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.

Notes on Paquette's Dreamer

A fascinating book, by Andrew Paquette, titled Dreamer (O Books, 2011). All through the years I’ve complained about the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg saying that it is all analysis, not enough raw material. Well, here we have a case of all raw material, not enough analysis. Paquette is a gifted psychic, by profession an artist—commercial, fine, etc. Mostly in dream-scapes, he reports on experiences that range far beyond the borderzone. He discovered his talents by dreaming the future, rather dramatically, while working in the Netherlands. He dreamt of a hold-up in which he was killed, shot, died, and rushed back to New York as a spirit to his then girl friend, later wife, to tell her of his misfortune—still in his dream. And then woke up—still in the Netherlands and very much alive. Some time later the event actually took place, but, in the midst of it, remembering the dream with great shock as, again, two men, in the same locale, actually took hold of him,  he managed to escape his assailants.

Here we have a classical dilemma. He dreamt the future with one outcome. It happened, and identically, more or less, in real life—but only up to a point. Then the recall of the dream itself served as the cause of his action to escape the consequences. So how do we explain what appears to be a contradiction. The future is visible, hence apparently fixed. But the future is changeable, hence subject to action arising from knowledge and will.

In a much more minor way, I’ve been concerned with dreams, including the precognitive kind, for more years (I think) than Paquette has lived. My own powers are drastically muted compared with his, but I’m open enough to recognize the same objective reality over there that he reports. Multiple posts on this blog deal with some of my observations.

Thus far I haven’t penetrated very far into this modest but rich book (less than 300 pages). I may have additional notes on Dreamer as time goes on.

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…

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.