The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Prophecies, Time Loops, and Bubble Realities: La Jetée and The Sacrifice


If precognition is real, then we have to take account of the range of sci-fi effects it would produce, effects that go beyond the strictly ‘prophetic.’ Because we fail to see how our consciousness is receptive to the future and how our actions contribute to, and only in a minority of cases confirm, that future, we fail to recognize the range of effects that Chaos Theory would predict should occur.

The most common kind of effect would be negation of precognitive information because our freely willed actions cancelled the validity of that information and turned it into noise. In such cases, we would never even know the precognitive information was information, so it can be ignored. This first possibility I already dealt with in my “Psi of Regret” post a few months ago: There are all kinds of reasons why, in a universe full of conscious, freely willed actors, precognition would tend to negate itself.

The downside of taking responsibility as a freely willed being in the universe is being unable to ever say for certain whether prophecies are genuine.

Less commonly, though, feedback effects would result in an intensified significance to coincidental events, or what people often call a “synchronicity”; our failure to believe in psi or to acknowledge our own (unconscious) role in this feedback loop produces the illusion that some meta-symbols have a cosmically ordering power in these events (i.e., Jung’s concept of archetypes). This more interesting and rarer fork in the bifurcation predicted by Chaos Theory, the intensifed phenomenon of the synchronicity as a kind of ‘attractor,’ is interestingly explored in the film Don’t Look Now, the subject of my last post: Misrecognizing a precognitive vision as present reality produces a synchronistic perfect storm that ends up claiming the life of a hardened materialist skeptic.

In Don’t Look Now, the events set in motion by the protagonist’s failure to include the knower in the known are precisely what enable the future to control his fate: Our fate is only predetermined when we do not recognize our own free will, and fail to see that our awareness encompasses our life and death—that it exists to some degree outside of time and can see into the future and the past.

Chris Marker’s wonderful 1963 short film La Jetée, composed almost entirely of still images, is another beautiful expression of this idea.

Misrecognition and Time Loops

In La Jetée, desperate subterranean survivors of a nuclear holocaust in post-nuclear-war Paris have developed the technology of time travel—in the form of a psychoactive drug—as a means to summon aid and resources from the past and future. To test it out, they select a war prisoner as a guinea pig, based on his strong fixation on an image from his childhood: a beautiful woman watching a man shot to death on the observation platform (“jetty”) at Orly Airport. Holding a powerful image in mind is necessary to stabilize the time traveler’s presence in the destination time.

After initial abortive attempts, the test subject is able to maintain himself in the past, and finds the woman of his childhood image. They wander together around prewar Paris, visiting museums and parks, falling in love—at one point, standing before a cut tree trunk with dates assigned to the different rings, he points to a spot in the air outside the tree’s circumference and says “This is where I come from.” But he is not allowed to stay in this idyllic past; his jailers retrieve him and send him to the future to retrieve needed technology to help the human race survive—the mission he was always intended for. Having accomplished this, his jailers return him to his cell, his role in their plans now complete. However, he is mentally contacted by beings from the future who are able to grant his wish to return to his lover in prewar Paris. When he goes back in time—he hopes permanently—he sees her at Orly jetty and runs toward her, but is shot by one of his prison guards, who has followed him back in time. He finally realizes that it was his own death he had seen as a child.

The time loop is broken through the final “interpretation” or moment of insight: ‘It was me all along enjoying this dark, perplexing story (the story of my life).’

The narrator says, as the man from the future steps out onto Orly Jetty the last time, that “confusedly, he expected to see a small boy, his younger self.” Yet there is no such boy there to witness this event, leaving us with the conclusion that his “memory from childhood” was really a precognitive dream or vision of his own death—in other words, exactly the fatal misrecognition that destroys John Baxter in Don’t Look Now. Thus La Jetee, which was the original inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, beautifully illustrates the Lacanian notion of a symptom as a kind of time-loop sustained by misrecognition of trauma, failure to include the knower in the known. The loop is broken through the final “interpretation” or moment of insight: ‘It was me all along enjoying this dark, perplexing story (the story of my life).’

The sustaining ‘enjoyment’ in this fable is explicit in the way that time travel is conflated with a drug experience—a syringe calls to mind a drug addiction, perhaps the purest form of pleasurable-painful-destructive jouissance. When the man is returned to his cell after his “trial runs” in the past, it is as an addict taken away from the source of his enjoyment. We could perhaps also see his need as the thing that opens a door to communication with the future beings who are able to grant his wish for a final, fatal return to the past.

Every film is a Rashomon, though, and there are other ways of interpreting what “really happens” in La Jetée. The entire story of the film could be a fantasy produced in this war prisoner’s dying moments, for example, as in Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”: A confederate sympathizer and saboteur is being executed by hanging, from a bridge during the Civil War; the rope breaks, allowing him to escape into the water and flee through the forest to his plantation and the arms of his waiting wife. As he approaches her, he feels the noose tighten around his neck and he “awakens” to the reality of his death.

But there is also a further possibility, that the real subject of the film is the woman, and that the whole story is her lonely fantasy or dream of a love affair with a man with no past, projected onto the fantasized gaze of a young boy who could be their fantasy child. The fact that the only actual motion in the film is a few seconds of the woman opening her eyes in bed hints at this possibility.

2 x Double = Toil + Trouble

What happens in a sci-fi universe where time loops and precognition are real and we do include the knower in the known? Here’s where we are caught in a paradox. Negative precognitions or premonitions (John Baxter seeing his own funeral procession, the man from the future seeing his own death) could only be verified if we do not act upon them to change our destiny—and thus, presumably, would only be apparent after the fact, if we consciously fail to recognize their true nature.

On first glance, Don’t Look Now and La Jetée might thus seem like the opposite of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where a prophecy destroys because it is obeyed to the letter rather than skeptically questioned or mistaken as involving someone else. But really the effect of willed disbelief or misrecognition is the same as the effect of insecure belief—hastening to fulfill the prophecy lest it not come true, as it were, “on its own.” It is MacBeth’s anxious efforts to fulfill the prophecy that catch him in the witches’ fatal logic and destroy him just as surely as rigid disbelief in the paranormal destroys John Baxter or misrecognition of his ’symptom’ draws the protagonist of La Jetée to his doom.

True freedom from prophecy seemingly is obtained by believing in the prophesied possibility as a virtual outcome but knowing we have some say in the matter. But the downside of taking responsibility as a freely willed being in the universe is being unable to ever say for certain whether prophecies (our own or those of seers we have faith in) are/were genuine. In a sense, the result is the sketch-like world described by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which nonrepetition—transience, Heraclitus’s inability to set foot twice in the same river—results in an “unbearably light” insubstantiality to things.

Yet, as I’ve argued before, this suspended belief in prophecy’s ‘hardness’ is the truly healthy stance. We must assume a skeptical distance both from reductive linear materialist causality (“there are no messages from the future”) and from “synchromystic” determinism in which the Big Other somehow perfectly knows us and controls our fate.

What Happens in a Sci-Fi Universe Stays in the Sci-Fi Universe

This middle attitude produces a third, purely theoretically but exotic possibility: that precognitive information will at times produce alternative ‘bubble histories’ that are isolated from the stream of causality through the conscious willed action of the recipient of future information. In a sense, this non-possibility is a theoretical ghost that hovers over all of reality when we acknowledge the existence of information reaching into and affecting the past in a universe that also includes free will.

How could we ever know whether a person’s psychotic or obsessive behavior is not, really, a sacrifice being made to forestall some personal or cosmic tragedy by isolating it in a bubble universe? Are some madmen really martyrs?

A few excellent films have explored this idea in different, creative ways. Donnie Darko is the most obvious: At the end of the film, we realize that the disastrous events leading up to the protagonist’s death are a bubble reality isolated from the time stream by his heroic sacrifice, creating what in theoretical physics has been called a “closed timelike curve.” In many ways, the film is a retelling or permutation of It’s a Wonderful Life, except in that case the negative/feared historical outcome is neutralized/negated by the protagonist not allowing himself to die.

But my favorite exploration of the possibility of a heroic sacrifice saving the protagonist’s universe is Andrei Tarkovsky’s beautiful final film, The Sacrifice. Despite appearances of being a slow (at times, paint-dryingly slow) Bergman-esque chamber drama about an aging artist’s birthday gathering, it is really a science fiction film, and one that all true Forteans owe it to themselves to see.

Alexander, a former actor now enjoying his retirement with his wife and young son at a beautiful country house in rural Sweden, meets the local postman, Otto, who turns out to be a “collector” of uncanny paranormal occurrences—essentially, a Swedish Charles Fort. Beyond merely collecting and cataloging such incidents, Otto actually goes to great lengths (he says) to verify them.

Otto visits Alexander’s country house to give him a rather excessive birthday gift—a precious antique map (he explains that “all gifts require a sacrifice”)—and while he is there, a TV alert somberly announces that a nuclear war has broken out; citizens are urged to stay calm, but the mood is gloomy, and Alexander’s family are able to hear the rockets flying overhead, launched from nearby missile silos. In solitary terror and desperation, Alex prays: He will give up speech and even give up his family and his house to end the war.

Otto then privately confides in him that there is one chance to save everything—save the world—and that is that Alexander must go to the home of his own servant, Maria—who is actually (Otto says) a witch—and sleep with her. Alex hesitates, but then gets on his bicycle, rides to her house, and fulfills this act. He returns home, falls asleep, and then wakes to find that there is no nuclear war—things are normal, no one is panicked. Was it all a dream? We don’t know. But keeping his promise, Alex falls silent, methodically sets fire to his home while his family is out for a walk, and finally, running around the burning house like an ecstatic (and silent) madman, is taken off by an ambulance.

Through his sacrificial act, we are led to believe, Alex has not “ended the war” but rather prevented it from ever happening. If only he remembers it, we can ask if he really is a madman, or if he really changed the future through a strange ritual recommended by his Fortean friend. There is no way to know what is “really real,” whether any of it was a dream, and whether his sacrifice (giving up speech and his house and family) is actually a significant history-altering pact with the silent universe … or whether it is just a psychotic break.

Lacan noted that neurotic rituals are often undertaken to cover over an emptiness, the lack in (or nonexistence of) the Big Other. But if time is multidimensional and looping, and if synchronicities emerge from misrecognized precognition or from double causation (Vallee’s phrase), it raises the possibility of encapsulated bubble histories, like growths or polyps sprouted by the stream of time and severed through some “mad” (or merely neurotic) act—some sacrifice—which may even save the world.

So The Sacrifice raises a disturbing question not only about the shape of time but also about mental illness: How could we ever know whether a person’s psychotic or obsessive behavior is not, really, a sacrifice being made to forestall some personal or cosmic tragedy by isolating it, encapsulating it, in a kind of self-cancelling bubble universe where it can no longer harm anyone? Are some madmen really martyrs who have sacrificed their sanity to save the world?

About

I am a science writer and armchair Fortean based in Washington, DC. Write to me at eric.wargo [at] gmail.com.

13 Responses to “Prophecies, Time Loops, and Bubble Realities: La Jetée and The Sacrifice”

  • Eric,

    Your recent posts act in a catalytic manner on many internal thoughts and ideas.
    I feel glad that I discovered your site, via the valuable comments of my friend and remarkable explorer of the Unknown, Thanassis Vembos.

    Greetings from Greece

  • Welcome, George–thanks for commenting!

    Eric

  • This reminds me of the metaphysical concept of the Sacrificial King in relation to an attempt toward skewing outcomes as nature requires us to be eaten randomly as well as cyclically just as we eat in a reciprocal balance that is self regulating.

    Throwing a beautiful young woman on an altar as a payment in advance… the concept of controlling these sacrifices that are foisted on us rather than being vulnerable to unpredictable outcomes that nature often provides. Which sacrifice or what sacrifice is needed? Can this be chosen by a precognition of a specific outcome in relation to…what is required?

    I tend to not subscribe to this. This shoe might be on the other foot which is just as interesting perhaps more transcendent.

    That being said, I do suspect that in a less grand scale this does happen ie in bubbles or what a recent physics paper called membranes surrounding a small localized field.

    Gurdjieff was fond of saying, do we chose to suffer for a purpose or do we suffer like dogs?

  • I have been toying with an idea that ties together things you have discussed in the “Psi of Regret” post and the “Rashomon Brain” post (and some others): If everyone is to some degree receiving information from the future, even though it’s all slightly different (“Rashomon Brain”), instead of one precognitive “cancelling out” information from a second, is it possible that there is a collective concensus of information coming from the future that works to stabilize the attractor that is “the future”? It seems to me that this might be consistent with the idea that *particular* instances of precognition involve some braned-off bubble universe.

  • Like you, the majority of “precogntive” hits from dreams that I have identified from doing the J.W. Dunne – style exercises (even if I forgot that’s who suggested them!)have been about very mundane, banal kinds of events; things that I would probably never have noticed if I hadn’t gone back and re-read the dreams I recorded.

    I just spent a few minutes on the psych-info database, which confirmed my suspicion that there has been very very little research on the actual experience of ‘deja vu.’ One 1992 review says “results are contradictory.” If, as you suggest, our dreams are a vehicle for more or less constant information from the future, then it’s an attractive idea for me that some of that might account for the deja-vu feeling of “I’ve dreamed of this before.”

  • I don’t know what I think about sacrifices, Bruce, but another thing The Sacrifice delves into (but I didn’t mention) is ritual and repetition–the idea that if you perform the same act every day, it will have an effect somehow on the universe. I think there is something to that, in terms of the entrainment to coincidence I discussed previously–for it to have a shaping effect on our future it needs to become a habit. We are affecting our future indirectly through the habit of working with coincidence, thereby creating an expectation-fulfillment when they occur.

  • Like you, the majority of “precogntive” hits from dreams that I have identified from doing the J.W. Dunne – style exercises (even if I forgot that’s who suggested them!)have been about very mundane, banal kinds of events; things that I would probably never have noticed if I hadn’t gone back and re-read the dreams I recorded.

    I’ve discovered over the past few weeks that the really interesting dream precognitions are not obvious at first but require free-association; but when you do this, they turn out to refer to emotionally salient events of the following day. Basically, you may not dream anything directly related to the event, but instead dream of something related to a very personal association, often from childhood, that the event reminds you of. It tends to be very specific, and unmistakeable as a ‘psi’ experience once you uncover it. Dunne needs to be combined with Freud.

  • I just spent a few minutes on the psych-info database, which confirmed my suspicion that there has been very very little research on the actual experience of ‘deja vu.’ One 1992 review says “results are contradictory.” If, as you suggest, our dreams are a vehicle for more or less constant information from the future, then it’s an attractive idea for me that some of that might account for the deja-vu feeling of “I’ve dreamed of this before.”

    I don’t think all dreams represent information from the future. Even when you scrutinize them for future information using free association, the bulk of them end up pointing to experiences from the previous day or two. As for this idea of deja vu … Maybe! I’m distrustful of the idea that deja vu is an actual memory, though. I think it could be a glitch or illusion, simply an altered feeling-tone of an ongoing experience such that it feels like a memory–in other words, a metacognitive trick caused by miscoding, but maybe motivated by some unconscious thought or feeling about what is happening in the moment.
    I suppose there’s not much research on it because it’s hard to produce in a laboratory.

  • Yeah, I haven’t been reading you as suggesting that all dream information is from the future, but I have been reading you as suggesting that we are more or less constantly getting *some* information from the future, in our dreams.

    I went back to psych-info and used the broadest keyword search possible: “deja vu.” I got 350 hits. After about the first 250, the relevance becomes pretty minimal (“deja vu” not being the topic). Besides the articles not in English, and besides the articles that got included because they were about some lesson that should already been learned regarding a wholly other topic, but included the phrase “It’s deja vu all over again” (note to self: Don’t ever write an article with that as part of the title, about anything), it’s clear that the literature on deja vu isn’t as small as it looked to me earlier, but it’s still not vast.

    Most of the articles had to do with epilepsy, and some had to do with cognitive models of mistaken ‘familiarity’ (the kinds of things I think you’re referring to as explanations for deja vu. A few had to do with surveys of people having ‘odd experiences’. There were about 8 that seemed to me to be pertinent to this conversation.

    One author seems to have done something very similar to your own practice: recorded a lot of dreams, found the Dunne effect, and noted that the precognitive aspect fell off quite dramatically in time spans longer than a day (this article didn’t actually have much to do with deja vu, based on the abstract, but it seemed close enough to what you’re talking about to be worth mention).

    Another author looked at a lot of dreams that seemed to be “prophetic” and conclude that all that content actually referred to material that had happened previously. Essentially, this author suggested that believing that one had had prophetic dreams was just a way to feel ‘important.’ (Typical).

    Two articles were closer to my particular mark. Here’s the abstract to one: “Argues that at least some occurrences of the déjà vu experience result from precognitive dreams that are remembered concurrently with their coming true. Déjà visité (unusual knowledge concerning a place one has never been to before) is held to be a different experience. Personal experiences of the present author with the déjà vu experience are recounted, and various characteristics common to most people’s experience of déjà vu are described.”

    It’s not what you’d call “highly empirical,” but this refers to the my own personal experience I had in mind when I first posted the comment: Having an experience and feeling “I’ve dreamed about this before…” which is NOT actually the same as *remembering the dream* (which, mostly, I have not; to the extent I feel like I have, I don’t have any documentation of it).

    Here’s another abstract, this time from a 2002 publication: “A questionnaire concerning dreams and déjà vu experiences was administered to 122 university students. Of all the respondents, twenty-four were not sure whether they had those experiences. Out of the remaining ninety-eight students, forty-one (41.8%) reported at least one experience of precognitive dream. Although 20% of the respondents claimed that the experiences were “true” precognitive dreams, a major portion (about 80%) of the respondents regarded their experiences as “pseudo” precognitive dreams (they recalled the dreams when they had “predicted” events). The onset age of the precognitive dream is concentrated on the age between 6 to 10 years old. Déjà vu experiences showed very similar patterns of age distribution. The respondents who had no precognitive dreams experienced déjà vu significantly less frequently than the ones who had “pseudo” precognitive dreams. This research showed that many people use the word “precognitive dream” in a wrong sense compared with a standard definition and that those “precognitive” dreams could be considered a subtype of déjà vu experiences.”

    Here, remembering the dream concurrently with the event that it supposedly foretold is actually considered a “precognitive dream,” because the person doesn’t recall the dream until waking-life event occurs.

  • That experience remains tantalizing to me, because of the oddness of the feeling (as I have experienced it), and the feeling of certainty that accompanies it. It could very well be some sort of “coding error” — but it still catches my attention.

    However, after I posted my initial comment, I had already started to back away from thinking of these as “good” examples of information from the future coming into dreams, mostly because of the problem identified in the second abstract. The *feeling* of having had a dream about a situation “sometimes” is not the same thing as remembering a dream and writing it down on waking. Also, as I thought about it, that “feeling” is not the same “feeling” I have when I am remembering dreams as I am writing down. Especially when a dream has some vividness, when I am recalling it, there is a sense of “being in a space,” a space that feels *real* (in its own dreamy way). This is a very different thing that the feeling of “I have dreamed this before.”

  • The initial set of ideas behind the first comment, though, went something like this: If we are (a) getting some information about “the future” more or less constantly in our dreams, and (b) we don’t remember many, if not most of our dreams (especially people who don’t practice), it seems at least possible that (c) sometimes, a waking event will confirm/conform to some forgotten dream with precognitive content.

    Maybe, maybe not. The case seems thinner to me at the moment than when I first proposed it.

  • ” It tends to be very specific, and unmistakeable as a ‘psi’ experience once you uncover it. Dunne needs to be combined with Freud.”

    …I am now thinking of this as the “Dunne-Freud-Wargo synthesis.”

  • Very interesting.

    Argues that at least some occurrences of the déjà vu experience result from precognitive dreams that are remembered concurrently with their coming true.

    The notion that deja-vu experiences are memories of precognitive dreams occurring in the moment is plausible, although in my experience there’s nothing much that is literal or camcorder-like about my dreams in their relation to either future or past reality. Instead the material is scrambled and distorted, precisely the way Freud describes and the way you would distort items you were trying to build a mnemonic for in the art of memory. Attributes of one object will be given to another, and the logical relation of the elements is distorted. For instance, in my 9/11 dream, Islam and the castrated/ruined towers were conflated, creating the image of the pair of corduroy 1-story square mosques; the destruction/castration of the towers itself was conflated with father-symbolism in the form of my dad’s office (the real-life location of the dream ‘mosques’), an office that he occupied only briefly when I was a kid but that I specifically associate with something he mentioned about a male patient of his at that time who was a transsexual or transvestite; so, sort of a symbolic “glomming” together of thematically related ideas.
    This is just like how remote viewing or clairvoyant information is received, too, according to all descriptions, including Upton Sinclair, Rene Warcollier, and the SRI folks. It’s almost as if the ‘psi eye’ is a purely mechanical form-perceiver and a slightly higher level of processing then attempts to cobble together a story from these form-impressions, but it’s always wrong or scrambled or mixed up.
    I have some beautiful recent examples of this from my dream diary, but they would take a few pages to describe. I may try to work one into a post to show what I mean. Two from last week were truly powerful and uncanny, but only visible after the fact; i.e., the real-life triggering event wouldn’t have resembled the dream enough to trigger an epiphanous deja vu, I don’t think, although maybe I’m wrong. On the other hand, different people dream differently, and Dunne’s examples are mostly of things being fairly literally dreamed and then encountered in real life, so maybe it’s a matter of different cognitive (and dreaming) styles.