How’s this for spooky? I happen to be thinking about a story by speculative fiction writer Bruce McAllister a couple of weeks ago. Two or three days later, a book for review arrives in the mail: It’s the novel version of McAllister’s short story.
But that’s not the best part. The book is Dream Baby, a novel about psychics forced by the U.S. Government to participate in special ops missions during the Vietnam War. The novel was first published in 1989. Now it’s been reprinted in a new trade paperback edition.
So--did I have a psychic flash about an event in the near future (the book’s arrival) that, fittingly enough, involved speculation on psychic phenomena? Or was it one of those odd coincidences that life sometimes tosses us?
I shot McAllister a quick note to thank him for the book, and to see what he thought of my little precognitive insight, if that was really what it had been.
"Not surprised all," he wrote me back. "Synchronicity seems to be the rule--even when we don’t know it."
Okay, sure. But by that point, my mind had taken off on a flight of fancy. Isn’t synchronicity simply the way that seemingly random events in life sometimes (or, maybe, fairly often) seem to line up in improbable ways? We can account for that, sort of, by referencing the brain’s innate ability (and habit) for recognizing patterns, even when no true pattern exists--that’s the skeptic’s view of such things.
So, too, precognition, telepathy, and clairvoyance--which an article on psychic phenomena in TIME Magazine three years ago defined, respectively, as "the ability to see into the future," "the ability to access someone else’s consciousness," and "the ability to broaden one’s consciousness to remote time and space." Though the TIME article didn’t address the skeptic’s point of view--it was about a Harvard University researcher and her theories--there are explanations for each of these so-called psychic abilities to be found in the normal operations of commonplace consciousness.
To wit: If we suddenly feel like we are looking at a person or situation we’ve seen before, is it because we’ve dreamed it at some previous point in time? Or is it the case that the brain is having some sort of hiccup, confusing the processing of fresh input so that it feels like a memory?
Or: If a person has a dream about an event taking place, or experiences a sudden premonition about a loved one’s death (a favorite example), and it later comes to pass, is this truly evidence of a human ability--intermittent and uncontrollable as it might be--to glimpse things to come? Or is it simply the case that our consciousness is full of static from the incessant barrage of stimuli (triggering our "fight or flight" reflexes, maybe), or from random associations in the background of our thoughts? When some random thought actually happens to correspond with an event that takes place shortly afterward, we seize on it as evidence of some exceptional ability or extraordinary experience.
But what’s "exceptional" about such incidents, whatever their nature? Whether psychic phenomena are real or merely illusory, they are not so strange as all that. In fact, they seem to be ubiquitous. Everyone has a story to share--well, maybe not everyone, but most people I know have had at least one experience that qualifies. My mother dreamed about seeing my stepfather’s high school graduation photo a decade before she met him. The first time she set foot in his house, there was the photo she had dreamed, sitting right on his mantle. But did she actually see that image years earlier in her dream? Or did her mind substitute that image in her recollection of the dream? You can’t tell her she didn’t actually see that photo in her dream--she knows that she did. But the question begs the very nature of human knowledge and of memory, which research has shown, in recent years, to be highly changeable.
Then there are my own experiences with knowing about pregnant relatives before they broke the news. From an early age, I started to have dreams whenever my mother was pregnant. I’d have such a dream, and invariably, a week or so later, my mother would announce that a new baby sibling was on the way. (I have six younger siblings, so I had plenty of opportunity to repeat the experiment, so to speak.) But could she have been dropping some subtle clue that I had learned, subliminally, to pick up on? Or could it have been a matter of pheromones--her body chemistry changing, and her scent changing as a result?
Well, maybe. But that doesn’t explain how I knew about my cousin Wilma, from thousands of miles away. Or my brother’s wife, also thousands of miles away--a pregnancy I dreamed of repeatedly, even as my brother and his wife denied it. (They lied their way through her first trimester in order not to jinx themselves.) I reckon those dreams could be explained the same way as any "precognitive" episode: maybe I have such dreams all the time, but forget the ones that don’t pan out. However, I don’t believe that, because I wouldn’t have forgotten every single such dream except the ones that were accurate. I usually have interesting, complicated dreams; they are like watching movies, and I look forward to seeing what my personal screening will be like each night. I remember lots of my dreams, and I only remember having dreams about people being pregnant when they turned out to be predictive.
I know I’m using my mother’s argument here ("I remember, dammit!"), even though I also know that memory is subject to unwitting, unnoticed revision. But that much revision? And so utterly unnoticed?
My friend Sasha has a good anecdote. He was about to board a commuter train when a wave of nausea and dizziness--acute, sudden malaise--suddenly swept over him. He was aggravated at missing the train, but convinced that he was about to faint or vomit, so he sat on a bench instead of boarding. The moment the train pulled away, the nausea vanished--but the train was involved in an accident that killed dozens. More than a coincidence? Surely, Sasha would have remembered if he’s had similar episodes in which the train didn’t crash. But nothing of the sort had ever happened before, or since.
What about clairvoyance--knowledge not of the future but of things happening in the same moment somewhere else? I don’t know about you, but I always knew--always--when I was in trouble as a kid. That is, I would get a certain, specific feeling that told me that across town, at that very moment, one or another of my parents was pissed off at me. I’d shuffle off home to face the music, and I was...I regret to note... never wrong.
Or how about when my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer? I knew about it a couple of weeks before my mother told me. Two and a half years later, after my husband and I had moved to Germany, I dreamed that my grandmother knocked at our front door. I answered to find my grandmother standing in the stairwell of our apartment building, dressed in her good Sunday coat and hat. I invited her in.
"No, sweetie," she said to me. "I can’t be staying. I just wanted to stop by on my way and check that you’re all right." I assured her that I was. "That’s what I needed to know," she said; "I’d best be on my way now." It was not news when I got word in a letter of her death. I already knew she was gone. She had, after all, made a brief detour to look in on me--or anyway, that’s what I chose to believe. And I am pretty certain that I would have remembered any earlier, similar dreams about my grandmother passing by on her way to the hereafter. This dream was simply too vivid to forget. If this one, why no others on the same theme?
Were these episodes lucky guesses? My subconscious weighing the odds? If so, then, why can’t I do that at the craps tables in Vegas? With a hit rate like that, I’d clean up. But I am lousy at gambling. I am also lousy at crossword puzzles and guessing games. Chess, too. I tend to think that there’s reason to believe some form of ESP is possible. It might even be an everyday thing so much a part of our lives that we don’t even recognize it.
But when I examine the idea of extra-sensory perception, I have to ask: how? Seeing without eyes? Hearing without ears? We live in a physical, mechanical universe. If registering information apart from the use of our physiological senses were possible, why would we need to bother with bodies? Why would life be metabolism-based, when bodiless, spiritual existence would be cleaner, less bother, and more direct? I mean, isn’t the simplest explanation usually the right one, as long as it’s within the realm of possibility? So, by that reasoning, isn’t sensory perception the easiest possible means to collecting information? And doesn’t that rule out extra-sensory perception?
And yet, ESP is not so simple to dismiss. It seems to happen--or, at least, something that the human mind takes to be ESP seems to happen.
I interviewed Bruce McAllister in 2007 upon the release of an anthology that contained a short story version of his novel Dream Baby. In the interview, McAllister told me about the research he did for the novel: he talked to a couple hundred combat vets, from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It was often the case that precognitive or clairvoyant episodes were once-in-a-lifetime happenings--or, if they happened more than once, it was in combat situations--extraordinary moments that lay outside of life as it is usually experienced. And McAllister had an idea of how ESP might work.
"The odd thing, of course, is that particle physicist friends have no trouble accepting ESP, anymore than they have a hard time accepting certain kinds of spirituality," McAllister said. "It’s the applied guys that have the hard time. Even the Navy (think the SEALS’ use of Silva Mind Control back in the day) don’t seem to have a problem with ESP, and that’s of course because they see it all the time, and without needing to understand it, feel they’re using it."
McAllister said that there were two main theories about ESP. "One model is a cross between physics and spirituality, not surprisingly. The deepest part of the psyche probably operates in Einsteinian time and space, and as we know, in an Einsteinian universe there’ s no problem thinking of simultaneity of time and space. ESP is not a problem there. Also, if one is at all spiritual, the oneness of things applies here.
"But the model that I used in Dream Baby," McAllister went on, "is one you run across from Buchanan, the story’s arch-villain, and that’s a secular, ’rational,’ psychological, and physiological one. I came up with that model because of the nature of the experiences that were reported to me by those 200 vets of three American wars. They had striking patterns: they all tended to be life-and-death situations, and the guys experiencing the episodes of what they feel was ESP had never experienced anything like it before; and when they returned to peacetime, they never experienced anything like it again.
"But episodes like that are called in the psych trade ’spontaneous anecdotal data,’ " McAllister added, "and they’re not of interest to scientists because they cannot be replicated in a lab. But these episodes are no different from all the mothers in World War II who dreamt the deaths of their sons in detail ten thousand miles away. They’d never dreamt anything like it before; they dreamt the deaths in detail; and that was that. There’s nothing you can do with that as a scientist, really. I can be interested in it as a writer; you can be interested in it if you’re interested in ESP; we can all, as readers, thinkers, fiction writers, and human beings be interested in them, because they point to what the mind can’t yet understand. But scientists can’t really do anything with that.
"What’s fascinating is that there are researchers actually doing interesting work with ESP," McAllister continued. "They’re the skeptics who are interested. They’re the ones who say, ’I don’t want to believe in this, but I’m curious and I’m going to work very hard to look at it.’ And they do, and wonderful work flows from it." Then he said something I have never forgotten: "ESP tends to have a sense of humor, like the human mind. If you try to look at it too carefully--a little bit like particle physics, too, as it should be--it will act the Trickster and knock you to your knees."
I remember those words, because years ago I experimented with trying consciously to predict the future. I’d relax, open my mind, and think about what lay ahead in the next year, the next three years, the next six years. I’d try to make my mind a blank and invite images, impressions, whatever. Something, anything. Soon enough, I’d be spinning elaborate stories... and I’d come to find out, in time, that my impressions were wrong, wrong, wrong--just as McAllister said they should be. I’m a writer after all; I’m supposed to have an imagination. It doesn’t necessarily have to correspond with reality when let off its leash.
Moreover, it turned out that I had cause to be disappointed with my imaginative powers as well as my psychic ones because what actually happened once the future arrived was so much more unexpected and surprising than anything I ever came up with in my little experiments. Looking back, I tell myself if I could have predicted anything, it’s how wrong my prognostications would turn out to be. My mind was trying to oblige the experiment, and so it filled in the cognitive blanks of what the future might look like. But the images my three pounds of wetware produced had nothing to do with actuality, and the glimpses of the future my mind invented proved to be poor substitutes for the events that unfolded in real time.
Then again, didn’t I suspect all along that I was fooling myself? My imaginings didn’t have the same bite (or ring, or heft) as dreams or premonitions that did, in fact, come to pass. It’s like thinking you see a face in a crowd: is that it? Is that it? As long as you are asking the question, it’s not. The moment the face heaves into view, however, there is a recognition and no question at all. It is what it is, and you know it. At least, that’s how I think my "precognitive" experiences felt, but again: am I remembering those experiences accurately? Or did my mind, at some point, edit and re-fashion my memories? If so, why? Is all memory subject to such revision? The troubling answer is that recent research suggests that this is so. How can we ever imagine that we know one scrap of the future, when even the past is so subject to confusion?
I have no answers for y’all, gentle readers. It’s pretty clear my crystal ball is not in working order. But I have had a dream or two of future times--when I’m in my mid-50s, about a decade from now--that "felt" like real, live precognitive flashes, and I will be curious to see whether they actually do come to pass--partly to see whether those visions of where I am and what I am doing in future days are accurate, but also to find out, in the fullness of time and actual experience, how I get there. After all, the past may be murky and the future a blank, but the real fun has always been in the now.
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But that’s not the best part. The book is Dream Baby, a novel about psychics forced by the U.S. Government to participate in special ops missions during the Vietnam War. The novel was first published in 1989. Now it’s been reprinted in a new trade paperback edition.
So--did I have a psychic flash about an event in the near future (the book’s arrival) that, fittingly enough, involved speculation on psychic phenomena? Or was it one of those odd coincidences that life sometimes tosses us?
I shot McAllister a quick note to thank him for the book, and to see what he thought of my little precognitive insight, if that was really what it had been.
"Not surprised all," he wrote me back. "Synchronicity seems to be the rule--even when we don’t know it."
Okay, sure. But by that point, my mind had taken off on a flight of fancy. Isn’t synchronicity simply the way that seemingly random events in life sometimes (or, maybe, fairly often) seem to line up in improbable ways? We can account for that, sort of, by referencing the brain’s innate ability (and habit) for recognizing patterns, even when no true pattern exists--that’s the skeptic’s view of such things.
So, too, precognition, telepathy, and clairvoyance--which an article on psychic phenomena in TIME Magazine three years ago defined, respectively, as "the ability to see into the future," "the ability to access someone else’s consciousness," and "the ability to broaden one’s consciousness to remote time and space." Though the TIME article didn’t address the skeptic’s point of view--it was about a Harvard University researcher and her theories--there are explanations for each of these so-called psychic abilities to be found in the normal operations of commonplace consciousness.
To wit: If we suddenly feel like we are looking at a person or situation we’ve seen before, is it because we’ve dreamed it at some previous point in time? Or is it the case that the brain is having some sort of hiccup, confusing the processing of fresh input so that it feels like a memory?
Or: If a person has a dream about an event taking place, or experiences a sudden premonition about a loved one’s death (a favorite example), and it later comes to pass, is this truly evidence of a human ability--intermittent and uncontrollable as it might be--to glimpse things to come? Or is it simply the case that our consciousness is full of static from the incessant barrage of stimuli (triggering our "fight or flight" reflexes, maybe), or from random associations in the background of our thoughts? When some random thought actually happens to correspond with an event that takes place shortly afterward, we seize on it as evidence of some exceptional ability or extraordinary experience.
But what’s "exceptional" about such incidents, whatever their nature? Whether psychic phenomena are real or merely illusory, they are not so strange as all that. In fact, they seem to be ubiquitous. Everyone has a story to share--well, maybe not everyone, but most people I know have had at least one experience that qualifies. My mother dreamed about seeing my stepfather’s high school graduation photo a decade before she met him. The first time she set foot in his house, there was the photo she had dreamed, sitting right on his mantle. But did she actually see that image years earlier in her dream? Or did her mind substitute that image in her recollection of the dream? You can’t tell her she didn’t actually see that photo in her dream--she knows that she did. But the question begs the very nature of human knowledge and of memory, which research has shown, in recent years, to be highly changeable.
Then there are my own experiences with knowing about pregnant relatives before they broke the news. From an early age, I started to have dreams whenever my mother was pregnant. I’d have such a dream, and invariably, a week or so later, my mother would announce that a new baby sibling was on the way. (I have six younger siblings, so I had plenty of opportunity to repeat the experiment, so to speak.) But could she have been dropping some subtle clue that I had learned, subliminally, to pick up on? Or could it have been a matter of pheromones--her body chemistry changing, and her scent changing as a result?
Well, maybe. But that doesn’t explain how I knew about my cousin Wilma, from thousands of miles away. Or my brother’s wife, also thousands of miles away--a pregnancy I dreamed of repeatedly, even as my brother and his wife denied it. (They lied their way through her first trimester in order not to jinx themselves.) I reckon those dreams could be explained the same way as any "precognitive" episode: maybe I have such dreams all the time, but forget the ones that don’t pan out. However, I don’t believe that, because I wouldn’t have forgotten every single such dream except the ones that were accurate. I usually have interesting, complicated dreams; they are like watching movies, and I look forward to seeing what my personal screening will be like each night. I remember lots of my dreams, and I only remember having dreams about people being pregnant when they turned out to be predictive.
I know I’m using my mother’s argument here ("I remember, dammit!"), even though I also know that memory is subject to unwitting, unnoticed revision. But that much revision? And so utterly unnoticed?
My friend Sasha has a good anecdote. He was about to board a commuter train when a wave of nausea and dizziness--acute, sudden malaise--suddenly swept over him. He was aggravated at missing the train, but convinced that he was about to faint or vomit, so he sat on a bench instead of boarding. The moment the train pulled away, the nausea vanished--but the train was involved in an accident that killed dozens. More than a coincidence? Surely, Sasha would have remembered if he’s had similar episodes in which the train didn’t crash. But nothing of the sort had ever happened before, or since.
What about clairvoyance--knowledge not of the future but of things happening in the same moment somewhere else? I don’t know about you, but I always knew--always--when I was in trouble as a kid. That is, I would get a certain, specific feeling that told me that across town, at that very moment, one or another of my parents was pissed off at me. I’d shuffle off home to face the music, and I was...I regret to note... never wrong.
Or how about when my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer? I knew about it a couple of weeks before my mother told me. Two and a half years later, after my husband and I had moved to Germany, I dreamed that my grandmother knocked at our front door. I answered to find my grandmother standing in the stairwell of our apartment building, dressed in her good Sunday coat and hat. I invited her in.
"No, sweetie," she said to me. "I can’t be staying. I just wanted to stop by on my way and check that you’re all right." I assured her that I was. "That’s what I needed to know," she said; "I’d best be on my way now." It was not news when I got word in a letter of her death. I already knew she was gone. She had, after all, made a brief detour to look in on me--or anyway, that’s what I chose to believe. And I am pretty certain that I would have remembered any earlier, similar dreams about my grandmother passing by on her way to the hereafter. This dream was simply too vivid to forget. If this one, why no others on the same theme?
Were these episodes lucky guesses? My subconscious weighing the odds? If so, then, why can’t I do that at the craps tables in Vegas? With a hit rate like that, I’d clean up. But I am lousy at gambling. I am also lousy at crossword puzzles and guessing games. Chess, too. I tend to think that there’s reason to believe some form of ESP is possible. It might even be an everyday thing so much a part of our lives that we don’t even recognize it.
But when I examine the idea of extra-sensory perception, I have to ask: how? Seeing without eyes? Hearing without ears? We live in a physical, mechanical universe. If registering information apart from the use of our physiological senses were possible, why would we need to bother with bodies? Why would life be metabolism-based, when bodiless, spiritual existence would be cleaner, less bother, and more direct? I mean, isn’t the simplest explanation usually the right one, as long as it’s within the realm of possibility? So, by that reasoning, isn’t sensory perception the easiest possible means to collecting information? And doesn’t that rule out extra-sensory perception?
And yet, ESP is not so simple to dismiss. It seems to happen--or, at least, something that the human mind takes to be ESP seems to happen.
I interviewed Bruce McAllister in 2007 upon the release of an anthology that contained a short story version of his novel Dream Baby. In the interview, McAllister told me about the research he did for the novel: he talked to a couple hundred combat vets, from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It was often the case that precognitive or clairvoyant episodes were once-in-a-lifetime happenings--or, if they happened more than once, it was in combat situations--extraordinary moments that lay outside of life as it is usually experienced. And McAllister had an idea of how ESP might work.
"The odd thing, of course, is that particle physicist friends have no trouble accepting ESP, anymore than they have a hard time accepting certain kinds of spirituality," McAllister said. "It’s the applied guys that have the hard time. Even the Navy (think the SEALS’ use of Silva Mind Control back in the day) don’t seem to have a problem with ESP, and that’s of course because they see it all the time, and without needing to understand it, feel they’re using it."
McAllister said that there were two main theories about ESP. "One model is a cross between physics and spirituality, not surprisingly. The deepest part of the psyche probably operates in Einsteinian time and space, and as we know, in an Einsteinian universe there’ s no problem thinking of simultaneity of time and space. ESP is not a problem there. Also, if one is at all spiritual, the oneness of things applies here.
"But the model that I used in Dream Baby," McAllister went on, "is one you run across from Buchanan, the story’s arch-villain, and that’s a secular, ’rational,’ psychological, and physiological one. I came up with that model because of the nature of the experiences that were reported to me by those 200 vets of three American wars. They had striking patterns: they all tended to be life-and-death situations, and the guys experiencing the episodes of what they feel was ESP had never experienced anything like it before; and when they returned to peacetime, they never experienced anything like it again.
"But episodes like that are called in the psych trade ’spontaneous anecdotal data,’ " McAllister added, "and they’re not of interest to scientists because they cannot be replicated in a lab. But these episodes are no different from all the mothers in World War II who dreamt the deaths of their sons in detail ten thousand miles away. They’d never dreamt anything like it before; they dreamt the deaths in detail; and that was that. There’s nothing you can do with that as a scientist, really. I can be interested in it as a writer; you can be interested in it if you’re interested in ESP; we can all, as readers, thinkers, fiction writers, and human beings be interested in them, because they point to what the mind can’t yet understand. But scientists can’t really do anything with that.
"What’s fascinating is that there are researchers actually doing interesting work with ESP," McAllister continued. "They’re the skeptics who are interested. They’re the ones who say, ’I don’t want to believe in this, but I’m curious and I’m going to work very hard to look at it.’ And they do, and wonderful work flows from it." Then he said something I have never forgotten: "ESP tends to have a sense of humor, like the human mind. If you try to look at it too carefully--a little bit like particle physics, too, as it should be--it will act the Trickster and knock you to your knees."
I remember those words, because years ago I experimented with trying consciously to predict the future. I’d relax, open my mind, and think about what lay ahead in the next year, the next three years, the next six years. I’d try to make my mind a blank and invite images, impressions, whatever. Something, anything. Soon enough, I’d be spinning elaborate stories... and I’d come to find out, in time, that my impressions were wrong, wrong, wrong--just as McAllister said they should be. I’m a writer after all; I’m supposed to have an imagination. It doesn’t necessarily have to correspond with reality when let off its leash.
Moreover, it turned out that I had cause to be disappointed with my imaginative powers as well as my psychic ones because what actually happened once the future arrived was so much more unexpected and surprising than anything I ever came up with in my little experiments. Looking back, I tell myself if I could have predicted anything, it’s how wrong my prognostications would turn out to be. My mind was trying to oblige the experiment, and so it filled in the cognitive blanks of what the future might look like. But the images my three pounds of wetware produced had nothing to do with actuality, and the glimpses of the future my mind invented proved to be poor substitutes for the events that unfolded in real time.
Then again, didn’t I suspect all along that I was fooling myself? My imaginings didn’t have the same bite (or ring, or heft) as dreams or premonitions that did, in fact, come to pass. It’s like thinking you see a face in a crowd: is that it? Is that it? As long as you are asking the question, it’s not. The moment the face heaves into view, however, there is a recognition and no question at all. It is what it is, and you know it. At least, that’s how I think my "precognitive" experiences felt, but again: am I remembering those experiences accurately? Or did my mind, at some point, edit and re-fashion my memories? If so, why? Is all memory subject to such revision? The troubling answer is that recent research suggests that this is so. How can we ever imagine that we know one scrap of the future, when even the past is so subject to confusion?
I have no answers for y’all, gentle readers. It’s pretty clear my crystal ball is not in working order. But I have had a dream or two of future times--when I’m in my mid-50s, about a decade from now--that "felt" like real, live precognitive flashes, and I will be curious to see whether they actually do come to pass--partly to see whether those visions of where I am and what I am doing in future days are accurate, but also to find out, in the fullness of time and actual experience, how I get there. After all, the past may be murky and the future a blank, but the real fun has always been in the now.
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