Moses contemplating a human skull

I dreamed that I was reading a book by a New Age author who claimed to have telepathically received a series of striking images. The book consisted of reproductions of those images — pen-and-ink drawings done in a style reminiscent of Tom Baxa‘s — each with an accompanying paragraph giving the author’s interpretation of its meaning. (As the introduction of the book made clear, the images themselves were “received” but the interpretations were the author’s own.)

One of these images — the only one I spent any time looking at in the dream — showed a young Egyptian man looking at a human skull which he held in his hand. (The Egyptian’s hand was not visible in the picture, but it was understood that he was holding the skull.) The scene was shown from such a perspective that the skull loomed huge in the foreground, grinning at the reader, occupying almost the entire right half of the picture. The Egyptian was in the background, on the left side of the picture. The skull faced directly out towards the reader — so the Egyptian was apparently looking at the back of the skull. Every detail of the skull was clearly visible, and it appeared to have a strange texture, almost as if it were made of tiny Legos.

The author had given this picture the title “Moses contemplating a human skull” and written the following commentary: “He asked himself, ‘Did you, O Moses, come from yon human skull?’ — and he concluded that he had, and that only he had.” (Yes, I know that’s an incorrect use of “yon.” The New Age guy in the dream wrote it, not me.)

In the hypnopompic reverie following this dream, I interpreted this as follows: The skull young Moses was contemplating was that of a Hebrew slave, and he noticed that he — and he alone, of all the people in the pharaonic court — had a similarly shaped skull. This was when Moses realized for the first time that he was of Hebrew, not Egyptian, parentage; and this realization marked the starting point of the trajectory that would lead to his role as liberator of the Hebrews. (Once I had fully woken up, though, I no longer thought that interpretation made sense. It seems unlikely that two closely related Middle Eastern peoples would have any noticeable craniometric differences; and if they did, those differences would surely have been accompanied by outwardly visible differences which Moses would have noticed long before, without having to look at a skull.)

*

The dream was on Wednesday night, and it’s clear where many of its elements came from. On Wednesday nights I lead a conversation group for students of English, and our topic that night was “Africa.” We talked about various historical figures from Africa, including Moses, and there was also some discussion of hominid evolution in Africa, including Leakey’s discoveries in the Olduvai Gorge. So that’s obviously why my dream featured Moses (and specifically Moses qua Egyptian), as well as someone contemplating a skull and considering whether he had “come from” it.

*

The Friday morning following the dream, I was browsing an online discussion board, and someone had posted an inspirational quote incongruously illustrated with a picture of “He-Man” cartoon villain Skeletor.

Clicking on the picture out of curiosity, I found that it came from a blog featuring dozens and dozens of such “Skeletor Affirmations.” The third one on the page caught my eye.

This is exactly the same layout as the picture I saw in my dream: a huge skull, staring directly at the viewer, occupying the whole right half of the picture; and in the background, a man staring at the skull. The ghost guy in the Skeletor picture is not an Egyptian, but the shape of his helmet, together with the horizontal stripes below his chin, does suggest the stereotypical Egyptian headdress seen, for example, on King Tut’s mummy case. (I am not entirely sure that the Egyptian in my dream was wearing such a headdress; I just know that he looked obviously Egyptian.) Skeletor himself, with his hood and his blue-and-yellow color scheme, reinforces the King Tut image. And while the Skeletor picture is not black-and-white, it is a cartoon line-drawing with extensive areas filled in with black, and to that extent it is similar in style to the picture in my dream.

*

This, like my other recent precognitive dream (of a beast with many eyes), demonstrates the following points:

• Dreams mix elements from past and future, combining them in such a way that they are impossible to separate out except in hindsight. (Dunne mentions this as well in An Experiment with Time.)
• So far, all of my strong precognitions have been of images, not ideas, and the meaning associated with the image in the dream is generally completely unrelated to the meaning of the image when it appears in waking life. (This most recent dream seems almost to make that point explicitly; the author of the book of images explains that, while the images themselves were revealed to him, the interpretations are his own.)
• None of my precognitions so far have been of anything that could even remotely be considered important or meaningful. The dreaming mind (my dreaming mind, anyway) appears to draw on experience (past and future) quite indiscriminately, without regard to whether or not it means anything.

A beast with many eyes

On Friday night (actually, very early Saturday morning), I dreamed that I was watching TV and saw an image of what I interpreted as being a whale with many eyes, though I only saw its face. It was blue in color, with a row of eyes on the left and a row of eyes on the right — perhaps eight eyes in all. It also had feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish. I dreamed that, after seeing this, I got on Wikipedia to do some research, trying to find out if whales with many eyes actually existed. I found information about a particular gene (with a Latin-sounding name which I no longer remember), rare but not unheard of (comparable to albinism), which manifests sometimes in whales and other animals and causes them to have several pairs of eyes. Now that I knew the name of the gene, I ran a Google image search on it and found several pictures of animals with it — several blue whales, killer whales, and other cetaceans, as well as a couple of tigers. As I did this online research, I had the feeling that I had learned about this gene once before but had forgotten about it. My reaction was, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. That gene.”

So much for the dream.

*

On Saturday evening, I watched the DVD of the film “47 Ronin” — a fantasified version of the Japanese historical incident, with monsters, demons, a fox-spirit “witch,” and Keanu Reeves thrown in.

In an early scene in the movie, Reeves and a group of samurai are chasing down some sort of giant beast — think qilin-meets-gigantelope. For most of the sequence we don’t get a clear view of its face, but then it stops, turns to face Reeves, and opens its eyes — of which we now discover for the first time that it has six. Here is a screenshot:

This image jolted me with a shock of recognition. Aside from the fur, horns, and nostrils, it looks exactly like the many-eyed “whale” I saw in my dream.

This is one of the clearest instances of apparent dream-precognition I’ve experienced yet. The dream even correctly portrayed the beast as being something I saw on TV. And after watching the movie, I did go online (using Wikipedia and Google image search, among other resources) to try to find out whether the beast was based on some actual Japanese legend — but that’s something I chose to do after experiencing both the dream and the movie and recognizing the connection between them, so it can’t really be counted as a “fulfillment” of the dream.

*

I enjoyed “47 Ronin,” by the way, despite the uniformly negative reviews it has been getting from critics. It undeniably has its awful aspects, the most obvious of which is the concept itself. Imagine if a Chinese studio made a King Arthur movie in which Lancelot had some made-up Chinese sidekick who was actually Guinevere’s true love and the greatest knight of them all — and in which the rest of the cast, all British, had to speak their lines in Chinese — and you’ll get some idea of how ridiculous and even insulting this movie must seem to the Japanese. (Also, the 47 ronin actually lived in the 18th century — more Queen Anne than King Arthur — far too recent for monsters, demons, and other fantasy elements to be appropriate.) I also admit to groaning when the fox-spirit unaccountably transformed into a dragon — which looked like the seraphic Chinese/Japanese variety but behaved like the evil fire-breathing Western version.

I’m not Japanese, though, and have no particular attachment to the original story they were butchering, so I was able to enjoy the movie on its own terms. It was visually engaging, and I thought it did a good job of communicating the stern, stoical samurai spirit (or, at any rate, what this relatively uninformed Westerner imagines to have been the stern, stoical samurai spirit).

One of the most provocative aspects of the movie, to me, was the portrayal of the tengu — forest-dwelling bird-demons of Japanese folklore — as Buddhists.  Not as bird-demons who also happen to be Buddhists, mind you, but as Buddhists plain and simple. Although they do look very slightly different from humans (no ears, strange nostrils), their religion is their chief distinguishing characteristic. They’re still demons, to be sure — cold, cruel, nihilistic, and possessed of magical powers — but their demonic nature is portrayed as being part and parcel of their Buddhism. I thought it was a pretty gutsy move to literally demonize a major world religion other than Christianity, but oddly the filmmakers don’t seem to be getting any flak for it. Although Buddhism obviously has its good aspects like any other religion, it does certainly have a very strong current of inhuman/anti-human “demonic” nihilism running through it — something that becomes more obvious to me the more practicing Buddhists I meet — and I thought the portrayal of the tengu was brilliant and rang true. Since the samurai ethos can also seem superficially cold and inhuman, the tengu provided a very effective contrast which helped bring out the essentially human, noble nature of bushido.

Minor precognitive dream

A couple of days ago, my morning alarm interrupted a very vivid dream in which I had taken a small bucket of water and splashed it out onto the dining room floor. Muddy cat footprints had appeared in the water, though no cats were visible.

Upon awakening from the dream, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and that sort of thing, and while I was in there I heard a loud clattering sound downstairs. When I went downstairs, I found that one of my cats had upset his water dish and spilled water all over the dining room floor. There were muddy pawprints, but the cats, presumably having been spooked by the sudden noise, were nowhere to be seen.

The noise made it clear that the water was spilled a few minutes after my dream, ruling out the explanation that the dream had been inspired by sounds I heard while sleeping. (I suppose it’s conceivable that cats knocked down the dish while I was sleeping and then later bumped it again and made another sound. However, I don’t think this is likely. The clatter I heard was very loud and was clearly the sound of the dish falling from its stand to the floor, not just moving around on the floor.)

I’ve been keeping cats for about four years now, but they’d never knocked over their water dish before.

Waking precognition experiments: postmortem

I’ve now completed five experiments in waking precognition. In each experiment I tried to foresee the contents of a randomly selected book before reading it, and for each book I came up with 10 potentially precognitive images. The five books I used were:

• The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi. Translated by Frederick Townsend.
• The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton. Vol. II.
• Edward Stewart White. The Westerners.
• Laura Lee Hope. The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms.
• Max Pemberton. The Man Who Drove the Car.

The table below shows the results for each of these 50 images. The number 0 indicates a miss; 1 indicates a weak similarity to something in the book or in my life during the book-reading period; 2 indicates a moderate similarity; 3 would have been used to indicate a perfect hit if there had been any. One of the images is marked N/A because it was fulfilled by my seeing something which I had seen many times before and can therefore not be considered specifically precognitive.

 

	Leo.	Nel.	White	Hope	Pem.
1.	0	0	1	0	0
2.	1	0	0	0	0
3.	0	1	0	0	0
4.	2	0	0	0	0
5.	0	0	0	0	0
6.	N/A	0	2	0	0
7.	2	0	0	0	0
8.	0	0	0	0	0
9.	0	0	0	1	0
10.	0	0	0	0	0

 

So 84% of the images are complete misses, without even the slightest resemblance to anything in the books; and there is not a single instance of clear and unambiguous precognition. As for the smattering of ones and twos, it’s impossible to evaluate them in any statistically rigorous manner, since there is no control group and no way of determining how many such results ought to be expected to occur by chance under the null hypothesis that there is no such thing as precognition. However, my common-sense interpretation is that I have not demonstrated any precognitive abilities and that I have failed to replicate Dunne’s results.

I will not be doing any more of these book experiments, since my results thus far give me no reason to expect anything interesting to result from them.

Fourth experiment in waking precognition: The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms

I’ve just completed another precognition experiment, in which I tried to obtain precognitive images of what I would read in the novel The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms, by Laura Lee Hope (selected at random using Gutenberg’s random book feature).

I got my precogs on May 15 and finished the novel on May 20. Not a single one of the ten precogs “came true” either in the novel or in my extraliterary life.

The closest thing to a hit — and it’s not really very close at all — was the 9th item on my precog list, “plaid skirt blowing up — shoe stuck in the mud, coming off foot.” There is a scene in the novel in which one of the male characters gets stuck in quicksand, and the titular moving picture girls tear their skirts into strips in order to make a rope to pull him out. Aside from the juxtaposition of a skirt being destroyed and something being stuck in wet earth, all the details are different. The skirts in the novel are not plaid but khaki, and the man does not lose his shoe.

Third experiment in waking precognition: The Westerners

I’ve just finished reading Stuart Edward White’s novel The Westerners, chosen via Gutenberg.org’s random book feature. (It actually turned out to be a pretty good story.)

On May 5, just before beginning the novel, I looked at the title page, concentrated on the title, and tried to pick up precognitive images of what the book would contain. I did this until I had a list of ten such “precogs,” all reasonably detailed. I finished the novel on May 15. Of the ten precogs, eight were complete misses, and neither of the remaining two was fulfilled very precisely.

My first precog, as recorded in my notebook on May 5, is “man smiling & scratching left side of black mustache.” The novel contains the following sentence: “Jack Graham, his hat on his knees, twisted his little moustache and smiled amusedly.” It refers to a man touching his mustache and smiling, but the other details (color, scratching, left side) are absent. I suppose there are a quite a lot of books that mention someone touching his mustache and smiling, so this match isn’t worth much.

The sixth item on my precog list is “a woman (in a white sun hat?) lowering her face (eyes still up) & covering her mouth w/ one hand to hide a smile.” The novel has this: “The little woman’s cheeks burned, and she lowered her head until the sunbonnet hid her face. . . . And she suddenly looked up into Jim’s honest eyes with an imploring gesture.” A few lines later, “She looked up suddenly with a blinding smile.” This match is slightly better than the first one — woman, sun hat, face down, eyes up, smile — but the bit about her covering her mouth with one hand is a miss.

So, still nothing terribly impressive or conclusive. I’ll try this with a few more books just for the sake of thoroughness and then call it quits.

Second experiment in waking precognition

I’ve just finished my second experiment in waking precognition, following the same method as the first one. The book I used was The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol II. With a Supplement of Interesting [sic] Letters by Distinguished Characters — and I got no positive results whatsoever.

Before reading, I made a point of getting only high-quality images which would be of value as evidence. I rejected several because they were too vague; and several others because they were too obviously nautical or military in nature, and it would have taken no special precognitive ability to predict that they might appear in a book about Nelson. I got a list of ten “good” images, each with a sufficient degree of detail to make coincidental matches unlikely. But none of them turned up in the book — not even the “obvious” naval-themed ones I had rejected!

The fact is, Nelson’s letters to his partner in crime are stupendously dull, with virtually no concrete details. Security concerns naturally precluded his describing his military activities in any detail, and he never describes scenery, relates amusing anecdotes, or anything of that nature. Even love, which has been known to bring out the poet in even the most prosaic of characters, did not move him to say anything figurative or otherwise visualizable. The other “interesting letters by distinguished characters” aren’t much better. About the only vivid, concrete image which a person precognitive faculties might have foreseen is Lord Hamilton’s account of hunting with the king and slaying vast numbers of wild boars. If I had foreseen that, that would have been evidence of precognition; but aside from that, there just wasn’t anything to work with.

Aside from the lack of visualizable details, the very boring nature of the letters may have worked against effective precognition. Events which arouse powerful emotions are the ones that stick in the memory, and we might speculate that something similar would be true for the postulated “pre-memories” which these experiments are dealing with.

*

Nor did any of my potentially precognitive images (or “precogs”) come true in my life outside of the book, though one did find a very faint echo in another book I was reading at the time. The third item in my list of precogs is “a stack of rough gray stones, one atop another.” This was written down on May 1, and then on May 3 I read the following in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “It was a great grim slab of grey stone supported on four upright stones.” The details are sufficiently different that I can’t consider this a hit, and in any case I had read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe before.

*

I intend to do five more of these experiments, but I will have to modify my method of selecting books slightly. Fiction and poetry are, I think, the only acceptable genres, since only they can be relied on to contain a sufficient number of concrete, visualizable images. Since I’ve just discovered that Gutenberg has a random book feature, I will obtain my titles that way, rather than using the more convoluted procedure described previously. All non-fiction books will be excluded, as will all books, authors, and subjects with which I have any familiarity.

Here, then, are the five books I will be using:

1. Stewart Edward White. The Westerners.
2. Sir Max Pemberton. The Man Who Drove the Car.
3. Sir William Magnay. The Hunt Ball Mystery.
4. Laura Lee Hope. The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms.
5. Rupert Hughes. What Will People Say?

Waking precognition: a trial run

Having already attempted to duplicate J. W. Dunne’s experiments in dream precognition, I am now making a similar attempt with regard to waking precognition.

Dunne’s method is to concentrate on a book which one is about to read (so as to provide a future anchor for associations) and note down whatever images come to mind — rejecting all images which pertain to the past. The next step is to actually read the book and see if any of those images appear in it — or in one’s outside life around the time of reading the book.

For my first organized experiment in this type of precognition, I chose the Kindle edition of the Townsend translation of the poems of Giacomo Leopardi. I chose an e-book so as to be sure that I hadn’t flipped through it and seen something before beginning to read it. I chose this particular work because I had downloaded it pretty much at random, never having read a review of it, had it recommended to me, or anything like that.

(I had just read Evola’s Ride the Tiger followed by Williams’s Place of the Lion, so simple logic — the same logic that makes me keep The Green Knight, The Black Prince, and The Red Queen together on my bookshelf — dictated that my next book ought to be something with a leopard or jaguar in the title. Not being in the mood for Salman Rushdie, I searched Gutenberg for leopards and came up with Leopardi. I sent it to my Kindle but didn’t actually read it until just now.)

Looking at the title page — and only the title page — I concentrated on the author’s name and got the following images and words:

1. a pointed spiral seashell — something along the lines of a turret snail or a horn snail (I sketched it in my notebook)
2. very long green grass waving in the wind
3. a man vaulting over a long, narrow black table — pressing his palms down on the table and jumping with his legs spread out gymnastics-style; I didn’t see his face, only his hands and legs
4. a young white woman (late twenties, probably) wearing a bright red dress (very slightly orange-ish), shaking something out of her long wavy light brown hair
5. a left hand writing with a white quill pen
6. a long black worm with a dry cord-like appearance, disposed in a sine-wave-like shape on a light-brown wooden surface; I noted very clearly that it was definitely not a snake
7. the word “sapphire”
8. the phrase “then shall we know”
9. something which I didn’t hear very clearly, but which sounded like “terms of tray”
10. the phrase “black words” — pronounced with a strong stress on the first word, so it sounded like the word “backwards” with an l-sound interposed.

I noted down these images on Wednesday, April 24, and then immediately started reading the book. Since I only read it for several minutes each day, I didn’t finish it until April 30.

Here are the results I got:

1. nothing
2. Leopardi’s poem “The Ginestra” contains a reference to “waving fields of golden grain.” Since the greenness of the grass was one of the most salient aspects of the image I saw, and since Leopardi puts similar emphasis on a quite different color, I don’t think this can be considered a hit.
3. nothing
4. On Saturday, April 27, I went to a movie theater with my wife, niece, and nephew to watch Iron Man 3. At the theater I saw a young white women, probably in her late twenties, with long wavy light brown hair, and wearing a bright scarlet strapless minidress. She would have been eye-catching in any context, but all the more so in Taiwan, where white people are exceedingly few and far between (I often go for weeks without seeing a single one), and where extremely casual dress is even more the norm than in America. She didn’t shake anything out of her hair, but she did toss it about in that horse-like way that some women have. (Not until the next day did I make the connection with my Leopardi images; my immediate thought, reinforced by the fact that she was accompanied by two men in black suits, was that she looked like the woman in the red dress from the Matrix.)
5. nothing
6. On Tuesday, April 30, I arrived early for an English class which I teach in a conference room at a manufacturing company, so to kill time I pulled out my Kindle and read some Leopardi. Then, while I was reading, I suddenly noticed the table I was sitting at: a light brown wooden surface exactly like the one I had seen. A laptop was sitting in the middle of it, and the black cord of its mouse was disposed in a sine-wave-like shape. There was not the slightest doubt that this was the image I had seen on the 24th and mistaken for a worm (though, as I had noted at the time, a “cord-like” worm). However, I teach in this room — with that same tabletop, laptop, and mouse cord — every week and have been doing so for months, so this clearly can’t be considered a specifically precognitive image.
7. One of Leopardi’s poems is called “The Last Song of Sappho” — phonetically similar to “sapphire.” Since I had heard the word “sapphire” rather than seeing an actual sapphire, this seems like a near-hit.
8. nothing
9. nothing
10. nothing

All in all, I’d say this experiment was a wash. The woman in red is the only one that seems even a little bit impressive.

One mistake I made was that I tried to pick up many different images as quickly as possible, rather than lingering over each and trying to pick up more details. As a result, many of the images are so common or vague that they would have been of no value as evidence even if they had come true in every particular. Next time around, I will insist on higher-quality images rather than simply jotting down every vague thing that pops into my head.

*

The next book I will be trying this with is The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol. II — selected at random so as to minimize the chances of my having had any past exposure to it. (The selection method was as follows. First I asked random.org for a random integer between 1 and 5000; it gave me 3312. Then I looked up entry 3312 in Davies and Gardner’s Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary American English, which gave me the word admire. Finally, I typed admire into the Gutenberg.org search box and chose the last result on the list. Since the results are ranked by popularity, choosing the last one is a way of avoiding very popular books, again with the aim of minimizing the chances of past exposure.)

For the benefit of any readers who may wish to try this kind of experiment themselves, here are five other titles, all available free from Gutenberg, selected by the same method:

1. Robert Green Ingersoll. Hell.
2. Archibald Makellar. An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis.
3. Edward Everett Hale. If, Yes and Perhaps.
4. Knowles King. The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern.
5. Tappan Wentworth. Report of the Hoosac Tunnel and Troy and Greenfield Railroad, by the Joint Standing Committee of 1866.

Dunne’s experiments in waking precognition

All quotations below are taken from the 13th chapter of J. W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time, in which he discusses experiments he conducted to determine whether or not the sort of precognition he had observed in dreams could also occur in waking life.

A little consideration suggested that the simplest way to set about a waking experiment would be to take a book which one intended to read within the next few minutes, think determinedly of the title — so as to begin with an idea which should have associational links with whatever one might come upon in that future reading — and then wait for odds and ends of images to come into the mind by simple association.

Obviously, one could save a lot of time by rejecting at once all images which one recognized as pertaining to the past. Also, since the images would be perceived while awake and with one’s wits about one, one might rely more upon one’s memories of them than one could when the memories were formed sleeping, and thus save a vast amount of writing. A brief note of each image should suffice.

In my own attempt at waking precognition (qv), I did not follow this method of beginning with an image which could be expected to have associational links with future experiences. I simply tried to pull images out of thin air. At this I was reasonably successful, but it seems probable that for most people most of the time, such an attempt would generate primarily past- and present-associated images without the aid of a future-oriented associational anchor of some kind.

Actually, the anchoring image needn’t be specifically future-related. Any image which is not obviously associated with one’s past experiences should do. One might choose an image which is timeless and iconic but not commonplace — a tarot card, for instance. I know that many tarot readers use the cards in precisely that manner, as starting points for an associational network of images. Rather than “translating” the cards in a straightforward way, using the conventional divinatory meanings given in the “little white book,” they concentrate on the images themselves and see what comes to them. (Of course studying the LWB and other commentaries on the cards still has its place, since the effect of such study is to create an ever thicker and more intricate network of associatons centered on the cards. One wants to cast one’s associational net as wide as possible.)

As for Dunne’s idea of using the title of a book one is about to read, caution would be necessary, since one’s ideas may have been “contaminated” with past exposure to the book in question. It is not common to buy or borrow a book without first flipping through it a bit, and words and images encountered in that way might stay in the mind after their source has been forgotten. (E-books might be useful in this regard, since it is not convenient to flip through them.) And of course one may also have read reviews of the book, heard discussions about it, etc., and these experiences, too, may leave traces in the mind after the experience itself has been forgotten. It would be best to steer clear of classics and bestsellers.

On the other hand, precognitive images associated with a book title may not necessarily come from the book itself — especially if one is in the habit of reading on trains, taking books on vacations, etc. I know that when I reread a book after many years, my reading often triggers memories of things that were going on in my life at the time of the previous reading, and the same principle could work for future experiences. Dunne’s first book experiment is a good example of this.

The first experiment was a gorgeous success — until I discovered that I had read the book before.

It was interesting, however, as showing the tremendous difficulty the waking mind experiences in freeing itself from its memories. I spent by far the greater part of the time in rejecting images of the past and starting afresh with a mind comparatively blank.

Apart from the items which related to the book (already read), I got only a few ideas, mostly concerning London and the exterior and interior of clubs. The only exception was the single word ‘woodknife‘, which drifted into my mind, seemingly, from nowhere. A little reflection satisfied me that I had never in my life come upon such a word, so I jotted it down.

Two or three days after this I moved, quite unexpectedly, to London. On my arrival, I went to my club, and having for the moment nothing better to do, proceeded to the library, picked out a newly published novel, and tried a second experiment. Result — nil. In fifteen minutes I got only eight images, which did not clearly belong to the ‘past’ half of the associational network. One of these eight related to a kangaroo hunt in Australia — riders and hounds chasing pell-mell after the leaping animal. Another comprised the single word ‘narwhal‘. There was nothing in the book that fitted, and presently I threw it aside.

I then drifted into a little inner library, which is an excellent place for a nap. I chose a comfortable armchair, and, for appearances’ sake, equipped myself with another volume — R. F. Burton’s Book of the Sword, opening this in the middle.

Immediately my eyes fell upon a little picture of an ancient dagger, underneath which was inscribed ‘Knife (wood)‘. I sat up at that, and began to dip into the book, turning back after a moment to page II. There I came upon a reference to the horn of the narwhal. Reading on, I found on the succeeding page the words ‘The “old man” kangaroo, with the long nail of the powerful hind leg, has opened the stomach of many a staunch hound.’

In the above experiment, none of the images which later “came true” actually appeared in the book Dunne was using as an associational anchor, but in extraliterary life (London, clubs) or in other books (woodknife, narwhal, kangaroo hunt).

Dunne goes on to relate several cases in which he successfully foresaw some of the contents of books he was about to read, but these are mostly inconclusive. His most impressive book-related precognition was, again, fulfilled outside the context of the book.

Here I altered the procedure. I opened the book at the beginning, and found the name of one of the characters, being careful not to glance at any other page. It seemed to me that a name which would be likely to occur in close association with many of the incidents of the story would provide a better associational link than does the mere idea of the book’s title. . . .

I then tried a book of Snaith’s, taking the heroine’s name as an associational link. Here I failed completely. But, in the middle of this experiment, I got one very curious image.

It was of an umbrella with a perfectly plain, straight handle, a mere thin extension of the main stick, and of much the same appearance and dimensions as the portion which projected at the ferrule end. This umbrella, folded, was standing unsupported, upside down, handle on the pavement, just outside the Piccadilly Hotel.

I happened to pass that way in a bus the next day. Shortly before we got to the hotel I caught sight of a most eccentric-looking figure walking along the pavement in the same direction, and on the hotel side of the street. It was an old lady, dressed in a freakish, very early-Victorian, black costume, poke bonnet and all. She carried an umbrella in which the handle was merely a plain, thin, unpolished extension of the main stick, of much the same appearance and dimensions as the portion which projected at the ferrule end. She was using this umbrella — closed, of course — as a walking-stick, grasping it pilgrim’s-staff fashion. But she had it upside down. She was holding the ferrule end, and was pounding along towards the hotel with the handle on the pavement.

I need hardly say that I had never before in all my life seen anyone use an umbrella that way.

So it does appear that it can be effective to use an unread book — either the title or the name of one of the characters — as a starting point from which to generate potentially precognitive images. However, results which are found in the book itself may be suspect, for the reasons discussed above; the most convincing precognitions will relate to incidents occurring outside of the book being used.

Dream experiment postmortem

A couple of years ago I attempted to duplicate the “experiment with time” described in J. W. Dunne’s book of that title. The experiment involves keeping detailed records of one’s dreams for a period of time and noting any resemblances between dream events and waking events which occurred shortly before or shortly after the dream in question. The higher the ratio P:F (the number of past resemblances to future resemblances), the stronger the evidence that apparently precognitive dreams are mere coincidences; the lower the ratio, the stronger the evidence that dream precognition is just as real as dream retrospection.

I posted the dream records I kept during the experiment at experimentsintime.wordpress.com. Relatively few of my dreams turned out to be discernibly connected to specific past or future events, and none of the resemblances I did notice were sufficiently strong to be truly compelling. Of the 23 dreams I recorded (or 23 nights’ worth of dreams, rather; I made no attempt to separate a given night’s dreaming into distinct dreams), 8 exhibited resemblances to specific past events (6 weak, 2 moderate), and 5 resembled specific future events (3 weak, 2 moderate). Thus my experiment would seem to be consistent with Dunne’s thesis that dreams are constructed from a roughly equal mixture of past and future components. (If all future resemblances were coincidental, we would expect past resemblances to outnumber them by at least an order of magnitude). However, the small number of resemblances noted, together with their overall weak quality, means that my experiment cannot be regarded as conclusive either way.

*

Apparently I am not a “good” dreamer in the sense that the experiment requires. That is, the raw materials from which my dreams are constructed tend to be integrated to a degree that it becomes difficult to identify the specific experiences on which the dreams are based. Dunne touches on this in his appendix to the third edition of An Experiment with Time.

It is a commonplace of psychology . . . that most structures of the imagination are ‘integration’ — blends of several images associated with several different waking impressions. And it is accepted generally that dream-images are mostly of the same character — certainly, it is very rarely that one comes upon one of these exhibiting an unmixed, photographic resemblance to any scene of waking life. Now, the possibility of discovering in one of these composite structures an element distinctive enough to be recognizable as pertaining to a chronologically definite incident of waking life depends, mainly, upon what may be described as the coarseness of the blending. The more intricate — the more fine-grained — is the integration, the more difficult becomes its analysis. And, with practice in constructing dream-images, just as with practice in waking imagery, the integrations become more fine-grained, more beautifully blended, and, so, less easy to associate with any chronologically distinctive waking incident, past or future (p. 137, Hampton Roads reprint).

I suppose I ought to be pleased that my dreams are so “fine-grained” and “beautifully blended” — that my dreaming self exhibits a high degree of creativity (in the Einsteinian sense of knowing how to hide your sources) — but mostly I am disappointed at my inability so far to evaluate Dunne’s thesis conclusively from my own experience.

Individuals apparently vary widely in the relative “coarseness” of their dreams. In an experiment involving six Oxford students, one of the subjects recorded 21 dreams, of which 18 resembled waking incidents, 6 of those resemblances being judged “good” or strong. Another recorded 16 dreams without finding a single resemblance of any value. It is my bad fortune to be closer to the latter end of the scale.

Another factor may be the regular — not to say boring — character of my day-to-day life, which would reduce the chance that anything in a dream would resemble a distinctive waking event belonging clearly to either the future or the past. Not wanting to burden a holiday with the troublesome task of keeping daily dream records, I ignored Dunne’s advice to carry out the experiment during a break from one’s usual routine — preferably during a vacation in an unfamiliar locale — and instead conducted it during a perfectly ordinary period of time. I shall probably be going to Australia next year for the first time, and may attempt a second experiment during that trip.

*

Some months after the end of my experiment, I did finally have a dream which bore a conclusively strong resemblance to a specific future event.

In my dream, I had the idea that I ought to write a book entitled Pineapples and Apple Pies. It would be an English textbook for use in Taiwan. The title was perfect because it illustrated the rules of compound formation in English: pineapple and apple pie were made up of the same two components (sic) but in a different order; also, pineapple was written as a single word with the stress on the first element, while apple pie was written as two with the stress on the second. I was delighted to have discovered two such common words which were thus related — much more natural than such strained pairs as songbird-birdsong and housecat-cathouse. As an added bonus, a pineapple was something typical of Taiwan, while an apple pie was a well-known symbol of America. (Upon waking, I naturally realized that the elements of the two compounds were not identical after all, that pine and pie were not the same.)

The day after the dream, I was teaching E., a child whom I tutor privately. At each of our sessions, he has to sign a record sheet, and, with a young child’s normal love of nonsense, he often writes a random word or two (often ghost or pig) on the paper after signing his name. This time, the random “word” he wrote was — applepine. When I said, “Applepine? What’s that?” he said, “You know, like pineapple but the other way!” Of course I had never in my life encountered the “word” applepine before, and the odds of running into it by chance the day after my dream are effectively zero. In fact, E.’s choice of that word is so bizarre and unaccountable that I’m almost more inclined to consider it evidence of mind-reading on his part than of precognition on mine.

Unfortunately, even this does not really count as conclusive evidence, since it occurred outside the formal experiment. The key thing is the ratio of clearly precognitive dreams to clearly retrospective ones, and I wasn’t keeping any records of the latter at the time. However, it did serve to keep me interested in the question, and I shall probably conduct further experiments in the future.

*

Dunne also describes similar experiments in waking precognition, something I may try in the future, since my dreams seem to be of such poor quality, and since I have experienced some success with waking precognition in the past, before I ever encountered Dunne’s ideas. The following is taken from an email I wrote to a family member.

Here’s an experiment you can try. Go somewhere dark, roll your eyes up and to the side like people do when they’re trying to remember something, and “try to get something.” Just try to pick something up, like tuning a radio — easier done than explained. When I tried this, the first thing I “got” was the nonsense words “wudder-wudder-wudderfly” followed by a rapid succession of mental images: a green parrot viewed in profile; a short, wide, yellow tin; and something else which I no longer remember. Hours later, at work, one of my coworkers who had just come back from abroad (the Philippines, if memory serves) gave me some snack food from that country — in a package decorated with a green parrot in profile. Another colleague, a Japanese teacher, was doing some sort of cooking activity with her students and has brought some kind of Japanese bean paste or something in a yellow tin like the one I had seen. I can’t remember now what the third image was — this was years ago — but it also “came true.” (Nothing came of “wudder-wudder-wudderfly,” though.) I haven’t tried that particular exercise again — partly because I didn’t know what I was “tuning in” to and it seemed a little creepy, and partly because I didn’t want to ruin the magic by trying it again and not getting anything.

Given that, against the background of Dunne’s theories, precognition no longer seems “creepy” to me, I may try an organized experiment in waking precognition in the near future. Of course it will be impossible to calculate a ratio of precognitive to retrospective images, but if the results are sufficiently striking they may be conclusive anyway.