Precognition

No Reader, I take it, has been so naïve as to rush to this article in the hope that I am about to unleash the great secret of (let's use the scientific term) precognition. If I knew how to foretell the future, I would not be writing about it: I would be too busy backing tomorrow's winners. Moreover, if such a secret could be generally imparted, of what use would it be to you? Everybody, including the bookmakers, would know tomorrow's winners. Indeed, there would not be much point in holding the race. No, the gift of accurate prediction is a thing we have to either discover for ourselves (as the Invisible Man discovered invisibility) or dream of having magically conferred on us. Science, which grants no favors, would give the precognitive faculty to the whole world, with the indifference with which it has already given television and transistors and laser beams. It would if it could. Nobody thinks it will: We can leap space miraculously but not time. This is maddening, since time doesn't--in the old priestly argument quoted in one of Graham Greene's novels--seem to have any solidity in it: "The present has no duration, and it comes between the past, which has ceased to exist, and the future, which has not yet started to exist." Yet the tough frosted-glass barrier is there. But, so science seems cautiously to admit, not for everyone. Precognition is a faculty that the superstitious past accepted, the materialistic 19th Century scoffed at and the pragmatic present is working on.

Many already accept two paranormal faculties that Victorian scientists would have derided--ESP, or extrasensory perception, and PK, or psychokinesis. The first is a process whereby thoughts are transferred or facts discovered without the intermediacy of normal devices of communication. The second denotes the influence of the will--human or animal or (if we are to accept poltergeists) disembodied--on objects that it has no normal means of controlling. Gamblers have always tended to believe that the fall of dice or cards could be "willed"; the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory seemed to establish support for such a belief. At the same time, it attested, through laborious experiments, that telepathy and clairvoyance were not to be laughed off as parlor tricks. Many cold-blooded rationalists have been forced to accept ESP and PK, but they draw the line at precognition. Why?

The obvious answer is, in the words of Professor Robert Thouless, that "the future has not yet happened and therefore cannot produce any effects in the present." This formed the basis of the rejection by Dr. Tanagras--the late president of the Greek Society for Psychical Research--of what would, to the man in the street, seem very obvious cases of precognition. There was, for instance, a child living near Athens who claimed to have been visited by an apparition in white who told him that he was going to be killed by an automobile. The child wisely spent most of his time indoors after that. But one day he risked going out to play on the road. He saw a car coming, rushed onto the sidewalk and flattened himself against a wall. The car also mounted the sidewalk and crushed the child. Dr. Tanagras was adamant in refusing to take this as an example of prevision. What happened, instead, he said, was that the child exerted an unconscious PK influence on the brain of the driver and forced him into an accident.

It's possible that Dr. Tanagras was predisposed to accept this kind of human influence on external events--what he called psychoboulia--because he lived in the evil-eye belt. The belief that some human beings have a faculty for nastily and willfully blasting plants, turning milk sour, stopping hens from laying, making people ill, and so on, is commoner in southern Europe than in the dourer latitudes north. Let somebody predict an earthquake and let that prediction come true: Dr. Tanagras would at once have suggested that what the person really did was to cause the earthquake. It's easier to disrupt untold tons of soil and rock with a wanton shaft of the will than to pierce the veil of time. But it's just that metaphor of the veil that Dr. Tanagras would have rejected: The veil hides from us something that's already there, but how can it be already there if it hasn't happened yet? The point is well taken.

And yet it's evident that some things are highly predictable. Meteorologists can forecast tomorrow's weather; a Gallup Poll can give us a fairly reliable indication of how an election will go (though, as recent history teaches, it can also fall down badly); an eclipse of the sun or the moon will come when astronomers say it will. To a great extent, we can prefabricate the future out of the materials of the past. People who accept the philosophy of determinism will say that the end of time was immutably fixed at the beginning of time; that everything has been prearranged, down to the shirt I will wear next Friday; that there are no accidents and no free will. This seems to go too far. We can accept the fact that death from cancer is no accident, since the seeds of the disease have been long planted; that the start of World War Two was implicit in the end of World War One; that miniskirts must be replaced by long skirts. But how about the winners of horse races, air crashes in perfect landing conditions, the need to have a tooth pulled on August second rather than October ninth?

Prophecy is easy with big historical processes. In his poem Locksley Hall, which he published in 1842, Tennyson foresaw commercial aviation, aerial warfare, Communist revolutions and the establishment of the UN (or it might have been the League of Nations). We pretend to be amazed at this, but weren't all these developments implicit in the science and politics of his own age? In his The Shape of Things to Come, H. G. Wells described, ten years before it happened, a war between Germany and the rest of Europe, with the immediate cause of the outbreak the Polish Corridor. Was this so difficult to prophesy? Go back to the Centuries of Nostradamus in 1555 and you will find any prediction you want; almost everything in those gnomic rhymes is so vague. Go back even further, to the Roman poet Virgil, and you will find not only a prediction of the birth of Christ (in the Eclogues) but (in the Aeneid) the very suggestive line "Describunt radio, et surgentia sidera dicunt." This can be taken as forehearing radio commentaries ("They will describe by radio") and communication satellites ("Rising stars will speak"). Desire to break the veil promotes belief that it can be done. In the same way, hindsight turns pure accident into prevision.

I will give a recent example of this. A chartered aircraft crammed with Britishers on holiday crashed in the Balkans: Everybody, crew member and passenger alike, was killed. Now, it happened that a young married couple had booked well ahead for this flight but, at the last moment, had to cancel the booking; the wife had fallen ill with acute gastric pains. To put this down to accident is entirely reasonable. But it was inevitable that the reasonable explanation should be jettisoned; it wasn't glamorous enough. The pains were interpreted as an emanation of foreboding, a miraculous accession of psychic stomachache. How ready we all are to believe this kind of thing; how we loathe reason.

Can anyone blame us? Reason is so dull. The older civilizations reposed trust in soothsayers' prophecies (was that ides-of-March business invented before or after Julius Caesar's assassination?), palpitated as the entrails of animals or flights of birds were divined, made pilgrimages to an imbecilic village girl in a cave and bowed down to her as the sibyl. Were they very much more credulous than our own age? I scoff at the copies of Foulsham's Dream Book and Old Moore's Almanac that are sold, along with stamps and ice cream, in my local post office; but I rather pride myself on my ability to read palms (chiromancy) and tell cards (cartomancy). Moreover, I don't regard this skill as merely something to enliven parties or raise money at charity bazaars. I believe that there may be something in it.

My precognitive pack is the tarot--a large wad consisting of two groups of cards called arcana, or mysteries. The minor group (56 cards, including princes as well as jacks) is the forerunner of the pack we use for card games, with four suits named swords, staves, cups and pentacles. The major group is made up entirely of symbolic pictures--a man hanging by his foot from a tree, a tower being struck by lightning, the dead rising to an archangelic trumpet, the moon dripping blood, a female Pope, a woman leading a lion and other fantasies of cabalistic origin. By arranging patterns from both arcana according to principles laid down in Papus' The Tarot of the Bohemians, it is possible to give generalized but reliable answers to questions about the future. These questions tend to be specialized and conditional: "What will happen to this money if I invest it in IBM?" or "If I marry this man will I be happy?" An answer such as "There may be trouble at first, but things will work out well in the end" is one quite likely to be fulfilled; "in the end" cannot be picked out on any calendar. Questions such as "Who will win the next Presidential election?" or "Give the date of the finish of the Vietnam war" tend to confuse the tarot and make it evasive. I have found it useful chiefly as a decision maker in cases where two possible lines of action have equal merit. But, prone as we all are to look for miracles, there's a tendency for hindsight to credit the tarot with more power than it really possesses. That it possesses some power I cannot doubt, but it's not of the kind that can be tested in a laboratory.

The same may be said of palmistry. It seems possible to read general facts of character, health and fortune from salient lines and bumps on both hands and, while the features of the left hand seem to remain static, those of the right hand appear capable of change. Thus, the chiromancer will, taking the left hand first, tell the subject (who is often a girl and is often giggling) about the formation of health and character and ambition in the past and then, changing to the right hand, say something about what is happening in the present and seems likely to happen in the future. Aware of the austere disciplines of the rigorous parapsychologists, I am shy of recounting some of my successes; but I will give one story. In an English pub one icy January night, I read the right hands of a married couple and found that their lines of life terminated at roughly the same point. The embarrassing thing was that sudden death seemed imminent at the very time of reading, and I told them so. They went out into the night cheerfully enough, got into their car, skidded on the ice, struck a tree and were badly injured. A little more alcohol, a weightier impact, and they could have been killed. Some time after, reading their hands once more, I fancied that the life lines were no longer prematurely truncated; they were growing again. Death had leaped at this couple, failed to engage, then retreated grumbling for an indefinite period.

This is, I know, pure anecdotal stuff, suitable for drinking sessions but not very impressive to the parapsychologist. Where are the before-and-after photographs, the sober tests, the laboratory confirmations? The trouble with these amateur acts of divination is that a desire for wonders is only too ready to help with the falsifying of memory. They are, I know, suspect; but I refuse to reject them entirely. On the other hand, I reject the finding of symbols in tea leaves and thrown apple peel, just as I reject horoscopes and crystal gazing. But dreams are different. Dreams have to be approached with some respect. After all, dreams as acts of precognition have Biblical authority. Joseph took (continued on page 178)Precognition(continued from page 170) Pharaoh's dream of the seven fat and seven lean kine very seriously indeed.

The two great classical writers on the meaning of dreams were Synesius and Artemidorus. In one travestied form or another, their guides to the reading of I dream events and dream symbols have persisted among the superstitious and unlearned for nearly 2000 years. When I was a boy, it was customary for the whole family to consult, after a busy night's dreaming, a popular book based, as I eventually discovered, on the Oneirocritics of Artemidorus. This told us that to dream of a cat meant that an enemy was sharpening his claws, but a dog meant that friends were coming to visit us. A journey meant death; a swarm of bees meant money. Dreams thus represented a series of cryptograms that had to be decoded. The assumption that dreams are symbols rather than pictures of actuality has been in existence a long time--all the dreams in the Old Testament, for example, are symbolic--and dreams are still symbols in psychoanalysis. But in the late 1920s a man came along to demonstrate that dreams could be plain precognitive experiences.

This was J. W. Dunne, who wrote a book called An Experiment with Time. His starting point was a peculiarly vivid dream of his own, which he dreamed miles from anywhere in what was once the Orange Free State of South Africa. The fact of his isolation, the apparent lack of any waking motivation for his dream, must be regarded as important. He seemed to be standing on a hill or mountain with little fissures in its surface, and jets of vapor were spouting upward from these fissures. He became aware that he was on a volcanic island and that it was going to blow up. He knew that there were 4000 inhabitants in peril, and he tried to persuade the authorities to evacuate them before the catastrophe happened. This was the dream.

Some days later, Dunne received a copy of an English newspaper that carried a long report of the explosion of the volcano Mount Pelée on the island of Martinique. The commercial capital of the island, Saint Pierre, was totally destroyed and 40,000 people were killed. Dunne, reading the paper rapidly, mistook the figure 40,000 for 4000 and only saw his mistake when he read the news item again some 15 years later. The point he makes in his book is that his dream was a precognitive dramatization of his reading the paper; his mind had not been transported to the event, only to the experience of taking in a report of the event. He misread a figure in fact; his dream, anticipating this, dramatized the error.

Another of Dunne's dreams found him on a path between two fields that were fenced off by high iron railings. In the field on his left, a solitary horse seemed to have gone berserk, but the railings prevented its getting out and attacking the dreamer. But then, in the manner of dreams, the horse made an inexplicable escape and pursued Dunne down the path at high speed. Dunne ran madly toward a flight of wooden steps rising from the path, and then, on a cliff-hanger, the dream ended. The following day, Dunne went fishing with his brother. While they were casting their lines in the river, Dunne's brother pointed out the erratic behavior of a solitary horse in a field. Everything was much as in the dream--fences, path, even wooden steps--but Dunne, after recounting the dream to his brother, thought he was safe in saying: "At any rate, this horse cannot get out." Nevertheless, as inexplicably as in the dream, it did. It galloped down the path toward the wooden steps and then made savagely for the Dunne brothers. They were, naturally, frightened. But at the last moment, the horse decided not to attack them; it merely snorted and thundered off down the road.

These two dreams are Dunne's most impressive examples of alleged precognition. Encouraged by them, he began to record all his dreams immediately on waking and then to look for evidence that they were composed of future as well as past events. Naturally, he was anxious to confirm his theory that dreams have precognitive power, and it was inevitable that he should discount coincidence, the similarity of past and future experience, the tendency of the mind--quite unintentionally--to reshape memory to its own ends. We have all, I think, had dreams like Dunne's, but we have rarely had enough of them to make us want to shrug off the shrugging-off word coincidence.

On the night of November 20, 1963, I was in a hotel room in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Reading the Spanish epic of the Cid before sleep, I was struck, by the line "Assis, parten unos d'otros, commo la uña de la came." The Cid is leaving his wife and daughters: "They part from each other as the nail parts from the flesh." When I went to sleep, I dreamed about this line; it found visual expression in a vivid image of a public man being torn from his wife by killers. I was aware that the wife's name began with J and that the husband, just before his assassination, was greeted by a cheering crowd as "Kid." No trouble there: "Kid" was a facetious Anglicization of "Cid," and the wife of El Cid was Doña Jimena. When I got back to England a couple of days later, I at once switched the television on and immediately got the shocking news from Dallas. I remembered the dream, wondered about it, but had to conclude that it was not really precognitive. It could be explained entirely in terms of my reading.

This, I recognize, is the moment to introduce the name of Jeane Dixon, who claimed not only the glum privilege of having foreseen that ghastly event (not in a dream, either; it was over eggs Florentine in a Washington restaurant) but also a generalized ability to predict earth-shaking events. I've read Ruth Montgomery's popular book about her--A Gift of Prophecy--and have been put off by the saccharine religiosity of Mrs. Dixon's ambiance, as well as by the melodramatic Montgomery prose. There are more things in heaven and earth--I know, I know, but my taste goes for the scientific test, the cold, indisputable record. I fear that hindsight, especially when clouded with powerful emotion, too often sees what it wants to see. I'm not imputing insincerity to Mrs. Dixon's high-placed admirers, but I am suggesting overmuch credulity. Besides, a lot of her predictions were pretty safe: "The years between 1964 and 1967 are a period of great national peril"--so they were; what years aren't, weren't, won't be? Both the Pope and Lyndon B. Johnson were, said Mrs. Dixon, "vulnerable to great personal danger." Who isn't in these violent days? I find something ludicrous also in the elephant and donkey trumpeting and braying in Mrs. Dixon's crystal ball, as though the American political emblems were a pair of eternal constellations. Her political prophecies have the shrillness of cheap journalism. They cry out to be ignored, even when they prove accurate. No, I'm not convinced by Mrs. Dixon. She seems to belong to a remote age of superstition, in which gullibility is elevated far above decent human skepticism. And now let me get back to dreams.

I'm the less anxious to accept visions that appear to foretell American tragedies because of the results of an investigation carried out in March 1932. The Lindbergh baby had just been kidnaped and, before the body was found, a team of parapsychologists put advertisements in the newspapers asking for dreams about the kidnaping. There were over 1300 replies. When the body was discovered--naked, mutilated, in a shallow grave in a wood off a road--the dreams were carefully compared with the facts. Only seven dreams gave the location in a wood, the nakedness, the manner of the burial; and of the seven, only the following came close to the reported reality:

I thought I was standing or walking in a very muddy place among trees. One spot looked as though it might be a round shallow grave. Just then I heard a voice saying, "The baby has been murdered and buried there." I was so frightened that I immediately awoke.

Out of 1300 dreams, this doesn't represent much of a score. It's this sort of census that tends to kill stone-dead our interest in the subject of dream precognition.

But J. W. Dunne's enthusiasm waxed and eventually led to a time philosophy that had a considerable influence on certain British writers in the Thirties. J. B. Priestley, for instance, presented in three stage plays a view of time as a simultaneous continuum; and this--because it entertained and contained no mathematics--did much to popularize Dunne's theories of serialism. Briefly, the idea was this: Time is not a single dimension but a series of dimensions--t1, t2, t3, and so on. Habit conditions us to remain on one dimension of time. But if we climb off it onto another dimension, we can look down on the whole stretch of the one we have quitted, seeing past, present and future as a single landscape. The spatial metaphor is convenient. Dunne suggested that our traditional approach to time is that of a man rowing a boat down a river. He moves forward looking back. He sees where he has come from but cannot, because of his propulsive technique, see where he is going. Change the boat for an aircraft and the entire river of time is laid out, simultaneously, below him. We have to discard old time-traveling habits, along with old spatial ones. Dreams, which are free from the restrictions of conscious thought, seem to show us the way.

Many of us will still feel inclined, despite Dunne's persuasive mathematics, to object with Dr. Tanagras that we can't see what hasn't yet happened. But theologians counter the objection by telling us that, if God is omniscient, God knew all about Genghis Khan, Shakespeare, Beethoven, the Lindbergh tragedy, the Second World War, the rise and fall of the Beatles, the Kennedy assassination, the marriage of his widow to Onassis, the Nixon-Red China entente, even the worn keys of this typewriter long before He made Adam and Eve. But how about free will, the power of human choice? This presumably means that God knows all the numerous alternatives that face us when we contemplate action, but He doesn't force us to choose one rather than another; divine foreknowledge doesn't mean divine tampering. On the other hand, our individual natures compel us to take one course rather than another, and God knows all about our individual natures. It's possible, then, that the whole pattern of each individual life has long been set down as a kind of orchestral score; what we have to do is to conduct it. This gives us plenty of scope with regard to tempo and expression, but the work remains the work.

We needn't, of course, bring God into this at all. A strong smell of determinism comes from the physicist-astronomers, who tell us that our world is exactly reproduced in other galaxies and that the score has, perhaps, long been played there and long forgotten, or that the concert has not yet even been announced. So the future may, as Dunne argues, be simultaneous with the present and the past. Precognition is all too possible; or, rather, precognition does not really apply: To see the future may be like seeing through a closed door--an act of here-and-now clairvoyance--or it may be an act of memory. How about déjà vu, the feeling of "I've been here before"? If you seem to recognize the present as a kind of past, that means you once knew the present as a kind of future--perhaps in a subconsciously remembered dream.

The professional parapsychologists are taking precognition as seriously as ESP or PK (except, of course, in the evil-eye regions); but they are not yet inclined to pay much attention to dreams, waking visions or the ambiguous noises made by oracles. These things are too subjective, too easily revised by a failure of memory or gilded by prejudice. Laboratory work is undramatic and plodding; it has to be. But it is so hedged about by antihuman-error devices that its findings are believed to be totally reliable. There is no room for the skepticism proper to a vaudeville performance by the Great Madam Zaza. Let us take a lady with a less glamorous name but a better precognitive record--a certain Miss Johnson.

Miss Johnson was the chief experimental subject of Professor G. N. M. Tyrrell. To test her predictive powers, he contrived an apparatus consisting of five boxes with lids, each containing a small electric lamp. Miss Johnson sat in front of these boxes, cut off from view by a large screen. Wires ran from the five lamps to five switches on Professor Tyrrell's desk. The object of the exercise was to see if Miss Johnson could predict--half a second before the depressing of the key--which lamp would light. A buzzer sounded, Miss Johnson lifted the lid of the box that she thought would be illuminated, then Professor Tyrrell worked a random switch. The opening of the box automatically drew a line on paper. A successful choice produced a double line. There was a commutator in the electrical circuit that kept changing the connections between switches and lamps; Professor Tyrrell never knew which lamp he was going to light. Miss Johnson opened a total of 2255 boxes. Chance guessing at the right result would have given her 451 hits (a fifth of the number of trials); in fact, she got 88 more than that--539. The odds against this happening are 270,000 to 1.

The British mathematician S. G. Soal used ESP cards--25 to a pack, divided into five sets of symbols: square, circle, star, cross and waves. He was skeptical about obtaining results that should indicate the possibility of precognition and, indeed, a number of years' experimentation confirmed his skepticism. But he heard about what are called "displacement effects" and began to look back over his data. The displacement doctrine teaches that, in a straightforward ESP guessing session, a subject aiming for the target card will sometimes miss it and choose the card immediately preceding or following. Basil Shackleton, one of Soal's star subjects, was found to "displace" his guesses pretty consistently: He found it easier to guess the next card than to guess the immediate target one. When the dealing of the cards was speeded up, Shackleton shifted his displacement a couple of cards ahead; it was as though his mind had established a rigid time relation. In 794 calls, he made 236 hits, against a mean chance expectation of 158.8. The odds against this happening are about 100,000 to 1.

These experiments have been so sealed off from the possibility of collusion, human error, even ordinary clairvoyance (which deals only in the here and now), that we're bound to conclude that precognition seems a proven fact. The examples I've given may seem tame: There's no prediction beyond a second or so; there's no spectacular foretelling of a 100-to-1 winner in the next race. Yet the very pedestrian quality is more convincing than wide-screen Technicolor stuff. Where do we go from here? We can perhaps look with a more credulous eye on our own apparent bouts of prevision or nod more at other people's stories of how they were warned in dreams not to settle at Pearl Harbor in 1941. But we ought really to be led to a greater stringency in selecting the true precognition from the phony, knowing that people lie without knowing it and that hearsay is not evidence. Apparently, the Miss Johnson and Basil Shackleton of the laboratory experiments are people genuinely endowed with an exceptional ability for seeing ahead. Other people who claim such gifts should be believed only when they have submitted to a similar dull treadmill of tests. That sounds repressive and spoilsport, but is there any other way?

The trouble with most of us is that, in wanting to be previsionaries, we're not concerned with widening the boundaries of psychological knowledge; what is it to us if we score 236 out of 794 in a card test? What we want is a gift that will manifest itself consistently in everyday life--to our own advantage, not the advantage of science. If we're not born with the gift, how can we learn to acquire it? There seems to be no easy way. Psychodelic drugs (allow me to be pedantic: "Psychedelic" is an impossible spelling) are supposed to open up the mind, but they certainly don't open up the future. Instead of lifting you above time, enabling you to look down on it from a pressurized cabin, they just wipe out time altogether. Concentration of the mind is probably needed--as in ESP and PK. Dissolution may let The Ground of All Being in, but not the name of your next President.

A lighthearted novel by Robert Graves --Antigua Penny Puce--lightheartedly suggests one precognitive technique that I myself have used with modest success. I mean, of course, in connection with the horses. You dose your eyes and imagine the sporting pages in tomorrow's newspaper. First of all, practice on today's, looking at it often and imprinting its appearance on your inward eye. Then, having established its general format, change its date to tomorrow's: See the date at the top of the page. Then catch the rest of the sports news off its guard. Move your visionary eye down and read tomorrow's headlines. There, naturally, you will find tomorrow's winners. The names may be somewhat garbled, but you can check them with today's list of runners. Now call your bookmaker, put your money on and await the result with confidence. I know no other way of achieving success on the horses.

As for the other things in life, leave those to the great organs of prediction--the meteorological offices, the economic bureaus, the computerized pollsters, the historiographers. Inference from the past is as good a way as any of getting at the future, and the techniques of inference are growing better every day. The unpredictable things are best left unpredictable. Women, for instance. Whether you're going to die tomorrow. You may take it from me that precognition is a known fact--call Durham, North Carolina, and have a chat with the people at the Psychical Research Foundation, if you're still incredulous, and then sit back and let the future do its own veil-breaking job. It's only a matter of waiting.