Precognition, Dream Psi, and the Nature of Time

Receiving direct knowledge or perception of the future, Precognition, is another common psi ability with a long-standing history.  Precognition is usually achieved through prophetic dreams, during deep meditation, or spontaneously received as images in the mind’s eye.  The existence of this paranormal ability, however, once again goes against the Newtonian grain and strikes close to the heart of people’s conceptions of time and free will.  Because if precognition is real, then the future must in some sense be pre-written and determined.  

“Time is not at all what it seems.  It does not flow in only one direction, and the future exists simultaneously with the past. The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”  -Albert Einstein

“Both in common experience and in physics, time has generally been considered to be a primary, independent and universally applicable order, perhaps the most fundamental one known to us.  Now, we have been led to propose that it is secondary and that, like space, it is to be derived from a higher-dimensional ground, as a particular order.”  -David Bohm

“When asked to define time, the physicist John Wheeler once replied that time is what stops everything from happening at once.  Scientists are still searching for a good definition, because the problem of time is that it doesn’t appear to exist!”  -Ervin Laszlo and Jude Currivan, “Cosmos” (68)

I have personally experienced Precognition on a few occasions but none as amazing or memorable as the following.  During college I had what seemed to be a normal dream involving myself and my friend, wearing our typical attire, talking outside my dorm about what we wanted to do that day.  Now I didn’t remember even having the dream until the next day as my friend and I were approaching my dorm; every word she said started triggering the clearest, most mind-blowing déjà vu as the dream came flooding back to me.  We were both wearing the same clothes I’d envisioned, we were standing in the same place, and every word she said was exactly as I had dreamt.  Seizing the opportunity to test and manifest this amazing clarity of déjà vu I was experiencing, I quickly blurted out the entire next sentence that I knew she would be saying and matched her word for word in real time!  Stunned at my simultaneous telepathic mocking, she abruptly stopped talking and I laughed uncontrollably trying to explain the whole thing.  

That and many other precognitive experiences forever changed my perception of the arrow of time.  If time is truly linear then we can only remember the past and cannot in any way remember the future.  But if it is impossible to remember the future, then what was my dream?  How was I able to vividly see and remember the entire scenario in precise detail the night before it happened?  I guarantee anyone who felt my paradigm-crushing déjà vu, would agree that this synchronicity was far beyond some quirky coincidence.

“Even our most ancient writings pay homage to the premonitory power of dreams, as is evidenced in the biblical account of Pharoah’s dream of seven fat and seven lean cows … The proximity the unconscious mind has to the atemporal realm of the implicate may also play a role.  Because our dreaming self is deeper in the psyche than our conscious self – and thus closer to the primal ocean in which past, present, and future become one – it may be easier for it to access information about the future.”  -Michael Talbot, “The Holographic Universe” (210)

“One near-death experiencer described what he saw once the filter of human perception was lifted. He talked of seeing the 'panoramic view of life': ... everything from the beginning, my birth, my ancestors, my children, my wife, everything comes together simultaneously. I saw everything about me, and about everyone who was around me. I saw everything they were thinking now, what they thought then, what was happening before, what was happening now. There is no time, there is no sequence of events, no such thing as limitation, of distance, of period, of time, of place. I could be anywhere I wanted to be simultaneously.” –David Icke, “The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy” (55)

President Lincoln dreamt of his own assassination a week before he died.  British Aeronautics Engineer J.W. Dunne documented several prophetic dreams come true in his 1927 book “An Experiment with Time.”  There are even 19 documented cases of people who precognitively saw the sinking of the Titanic.  Some by passengers who acknowledged their premonitions and survived, others by passengers who ignored their intuition and drowned, and others still by non-passengers. 

Swedish scientist/mystic Emanuel Swedenborg had a gift for precognition and documented many independently verified examples. One evening, on June 19^th, 1759 upon arriving at a dinner party in Goteborg, Swedenborg had a vision of Stockholm burning 300 miles away.  He told everyone in attendance including the mayor about the blazing fire and that it had stopped only 3 doors from his home.  The next day a messenger from Stockholm arrived and confirmed Swedenborg’s incredible vision.

Dutch psychic Gerard Croiset was well-known for the several “chair tests” he accurately predicted.  First the experimenter randomly selected a chair from the seating plan of some upcoming public event in a large theater, stadium, or auditorium anywhere in the world.  There could be no reserved seating to prevent possible collusion or trickery.  Then without telling him the name, the location or the event, knowing only the date and seating plan, Croiset consistently gave accurate and detailed descriptions of the people who would be sitting in any given chair. Over the course of 25 years numerous investigators in Europe and America were stunned by Croiset’s accurate predictions including specifics like gender, dress, features, occupation, and personality.

“For instance, on January 6, 1969, in a study conducted by Dr. Jule Eisenbud, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Medical School, Croiset was told that a chair had been chosen for an event that would take place on January 23, 1969.  Croiset, who was in Utrecht, Holland, at the time, told Eisenbud that the person who would sit in the chair would be a man five feet nine inches in height who brushed his black hair straight back, had a gold tooth in his lower jaw, a scar on his big toe, who worked in both science and industry, and sometimes got his lab coat stained by a greenish chemical.  On January 23, 1969, the man who sat down in the chair, which was in an auditorium in Denver, Colorado, fit Croiset’s description in every way but one.  He was not five feet nine, but five feet nine and three-quarters.”  -Michael Talbot, “The Holographic Universe” (207)

Psi-researcher Dean Radin highlighted the interesting case of Anne Ring in his “Entangled Minds” book.  She sent him the following in a letter:  “Many years ago I had a very strange dream concerning my father.  I dreamt that he was decorating the house (the way we do in England – or used to – with paper chains, holly, etc.).  Except the decorations he was using were not the type used for Christmas.  Suddenly he sat down on a chair and collapsed and he died.  I woke up crying so loudly that it woke up my husband.  I looked at the clock and it was exactly 2 a.m. California time.  I told my husband the dream and he just said, ‘Well it’s nothing, you are always having strange dreams, go back to sleep.’  But the dream had disturbed me and it took a long while for me to get back to sleep.   The following morning was Thanksgiving Day and as I was preparing the meal the telephone rang and it was my brother calling from London to say my father had died.  It was a terrible shock because I had seen him in May of that year and he was in robust health (in fact, he had not ever been ill or in hospital in his life).  I asked my brother when it had happened and he replied that our stepmother had just called him and told him it had happened at 10 a.m. London time: The exact moment that I had the dream (2 a.m. California time).  By the way, he was putting up decorations because it was his wedding anniversary to my stepmother and they were going to have a party that night.”

“How shall we interpret this experience?  Is it a poignant coincidence or is it a case of genuine clairvoyance?  This was the one and only time Mrs. Ring ever had a dream like this, and it contained details and timings that matched real-world events.  I’ve been told similar experiences by professors at major universities, by program directors at the NSF, and by generals in the Army.  These are not naïve people prone to fantasy.  They appreciate the difference between meaningless coincidence and genuinely exceptional events.”  -Dean Radin, “Entangled Minds” (105)

The most rigorous scientific study of dream psi ever took place at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York.  Over the course of several years, Psychologists Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner ran hundreds of in-house and at-home dream sessions with thousands of volunteers.  Experiments usually involved trying to predict random images chosen by computer and displayed overnight in a locked room at the dream lab.  Each day volunteers attempted to dream of tomorrow’s picture then recorded their impressions for Ullman and Krippner to cross-check.  In 2003 when British psychologists Simon Sherwood and Chris Roe performed a meta-analysis of all the Maimonides dream psi results they found that the overall hit rate was associated with odds against chance of 22 billion to 1.

“In his work at the Dream laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center, Montague Ullman, along with psychologist Stanley Krippner and researcher Charles Honorton, produced compelling evidence that accurate precognitive information can also be obtained in dreams.  In their study, volunteers were asked to spend eight consecutive nights at the sleep laboratory, and each night they were asked to try to dream about a picture that would be chosen at random the next day and shown to them.  Ullman and his colleagues hoped to get one success out of eight, but found that some subjects could score as many as five ‘hits’ out of eight.  For example, after waking, one volunteer said that he had dreamed of ‘a large concrete building’ from which a ‘patient’ was trying to escape.  The patient had a white coat on like a doctor’s coat and had gotten only ‘as far as the archway.’  The painting chosen at random the next day turned out to be Van Gogh’s Hospital Corridor at St. Remy, a watercolor depicting a lone patient standing at the end of a bleak and massive hallway exiting through a door beneath an archway.”  -Michael Talbot, “The Holographic Universe” (206)

Other evidence such as psychic “forced-choice” experiments also supports the idea that we can see into the future.  These entail having participants guess the outcome of future events with calculable possibilities like what playing card will turn up or what dice number will roll.  In 1989 the Maimonides Center’s Charles Honorton and Diane Ferrari published a meta-analysis of all forced-choice precognition experiments conducted since 1935.  They found 309 studies with 50,000 participants totaling 2 million trials where the time between prediction and event ranged from milliseconds to a year.  The results were surprisingly positive with odds against chance of ten million billion billion to one.

One of the most convincing and astonishing proofs of precognition was discovered when University of Amsterdam’s Dr. Dick Bierman hooked several poker players to electrodermal instruments to test learned responses in gambling addicts.  He found that they all registered rapid changes in electrodermal activity just before being handed their cards.  Not only this but the differences in EDA corresponded with the type of cards being drawn.  When about to receive a bad hand participants showed physiological activity indicating a heightened fight or flight response. When about to receive a favorable hand their EDA calmed towards a relaxation response.  This indicates that on a subconscious physiological level, somehow we already “know” the future. 

Building on Bierman’s work, Dean Radin also hooked volunteers up to electrodermal and other physiological instruments (heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductivity etc.) to test for recordable physical effects of anticipating future stimuli.  In his experiment volunteers would click a mouse button, wait 5 seconds, view a random picture displayed on their monitor for 3 seconds, then watch as the screen went blank for 10 seconds and began again.  The images randomly shown were either tranquil photos such as landscapes and nature scenes or disturbing photos such as autopsies and erotica.

“As expected, the participant’s body would calm down immediately after he or she observed the tranquil scenes, and become aroused after being confronted by the erotic or disturbing.  Naturally, study participants recorded the largest response once they’d seen the photos.  However, what Radin discovered was that his subjects were also anticipating what they were about to see, registering physiological responses before they’d seen the photo.  As if trying to brace themselves, their responses were highest before they saw an image that was disturbing.  Blood pressure would drop in the extremities about a second before the image was flashed.”  -Lynne McTaggart, “The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe,” (169)

“The idea of presentiment assumes that we are constantly and unconsciously scanning our future, and preparing to respond to it.  If this is true, then whenever our future involves an emotional response, we’d predict that our nervous system would become aroused before the emotional picture appears … As expected, skin conductance reacted 2 to 3 seconds after the presentation of an emotional stimulus, and the expected differences between the calm and emotional responses were clearly evident.  But the presentiment effect, which was predicted to occur before the stimulus, was also observed … The skin-conductance levels were virtually identical before the button press, but as soon as the button was pressed they began to diverge in accordance with the future stimulus.”  -Dean Radin, “Entangled Minds” (166-7)

Nobel laureate Kary Mullis had the opportunity to participate in Dean Radin’s presentiment experiment and was quite impressed with the results.  He went on National Public Radio’s May 1999 Science Friday program afterwards stating, “I could see about 3 seconds into the future.  It’s spooky.  You sit there and watch this little trace, and about three seconds, on average, before the picture comes on, you have a little response in your skin conductivity which is in the same direction that a large response occurs after you see the picture.  Some pictures make you have a rise in conductivity, some make you have a fall.  He’s done that over and over again with people.  That, with me, is on the edge of physics itself, with time.  There’s something funny about time that we don’t understand because you shouldn’t be able to do that.”

In 2004 psychophysiologist Rollin McCraty replicated Bierman and Radin’s experiments and published his results in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.  With odds against chance of 1000 to 1 he found that heart rate significantly slowed before future disturbing pictures and that the brain responded differently before the two different types of stimuli. 

“Lest we forget what’s going on in this experiment, it’s useful to be reminded what these results mean: The brains of both men and women were activated in specific areas before erotic pictures appeared, even though no one knew in advance that those pictures were about to be selected.  In other words, the brain is responding to future events.  Given the controversial nature of this claim, Bierman discussed in detail alternative explanations for these results … He concluded that the fMRI results were valid, and in agreement with the other studies based on skin-conductance and heart and brain measures … When you step back from the details of these studies, what you find is a spectacular body of converging evidence indicating that our understanding of time is seriously incomplete.  These studies mean that some aspect of our minds can perceive the future.  Not infer the future, or anticipate the future, or figure out the future.  But actually perceive it.”  -Dean Radin, “Entangled Minds” (179)

In ordinary states of consciousness and without the aid of technology most people are able to remember the past but not the future.  This has led to the philosophical idea of an “arrow of time” shooting from past to future with us riding along the present.  In altered states of consciousness or with the aid of technology, however, many people, myself included, have been able to experience and remember future events in detail.  Perhaps then it is more likely that time, as our ancient ancestors believed, is cyclic and infinite, not straight and finite.  It seems that ultimately, our consciousness exists outside of this time/space/matter explicate hologram and therefore under the right conditions has the ability to access and experience anything in the implicate.  Physicist David Bohm concurred and wrote that, “when people dream of accidents correctly and do not take the plane or ship, it is not the actual future that they were seeing.  It was merely something in the present which is implicate and moving toward making that future.  In fact, the future they saw differed from the actual future because they altered it.  Therefore I think it’s more plausible to say that, if these phenomena exist, there’s an anticipation of the future in the implicate order in the present.  As they used to say, coming events cast their shadows in the present.  Their shadows are being cast deep in the implicate order.”

“Such incidents strongly suggest that the future is not set, but is plastic and can be changed.  But this view also brings with it a problem.  If the future is still in a state of flux, what is Croiset tapping into when he describes the individual who will sit down in a particular chair seventeen days hence?  How can the future both exist and not exist?  Loye provides a possible answer.  He believes that reality is a giant hologram, and in it the past, present, and future are indeed fixed, at least up to a point.  The rub is that it is not the only hologram.  There are many such holographic entities floating in the timeless and spaceless waters of the implicate, jostling and swimming around one another like so many amoebas.  ‘Such holographic entities could also be visualized as parallel worlds, parallel universes,’ says Loye.  Thus, the future of any given holographic universe is predetermined, and when a person has a precognitive glimpse of the future, they are tuning into the future of that particular hologram only.  But like amoebas, these holograms also occasionally swallow and engulf each other, melding and bifurcating like the protoplasmic globs of energy that they really are. Bohm’s and Loye’s descriptions seem to be two different ways of trying to express the same thing – a view of the future as a hologram that is substantive enough for us to perceive it, but malleable enough to be susceptible to change.  Others have used still different words to sum up what appears to be the same basic thought.  Cordero describes the future as a hurricane that is beginning to form and gather momentum, becoming more concrete and unavoidable as it approaches.  Ingo Swann, a gifted psychic who has produced impressive results in various studies, including Puthoff and Targ’s remote-viewing research, speaks of the future as composed of ‘crystallizing possibilities.’  The Hawaiian kahunas, widely esteemed for their precognitive powers, also speak of the future as fluid, but in the process of ‘crystallizing,’ and believe that great world events are crystallized furthest in advance, as are the most important events in a person’s life, such as marriage, accidents, and death.”  -Michael Talbot, “The Holographic Universe” (211-212)

“Time, then, is much like a hologram that already stands complete; it’s a subjective sensory effect of a progressively moving point of view.  There’s no beginning or end to a hologram, it’s already everywhere, complete – in fact, the appearance of being ‘unfinished’ is part of its completeness.  Even the phenomenon of ‘unfoldment’ itself reflects a limited point of view: There is no enfolded and unfolded universe, only a becoming awareness.  Our perception of events happening in time is analogous to a traveler watching the landscape unfold before him.  But to say that the landscape unfolds before the traveler is merely a figure of speech – nothing is actually unfolding; nothing is actually becoming manifest.  There’s only the progression of awareness … In fact, this is a holographic universe.  Each point of view reflects a position that’s defined by the viewer’s unique level of consciousness … A hologram, we might say, is in and of itself a process.  There’s nothing fixed in a three-dimensional hologram.  And what then of a four-dimensional hologram?  It would include all possible instances of itself simultaneously.  To change seems to be to move through time, but if time itself is transcended, then there’s no such thing as sequence.  If all is now, there’s nothing to follow from here to there.”  -David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D., “Power Vs. Force” (232-239)

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