is, the way we think of time on a watch face as faithfully ticking or spinning away in a regular, orderly fashion and from whose regular, straight-arrow direction we can never escape. By “dreaming the future,” that is, entering an altered state of consciousness and cognizing events that have not yet happened (at least from our perspective in the present), Elizabeth in effect “breaks” our ordinary linear experience of time. She leaps forward into the future, or the future reaches back to her, or some part of her steps out of time altogether and scans the entire temporal landscape, as if she were in a balloon floating above ordinary history. Whatever is happening, time is no longer functioning like it usually does. It is “broken.” And so her watch breaks to signal this. Ordinary time stops.
This again is a very old theme, and again it can be connected to technology, low or high. The lore around death is filled with various sorts of technologies “stopping” at the moment of death. In Europe, before the widespread use of clocks, candles would go out at the moment of death. This was very low-tech, for sure, and maybe it was sometimes just a breeze, but still—the symbolism is there, particularly since gradually melting candles also measured a kind of time. After the advent of clocks, things got a bit more dramatic: mechanical clocks would stop at the moment of death. The message here appears to be at least double. The stopped clock marks the precise time of death, but the stopping of the marking of time also honors the person’s entrance into “no time,” that is, into eternity. For this was how eternity was often imagined: not as endless time, but as a state outside of time altogether.
Another double message may well be at work in Elizabeth’s case, since she did not begin dreaming the future and so transcending ordinary time until “after” the lightning strike and the altered temporal stream of the afterlife. It is as if her two-week experience “there” within a few minutes “here” somehow rendered her capable of experiencing temporal bending in her dreams, as if the “gravity” of that original near-death experience somehow warped the fabric of space-time in and around her sleeping brain so that information from the near future could flow backward and be cognized in the present. This is all speculation on my part. I am not exactly arguing this. But I am certainly leaning, really falling back, in this direction.
It also seems important in this context to note that the modern sense of time as completely homogenous, straight, inviolable, and empty of meaning is a very rare one in the history of human civilization and virtually unknown in the history of religions. Indeed, our modern “empty” sense of a strictly linear time may well be entirely unique. For most human cultures, time is not straight or inviolable, and in very special moments or in-breakings it can be pregnant with meaning. Time can also, as it were, flow backward, as has been assumed and commonly experienced for millennia now in countless divination practices (rituals designed to intuit or see the future), oracles, omens, and prophetic states all over the world.
Indeed, although intellectuals have yet to come to terms with the fact, there are few human practices more universal, more globally distributed, and more widely accepted (including and especially among the elites of these cultures) than those ritual technologies dedicated to divination and dream. It is tempting to brush this off as nothing more than “superstition,” but such easy rationalizations cannot explain the global distribution or the historical commonality of the divination practices. It is almost certainly the case that such practices are so universal because different human cultures have found them extremely practical and helpful, that is, because they work.
To take one iconic example, the Greek philosophers and intellectuals who laid the foundations for Western thought, civilization, and modern empirical science did not seriously doubt the efficacy of prophecy, divination, and precognition. They recognized that human beings routinely know things that go far beyond any sensory datum or rational deduction. And they did not just accept this. They thought and wrote about it a great deal. As the classicist Peter Struck has recently demonstrated in rich detail, these foundational thinkers theorized this “surplus of knowledge,” this “foresight in dreams,” this “extra-sensory knowledge” in nuanced and very careful ways: as a part of human nature, as a function of the natural world, as something that happens spontaneously in dream or coincidence, as something that can be induced by the proper ritual technology (techne), as a special gift of the gods in a particular prodigy or trance specialist and, perhaps most famously, as a privileged way to “know yourself,” as the two-word saying cut into the temple wall at Apollo’s temple at Delphi had it (and still has it).76
Precognition or divination, then, was not some “woo-woo” to dismiss and make fun of in the ancient Greek world. Nor was it tangential to serious thinking and an adequate understanding of the natural world. It lay at the very root of human being and human knowledge. It lay at the root of us.
There are more modern versions of the sense that time is not homogenous, that it can change its speed, nature, or even direction. These, of course, are generally devoid of any reference to the afterlife, eternity, or sensing the future, but they are nevertheless quite striking and well worth discussing here.
Before I begin to engage them, however, allow me to issue a very important proviso. It is this. The following discussion of time in contemporary neuroscience and physics should in no way be construed as an authoritative discussion of these sciences. If I were to claim such a professional mantle, you should be immediately suspicious. (Alternately, if a neuroscientist or a physicist claims to speak on the historical or philosophical nuances of religious experience, you should be immediately suspicious. I certainly am.)
I do not claim to speak for or about neuroscience or physics as sciences. My goals are much more humble but also, be forewarned, much more radical. My aim is to suggest that neuroscience and physics, with or without the permission of a particular scientist, can provide new intellectual frameworks and striking new images that allow us to “see” the historical data (that is, the reported anomalous experiences) as real and important aspects of the actual world in which we live. Put a bit differently, as I explained in my first pages, I am not after proof in what follows. I am after new plausibility structures. I am not after the facts. I am after a better framework to help us see and understand what is right in front of us but that we cannot yet see because we do not possess a sufficiently nuanced framework in which to fit them and so make some sense of them. We cannot admit that “burning rocks are falling from the sky,” because we still lack a worldview in which that is thinkable, possible.
I also have a proposal. This is where it gets much more radical. I want to propose that scientists take anomalous experiences as signs or signals of where these sciences should go with their research agendas and theorizing about space, time, matter, energy, and mind. I want to suggest that the human being is the most sophisticated form of technology of any kind on the planet, far more sophisticated than any of the clunky machines this same human being has yet conceived and constructed, like the computer, the international space station, or the Large Hadron Collider underneath central Europe. Along these same lines, I want to suggest that human beings like Elizabeth can actually experience (and have long experienced) some of the realities that the formal scientific theories are just beginning to encode in their formal mathematical models, and that, if we are really serious about understanding the cosmos and consciousness, we should look first and foremost to these experiences and to these individuals. The sciences study and mathematically map the “outside” of reality. Mystical and paranormal events are experiences of the “inside” of reality. It is the same reality, though, and we will never really understand reality until we embrace both sides of the coin: the outside and the inside.
With such a proposal, please note, I am not suggesting that the mystical experiences are the same thing as the scientific experiments. They are not. Nor am I proposing that the mystical experiences somehow “prove” a particular scientific idea or proposal. Nor am I proposing that a particular scientific hypothesis “proves” a particular mystical worldview. I am suggesting that both the experiences and the experiments are engaging or expressing the same fundamental reality, and that we would do well to ponder both in respectful and constructive conversation.
I claim no originality with the suggestion that time might be a brain-created illusion and not an objective feature of the external cosmos. As the opening epigraph to this chapter makes clear, Albert Einstein thought the same, as do many physicists with whom I have interacted over the years. It is by no means an uncommon conviction among such professionals. Einstein famously described time as “a stubbornly persistent illusion.” What is so interesting about this overused quote is that it is almost never quoted in full. The context is also usually removed: the death of the physicist’s lifelong friend, Michele Besso. Einstein, it turns out, was not just speaking about time; he was also speaking about death.
Einstein also insisted on the “frameworks, not facts” principle that I introduced earlier and am pursuing again in this chapter. Here is how he put the situation: “Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.”77 In short, if you lack a plausible model of something, you cannot see it, you cannot even recognize it, even if it is staring you right in the face, as it were (as psychical experiences have been doing for millennia).
One such theory that might well determine what we can see and recognize is something called the “block universe.” The block universe is built on Einstein’s theory of relativity. It is most often associated with Einstein’s teacher, the Jewish German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who demonstrated that space and time cannot be considered independently of one another, and that his most famous student’s special theory of relativity could be figured geometrically as a four-dimensional object, sometimes referred to as “Minkowski space-time.” The basic notion here is that space and time are woven together into a single field or medium. You have probably seen the artistic representations of the rubber-like “sheet” warped or stretched by large objects like planets and stars sitting “in” it. That’s Minkowski space-time.
The same model possesses profound implications for how we think about time. In a block universe, the past, present, and future exist all at once, woven into a four-dimensional block of space-time. Some models have us “moving through” this block, like a spotlight moves across a dark room, to create the illusion of moving time. Other models have us “spread out” in time and space, like some kind of weird, four-dimensional worm or temporal snake. MIT professor Brad Skow, one proponent of the block universe model, described the theory this way: “If you could look down on the universe, you would see things spread out in time as you would see the universe spread out in space. You could see that things are one way at earlier times and different at later times, but you wouldn’t say the universe as a whole is changing.”78
I am especially intrigued by such a description, because it sounds eerily like what individuals sometimes report in a near-death experience or extreme religious experience, which is often exactly about “looking down on the universe” from some esoteric perspective outside of time and space.79 Actually, it sounds exactly like that. Traditionally, we call such perspectives “transcendent.” For most intellectuals, such transcendent experiences are not supposed to exist or be possible at all. Still, they are commonly reported and, if we are willing to imagine ourselves living inside a block universe, they are clearly not impossible. But neither, please note, would they be supernatural or outside of nature in such a universe; they would be entirely natural, or better “super natural” to our present historical linear perspectives. Perhaps this is why these experiences of the transcendence of time happen—forgive the expression—all the time.
Certainly such a block universe and its model of time jive exceptionally well with Elizabeth’s simple metaphor for her precognitive dreams: a kind of slicing through an infinitely layered cake. The layers are all already there. One simply moves around in the layer cake with the knife. Indeed, when the string theory physicist Brian Greene describes the block universe and relativity theory, he actually uses the metaphor of a giant loaf of bread through which different actors at different points of space-time in the universe cut a “now” or “world-line” at different angles, depending on their movement and place in the space-time continuum.80 The similarities in the two images are striking, to say the least. But how did a Houston mother and wife with no physics training or advanced mathematics arrive at the same conviction as a Columbia University theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist?
Simple. She experienced it.
For a contemporary example of how the block universe can help us think about remarkable experiences like those of Elizabeth and so “make the impossible possible,” consider the elegant blog of Eric Wargo, “The Nightshirt: Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions,” and his subsequent book Time Loops.81 The subtitle of the blog signals the author’s main interest: precognition or, put in the more technical language of quantum physics, retrocausation, that is, the notion that on a subatomic or quantum level causality might well move backward (retro-) in time, that is, from the future to the present or past. This quantum bizarreness in turn sometimes creates a phenomenon that Wargo calls “time loops.”
Allow me to intervene here for a moment and explain both retrocausation and the time loop with a concrete example. I once wrote about an academic colleague of mine who wishes to remain anonymous.82 After I gave a lecture on the paranormal at her university, she told me a most remarkable story about how she once sent her young son to visit a zoo with their nanny. After they left, at 10:06 a.m., she felt an impact in her body and “saw” in a kind of flash-picture her young son screaming in the car seat as the car filled up with a strange white smoke. She just knew that something terrible had happened.
Except that it had not. She called her nanny, learned that they were safe, and asked the nanny to drive back immediately on local slow roads. They got back safely. The next morning, the son wanted to go back to the zoo. The mother took no chances. She drove herself this time. On the way there, the mother and son were in a high-speed accident and crashed. The airbags released and filled the car with the white powder that coats airbags and helps them release quickly. After the car crashed, the mother looked back and saw, in the present now, the exact same scene that she had witnessed the morning before, like a “video rerun.” A screaming son in a car seat and “white smoke.” The man who had caused the accident came to her aid and called her husband. The call came in at around 10:08 a.m. Her earlier vision even had the time right, but twenty-four hours off.
There are two really interesting features of this story that concern us here. First, it dramatically demonstrates that what we call “clairvoyance” (seeing something at a distant point of space in the present) might easily be confused with an experience of “precognition” (that is, knowing about something before it happens). Note that this mother mistook the two phenomena and, by so doing, literally drove right into the accident: by trying to prevent the precognized event on day one, she ended up participating in the causal chain that produced it on day two. It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that she was caught in what Wargo calls a time loop, with the events of the first day causing the events of the second day that in turn caused the events of the first day that in turn caused the events of the second day, and, well, you get the picture.
Loopy, right?
The second thing that is fascinating here is that, logically speaking, it is not possible to know which self or brain of the mother caused this particular vision. I mean, do we think that the mother on day one somehow “saw” what the mother was seeing on day two? Or do we think that the mother on day two “sent back” a signal to the mother on day one, perhaps as a kind of warning or hesitation that would prevent an even worse accident on day two? The former option would be a classical case of precognition. The latter option would be a near-perfect example of retrocausation. Logically speaking (since we are caught here in a logical loop), these two options are identical. We cannot choose between them with any degree of certainty. All we can do is make the honest but mind-bending observation that a very clear information flow occurred between the two mothers, on day one and on day two. In which direction that information flowed we cannot say. Hence the time loop.
Which brings me back to Eric Wargo. His central claim in “The Nightshirt” blog is that many paranormal events are in fact camouflaged or misrecognized forms of precognition, and that these work through retrocausal flows from the immediate or distant future back into the present. For Wargo, these retrocausal flows are entirely normal and are happening all the time, even though we seldom recognize them as such, for example in our nightly dreams, where they are disguised by all of the mental processes Freud mapped more than 100 years ago (free association, puns, displacement, condensation, reversal, symbolization, and so on). Wargo speculates that these retrocausal flows are the secret of evolution (that is, they are what make a biological organism so surprisingly “lucky” in a world otherwise ruled by chance and randomness) and occur in living organisms on some kind of deep quantum biological level. Wargo brings a stunning array of training to imagining this impossible possibility, from anthropology and neuroscience to Zen Buddhism and the history of science fiction. The implications of all of this for how we understand ourselves, history, psychology, much of religion, and—please note—the act and powers of interpretation (which, for Wargo, actually end up determining or guiding the past) are so profound that it is difficult to know where to begin, or end.
But let me try.
Wargo adopts Minkowski space-time as one of the secrets of understanding precognition, as the framework that makes visible the otherwise invisible retrocausal facts. He prefers to call this the glass-block universe. The universe here is a single object likened to a see-through glass block, which implies “that things in the past are still here, and that things that haven’t happened yet are here already.” Or again: “The considerable evidence of precognition (and more generally, retrocausation) points to the reality of something like the glass block, the already-ness of the future and the persistence of the past.” The point here is not that we have conclusive proof of such a model of the universe. We do not. The point is that, in such a glass-block universe, we would not doubt precognition as logically impossible. Quite the opposite, we would expect it as entirely logical and entirely natural.
Significantly—and here comes the radical proposal again—Wargo does not just think the glass-block universe is an abstract theory for scientists to think about. He thinks we can actually experience the glass-block universe, and indeed, that many people already have reported on their realizations of the same, always of course in the cultural code of their place and time. Some of his favorite examples here are the masters of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, who have known “a direct enlightenment experience of the glass block.” Hence paradoxical Buddhist one-liners like this one: “Streams and rivers run into the ocean and yet there is no flowing.” And then Wargo goes further and gets a bit personal: “I too have had these brief altered perceptions that ‘nothing is really happening’ even when things are visibly in flux in front of my eyes. I think there’s real truth to what those guys were experiencing back on their misty Chinese mountainsides (and are still experiencing).”
So what does this have to do with Elizabeth’s precog dreams and how we might think of them today? Well, quite a bit, actually. I can see at least three obvious takeaways for us in Wargo’s writing on precognition and retrocausation: (1) the apparent evolutionary function of psychical capacities (hence all my mythical references to the mutant); (2) the “semiotic” (meaning making) or creative nature of paranormal events, that is, the way they seem to goad or push us toward our own creation of meaning (hence my refrain that “we are changing the afterlife”); and, perhaps most originally, (3) the nature of precognition as a cognition not of the event itself, which would make it clairvoyant, but of one’s own brain cognizing itself in the future learning of this event through an ordinary physical channel, like a newspaper or online news report. Allow me to treat each of these in turn.
As a perfect cinematic example, I encourage the reader to watch the sci-fi film Next (2007), based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. The protagonist of the film is a Las Vegas magician and gambler named Cris Johnson, played by Nicolas Cage, who can see a few minutes into the future. Johnson makes a living by gambling, but he has to be careful not to be too successful lest he get recognized and caught. He gets noticed anyway, by the intelligence services of the U.S. government, which need his extraordinary ability to prevent a terrorist threat. They come after him, he thinks, to arrest him. He runs. The next scene, a chase through a casino lobby in which Johnson easily slips through dozens of secret agents like some invisible ninja (since he knows which direction each will look and when), is a powerful example of how just a few seconds of reliable precognition would make one basically invincible, and practically invisible, in these situations. Johnson will later learn that there is one way to magnify his powers in super ways: loving sex.
This is a Hollywood exaggeration, but it is an exaggeration of something that appears to be quite real on a much more humble level. There is in fact laboratory evidence pointing to a few-second version of precognitive ability in the work of researchers like Daryl Bem and Dean Radin, both of whom have also demonstrated a connection between these forms of “ESP” or “presentiment” and erotic stimulation.83 This, of course, also makes good evolutionary sense, since erotic arousal is a classic evolutionary reward toward reproduction and survival. If precognition serves an evolutionary function, one would expect to find something like this. And, indeed, one does.
Wargo goes one step further with the laboratory research by engaging Benjamin Libet’s famous research on volition or human agency. What Libet appears to have shown is that the decision to perform a manual act (say, the moving of a finger) actually occurs about one-fifth of a second after the finger moves. The conventional claim here is that our conscious sense of having free will is illusory, and that this false sense of agency is only an after-the-fact interpretation of something our bodies were in fact doing on their own and had already “decided” without us.84
Wargo flips this standard deterministic reading to suggest that, actually, what Libet’s results might well show is that our true acting, deciding selves exist one-fifth of a second or so in the future and reach back to the body to manipulate and guide it, as if the body were some kind of Golem or meat puppet. In this thought experiment, we actually live in the near-future, where we already know the outcome of our actions and so can act in uncannily successful and “lucky” ways. In yet another provocative flash, Wargo suggests that this might explain the subtle but real altered sense of things one gets in moments of intuition, literary creativity, and athletic flow. Being “in the zone” is, in effect, acting from the near-future and sensing this.
In yet another moment of insight, still in this evolutionary current, Wargo links the survival advantage of acting from the slight future to a theme treated in these pages: the key role that trauma so often plays in paranormal events. Trauma, Wargo points out, is another word for survival: “Although psychical phenomena and ESP have always been linked to ‘trauma,’ this notion masks the fact that they really seem to key in on signals of survival: Implicitly, if you’re traumatized, then you’ve survived. If psi, as precognition, is a biological function, it has to have emerged and prevailed as an adaptive trait, orienting the organism toward its own future survival/reproduction or that of its kin.”85
Recall the earlier story of my correspondent and the ways that the strange event in the trenches allowed a particular genetic line to survive and pass on:
Then he heard a voice, a Greek voice, that he was sure was his father’s voice. “Demetri, Demetri, get out of there.”
My uncle shuffled down the communications trench to his platoon, which was filled with Greek immigrant boys, and asked them, “Have any of you guys been calling for me?”
“No, sergeant Moskhopoulos,” they all said.
All this time, my uncle had been telling us this story with his eyes down, looking at his cards. Now he looked at us all and said, “When I started to go back a shell blew up the whole place where I’d been. After the war, when I went back to the family in Greece. I found out that day was the day my father died.”
But there is also the sense in which human beings do not just receive meaningful information but also create it. We call this meaning-making “interpretation.” I know that most people think of interpretation as finding something that is already there, but I trust that the reader realizes by now that this is not how this second kind of meaning actually works. As George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have put it, “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” That seems simple, even cute, but, again, the implications are vast, and they bear directly on paranormal events like precognition for Wargo, who argues that a future interpretation or meaning-making act actually causes or helps create the events in the past that are going to be interpreted as such! He turns everything upside down. We do not interpret past events that are already determined.
Meaning arrives from the future and guides the present and past events that will find their ends in the future interpretation or meaning.
Wargo commonly invokes science fiction concepts to explain this mind-boggling thought. Indeed, he turns to the same movie that so moved Elizabeth: Arrival. Wargo reads the movie as an uplifting film that gets it just right, that functions as “a brief and inspiring peek into a world where we realize that we are prophetic beings but just don’t know it.”86
When Wargo writes that we are prophetic beings without knowing it, he does not mean to say that we are called by some god to proclaim this or that local revelation. He means something much more universal, and much more significant. He means to say that we really can “see” or “feel” the future a few seconds, days, sometimes even years out, and that these acts of vision, intuition, and interpretation are all about helping us to adapt, survive, and create the future, which is in turn reaching back to us to create us. It is not, then, that we choose an arbitrary interpretation of a past event (or scripture), or that anything goes. Not at all. It is more that our future interpretations help determine what happens in the past. Time flows both ways. It’s a circle, not a line. It’s a loop.
Remember Elliot Wolfson?
For Wargo, then, the deepest message of Arrival is that “meaning always is something that arrives from the future. We make our lives meaningful, and renew those meanings in our actions; and our best and most creative insights seem to come from reaching into the Not Yet in obscure and subtle ways.” Or, if you prefer, our best and most creative insights seem to come when the Not Yet reaches back to us in obscure and subtle ways. Again, it’s a loop, not a line.
Perhaps not accidentally, Wargo sees the genre of film or the movie as the best metaphor for this meaning-making message: “It seems no accident that (as my wife pointed out when we saw Arrival) the heptapods’ glass screen is the same dimensions as a movie screen, and the whole experience of the film is staged to express the idea that we are basically spectators of something.”87 There is the sci-fi movie metaphor again, in a sci-fi movie no less. It just goes round and round.
Wargo’s writing on this subject orbits around one of the classics of parapsychological literature, J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927). Dunne was an important early aviator inventor with a distinguished military career in World War I. Significantly, he was also an avid reader of Jules Verne, that is, of early science fiction. Dunne first honed his theory of time through his own precognitive dreams of historical events, including the eruption of Mont Pelée on the Caribbean island of Martinique. He eventually realized that these precognitive dreams were not of the event itself but of himself reading newspaper accounts of those events. He also had numerous dream precognitions about events that would play out in his own life (that is, in his own brain) in the near future or the next day, including one involving a stopped pocket watch (there is the stopped watch again) and another involving a crazed horse that escaped a fence.
Dunne was a trained engineer and had a skeptical mind. He did not just believe these things. He tested them. To test whether his precognitions were false memories, he began to scrupulously record his dreams (like Elizabeth). He concluded that these were genuine dream precognitions, even if they were often slightly distorted, like all dreams. “No, there was nothing unusual in any of these dreams as dreams. They were merely displaced in time.”88
He called his theory of time Serialism. Wargo is worth quoting in full here as he explains the basic idea (I hope you are sitting down):
Dunne’s dreams seemed to him evidence for what Einstein and other physicists and mathematicians were just beginning to assert: that since the present moment depends entirely on where you stand in relation to objects—what might be in the past for one observer may still be in the future for another observer, and vice versa—then the future must in some sense already exist.
Einstein’s theory of relativity suggested time was a dimension like space; to help visualize this, his teacher, Hermann Minkowski, pictured “spacetime” as a four-dimensional block. Let’s make it a glass block, so we can see what is happening inside it. Our lives, and the “life” of any single object or particle in the universe, is really a line—a “world line”—snaking spaghetti-like through that glass block. The solid three-dimensional “you” that you experience at any moment is really just a slice or cross section of a four-dimensional clump of spaghetti-like particles that started some decades ago as a zygote and gradually expanded in size by incorporating many more spaghetti-strand particles, and then, after several decades of coherence (as a literal “flying spaghetti monster”) will dissipate into a multitude of little spaghetti particles going their separate ways after your death. (They will re-coalesce in different combinations with other spaghetti-strand particles to make other objects and other spaghetti beings, again and again and again, until the end of the universe.89) What we perceive at any given moment as the present state of affairs is just a narrow slice or cross-section of that block as our spaghetti-clump-bound-consciousness traverses our world-line from beginning to end.90
Working with this vision (minus the flying spaghetti monster), Dunne arrived at a classic mystical model of the Human as Two. Here is Wargo again, summarizing Dunne for us:
Precognitive dreams, Dunne argued, show that at night, as well as other times when the brain is in a relaxed state, our consciousness can wriggle free of the present moment and scan ahead (as well as behind) on our personal world-line, like a flashlight at night illuminating a spot on the path ahead. This ability to be both rooted mentally in our body, with its rich sensory “now,” and the possibility of, as novelist Kurt Vonnegut would later put it, “coming unstuck in time,” suggested to Dunne that human consciousness was dual: We possess an “individual mind” that adheres to the brain at any given time point; but we also are part of a larger, “Universal Mind,” that transcends the now and the body. The Universal Mind is ultimately shared—a consciousness-in-common—that is equivalent to what has always been called “God.” Universal Mind is immortal. The body-bound individual mind is, in some sense, a “child of God and Man.”91
Dunne, then, arrived at a belief in God as a Universal Mind—a very high bar. But the data of his precognitive dreams, as Wargo points out with a graceful honesty, do not actually require such a belief, nor do they support it. These precognitive dreams, after all, were all examples of a body and brain precognizing its own future state, for example, while reading an account of a precognized event in a newspaper (note the paranormal role of reading again).
Wargo, then, wants to think about precognition as self-precognition, as Dunne did, but he is not a theist, as Dunne was. His bar is lower, in the sense that his model does not rely on any supernatural event, any transcendent Mind, or any soul leaving the body. For Wargo, those traditional religious understandings are understandable metaphors or visionary displays that are attempting to translate what is happening, but they are not what is actually happening. What is happening is that a human body-brain—“spread out” in time in the glass-block universe like some four-dimensional space-time worm (the three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time)—is communicating with itself, probably through quantum processes, that are moving from the future of that glass block universe back to the present or past. The space-time worm is simply communicating with itself through its own world-line, since it is literally and physically “spread out” along this same line.
Got that? Did you think that thinking about something like dreaming the future would be easy, that it would not violate your normal way of thinking and imagining? How could it be otherwise?
Let me try to explain the model a bit more. I think I can, since this is where Wargo allows me to see much more clearly what I earlier intuited but could not quite explain in any clear way. Early in my conversations with Elizabeth, I began to suspect that what she was often picking up in her dreams was not the plane crashes themselves, but the future media events reporting the plane crashes. After all, what she dreamt about the US Airways and TransAsia cases corresponded perfectly to the images that appeared in the media the next day.
She saw in her dreams, moreover, the exact same image that she herself would see on the television and internet the next day: the people standing on the wing of the US Airways plane floating in the Hudson River and the dramatic sidewise crash of the TransAsia Airways flight over the bay and highway. The same was true of her remembered precognition of the San Francisco earthquake of 1989. She did not see some random image of destruction and death. She saw a policeman looking into an immense crack in the concrete, more or less exactly as it would appear in the newspapers. These images are simply too specific to be coincidental.
The same model, note again, works beautifully for the Brazilian soccer team dream. The actual crash happened a few hours before Elizabeth dreamed of it in the middle of the night. Her instincts here were two: (a) that the dream was precognitive, but then (b) to discount it as such, since she learned the next day that the accident actually happened before the dream. Both of these instincts can be immediately affirmed in Wargo’s model, however. Her dream was indeed precognitive, exactly as it felt to her, but not in the literal sense that she was thinking. She was precognizing her own future reading about the event, not the event itself.
Eric Wargo has convinced me. I think that this in fact is the case, and we are always, each of us, unconsciously sending our psychic tentacles into the near future to scope out the environment and help us negotiate what is about to be. We are remembering the future and, in the process, creating it within a constant series of time loops. Or maybe this is still all too time-bound. Maybe we are actually living, right now, in the near future, reaching back every second of every day to work our bodies like a biological puppet.
I know that is mind bending. Of course it is. We are used to thinking in straight, one-directional lines from the past to the present. We need to start thinking in circles from the future to the present and back to the future.
Let me return to my proposal. Whether we are thinking in terms of an abstract formal description of the block universe of a philosopher of science or a physicist, as we have it in the work of Minkowski, Skow, and Greene, or an emergent theory of precognition as we have it in a gifted writer like Eric Wargo, we arrive at the same striking suggestion, namely, that the future already exists.
If this is true, it would, of course, render Elizabeth’s precognitive dreams entirely plausible. They would no longer be impossible. They would be possible. We would not yet have a precise “how,” of course, but at least we would have a framework that could render these experienced facts thinkable. We could accept what happened instead of invoking an endless series of denials and distraction devices.
The implications here—at once spiritual and scientific—are vast. Can human beings actually experience, directly and personally, features of reality mapped out by the advanced mathematics of modern physics but not normally accessible to our senses and brains? A figure like Einstein could imagine the structure of space-time as a four-dimensional, malleable “sheet,” and he could establish this mathematically in a way that predicted the actual behavior of the cosmos, say, the light from a distant star “bending” around the sun as the latter warped the space-time field around itself. But Einstein never claimed to actually experience the universe as such, that is, to know it directly as such. He was a physicist, not a mystic. He was advancing an abstract theory or formal model, not a technique to experience the truth of the same.
But this is precisely what Wargo is claiming for both his Buddhist masters in China and for his own meditation experiences. He also proposes the glass-block universe as our best model to explain the universal phenomena of precognition, which he considers utterly normal and common. Elizabeth’s precognitive dreams imply the present of the future as well, and her image of slicing through a layer cake is highly reminiscent of the block universe of the theoretical physicists.
Is this really possible? Can Einstein’s thought experiments become actual human experiences? Einstein marveled at how human reason and its mathematics could rationally or intellectually comprehend the universe. Turns out it may be even weirder than that. Turns out that there may be depths to the human being that go far beyond even the mathematics and that may be able to know the universe as it really is before and beyond any scientific theory or mathematical formula. “I just knew.” Turns out that Einstein’s thought experiment or Brian Greene’s cosmic loaf of bread might morph into an actual mystical experience of the same. Here to be enlightened is to know and experience the glass-block universe, where everything is always and already so, and where time flows inside the utter stillness of eternity.