I’ve mentioned this experience once before on this blog (here) when commenting on Carl B. Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death—in that context regretting Becker’s exclusion of that experience from the subject matter that he covers under the category of the paranormal. Then I mentioned the experience again in yesterday’s posting—and the post promptly brought some visitors who were using a Google search with the phrase. My own conviction is that the experience is the most widely-known instance ordinary people have of precognition. In my own case—and I think this is generally the case—I experienced the déjà vu feeling much more frequently in childhood than later, but these experience still recur, if very rarely. They’ve always fascinated me. Indeed it was when I first encountered J.W. Dunne’s writings that I felt sure that I’d approached some kind of explanation of the phenomenon.
Déjà vu literally means “already seen” in French. The phrase was first used by the philosopher and parapsychologist Émile Boirac (1851–1917) in a letter to the French journal Review Philosophique and later in his book, The Future of the Psychic Sciences. In that book he also proposed the word metagnomy as a substitute for clairvoyance, thus “knowledge of things situated beyond those we can normally know” (link). Frederick Meyers (1843-1901), the founder of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR)†, called it promnesia, using a Greek formation meaning prior memory. The simpler common-language French phrase won the linguistic battle. Déjà vu is simply a very powerful sensation that some situation, right now, has happened before. Indeed when it does, we often know what will happen next, including what people will say.
The notion that we are remembering a dream—and a precognitive dream, at that—is totally persuasive if we have ourselves actually had one or more such dreams which we remembered at the time when had them—so that when the déjà vu moment later actually arrived we already knew that we had dreamt it.
The Paranormal Encyclopedia.com here notes that one psychology professor at least, in 1896, Arthur Allin, then of the University of Colorado, Bolder, had suggested that the source of déjà vu was forgotten dreams. The modern explanation, summed up by Wikipedia here, rejects precognition as an explanation and trots out a long list of other supposedly more scientific explanations of that squirrelly sort that make those of us sublimely confident in the Big Picture smile with bemusement.
†The SPR has an American counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research, Inc., reachable here.
Showing posts with label Precognition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Precognition. Show all posts
Friday, June 24, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Precognition: Some Curious Trails
If you looked for a thinker who has expended serious thought on precognitive dreaming—and did so before this 2011—the one name that would surely surface is that of John William Dunne (1875-1949). Since publishing his book, Dreamer, Andrew Paquette joins Dunne as another.
J.W. Dunne, born in Ireland, worked as an aeronautical engineer in England. His book, in multiple (and drastically-changing) editions, is An Experiment with Time (1927) arose from multiple experiences of his own in which he dreamt of events that, later, actually took place—both private and very public events. His theory, Serialism, was an attempt to explain it.
Paquette is an artist of some renown, with multiple achievements in comic books, video games, teaching, the fine arts, and as an author and teacher in computer graphics. He is also a psychic of obviously high gifts—a very well-written report of which experience is his book, Dreamer. He discovered these talents following a precognitive dream, the first of many (see my last post here).
I could, but almost hesitate to, add a third name to the list, that of the Russian, P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), who developed his own theory in A New Model of the Universe. Ouspensky did not address the subject of precognitive dreams narrowly, but his model, presented in the book mentioned above, appeared at about the same time as Dunne’s book (1931).
The first two (Dunne, Paquette) both assume that the future we see in dreams actually exists, with the implication that free will is at minimum problematical. Ouspensky provides a model of time in which this preexistent future is potentially present, but its manifestation (actualization) is due in part to choices. Therefore in Ouspensky’s scheme, the future we dream can be changed—if we make other choices—but the event that we actually live was also there, hiding in potential right alongside the more painful alternative that we avoided by acting differently. We’re dealing here with very original people; therefore it may not come as a total surprise that Ouspensky believed in eternal return, thus that he lived the same life, over and over again—a fact to which he attributed his experiences of déjà vu, whereas others in turn explain that sensation by saying that we’ve dreamt the future the night or the week before but just don’t remember the dream. Sorry, but that’s the nature of this subject…
Dunne and Ouspensky both think in terms of geometrically arranged times. Dunne projects a serial succession, one time existing above the other—so that from T2 you can see the entirety of T1; thus from T2 the observer sees T1’s life all at once, from childhood to death, all at one glance. Dunne imagined an infinite regress of times—and staunchly defended this heterodoxical view. Ouspensky’s model, presented on pages 343-406 of his book (Vintage, 1971) presents an infinite time in which a multi-dimensional matrix contains an infinite number of lines, each linking points of possibility. One life is thus a single branching line traced through this (to the human mind unimaginably complex) matrix of possibilities. The line is what we actualize; other possibilities, other lives we might have lived, remain in the matrix. (One is reminded of the many-world theory we owe to physicist Hugh Everett (1957)—with the difference that in Everett’s scheme, each world tangibly exists.)
Alas, precognition is a genuine problem. If we see the future, something must be there to see. Is it a tangibly existing hard real something? Ouspensky avoids the problem of free will—the existence of which we assert from experience—by moving preexistence to a quasi-real matrix of potential. You might say that he reifies Aristotle’s potential. But if we accept hard preexistence, we must find another explanation for free will. One solution Paquette presents is that we choose to live a life, a life shown to us, in the sublime world, and in great detail, before we’re born. Thus we exercise choice outside this life but not in it. But Paquette is no doctrinaire; his focus is on rich actual experiential data. He reports precognitive dreams that come out almost, but not precisely, as dreamt; thus choice is exercised here. Sometimes he says that everything’s fixed; he also asserts that we are here to develop. He does not resolve the contradictions that thus sprout here and there; no coherent cosmology has yet (I’m still not finished with his book) emerged that might explain how we can possibly learn anything in a life in the midst of which the most crucial element of agency, choice, is denied us except as an illusion.
The fully worked-out models all reflect a modern form of thought in which it is not at all common to ponder such divine powers as omniscience—or to take them seriously. At the same time, the actual experience of precognitive dreams frequently features instances showing that (1) they do indeed happen, (2) are confirmed later in very large part, but (3) then sometimes do not end tragically, as they did in the dream. This would suggest that the assertion of a fixed future must be opened up in some way, thus minimally as Ouspensky opened it. Another way to do that is to suggest that agencies may be involved—other than ourselves, that precognitive dreams may be in the category of communications. Let me flesh that out a little more.
The best way to do this is to imagine that the future may actually be visible—thus projected to the eyes of minds—without being tangibly there. At some resolution all events and things are energy in motion, at all kinds of levels of coarseness and subtlety, mental and physical. Our reality may be more transparent to higher beings than ourselves. God, of course, is omniscient, but angels (not least guardian angels) may be multiscient, or much-knowing, just eyeballing the vast energetic flow and, furthermore, communicating instantly with one another. And if you hate the very notion of an angel, why not every human being but not in our ordinary waking selves but genuinely near-angelic when we are asleep. Either way, the future may already be here, in projection, and the distant future as well as the near—but the nearer the more detailed. And our sleeping selves may see it (or may have it framed as dreams by guardian angels). And some of us are more gifted, alert, or open to these things than others—and the dramatic is more likely to catch our attention than the ordinary.
What we are seeing, then, are patterns of the future, not the actual rooted and cemented tangible reality of it. Therefore it remains open to change, certainly at the level of personal detail, which is what matters to individuals. It is simply a general kind of communication of reality, in projection, which is present quite naturally based on the very design of reality. And if apprehended can sometimes be a source of help in need.
One of the more interesting aspects of the paranormal, and Paquette notes this fact in his book, is that willful attempts to produce psychic results tend to fail dramatically. A prominent explorer of this phenomenon is J.E. Kennedy (for some of his papers, see this link). One aspect of this well-documented observation is that paranormal phenomena may possibly be a means of communication, form beyond the borderzone, to humanity here, to indicate that something more exists than we can actually see. It’s there like water, but nobody is forced to drink. And precognition may be a means of signaling that fact to many people in times when great disasters loom ahead—already clearly visible from “over there,” not fixed in every detail, but visible, from patterns already forming now.
J.W. Dunne, born in Ireland, worked as an aeronautical engineer in England. His book, in multiple (and drastically-changing) editions, is An Experiment with Time (1927) arose from multiple experiences of his own in which he dreamt of events that, later, actually took place—both private and very public events. His theory, Serialism, was an attempt to explain it.
Paquette is an artist of some renown, with multiple achievements in comic books, video games, teaching, the fine arts, and as an author and teacher in computer graphics. He is also a psychic of obviously high gifts—a very well-written report of which experience is his book, Dreamer. He discovered these talents following a precognitive dream, the first of many (see my last post here).
I could, but almost hesitate to, add a third name to the list, that of the Russian, P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), who developed his own theory in A New Model of the Universe. Ouspensky did not address the subject of precognitive dreams narrowly, but his model, presented in the book mentioned above, appeared at about the same time as Dunne’s book (1931).
The first two (Dunne, Paquette) both assume that the future we see in dreams actually exists, with the implication that free will is at minimum problematical. Ouspensky provides a model of time in which this preexistent future is potentially present, but its manifestation (actualization) is due in part to choices. Therefore in Ouspensky’s scheme, the future we dream can be changed—if we make other choices—but the event that we actually live was also there, hiding in potential right alongside the more painful alternative that we avoided by acting differently. We’re dealing here with very original people; therefore it may not come as a total surprise that Ouspensky believed in eternal return, thus that he lived the same life, over and over again—a fact to which he attributed his experiences of déjà vu, whereas others in turn explain that sensation by saying that we’ve dreamt the future the night or the week before but just don’t remember the dream. Sorry, but that’s the nature of this subject…
Dunne and Ouspensky both think in terms of geometrically arranged times. Dunne projects a serial succession, one time existing above the other—so that from T2 you can see the entirety of T1; thus from T2 the observer sees T1’s life all at once, from childhood to death, all at one glance. Dunne imagined an infinite regress of times—and staunchly defended this heterodoxical view. Ouspensky’s model, presented on pages 343-406 of his book (Vintage, 1971) presents an infinite time in which a multi-dimensional matrix contains an infinite number of lines, each linking points of possibility. One life is thus a single branching line traced through this (to the human mind unimaginably complex) matrix of possibilities. The line is what we actualize; other possibilities, other lives we might have lived, remain in the matrix. (One is reminded of the many-world theory we owe to physicist Hugh Everett (1957)—with the difference that in Everett’s scheme, each world tangibly exists.)
Alas, precognition is a genuine problem. If we see the future, something must be there to see. Is it a tangibly existing hard real something? Ouspensky avoids the problem of free will—the existence of which we assert from experience—by moving preexistence to a quasi-real matrix of potential. You might say that he reifies Aristotle’s potential. But if we accept hard preexistence, we must find another explanation for free will. One solution Paquette presents is that we choose to live a life, a life shown to us, in the sublime world, and in great detail, before we’re born. Thus we exercise choice outside this life but not in it. But Paquette is no doctrinaire; his focus is on rich actual experiential data. He reports precognitive dreams that come out almost, but not precisely, as dreamt; thus choice is exercised here. Sometimes he says that everything’s fixed; he also asserts that we are here to develop. He does not resolve the contradictions that thus sprout here and there; no coherent cosmology has yet (I’m still not finished with his book) emerged that might explain how we can possibly learn anything in a life in the midst of which the most crucial element of agency, choice, is denied us except as an illusion.
The fully worked-out models all reflect a modern form of thought in which it is not at all common to ponder such divine powers as omniscience—or to take them seriously. At the same time, the actual experience of precognitive dreams frequently features instances showing that (1) they do indeed happen, (2) are confirmed later in very large part, but (3) then sometimes do not end tragically, as they did in the dream. This would suggest that the assertion of a fixed future must be opened up in some way, thus minimally as Ouspensky opened it. Another way to do that is to suggest that agencies may be involved—other than ourselves, that precognitive dreams may be in the category of communications. Let me flesh that out a little more.
The best way to do this is to imagine that the future may actually be visible—thus projected to the eyes of minds—without being tangibly there. At some resolution all events and things are energy in motion, at all kinds of levels of coarseness and subtlety, mental and physical. Our reality may be more transparent to higher beings than ourselves. God, of course, is omniscient, but angels (not least guardian angels) may be multiscient, or much-knowing, just eyeballing the vast energetic flow and, furthermore, communicating instantly with one another. And if you hate the very notion of an angel, why not every human being but not in our ordinary waking selves but genuinely near-angelic when we are asleep. Either way, the future may already be here, in projection, and the distant future as well as the near—but the nearer the more detailed. And our sleeping selves may see it (or may have it framed as dreams by guardian angels). And some of us are more gifted, alert, or open to these things than others—and the dramatic is more likely to catch our attention than the ordinary.
What we are seeing, then, are patterns of the future, not the actual rooted and cemented tangible reality of it. Therefore it remains open to change, certainly at the level of personal detail, which is what matters to individuals. It is simply a general kind of communication of reality, in projection, which is present quite naturally based on the very design of reality. And if apprehended can sometimes be a source of help in need.
One of the more interesting aspects of the paranormal, and Paquette notes this fact in his book, is that willful attempts to produce psychic results tend to fail dramatically. A prominent explorer of this phenomenon is J.E. Kennedy (for some of his papers, see this link). One aspect of this well-documented observation is that paranormal phenomena may possibly be a means of communication, form beyond the borderzone, to humanity here, to indicate that something more exists than we can actually see. It’s there like water, but nobody is forced to drink. And precognition may be a means of signaling that fact to many people in times when great disasters loom ahead—already clearly visible from “over there,” not fixed in every detail, but visible, from patterns already forming now.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
About Incomplete Models
The models of the world we carry about in our heads may blinker our view of reality, deny us ways to explain certain experiences, and may also encourage inappropriate behavior. An example. Once at a seminar that Brigitte and I attended, the presenter said something like this: “Before people concluded that the earth was spherical, nobody ever thought of sailing around the earth.” The mathematician Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907) wrote a fiction called An Episode on Flatland: Or How a Plain Folk Discovered the Third Dimension. Hinton’s Flatland has served numerous writers on the fourth dimension to illustrate by analogy how two dimensional people would interpret a three-dimensional intrusion into their world. Imagine a sheet of paper held rigidly enough so that we could cause a sharpened pencil to pierce it and then to slide through it in a vertical direction. To the people on Flatland, the pencil would be the magical appearance of a tiny round creature out of nowhere. It would then grow in size by magic into a large hexagonal creature. That creature would then—again quite magically—transform itself into a large round creature as the eraser finally reached the surface. The creature would finally vanish into nothing. They’d report this event as a miracle. For us, living in three dimension, the pencil doesn’t disappear and has no magical or miraculous aspects. What’s wrong with those people? Their model of reality is incomplete.
I offer this as food for thought when we encounter phenomena that don’t fit our model of reality. A mild case of that is telepathy—mild because we can assume that some kind of super-subtle energy may be the carrier of thoughts and feelings. We have discovered other such energetic fields, i.e., electromagnetism. But what about premonitions that come true? Or people who don’t merely dream but dream the future and see it materialize days, weeks, or months later. (I have a case like that on this blog here.) Such experiences are common enough. Quite a literature of premonitions has been assembled on people who foresaw the 911 disaster. A sampling of these is presented here courtesy of the Boundary Institute. Now I’m encountering reports of premonitions of the Haiti earthquake too. Unlike telepathy, seeing the future in the present is not a mild but rather an incomprehensible violation of our current understanding of reality.
The usual coping mechanisms are three. We can assume that those reporting such things are mentally deranged (not much of an option if we’ve experienced them ourselves). We can deny the experience, even in ourselves. We are incredibly good at that sort of thing if our will is genuinely behind it. Or we can assign the event to sheer coincidence. Close study of the basis for many theories, not least of how life arose, show that chance is an all-purpose explanatory tool. In some cases we must indulge in a tiny bit of intellectual dishonesty to give chance a chance, but a good cause deserves a small assist, and to make omelets, you have to break eggs. The tougher stance is to confess that our model may be defective. To maintain that stance, we have to have a strong mind. We may be thought kooky or labeled a primitive—not by ordinary people; they have an innate intuition that things are not quite what they seem. I’m speaking of ruling elites.
I offer this as food for thought when we encounter phenomena that don’t fit our model of reality. A mild case of that is telepathy—mild because we can assume that some kind of super-subtle energy may be the carrier of thoughts and feelings. We have discovered other such energetic fields, i.e., electromagnetism. But what about premonitions that come true? Or people who don’t merely dream but dream the future and see it materialize days, weeks, or months later. (I have a case like that on this blog here.) Such experiences are common enough. Quite a literature of premonitions has been assembled on people who foresaw the 911 disaster. A sampling of these is presented here courtesy of the Boundary Institute. Now I’m encountering reports of premonitions of the Haiti earthquake too. Unlike telepathy, seeing the future in the present is not a mild but rather an incomprehensible violation of our current understanding of reality.
The usual coping mechanisms are three. We can assume that those reporting such things are mentally deranged (not much of an option if we’ve experienced them ourselves). We can deny the experience, even in ourselves. We are incredibly good at that sort of thing if our will is genuinely behind it. Or we can assign the event to sheer coincidence. Close study of the basis for many theories, not least of how life arose, show that chance is an all-purpose explanatory tool. In some cases we must indulge in a tiny bit of intellectual dishonesty to give chance a chance, but a good cause deserves a small assist, and to make omelets, you have to break eggs. The tougher stance is to confess that our model may be defective. To maintain that stance, we have to have a strong mind. We may be thought kooky or labeled a primitive—not by ordinary people; they have an innate intuition that things are not quite what they seem. I’m speaking of ruling elites.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Precognition and Time
I’ve written on this subject before (see Precognition under Labels). The subject fascinates me because awareness of the future is the clearest, most compelling sign that our conventional views of reality are incomplete. I’ve argued earlier that the experience of precognition, for those who’ve had it, is compelling. The only way to avoid this subject is by burying one’s head in the sand. The last entry here, pointing to a case of premonition, got me to thinking about the subject again. I avoid it by and large because no answers seem possible. Yesterday I had a bit of idle time waiting at the doctor’s office, and these stray thoughts occurred to me. They are in the category of pondering the nature of time.
I was remembering earlier sessions of thinking about the subject. Time and again, I start by dividing the concept of time into two categories. One of these is that time is the necessary complement of enduring existence, meaning that we can’t imagine anything being unless we envision a kind of invisible environment in which the persistence of something continues. From this comes my notion of time-as-endurance.
We know this time because our consciousness is capable of retaining memories of past moments. The power of remembering is itself something dynamic, however, something analogous to motion. The experience of this moment is stored away—picture it as being put on a shelf. And we can look at the shelf and note a past action, the action of putting the memory there. Never mind that it happens automatically. From this I derive another concept of time, time-as-motion. Just as we cannot imagine persistence without time so, also, we cannot imagine motion without a container in which it takes place. Mental motions, unlike physical, do not require space. To be sure, a purely materialistic viewpoint would deny this. The materialist derives mental actions from neural motions. But I’m personally persuaded that mental actions do not require space—but do require a time container. In physics we speak of a fusion of space and time, spacetime. It is the container. In the mental sphere, time alone suffices as a necessary environment for motion.
Our mental states—as we experience them in this life—are also fused with the physical. For this reason we experience time as spacetime. Now the thought occurred to me yesterday that the experience of time may be closely bound to the dimension we inhabit. Thus in this life, welded to bodies, we may experience time one way—but, possibly, outside of bodies, in another “mansion” of reality—say across the border that I stare at in this blog—it may be quite different.
The justification for this strange thought is that we measure time by motion here. Motion has a speed dimension. And, in this dimension, anyway—if we take Einstein seriously—there is a speed limit. It is the speed of light. Nothing with any kind of mass can travel even at the speed of light. A photon is considered to be a mass-less something. Now if time is measured by motion, in the cosmos we inhabit the passage of time (time-as-motion) is limited to the speed of light at one extreme.
But let us now suppose that other dimensions may very well exist—characterized by different existential laws than those of matter. And let us suppose, just as a thought experiment, that we may have originated in another dimension and are merely temporarily (that word again) encased in matter. Suppose that we are capable of another, higher or different, time perception. Not that it is readily available to us; let’s just assume that we have the capacity, under certain circumstances, to perceive it—and to have that power because we are not originally from this dimension. Most precognitions, for example, reach us in dreams, a state in which, to some extent, we are much more tenuously linked to the physical dimension than we are when awake.
Precognitions may arise from glimpses of this world from another. And from that perspective, which may operate at much higher speeds of change, we may see more of what is already firmly realized than is visible from this dimension while embedded in it.
I was remembering earlier sessions of thinking about the subject. Time and again, I start by dividing the concept of time into two categories. One of these is that time is the necessary complement of enduring existence, meaning that we can’t imagine anything being unless we envision a kind of invisible environment in which the persistence of something continues. From this comes my notion of time-as-endurance.
We know this time because our consciousness is capable of retaining memories of past moments. The power of remembering is itself something dynamic, however, something analogous to motion. The experience of this moment is stored away—picture it as being put on a shelf. And we can look at the shelf and note a past action, the action of putting the memory there. Never mind that it happens automatically. From this I derive another concept of time, time-as-motion. Just as we cannot imagine persistence without time so, also, we cannot imagine motion without a container in which it takes place. Mental motions, unlike physical, do not require space. To be sure, a purely materialistic viewpoint would deny this. The materialist derives mental actions from neural motions. But I’m personally persuaded that mental actions do not require space—but do require a time container. In physics we speak of a fusion of space and time, spacetime. It is the container. In the mental sphere, time alone suffices as a necessary environment for motion.
Our mental states—as we experience them in this life—are also fused with the physical. For this reason we experience time as spacetime. Now the thought occurred to me yesterday that the experience of time may be closely bound to the dimension we inhabit. Thus in this life, welded to bodies, we may experience time one way—but, possibly, outside of bodies, in another “mansion” of reality—say across the border that I stare at in this blog—it may be quite different.
The justification for this strange thought is that we measure time by motion here. Motion has a speed dimension. And, in this dimension, anyway—if we take Einstein seriously—there is a speed limit. It is the speed of light. Nothing with any kind of mass can travel even at the speed of light. A photon is considered to be a mass-less something. Now if time is measured by motion, in the cosmos we inhabit the passage of time (time-as-motion) is limited to the speed of light at one extreme.
But let us now suppose that other dimensions may very well exist—characterized by different existential laws than those of matter. And let us suppose, just as a thought experiment, that we may have originated in another dimension and are merely temporarily (that word again) encased in matter. Suppose that we are capable of another, higher or different, time perception. Not that it is readily available to us; let’s just assume that we have the capacity, under certain circumstances, to perceive it—and to have that power because we are not originally from this dimension. Most precognitions, for example, reach us in dreams, a state in which, to some extent, we are much more tenuously linked to the physical dimension than we are when awake.
Precognitions may arise from glimpses of this world from another. And from that perspective, which may operate at much higher speeds of change, we may see more of what is already firmly realized than is visible from this dimension while embedded in it.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Premonitions
Herewith a link to a straightforward story presented by National Public Radio of a young boy's premonition of his own death (hat tip to a member of my family). For those of us of a modern mind but curious and hardy enough to patrol the borders of this zone, nothing is more interesting than reports from our immediate time of what counts as empirical evidence of a wider sphere of reality than is officially countenanced.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
What Does "Higher Power" Mean?
One of the more interesting books around—especially for people who read such blogs as this one—is Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. The book is by Rupert Sheldrake and is subtitled “And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.” The amazon.com link to the paperback is here. I read the book in fascination. I consider Sheldrake to be one of our time’s most original thinkers about biology. He is also a creative experimenter and a genuine scientist. In certain narrow circles of scientific orthodoxy, to be sure, he is a heretic. But never mind them. What the book demonstrates is that dogs as well as other animals appear to have what for them—for us too, for that matter—are “higher powers.” Telepathic abilities are classed as paranormal at least. Animals also evidently have powers of orientation in the wild inexplicable by ordinary sensory capacities. They seem to have a kind of sight that, traditionally, we call “second sight.” Yes, they’re at home in border zones much as some people are. And, as with us as well, the talent isn’t uniformly present. Nor are these capacities limited to mammals; birds display such powers too.
I start here with animals to make a point. We have a reflexive way of assuming that higher powers, when they manifest, must come directly from God—and if not from God then still from some higher, conscious entity. I’ve pondered this matter for quite a long time and have another take on the matter. But let’s begin with some sorting.
* * *
By “higher powers” I mean phenomena like miraculous healing, ecstatic states, and prophetic visions. In these cases God does the healing, God manifests in the ecstatic states (or the mystic experiences union with God), and God sends the prophetic vision. To be sure, in all of these instances, the phenomenon itself transcends ordinary experience; it is therefore logical enough to use a word that signifies the Transcendent writ large as its cause. But when people speak of God this way, they have something more concrete in mind. They imagine an Agency, distinct and separate, acting deliberately in this specific case whereas, in all other cases, God acts in a more nebulous and indirect way. This must be what people mean. If God sends me a prophetic message but lets you read tea leaves, the only way to understand the distinction is that God intervenes in reality deliberately in some but not in other cases.
People don’t usually invoke divine action to explain telepathy. It is a paranormal power but mild in effect and common enough to be assigned to a lower agency, say to a “talent” or to a “gift.” But notice that even here, using the word “gift” suggests a divine dispensation given to some, not to others. By contrast, people rarely assign a run of bad luck to God. But why not? If in one case God rewards us for being good, in others he might punish us for our careless acts of stupidity. Finally, when in legalese we speak of an “act of God,” what we mean then is simply “accident”; the lawyers don’t intend to suggest that floods, lightning strikes, or tornadoes are literally acts of God.
I think I’ve outlined the issues sufficiently here to show that referring strange, unusual phenomena to God serves no rational or meaningfully explanatory purpose. I strongly lean toward the view that God cannot be pulled down to our level and assigned roles in our ordinary experience. Technically this is known as negative theology: man should not presume. Furthermore, the use of God as a mechanism of explanation amounts to little more than saying, “It happened because it happened.”
Let’s look at these phenomena from another perspective. Let’s look at miraculous healings. Healers are often involved. They often speak of a flow of energy or of a power that aids them—and they report feeling this whatever in themselves. The consequence, namely healing, is assigned to a “higher” power only because the healing is extraordinary. It is also highly desirable. We give the desirable a “high” value. But what exactly happens in a healing? Some kind of rearrangement of matter takes place. Cancerous cells are destroyed, their remains carried away as waste. Chronic chemical, hormonal balances are restored because the organs that produced or failed to produce them are realigned in proper ways. Something physical happens or no healing could possibly take place. This process requires two factors, it seems to me. One is some kind of knowledge about the right arrangements of the biochemistry and bone structure involved. The other is some kind of energy that removes obstructions and speeds up a process that, in ordinary healing, takes its own sweet time. Let’s examine these factors.
The knowledge may be present in the body already, but the body’s mechanisms may be too weak to implement the healing. In that case the healing stream overcomes weakness, energizes natural processes, possibly catalyzes reactions, and thus leads to rapid recovery of a status quo ante. An alternative possibility is that the healing current itself carries both knowledge and energy. That concept needs special parsing.
When we speak of “energy” in these cases, the justification for using the word is the reported experience both of healers and those who are healed. But the energy involved is not the sort we usually experience—thus mechanical pushes and pulls, gravitational attraction, electrical current, heat, or, more generally, radiation. The very reason why such healings are “miraculous” is because something very different is present. Or is it?
Here things become complicated because, ultimately, we don’t really understand what life really is. We think it is ordinary energy manifesting in material structures. But let us suppose that life itself is just as transcendent a phenomenon as the healing current itself. We don’t think so because we’re all too used to its normal manifestations. One possible explanation of miraculous healings is that they are a temporary intensification of life energy, something that always flows through our bodies but in a relatively thinned-out form. It may be possible to tap into it in such a manner that it flows much more abundantly, and when it does, it will manifest its ordering powers rapidly, setting this right where, in our body, it encounters disturbances in what should be the healthy pattern.
I began this post with a reference to Sheldrake. I’ll also end it on that note. Sheldrake’s theories of morphic fields suggest a way of thinking about miraculous cures along the lines I’ve just sketched in above. I’ll discuss that application of the morphic field theory in a future post and continue this outline then. For now, as the medievalists used to say, satis.
I start here with animals to make a point. We have a reflexive way of assuming that higher powers, when they manifest, must come directly from God—and if not from God then still from some higher, conscious entity. I’ve pondered this matter for quite a long time and have another take on the matter. But let’s begin with some sorting.
* * *
By “higher powers” I mean phenomena like miraculous healing, ecstatic states, and prophetic visions. In these cases God does the healing, God manifests in the ecstatic states (or the mystic experiences union with God), and God sends the prophetic vision. To be sure, in all of these instances, the phenomenon itself transcends ordinary experience; it is therefore logical enough to use a word that signifies the Transcendent writ large as its cause. But when people speak of God this way, they have something more concrete in mind. They imagine an Agency, distinct and separate, acting deliberately in this specific case whereas, in all other cases, God acts in a more nebulous and indirect way. This must be what people mean. If God sends me a prophetic message but lets you read tea leaves, the only way to understand the distinction is that God intervenes in reality deliberately in some but not in other cases.
People don’t usually invoke divine action to explain telepathy. It is a paranormal power but mild in effect and common enough to be assigned to a lower agency, say to a “talent” or to a “gift.” But notice that even here, using the word “gift” suggests a divine dispensation given to some, not to others. By contrast, people rarely assign a run of bad luck to God. But why not? If in one case God rewards us for being good, in others he might punish us for our careless acts of stupidity. Finally, when in legalese we speak of an “act of God,” what we mean then is simply “accident”; the lawyers don’t intend to suggest that floods, lightning strikes, or tornadoes are literally acts of God.
I think I’ve outlined the issues sufficiently here to show that referring strange, unusual phenomena to God serves no rational or meaningfully explanatory purpose. I strongly lean toward the view that God cannot be pulled down to our level and assigned roles in our ordinary experience. Technically this is known as negative theology: man should not presume. Furthermore, the use of God as a mechanism of explanation amounts to little more than saying, “It happened because it happened.”
* * *
Let’s look at these phenomena from another perspective. Let’s look at miraculous healings. Healers are often involved. They often speak of a flow of energy or of a power that aids them—and they report feeling this whatever in themselves. The consequence, namely healing, is assigned to a “higher” power only because the healing is extraordinary. It is also highly desirable. We give the desirable a “high” value. But what exactly happens in a healing? Some kind of rearrangement of matter takes place. Cancerous cells are destroyed, their remains carried away as waste. Chronic chemical, hormonal balances are restored because the organs that produced or failed to produce them are realigned in proper ways. Something physical happens or no healing could possibly take place. This process requires two factors, it seems to me. One is some kind of knowledge about the right arrangements of the biochemistry and bone structure involved. The other is some kind of energy that removes obstructions and speeds up a process that, in ordinary healing, takes its own sweet time. Let’s examine these factors.
The knowledge may be present in the body already, but the body’s mechanisms may be too weak to implement the healing. In that case the healing stream overcomes weakness, energizes natural processes, possibly catalyzes reactions, and thus leads to rapid recovery of a status quo ante. An alternative possibility is that the healing current itself carries both knowledge and energy. That concept needs special parsing.
When we speak of “energy” in these cases, the justification for using the word is the reported experience both of healers and those who are healed. But the energy involved is not the sort we usually experience—thus mechanical pushes and pulls, gravitational attraction, electrical current, heat, or, more generally, radiation. The very reason why such healings are “miraculous” is because something very different is present. Or is it?
Here things become complicated because, ultimately, we don’t really understand what life really is. We think it is ordinary energy manifesting in material structures. But let us suppose that life itself is just as transcendent a phenomenon as the healing current itself. We don’t think so because we’re all too used to its normal manifestations. One possible explanation of miraculous healings is that they are a temporary intensification of life energy, something that always flows through our bodies but in a relatively thinned-out form. It may be possible to tap into it in such a manner that it flows much more abundantly, and when it does, it will manifest its ordering powers rapidly, setting this right where, in our body, it encounters disturbances in what should be the healthy pattern.
* * *
I began this post with a reference to Sheldrake. I’ll also end it on that note. Sheldrake’s theories of morphic fields suggest a way of thinking about miraculous cures along the lines I’ve just sketched in above. I’ll discuss that application of the morphic field theory in a future post and continue this outline then. For now, as the medievalists used to say, satis.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Time Concept Goes Wobbly
Time is like a fortress, unassailable, impregnable—until the experience of precognition makes the concept go wobbly. This is no problem for those who dogmatically deny that precognition is possible. But if it has happened to them (it has for me), they have problems denying it. Precognition is also the only paranormal phenomenon that resists explanation by the ever-handy super-psi explanation (discussed here); thus it’s difficult to explain away.
It’s easy to see why. We feel time as a moving front and therefore do not feel that the future exists, now, in any sense. The raw material of future events is already here, enduring along, as it were, but events are waiting for causation in that nebulous land of potential. Time is thus a necessary part of causation because cause-effect relationships are sequential. Therefore no one can pick up precise, complexly-related features of the future from presently existing minds—by telepathy, for instance—no matter how advanced the telepathic power might be. For this reason I’ve thought for quite a while now that precognition is a genuine hard pointer to some kind of transcendental reality. The really good cases totally resist explanation by naturalistic assumptions. In Einstein’s universe, by way of contrast, time is a function of space and space a function of time. You don’t get one without the other. Can we even think a future space?
Good (believable) cases of precognition therefore force us to question either our own understanding of time or our concept of free will. Let’s take the latter and see where it leads.
If we jettison free will, we are able at least to hypothesize that past, present, and future coexist. If that is true, the future is already present, we just don’t see it. Everything is fixed because everything happens deterministically—and therefore must be. No choice, no alternatives. The future then is totally predictable because it is produced deterministically. J.W. Dunne, one oft-cited thinker about this subject, suggested in the early editions of his An Experiment with Time that if we could move ourselves into the next dimension over, into a time above our time, we would be able to see our lives as a whole, from beginning to end, much as, from a high hill, we can see a whole train progressing east to west, say, on the plain below. Dunne believed in a serial time, a layered time. I came to realize that Dunne mustn’t have thought his example all the way through. Foolishly, perhaps, I did.
Yes. I made a real effort to picture the situation that Dunne described. And I realized that I wouldn’t see a body. I would see a very strange snake formed of endlessly many instances of my body. Let me explain. Take tonight. I would see myself as I was an hour ago (watching TV), as I am now (at the computer), as I will be in an hour (lying in bed). But I would also see my body rising from the chair, moving up the stairs, would see myself slightly advanced at every second, but still connected to the earlier versions, one for each of my slightest movements, each of which would still be there. I’d be a continuous snake. Indeed, the whole house would be filled with my body—up near the ceiling too, because once I painted the ceilings. This giant snake would grow smaller as I moved ever farther into the past and ultimately I would see myself emerging from my mother’s body. — Or, to change the example, the earth wouldn’t appear as a globe but, rather, as a solid ring of many, many earths, all overlaid, forming a ring around the sun. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be able to see anything because the light of the sun would still be there, the photons would also be present at every instant of time, and the brilliance would hide everything.
As you can see, “collapsing time” so that past, present, and future coexist produces some fairly serious problems in seeing anything—or anything clearly. Everything is jam-packed into a solid mass of bodies. Because I don’t live in this house alone—and every visitor is still here too—as are the bodies of the men who built it, the birds that flew through this space before there was a house, and the trees that grew here once are still here too. But I’ve said enough to make the point. The past remaining as it was, the future as it will be—so that it can be seen, if only we changed our perspective—is not a very plausible hypothesis. So I abandon it—and get my free will back as a reward.
But if the future is not already present, how can anyone perceive any piece of it in a precognitive dream? Not by attempting, as Dunne attempted, to finesse the situation by spatializing time. I’d like to be able to deny that precognition is possible at all—but as I’ve shown in an earlier post, I’ve experienced it, and you can’t doubt your own experience. So I punt, seeing especially that it’s nearly midnight. Alas. There are more things out there, beyond the border, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…
It’s easy to see why. We feel time as a moving front and therefore do not feel that the future exists, now, in any sense. The raw material of future events is already here, enduring along, as it were, but events are waiting for causation in that nebulous land of potential. Time is thus a necessary part of causation because cause-effect relationships are sequential. Therefore no one can pick up precise, complexly-related features of the future from presently existing minds—by telepathy, for instance—no matter how advanced the telepathic power might be. For this reason I’ve thought for quite a while now that precognition is a genuine hard pointer to some kind of transcendental reality. The really good cases totally resist explanation by naturalistic assumptions. In Einstein’s universe, by way of contrast, time is a function of space and space a function of time. You don’t get one without the other. Can we even think a future space?
Good (believable) cases of precognition therefore force us to question either our own understanding of time or our concept of free will. Let’s take the latter and see where it leads.
If we jettison free will, we are able at least to hypothesize that past, present, and future coexist. If that is true, the future is already present, we just don’t see it. Everything is fixed because everything happens deterministically—and therefore must be. No choice, no alternatives. The future then is totally predictable because it is produced deterministically. J.W. Dunne, one oft-cited thinker about this subject, suggested in the early editions of his An Experiment with Time that if we could move ourselves into the next dimension over, into a time above our time, we would be able to see our lives as a whole, from beginning to end, much as, from a high hill, we can see a whole train progressing east to west, say, on the plain below. Dunne believed in a serial time, a layered time. I came to realize that Dunne mustn’t have thought his example all the way through. Foolishly, perhaps, I did.
Yes. I made a real effort to picture the situation that Dunne described. And I realized that I wouldn’t see a body. I would see a very strange snake formed of endlessly many instances of my body. Let me explain. Take tonight. I would see myself as I was an hour ago (watching TV), as I am now (at the computer), as I will be in an hour (lying in bed). But I would also see my body rising from the chair, moving up the stairs, would see myself slightly advanced at every second, but still connected to the earlier versions, one for each of my slightest movements, each of which would still be there. I’d be a continuous snake. Indeed, the whole house would be filled with my body—up near the ceiling too, because once I painted the ceilings. This giant snake would grow smaller as I moved ever farther into the past and ultimately I would see myself emerging from my mother’s body. — Or, to change the example, the earth wouldn’t appear as a globe but, rather, as a solid ring of many, many earths, all overlaid, forming a ring around the sun. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be able to see anything because the light of the sun would still be there, the photons would also be present at every instant of time, and the brilliance would hide everything.
As you can see, “collapsing time” so that past, present, and future coexist produces some fairly serious problems in seeing anything—or anything clearly. Everything is jam-packed into a solid mass of bodies. Because I don’t live in this house alone—and every visitor is still here too—as are the bodies of the men who built it, the birds that flew through this space before there was a house, and the trees that grew here once are still here too. But I’ve said enough to make the point. The past remaining as it was, the future as it will be—so that it can be seen, if only we changed our perspective—is not a very plausible hypothesis. So I abandon it—and get my free will back as a reward.
But if the future is not already present, how can anyone perceive any piece of it in a precognitive dream? Not by attempting, as Dunne attempted, to finesse the situation by spatializing time. I’d like to be able to deny that precognition is possible at all—but as I’ve shown in an earlier post, I’ve experienced it, and you can’t doubt your own experience. So I punt, seeing especially that it’s nearly midnight. Alas. There are more things out there, beyond the border, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Dreams: Winding Down
In that most dreams appear to be produced by autonomous activities of our brain—as it drifts off or becomes more active again—dreamland seems to be a much less promising route into the border zone than, say, paranormal phenomena or, in general, more conscious experience.
The exception here appears to be the precognitive dream—until you realize that the subject is a cul-de-sac. At best such dreams set down a marker. The marker itself is useful—but limited. It says: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Yes. But you can’t get at them. Attempts to do so produce monstrosities. J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time serves as an illustration; so does P.D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum. People like me will wander off into these thickets just to see what they might hold; but what such excursions usually reveal are the temperamental leanings of their authors. In these cases my own intuition rears up in protest. Dunne spatializes time so that he can do his engineering with neat graphs. Ouspensky imagines a kind of infinite universe, not unlike that produced by the many-worlds theory; every possible choice already preexists within a vast multi-dimensional matrix. So does every choice that derives from that one. And all others from each of the siblings. Ad infinitum. Our actual lives thus become a tracing out of one possible path among trillions. Both J.W. and P.D. produce instances of a kind of violence: they force something clearly transcendent into the narrow confines of our realm. No. Precognition is a marker. It says: There is more. But you stop here.
Carl Jung took another tack. He thought he had discovered a vast Collective Unconscious (CU) that, paradoxically, is the reality behind consciousness. The very logic of this reveals its New Age flavoring, its “emergent” sort of character, its evolutionary creation ex nihilo. In Jung’s lexicon, indeed, consciousness is somewhat inferior in character to the Unconscious which latter, in his hands, looks more and more god-like, if, to be sure a pagan god of nature.
Jung viewed dreams as ways of exploring that nebulous realm—and that nebulous realm as spewing out content, almost like lava. The problem, it seems to me, is that waking consciousness, if rendered into symbols but detached from its concrete objects—those that in our waking states render the world objective and real—that consciousness, thus uprooted, becomes a vast Rorschach blot onto which one can project, and from which one can obtain, anything one pleases. Jung used the CU in that way constantly. It became a deus ex machina for him. But there is no independent fixed point of reference from which to judge it, no court of appeals before which the CU’s strange judgments may be presented for resolution.
In summary, then, dreams appear to be, with exceptions, a form of inferior mental activity. Their magical character comes from two sources: their spontaneity on the one hand and their symbolical presentation on the other. The latter really means picture language. The magic that we project into the dream actually comes from the conscious mind and its own pleasurable marvel or its terrors. The dream itself just twirls its magical show without awareness.
The exceptions prove the rule. Significant dreams strongly suggest something transcendental, either the action of an agency (clear meaning) or of an environment beyond our grasp (time distortions). Neither kind of exceptional dream, however, lends itself to any kind of empirical explanation. They require speculative approaches.
The exception here appears to be the precognitive dream—until you realize that the subject is a cul-de-sac. At best such dreams set down a marker. The marker itself is useful—but limited. It says: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Yes. But you can’t get at them. Attempts to do so produce monstrosities. J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time serves as an illustration; so does P.D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum. People like me will wander off into these thickets just to see what they might hold; but what such excursions usually reveal are the temperamental leanings of their authors. In these cases my own intuition rears up in protest. Dunne spatializes time so that he can do his engineering with neat graphs. Ouspensky imagines a kind of infinite universe, not unlike that produced by the many-worlds theory; every possible choice already preexists within a vast multi-dimensional matrix. So does every choice that derives from that one. And all others from each of the siblings. Ad infinitum. Our actual lives thus become a tracing out of one possible path among trillions. Both J.W. and P.D. produce instances of a kind of violence: they force something clearly transcendent into the narrow confines of our realm. No. Precognition is a marker. It says: There is more. But you stop here.
Carl Jung took another tack. He thought he had discovered a vast Collective Unconscious (CU) that, paradoxically, is the reality behind consciousness. The very logic of this reveals its New Age flavoring, its “emergent” sort of character, its evolutionary creation ex nihilo. In Jung’s lexicon, indeed, consciousness is somewhat inferior in character to the Unconscious which latter, in his hands, looks more and more god-like, if, to be sure a pagan god of nature.
Jung viewed dreams as ways of exploring that nebulous realm—and that nebulous realm as spewing out content, almost like lava. The problem, it seems to me, is that waking consciousness, if rendered into symbols but detached from its concrete objects—those that in our waking states render the world objective and real—that consciousness, thus uprooted, becomes a vast Rorschach blot onto which one can project, and from which one can obtain, anything one pleases. Jung used the CU in that way constantly. It became a deus ex machina for him. But there is no independent fixed point of reference from which to judge it, no court of appeals before which the CU’s strange judgments may be presented for resolution.
In summary, then, dreams appear to be, with exceptions, a form of inferior mental activity. Their magical character comes from two sources: their spontaneity on the one hand and their symbolical presentation on the other. The latter really means picture language. The magic that we project into the dream actually comes from the conscious mind and its own pleasurable marvel or its terrors. The dream itself just twirls its magical show without awareness.
The exceptions prove the rule. Significant dreams strongly suggest something transcendental, either the action of an agency (clear meaning) or of an environment beyond our grasp (time distortions). Neither kind of exceptional dream, however, lends itself to any kind of empirical explanation. They require speculative approaches.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Precognitive Dreams
I had one unambiguous dream of the very near future, an event that came to pass two or three days after my dream of it. The matter was rather ordinary in a way, and the only reason I became aware of the dream, and able to check that it had come true, was because, at that time, I’d just read J.W. Dunne’s book, An Experiment with Time. Dunne, who published this work in 1947, is probably the best-known expositor of precognitive dreaming. Having read the book, I set myself the task of recording dreams when I remembered them on waking. I wanted to test Dunne’s assertion that most everybody occasionally dreams the future. But just because the future is pretty much like the past, we don’t notice the fact. Record your dreams, Dunne had urged. Compare them to later events. You’ll convince yourself. I took up the challenge. This was in the early 1960s. I had my proof within about a week. As soon as I did I stopped my experiment because recording dreams was tedious. The intention to do so kept waking me up.
The dream itself developed as follows. I dreamt that I was in my office with my door closed so that I could concentrate on writing a final report on what had been a long and painful research project for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. My office happened to be next to the conference room. As I was laboring at my typewriter, this is still in the dream, noises penetrated through the wall and gave me the impression that people were arguing. After a while the argument ceased. Someone then knocked on my door. I rose and opened it. Outside stood the head of our Washington office. He was in the company of a tall black and rather distinguished-looking gentleman. With that the dream ended.
I noted this dream and went back to sleep. I promptly forgot it again—until, some days later, I actually lived the actuality. Events in reality developed almost exactly the same way. The only difference was that, instead of an argument next door, I heard muffled conversation and the persistent clicking of chalk on the blackboard. The noise disturbed my concentration enough so that I grew quite incensed. And, yes. My door was closed. Then the dream-event actually happened. A knock sounded on the door, I opened it. The head of our office stood there with a tall, black gentlemen. He wanted to introduce me to his visitor. The man was the president of the National Bar Association, then a body of black lawyers. The American Bar Association, at that time, had only white members. This was the 1960s, after all. The gentleman was the only black person I ever remember seeing in that office as a visitor in the course of the year I then spent in Washington, D.C.; thus it was an unusual and memorable event. After a few words of conversation, my chief took the gentleman to lunch. I sort of staggered back to my chair, sat down and shook my head: I’d actually dreamt the future. The dream had come rushing back the moment I’d opened the door. And my notes, still there at home, confirmed it with a date.
As Dunne pointed out, precognitive dreams are still dreams; they use symbolical representations of future events. They’re not always as boringly literal as my dream had been. Brigitte had a precognitive dream of Kennedy’s assassination two days before it happened. We lived in a second-storey apartment at the time. She dreamt that she was upstairs looking down at the street below. I came driving by in a convertible. We didn’t own a convertible then; we drove a VW beetle. Then she heard a shot and saw, in horror, that my head was rolling on the pavement down below… In her dream-vocabulary, the President was symbolized by a stand-in, someone who had the role of “head of household” in her own immediate life.
The literature on precognitive dreaming is extensive, some of it recent. Nine-eleven produced a rash of these that some people have collected and made available on the Internet. Mere laziness prevents me from giving links here. But they’re available. Great public events always seem to ease such dreams out of hiding; people recognize, from the news of the events, that they’d actually dreamt them. Thus there were also people who dreamt of the Titanic’s sinking before it actually took place. Denial of this sort of thing is literally impossible if they happen to you or to immediate members of your family. This then lends credence to more distant reports because we are sensible and rational in knowing what we know. Here I refer back to an earlier entry on epistemology.
Precognitive dreams, therefore, represent a dimension of dreaming which goes far, far beyond the more ordinary explanation, which I’ve presented already, namely that dreams are (and most certainly are) the automatic presentation of memories by the awakening brain. What precognitive dreams indicate, at minimum, is that our conceptualizations of time and space, however useful they are in everyday life, do not exhaust the possibilities available to a transcendent function that I call consciousness or mind.
The dream itself developed as follows. I dreamt that I was in my office with my door closed so that I could concentrate on writing a final report on what had been a long and painful research project for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. My office happened to be next to the conference room. As I was laboring at my typewriter, this is still in the dream, noises penetrated through the wall and gave me the impression that people were arguing. After a while the argument ceased. Someone then knocked on my door. I rose and opened it. Outside stood the head of our Washington office. He was in the company of a tall black and rather distinguished-looking gentleman. With that the dream ended.
I noted this dream and went back to sleep. I promptly forgot it again—until, some days later, I actually lived the actuality. Events in reality developed almost exactly the same way. The only difference was that, instead of an argument next door, I heard muffled conversation and the persistent clicking of chalk on the blackboard. The noise disturbed my concentration enough so that I grew quite incensed. And, yes. My door was closed. Then the dream-event actually happened. A knock sounded on the door, I opened it. The head of our office stood there with a tall, black gentlemen. He wanted to introduce me to his visitor. The man was the president of the National Bar Association, then a body of black lawyers. The American Bar Association, at that time, had only white members. This was the 1960s, after all. The gentleman was the only black person I ever remember seeing in that office as a visitor in the course of the year I then spent in Washington, D.C.; thus it was an unusual and memorable event. After a few words of conversation, my chief took the gentleman to lunch. I sort of staggered back to my chair, sat down and shook my head: I’d actually dreamt the future. The dream had come rushing back the moment I’d opened the door. And my notes, still there at home, confirmed it with a date.
As Dunne pointed out, precognitive dreams are still dreams; they use symbolical representations of future events. They’re not always as boringly literal as my dream had been. Brigitte had a precognitive dream of Kennedy’s assassination two days before it happened. We lived in a second-storey apartment at the time. She dreamt that she was upstairs looking down at the street below. I came driving by in a convertible. We didn’t own a convertible then; we drove a VW beetle. Then she heard a shot and saw, in horror, that my head was rolling on the pavement down below… In her dream-vocabulary, the President was symbolized by a stand-in, someone who had the role of “head of household” in her own immediate life.
The literature on precognitive dreaming is extensive, some of it recent. Nine-eleven produced a rash of these that some people have collected and made available on the Internet. Mere laziness prevents me from giving links here. But they’re available. Great public events always seem to ease such dreams out of hiding; people recognize, from the news of the events, that they’d actually dreamt them. Thus there were also people who dreamt of the Titanic’s sinking before it actually took place. Denial of this sort of thing is literally impossible if they happen to you or to immediate members of your family. This then lends credence to more distant reports because we are sensible and rational in knowing what we know. Here I refer back to an earlier entry on epistemology.
Precognitive dreams, therefore, represent a dimension of dreaming which goes far, far beyond the more ordinary explanation, which I’ve presented already, namely that dreams are (and most certainly are) the automatic presentation of memories by the awakening brain. What precognitive dreams indicate, at minimum, is that our conceptualizations of time and space, however useful they are in everyday life, do not exhaust the possibilities available to a transcendent function that I call consciousness or mind.
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