Precognition Quotes

Would you like to know your future? If your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator. So enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence -- a surprise.

We all have an inner voice, our personal whisper from the universe. All we have to do is listen -- feel and sense it with an open heart. Sometimes it whispers of intuition or precognition. Other times, it whispers an awareness, a remembrance from another plane. Dare to listen. Dare to hear with your heart.

I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.

What does this wildish intuition do for women? Like the wolf, intuition has claws that pry things open and pin things down, it has eyes that can through the shields of persona, it has ears that hear beyond the range of mundane human hearing. With these formidable psychic tools a woman takes on a shrewd and even precognitive animal consciousness, one that deepens her femininity and sharpens her ability to move confidently in the outer world.

PRECOGNITION, TELEPATHY, BULLSHIT! EAT MY DONG, YOU EXTRASENSORY TURKEY!

Why procrastinate when you can precognitate?

Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitch-hiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counsellor for neurotic elevators.

Intuition goes before you, showing you the way. Emotion follows behind, to let you know when you go astray. Listen to your inner voice. It is the calling of your spiritual GPS system seeking to keep you on track towards your true destiny.

I just had a precognition, she told Anna silently,a stream of unspoken love and joy. You will be very happy. Your best friend says go for it. Annas face was bright, as if someone had set a candle behind it. You're giving me permission? I'm giving you an order!

I remember being unusually pensive that May evening, perhaps it was the heat of Spring's first warm day which, encountering my thick winter blood, forced a dilution upward into a brain weary of straining the last six months to overcome freezing and the long absent thinning of blood stirred a weakening desire for the softer things, a nostalgia, yet a death, a precognition, if you will...

Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. (“Death Ship”)

I think it’s relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn’t cost them anything. It doesn’t keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is more unsettling.

A voice on the other end squealed and said distinctly, "Kee-kee!" "Yeah, it's Kee-kee," Keller said, startled. "Um, I'm glad you're okay, kid. And, see, I didn't go bye-bye after all. So you may think you're pretty smart, but you still have something to learn about precognition, hotshot. Right?" Keller added, "You know I thought for a minute once that you might be the Wild Power. But I guess you're just a good old-fashioned witch baby." Iliana, who was passing by, gave her a very strange look. "Keller, are you having a conversation with my baby brother?

[The Void Which Binds] actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.

If she's really psychic," Zack said when he saw Tanisha's photo at school, "why does she need a doorbell?

Clay snorted. “Special powers like what?” he’d asked. “You know,” Starflight had answered, irritated. “Telepathy? Precognition? Invisibility? Hello?” “You don’t have invisibility,” Clay had argued. “I mean, you’re a black dragon. You’re just hard to see in the shadows. That’s not a power. I’d be invisible, too, if I were lying in a mud puddle.” “Yeah, well,” Starflight had said, “we can appear out of nowhere in the dark of night! Swooping down as if the sky has just fallen on you!” He’d spread his wings majestically. “Still not a power,” Clay had said. “That’s just you guys being creepy.” “It is not creepy!” Starflight had cried, his voice rising. “It is magnificent and imposing!

Can one come 2 conclusions, Before the question is conceived?

In my own case, I employed this experiment mainly in order to seek for the barrier, if any, which divides our knowledge of the past from our knowledge of the future. And the odd thing was that there did not seem to be any such barrier at all.

Sometimes you just know what you're doing is the only thing to be doing. That the world is conspiring all around you to make it happen, like, not just giving you permission, but herding you the direction you need to go, giving you secret nods and obvious hand signals, and getting everything out of the way so you have the clearest path possible.

Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life, I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions. Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.

We don’t have clairvoyance or precognition. At least, I don’t. Does anyone else?” “I don’t even know what those mean,” Jordana said. “Telepathy is when you can hear other people’s thoughts. Clairvoyance is when you are aware of something happening in another location. Precognition is when you can tell the future. And then there’s telekinesis, which is when you can move objects with your mind.” “No, I’m just having the first one,” Tess said.

If your enemy has the power to see into the future, make sure you are the author of that future.

What you got, son, I call it shinin on, the Bible calls it having visions, and there’s scientists that call it precognition. I’ve read up on it, son. I’ve studied on it. They all mean seeing the future.

I've never been in a single accident - basic precognition takes care of that - and the cops all know my car well enough to leave me alone when I'm bending the laws of physics and traffic to get somewhere.

If prevision be a fact, it is a fact which destroys absolutely the entire basis of all our past opinions of the universe.

No, there was nothing unusual in any of these dreams as dreams. They were merely displaced in Time.

it’s quite common for the Old Soul to experience what many people would refer to as “new age phenomena.” These vast and varied experiences range from sensations as commonplace as experiencing vivid and repeated déjà vu to other sensations as complex as precognition – the foreseeing of an event or series of events in a dream which later transpire in real life.

I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is more unsettling.

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.

The systems we will be exploring in order are: ● Breeding Targets: Arousal patterns tied to systems meant to get our ancestors to have sex with things that might bear offspring (e.g., arousal from things like penises, the female form, etc.). ● Inverse Systems: Arousal patterns that arise from a neural mix-up, causing something that disgusts the majority of the population to arouse a small portion of it (e.g., arousal from things like being farted on, dead bodies, having insects poured on one’s face, etc.). ● Emotional States and Concepts / Dominance and Submission: Arousal patterns that stem from either emotional concepts (such as betrayal, transformation, being eaten, etc.) or dominance and submission pathways. ● Emotional Connections to People: While emotional connections do not cause arousal in and of themselves, they do lower the threshold for arousal (i.e., you may become more aroused by a moderately attractive person you love than a very attractive stranger). ● Trope Attraction: Arousal patterns that are enhanced through a target’s adherence to a specific trope (a nurse, a goth person, a cheerleader, etc.). ● Novelty: Arousal patterns tied to the novelty of a particular stimulus. ● Pain and Asphyxiation: Arousal patterns associated with or enhanced by pain and oxygen deprivation. ● Basic Instincts: Remnants of our pre-cognitive mating instincts running off of a “deeper” autopilot-like neurological system (dry humping, etc.) that compel mating behavior without necessarily generating a traditional feeling of arousal. ● Physical Stimuli: Arousal patterns derived from physical interaction (kissing, touching an erogenous zone, etc.). ● Conditioned Responses: Arousal patterns resulting from conditioning (arousal from shoes, doorknobs, etc.).

I can confirm by a modern dream the element of prognosis (or precognition) that can be found in an old dream quoted by Artemidorus of Daldis, in the second century A.D.: A man dreamed that he saw his father die in the flames of a house on fire. Not long afterward, he himself died in a phlegmone (fire, or high fever), which I presume was pneumonia.

I had lost my connection with the universal energy and gained in its place precognition, visions, and a healing gift I could not control.

Chaotic Of Echoes The Lands Darkest Hours Of Lions Architect the Garlots of War The Precognitions

There is no precognition - there is only cognition.

Maybe I'm getting precognitive in my old age.

Thus, dreams may sometimes announce certain situations long before they actually happen. This is not necessarily a miracle or a form of precognition. Many crises in our lives have a long unconscious history.

The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year’s price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life.

an indigo empath? Here are some of the most common signs: ● Highly sensitive and intuitive ● Possess extrasensory gifts like clairvoyance and precognition ● Strong-willed ● Gets bored easily ● Freethinking and questions rules and authority that are outdated ● Tremendous desire to be of help to humanity ● Empathetic and compassionate ● Highly intelligent ● Free-spirited and find it hard to fit into “normal” society ● Visionary ● Interest in protecting, healing, nurturing, and advocating for other living beings such as the earth, animals, minorities, etc. ● Very perceptive and insightful about the human condition ● Feel like they have a major life purpose Indigo empaths are also old souls who tend to display surprising maturity and wisdom for their age.

I was suffering, seemingly, from some extraordinary fault in my relation to reality, something so uniquely wrong that it compelled me to perceive, at rare intervals, large blocks of otherwise perfectly normal personal experience displaced from their proper positions in Time.

Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a single spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before. In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences—red spot, green spot—smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation before the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book Consciousness Explained , philosopher Daniel Dennett points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot?

But what is this clock, marking only so many years, that such men seem to consult in the dark of their being? We do not know. All we do know for certain is that no such clock, no such warnings, can come out of the passing time that we are told is all we have. They belong to a larger idea of Time, like all these dreams that came true.

You’ve heard the woodsman’s advice, don’t get between a bear and her cubs? Well, don’t get between a modern, science-literate person and their beliefs about causality.

The brain may well turn out to be an organ that extracts meaning from an otherwise noisy, but constant, informational reflux from the Not Yet.

I gasp as all the pieces click in one overwhelming heartbeat. The reinforcements. Telling me to guard Dunne’s temple. Yanking Lynx out of the way before the doors even opened to the great hall. He knew. He’s been manifesting this entire time. “He’s a fucking precog,” I whisper in awe. A real one—not like Melgren, who can only foresee battles. If Aaric wields true precognition, he saw this,

We may be on the verge of a massive shift in how we view time, causality, and information. Classical causality, the one-thing-after-another billiard-ball world of Isaac Newton and his Enlightenment friends, is being revealed as folk causality, a cultural construct and a belief system, not the way things really are.

In a representative statement from 1963, he claimed, “Man does not know most of the rules on which he acts; and even what we call his intelligence is largely a system of rules which operate on him but which he does not know.”60 This deference to the precognitive or the pre-rational is what separated him from the rational choice and rational expectations models of Chicago School economists, who professed much more faith in the possibility of both formal mathematical modeling and forecasting. As he explained in his Nobel speech, Hayek saw such efforts as not only presumptuous but misleading. The best one could hope for was pattern prediction.

Faster than light space travel to distant galaxies has been proven impossible. The existence of other planets or alien races, therefore, remains mere conjecture as these cannot be reached or contacted. Miraculous machines that let you travel backward or forward in time are impossible – an unsolvable paradox. Teleportation, precognition, telekinesis, and all versions of extrasensory perception have all been scientifically disproven. Technological and medical advancements have allowed people to live longer and better but there is no sufficiently advanced technology that has freed mankind from tedious labor, eventual suffering, or death. Most inhabitants of the developed world go to work every morning, where they sit for several hours in front of blinking screens, and then return home to sit in front of other, bigger screens.

J.W. Dunne was a distinguished man of science and professor of mathematics. [...] He embarked upon a lifetime study of precognition. In 1927 he published his basic conclusions in his bestselling book An Experiment with Time. [...] He argued that if time was a fourth dimension then the passage of time must itself take time. If therefore time takes time there must be a time outside of time. He called this "time 2". [...] Most of our life we live in "time 1", which is synonymous with the passing ordinary moments of everyday life. But during sleep a part of our personality (observer 2) can slip into this other dimension of time and experience events in the future which are communicated to our ordinary self (observer 1). Investigations led Dunne to conclude that under certain circumstances past, present and future events were accessible to consciousness and that during dreams we can enter this fourth dimension of space-time.

In fact, there did not seem to be any limit to what Grof's LSD subjects could tap into. They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and even plant, on the tree of evolution. They could experience what it was like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun, the consciousness of the entire planet, and even the consciousness of the entire cosmos. More than that, they displayed the ability to transcend space and time, and occasionally they related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences during their cerebral travels, discarnate beings, spirit guides from "higher planes of consciousness, " and other suprahuman entities. On occasion subjects also traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality. In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple's name, street address, and telephone number. The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man's problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. "After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues' jokes, had they found out, " says Grof. "I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: 'Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.

The anti-precog has to be present when the precog is in the process of deciding, not after. The anti-precog makes all futures seem equally real to the precog; he aborts his talent to choose at all. A precog is instantly aware when an anti-precog is nearby because his entire relation to the future is altered. In the case of telepaths a similar impairment—” “She goes back in time,” G. G. Ashwood said. Joe stared at him. “Back in time,” G.G. repeated, savoring this; his eyes shot shafts of significance to every part of Joe Chip’s kitchen. “The precog affected by her still sees one predominant future; like you said, the one luminous possibility. And he chooses it, and he’s right. But why is it right? Why is it luminous? Because this girl—” He shrugged in her direction. “Pat controls the future; that one luminous possibility is luminous because she’s gone into the past and changed it. By changing it she changes the present, which includes the precog; he’s affected without knowing it and his talent seems to work, whereas it really doesn’t. So that’s one advantage of her anti-talent over other anti-precog talents. The other—and greater—is that she can cancel out the precog’s decision after he’s made it.

The importance of Jung’s discovery bears considering. Since the seventeenth century, we’ve been taught that what is “in our heads” is only “subjective,” that we are all island universes, separate worlds, and that everything in those worlds has been furnished with material taken from outside, from the senses, as if our minds began as empty rooms, waiting for the mental equivalent of a trip to Ikea. Yet anyone, like myself, who has had precognitive dreams or experienced synchronicities or telepathy or other “paranormal” phenomena knows this isn’t quite true. Jung knew this and is saying that there are things in our heads that have nothing to do with us or our senses. In his book Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley made the same point. “Like the earth of a hundred years ago,” Huxley wrote, “our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins.” And while the creatures that inhabit these “far continents” of the mind seem “improbable,” they are nevertheless “facts of observation,” which argues for their “complete autonomy” and “self-sufficiency.”18 Huxley borrowed the title of his book from another extraordinary inner explorer, the Swedish sage Emanuel Swedenborg, who was a powerful influence on Jung, and who, like Jung, was a practiced hypnagogist and developed a method of entering similar inner worlds.

At its utter utmost, depression is the intimate concretion of the remotest abstraction from my body: being nowhere while protruding into the world. My psyche is in limbo, while my body is incessant. The body is a property of the psyche, not the reverse. Accordingly, the abstraction from my body is no longer an aberration. It is newly intuitive. I can distinguish bodily recognition and psychic precognition. In limbo, bodiless, I’m a free being. Sleep is one way into limbo. But the lucidity of awakening from limbo is convulsive. I become anxious, desperate. Then, after breathing deeply, I calm and feel fine. The only hard times are the moments of transfer between pure psyche and hybrid body.

It is now well established that one can reliably evoke several distinct emotional patterns in all mammals during electrical stimulation of homologous subcortical regions. Typically, animals either like or dislike the stimulation, as can be inferred from such behavioral criteria as conditioned approach and avoidance. If the electrodes are not placed in the right locations, no emotional behaviors are observed. For instance, most of the neocortex is free of such effects. Even though cortical processes such as thoughts and perceptions (i.e., appraisals) can obviously instigate various emotions, to the best of our knowledge, the affective essence of emotionality is subcortically and precognitively organized.

precognitive is taken to mean that these systems have an internal organization so that they could, in principle, generate emotional feelings with no direct input from either unconditioned or learned environmental inputs. For instance, a ill-placed tumor could generate a chronic state of emotional arousal, even though the underlying neural system is designed to be normally governed by external inputs.

In addition, participants were entirely unaware that their performance was being affected by their own future perceptions, suggesting that unconscious nervous system activity may be used to detect precognitive perceptions. Studies relying on unconscious responses may be more effective than those relying on conscious responses by bypassing psychological defense mechanisms that may filter out psi perceptions from ordinary awareness.8 Future Feelings In a recent series of experiments conducted in our laboratory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, we’ve explored unconscious nervous system responses to future events. Strictly speaking, such responses are a subset of precognition known as “presentiment,” a vague sense or feeling of something about to occur but without any conscious awareness of a particular event.9 The unconscious responses studied in our experiments took advantage of a well-known psychophysical reflex known as the “orienting response,” first described by Pavlov in the 1920s. The orienting response is a set of physiological changes experienced by an organism when it faces a “fight or flight” situation. For human beings, the response also appears in less dangerous contexts, such as when confronting a novel or unexpected stimulus. The classical orienting response is a series of simultaneous bodily changes that include dilation of the pupil, altered brain waves, a rise in sweat gland activity, a rise/fall pattern in heart rate, and blanching of the extremities.10 These bodily changes momentarily sharpen our perceptions, improve our decision-making abilities, increase our strength, and reduce the danger of bleeding. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because when our ancestors were challenged by a tiger, the ones who survived were suddenly able to see and hear exceptionally well, make very fast decisions, become unusually strong, and not bleed as easily as usual. It’s relatively easy to produce an orienting response on demand by showing a person an emotionally provocative photograph. Stimuli like noxious odors, meaningful words, electrical shocks, and sudden tactile stimuli are also effective. Because a person’s general level of arousal is affected cumulatively by successive stimuli, the strength of the orienting response tends to diminish after three to five emotional pictures in a row. In our study, to prevent participants from “habituating,” we randomly interspersed the photos used to produce the orienting responses within a pool of twice as many calm photos.

In addition, participants were entirely unaware that their performance was being affected by their own future perceptions, suggesting that unconscious nervous system activity may be used to detect precognitive perceptions. Studies relying on unconscious responses may be more effective than those relying on conscious responses by bypassing psychological defense mechanisms that may filter out psi perceptions from ordinary awareness.8

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. —Albert Einstein In previous chapters, we saw that the perceptual forms of psi are difficult to distinguish clearly in the laboratory. Telepathy in the lab, and in life, can be explained as a form of clairvoyance, and clairvoyance is difficult to localize precisely in time. Concepts like “retrocognition,” “real-time clairvoyance,” and “precognition” have arisen, blurring the usual concepts of perception and time. It seems that we must think of psi perception as a general ability to gain information from a distance, unbound by the usual limitations of both space and time.1 As long as we are interested in demonstrating the mere existence of perceptual psi, these conceptual distinctions do not matter. But when we try to understand how these effects are possible, the differences become critical. For example, it’s important when theorizing about psi to know if it’s actually possible to directly perceive someone’s thoughts. Likewise, it’s important to know if it’s possible to perceive objects at a distance in real time. Based on the experimental evidence, it is by no means clear that pure telepathy exists per se, nor is it certain that real-time clairvoyance exists. In stead, the vast majority of both anecdotal and empirical evidence for perceptual psi suggests that the evidence can all be accommodated by various forms of precognition. This may be surprising, given the temporal paradoxes presented by the notion of perception through time. But one simple way of thinking about virtually every form of perceptual psi is that we occasionally bump into our own future. That is, the only way that we personally know that something is psychic, as opposed to a pure fantasy, is because sometime in our future we get verification that our mental impressions were based on something that really did happen to us. This means that, in principle, the original psychic impression could have been a precognition from ourselves.

Worshipers in meditation literally lose themselves in a sense of oneness with the universe, as shown by the quieting of their parietal lobes. The Franciscan nuns use the Latin of their faith to describe the experience, unio mystica (mystical union). Buddhists call it “unitary consciousness.” Newberg says that “Unity is . . . the foundational notion in pretty much every religious tradition . . . people often describe unity as more ‘fundamentally real’ than anything else they’ve ever experienced. More real than reality.” In a survey of 2,000 people who had enlightenment experiences, over 90% report that they’re more real than everyday reality. This sense of hyperreality may occur because in these states the energy saved by the 40% deactivation of the parietal lobe is redeployed to enhance attention. Newberg says, “It’s an efficiency exchange . . . energy normally used for drawing the boundary of self gets reallocated for attention. At that moment, as far as the brain can tell, you are one with everything.” Newberg notes that this produces a sense of awe. Meditators don’t feel alone. They describe a sense of connection with everyone and everything in the universe, part of an infinitely large picture. On the material level, like everyone else, you still have vibrant connections with family and friends. But you also have a source of social support that isn’t dependent on the availability of other human beings. As you merge with universal consciousness, you feel one with all beings and the universe itself. An overview of meditation studies by a panel of top experts shows that this opens up “what have been termed ‘nonlocal’ aspects of human consciousness . . . people report experiences of perceiving information that does not appear limited to the typical five senses or seems to extend across space and time, such as precognition, clairvoyance, and mind-matter interactions (described as ‘siddhis’ in the Hindu yogic traditions).

Presque vu: a sense of experiencing something which has not happened yet but will. Not precognition, exactly, but misplaced memory.

For example, Keith Stanovich’s psychology textbook lists paranormal phenomena as “telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition, reincarnation, biorhythms, astral projection, pyramid power, plant communication, and psychic surgery” (page 186).118 All these items are perfectly amenable to scientific inquiry, but so far only a few have been systematically investigated. Education may benefit by teaching students to avoid knee-jerk negative reactions to topics just because they seem peculiar and instead to evaluate what the evidence actually says. If there’s no body of systematic scientific evidence to rely upon (e.g., for the viability of “pyramid power”), then we can’t say much about that topic yet. But when there is evidence (as with several classes of psychic phenomena), then students should learn how to evaluate it. Professors often give lip service to the importance of teaching critical thinking skills, but in practice most of that lip is arrogant and dismissive. Another reason that the paranormal gets a bad rap is that professors are unaware of the evidence because their professors, and their professors before them, kept repeating that there wasn’t anything worth paying attention to.120 When something is repeated often enough, the lie takes on a life of its own. Political propagandists and advertising agencies have long capitalized on this fact.

With reflexes that were more like precognition, Han threw everything he had into an equally frantic bank.

This would explain a great many of the ACOPs collected by Jung, Kammerer, Koestler and others; it might even explain the Hardy-Harvie experiment, in which randomizing led to more order rather than more disorder. And it throws all of the data of parapsychology into a new perspective: instead of separate paranormal abilities such as ESP, precognition and telekinesis, there might just be one ACOP—acausal coincidental principle—appearing to us in many forms to which we give those names.

Time is relative and there is no universal past.

his classic 1927 book on precognitive dreaming, An Experiment with Time.6 Just a few years after Dunne began noticing dreams that seemed to predict future events, Einstein’s discoveries provided the beginnings of a possible explanation for this impossible-seeming phenomenon. According to the theory of relativity, time is a dimension like the three dimensions of space. Einstein’s teacher Hermann Minkowski realized that his student’s theories led to the conclusion that there is a singular continuum, space-time—or what is often called a block universe.7 In such a universe, future events already exist, as it were, and past events still exist. Although we can’t directly perceive it, objects including our own bodies are really cross sections of four-dimensional wormlike entities winding and twisting through the block universe from birth to death. (The particles our bodies are made from, like atoms, may last much longer.) The four-dimensional path of a particle or a body through the block is called its world line. Grasping that we are really four-dimensional beings opens various possibilities for how we—or at least our brains (what Dunne called our brain line8)—might send messages to ourselves back from our future. Effectively, through the particles making up our bodies and nervous systems, we are already connected to that future, like wires to and from our fate.

Dreaming is the doorway—the royal road as Freud would call it—to a greatly expanded sense of your life on Earth—seeing that whole timeline rather than the myopic now that typically dominates our attention. There’s an even more mind-bending implication of all this that we’ll be addressing in part 5: if you are able to be influenced by some future experience via a dream—even just one that you took a minute out of your morning to write down—then by extension, present dreamworthy thoughts and experiences shape your past. Let that sink in a moment: your present thoughts and experiences shape your past. Consequently, the business of keeping an annotated dream diary lays the foundation for an even more sublime autobiographical project that I have come to call precognitive lifework: the reexamination and reexploration of one’s own life in light of the trans-temporal wormholes, i.e., our dreams, that transect it and periodically bring us face to face with our younger and older selves. It’s a process that actually makes our prior history through self-discovery, and one emotion in particular—amazement—may be the motor of this self-creation. In the process of examining this possibility, we will delve into various unexpected and amazing curiosities of the precognitive dreamworld such as time gimmicks, symbols of precognition within a dream.

the simple likelihood of drawing a connection between a dream and a waking experience dwindles with temporal distance from the dream. At this point, it is hard to say if there is any kind of probability curve defining some temporal sweet spot when you are likeliest to identify a waking experience relating to a prior dream. This is one of the many, many open questions that we need armies of precognitive dreamworkers with fat dream journals to help figure out. While the bulk of my precognitive hits occur within about three days of a dream, it is not uncommon to find hits up to a couple weeks after a dream, as well as at yearly intervals (we will discuss calendrical resonances in more detail later). Dunne recommended returning to your dreams up to two days afterward and thereafter discarding dream records. He lived before word processors, and since no one would have the time to check all their dreams on an indefinite daily basis, he felt you had to set limits to make your search most effective. In our day of computer files, it is easy to keep permanent, detailed dream records—they no longer take up space—as well as to search them electronically and potentially perform other kinds of analyses if you are really hardcore. But it remains the case that nobody has the time to compare their entire dream journal, which may grow a bit each day, to their entire life, every day. You can see how that could begin to consume one’s life! You have to make compromises. Revisiting your dream records from the previous three days for a minute or two each evening is minimally sufficient. EMINENT COMPANY In taking the J. W. Dunne challenge, you will be in some brilliant and eminent company. Some of the most influential writers of the mid-twentieth century, including T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, were powerfully inspired by Dunne’s book, and some undertook his experiment. Most fans of Tolkien’s fantasy epics The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings don’t realize that the timeless worldview of his Elven races was based largely on the serial-universe cosmology developed by Dunne on the basis of his dream experiences.4 So far, no dream diary has emerged among Tolkien’s papers that would prove he carried out Dunne’s experiment systematically, but his friend C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, probably did. Lewis hints as much in a posthumously published novel called The Dark Tower, which is partly devoted to Dunne’s ideas.

What happens to a billiard ball, say, if you shoot it through a wormhole at its slightly younger self, trying to deflect it off course? A physicist at the Russian Space Institute in Moscow named Igor Novikov worked out the math that would govern a trans-temporal, suicidal (or at least self-inhibiting) billiards game (a sort of cross between billiards and Russian roulette), and he discovered something remarkably reassuring: physical law would actually prevent the billiard ball from inhibiting its past self. In fact, a principle of self-consistency would govern a wormhole-riddled universe. Even if an object could enter a wormhole at some time point B and emerge earlier, at some time point A, it could never actually interfere with its own entry into the wormhole at that later time point B.7 Two of Thorne’s students checked and found that Novikov was right: a time-traveling billiard ball cannot take the place of its younger self.8 (According to physicist Nick Herbert, it is analogous to the exclusion principle discovered by Wolfgang Pauli, which prevents any two electrons from occupying the same states simultaneously—a principle that ultimately makes the world built of tiny probabilistic particles solid.9) More recently, the physicist Seth Lloyd designed and actually conducted such an experiment using a photon and what he called a quantum gun—essentially shooting the photon a few billionths of a second back in time to interfere with its past self. He discovered he couldn’t. “No matter how hard the time-traveler tries, she finds her grandfather is a tough guy to kill.”10 This does not mean that time travel is impossible. Quite the contrary. It means that the time-traveling object encounters and interacts with its earlier self in precisely such a way that its later entry into the wormhole is facilitated rather than impeded. In other words, all possible paths of a billiard ball entering a wormhole would, upon exiting the wormhole earlier, nudge itself into the mouth of the wormhole later, thus completing the causal tautology, or what physicists call the closed-timelike curve. These days, quantum physicists like Lloyd use the idiom of postselection, a kind of informational-causal Darwinism that ensures that the only information that survives its journey into the past is information that does not foreclose its origins in the future. It’s not like there’s a Causality Police stepping in now and again to prevent grandfather paradoxes from occurring, or that time travelers need to step gingerly in the past to avoid disturbing things (a common trope in time-travel stories)—although they may in fact find that funny paranormal experiences impede them in ways they hadn’t expected. Guns might misfire at a crucial moment, for instance. (There’s nothing keeping you from trying to kill your grandfather.) But mainly, it is that time travelers from the future who survive their journey into the past are the ones whose actions somehow lead to the identical future from which they will have been sent back. Time loops, in other words.

Even in the equations that had been formulated to describe electromagnetism, there is no natural directionality to the interactions of particles; the equations look the same going both directions. If you looked at a video of atoms interacting, you could play it backward and you wouldn’t be able to tell which was correct. It is only in the macroworld of objects, people, planets, and so on, the world governed by entropy, that causation appears to unfold in a single direction. The second law of thermodynamics describes the increasing disorder in the universe at macroscales and is often seen as equivalent to the one-way arrow of time. More and more physicists over the past few decades, sensitive to the nondirectionality that seems to rule at the micro or quantum level, have begun to question the no-teleology rule. Recall that the tiny particles making up the matter and energy of the physical universe are really like worms or strings snaking through the block universe of Minkowski spacetime. Their interactions, which look to us a bit like tiny balls colliding on a billiard table, are from a four-dimensional perspective more like threads intertwining; the twists and turns where they wrap around each other are what we see as collisions, interactions, and “measurements” (in the physicists’ preferred idiom). Each interaction changes information associated with those threads—their trajectory through the block universe (position and momentum) as well as qualities like “spin” that influence that trajectory. According to some recent theories, a portion of the information particles carry with them actually might propagate backward rather than forward across their world lines. For instance, an experiment at the University of Rochester in 2009 found that photons in a laser beam could be amplified in their past when interacted with a certain way during a subsequent measurement—true backward causation, in other words.8 The Israeli-American physicist Yakir Aharonov and some of his students are now arguing that the famous uncertainty principle—the extent to which the outcome of an interaction is random and unpredictable—may actually be a measure of the portion of future influence on a particle’s behavior.9 In other words, the notorious randomness of quantum mechanics—those statistical laws that captured Jung’s imagination—may be where retrocausation was hiding all along. And it would mean Einstein was right: God doesn’t play dice.*23 If the new physics of retrocausation is correct, past and future cocreate the pattern of reality built up from the threads of the material world. The world is really woven like a tapestry on a four-dimensional loom. It makes little sense to think of a tapestry as caused by one side only;

As you look at a recorded dream that contains your own gaze in it, you realize you are quite literally looking at yourself across time. Your own past is also closer than it may appear. Whether we’re talking a span of a few hours or days or a few decades, such an idea has no place in mainstream psychology or philosophy. Just imagine what it could do for our sense of self to have such experiences more frequently. Discovering some past dream representation of oneself looking back at the dream in hindsight is the most powerful validation of precognitive dreamwork as a gnosis: the knower is literally included in the known. There’s that serpent devouring its own tail, again. It is also yet another startling confirmation of the solid, block-like nature of spacetime: the past is still here, and more amazingly, the future is already here. The evidence is there for those who merely have the patience to write their dreams down in their journals and routinely go back to their dream records. The act of inscription is crucial, though. Even though I might well have remembered my Permian-battle dream from the night before without a written record, I would never have been sure of my memories, or sure I wasn’t somehow deceiving myself, and I would easily have forgotten a small but pertinent detail like the laser dot.

The more we build the habit of allowing ourselves to be deflected by dreams that fascinate us but that we cannot yet understand—that is, the more we pay attention to and appreciate our dreams upon waking without knowing their meaning—the more we will find, later, that we have been actively shaping our past through our amazement at our precognition and what it reveals about our biography. And the more we honor our precognitive hits or confirmations, for instance through art or by keeping or making souvenirs, the more exciting they are and the more they will become a target of our dreams, and the more we will notice precognition happening. By building a habit of honoring your dreamlife, you will sow the seeds for amazing discoveries in your future, which then feed into and shape your past.

I asked Saf. “How do you do that?” Saf smirked. “He has you on punishment, he thinks you are hurting and wasting your time morosing over him while he lives his life” “He is exacting punishment and he is enjoying it!” “He probably not thinking of you any at all” “His hope is to come back and see you same place he left you!” “And ready to take him back and take you out of your suffering!” Saf chuckled. “Waste his time!” Saf half shouted. I leaned in conspiratorially. “Me no understand!” Saf always spoke in colloguish manner. “Change the ending, the outcome!” “Let when he checks in back, he has lost the compass!” “You can’t be found!” “That’s how you get back control!” “Right now he has all the control in the world!” “And you have none!” “You start to get back your control!” “Remember when i told you about that rope!” “The one people tug every now and then to see if you still at the end of it!” “We move pass that now…!” “You come tie the rope to a stump of a tree!” “Or on a stick or staple it to the ground!” “And you gone run…!” “You gone play the same game he is playing…!” “Play it his way but still play against him” Saf sucked her teeth. “Precognitive!” She pressed her index finger against her forehead. “Same story as the Tortoise and the Hare” Yakima II Crystal Evans Copyright ©️ 2023

Then the wizard looked down at the six big coins in his hand. Twoflower had insisted on paying his first four days’ wages in advance. Hugh nodded and smiled encouragingly. Rincewind snarled at him. As a student wizard Rincewind had never achieved high marks in precognition, but now unused circuits in his brain were throbbing and the future might as well have been engraved in bright colours on his eyeballs. The space between his shoulder blades began to itch. The sensible thing to do, he knew, was to buy a horse. It would have to be a fast one, and expensive — offhand, Rincewind couldn’t think of any horse - dealer he knew who was rich enough to give change out of almost a whole ounce of gold. And then, of course, the other five coins would help him set up a useful practice at some safe distance, say two hundred miles. That would be the sensible thing. But what would happen to Twoflower, all alone in a city where even the cockroaches had an unerring instinct for gold? A man would have to be a real heel to leave him. The Patrician of Ankh - Morpork smiled, but with his mouth only. “The Hub Gate, you say?” he murmured. The guard captain saluted smartly. “Aye, lord. We had to shoot the horse before he would stop.

UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS Associative binding of experiences in memory to create an internal chronology would also help explain why most precognitive dreams are only identified as such in hindsight. Even if premory is just an aspect of memory and obeys most of the same principles, the stand-out exception is that only with memory for things past can we engage in what psychologists call source monitoring. We can often tell more or less how we know things from past experience because we can situate them, at least roughly, in relation to other biographical details. We can’t do this with experiences refluxing from our future, because they lack any context. We don’t know yet where or how they fit into our lives, so it may be natural for the conscious mind to assume that they don’t fit at all.12 Again, it is natural and inviting to think of precognition as a kind of radar or sonar scanning for perils in the water ahead. A metaphor that Dunne used for precognitive dreaming is a flashlight we point ahead of us on a dark path. But it makes more sense that our brains are constantly receiving messages sent back in time from our future self and are continually sifting and scanning those messages for possible associations to present concerns and longstanding priorities without knowing where that information comes from, let alone how far away it is in time. Items that match our current concerns or preoccupations will be taken and elaborated as dreams or premonitions or other conscious “psi” experiences, but we are likely only to recognize their precognitive character after the future event transpires and we recognize its source. And even then, we will only notice it, by and large, if we are paying close attention. That matching or resonance with current concerns may be important in determining the timing of a dream in relation to its future referent. For instance, it is possible Freud dreamed about the oral symptoms in the mouth of his patient Anna Hammerschlag when he did because of a confluence of events in his life in 1895 that pre-minded him of his situation all those years later, in 1923—including his relapse to smoking his cigars after his friend Wilhelm Fliess had told him to quit. Again, his thoughts about his smoking may have been the short circuit or thematic resonance between these two distant points in his life, precipitating the dream. Incidentally, there is no reason to assume that that single dream of Freud’s was the only one in his life about his cancer and surgeries. Multiple dreams may point to the same experience via multiple symbolic or associative avenues, so it would be expected that some of Freud’s later dreams, especially closer to 1923, may have also related to the same experiences. We’ll never know, of course. But dreamers frequently report multiple precognitive dreams targeting the same later upheaval in their lives, especially major experiences like health crises and life milestones.

The word the Anglo-Saxon poets of Dark Age England used for fate highlights this ironic, circling, swerving logic; they called it wyrd—a word related to a lot of other w-r words still existing in our language that connote twisting and turning (worm, wrap, writhe, wreath, wring, and so on—even word, which, as writers know, is made of bendy-twisty marks on paper or stone). Wyrd, or weird, is the bending force in our lives that, among other things, causes dark prophecies to be fulfilled not only despite but actually because of our best efforts at preventing them. It also warps our mind and induces a kind of compulsion around more appealing-sounding prophecies, as it did to Shakespeare’s Macbeth after hearing the Weird Sisters’ prophecy that he would become king. When we realize that the Minkowski block universe, in its resolute self-consistency, imposes a wyrd-like law upon us (a “law in the cosmos,” you might call it), then all those antique myths about prophecy and the ironic insistency of fate start to appear less like the superstitions of benighted folk in the Back When and start to seem remarkably, well, prescient. And not only prescient, but based on real-life experience with prescience. Divination was an important part of Greek culture, for instance; it was even the basis of their medicine. Sick patients went to temples and caves to have healing dreams in the presence of priests who could interpret their dreams’ signs. They were not strangers to this stuff, as we now are. As intrinsically precognitive beings who think of ourselves as freely willed, the logic of wyrd is our ruler. We can’t go anywhere that would prevent ourselves from existing, prevent ourselves from getting to the experiences and realizations ahead of us that will turn out to have retroinfluenced our lives now, and this imposes a kind of blindness on us. That blindness may keep us from going insane, reducing the level of prophecy to a manageable level. It is why our dreamlife only shows us the future as through a glass, darkly. It is also why the world seems so tricksterish to those who are really paying attention. That we are interfered with by an intelligence that is somehow within us but also Other is the human intuition that Freud theorized in such a radical new way. His focus was on how this Other inside could make us ill; the flip side is that it really does serve as our guide, especially when we let ourselves be led by our unreason. Research shows that “psi” is an unconscious, un-willed function or group of functions.2 The laboratory experiments by Daryl Bem, Dean Radin, and many others strongly support something like presentiment (future-feeling) operating outside of conscious awareness, and it could be a pervasive feature or even a basic underlying principle of our psychology.

But rewards and upheavals on the road ahead can and regularly do influence us while we are awake—and in many of the same ways Freud identified as waking manifestations of the unconscious: via uncanny out-of-the-blue feelings, via misperceptions of speech or texts, via slips of the tongue or pen, via songs that get stuck in our head—the lyrics of “earworms,” I find, sometimes relate to something that will happen later that day—and just generally via “random” thoughts and obsessions that end up corresponding to some imminent unpredictable encounter or experience.

That’s not radar—it’s something far wyrder. Call it wyrdar, perhaps. In Time Loops, I noted that precognition is a bit of a misnomer, since it implies thinking (cognition). I use the term because it is the most common and familiar term for future influence, but really we should define it as behavior oriented toward forthcoming rewards.5 It needn’t involve conscious thought at all. It might manifest as an urge, a hunch, or a gut feeling without any kind of mental representation attached. Waking premonitory experiences quite often produce positive effects in our lives, indirectly and unconsciously, via our behavior and via intentions that are unclear or that we are likely to misinterpret at the time. People who are highly intuitive may be especially good at acting on the kind of strange, senseless impulse that ends up saving a life or preventing some lesser mishap—perhaps by not censoring their reason, which will tend to get bogged down in finding rational causes for feelings and hunches rather than simply acting on those feelings. Intuition, I think, is just presentiment by another name, and being an intuitive person is just not getting in the way of this presentiment by overthinking our motives. Indeed, the kind of intuitive, spontaneous behavior displayed by Valerie or Mossbridge may be the most direct, important, and immediate, not to mention potentially survival-relevant, manifestation of the precognitive unconscious.

If there is no plan as such, but just what lies ahead, drawing living things and thinking beings like ourselves toward generally positive outcomes (most basically survival, but also other meaningful connections and rewards), then it creates a new vision of time, one that is always full of hope. The Italian psychologists Ulisse di Corpo and Antonella Vannini use the term syntropy: convergence on order and unity.8 Whatever we call it, it offers a wholly new way of looking at the meaning, and joys, of being a conscious being in a deterministic universe. Seeing the brain as a tesseract allowing future thoughts and emotions to impact us in the present totally reframes that eternally vexing question of free will, or at least the conscious will that neuroscientists no longer believe in. We simply need to “place” conscious will differently in relation to our actions: it would be in our conscious reflections on our past that something like the causal efficacy of thought actually comes into play. Our conscious will may really be what we experience as our hindsight reflection, specifically on our successes. Getting clearer on this may be what makes the difference between succumbing to akinetic mutism like the Predictor users in Chiang’s “What’s Expected of Us” and being able to say “carpe diem!” instead.

An attitude of care for oneself and others is what creates the fertile ground for precognition to manifest, and a conscientious, ethical mindset goes along with this. A growing body of psychological research in the area of prospection (thinking about the future) is worth mentioning here. The extent to which people feel a sense of connection to their future selves appears to predict how well they make life decisions like saving for retirement, taking care of their health, and so on.12 Prospection includes anticipating how we will think back on our present from a future standpoint—for instance, imagining future regrets—and this kind of thinking has implications for ethical decision-making too.13 The real (versus just imaginal) reality of precognitive/retrocausal self-interaction across time in both directions—influencing one’s own past as well as being influenced by one’s own future—elevates this ethical dimension of prospection to paramount importance in the life of the precognitive dreamworker and lifeworker.*41 Chiang’s thought experiment in “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” suggests that we relate to our Long Self with the same mindset that we treat other people—with care and compassion (like Hassan) or else instrumentally and exploitatively (like Ajib)—and that our life choices reflect that basic attitude with which we approach other-as-self and self-as-other. It benefits our own success and that of our fellows to be able to imagine ourselves as Long Selves.14 A principle can be formulated here, and it’s Principle #22: Conscientiousness and an attitude of care (for self and others) may be essential for manifesting precognition, or at least for doing so consistently.

You will increasingly have these kinds of sublime realizations about the block universe and your own unconscious role in fulfilling your fate the more you become attuned to precognitive dreaming. PAY IT FORWARD Earlier I mentioned the possibility of sowing seeds in our past for a better tomorrow via establishing habits of honoring our dreams and other potentially precognitive experiences. Among the positive values of Jung’s writings and teachings was his emphasis on honoring and commemorating the miraculous in one’s life. He encouraged his patients to draw or paint their dreams, for instance, and he commemorated his own synchronicities in the grand style that his and (mostly) his wife’s wealth allowed. For instance, during a period in 1933 when he was studying the relationship between Christianity and Alchemy, he encountered a snake that had choked to death trying to swallow a fish. This seemed to him like a concrete symbol of the fatal inability of both systems of thought—the Christian fish and the Alchemical serpent—to integrate each other. He honored this synchronistic discovery with a stone engraving that can still be seen at his Bollingen tower retreat on the shore of Lake Zurich, where he had found the animals.1 Developing personal habits and rituals to honor our dreams is an important part of precognitive dreamwork. Writing dreams down in the morning in a notebook dedicated for the purpose is the most fundamental part of it. But drawing or painting striking images from dreams is also a common practice. However you choose to honor your dreams, such honoring is a crucial feed-forward component helpful in manifesting precognition with regularity. As with any habit or skill we wish to improve upon, it is important to build positive associations with it, so these little celebratory acts of honoring can contribute to those associations and in some cases even serve as the target of our precognition. Some of these targets may become powerful personal symbols and associations that you will then find have fed back into your prior dreamlife.

The sooner we can face the bizarre fact that we make our past in the process of finding it, and find it in the process of making it, the sooner our attitude can become one of care for our Long Self in the block universe. Dream journaling with an eye to precognition—precognitive dreamwork—is the first step. But you may find, as you build up a corpus of precognitive dreams and come face to face with the reality of that Long Self on a daily or near-daily basis, that mapping out those dream connections and reexploring what may have seemed like dead-and-gone territory—your past life, however meandering it may have seemed at the time, however traumatic it may have been, even—starts to brings even more amazing rewards and insights than just identifying discrete precognitive dream hits. This is because even if we can’t change the past or future, precognition (and the retrocausation it implies) changes everything we thought we knew about both. It is redemptive. We see our past and future selves unclearly and obliquely. But in fact, the distance between you now and you decades from now, or decades ago, may be just a wrinkled piece of cellophane. When we realize that our major upheavals in the second half of life may actually have been the billiard balls deflecting us when we were younger, it compels a new kind of sympathy and understanding for that immature being we once were—and by extension, a new kind of loyalty to the person we will become. The Long Self is truly an epic composition, and you are the one composing it. Like a writer of your soul, your aesthetic decisions now turn out to have shaped yourself long in the past, and your decisions in your future are shaping your experience now. Tobi characterizes it this way: “I believe we are involved in creating the already-written lives that we enact.” To consciously manifest and realize this amazing fact, you must build habits of self-care. Recognize that care for yourself at other ages is not just an attitude but has a real effect, a real outcome in the past—and via the past, in your future. “This is the part of the route without a short cut,” Tobi insists. “You must do the tasks, you must care.” Tobi wrote in another email: “It delights me to think that all those times I wished aloud to my family that I could go back and assure my younger self and the younger selves of my family members that we got through that time, that all would be well, that we survived, that I actually was doing that.

But given all the inherent limitations in recording dreams, interpreting them, comparing them to subsequent and prior events across the span of a whole lifetime, and sharing them with others, there would really be no way to make a firm assessment of how many dreams may relate to future experiences, and certainly no way to make an estimate that would hold water scientifically. We have to appeal to the philosopher’s reason on this question: if anywhere near a quarter of them can be shown reasonably to be precognitive, then it is reasonable that many more may be precognitive and we just don’t detect them as such. You will seldom see precognition if you aren’t looking for it, and until now, few have looked for it. The worst mistake would be to assume that, since precognition is hard to fathom, the brain therefore finds it hard to do. That’s a fallacy. If you accept the basic premise that some dreams do relate to future experiences, it raises the reasonable—indeed natural—question: Why would evolution create a brain that reaches into its own future but only manifest that ability occasionally? Might all dreams be precognitive? It may really be a mistake to speak of precognitive dreams as some distinct set of dreams targeting a future event versus one in the past. Dunne suspected that dreams draw equally on past and future experiences.5 Again, dreams that seem to be about past experiences, per our cultural assumptions or per some standard dream theory like Freud’s, could simply be using past bricks (identifiable items and experiences in memory) to pre-present some future experience that goes unnoticed by the dreamer or dream researcher. Thus, coming to some realistic estimate of the true prevalence of dream precognition is the kind of question that is going to require many precognitive dreamworkers sharing their experiences to help answer. The bottom line is this: we should stop thinking of precognition as something like the special holiday china our moms kept in a certain cupboard and brought out just once a year. Our brains likely use it every day, every night, possibly even every dream, for all occasions big and small. If the brain ever does it, it probably always does it. Principle #9 of precognitive dreamwork isn’t a conclusion so much as a working presumption: Assume (without ever being able to prove it) that all your dreams may be precognitive.

There's a theory about déja vu." "I don't want to hear it." "Why do we think these things happened before? Simple. They did happen before, in our minds, as visions of the future. Because these are precognitions, we can't fit the material into our system of consciousness as it is now structured. This is basically supernatural stuff. We're seeing into the future but haven't learned how to process the experience. So it stays hidden until the precognition comes true, until we come face to face with the event. Now we are free to remember it, to experience it as familiar material." "Why are so many people having these episodes now?" "Because death is in the air," he said gently. "It is liberating suppressed material. It is getting us closer to things we haven't learned about ourselves. Most of us have probably seen our own death but haven't known how to make the material surface. Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.

Oh, yes," Father Mancuso nodded. "As Father Ryan mentioned, I've seen and heard many who've come to me as a psychotherapist and as a parish priest." Chancellor Ryan picked up the thread. "Then there are the so-called extraordinary activities of the devil in the world. Usually these are material things around a person that are affected; that might be what you're up against. We call it infestation. It breaks down into different categories which we'll explain in a minute." "Obsession," Father Nuncio put in, "is the next step, in which the person is affected either internally or externally. And finally there is possession, by which the person temporarily loses control of his faculties and the devil acts in and through him." When Father Mancuso had come to the Chancellors' office to keep his appointment, he had been somewhat embarrassed as to how to approach his problem. But he relaxed as the two priests had shown keen interest. Now with their spelling out the guidelines he must take in this kind of situation, Father Mancuso raised his hopes for deliverance from this evil. "In investigating cases of possible diabolical interference," Chancellor Ryan went on, "we must consider the following: One, fraud and deception. Two, natural scientific causes. Three, parapsychological causes. Four, diabolical influences. And five, miracles. In this case, fraud and trickery don't seem plausible. George and Kathleen Lutz seem to be normal, balanced individuals. We think you are too. The possibilities therefore are reduced to psychological, parapsychological, or diabolical influences." "We'll exclude the miraculous," Father Nuncio broke in, "because the Divine would not involve itself in the trivial and foolish." "True," said Father Ryan. "Therefore the explanation would seem to include hallucination and autosuggestion - you know, like the invisible touches Kathy experienced - and when George thought he heard that marching band. But let's take the parapsychological line. Parapsychologists like Dr. Rhine, who works at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, define four main operations in the science. The first three come under the general heading of ESP-extrasensory perception. They are mental telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, which could explain George's visions and 'picking up' information that seems to coincide with known facts about the DeFeos. The fourth parapsychological area is psychokinesis, where objects move by themselves. That would be the case with the Lutzes' ceramic lion - if it did move," he added. Father Nuncio got up to refill his cup. "All of what we've said, Frank, is part of the suggestion we have for the Lutzes. Have them contact some investigative organization like Dr. Rhine's to come in and look at the house. They'll do extensive testing and I'm sure they can come to some conclusion short of diabolical influence.

Harry and told him where we were headed. He frowned. “You sure you want to do this, in your condition?” “I’m pregnant, McGlade, not helpless.” “What about your precognition disease?” “It’s preeclampsia.” “For some reason I knew you were going to say that.” I sighed. “That’s precognition.” “I thought you said it was preeclampsia.” “It is. You’re the one with precognition if you knew what I was going to say.” He shrugged. “I probably picked it up from some call girl. I should have seen that coming.” It

And as far as he could tell, she wasn’t mentally challenged other than the brainwashing she’d suffered. All things he could help or at least effect. Or die trying. Die trying. An odd precognitive shiver rode his spine at the cliché, making him consider it realistically. What if his life was threatened?

And, 37 years later, in 2013, his breakthrough moment came in another thought experiment, which revealed a system of cycling protocells capable of evolving but also sharing innovations, thereby able to lift ever more complex forms into being. Was this vision simply a motivation for his life’s work, driving him on for decades? Or was it a precognition sent by his future self or from some other mysterious time-shifted source? However you might interpret it, a causal temporal loop seems possible. A clue to this loop came from another point in the interview when Dr Damer told Dr Mossbridge that he had had an even earlier vision, suggesting that future versions of himself were able to communicate back through time. When he was about to turn ten, he wanted to mark that milestone, so he went on a long walk in his neighbourhood. He found himself at the edge of a slough, and asked, “What could I do right now that would have a really positive effect on my future?” Suddenly a vision opened up in his mind’s eye, a line of all his future selves extending to the horizon. They were all busy doing slightly different but interesting things. He felt pleased and began to look forward to this future. Showing remarkable maturity and awareness, the young Bruce decided it would be a good idea to make a deal with these future selves, then and there. He asked them to agree to a written contract, which he held up on an imagined piece of paper. It said: “You will all agree to not send negative thoughts back to the prior, littler selves because they did their best at the time.” One after the next, the future selves each “signed” the only-positive-thoughts contract. Once this was completed, he described experiencing a rush, a sort of force pulling on him as all the doors to the future swung open. He then saw his future path as one flowing, forward movement with no turbulence returning back down to his present. Given this earlier experience, it’s no surprise that just four years later he experienced receiving a clue from the future, setting his life’s work. From a very young age, Bruce felt he was in communication with his future selves and that he also possessed an intimate relationship with some kind of bigger, guiding system. This gave him an abiding sense that his life’s path was somehow mapped out through his intentions toward destinations lit by delivered visions.

And, 37 years later, in 2013, his breakthrough moment came in another thought experiment, which revealed a system of cycling protocells capable of evolving but also sharing innovations, thereby able to lift ever more complex forms into being. Was this vision simply a motivation for his life’s work, driving him on for decades? Or was it a precognition sent by his future self or from some other mysterious time-shifted source? However you might interpret it, a causal temporal loop seems possible. A clue to this loop came from another point in the interview when Dr Damer told Dr Mossbridge that he had had an even earlier vision, suggesting that future versions of himself were able to communicate back through time. When he was about to turn ten, he wanted to mark that milestone, so he went on a long walk in his neighbourhood. He found himself at the edge of a slough, and asked, “What could I do right now that would have a really positive effect on my future?” Suddenly a vision opened up in his mind’s eye, a line of all his future selves extending to the horizon. They were all busy doing slightly different but interesting things. He felt pleased and began to look forward to this future. Showing remarkable maturity and awareness, the young Bruce decided it would be a good idea to make a deal with these future selves, then and there. He asked them to agree to a written contract, which he held up on an imagined piece of paper. It said: “You will all agree to not send negative thoughts back to the prior, littler selves because they did their best at the time.” One after the next, the future selves each “signed” the only-positive-thoughts contract. Once this was completed, he described experiencing a rush, a sort of force pulling on him as all the doors to the future swung open. He then saw his future path as one flowing, forward movement with no turbulence returning back down to his present. Given this earlier experience, it’s no surprise that just four years later he experienced receiving a clue from the future, setting his life’s work. From a very young age, Bruce felt he was in communication with his future selves and that he also possessed an intimate relationship with some kind of bigger, guiding system. This gave him an abiding sense that his life’s path was somehow mapped out through his intentions toward destinations lit by delivered visions. We don’t all have to have visions like Bruce Damer’s to connect with our future selves or to develop our precognitive abilities. Each of us will do this in our own way, as we discuss in detail in Part 2. But Dr Damer’s experiences illustrate just how incredibly powerful it can be to take seriously messages and visions that seem to come to us from the future.

To be reasonably convinced that genuine precognition has occurred in your daily life, you would need to meet all of the following criteria: • Two or more correspondences between the precognition and the event. • A reasonably short delay (less than two weeks) between the precognition and the event (more than two correspondences between the precognition and the event should be required for longer delays). • No way of predicting or causing the event yourself in the normal course of your daily life, even using your unconscious mind. • Extra credit if you record the experience before the event occurs (so you don’t fool yourself with false memoriesh).

Step 2: Reverse the polarity In this step, you write down an intention that supports you in “reversing the polarity” – shifting the focus from acting to receiving. For so much of our lives, we are in a “doing” mode. We feel we need to take action to get things done, and of course in many cases action is the only way forward – but not always. Sometimes we have to reverse the polarity and just receive. This is one of those times. The idea is first to reverse the usual polarity of making effort in your daily life and thinking you are in control of the outcome. Next, replace that habit with receptivity to whatever appears. This “reverse the polarity” practice is the essential next step in a controlled precognition session, because it allows your superconscious or higher self to communicate with your conscious mind. At first, it isn’t always easy to “let go” and enter a receptive mode, so it works best to create an intention designed to help you reverse the polarity. This intention should also contain a summarized version of the Higher-Self Handshake (Chapter 4). Go ahead and write down this combined intention, right under where you wrote about your mental and emotional state. I am letting myself go into receiving mode to receive exactly the right information about the target during this controlled precognition session. I allow my conscious mind and my higher self to do exactly their correct jobs and only their correct jobs.

REACH” PRINCIPLES • Respect for the unknown • Ethics in our use of precognition • Accuracy of our precognitive skills • Compassion for ourselves and others • Honesty in all our dealings How to truly practise the REACH principles How can James or anyone in an unsupportive environment practise the REACH principles? It’s an important question to ask – not just for James, but for anyone who has already run into disorientation or destabilization as a result of their spontaneous precognitive abilities. We have heard from some of these people, and they tend to be desperate to control their abilities so they do not feel like “freaks” at the mercy of their gift. As we explore what James could do, we are also exploring what anyone could do to turn their relationship with precognition in a positive direction if they feel it has become disorientating for them. The first change would be to take a thorough inventory of your relationships – are they supportive of who you are and the gifts you have to offer? If not, the first change you need to make is to find one or two people whom you trust, and talk with them in confidence about your practice of controlled precognition. Tell them about your intention to be a Positive Precog and share with them what that means to you. Tell them why it is important to you to try out your gifts in this area. This will be a different conversation for each person, but the basic idea is that you need a few people in your life who accept and love you for who you are, especially when who you are is someone who has something controversial to offer. If precognition is a big part of your life, you need to tell them about that. You can expect three responses – scepticism (from science-minded people who haven’t read the literature about precognition or don’t believe it), concern (from people who fear you are messing with things you don’t understand), and support (from people who are open enough to support what you are interested in). Dealing with scepticism is easy – don’t try to convince anyone. Just let them know that controlled precognition is important to you, you feel that it is likely to be real, and you would like their support in trying this out. If they don’t support you, move on to the next person. Concern is a little tricky, because anyone concerned about you is already in your corner, so that’s a start. But if their concern is so great that they can’t be supportive, consider thanking them and moving on to the next person. Your goal is not to find someone who agrees with you about precognition, but someone who is supportive of you pursuing controlled precognition responsibly.

we included a section about scientist Bruce Damer’s experiences as a child? In one of the stories, his “future selves” appeared and he asked them to sign a contract to only send positive energy back in time. As you keep track of your spontaneous precognitive experiences or if you pursue controlled precognition as a practice, this kind of thinking will become commonplace. In other words, you will start to think of yourself as not just this version of your body that exists right now as you read this, but instead, as all past and future versions of your body and mind. As a result of this shift, your sense of self can feel more permanent and connected in both time and space. Imagine a line drawn through time, where each point in the line is wherever you have been and wherever you will be, from birth to death. Physicists call this your “world line” – the map of your entire existence in space and time. Similar to this world line, as you become more comfortable with your own precognitive experiences, you will probably start to include your past and future selves as part of your definition of yourself. This is a reasonable response to having first-hand experience with accessing information from the future. It doesn’t mean you always know what your future self will do, or that the future is necessarily determined at the present moment. But thinking of yourself as all of yourself – through time and space – is a shift that is likely coming your way as you continue your training as a Positive Precog. Fortunately, connecting with yourself in this way is likely to make you more compassionate with yourself (the “C” in the REACH principles) – and, as a result, more compassionate with others (also the “C” in the REACH principles). In addition to embracing connections in time, this shift in your sense of self will probably also embrace connections in space. That’s because, as you practise controlled precognition, you’ll notice that not only are you able to sometimes perceive uncannily accurate information from the future, but also this information can be from locations that are distant. You might end up thinking about these connections in space like the Iroquois, a Native American Indian tribe, have done. They speak of a long body. Your long body would include your mind, your body, the minds and bodies of people with whom you have relationships, the tools you use, and the places you live.a Again, this feeling of connection can be very positive. Any feelings of compassion you have for yourself as a result of extending your sense of yourself over time will also extend to those in your long body. And guess what? When compassion is passed around to others, it turns out that the originator of the compassion is more resilient to stress.b That brings us nicely to the changes you can expect in health and wellbeing as a result of your Positive Precog practice.

Selftranscendence involves working toward something positive that is larger than yourself and your individual concerns, connecting with others in an authentic way, and fostering an internal sense of truth. Moving beyond yourself is a natural outcome of the shift in your sense of self that we have already talked about – you will naturally see the connections between yourself and others. Working toward something positive that is larger than yourself follows easily – once you are clear about the connections between yourself and others, it is so much easier to see how the wellbeing of others affects your own.

When it comes to an internal sense of truth, what develops for some Positive Precogs could be called faith, and for others a sense of awe and humility in the beauty of the universe. Regardless, this internal sense of truth is not at odds with actual reality. It is just a very personal way of understanding and being in relationship with the universe. But wait, weren’t we talking about health and wellbeing? Yes! So why all this talk of self-transcendence? Well, that’s because the two are intricately linked. Having experiences of self-transcendence are directly related to your health and wellbeing. People who more regularly work toward something beyond themselves, who connect authentically with others, and who have an internal sense of truth – in other words, people who score higher on a scale of self-transcendence – have better physical health and more positive moods.c In fact, psychiatrists feel that self-transcendence is so important for wellbeing that the World Psychiatric Association released a statement in September 2015 asking all psychiatrists and psychological professionals to discuss spiritual, religious and self-transcendent ideas and experiences with their patients.d This recommendation has thus far been slow to catch on, as is any major change in protocol. Yet it is clear that many people would be better off with mental health professionals who were aware of the benefits that self-transcendence can bring to wellbeing.

Authentic psychic prediction reflects free will and personal power, not fate and fortune. It reveals only the next few steps, not the entire staircase.

The thing is, your unconscious mind is smart. There’s usually a reason when absolutely nothing at all comes up; having absolutely no feelings, thoughts or sensations is actually a very unusual state. Your mind has to try hard to make that happen. So, if it keeps happening, this might suggest that controlled precognition is not for you, not right now at least. Your unconscious mind, particularly your superconscious or what we call your “higher self”, might know that getting involved in controlled precognition would be destabilizing for you. Likely because you would learn about parts of yourself that are not great for you to access without some kind of safe help. So maybe it’s saying “no” in the way it knows how to do that. This is fine, and you should listen. If you still want to pursue controlled precognition, seek a mental health professional that you trust and start exploring what might be hiding in your subconscious. Odds are, once your unconscious mind feels like controlled precognition is safe for you, you’ll come back to it and it will be much better for you and less destabilizing than it would have been before seeking help. Usually, however, the problem is the reverse: so many seemingly random images, thoughts and sensations come up that people feel overwhelmed and end up with garbage in their controlled precognition sessions. That’s why the six-step controlled precognition protocol was created, so you can learn to carefully perform controlled precognition, learning to weed out the fantasy thoughts and concentrate on those impressions that are delivered to you without further elaboration by story telling. What if I don’t remember any of my dreams? That can happen for many reasons. One is that you might have had a traumatic experience, and you might not be ready to re-live it in your dreams. If this is the case, I would say don’t worry about remembering your dreams. You can use controlled precognition to sense the future, and if you want to work with a mental health professional to work through the trauma to make it safe to remember your dreams, then you can do that independently. If you’re sure you want to remember your dreams, here’s a list of things to try. When we’re lucky, life is long … try them all! • Write down your dreams every morning, and when you don’t have any, write down, “I don’t remember my dreams right now, but I might later. And if I do, I’ll record them.” That gets you in the daily habit, and it sets an intention that tells your subconscious that you’re ready to start remembering dreams. • Make sure you get enough vitamin B-6, found in eggs, nuts, vegetables, wholegrains and milk, as it seems to enhance dream clarity as compared to a placebo. • Try to go to bed at a time that feels good to you. • Turn off wi-fi at night in your house, if you have a router. • Don’t look at any screens within one hour of going to bed.

More recently, physicist Edwin May, who directed the ESP research at SRI after 1986 and then headed the program researching “anomalous cognition” (May’s preferred term) after it was transferred to SAIC, and psychologist Sonali Bhatt Marwaha have also argued that all forms of ESP are likely precognition misinterpreted or misidentified.29 Unlike Feinberg, they do not assume precognition is solely an “inside the head” phenomenon30; but reducing anomalous cognition to precognition is a bold step that may move the field of parapsychology forward by, as they say, “collaps[ing] the problem space”31 of these phenomena. What has always seemed like several small piles of interesting but perhaps not overwhelming data supporting various diverse forms of psi or anomalous cognition may really be a single, impressively large pile of evidence for the much more singular, astonishing, and as I hope to show, physically plausible ability of people to access information arriving from their own future. In Part Two, where I address the possible “nuts and bolts” of this ability, I will be making a case for precognition being something close to Feinberg’s “memory of things future”—an all-in-the-head information storage and retrieval process, but one that is not limited to short-term memory. Evidence from life and laboratory suggests it may be possible, within limits, to “premember” experiences days, months, and years in our future, albeit dimly and obliquely, in a manner not all that different from how we remember experiences in our past. The main qualitative difference would be that, unlike memory for past experiences, we have no context for recognizing information from our future, let alone interpreting or evaluating it, and thus will seldom even notice its existence. We would also have little ability to directly search our memory for things future, the way we can rummage in our mental attic for information we know we acquired earlier in life. Yet things we will learn in our future may “inform” us in many non-conscious ways, and this information may be accessed in dreams and art and tasks like ESP experiments that draw on ill-defined intuitive abilities.

When asked over a decade later how he thought remote viewing works, McMoneagle put it plainly: Simply put, I think that I am sending myself information from the future. In other words, at some point in the future I will come to know the answer to whatever question has been put to me in the past. Therefore, whenever the information is passed to me in its accurate form, that is when I send it back to myself in the past.

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 events—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 that time was a dimension like space. To help visualize this, his teacher, Hermann Minkowski, pictured “spacetime” as a four-dimensional block. For the purposes of this book, let’s make it a glass block so we can see what is happening inside it. One’s life, and the “life” of any single object or atom 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 atoms that started some decades ago as a zygote, gradually expanded in size by incorporating many more spaghetti-strand atoms, and then, after several decades of coherence (as a literal “flying spaghetti monster”) will dissipate into a multitude of little spaghetti atoms going their separate ways after your death. (They will recoalesce in different combinations with other spaghetti-strand atoms to make other objects and other spaghetti beings, again and again and again, until the end of the universe.) 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 consciousness traverses our world-line from beginning to end. (If it helps envision this, the comic artist, occult magician, and novelist Alan Moore has recently revised the “block” to a football—one tip being the big bang, the other the “big crunch” proposed in some cosmological models.32 I will stick with the term “glass block” since I am not a football fan and “glass football” sounds odd.) 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 coming unstuck in time (as Vonnegut put it) suggested to Dunne that human consciousness was dual. We not only 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 that spaghetti-clump body. The Universal Mind, he argued, is ultimately shared—a consciousness-in-common—that is equivalent to what has always been called “God.

In short, what at first seems strangely coincidental quickly loses much of its uncanny grandeur, the “size of the impossible” when examined with a critical eye. But the fact that in the infinite universe there will be myriad coincidences that only seem impossible, or meaningful, from a certain point of view is no kind of argument that our commonsense understanding of causality is complete, or that there aren’t real “synchronicities.” Who are skeptics to say that people might not sometimes be right when they detect the operation in their own lives, or in history, of some principle that has not yet been given mainstream psychology’s stamp of legitimacy, such as premonitions of future events? We know our understanding of physical reality is not complete—physicists are clear on that—and we will see in Part Two that new advances at the intersection of physics and biology are radically revising our understanding of living systems too. Among other things, they raise the possibility that the brain may have properties that could even be time-defying. Given the certainty that science is not finished and that new revolutions await us, is it reasonable to insist that there are no undiscovered realms of human capacity awaiting to be catalogued and investigated?

There is, for instance, the case of a retired art professor named David Mandell in the London suburb of Sudbury Hill. A 2003 British TV documentary profiled Mandell and his astonishing record of seemingly precognitive dreams, which he depicts the next morning in drawings or watercolors and then photographs under the calendar clock at his local bank to provide a time stamp and forestall accusations of fakery or faulty memory.