Beyond the Occult (33 page)

Lethbridge’s own experiments soon convinced him that Dunne was correct, and that precognitive dreams are far commoner than we think.
(J.
B.
Priestley reached the same conclusion when he made a public appeal for precognitive dreams and received thousands of replies.) Again they were mostly very minor ‘glimpses’: the face of an unknown man seen a few hours later; items seen in newspapers the following day.
Some of his correspondents had had dreams of catastrophes that had subsequently happened: a hotel fire; the collapse of a block of flats in a gas explosion.
But once again it seemed clear that the dreams were of subsequent newspaper or television reports, not of the actual events.

Lethbridge reached the conclusion that there are other ‘levels of reality’ beyond our material level, and that they exist on higher ‘vibrational rates’.
Immediately beyond the material level, he suggested, there is a ‘timeless zone’, in which the future is as real as the present or the past.
It is, he thought, possible that the ‘spirit’ (or ‘astral body’) passes through this timeless zone immediately after sleep or immediately before waking, and that this explains precognitive dreams.

Dunne’s theory is altogether more ambitious.
He began by pointing out that when we say time goes quickly or slowly we must be
measuring
it against some other standard, and that this standard must be some other kind of time — he called it Time 2.
And presumably there must be another kind of time by which we measure Time 2, and so on ad infinitum.
And there are also probably an infinite number of ‘me’s’ who correspond to each level of time.

In fact we tumble into this kind of speculation the moment we admit that time is something more complicated than a simple one-way flow.
If
any
kind of precognition is possible then we must be capable of a kind of ‘time travel’.
And time travel also implies that there are an infinite number of ‘me’s’.
For example, if I could travel forward into tomorrow I could presumably encounter ‘me’ as I shall be in twenty-four hours’ time.
And I could keep on doing that indefinitely, meeting dozens — or billions — of ‘me’s’.
It was this kind of reasoning that led Dunne to conclude that our human time is in some sense an illusion.
In a book called
The New Immortality
he compares human life to a long strip of film that contains everything that happens to us between birth and death.
The ‘real you’ stands opposite that film, able to direct its attention to any part of the film.
But along that strip of film there travels an entity he calls ‘Observer 1’, whose attention is usually taken up entirely with moment-to-moment impressions.
If nothing much is happening, however, and he can relax, Observer 1 sometimes catches glimpses of other parts of the film.
These are glimpses of the past and precognitions.

Dunne has a particularly poetic section which seems to be the crux of the book, and which was given as a television lecture in 1936.
A pianist was told to play the whole keyboard, from bottom to top.
That, says Dunne, is what everyday life is like — just ‘one damn thing after another’.
In sleep the ‘pianist’ can jump back and forth, hitting keys at random — and creating a horrible cacophony.
But after death the ‘Observer’ can choose what keys he likes and strike them so as to make them into a pleasant little tune or even a piano sonata.
(At this point the pianist was instructed to play Mendelssohn’s Spring Song and Beethoven’s Funeral March.) It is a charming illustration, but still leaves us rather baffled as to Dunne’s basic beliefs about time.
One point, however, emerges fairly clearly.
Human beings, he says, mistake a ‘hybrid’ form of time for real time.
The result is that we feel that life is a disappointing business, which opens
with high hopes and sounding trumpets, moves on to frustration after frustration, and ends in a disillusioned crawl into the grave.
If we can once grasp ‘real time’ and the ‘real me’, we shall realize that everything that is in existence remains in existence.
‘A rose which has bloomed once blooms for ever.’

In the last analysis what Dunne seems to be saying is that there is a ‘real you’ which exists up above time — roughly what the philosopher Husserl meant by the ‘transcendental ego’.
It occupies a kind of permanent four-dimensional universe and possesses a kind of freedom that is unknown to the physical self.

Now this view certainly seems to echo some of the mystical insights we examined in the second chapter.
The
Bhagavad Gita
, for example, says, ‘There never was a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these kings.
Nor is there any future in which we shall cease to be … .
That which is non-existent can never come into being, and that which is can never cease to be.’
It seems encouraging that Dunne believed he had arrived at these insights through purely scientific reasoning, even though no one I have ever met has succeeded in following his reasoning.
But it still seems to leave us with the problem that worried Wilbur Wright.
If my life is already ‘on film’, so to speak, then presumably everything that happens to me is predestined and my feeling of having free will is an illusion?

This was an aspect of Dunne’s theory that worried a successful young novelist named John Boynton Priestley who had achieved overnight fame with
The Good Companions
in 1929.
When he began writing plays in the early 1930s he made an attempt to dramatize Dunne’s theory in a tense little play called
Dangerous Corner
, in which he splits time in two and tries to show what might have happened as well as what did happen.
This, and a second ‘time play’ called
Time and the Conways
, seemed to echo the fatalistic view that our lives are preordained.
But by 1937 Priestley had discovered another theory of time in the work of P.
D.
Ouspensky, whose ‘experimental mysticism’ was considered in an earlier chapter
(p.
47).
Ouspensky argued that time, like space, has three dimensions: duration, speed and direction.
So time is, so to speak, a cube rather than a straight line.
We only see the straight line, because we are stuck in time, so to us it seems inevitable that one event follows another like the notes on a piano keyboard.
But if time is a ‘cube’ and not a line, then its forward flow can go up or down or sideways within a three-dimensional space.
And this obviously means that the next point on the line is not rigidly predetermined, for it might be up or down or sideways.
Life is full of non-actualized potentialities, says Ouspensky in the ‘Eternal Recurrence’ chapter of his
New Model of the Universe
, and when it comes to an end it starts all over again, so we go on living the same life forever.
(He used this idea in a remarkable novel called
The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin
.) But it does not have to be exactly the same: only dull and lazy people live the same life over and over again.
More determined people strive to actualize their potentialities, and although the events are predetermined, they can choose to pour more energy and determination into them.
So their lives are changed infinitesimally each time.

In his chapter ‘Experimental Mysticism’ Ouspensky offers some clues about how these ideas were developed.
He speaks of the curious feeling of a ‘lengthening of time’, so that seconds seem to turn into years or decades.
He emphasizes that the normal feeling of time remained as a background to this ‘accelerated time’, so that he was — so to speak — living in two ‘times’ at once.
Our ordinary time merely has ‘duration’, but the second time has ‘speed’.
And since time has a flow from past to future, it would also seem to possess a third dimension — ‘direction’.

These experiments also seem to have convinced Ouspensky that the future is, in some sense, predetermined.
On one occasion he asked himself whether communication with the dead was a possibility and immediately ‘saw’ someone with whom he urgently wanted to communicate.
But what he ‘saw’ was not the person but his whole life, in a kind of four-dimensional continuum.
At that moment Ouspensky realized that it was pointless to feel guilt about
his own failure to be more helpful to this particular person because the events of his life were as unchangeable as the features of his face.
‘Nobody could have changed anything in them, just as nobody could have changed the colour of his hair or eyes, or the shape of his nose … .’
In other words, what happened to the man was his ‘destiny’.

It was also during these experiments that Ouspensky had a clear premonition that he would not be going to Moscow that Easter, as he fully intended to.
He was able to foresee a sequence of events that would make his visit impossible.
And in due course this sequence occurred exactly as he had foreseen it in his mystical state.
Ouspensky, therefore, had no doubt that precognition is a reality.

Priestley borrowed Ouspensky’s idea for his third ‘time play’,
I Have Been Here Before
, in which a thoroughly unsatisfactory character who has committed suicide out of self-pity produces a determined effort the ‘second time round’, and makes an altogether better job of his life.

In his book
On Time
, Dr Michael Shallis, an Oxford don, recounts two personal anecdotes which seem to offer support for Ouspensky’s theory.
Dr Shallis remembers how, when he was twelve, he came in through the back door of his house and called to his mother, who was upstairs, to say that he was back: as he did so he was overwhelmed by the feeling that this had happened before, and that his mother would call down that they were going to have salad for dinner — which she did.
Now this case could be labelled ‘doubtful’, for it is my own experience that such feelings may be the reactivation of some half-forgotten memory, or perhaps some malfunction in the computer known as the brain, which tells us that an experience is ‘familiar’ when it is actually not.
(His mother’s information about the salad could have been coincidence — or perhaps they always had salad on that day of the week.) But Dr Shallis’s second case seems altogether odder.

Shallis was giving a tutorial on radioactivity when he was again swamped with the
déja-vu
feeling.
He felt that the next thing that ‘had’ to happen was that he should suggest that he needed a certain book from his office, and then go to fetch it.
He decided that he would break the pattern by resisting the urge to go and get the book.
Yet even as he made this resolution he heard his voice saying, ‘I think I had better show you some examples of this.
I will just pop down to my office and get a book.’
This certainly seems, on the face of it, an example of the ‘predetermination’ Ouspensky speaks about.

In fact J.
B.
Priestley came to accept the Ouspensky theory as altogether more realistic than Dunne’s ‘serial time’.
But he still had some basic reservations.
In his book
Man and Time
(1964) he illustrates these with a case borrowed from Dr Louisa Rhine.
A mother described a dream in which she was camping with some friends on the shores of a creek.
She took her baby down to the creek, intending to wash some clothes.
Then she remembered that she had forgotten the soap and went back to the tent, leaving the baby throwing stones into the water.
When she came back the baby was lying face down in the creek: she pulled him out and found he was dead.

That summer she went camping with some friends, and they chose a spot on the banks of a creek.
She decided to do some washing and took her baby down to the water: then she recalled she had forgotten the soap and started back for it.
As she did so the baby started to throw stones into the water and her dream flashed into her mind.
She realized that everything was exactly as it had been in the dream, even to the baby’s clothes.
So she picked up the baby and took him back to the tent with her … .

Here, clearly, is a case where the ‘precognition’ enabled her to avert a catastrophe, and it seems to demonstrate clearly that the future is not rigidly determined.
And this view could be supported by many other cases, two of which can be found in a classic study of precognition,
The Future is Now
by Arthur W.
Osborn.
An eldest son was visiting his family who were on holiday in a cottage in Hobart, Tasmania.
Before he left to drive back to Kingston his mother warned him that she had had a premonition that he would have an accident on the way home, and to drive carefully.
Halfway home the young man remembered his mother’s warning and slowed down to twenty-five miles an hour.
A
few seconds later the car skidded on a patch of ice — the only one on the entire journey — and landed in the ditch after hitting the embankment.
The car was badly damaged, but he was unhurt: if he had still been travelling at twice that speed he would have been killed or seriously injured.