I awake with a sense of anxiety.
And a real clarity as to my next move: get on the phone and tell everyone in my family to buy a lottery ticket. My mother is confused by the urgency in my voice, but agrees to get one later that day. My brother already has already has a ticket and finds our conversation weird.
After the calls have ended, I realise my mood is oscillating between desperation and exhilaration, with a frequency that anyone would find unsettling.
Could it be otherwise, given the content of my latest dream?
The dream
I’m sitting with my family. We are huddled around a kitchen table. In the centre of the table is a glass bottle, wide at the bottom, narrow at the top. The bottle contains a piece of paper, printed with six numbers.
Those numbers have just won us a significant sum of money, but we can’t work out how to get to the ticket. The sense of frantic disbelief is overwhelming. We try and try, but the ticket remains stuck. With the logic that only dreams can manifest, it does not occur to anyone that we can simply smash the bottle.
No, we turn the bottle upside down and shake it like lunatics. We take turns in sticking our fingers through the neck, but it’s impossible to grab hold of the ticket and pull it out. Everyone has a go, and everyone fails.
Knowing that we have been defeated, I take one last look inside the glass and, for the first time, ‘see’ the prize money: just a little bit shy of £230,000. This figure is not written on the ticket itself, or anywhere else for that matter. It’s just there somehow, subtly embedded into the fabric of the scene in front of me.
The dream ends with the bottle and ticket still conjoined.
Inevitably, when I wake up my first thought is that someone in my family would have won that money, but forgot to get a ticket.
The emotions of the dream are so powerful that I need to share them with my partner. She sits patiently. I tell her the dream had a strong sense of reality and is impossible to ignore. Having nodded in all the right places, she suggests that I start recording the more impressive dreams.
I open up a small black diary, select the relevant Friday and write ‘won £230,000 on the lottery but couldn’t get to the ticket.’
Then I pick up the phone…
The non-event
It’s early Sunday morning. I can’t believe there wasn’t a call last night, immediately after the Saturday evening lottery draw. I ring my mum, and she tells me they didn’t get a single number. I ring my brother, and he says exactly the same thing.
I’m genuinely confused. The dream was so urgent, so forceful. Perhaps we should have pooled our resources and bought a single ticket, between us? Yes, that’s probably it.
I feel annoyed for not thinking of it sooner.
The eventual… event
One week later, and tennis is on the TV in the lounge. With the sun out, Wimbledon looks spectacular. We are so ‘in the mood’ a jug of Pym’s sits on the table beside my chair, and I am led to believe that cucumber sandwiches are on the way.
Spiffing.
My lottery dream of some nine days previously is a long, long way from my mind, when the phone rings.
“It’s your mum,” says my partner, handing me the receiver.
“You know your lottery dream,” says my mother, with no hint of preamble.
“Well, yes,” I reply.
“How much did you say it was?”
“About £230,000.” My heart is thumping loudly, occupying an awkward silence. “Mum, have you won or haven’t you?” I add, urgently. My confusion is growing.
“Oh no, we didn’t get a penny. But your dad’s cousin did. He won last Saturday.”
“R-i-g-h-t,” I reply, hesitantly. My mind is now performing somersaults.
“He got five numbers and the bonus ball… just under £230,000. Which is really lucky,” she continues, “as he’s just given up work to look after his daughter.”
“Err… so what was his job?” I ask, trying to buy some time and get my brain back into gear. It’s now leaping around all over the place, struggling - and failing - to make sense of the situation.
The line goes quiet. I can hear mum talking to dad in the background, presumably repeating the question. I take the opportunity to ask Graham, my partner’s stepfather, to go to the bedroom and retrieve my diary.
“Oh, he’s been a milkman most of his life,” says mum, returning to the phone.
A milkman. That explains the glass bottle – it was a milk bottle. And we couldn’t get to the ticket because it wasn’t our ticket. It was his ticket.
I don’t say anything. I just sit there, dumbfounded.
My diary has appeared, in Graham’s firm (ex-police officer) grip. I hand him the phone and tell mum to repeat what she’s just told me. I turn to the relevant page in the diary and point to it, as Graham listens.
“Hmmm… won £230,000 but couldn’t get to the ticket….” he mumbles, twiddling the ends of his moustache. He listens to my mum. After a few seconds his eyebrows lift very slightly. In Graham’s world, this is a sign of utter astonishment.
After the event
Lots of people dream of winning the lottery and, sooner or later, one of them will. At which point they can justifiably claim to have personal experience of a precognitive event.
But that isn’t precognition. No, that’s just coincidence. Someone has to win, and every now and then, that person will have previously dreamt of winning.
No big deal.
However, this situation is a little different.
To begin with, my dream involved a very specific sum of money, won on a very specific date. It was not the nebulous ‘I think we might win some money soon’ kind of dream that so many people claim to have experienced.
Additionally, the dream had an intensity that was so unusual it was impossible ignore. This depth of feeling was peculiar enough for me to start writing a dream journal, something I still do today, almost 25 years later.
Enter Eric Wargo…
As the years passed, I did not forget the dream. At the same time, I had no idea what to make of it. The universe had given me a glimpse of the future, but it was an inaccurate glimpse, destined to create nothing but disappointment and confusion.
I read numerous books on the subject, trying to understand how it happened. And, of course, to work out a way of making it happen again, perhaps, this time, with a little more clarity and accuracy. Enough to actually win the lottery.
Then I came across a YouTube video featuring Dr Eric Wargo, an American anthropologist, and the lightbulb in my head finally lit up.
In short, Eric believes that dream precognition is not evidence of our minds directly predicting future events, but of our ‘present’ minds connecting with our ‘future’ minds.
It’s a subtle difference, but an important one.
In my case, I did not dream of the core event, namely a distant relative (who I’d never met) winning the lottery. Instead, I connected with my state of mind just after my mum’s telephone call, in which I learned of his win.
How can I know this? Because my precognitive dream included a strange, central element that I did not understand, until after the phone call: the milk bottle.
This milk bottle stopped us getting to the ticket. And it stopped us because the ticket wasn’t ours – it belonged to a recently retired milkman.
Eric’s book Time Loops (2018) includes numerous examples of precognitive dreams that feature unusual motifs and peculiar anomalies that make no sense at the time of the dream, but slot neatly into place once news of the dreamed event is received. It’s only after the event comes to pass that we learn why the stranger (obfuscating) elements were present.
If you’re finding this hard to get your head around, don’t worry; you’re certainly not alone. It’s why the reality of precognitive dreaming is so easy to dismiss, and the power of precognitive dreaming so difficult to harness.
This will make things clearer… perhaps
One of my favourite examples, taken from Eric’s book, is of the soldier J.W. Dunne.
In 1902, aged 27, Dunne – serving in the British army on South Africa – dreamt that he was stuck on a volcanic island that was about to erupt. In the dream world, he rushed from one office building to another, frantically trying to convince the French authorities to evacuate all 4,000 inhabitants, but no one would listen.
Days after the dream, when the next batch of mail arrived in camp, Dunne read news of an eruption on the French island of Martinique, which, according to The Daily Telegraph article, had likely resulted in the loss of 40,000 lives.
Dunne could not get over the fact that the ‘4’ was the dominant and repeated element of his dream. Yes, he got the wrong number of zeros… but the ‘4’ was the central motif.
And yet, as it transpired, the ‘4’ was also incorrect: the actual death toll turned out to be 30,000, not 40,000.
An accurate precognitive dream of the eruption should have made the number ‘3’ paramount. But Dunne saw a ‘4’, which accorded well with his learning of the event, through the (inaccurate) newspaper article, but not with the facts of the event itself.
The conclusion: his dream had linked his present self with his future self, at the point at which he read about the disaster. He had not ‘witnessed’ the eruption directly, like a spectator bobbing around in the smoke-filled ether. No, the newspaper article told him the death toll began with a ‘4’, so that’s what he saw in the dream.
Dunne was so intrigued by this experience that he became obsessed with precognition, and created new models for reality and consciousness, as epitomized in his 1927 book An Experiment with Time. His ideas garnered a moderate degree of respect from the scientific community of the early twentieth century, and even greater success in capturing the imaginations of countless fiction writers, including JRR Tolkien.
A framework for precognition?
In many traditional cultures, time is not a straight line of events that progress in regimented fashion from past to future. Nor are human beings passively observers of this flow, standing like anglers on the banks of some muddy river.
The Maya believed that everything moved in cycles of different durations, culminating in the 5,125 year ‘Baktuns’ or world-ages, one of which famously ended with much fanfare - and barely a whimper - on December 21, 2012. They understood the passage of time better than most pre-modern cultures, except perhaps, for those nurtured in the Indus Valley.
Hindus also see time as cyclical, though they have a different number of world ages or ‘Yuga’ (four, instead of the Mayan seven), each of which is much, much longer in duration. According to this model, we recently began a 427,000-year period, called Kali Yuga, which will be characterized by ‘quarrel and hypocrisy’.
Marvellous.
Within these cycles, specific events can replicate over and over again, in almost identical fashion. As individual beings, one of our tasks is to anticipate these repetitions, and to mitigate or break free of their negative impact - something that is encapsulated in the idea of ‘karma’.
Remembering the future
Modern scientific theory also offers a surprisingly large number of concessions to the idea of non-linear time; or, at the very least, to the idea that past and future events are not necessarily disconnected from the present.
For example, one significant interpretation of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is the notion of the ‘Block Universe’.
Because time is relative, an event that appears in the past for one observer can nonetheless be a long way in the future for a second observer, located elsewhere in space. Taking this idea to its natural conclusion, you end up with a deterministic universe, in which all possible events are present simultaneously.
It’s (just about) possible to visualise this by imagining each moment in time as an incredibly thin slice of glass, on which all the information relating to that instant (positions of atoms etc.) is imprinted. If you take all these glass slivers and stick them together, you end up with a single, solid glass block, incorporating every particle, being and event in the life of entire universe, from beginning to end.
In a block universe, the past, present and future of every single human already exists (and has always existed). The concept of ‘now’ is just something our brains have constructed, to help us make sense of all these coexistent events… and to stay alive.
Einstein firmly believed this ‘everything present at once‘ model to be true. He famously replied to the widow of an ex-colleague, who was distressed by the unexpected death of her husband, with the words:
“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Perhaps some humans have the ability to project their spark of consciousness beyond the confines of an artificially constructed ‘present moment’, into the coexistent past and… very occasionally… the coexistent future.
At a basic level, the block universe certainly removes one very significant obstacle to precognition: dreaming about future events must be a lot, lot easier if those events have already happened.
The proof is out there… maybe
There is ample anecdotal evidence for precognition, including numerous accounts of people cancelling their Titanic bookings at the last moment, following upsetting dreams and waking visions of imminent disaster.
Famously, in 1886, the author William Stead wrote a short story, depicting events very much like those of the Titanic sinking, 24 years before the disaster unfolded. Even so, he failed to grasp the significance of his own foretelling, and sadly joined 1,500 other people in losing his life to the iceberg impact.
Anecdotes are one thing, but there’s even a degree of scientific proof for information from the future bleeding back into the past. The work of psychologist Daryl Bem (Cornell University) is particularly notable.
In a 2011 paper, Bem presented what he believed to be experimental evidence for retrocausality. In essence, he showed that subjects were able to ‘sense’ the erotic (or non-erotic) nature of an image on a screen, fractions of a second before it was revealed to them.
How do we know that the subjects were telling the truth and not just playing along with Bem’s expectations? Because erotic stimuli prompt reactions in the autonomous systems of the human body that cannot be consciously controlled. These reactions were occurring (or not occurring, if the stimulus was not erotic), moments before the images were revealed.
Bem described this as ‘Anaomolous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Effect’. But we might just call it intuition – the sensing an event just before it happens. Intuition is pretty much the same thing as precognition, only it typically occurs over shorter timescales: fractions of seconds or minutes, as opposed to days, months and years.
In Britain, studies show that 70% of people believe in intuition, and up to 20% actively use their ‘gut-feelings’ to inform the decision-making process.
Needless to say, most scientists see anecdotal evidence as no kind of evidence at all, and view Bem’s experiments as little more than an affront to the scientific method. It is, perhaps, rather telling that Bem’s colleagues in the psychology community are twice as likely to criticise his work than those in other areas of academia.
If you are going to upset the apple cart, it’s best to avoid the one you are sitting in.
Many of Bem’s detractors argue that precognition is ‘simply impossible’, without offering an explanation as to why. Denial is their default position, and they will be sticking to it, come hell or high water.
Despite the in-built pessimism of the nay-say crowd, we can also look to some of the most famous experiments in quantum mechanics, for proof that time-bending phenomena do exist.
For instance, the ‘quantum eraser’ seems to indicate that choices made in the future materially affect events in the past, while ‘quantum entanglement’ (what Einstein termed ‘spooky action at a distance’) hints at connections between particles that are able to transcend the limitations of time and space.
Through a glass darkly
In my own experience, we certainly do get occasional, fragmentary glimpses of future realities. However, these are gathered, filtered, compiled and represented by our sleeping minds, using the peculiar language of our dreams.
Very rarely do these dreams survive into the waking world, unless we make a conscious effort to document them. Even more rarely do we take the time to think about the unusual motifs, or analyse the stronger impressions, that bubble up in our dreams, and attempt to connect them to events that unfold in our waking lives.
This does not mean there is no connection.
Consider the incredible circumstances that have given rise to our existing at all, and our complete ignorance of the true nature of reality.
We do not understand the first thing about consciousness. We have no idea what time is, and there is absolutely no evidence that what we think of as the real, ‘material’ world, even exists. If that wasn’t bad enough, we now believe 95% of the universe is composed of ‘dark’ matter and ‘dark’ energy, meaning that our best scientific theories are built upon slightly less than 5% of reality.
This is akin to looking at the Mona Lisa and making a decision about its overall power, beauty and composition – not to mention the techniques, motivations and intentions of its creator – based solely on analysis of her left eye, with the rest of her features entirely blacked-out.
Meanwhile, the world’s greatest ever physicist (and tongue-sticker-outer) believed the ideas of past, present and future to be nothing but an illusion.
Is it insane to believe that glimpses of the future might be available to those who are open-minded enough to see them?
Postscript (a word on those worms)
My lottery dream features on page four of Eric Wargo’s book 2021 book Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self. I am given the pseudonym Tom in Eric’s account, but he faithfully replicates (and succinctly abbreviates) the information given in this article.
As I understand it, ‘the Long Self’ is Eric’s term for the mind or consciousness of the human being that inhabits the block universe.
If you imagine your birth as the emergence of a tiny, highly-organised collection (let’s call it a circle) of innumerable atoms and particles, on the first of the glass slices that spans your lifetime, then your death is the dissolution of this circle, on the very last slice of your existence.
In between, there are many, many slices, each featuring a similar (but not identical) circle of the self, positioned in a similar (but not identical) location. Join up all these circles, by compressing the slices, and you end up with a worm-like entity, spanning what is still a minuscule percentage of the near-infinite slices that make up the block universe.
In a scaled-down version of this block universe – a glass cube, large enough to contain the sun – your individual 'worm of existence' would barely register as the most minuscule of scratches.
But that doesn't make your life irrelevant. You, and all the other human worms, exist alongside the similar worms of a multitude of other creatures, here on Earth and everywhere else in the universe, in numbers so unimaginable that our accumulated scratch-marks will turn the transparent material of the glass block completely opaque.
Indeed, it might be argued that the block is comprised of nothing but the intertwined tracks of innumerable conscious entities, from the simple to the incredibly complex, and has no material reality.
But that’s another story…
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