Reposted with permission from Inner Traditions’ “Off the Shelf” blog. Throughout history and in most if not all cultures, the phenomenon of dreams seeming to foretell future experiences—what we now call precognitive dreams—has been accepted as a normal, even unremarkable, feature of sleep. Yet mainstream psychology continues to deny—or at least ignore—this belief. I’m here […]
Whenever and wherever I discuss the hypothesis that most forms of ESP, including remote viewing, could really be misrecognized precognition, I’m answered with the same thing: “But Pat Price, Semipalatinsk.” Everyone who knows anything about the remote viewing and the research at Stanford Research Institute in the mid-1970s “knows” the story of how Pat Price, […]
Check out the very fun conversation I had last year with John Craig on his Japanese webcast Real Rover, about all things time-loopy. We discuss retrocausation, alchemy, Zen, and the Long Self that precognition gives access to. Enjoy! ***
Dreams go hand in hand with origins, so it is conveniently coincidental—coincidentally fractal maybe—that what is usually considered to be the first recorded poem in our tongue was about the origins of origins—the beginning of created things—and was composed in a dream after the poet had tried to escape the burden of being original himself. […]
In 2017, a couple in Stratford upon Avon, England requested that a technician from Severn Trent, the water company that serves their region, come out to replace the water line to their house from the main under the street. First, he had to locate the buried pipe, and the couple were surprised to see the […]
Ted Chiang is an SF writer after my own heart. At every stage in my own investigation of time loops, someone sends me yet another Chiang story that addresses exactly the issues I’ve been working on. What’s more, his stories seem to act as attractors for precognitive and time-looping experiences. I’m sure his new collection […]
“We can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain.”—Adam Phillips, Missing Out Ship’s Log: star-date 3139.0. Having tracked unusual spacetime ripples to their source, the Starship Enterprise now threatens to be ripped apart as it struggles to maintain its orbit over an uncharted, weirdly time-disturbing planet. There is chaos on the bridge. Mr. […]
In the 1980s, when the possibility of wormholes began to capture physicists’ imaginations, there was the inevitable concern about what such objects might mean for causality in an Einsteinian, time-elastic universe. Wormholes through space meant, inevitably, wormholes through time. And so, naturally, people thought of the grandfather paradox, that strange fantasy of killing one’s patriarchs […]
We are four-dimensional beings. As I argue in my new book Time Loops, our behavior at any given moment is shaped not only by the exigencies of that moment and what has preceded it, but also by what comes next; we are informed by things we will learn in our future, not just by what […]
Valentine’s Day, 1900. A group of Australian schoolgirls, all clad in white dresses, are driven by coach to Hanging Rock, an enormous volcanic formation in central Victoria, Australia, for an afternoon picnic. Four girls, including the most popular, Botticelli Venus-looking Miranda (played by Anne-Louise Lambert), defying the orders of the school’s stern headmistress, venture off […]