Eric Wargo explores how precognitive dreams, from Freud's 1923 "Irma" dream predicting his oral cancer to Toby Wattery's 2018 vision of a murder ten years later, challenge linear time. Citing Daryl Bem's controversial research and the "block universe" model where past, present, and future coexist, he argues that ambitious goals may stem from retrocausal influences rather than forward momentum. Ultimately, the discussion suggests that phenomena like remote viewing and quantum entanglement imply free will is an illusion, as human actions are shaped by future outcomes traveling backward through time. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Jacques Valet and UFO Reports00:06:27
What's up, Eric Wargo?
I'm just glad to be here.
Good.
I'm glad to have you.
Excited.
I'm ready to talk about time travel.
How did you get interested in time travel and this idea of nonlinear time?
And by the way, your book, Time Loops, is amazing.
And it's linked below for people who want to go check it out on Amazon.
Cool.
Yeah.
How did I get interested in it?
It's a long, it's a loopy story, actually.
And actually, it begins with a UFO sighting.
Oh, wow.
Perfect.
Yeah.
That's it's these topics, you know, they all touch and contact in some way, as my friend Jeffrey Kripel always emphasizes.
I know you had him on the show.
Yes.
Yes.
So, yeah, this was in 2009.
Well, let me back up a little bit.
I mean, I'd, I'd always had esoteric interests and I'd, you know, I at that point I think I was sort of into Carl Jung and stuff like that.
But uh, in 2009, I saw a Ufo over the Philadelphia Art Museum.
Uh, oddly enough, on july 4th in the evening, before the fireworks had started uh, and it wasn't anything up close and personal, it was just some like orange orbs sort of dancing in the sky.
It was just very weird, and I tried to film it with a flip cam one of those flip cams that they used to sell, uh and it didn't come out.
But you know, it was like what the?
You know, I don't know if I can swear on you.
Yeah, you can say what the.
And the next day I got online and saw that there were like reports, people who saw the same thing in the same part of the country that night.
And so I made a report to MUFON and all that.
And like at that point, I didn't really know much about the UFO topic.
So I started, you know, started reading about it.
You know, I thought, wow, this is really interesting.
And it didn't, I had no idea that there were like serious people who actually study UFOs, you know, but.
I quickly discovered names like Richard Dolan and read his books.
And of course, you discover Jacques Valet when you start going down this path.
And I was like writing.
Oh, yeah.
He's like the godfather of UFOs.
And I was like, right.
I had a blog at that point, but it didn't really have much focus.
And I started writing about UFOs.
And at that point, like any newbie, I thought, oh, it's extraterrestrials and stuff.
But you start to read these intelligent. writers on the topic of ufology and especially Jacques Valet and you realize that this topic, you know, the topic of psychic phenomena comes up a lot.
Now, I was a scientifically trained person.
I have a degree in anthropology and my parents were psychologists and I sort of grew up with the sciences and I didn't really have any problem with UFOs, but I had a big problem with ESP.
Okay, like for scientists and especially psychologists, scientific psychologists are incredibly hostile to the idea of psychic phenomena of any kind.
They just think it's pseudoscience.
And that was my assumption at that point.
So I'm having a bit of cognitive dissonance, honestly.
I'm reading this very intelligent literature on UFOs and by very smart people and scientists like Jacques Valet who are also saying, look, there's people who experience UFO encounters.
They have precognitive dreams.
There's these psychic phenomena too that you have to take seriously.
You know, he was also a part of that Stanford Research Institute work on remote viewing.
And he was kind of jacques was?
He was not directly part of it, but he was friends with the his office was like one floor up, I think, from the office of Hal Putoff and those people who were studying ESP and remote viewing.
So, you know, he knew all those guys and they all hung out together and shared ideas.
And so he became kind of informally a part of that.
And he was friends with Ingo Swan and Ingo Swan trained him in remote viewing.
Anyway, so he was writing about these topics as well as UFOs.
And like I said, this was like real cognitive dissonance for me.
I didn't know anything about the ESP research.
But I felt I had to do my due diligence in sort of going down that rabbit hole.
What's really going on here?
And is there anything to this subject?
And quickly discovered that there was a lot.
There's a century's worth. almost now of solid scientific laboratory research showing the reality of ESP phenomena.
Oh, laboratory research?
Laboratory research.
And especially precognition research.
Now, so I was immersed in all this stuff.
And then in 2011, a paper.
So, okay, I was working as an editorial director for a scientific psychology organization in Washington, D.C.
And this paper crossed my desk, which was like a draft of a paper that our rival psychology organization was about to publish.
And this was by an eminent personality psychologist named Daryl Bem.
I don't know if you've heard his name, but he was a very prominent guy in the field of psychology, very well respected.
But he had spent like 10 years basically.
In the early 2000s, running a series of big experiments on precognition, or specifically what he called and what the field calls pre sentiment.
That's the idea of responding or pre spawning to something that's about to happen, okay, or to some stimulus that's about to occur.
The Precognitive Dream Experiment00:15:34
And what he did was he put large, he would, these were big studies.
He wanted this to be.
You know, he wanted to have enough people that there would be statistical significance in these studies.
And they were relatively simple like paradigms because he wanted other laboratories to be able to replicate these things.
But so what he'd do was he would put Cornell University undergraduates in these typical psychology type experiments, but where he'd invert the order of stimulus and response.
So in his most famous experiment, he had Like a student sit in front of a computer screen and try to guess which of two curtains on the screen had a picture behind it.
Okay.
Now, it was randomly determined after the mouse, after they would make their mouse click, which curtain had the picture.
So there wasn't actually already a picture behind the curtains.
But anyway, now you'd think that they would be accurate 50% of the time, which is exactly what he found when the picture that would be revealed was boring.
Okay, just a boring like beach scene or something like that.
But when the picture was erotic, okay, they were accurate more than 50%, which meant that somehow, you know, there was a reward there, and they were pre-spawning to that reward by picking the curtain with the erotic picture more than they should have been able to do.
Okay, and this is mind-blowing.
So they knew that the picture was going to be erotic?
They didn't know, but they're guessing, and they think that they're just guessing randomly, but somehow they had a hunch that the picture would be behind, you know, a certain curtain.
Okay, so that was his most.
Famous finding and he actually did multiple experiments, variations of these, these things.
There was another one, um uh, where he gave students a word list.
All right, this was a tip.
This is a typical kind of a typical kind of memory experiment.
You might give uh participants a word list and then give them a second like refresher on certain of those words and then test them okay and see which words they remember all right.
Or they'll try to ask them like, well, what are the words that you saw on that list?
And they would, you know, they'd be more accurate with the words that they got a refresher on.
Or I'm not saying typically it wouldn't be a refresher.
They'd do some other kind of task in which they were kind of subliminally primed with certain of those words.
And anyway, they would pick out those words more than they would on the other words.
Okay, well, he reversed that.
So he gave the participants a word list and then he tested them.
He said, now, can you please tell me the words you saw on that list that we showed you a half hour ago or whatever?
And then after the test, he would give them a refresher on certain of those words.
And again, they did better on the words that they got the refresher on later.
Whoa.
Yeah.
So he called this retroactive facilitation of recall is the word that he used for this.
Anyway, so he took a lot of basic psychology paradigms, but just flipped them in that way.
And he got statistically significant. results in I think eight of the nine experiments.
So this was like, like what, again, what the is going on here?
So he submitted this to a major journal and it went through peer review.
Peer review could not find a problem with it, but the editors attached a note saying, we have a responsibility to publish this because it went through peer review, but we can't explain this.
It goes against all of our beliefs and so on.
So they even had to attach a disclaimer essentially to this article.
Wow.
All right.
Anyway, this, this, it's, where was it?
Was it published on it in a journal or something?
Yeah.
The journal of, I'm, I'm forgetting the name of the journal.
It's like one of the top ranked journals.
Really?
In psychology.
How could we search it?
Just type in feeling the future.
Feeling the future.
Yeah.
Daryl Bem, B-E-M is his, his last name, feeling the future.
It's very famous now.
Okay.
And, and of course, there's like a million people trying to debunk it.
You know, if you go on Wikipedia, there, it's like, you know, there's, there are cadres of people who just debunk, you know, controversial.
Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and effect.
Wow.
I have something else here that's like, it's like a.
Oh, this is him, Daryl.
This is the same.
Yeah.
It's like, this is a list of a whole bunch of like top like 90 articles and Daryl's is one of them.
What was the year again that it was published?
This is 2011.
2011.
And then he subsequently, with some colleagues, published.
a kind of meta-analysis of a bunch of other laboratories that then who had mostly replicated his findings.
So like something like 80 or 90 separate replications, most of which got the results he got.
And anyway, so this is just one corner of the topic of precognition that I have since immersed myself in for the last decade and a half.
Have there been any other studies done since then?
Yeah, there's a lot of people are doing this work around the world.
No, I won't say a lot.
Some people have.
There are a few handful of researchers in neuroscience that are open-minded enough to study this stuff, but no one can get the funding necessarily that's necessary to do a big major study on this because no one in the big funding institutes are going to take it seriously at this point because there's so much resistance to this.
Topic.
Like you know, you find that with any paranormal topic, you know we're, I think things, I hope things are going to change.
Uh, because I think honestly, I think the way the UFO topic has opened up in the last few years, I think this may help some of these other topics now I honestly have come to believe that there's no intrinsic connection between Ufos and uh uh uh, you know, esp necessarily, but uh, the fact that all these things are sort of stigmatized in the same way and kind of get lumped together under the heading of the paranormal,
you know, helps.
I think what's happening in the UFO scene right now hopefully will kind of help move things in the realm of ESP research.
So, but okay, so that's part of the story.
In the end, I'm not honestly that interested in the scientific research because, again, right now it's like little studies and it's easy to dismiss them.
Yeah.
But, you know, one thing if you start reading about precognition at all, you realize that most people experience this in dreams.
All right.
A lot of interesting things have been written over the last century about precognitive dreams.
The first was an aviation engineer in the very early years of flight in England.
It was a guy named J.W. Dunn, John William Dunn.
He had had precognitive dreams since childhood.
He was fascinated by this topic.
He sort of brought his engineer's mind to thinking about how it worked.
And he early on figured out that if he was going to study this, he had to A, be diligent about recording his dreams and then really trying to figure out what was going on with these dreams where, you know, he would have a dream like one night and then two days later, the thing he dreamed would in some way come true.
And so he worked on this problem sort of as a sideline to his main work in aeronautical engineering for, you know, a couple decades and published A book in 1927 called An Experiment with Time.
And this book is fascinating.
The first half of it is just tons of examples of his own precognitive dreams.
Here's the dream, and here's what happened two days later, or here's what I read in the newspaper three days later.
I mean, most of his dreams turned out to be about things he was going to read in the media.
And then the second half of the book, most people don't even read the second half because it's kind of this he goes into theories of.
Of time and developed his own theory of time based on Einstein and stuff like that.
It's very complicated, and that's it.
That's the book.
That's the book.
I'm going to experiment with time.
Yep.
But it was a really compelling book, and it was actually super influential on writers and intellectuals in the sort of middle years of the century.
You said it was in the 20s?
Yeah, 27.
Published in 27, then it went through a lot of reprintings over the next decade or so.
And a lot of writers of the time like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, nobody knows that.
I mean, J.R.R. Tolkien was super influenced by this book on precognitive dreams and the nonlinear nature of time.
Yeah, in fact, the elven races in Tolkien's stories, he developed this whole kind of way in which the elves live in this kind of nonlinear Time.
It was all based on this book about precognitive dreams by J.W. Dunn.
T.S. L. The elves.
Tolkien's novels are all about elves.
Oh, they're all about elves.
The elves are like these immortals that inhabit Middle Earth.
Because they're immortal, they have this totally different sense of time than humans do, and they live sort of outside of time.
That sounds fascinating.
Yeah, I mean, his works are amazing.
But it was based, you know, this aspect of their culture in Tolkien's writings was based on this theory of precognition and precognitive dreams that Dunn came up with.
T.S. Eliot is another one who was very influenced by Dunn.
Vladimir Nabokov is another one.
In fact, Vladimir Nabokov.
Okay, let me say.
Dunn.
Is that a filmmaker?
No, the novelist.
Oh, okay.
Russian-American novelist.
Oh, okay.
Gotcha, gotcha.
This book, An Experiment with Time, was kind of an early example of citizen science, okay, because he was saying, look, this happens in my dreams.
It happens in the dreams of the people I know, but try it yourself.
The only way we're going to know if this is real is if you can find it happening in your own life.
He had a few sort of recommendations for readers to how to record their dreams and look for examples of precognition in them.
He was inviting people to do this.
Vladimir Nabokov, I guess in the 50s, came across Dunn's book and tried it.
He got positive results.
He tried it for a month and he got several dreams that were very exactly about things he would see on TV the next day.
Now, Nabokov was already interested in precognition because he had had an incredible precognitive dream.
I'll just tell you about that.
The dream actually was when he was, I think, 17. in Russia outside St. Petersburg.
And his uncle Vasily died.
And this was a wealthy family.
And Vasily left him.
He's like 17.
And his uncle leaves him this huge estate outside of St. Petersburg.
So suddenly this 17 year old poet, and he's butterfly collector and stuff, he's suddenly a rich man, a really rich man.
He's set for life.
He's got this estate.
Everything okay.
Well, a year later, all that is washed away by the Russian revolution.
Okay, it's like the, all the, the elite, the titled elite in Russia are sent into exile and their wealth is confiscated and whatnot.
So his family had to emigrate.
Um, but around this time he had a dream.
His uncle Vassili, his dead uncle Vassili, appears to him in this dream and says, I will return to you as Harry and Kuvirkin.
Harry and Kuvirkin.
Okay, well, whatever.
What does that dream mean?
Who knows?
Okay, he interpreted those names as circus performers.
Kuvirok in Russian means somersault.
So he somehow associated these with circus performers, but he didn't know what it meant.
Anyway, okay, so fast forward, I think, my math may be off, like more than 40 years, I believe.
And he's now living as a english professor at Cornell University, not a rich man, making a modest living as an English professor and novelist.
He's just written I'm going to have to adjust this.
Yeah, yeah.
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He has just written his novel Lolita, his most famous novel.
And he suddenly gets word.
In fact, I think he reads – oh yeah, a friend calls him up, a fellow professor calls him up and he says, have you read the New York Times today?
And there's an article in the New York Times that – or maybe it's not the New York Times, but in some paper, there's an article that Harris and Kubrick pictures That's Stanley Kubrick's production company has just purchased the rights to Lolita for this like massive sum.
It was like $150,000 at that point, which was in today's money would be huge.
And so he basically learned that he was now a rich man.
Reaching Into the Future00:07:08
And indeed, Vasily, his wealthy benefactor, had come back to him as Harry and Kuvierkin.
Kuvierkin, if it's anglicized, would be Kubrick.
Really?
Yeah.
So, but it sounds amazing, but this happens all the time.
There's so many, so many, so many examples of this.
And if you do what I call precognitive dream work, We can talk about that a little bit if you want.
It's essentially a variant of what J.W. Dunn recommended.
So, J.W. Dunn, he came up with a protocol.
So, you could have precognitive dreams.
Now, not all dreams are precognitive, though.
Well, let's talk about that.
He came up with a protocol not to have precognitive dreams, but to notice precognitive dreams.
His presumption, and it's one that I agree with. is that first of all, we're all dreaming all through the night.
We have and they flow one to the other, so it's hard to say how many people have tried to quantify how many dreams you have in a night, but you're dreaming throughout the night, not just in the REM sleep periods, but even in the deeper non-REM sleep periods, you are dreaming.
And we can talk about what contemporary sleep scientists say about dreams and what their function is and so on.
But his argument was that, Dunn's argument was that, well, dreams are reaching into the future, reaching into our future as well as into our past, reaching into our memories and reaching into the future somehow to create these dream scenes.
Now, this was a time when Sigmund Freud was very influential.
Everyone was, well, not everyone, but his ideas about dreams that he had written about right at the turn of the century were that dreams were the disguised, the symbolically disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes.
That's Freud's dream theory in a nutshell.
So J.W. Dumm sort of fit his theory into Freud's by saying, well, Freud would say that we're reaching into our past.
I mean, our dreams are full of things from our past, basically, but jumbled up and rearranged.
Freud would say that we are expressing our repressed wishes in this disguised fashion using these symbols and using things drawn from our past memories but juxtaposed in new ways.
Dunn accepted that basic thesis but said, well, instead of just reaching to our past, they're reaching into our future.
And so some of the things that happen in our dreams are actually things that haven't happened to us yet.
I lost my train of thought.
So Freud's basic idea was that dreams were wishes of the subconscious mind, or desires that we're not aware of consciously, but that exist deep down within us.
Yes.
And Dunn kind of took this and said, this somehow has to do with the future.
How does it have to do?
What is it?
from events that are happening in our future as well as the past.
the past.
Now, we can move beyond that and say that I think that he kind of got it backwards.
What I argue in my book on dreams and in my first book, Timelapse, is that in fact, Freud was wrong about the function of dreams, that they don't have to do with repressed wishes, that the function really is precognition,
that we are reaching into our future and it's helping as a guidance system to the individual and that we're using Materials from our past to help represent those future thoughts and future experiences.
We're using experiences from our past.
Memories.
Memories from our past to process things, events that are going to happen.
To represent, like, imagine a dream is like a little diorama or like a little tableau or whatever.
And you take this old friend and this old co worker and your mom and stuff like that and put them together.
together like little action figures and like a tableau and make them do things, you know, that story of the dream.
Freud said it was a repressed wish that you're acting out.
I'm suggesting that it's taking the, that it's, it's acting out thoughts, important thoughts, important realizations, important experiences in your future is what those memories are helping represent in your dreams.
That's wild.
But when you start, First of all, the because I've had some crazy dreams that I hope never happen.
Well, of course, yeah, this is a whole, this is its whole topic.
People who start going down the top, the rabbit hole of precognitive dreams, there's a fear component there because everybody has negative dreams and dreams about awful things happening to yourself or to your kids or whatever.
And they go, oh my God, I hope that's not a precognitive dream.
I'll say right off the top that most, you know, dreams do not come true literally.
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Video Quality Precognition00:14:58
Okay.
These are, again, they're symbolic, mostly symbolic representations of things that are going to happen.
Like even in Nabokov's case, this was not a literal dream of him getting a $150,000 check from Stanley Kubrick.
It was a dream of, you know, Harry, of his uncle Vasily, this rich man, you know, who had died, you know, decades earlier, returning to him as circus performers.
You could, you know, that's, there was no movie industry at the time that he had the dream, you know, circus performers, that's the nearest thing to movie industry executives, you know, or people in the movie industry.
And named, you know, Harry and Kuvirkin, again, which is, you know, incredibly close to Harris and Kubrick.
And in fact, Kuvirkin is Kubrick in English.
It's like the right.
Yeah.
But that's an example of how dreams, they symbolically represent events in your future.
But there are exceptions.
There are exceptions that are what I call video quality, precognitive dreams of something that will happen in the next day or two or years sometimes.
But most of them are symbolically twisted, distorted.
But that makes the topic easy to debunk or easier for debunkers and skeptics to say, oh, how can you prove that this dream is about this event or whatever?
And dreams are often very hard to remember.
Yeah.
Right?
It makes me wonder, is that the fact that dreams are often very hard to remember unless you really focus hard right after you wake up or unless it's a really vivid dream that's unforgettable?
I wonder, is that by design?
that we can't, that there's a barrier there to us accessing our dreams after we're conscious?
No, I don't think there's a barrier, but that's a great question.
And it's kind of one of the big ironies of dreaming, because if you ask any modern or most modern dream researchers, the consensus that has sort of formed around dreaming and why we dream is that dreams are making new memories.
The idea is that they take daily experience that is held in short-term memory.
And then at night during REM, especially, but during other modes of sleep, that stuff in short-term memory is getting shunted into long-term memory.
Ah.
Like backing up your hard drive.
Backing up your hard drive.
Well, not just backing up.
You're sort of creating, you know, you're sort of cleaning out your, I don't know what the word is in your RAM.
Your RAM?
Maybe, yeah.
Okay.
Right.
And you're moving.
Your desktop.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you're moving that into the longer-term storage.
Okay.
All right.
That's the basic idea.
I basically agree with that.
I think that dreams are making new memories.
I just think that they're making memories based on future experiences as well as past experiences, not just past experiences.
So that night in REM, we are mashing up things that happened yesterday with things that are happening tomorrow.
Because that idea is so impossible seeming or counterintuitive, that nobody even pays attention to that idea.
When you start doing precognitive dream work, you start noticing, oh, fuck, I'm having, I'm, you know, not necessarily every night, but I'm able to identify all these elements in my dream that crop up in the next day or two.
And, you know, this is happening all the time and we're just not attuned to it.
If you don't have a concept of precognition or any idea that time may not be as simple as we've been led to believe since the Enlightenment, you just won't even look for it.
So what is this protocol that Dunn came up with to recognize or to do this dream work?
His protocol boils down to two steps, and that is record your dreams, record all of them in a dated journal in detail.
Anyone who's interested in dreams, whether they're interested in Freudian or Jungian or there's all kinds of ways of approaching your dreams, a lot of metaphysical approaches to dream interpretation, anyone's going to say you have to record your dreams.
I mean, if you're interested in dreams, you've got to record them.
That's number one.
But his second step, and it's actually my third step, I add a new step in the middle, but his second step is every, okay, so write your dreams down in the morning and then set them aside.
Then at the end of every day, go back and look at your dream, your dreams from that morning and the previous couple mornings.
And just reflect on like any similarities that you notice between the events that intervened, you know, over the course of the few days during waking life and what you recorded in your dreams.
Now, he was living in a day, in a time before there was computers and hard drives and you know, one's written records of dreams would quickly be too massive to like deal with.
I mean, you can't compare every dream, every experience you've had in your life to every dream you've had over the course of your life.
So he recommended just tossing out your dream records after a couple days.
So like, just just look at the last few days, you know um, nowadays it's it's easier to keep longer term dream records.
You can keep in a searchable, like I i've kept, you know, dream journals for decades, long before I even knew about precognition.
You can search them on a hard drive or whatever.
This is the other aspect getting back to the biographical thing of how I got interested in this.
Around the time I was reading Bam and Dunn and so on, I was realizing, oh, I've had these dreams before.
I had a dream the night before 9-11.
You did?
Yeah.
I had other dreams that were just stunningly what I dreamed about or some variant of it would happen the next day.
What was your dream before 9-11?
Yeah, so I dreamed on the morning of 9-11.
This would have been about three hours before the events.
It was one of my last dreams before waking up.
And those are typically the ones that are easiest to remember.
Those are the ones.
If you remember any dreams at all, you're going to remember the last dream you had before you.
Because you're kind of awake.
Yeah, you're kind of semi-awake.
So the dream was this, and it's not on the surface going to sound that compelling, but just wait.
I was driving down a certain street in my hometown in Lakewood, Colorado.
It's a suburb of Denver.
And I was living at that point, I had just moved a week before to Vienna, Virginia, which is right outside of Washington, D.C.
Okay.
But dreamed about this street near my where I grew up.
And on this certain part of the street, I drove past two identical, identical buildings with corrugated facades, like gray corrugated facades.
And somehow these buildings were mosques.
Now, I'd never in I'd never once dreamed about anything to do with Islam or.
Mosques or whatever.
But I dreamed about these two identical corrugated facade, very square a pair of them okay, that were mosques, all right, and drove past them okay, and I got up and I wrote this dream down.
It's like, doesn't seem very remarkable, they weren't tall towers, they were, but they were squat, very square a pair of them, and they had that kind of.
In fact, I think I wrote down that they looked like corduroy, kind of gray corduroy yeah anyway okay, so you know, the events of 9-11 happened, didn't ever didn't even think about this dream until the next day I looked at my dream record And I started thinking about it.
Well, actually, I didn't.
I thought, well, that's weird because that pair of buildings, the same gray facade and the fact that they were mosques and that all of a sudden the media chatter was all about Islam and Islamic terrorists and stuff like that.
But I didn't know what to make of it.
It's not like I didn't dream.
A lot of people had literal dreams of towers falling and explosions in New York.
A lot of people had those dreams in the days before 9-11.
But this wasn't obvious.
Obviously precognitive.
But then when I went back to this, after having read Dunn's book and being more open to the topic of precognition, well, I realized all you have to do is free associate.
That was Freud's method for interpreting a dream was like you take every element of the dream and just think, what's the first thing this reminds me of?
And while free associating on this dream, like, oh shit.
So the certain place in my dream where these buildings were, In fact, in actual fact, it was a little, what's there, it's still there, is this little old like one story office building where my father had had his psychology practice for like just like a year when I was in, I think in junior high school or around that time.
And I have one association to that, to that building and the time he was in that office was that he had to be called late one night by a patient who was having a suicidal crisis.
This patient was on the verge of committing suicide and he had to go to that office to meet this patient and help talk him out of suicide.
Okay, so that's interesting because that's an association to suicide additionally to the association to Islam and those corrugated facades and all that.
So it's like all the big parts of that story on 9-11 were mashed up into this into this little dream diorama that was meaningful to me.
I mean, it wouldn't be meaningful to anybody else.
Your dreams are all about you and your thoughts and your experiences and your associations from childhood on up.
But that's not going to be super convincing to someone who's A, not a believer in precognition, which most people aren't, and B, to anyone who thinks you have to interpret your dreams symbolically.
I mean, Freud went out about the middle of the last century because Scientists didn't find his approach compelling.
They say, you can't, how can anyone prove that this dream means that if you have to symbolically decode it?
Okay.
Right.
So there's that problem.
But And there's the problem of recording them too.
Like you can't just say, oh, I had this dream and this happened.
You have to have evidence that you recorded it.
And that's why, you know, that's why Dunn was so adamant, you have to record your dreams, you know.
But anyway, so, you know, that's just one example.
But I had like many, a lot even more compelling examples where the event that happened the next day was.
you know, obviously what I had dreamed the night before.
But tons of people had these dreams about 9-11.
I mean, there's a, like one of the examples that I've used in all my books is a painter in, and this is a painter who lived outside of London.
He's probably not still alive yet.
He was old.
He was already retired when he, even when he had his dream.
On September 11th, 1996, he had a dream about, two towers crumbling in New York.
New York.
Now, he had already had lots of precognitive dreams about IRA bombings and plane crashes and stuff like that.
And so he knew to, he had already developed sort of a method where he would have the dream and he would paint it.
He was an artist and so he would actually paint his dreams in watercolor.
And then he would go to his local Barclays Bank where they had a clock, like they had a clock with a date, you know.
And so he would have himself photographed at his bank under the clock showing the date just to prove you know, to put a date stamp on these dreams.
Okay.
All right.
So on 9-11, 2000, I'm sorry, 9-11, 1996.
He did this?
Yeah.
In 1996, he took the picture?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can see the picture.
Oh, holy cow.
And, but a few months later, he had another dream about the same event with planes, planes crashing in the place.
Okay.
And he also, I guess, drew that and painted.
I don't have a, I don't have that photograph, but.
Is it online, you think?
Yeah, it's online.
You can find it.
Who is this guy?
Okay.
His name is, um, blanking on his name.
It'll come to me.
Okay.
Anyway, he – so yeah, so when 9-11 happens, he's like, you know, astounded and kind of terrified, frankly, you know, that he had such an accurate dream about this event, but like tons of people did.
And that fact that he had it on 9-11 like five years earlier is also extremely common.
People who do this, who start to study precognitive – study their own precognitive dreams find that they – Either they'll dream about something that happens in the next few days, sometimes it's longer, but significant events in their lives they may dream about exactly one year earlier or exactly multiple years on the same date.
It's something that I call calendrical resonance.
It's very common when you start to record your dreams and keep a dated dream journal over multiple years.
Find that there's something about dates.
There's some way in which we unconsciously keep track of dates.
And, you know, it's a very common phenomenon to like, you suddenly feel sad, you know, on a certain day.
And then you look at the calendar and go, oh, this is the day that my dad died, you know, three years ago.
And like, I wasn't consciously aware of it, but, you know, the date, the anniversary, you know, is, you know, our unconscious keeps track of it.
Well, I think it works in reverse too, you know, and it, it, A certain date might prime us or pre-mind us about an event that's going to happen on our future on that date and prompt a dream.
I've worked with other frequent precognitive dreamers who've noted the same thing in their dream journals.
Tuskegee Airman Sculptures00:02:21
And wasn't there another guy who was an artist who actually had rented a space in one of the towers?
Yes.
So the first chapter of my new book, From Nowhere. is about artists and writers.
His name is Michael Richards, but this is not the Michael Richards, the comedian.
Michael Rolando Richards.
He was a Jamaican-American sculptor.
He was sort of a rising star in the New York art world in the 1990s and approaching the millennium.
He made a A lot of very striking sculptures.
So he was black and very, you know, his sculptures were all about the struggles of a black artist in a white dominated art world.
And his sculptures were all on the themes of aviation.
And so he, you know, he was really compelled by aviation, but he would do these sculptural self-portraits where he was in the flight suit of a Tuskegee Airman.
Now, the Tuskegee Airman in World War II was a black, were black pilots.
who flew in World War II and distinguished themselves in World War II.
But the name Tuskegee also calls to mind the Tuskegee experiments, if you know about that.
So it's like it was kind of a double meaning there for Michael Richards.
But anyway, he would do these sculptural self-portraits.
Find Michael Richards portraits.
Yeah, look up Tar Baby versus St. Sebastian.
You'll see it.
Oh, wait.
Did you find the other guy?
I think.
No, no, that's not it.
Gosh.
Tar Baby versus bleh.
Tar Baby versus St. Sebastian.
Anyway, he painted these self-portraits as a Tuskegee airman, often where he had parachuted to the ground or where he had crashed to the ground.
And in this one case, in 1999, he made this sculpture of himself in bronze, levitating off the ground, impaled by all these airplanes.
Titanic Disaster Premonitions00:04:44
Wow.
Okay.
Now, he at the time, I'm sorry, in in 2001, he became part of what was called the World Views Program, where the World Trade Center gave some of its unused office spaces to artists for like six months.
And anyway, he was.
Oh, yeah.
I was just watching a video about this on Twitter.
And so he was working in his studio.
Actually, he'd spent the night in his studio.
He was the only one in his group of.
his cohort of like 15 artists who had spent the night of September 10th in his studio and he was killed on the morning of 9-11 by, you know, martyred by planes.
So he's like here, he's a self-portrait of himself as a saint martyred by planes.
So but my book is full of examples like this.
I mean, this is a particularly striking one, but this happens all the time.
I mean, this is my, this is my, what I'm trying to get people to take seriously in my work is that precognition is not only real.
I mean, people think, people kind of imagine, well, okay, maybe, maybe it happens occasionally or maybe certain things like 9-11 are so awful that they somehow ripple through space time and can cause people to have a precognitive dream.
But the fact is 99% of precognitive dreams are about like the sink backing up at work the next day or, or, you know, some relatively trivial event in your own life.
There's so many crazy examples of people predicting 9-11.
It's freaky.
There's the X-Files episode?
I think it was a pilot of an X-Files?
Lone Gunman.
Lone Gunman.
It was a spinoff series, a pilot episode of the Lone Gunman spinoff series.
It was about some faction in the government trying to remote control planes into the World Trade Center.
But there's a million other examples too.
Chapter one of my new book is full of these examples about 9-11.
It focuses mainly on Michael Richards.
But yeah, a ton of people had these dreams.
Same with the Titanic.
I mean, people, if you know anything about precognition, you might know that in 1898, a sea adventure writer named Morgan Robertson wrote a novel called Futility, which was about the biggest ocean liner ever named the Titan, which hits an iceberg on an April night and sinks and almost all the passengers die because there's too few lifeboats.
So it's like exactly what happened 14 years later in reality.
This is real?
This is totally real.
And he wasn't the only one.
I mean, people know if they know anything about premonitions of the Titanic disaster, they may have heard that story.
But tons of people had dreams about it.
Titan, if you wanted to find that, it would be called what?
Titan Story written in?
Yeah, Morgan Robertson Futility is the name of the novel.
Morgan Robin Futility novel.
Robertson.
I don't think there's going to be an interesting picture of it.
I mean, do you really?
Yeah, it was republished.
Okay, so the publisher republished it as the wreck of the Titan because they were trying to capitalize on the Titanic disaster.
Oh, really?
They reissued it in 1912.
Scroll down, Steve.
Oh, you're not on it.
Okay, what does that say?
It features a fictional British ocean liner named the Titan that sinks in the North Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg.
The Titan and its sinking are famous for similarities to the passenger ship Titanic after it sank 14 years later.
Holy shit.
That's freaky.
What to you is the most compelling premonition or precognitive experience that was documented, like a dream that was actually documented and proof that it happened later?
Well, as far as dreams, I love the Vladimir Nabokov story.
I just think that's wild.
And one of the things that it shows is that precognitive dreams can.
be very long range.
I mean, they can span decades of a person's life.
Okay, I'll give you two examples of very compelling dreams that one that anyone can look up and one that I've written about in my precognitive dream work book that's from a friend of mine who's highly precognitive.
Oral Cancer Warning Signs00:11:28
One of the famous public one that people don't realize is a precognitive dream is Freud's, Sigmund Freud's most famous dream.
And it's the dream that gave him the theory of, to him, the idea that dreams are the disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes was a dream that he had in 1895 where he was, he dreamed this, he was staying outside of Vienna at like a summer villa or whatever that he and his wife rented.
And he has this dream that there's a party and a bunch of his friends, his doctor friends are at this party and this one patient of his is at this.
party and he goes up to her and she doesn't, and she's reluctant, she won't open her mouth or talk.
And he finally compels her to open her mouth and he looks in her mouth and he sees these white patches on the back of her mouth and scabs, a bunch of scabs.
mouth and scabs, a bunch of scabs.
He can somehow see the bones inside her nose by looking at her mouth.
Then some other things happened in the dream and he sort of interpreted this dream as being about sort of medical malpractice issues that were happening in his sphere, because the doctors in the dream all were like having these mal.
One of them had killed a pain or nearly killed a patient, and he had.
He himself had nearly killed a patient uh, and so he was having all these sort of anxieties and doubts about his, his work, and he interpreted this, see the, the woman in actuality did not have any of these physical symptoms.
She was a hysteric, you know, she had hysterical symptoms.
That's what was common at the time uh, what we would now call depression, probably.
Um, but uh his, so he was.
He interpreted this dream yes, the dream of Irma's injection.
So he interpreted this dream as being about his wish that he be blameless in all these medical malpractice issues, including the fact that Irma that's not her real name had not gotten better from his treatment.
One of the people in the dream had told him the night before that she was not better from his and he was like he was feeling a lot of anxiety about himself as a physician and so on.
Um, but okay, so fast forward.
Uh, let's see, this was 1923, so like almost three decades, I think 28 years.
He is Diagnosed with an oral cancer.
The doctors found white patches, white patches called leukoplakia.
People who smoke a lot often develop an oral precancerous condition called leukoplakia, and that's what he had because he smoked cigars.
He was like a big cigar smoker.
They had to do these really horrible surgeries.
I mean, this is like 1923, you know, it's like where they had to cut away these parts inside his mouth and it left him with these huge scabs.
All right.
And then they ultimately had to cut out his palate.
All right.
Inside his mouth.
And then put in this.
And so every day he had to be fitted with or had to put in this, this wooden denture, which like made him unable to open his mouth or speak.
So all these, these elements that he was seeing in Irma's mouth in that dream were true of him.
The white patches, the scabs, the no, the bones in the nose.
If you take out your palate, you can look inside the mouth and see up into your nose.
Wow.
Holy cow.
And he recorded this dream right after it happened.
Yeah.
It takes up like 14 pages of his book, The Interpretation of Dreams.
I mean, it was his interpretation of free associating all the elements of his dream.
But he didn't believe in precognition.
And he didn't, you know, it never even crossed his mind that this was about something that was going to happen in nearly three decades in his life.
I mean, who's going to think about that when they record a dream?
So he's interpreting dreams, this dream, all in terms of his sort of contemporary situation and his past, not his future.
So that's one of them.
You know, it's very striking.
And, you know, also Irma in the dream does not.
can't open her mouth or talk.
Well, that is in fact what happened to him after he had to wear this denture every day for the last 15 years of his life.
Another very compelling dream example comes from a friend of mine named Toby Wattery.
She has a whole chapter in my book, Precognitive Dream Work and the Long Self, because this is just such a mind-blowing experience.
This happened when she was in college at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
She was living in a basement sort of apartment, like group house kind of basement situation with a bunch of other people.
And she had these recurring dreams about this kid that she'd known like in second or third grade, like this kid, like she no longer, she'd moved away from that city years earlier, never seen or thought about that kid, just one random kid from grade school.
But she had this dream, this recurring dream over the course of, I don't know, a few weeks, I guess, of this kid.
And she was trying to kill him with a certain weapon, okay?
And she kept having these awful dreams and they were like really disturbing and distressing.
And she, whether because of the dream, dreams exactly, or just because she was going through depression or whatever, she had to leave school for like a semester or whatever.
It was really kind of a bad, you know, phase in her life.
Okay, so fast forward like a couple decades later, she had another dream about this kid.
I won't go into the details of the dream, but then 10 years later, and this is in 2018, she had another dream.
related to this kid.
Now, in 2018, she was able to do a Google search.
This is something that she couldn't obviously have done back in 1988 when she had the original dreams.
And so she Google searches this guy and she discovers terrible news that he had been murdered in exactly the way she had dreamed.
Holy cow.
In 1988.
And that he had been, that he had, and that the date of the murder, now she had been.
Like me, she had been keeping a detailed dream journal for years and years by this point.
She was, happened to be interested in dreams and was interested in Carl Jung and stuff like that.
The date of his murder was exactly the date of that second in between dream that she had had, you know, like about 20 years after the initial dreams.
Not the same, it was not the same year, but it was exactly the same date of the year.
And okay, so that it, it, but it gets better.
So she, it occurred to her like, so she's like, What the fuck is going on here?
So she, among other things, decided to Google her classmates that year at the University of Colorado Boulder.
And one of those classmates was me.
I was one of her housemates.
She was a friend of my girlfriend.
And we had completely lost touch after college.
She did not know.
What she found out when she Googled me was that she thought that I was an anthropologist because I'd gone off to graduate school after college.
Well, she did not know that I had been writing about precognition and had just published, like literally a couple days earlier, I had published my first book, Time Loops.
So she, you know, or she reads my blog, orders the book and like discovers, holy shit, I'm a precog.
I mean, that's that was Phil Deck's word for, you know, someone who has, you know, recurring precognitive experiences.
And she like suddenly realized that, wait, a lot of her dreams, she'd been chalking it up to synchronicity.
That's the term that if nobody knows the word precognition, they'll they'll think, oh, this is synchronicity somehow.
So she had all these dreams.
That would come true the next few days or later.
Anyway, so she then reached out to me and then we started like sort of working together, like figuring all this out.
But it was a mind blowing experience for her, mind blowing for me as well.
In fact, it kind of like prompted me to write the dream work.
It was part of what prompted me to write the dream work.
But amazing experience.
And she's like very, very smart about this whole topic.
She had already sort of figured out a lot of aspects of precognitive dreaming and how precognition works.
She's been an influence on me, definitely.
Are there any records of precognitive experience, like conscious thoughts, not dreams?
Because I had something like this happen to me like a week ago.
Oh, okay.
Craziest thing I've ever had.
I was telling everybody about it.
My wife was blown away.
So there's a guy, one of my dad's close friends, he's been friends with for 30 years.
They worked together at the post office.
I've known this guy my whole life, right?
It's one of my dad's close golf buddies.
He's called me maybe four times in my whole life for various reasons.
Who knows?
Like maybe to.
You know, borrow my golf clubs or something to go golfing with my dad or whatever.
Four times in the 25 years I can remember knowing him.
I was driving home one day from here, from the studio, and I was thinking about something.
And for some reason, I was thinking about people's reaction to something that I was going to do.
Right.
And this guy's voice popped into my head.
And I was thinking of how would this guy react to this?
And I look, I never really think about him either.
Like he's not a guy I think about often.
And I was like, I heard his voice.
reacting to something that I knew he was that like to because I knew I was going to see him sometime in the next couple of weeks or whatever.
And I was like imagining what his reaction would be to seeing this thing.
And I had his voice in my head, like imagining what his reaction would be.
Three seconds later, he calls me.
And I was just like in my pants.
I was like, this is so crazy.
And I was telling my wife, I'm like, have you ever had anything like this happen to you?
And I don't know.
I don't know how to explain it.
But have you ever heard any stories like that?
All the time.
It happens all the time.
And the moment, the thing is, it's going to start happening all the time to you now that you know about this topic of recognition.
Yeah.
Because it starts happening.
It's a cycle.
Yeah.
Well, it's a thing that we just don't pay attention to.
You know, like these things happen all the time.
And because we don't have a cultural concept for it, it's not part of our upbringing.
Kids all the time.
It happens all the time to little kids.
My little kids have these, they'll say, oh, this thing is going to happen.
And then it happens.
And it's like, what the?
But it happens all the time, but it gets socialized out of us because most people, you know, like, uh-huh, kid, yeah, right.
You know, it's like, it's socialized out of us to even talk about these things.
And so we wind up growing up in a society that just doesn't accept that this kind of thing happens at all.
But if we grew up in almost any other society at any other time on Earth, it would be totally accepted.
Channeling Spirits for Art00:04:01
Ours is literally the only culture on Earth that doesn't believe that dreams sometimes foretell the future.
And yes, it always happens in waking states.
People are most aware of it with dreams because the most famous stories are from dreams.
Happens all the time, exactly what the kind of thing you're describing just coming comes into your head.
And that's what the new book is about, because because i'm talking about, about inspiration, like the idea of ideas that come from nowhere.
The title of the book is, from nowhere um uh, I things, thoughts that just pop into our head.
For artists, you know, they pay attention to those things.
That's where they're.
They get their, their ideas.
So, the muse, the muse or, you know, different cultures have had different words for it.
Yeah, the Greeks had a lot of words for it.
Yeah muses, the demon is one word, But, you know, and every culture has ideas about where ideas come from.
It may be from the Lord, you know, it may be from the gods, it may be from the muses or spirits, the spirit world or whatever.
I mean, every culture has theories about this.
I know you've had Diana Pasulka on your show, and she, you know, writes about tech people who think that they get ideas from the non-human intelligences behind the phenomenon.
You know, that's a new kind of variant of a very old idea that, you know, these, that our thoughts come from some external, you know, source in the spirit world or whatever.
Yeah.
There are people talk about a protocol you can follow where you can open up a portal to channel some sort of download, right?
Some sort of creative download or inspirational download that can help them in what they're trying to ultimately achieve.
Stephen, Stephen Pressfield writes about this too.
He has a book called The War of Art.
He talks about channeling the muse.
He's a writer and he talks about, you know, he spent his whole life writing and he was a, talks about how he was a failed writer most of his life until he came up with the war of art.
And the muse essentially, he talks about like showing up to work every day, sitting down and putting pen to paper.
And he says, he goes, every day, he goes, I have to sit down, I have to start writing every day.
I don't know when the muse is going to show up, but all I know is I have to be disciplined to sit down, start writing, and then maybe an hour later, maybe two hours later, the muse will arrive.
But you have to, Sit down and do the work first.
And he also talks about a thing called, he talks about what's the word he uses for it?
It's like distractions or something.
Anyways, he talks about all the things in life that are meant to, that try to get distract you from achieving that, right?
Like whatever it is, like distractions or doing other things.
And, you know, it's really hard to channel that thing.
Anyways, yeah, like you said, people have been talking about this.
you know, throughout history.
Right.
Well, what I'm arguing in the new book is that, you know, I'm not going to say it's not spirits or the Lord or, you know, or non-human intelligences, but that most of the time it's your own self.
It's your future self that's, you know, you are tapping into, you know, things that are going to happen in your future and that that's where your best ideas are coming from.
They're coming from your future.
And exactly the same way that it works in dreams, but you asked about it happening in waking life.
Well, that's the way it happens for most.
I mean, some artists certainly get their ideas from dreams, but most are getting them in this sort of inspired states or when the muse hits them or however you want to describe it.
So there's a million compelling examples of people channeling their future in their art.
I mean, we already saw Michael Richards.
Let me give you another example, a beautiful example of this that I just learned about this a few weeks ago after I'd finished the book, so I couldn't include it in the book.
Simon Du Bois at Agincourt00:05:32
This was a guy named, I can give you his actual name, Kevin Archer, because he wrote a blog post about it, a really beautiful little blog post where he, I had known him or we had been communicating a few years ago because after time loops, he sent me some of his precognitive dreams.
He'd had a few really interesting precognitive dreams.
I used one of them as an example in my dream workbook.
But this story was not a dream.
The starts when he was 10.
He was in school in England, and I'm not sure exactly what grade that equates to in the English school system, but he was I guess it was the last year of primary school or whatever.
His teacher assigned the class to imagine that they were some ancestor of theirs in any kind of historical period and to just write a story about being that.
Ancestor.
Okay.
So, okay.
So this guy's name is Archer, and he'd always, he said he'd always wondered about where that name came from.
Okay.
So he writes this story.
He's just thinking this up.
He writes this story where he's a bowman, an archer on a medieval battlefield.
Okay.
And he sort of describes the, you know, the armor he was wearing and describes the scene of the battle and all that and describes it.
You know, he, you know, this ancestor of his, you know, he describes how he had like prevailed as a bowman so successfully that the king said, from now on, you must call yourself archer.
Okay.
So, okay.
The teacher apparently like, talked to his parents and said, this was such a good story, I felt like I was transported into medieval times, whatever.
Okay, so fast forward 40 years.
Okay, he's now about 50 and his young daughter is asking about her heritage.
Um, and so he, you know again, he's now in an age where you can look these things up on the internet rather than you know right, you know, which wasn't the case, you know, 40 years ago.
Uh, so he starts doing a little genealogy research, or not even doing the genealogy research.
He just immediately finds online that one of his distant cousins had been doing the genealogy of his family and had like a vast spreadsheet of the Archer family.
Okay.
Well, the very first entry of this spreadsheet he sends him is the story of this bowman in Henry V's army at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
And this ancestor was named Simon de Bois.
All right.
And if you know anything about the Battle of Agincourt, it was won partly because of the English bowmen.
They were vastly outnumbered by the French in this forest or near a forest, but their bowmen were superior and the archers sort of won the day.
And it's a very famous battle and Shakespeare's Henry V, that famous speech, you know, we band of brothers, that comes from Shakespeare's story about the Battle of Agincourt and Henry V. Anyway.
So the very first cell in this spreadsheet about this guy's genealogy explains how Simon Du Bois, you know, was so successful as an archer or as a bowman in the Battle of Agincourt that Henry V, like, gave him, awarded him an annual stipend of like five marks or whatever, which was pretty good salary on the condition that he change his name to Archer.
Huh.
Okay.
So it's exactly what he wrote about randomly at age 10.
He, like any person who's at all skeptical and you should be skeptical of these stories, you know he immediately reached out to his parents and said, did you guys know any of this history about our name?
Did you?
Had you ever told me this?
You know, is this, am I just imagining that?
I didn't know this at the time?
And they they were just as huh was as new to them as it was to him.
He never knew this, this history, and and there's an added detail to it like a lot of people are going to hear that story and think, oh well, maybe he's the re, maybe he was the reincarnation of Simon Dubois or something like that.
Oh, yeah, like he was remembering a previous life.
A life, yeah, okay.
That's what Well, in his subsequent sort of subsequent to this, he learned that that story about the origin of the name Archer happening after the Battle of Agincourt is false.
That actually the family name Archer originates a few decades before that battle and it wasn't that story.
Oh, really?
So it's not – he wasn't like remembering some past life because that – That was actually kind of fictional, or it was a fiction that he wrote, or a bit of kind of legend or folklore that you read.
Interesting.
folklore that you read.
Interesting.
So he was precognizing in his inspired moment, or it wasn't inspired.
He was just forced to write a story in school.
And so kind of what emerges under his pen as he's writing is this amazing learning experience he would have four decades in his future about his ancestry.
George Harrison Returns to Beatles00:06:21
It's just a lovely example of what I think happens all the time when When artists are working, whether it's getting that kind of random out of the blue, oh my God, this new idea comes landing in your head, or whether you're just doing what you described, which is just kind of the work of sitting down and forcing yourself to work.
I'll give you another example that I think some people are going to raise their eyebrows at this, and I would love to hear people's reactions to this.
So I was watching.
So I'm obviously, when I read artists' biographies now, or when I. Uh, learn about an artist's process.
I'm always kind of, you know, looking for possible examples of this, and so I was.
So, you know, a couple years ago, when it came out, I was one of those people just utterly blown away by Get Back the uh, Peter Jackson's series about the Beetles and their and their creation of the of the um uh, of their penultimate album.
What was it?
Let It Be um, and I don't know if you saw the series, but It begins with Paul McCartney kind of noodling on his bass, the first strains of the song that became Get Back.
And he's kind of noodling and over the first few days, and this is about a rehearsal, they're kind of rehearsing for what they think is going to be a live show.
And it's just, on the surface, it's kind of boring, but the fact that these are the Beatles, and if you grew up with the Beatles and in awe of the Beatles, it's amazing to watch this.
And it's the best.
You know it's the best document of artistic creation that's ever been put on film.
It's just, it's a phenomenal show.
And uh it's, he's just, it's just.
This footage, that of of them in the in the studio, like jamming essentially and, and you're watching, you're watching these store, these songs come together, you know essentially, as you're watching, so anyway.
So so on july i'm sorry, january 7th 1969 uh, which is when the show starts, Paul Mccartney is like noodling this idea and it's like about, the only line he has is, get back, get back, get back, you know, to where you once belonged.
So, and then over the the next two days, it sort of evolves a little and he gets this idea, okay this, the they're Jojo, something about Jojo um, and then Jojo is somehow he lives in Arizona and like uh Tucson Arizona Jojo, get back, get back, Jojo.
You know they're just kind of like, they're all kind of just playing around with this idea and like yeah whatever um, and then on january 10th in the morning um, There's a book, by the way, that goes with this film.
And so you can read the transcript and everything.
It's amazing.
So on the morning of January 10th, 1969, they're noodling this idea.
John Lennon tosses out there, but he knew it wouldn't last.
So that's another new line in the song.
Okay, whatever.
Okay, so that day at lunch, George Harrison leaves the band.
He walks out.
He stands up.
He's so exasperated with all the disagreements between his band members.
There's a lot of frictions.
Paul's being very bossy.
And he feels he's george is just feeling unappreciated.
So he walks out and he says, see you around the pubs.
So that's the big cliffhanger ending of the first episode of Peter Jackson's series.
And so what transpires is over the following week, the other three Beatles had to go, all the four Beatles had to convene at Ringo's house to convince George to get back.
And JoJo sounds a lot like George.
And Harrison sounds a lot like Arizona.
So I think harrison sounds like what?
Arizona.
I mean, the only words he had at this point were JoJo and Arizona.
You know, wow.
So you know, is this precognition on the part of Paul?
Is he kind of just kind of channeling this this this, this kind of important upheaval that's about to happen in his life, that George Harrison is going to walk out of the band and they're going to have to like, do some real uh, do something, something big to convince George to get back to where he once belonged?
You know, but and there's there's more irony here that line get back, get back to where you once belonged actually came from a song that George had written, called Sour Milk Sea.
And it was a song about getting out of situations that you don't want to be in because they're not satisfying.
And he'd just written this song and actually he'd given it to another artist to record.
So basically Paul McCartney had essentially stole this idea from George, who was already disgruntled about get back, get back to where you once belonged.
And then creates this song.
And of course, it never would have occurred to any of the beatles that that's what this song was about.
They kind of then have the song then evolved and they even thought, well, maybe it was somehow about immigration and stuff.
There's a lot of theories and whatever.
And then there's another character they added and all that.
I'm none of this would have ever been conscious, but I just find it really uncanny that that Paul McCartney like has this idea for, you know, telling someone to get back.
It's just like it's all just telling someone named Jojo, get back, Jojo, get back, Jojo, get back to where he once belonged.
That's fast.
And then in, you know, literally three days that the He is in that situation of having to convince George to get back to where he once belonged.
So anyway, you know, it's an example.
This is not one of the main examples in my book because I think people are going to like go, yeah, you know, but if you have, if you're at all open to the suggestion I'm making that that that inspiration and creativity might often involve these kind of precognitive you know, upheavals, upheavals in our future.
Yeah, it's really, really interesting.
Remote Viewing and News Stories00:06:07
It's, is it any way this precognitive or this precognition, is there any ties that you've found to remote viewing?
Because I had this guy on here a couple of times.
Mr. Morehouse was on the show and he got, he was overseas training and I think he was a, I think he was an Army Ranger.
And, anyways, he got shot in the head by a stray bullet.
And he was wearing a helmet, luckily, and a crazy concussion, knocked unconscious, had a severe head trauma.
Came back in to see a psychiatrist, and they decided to do a bunch of tests on him.
And then they submitted him to Project Stargate in the CIA to do remote viewing.
And he came on here and he walked us through how they do remote viewing and the whole protocol.
And it's crazy because it's not.
It's again, it's not something you can really measure or duplicate, you know, with the scientific method.
But it's insane that our government would spend so much money on it if it wasn't real.
Oh, it's totally real.
I mean, the question is this is the whole battle between science and the supernatural.
Yeah, the thing is, it's not supernatural.
This is just an uncharacterized factor of human cognition.
And we don't know how it works partly because we are stuck with enlightenment models of causation and causality that really were inherited from the enlightenment, but they have really outworn their usefulness.
I'll say a couple things.
Yeah, the remote viewing stuff is fascinating.
There is an argument about whether remote viewers – there's the sort of mental model we all have of remote viewing or clairvoyance, as it's sometimes called, as somehow seeing things across space, seeing things that are happening simultaneously with us, but they're happening in another room or another country or seeing into that closed envelope.
They can also go across time, though.
Well, that's the thing.
There are great examples from remote viewers where they're actually seeing things that haven't happened yet.
Paul Smith is another remote viewer who is in the Stargate program.
And he writes about several fascinating examples of, in one case, you know, is the end of the day on Friday.
He gets this, he has a mental image of a missile striking a ship in some desert, off of some desert country.
And it somehow was accidental but on purpose, kind of weird.
It wasn't corresponding to anything that was going on in the world at that time.
So he just kind of filed it.
That Monday, you know, one of his One of his colleagues called him and said, Have you looked at the news today?
And it was the strike on the USS Stark in the Persian Gulf.
And it was, I think it was Iran or I forget it was Iran or Iraq, struck the ship and it was like supposedly accidental, but there was an idea that it might have been on purpose.
Anyway, so he was seeing this event that was about to happen in the future.
But there is a debate among people who study this stuff whether maybe remote viewing is all precognition.
That is to say, If you're going to get feedback in the future, if you're going to learn the truth in the future, are you in fact seeing across space?
Are you seeing into that envelope or are you seeing your future moment when the contents of the envelope are revealed and you get that excitement that, oh, I was right.
It was this thing.
Are you seeing that moment in time in your biography?
So there's a disputed thing, and a lot of remote viewers would push back on that.
But yeah, it's, it's.
But some argue that that's what it is like.
Edwin May has made, argued compellingly that it's really all precognition.
I think Russell Targue too has has off, has always kind of suspected that a lot of it might be precognition and and so so this is a debate in the field of remote viewing.
I would imagine that they still if, if this stuff there's so much evidence and there's been studies on it, like you pointed out earlier, that it has to be being still used to some extent, if it was used, you know, like that in the 80s and the 90s.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The question is, though, that if it is precognition, that changes its value in intelligence gathering.
Because if you can always, the feedback you get can always be false, right?
I mean, you could, you know, you can get, you know, feedback from the news, but the news story might be wrong.
So if you're precognizing like a news story or precognizing information that you get that may be manufactured.
Or fictional.
Because a lot of what people precognize is fictional things, TV shows like Vladimir Nabokov.
I mean, he was precognizing scenes in TV shows that he was going to watch.
People often precognize movies.
I've got tons of examples in my book of precognizing some striking scene in a movie I watched the next day.
Is there any way to focus it?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Yeah, some people would say definitely.
Another person who studies precognition, she's a neuroscientist, Julia Mossbridge.
I don't know if you've heard her name.
She's very much about developing ways to focus this using sort of the remote viewing style protocols to focus your precognition.
So certainly, certainly there are ways to focus it.
I've not been so interested in focusing it.
I'm not kind of, I'm not really in the end that interested in developing precognition as some kind of new superpower or whatever.
I think I'm more interested in what it reveals about just spontaneous precognition, what it reveals about what I call the long self.
Quantum Physics Mystery Explained00:10:49
That is to say, the fact that we are four-dimensional. creatures extending through time and there somehow we are in contact with those future moments the same way we're in contact with our past via memory.
I just think precognition is just memory.
It's all memory.
So and memory goes in both directions.
It doesn't just go in one direction.
I wanted to say one of the reasons that people have such a mental block about this stuff.
It goes back to the Enlightenment.
One of the rules of science when it was first modern science when it was first emerging in the 17th century was that you had to banish anything that had to do with God.
You had to keep God out of it.
They were looking for naturalistic explanations for phenomena.
So one of the things that they threw out in the bathwater basically with God was teleology, what's called teleology.
Now teleology is the idea of causes running in reverse.
We would now call it retrocausation.
That's the term that physicists now use.
Causes running in reverse.
In temporal reverse.
That is to say, something in the future affecting something in the past.
We usually think of causes going forward in time.
Effect happening first, cause happening later.
Exactly.
Yeah, an effect happening before a cause.
At that time, teleology was just assumed to be like if you were talking about teleology, you were automatically talking about God's plan.
Teleology got thrown out of science because it was not fair bringing God into the equation.
And if you were talking about causes running backwards in time, you were implicitly at that time talking about God's divine plan.
All right.
Okay.
So the idea, the presumption that causes only run in one direction, it worked fine in science for a couple centuries.
But then almost exactly a century ago, physicists discovered that on the smallest scales in nature, and we're talking about quantum scales, It doesn't quite work.
That there's this element that's always been called randomness or indeterminacy or uncertainty.
And so quantum physics for the last century has been about this component of causation that cannot be predicted from past events, from prior events.
And now you have all these interpretations of this mystery.
There's a lot of different interpretations.
You've got the Copenhagen interpretation.
You have the many worlds interpretation.
You have a lot of different sort of competing interpretations.
of what it means that certain things cannot be predicted from a chain of prior causes.
And one of the theories is retrocausation.
Well, wait a minute.
Maybe causes are propagating from the future to the past as well as from the past to the future.
And maybe that's what accounts for this thing we're calling randomness.
Now, one of the most influential figures in early quantum mechanics was Niels Bohr.
And he was a very brilliant man and very sort of powerful personality.
And he sort of dominated the conversation, like in the early years of quantum physics.
And he sort of convinced people that it's just random.
And you have to accept that the world is random on the smallest scales in nature.
And we have to just accept it.
And there's no reason for it.
And that you've probably heard the idea of wave functions collapsing, the collapse of the wave function.
This is kind of the core mystery in quantum physics.
Things are completely, they're mostly unpredictable until you make a measurement and then things take on a solid reality.
There's kind of things behave as waves.
Double slit experiment.
Double slit, all that, yeah.
And sort of there's this mystery of what happens when you make a measurement of something.
And that from that, there's a popular idea that somehow it's observation itself that collapses the wave function.
And maybe it has to do with our consciousness or something like that.
That's one.
It's not a mainstream idea in physics, but that's been taken up by, you know, certainly by people in the new age and stuff.
It's an appealing idea that somehow it's our minds that are causing reality or whatever.
Right, right.
But anyway, Bohr said, just don't worry about it.
Just do the math.
The equations can be used to predict very well what happens to particles in the aggregate.
Like if you have a bunch of particles, you can tell exactly what's going to happen, even if you don't know what's going to happen to a single particle because of this indeterminacy factor.
More and more physicists now are talking about retrocausation, that, hey, wait a minute.
What if that whole randomness thing, what if it isn't random?
What if my measurement now of this particle, this electron, is actually causing what happened in its past?
And in that case, it's not random.
And there's this retrograde component in causation, retrocausation.
And they have actually done experiments that suggest that that's what's going on.
I'll give you an example.
This is from my book, Time Loops.
I talk about this.
But in 2009, there's new methods in quantum physics that are enabling researchers to kind of probe this question.
Okay.
And one of the methods is called weak measurement.
And it's kind of complicated how it works.
But the idea is, in most measurements, you affect the thing you're measuring.
And so it causes problems.
But there's this method called weak measurement, which if you weakly measure a bunch of particles, you can kind of measure them without affecting them.
So what they did in this experiment, it's very similar to what happened in Daryl Bem's experiment, except this time we're using photons, not Cornell undergraduates.
Just substitute photons for the Cornell undergraduates.
Basically, what they did was they took a laser beam and they put it through a beam splitter.
So you have the same beam, but then it's split into two.
Now then what they did was they weakly measured the photons in both beams, all right?
And then they subjected one of the beams to this strong measurement, if you want to put it that way.
And what they discovered was that back in time when they were weakly measured, the photons that got the later strong measurement had been amplified significantly.
So that later measurement amplified the photons in their past.
I see the look on your face, but it's the exact look on your face when you learned about Daryl Bem's experiments.
I mean, you're like, what the fuck?
But it means that causes, that events in the future, at time point B, somehow affect things at time point A in the past.
And the idea I think the idea of me and others who study precognition are that, okay, so the brain is somehow, well, first of all, more and more people now think that the brain is some kind of quantum computer or a quantum, sort of a hybrid quantum classical computer, because there seem to be quantum processes going on inside neurons.
You've probably heard about microtubules.
Well, they're, yes.
So microtubules, one theory of consciousness is that they have to do with these.
Quantum, these little molecular quantum computers inside neurons called microtubules.
Well, I think microtubules are responsible for reshaping the synapses during learning and I think that microtubules are getting information from their future and reshaping the synapses based on future.
What's going to happen to that cell in the future?
Um, I know it's it's, it's it's mind-blowing, but evidence for this is actually coming from the field of quantum computing, because one of the things that's that's being discovered and people who are working with quantum computers and working with models of quantum computers, is that you can reverse temporality in a quantum computer circuit.
And sort of essentially, my simplistic way of putting it is you can get an output before an input in a quantum computer circuit.
And there's several articles on this phenomenon just in the last few years.
So it's looking like quantum computers, you know, might be more than just sophisticated number crunchers.
I mean, it looks like, you know, quantum computers might eventually make possible communication across time.
This is a possibility that if you saw the, did you see the television show The Peripheral?
It's based on a novel by William Gibson.
He wrote The Neuromancer back in the early 80s.
He was sort of predicted, you know, cyberspace and everything.
Right.
Well, his novel, The Peripheral, and they made it into an Amazon series a couple years ago, is about people using a quantum computer server to communicate across time.
Wow.
Yeah.
But if what's being shown in these early days of quantum computing, if it pans out that, oh, yeah, this isn't about spatial non-locality, you'll hear that word non-locality a lot.
temporal locality.
And if these threads from quantum computing are true, if these threads of quantum biology hold that indeed the brain is a quantum computer or involves quantum computation, well, right there you would have a physical explanation for how information from the future could get into the past and how we could have precognitive dreams or we could have exactly happened to you where it's like, oh,
Free Will From the Future00:08:39
A thought comes into your head about this random person you haven't thought of in in ages, and suddenly you get a call from them.
You know what if this is always happening?
Right, you know what if this is always happening and that we are?
That's kind of a part of, like a guidance system or or um, the the.
The analogy I draw in my dream work book is to uh imagine, imagine the you, the usefulness of something like this in like a safety device like, and.
So I imagine like well, you know my, you know my 2030 Tesla okay, has a quantum airbag okay, and it deploys a second before a collision, not because it predicts the collision, but because it's got a quantum computer and it knows when there's inevitably going to be a collision.
So it deploys my airbag just a second earlier to, you know, to enhance my survival.
Well, what if?
That's?
What if we're going through life with this quantum airbag that essentially cushions us against like shocks?
That gets pretty philosophical, doesn't it extremely yeah yeah, i'm hoping we run out of time before we have to talk about free will, because the free will question is so Yeah, it hovers over all of this.
Yeah, how does that change your life when you know that everything that's going to happen in your life is already predetermined?
What does that even mean?
Well, right.
That's a great question, and I can't answer it for you, like just sitting here.
I mean, I've addressed this in my books.
I talk about it a lot in the new book.
I think, first of all, I think free will is not the most helpful thing because it bogs you down.
Like, why worry about it?
Like, we.
We feel like we have free will.
Our actions and my actions right now affect, you know, the next moment, affects the next.
You know our, our action, you know we, we can't help, we can't escape what we experience as free will.
Some bored philosophers keeping them busy.
Right, I mean essentially.
Essentially it is, I mean I okay.
So my, my tradition, my spiritual tradition, I would say, is Zen.
All right, and one of the things that comes through again and again in Zen enlightenment experiences is is that You don't need free will.
Free will is a kind of a mirage.
And it's actually really blissful when you kind of break through this idea of free will and this worry about free will and this sense of having free will.
In fact, whenever you are the most successful at whatever it is you do, whatever flow state you get into with whatever you're athletic or creative or whatever, or when you're driving a car, you're not thinking about, you're not exerting free conscious free will.
You're like your unconscious is in complete control.
Right.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, this guy named Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist, you may have heard of him, he performed some really fascinating experiments that were really troubling for people because they showed that our nerves would initiate an action like a half second before we were consciously aware of it.
Okay.
Whoa.
Right.
Which you can interpret that in multiple ways.
And the way that a lot of people interpreted it was that, well, free will is just a complete mirage and we don't exert, you know, the sense that we have of being consciously in control of our lives is completely a mirage.
Another way of looking at it is that we are controlling our lives, but from the future, that we are reflecting back on, you know, think about how, I don't know if you do a martial art or something.
I used to do martial arts and you'd make a particular move and you'd replay it in your head, you know, like a successful.
Move, you you'd replay it in your head.
Well, what if that mental replay, what if you're, what if you are that mental replay is actually causing?
Maybe you are actually pulling your, your meat puppet strings from a position displaced into your future, and that that's what free will and agency.
What if that's what it is?
It's kind of rich retro causation in the body.
Um yes, it raises like like a maze.
There's amazing implications of retrocausation and its biological, physical manifestations as precognition or what Daryl Bem called pre-sentiment, feeling the future without being consciously aware.
I think that's where it really mostly manifests.
We're not consciously aware of seeing the future.
I mean, that occasionally happens like in visions.
People have precognitive visions.
But most of the time, it's controlling us unconsciously.
And the implications, if this exists at all, That is astonishing.
It's astonishing.
And I find it incredibly exciting because it's like since the Enlightenment, if you can divide time into past and future, and then there's this line of the present in the middle of it, all we've been looking at causally for the last three centuries of the Enlightenment is this left half.
But there's this whole right half, the future, that is I think, and a growing number of physicists even think, is influencing our actions and influencing what happens in the physical world that we just have had a mental block to because we threw out teleology with God three centuries ago.
Okay, so time loops.
It's kind of hard to conceptualize.
So we got here some of your infographics that explain how this works.
So it says a time loop is.
A causally circular formation in the block universe, an effect retro influences its own causes.
Okay, so on one side, so you have a line going through the center of this loop, right?
And the line represents time going forward from the present to the future.
And on the left side of it, we have information traveling backwards in time, carried by strong emotion.
And on the right side of the line, we have another curved arrow.
That is freely willed actions that lead to future outcomes.
Okay.
So, if we were like thinking about the Daryl Bam experiment, that would be a good example.
Okay.
You know, clicking on a curtain and suddenly being rewarded or seeing an erotic picture, you know, that's a reward.
That's like acting like one of, you know, a treat if you were training a dog or a dolphin, you know, give them a sardine.
It's like a reward.
And it's those little rewards, you know, somehow we don't know the mechanism, but somehow those rewards get traveled backward in time.
Not only rewards, but also traumas of various kinds.
So that's why, you know, people often have you know, if they're aware of precognition, it's often in the context of having a dream about a loved one's death, for instance.
Okay, this is interesting when you look at it this way, because this is not how I was thinking about it originally.
So, in the present, like we could have, like, you could think of this sort of like as ambition, right?
Like, if you're ambitious throughout your life to achieve something, or you know that you want to do something with your life, all of your actions.
Are going to be directed towards achieving this goal that you think that your life that you were destined to do, like you being a writer, right?
Or me doing podcasts.
So essentially, the idea is that if somebody has, and tell me if I'm completely butchering this, but if somebody has some sort of an idea early on in life about what they want to do with their life, and then they go to college, they get a job, they start writing books.
They become a super famous published author.
Parallel Timelines Connected00:14:55
Essentially, that this happened in reverse somehow.
Like, this already happened and it's coming back to them, which is why they're inspired to do this in the first place.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
The question is how pervasive is this?
You know, how much of an effect is this?
How much of an effect does the future have on the past?
And that's an open question.
I mean, it's like, obviously, it's not like an incredibly strong effect or we'd be more aware of it.
It is a subtle effect, you know, and.
Even in quantum physics, I mean, you can say, talking about the direction.
If you know a lot about the position of an electron, you don't know much about its velocity, but you know some.
There's a way in which we know most of what we need to know from classical physics that moves from the past to the future.
But we don't know everything.
And that's that uncertain component that is coming from the future.
So there is like an asymmetry.
You know, I think anyone who studies this would say, yeah, there's an asymmetry there.
And why there's that asymmetry, I mean, who knows?
I mean, that's you're getting into realms that we can't even address yet.
But some component of the way the world is at this moment is a result of things, causes propagating backward in time versus causes, just causes going forward in time from the past.
And the The reason why quantum computers are so important in this is that it doesn't really matter – this idea of, well, the fact that randomness is really retrocausation, it doesn't matter for just inert matter.
It doesn't matter for predicting.
We don't need to know about retrocausation if we're going to predict the planets and weather and things like that.
Where it becomes important is when that little retrocausal factor at the micro, micro scale of the quantum is scaled up somehow and made coherent at a larger scale.
And that's what a quantum computer is because what a quantum computer is, is a matrix of electrons or some particle that they're all entangled.
They're all entangled.
That is to say, they act as a unit.
They all act together.
So you do something to affect one of those particles, it affects the whole thing simultaneously.
And if you can create a system like that, and if that entanglement is really a temporal entanglement, like where it's entangled with its future or what's going to happen in the future, then you can create a system for.
where a system, whether it be a living system or a mechanical system, can be influenced by things in the future in a coherent way.
You're talking about like deja vu?
Well, people have argued that deja vu is a kind of symptom of precognition, that you suddenly have an experience that feels familiar and you don't know how.
Well, maybe you had a dream and you can't remember the dream, but there's that feeling of familiarity.
It's complicated with deja vu because you can artificially induce deja vu.
I think you can like probe a certain part of the brain and give someone the sensation that they've experienced this before.
So the possibility that this is just the brain misfiring, I think you have to kind of keep that possibility.
So that's why I hesitate to say that deja vu is necessarily about precognition.
But a lot of people through the years have argued exactly what you're saying.
What other slides we got here, Steve?
Well, let's see what we got.
Oh, this is the block universe.
Past, present, and future really coexist.
Objects travel along world lines from past to future mostly.
Okay, so this is showing a graph at the vertical axis of space and the horizontal is time.
And can you explain this a little bit?
Yeah, it's not really a graph.
It's just a representation of space-time.
Now, when Einstein's discoveries in the early years of the century really revealed that we live in a four-dimensional, not three-dimensional universe.
And that that added dimension is time.
Now, people have speculated about higher dimensions than fourth, but let's just stick to four because, you know, you can't.
It's very hard to visualize this.
And this is why anytime you're going to visualize a four dimensional space time, you've got to get rid of at least one of those spatial dimensions and turn it into time and make it something solid like we're seeing in this diagram.
You know, this is a big, just imagine a big glass brick, you know, essentially.
And things, anything like a particle or an are a person.
We are world lines.
We extend through time.
Got it.
And actually, yeah.
And mostly we extend in one, you know, the, well, yeah, that world line is generally not tangled, but there are, it's possible to have a loop in that world line.
And that's what wormholes are, for instance.
That's not how I think precognition works, but this is just an example of how you can have an object that kind of makes a loop in space-time.
And wormholes allow objects to travel backward in time and then resume their journey back to the future.
Okay.
Particles also carry some quantum information backwards along their world lines from future interactions to previous ones.
Okay, this offers an alternate explanation for entanglement.
okay entanglement is the idea that i'm sure you've heard about from other people on your show It's sort of often thrown around as an explanation for not only psychic phenomena but things having to do with UFOs and so on.
It's this kind of mysterious fact that if you take two particles that have been in contact, And then you take them and separate them, even they could be separated by the length of the universe.
You do something to measure one of those particles, the other one is going to show a corresponding measurement.
And the way this is usually imagined is that it's somehow communing across space.
Again, we have a hard time thinking in terms of time.
So the assumption of most physicists, the kind of mental image they have, is they're somehow exchanging information, even though they know that that's not possible, that things you know, there's not telepathy on the level of, you know, of electrons.
But one of the possibilities, and this was originally proposed by a physicist named Olivier Costa de Beauregard, and he offered it back in the 50s, but it was never, nothing was much done with it.
And then a philosopher, I believe, who sort of got into quantum physics named Hugh Price in Australia wrote a really good book in the 90s arguing that, wait a minute, this is a possible explanation for entanglement,
that instead of these particles sort of simultaneously communicating, that whatever you do to measure particle B sends information backward in time to where it was in contact with particle A so that automatically particle A contains some of that information from the measurement of particle B.
So it's what he calls, what Costa de Beauregard called it, the Parisian zigzag.
He was a French.
So these causes travel zigzag paths in space-time.
And that that's an alternative explanation for this thing called quantum entanglement.
And what people in the paranormal world and who study ESP like the concept of entanglement because, again, the usual explanation is that it means it entails what's called non-locality, that being in a certain place doesn't matter because you're connected somehow across space to other things.
And maybe our minds are connected across space to to a target in a remote viewing experiment or my mind might be connected to yours in telepathy or whatever.
The alternative, if they're really connected across time, that makes what I'm arguing possible about the brain or a person being connected through time to itself.
Right.
Have there ever been any studies that you're aware of on the accessing alternate timelines or alternate spaces in time or parallel universes with drugs.
There's a guy I had in here, Andrew Gallimore.
What he's doing in Tokyo is he's doing this thing called DMTX, where it's DMT extended state research, where he puts people on an IV drip of DMT for a long period of time, multiple hours in a day, brings them out, and then basically just trying to map the DMT realm.
This is very similar to what he talks about.
Well, it depends on your interpretation of quantum physics.
A lot of people assume, again, that this is a thing about spatial...
spatial non-locality.
And one of the interpretations of that that goes along with that is the idea of many worlds or multiple parallel timelines.
And so there's the idea that what people are accessing in altered states or in dreams or whatever is some other timeline.
But actually the retrocausal interpretation argues against that.
That's one timeline.
That it's one timeline.
And so what you're accessing in those states is really, in some way or another, precognitive information, or you're accessing potentially uh, you know, things happening in the future mashed up with things in the past or whatever, in that kind of symbolically distorted way that that uh, that precognitive dreamers are become aware of when they start to study this stuff.
That's the, that's the, the alternative argument.
I'm not a, yeah, I'm not a fan of the many worlds interpretation.
Yeah.
And, and a lot of people in quantum computing will talk in these terms, exactly the terms that you're talking about, because again, that's the kind of favored interpretation of what happens with entanglement is that, is that, that, uh, or I'm sorry, not entanglement superposition.
Okay.
This is another technical term from quantum computing, but the way quantum computers work is that they're able, uh, to take multiple states simultaneously.
Okay.
or that's that's how it's thought of right, it's called superposition so, so it's kind of like parallel computing or parallel processing but uh, but the particles are in multiple.
You know it's a superposition of multiple states simultaneously.
So you get this amped up, computing power, because you're capitalizing on all those possibilities.
And so people in quantum computing often think that, okay, well, this means that quantum computers are somehow accessing alternate realities or alternate timelines.
But if it's really retrocausation that's going on, then we're truly talking about the computer is accessing its future, not an alternative timeline.
It's computing across its lifespan, essentially.
And the prediction of this, now, the prediction here would be that The power of a quantum computer would be dictated by how long you leave it plugged in, essentially.
Its computing power would be dictated by, you know, the longer you leave it plugged in, the more processing it has because it has more time that it's using its whole future, you know?
That's a good point.
Going back to what you were talking about earlier, I think you mentioned PK Dick earlier.
This is something that he's been, he writes, wrote, wrote about a lot.
You know, he has that. novel or that famous story he wrote, I think it was Man in the High Castle or something like that.
There was a series made on it, which was fascinating.
Yeah, he loved the many worlds thing.
And it's a favorite of science fiction writers.
It's certainly a fun idea to think about multiple parallel realities and who knows.
That could be true too.
What I'm saying is not necessarily prohibit that.
But yeah, he's a great example actually of a precognitive artist.
I mean, he's a lot of he wrote a lot about precognition because he experienced it again and again and again in his life and in his works.
He was hyper aware of how he would write a story and then a year later what he wrote about would come true.
An example of this would be he wrote a story in I think 1962, I believe, about these entrepreneurs creating this robot Abraham Lincoln.
No one was interested in the story.
it just went unpublished.
And then a year later, Disneyland unveiled its animatronic Abraham Lincoln.
It's like one of its perennially favorite exhibits.
How many years later was this?
One year.
Wow.
Yeah.
But there's a million examples of like that in Phil Dick's life.
I mean, he would write about a certain idea and then he would read about it a year later.
Like he was really like he would read popular science magazines and stuff.
And like he wrote his novel, I think it's a Scanner Darkly talks about like split brain stuff, the idea of the hemispheres being split and the effects of that.
Well, like a year after he wrote that story or less than a year.
After he drafted his story, he read an article about brain research.
It's something that he didn't know anything about before he wrote this story.
But he was doing that again and again.
His novel, Ubik, was about this fictional spray can product called Ubik, which has all these time-retarding properties and also affects the atmosphere in some weird way.
Well, he wrote this a couple years before the effects of aerosols on the ozone layer became – people became aware of that and started focusing on that as a focus of ecological concern.
Yes.
Minority Report Precogs Story00:02:25
It became like a symbol of ecology and protecting the environment in the 1970s, the idea of spray cans.
Well, he essentially wrote about that a couple years beforehand.
And also the idea of retarding time was – he read an article about that from a Russian researcher.
like a year after he wrote the novel.
And so he thought, look, I was precognizing this article when I wrote this story.
And so this happened again and again in his life.
I mean, he would write about a character, you know, a certain kind of character, and then he would meet that person in real life.
His story about the Abraham Lincoln thing, what makes it more kind of amazing than that he predicted a robot Abraham Lincoln is that the story really focuses on one of the entrepreneurs has this kind of crush on on this young woman that they hire to kind of apply makeup to the Abraham Lincoln and make it look really realistic.
Okay.
All right.
Well, years and years later, he wrote that story.
Well, he wrote that story when he was living in, I think, in the Bay Area in California.
But he then moved to Orange County, which is where Disneyland is or near where Disneyland is.
And he discovered that this woman in his apartment building worked at Disneyland.
And he said, oh, well, what'd you do?
He says, oh, I apply makeup to the animatronic Lincoln late at night, you know, to make it look realistic.
It's like this was happening all the time in his life.
And yeah, he was one of the smartest really people about this topic of precognition.
He understood that he was somehow in contact with his and he wrote about precognition.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
He's the guy that we get the term precog from.
He wrote about precogs in his story The Minority Report, which they turned into a movie.
That was his story?
That was his story.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
So, yeah, the idea of precogs who can predict crimes, and then you have a police unit that goes and prevents these crimes from happening because they were precognized.
Yeah, that's Phil Dick.
Yeah.
He was an amazing, very troubled, kind of fucked up person.
Brain Filter Theory Hypothesis00:03:52
What kind of drugs was he on?
Well, he was on.
People have this idea of him as this super druggy.
He did not, I don't think, use hallucinogens or anything like that.
He did it?
No.
I think he'd tried them a few times.
I think he took a lot of amphetamines.
He'd been prescribed some amphetamine when he was a kid for some reason.
And he had a lifelong, I think, maybe dependency.
I think I'm not an expert on this.
But no psychotropics.
Not that you're aware of.
I'm not an expert on that aspect of Phil Dick.
Yeah.
I'm wondering.
I'm just like, I'm trying to connect the dots here to see if there's any sort of correlation between being able to.
Have an objective grip on what's going on here with the brain and, like what, what correlations there are between people who are more predisposed to this precognition than others.
Well, I think that we're all precognitive, but as far as being aware of our precognition and sort of accessing it more consciously yeah, definitely there's a um, there are people on a certain end of a spectrum and people in psychiatry will sometimes talk about what's called schizotypy.
All right um, and it's sort of an axis of kind of having a really powerful imagination and being suggestible and stuff like that, without being necessarily schizophrenic.
There are people sort of on one end of schizotypy who are prone to maybe hearing voices or having hallucinations occasionally, but that are still able to function and so on.
And these people are the kinds of people who would be shamans in some cultures.
think that a lot of, you know, a lot of those kinds of experiences, those oftentimes those kinds of hallucinations, those waking, you know, visions or whatever that don't fit, you know, psychics become aware, you know, be able to tell, oh, wait a minute, you know, this might be a, this might come true, you know, and, and often that's the case.
I certainly wouldn't say that for all or most hallucinations, but, but that's one way in which this can be accessed and people who are sort of high on that dimension of schizotypy.
Yeah.
May.
You know, be prone or able to access and be aware of precognition in their waking life more than others.
Yeah.
It's also interesting.
We actually had a guy in here the other day who wrote a bunch of books on near death experiences.
And I know there are correlations with people that are able to have these precognitive abilities that appear after near death experiences.
And there's this hypothesis or this theory, the brain filter theory.
I forget what it's exactly called, but it's basically the idea that the brain is a filter, the brain is there to. filter out all the things that could exist here so that we can only associate or we can only sense the things that matter to us for our survival and reproduction and everything else, right?
And the connection with near-death experiences is the one thing that they do is they can sort of shut the brain down for a period of time.
And does that mean when the brain is being shut down that this filter sort of breaks and now we can access more?
Can we access the future?
Can we access the past?
And there are multiple ways conventionally to do this, right?
Meditation is a way to do this.
Psychedelics is a way to do this.
Car crashes can shut down your brain.
Lightning strikes.
Jeff Kripo wrote a whole book about a lady who was struck by lightning.
Trauma Accessing Future Events00:03:46
Elizabeth Krohn.
Elizabeth Krohn, yeah.
And she had some crazy experience where she was drawn to the afterlife or some other realm where she could see herself laying there on the ground dead.
And she decided to re enter her body.
And after that, she had all these precognitive abilities.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, she's one of the most interesting modern cases of and well-documented cases of precognitive dreaming.
I mean, she's – her precognitive dreams are phenomenal.
Again, like – oh, David Mandel, that's the name of the painter I was trying to think of.
Oh, okay.
I told you it came to me.
Yeah, he was right.
It came to him.
David Mandel painting of 9-11.
Yeah.
Elizabeth Crone on her own before she ever – Met Jeff Kripel.
I mean, she learned to send herself emails.
Yeah, that's the guy.
She learned to send herself.
The black and white one in front of the clock.
What?
The black and white one?
Right.
Yep.
Yep.
This one?
Yep.
Yep.
Blow that one up.
She, yeah, she learned to send herself emails, which provides a date and timestamp, you know, and to prove to herself, you know, and to keep a record of these things.
So she.
Yeah, she had some incredible dreams.
One of them is she dreamed of an American jet landing somehow in the water in New York.
And she had this dream.
She was actually on vacation in Israel at the time.
And then, like a few hours later, the miracle on the Hudson occurs where Captain Sullenberger piloted to a safe landing on the water.
And the thing is, she saw in this dream, she saw people standing on the wings.
And it was like, that's impossible.
But then all.
The pictures that went viral on the internet and in the media after this event were all of the passengers standing on the wings waiting to be rescued.
So it's that kind of, you know.
So skeptics will say, well, you know, we're going to have dreams that match some later event just because of randomness, you know, like it's, you know, it's going to happen inevitably because of statistics.
But no, that's not how it works.
I mean, it's a precognitive dream that has these very specific details that, you know, you can't. say that in a life of dreaming, you're going to randomly have a dream about people standing on the wings of a plane that's landed in the water, you know, just hours before it happens in real life.
I mean, that's just skeptics who throw out this possibility or dismiss this possibility just have not looked at the evidence.
Have you noticed any correlation between like the age of people who have these precognitions?
I know because there's been a lot of recounts of children having more of this ability.
I know Kreipel talked about it.
I mean, that was a little bit different.
He was talking about children having dreams or memories of previous lives involving like very violent depictions of previous lives.
And his idea about that is that in these children's previous lives, they were always males.
And he thinks that they were males because the males were more likely to die of very violent crimes than females.
And there's a connection between the trauma.
Yeah.
And this ability.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know about the past life stuff, previous life stuff, but that- But even with UFO stuff.
Yeah.
The trauma, he's right.
He calls it the traumatic secret.
And it's, you know, people who are psychic or have this developed, you know, ability, there's some trauma there.
Lucid Dreams and Out-of-Body Experiences00:09:42
You know, Elizabeth Crone had trauma.
I forgot the- I lost my train of thought again.
Kids.
Oh, kids.
Right.
So, yes.
I don't know that anyone has studied this, but people who are younger are more prone to, I think, a lot of experiences that I think are related to precognition, like spontaneous out-of-body experiences, lucid dreams.
I know in my own case, I used to have spontaneous out-of-body experiences and lucid dreams when I was in my teens and early adulthood.
And then later, when I became consciously interested in this stuff, as you know, in my middle age and I even like devour for a while, I was devouring books on, like trying to induce out of body experiences.
It's really hard, you know, and I was successful.
You know twice and you know whereas when I was younger.
If i'd been doing this stuff when I was younger, it probably would have been really easy.
Unfortunately, I wasn't interested in or I wasn't recording my dreams when I was young.
Uh, so I don't know if I was having precognitive experiences, but I do know that my own kids I have two small children They're doing this all the time.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, my oldest daughter, I think she was probably around three.
And we were standing near a field, a pasture with some horses.
And the horses, there was like four horses, and they were just ambling around.
And we were particularly interested.
We liked this one brown horse because we'd seen him before.
And they're just ambling around in the fields.
And we're just sitting there, kind of enjoying.
This was in Colorado near my mom's house.
And she said, he's going to run from there over to there.
And I'm like, whatever.
I just kind of didn't pay attention to it.
Anyway, a few minutes later, all the horses kind of slowly ambled back into their barn, which was along over on the right side of this big pasture.
And so we kind of got up and started to walk away.
And all of a sudden, that one brown horse charges out of that barn and ran from the right side of the pasture to the left, just exactly what she had.
said was going to happen.
But the thing is, this kind of stuff happens all the time if you pay attention to little kids and don't have your mind closed to this possibility.
Yes.
So I think, yeah, I think that we're, yes, I think we all have this and we're all, we're born with it.
It's part of our cognitive makeup and it's always operating under, you know, below the level of conscious awareness.
And, you know, if we lived in another society that that kind of just accepted this, it wouldn't be strange at all that a kid will utter some strange thing and then have it happen a few minutes later.
What's going on with lucid dreaming?
Is there a protocol you're aware of to induce this?
And then how does that fit into everything?
Oh, yeah.
A ton of people have written books on lucid dreaming and how to have lucid dreams.
And I'm not an expert at it, and I wouldn't want to talk.
I mean, if you just Google it, you'll find. you know, a lot of books on it.
But as far as what they are and so on, I've noticed in my own case that they're very often precognitive.
Whether they're more precognitive than other dreams, I don't know if that's even a meaningful distinction.
But when I have a lucid dream, I always am sure to write it down because it's very often will relate to something that happens shortly thereafter.
And I personally think that so-called out-of-body experiences may be sort of on the same, on a continuum with lucid dreams that, that it may be that there's just some sense in which some of these dreams just feel very much like you're in your physical environment.
Uh um, because i've had a couple of the times I was successful at inducing an out-of-body experience.
Uh, they were incredibly precognitive, like in one case, precognitive of an event that happened exactly a year later.
It's, the stuff is really stunning.
When you start, you said two times you were able to induce an out-of-body experience.
Yes.
It was I'm forgetting the details of the second one.
It wasn't as remarkable.
But the first one was I'd been reading one of the guides.
There's a guy named Robert Bruce, and I think he's in Australia, who writes guides to astral projections, sometimes called astral projection.
Anyway, he has a set of protocols for doing this.
It involves meditating in a certain way and kind of really focusing on your body.
Ironically enough, a lot of the most, I think, important techniques for inducing all this stuff involve really focusing on your body.
You know, it's not like trying to leave your body.
It's trying to focus on your body in this sort of enhanced way and becoming more aware of your sensations and so on.
But anyway, I was meditating in this one way and I had tried literally for months to do this and without any success.
But anyway, this one time I was like, holy crap.
And I was out of body.
This is a complicated story, but it's kind of funny.
I was out of body and where I was was down the hall from my bedroom, down by the floor of by an opened kind of closet.
All right.
And I was like staring at my wife's shoes because that's where she kept her shoes.
And it was just the weirdest thing, but there was a I felt there was a weight on my back of my cat.
One of my cats was somehow sitting on my back.
All right.
And then And then it shifted.
So I didn't have a sensation of like flying, but then I had a sensation of being up by the ceiling in my office, which was just a few feet down the hall from there.
I had a sensation of being up by the ceiling in my office, looking down out the window of my office and seeing these two green lights, like there's like almost like eyes, like looking at me.
And it was just kind of like, what the hell?
Anyway, I immediately, one of the instructions that Robert Bruce has is to keep your flight short.
And like, because if you stay too long, you're gonna, you're gonna like not wake up and you're gonna forget it.
And, and so you want to like, like keep your flights short at first.
Okay.
And so I like immediately like, I sort of had this, I immediately like basically flew back to my body and woke up and wrote all this stuff down.
All right.
So exactly, you know, and I'd forgotten by the time it came true, I'd forgotten about it, but at least I had a record.
exactly a year later, I think exactly minus a day or two is like just slightly off from a year later.
I was in that closet that I had opened that closet that I talked about to get out an Advil, actually.
And I dropped it.
I dropped on the ground.
And I worried that my cat had eaten this Advil, because that's really toxic for cats.
And so I was like crawling.
around my wife's shoes trying to find this Advil that I'd dropped.
And I was really frustrated and I couldn't ultimately find it.
And so I wound up, there was a whole story where I had to take the cat to the vet emergency room and pump her stomach and stuff like that.
She was fine.
But the fact that I had had this experience of rummaging on the floor by my wife's shoes with the sensation of a cat weighing on me, you know, I mean, she wasn't literally on me, but I was worried about my cat because I was worried that she had eaten this Advil.
So I think, I don't know if it was that night or the next night, I was changing a light bulb.
I was up on a ladder changing a light bulb in my office.
And I looked down from that vantage point up by the ceiling in my office.
And I saw this, it was exactly the point of view from the second part of that out-of-body experience.
I looked down, I saw those two green lights reflect, and I saw what they were.
They was the reflection of my power cord, of my.
My laptop created this little.
It has a little green light.
If you have an Apple laptop, it has a little green light when it's charging.
Yeah, on the power cord where it attaches to the computer, and it was reflected.
It was right up against the window, so it was reflected in the window and there was.
So it looked like two little green lights, like two little green eyes, but I was obvious when I was staring, looking down at it that that's what it was.
So this was exactly a year after i'd had an out of what I thought was an out of body experience with both of these these, you know, these, these two kind of this two part out of body experience.
It turned out it was precognitive.
It was a precognitive, precognitive experience of an, of two in body experiences a year later.
That's why.
Precognitive Nightshirt Experience00:01:58
So I propose, I mean, I talk about this at the end of my dream work book.
I have no, you know, I can't say that that's what all out of body experiences are at all, but I suggest that people who are interested in this consider that possibility.
And when they have an out of body experience, write it down, treat it as a dream.
and see if it, you know, if in your real life you have this experience physically later.
So I don't know.
Are all out-of-body experiences that?
I certainly couldn't say that.
But since it's happened to me, you know, that possibility interests me.
That's fascinating, man.
Time loops.
Well, thank you so much for coming on, Eric.
I really appreciate it.
This has been a fascinating conversation.
Where can people find your books, find more about you, get in contact with you?
Sure.
So my books are available anywhere where you obtain books on the internet.
I won't name names there, but I'll link them below too.
Yeah.
Your website?
I have a website.
I have a blog.
It's called The Nightshirt.
I don't add to it that much lately, but I have a lot of many years of articles on precognition on my blog.
And I'm on Twitter.
There we go.
My Twitter address is The Nightshirt, all one word.
I encourage people to follow me on Twitter.
If they want to reach out to me, they can DM me on Twitter.
That's not the best.
That's not me.
That is not me.
There I am.
There we go.
Yep.
And that, what you saw.
Beautiful.
What you saw there briefly was my new book, which is, by the time your viewers see this, it is already out.
Awesome.
And we got some stuff to talk about on Patreon as well.
Okay.
So we're going to keep going there.
But for everybody, thanks for watching and good night.