|
|||
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
ABSTRACT Transtemporal Dreaming: Intersubjectivity, Precognition and the Physics of Time David Pleasants, MA, Certificate in
Dream Studies
Summary of Presentation Precognitive dreaming and precognition will be discussed as perceived anomalies in the current scientific worldview. Special emphasis will be placed on the philosophical considerations of Einstein’s theory of relativity, Deutsch’s interpretation of quantum theory, Whitehead’s panpsychism, de Quincey’s intersubjectivity, and Bierman & Radin’s “presponse” experiments.
Learning Objectives: 1) why precognitive dreaming and precognition cannot be explained in the current scientific paradigm, 2) what theoretical models of time and consciousness do allow for the existence of precognition and precognitive dreaming, 3) why precognitive dreaming represents a unique opportunity to more closely study relation between time and consciousness.
Evaluation questions: 1)
How does Einstein’s theory of relativity negate the existence of
precognitive dreaming? 2) How does Whitehead’s theory of panpsychism reorient our understanding of what dreaming is? 3) What
are alternative explanations for precognitive dreaming? Abstract TRANSTEMPORAL DREAMING: INTERSUBJECTIVITY, PRECOGNITION, AND THE PHYSICS OF TIME A General Event with David Pleasants, MA Dream
studies cannot be separated from consciousness studies, and neither of
these can be separated from our use of physics in understanding the nature
of the universe. And yet
current models of the universe vying for the titles of “grand unified
theory” and “theory of everything” have nothing to say about the
existence of consciousness. During
this presentation I will discuss how the phenomena of precognitive
dreaming and precognition threaten most of the current scientific
paradigms, which view both skeptically as either anomalous or nonexistent.
I will critically examine the underpinnings of these paradigms
including Cartesian dualism, object-oriented determinism, Einstein’s
theory of relativity, and modern interpretations of quantum theory. Bierman
and Radin’s experiments with nonconscious somatic precognition will also
be examined, the implications of which invite a new understanding of
precognitive dreaming based on the transformation of somatic knowledge
into unconscious imagery. Alternative
models of time and consciousness that do allow for precognition and
precognitive dreaming are explored including Everett and Deutsch’s
interpretation of quantum theory, object-oriented panpsychism,
Whitehead’s process-oriented relational ontology, and de Quincey’s
intersubjectivity as a key characteristic of consciousness. From
these models, an integrative approach to consciousness and dreaming is put
forth based on conscious events (as opposed to objects) merging together
to form greater and greater degrees of intersubjectivity (wholeness).
This approach is applied not only to typical states of dreaming,
but also to the evolution of consciousness in the universe as well as
transtemporal phenomena such as precognition and precognitive dreaming. Transtemporal Dreaming: Presentation Outline by David Pleasants I. Introduction (Slide #1) A. Big Topics / Additional Resources - Today I’ll be talking about some pretty big topics, so please bear with me. In fact, I wish we had at least a weekend together, because this is truly fascinating stuff. But… we only have a few minutes today, and so many of the concepts I’ll go over – I’ll do so very simply to illustrate the most important points. For those of you interested in going deeper, you can give me your email address after the presentation and I can email you additional resources. In addition, I have two background papers, which describe many of today’s topics in greater details. B. Transtemporal Dreaming - Although I will be talking a lot today about Precognitive Dreaming, I prefer the term Transtemporal Dreaming. I define transtemporal dreaming as dreaming that involves aspects of consciousness not located in the same temporal coordinate as the dream itself. This could include dreams involving 1. precognition, which can be defined as “knowledge of an event in advance of its occurrence by extrasensory means”, or 2. retrocognition, which is defined as “knowledge of an event after its occurrence by extrasensory means”. This definition excludes memory, as memory has to do with past moments, but is a present-moment phenomenon. Precognitive dreaming is a special case of precognition, and is usually defined as “dreaming of a future event that later comes true, the details of which were not acquired by ordinary means”. As most of you are unfamiliar with the term transtemporal, I will not use it until the latter stage of my talk when the reasons behind its use become more apparent. C.
Holistic Studies (Slide #2):
Speaking of precognition and retrocognition, many of you might
think that these concepts have more to do with consciousness research than
dream research, per se. But
from my experiences in Holistic Studies at JFKU, I’ve learned that there
are no firm boundaries between consciousness research and dream research.
Or if there are, these are the artificial boundaries created not by
necessity but by the hubris of science. II.
Precognitive Dreaming A. In this presentation, I will be discussing precognitive dreaming but I will not be making a case for precognitive dreaming, per se. There are many in the field that have gathered a significant amount of evidence of precognitive dreaming as well as precognition. Some of these resources include Dream Telepathy (Ullman, Krippner & Vaughn, 1973), Dreams That Come True (Ryback & Sweitzer, 1988), The Handbook of Parapsychology (1977), The Dream and Human Societies (Ebon, 1966), and The Conscious Universe (Radin, 1997). Rather, what I will be discussing is how these concepts challenge the current scientific paradigm as well as additional theoretical models of the universe that do allow for the existence of precognitive events. Nobel physiologist, Charles Richet, crystallized just how inflexible our current scientific worldview is by saying “I didn’t say it was possible, I just said it was true.” On that note, as many of you know there seems to be something significant happening with respect to precognitive dreaming. There are many examples of precognitive dreaming in the literature of many cultures. Indeed there many examples from our own culture. One such famous example is a dream Abraham Lincoln had shortly before his assassination where he found himself in the white house where someone had died. He asked “who died” and someone said “it is the president”. B. Research (Slide #3) - In terms of research, there has also been quite a bit done over the years into precognitive dreaming as well as precognition in general. 1. Past - (Society for Psychical Research in late 1800’s.) 2. Recent - More recent research has been carried out by scientist such as Honorton, Ferrari, Krippner, Ullman, Radin, Bierman, and many others. In many cases, the results of this research were statistically significant, sometimes overwhelmingly so. 3. Skepticism - And yet most of the scientific community has remained deeply skeptical. I feel that the main reason for this skepticism, in light of robust results, continues to be that the possible existence of such quote-unquote anomalies threatens their underlying paradigm and belief system to such an extent, that they their psychological defense mechanisms engage, effectively closing themselves to new possibilities. As Charles Tart has stressed over the years, what is needed is open but discriminating minds (Open Mind, Discriminating Mind: Reflections on Human Possibilities, Tart, 1992). C. Alternative Explanations (Slide #4) - There are however several alternative explanations to the phenomena of precognitive dreaming, and in any balanced discussion, these must be discussed. 1. Some of these are… a) Selective Perception, where we selectively perceive the world in relation to our dreams – [example] b) Self-fulfilling prophecy – [example, unconscious] c) Fine cuing – picking up on cues that are often too fine for the conscious mind, but not for the unconscious mind. [example] And yet, even taking these explanations into account, researchers have still found results that are statistically significant. D.
And so what is going on? (Slide #5) 1. Survival Strategy - Most researchers agree that the most likely answer is that precognitive dreaming, and precognition in general, arises as a survival strategy. From the work of Krippner and Ullman, Ullman theorized that in dreams, one’s consciousness continues to scan the immediate future for danger. He referred to this as the Vigilance Theory. This enables one to not only better survive the future, but also to help the species as a whole survive. In fact, Ullman felt that in terms of precognitive dreaming, it was the survival of the species that came first and the individual second. 2. Future Day Residue: Another interesting issue that has arisen in the study of precognitive dreaming, is that these dreams often describe seemingly trivial matters that eventually end up coming true. One explanation that has been put forth for this is that precognitive dreaming involves “future… day… residue”. As many of you know, one long-held belief in dreams studies is that the unconscious mind uses many experiences from the immediate past to populate the dream landscape, create archetypal images, etc. And so the idea here is that it is not only experiences from the immediate past that are used but also experiences from the immediate future. Often individuals that have such dreams, when they experience the trivial event, have a feeling of well-being and security, feeling as if they’re on the “right path”. 3.
Chaos Theory - Another explanation of precognitively dreaming
about trivial matters has to do with chaos theory.
Chaos theory in a nutshell is “sensitive dependence on initial
conditions”, meaning that one small difference in the present moment can
have enormous implications when extrapolated into the future. [Example –
Butterfly effect] III.
The Presponse (Slide #6) A. Although I have alluded to quite a bit of evidence involving precognitive dreaming, I want to turn now to a specific experiment attempting to measure precognition on the body’s level. This is not ordinary precognition, but what I refer to as somatic precognition – that is, knowledge of a future event that is perceived and held at the primary level of one’s body, but not necessarily manifested at other levels of consciousness. B. This study was peformed by Dean Radin in the mid 90’s and then later Dick Bierman. [Describe Presponse - include orienting response, GSR, presponse, etc.] (Slide #7) C. Bierman now is in the process of reanalyzing past data, that is data that has been collected over the decades that use a stimulus that causes the “orienting response. In these past experiments, the measurement devices are recording continuously, although in most cases the researchers were not paying attention to any data to accrue before the stimulus they were measuring occurred. He shared his findings at this year’s Tuscon conference, and they were statistically significant as well. IV.
Discussion of Time A. Conundrums & Paradoxes – Bierman and Radin’s “presponse” as well as other evidence for precognitive events bring us to an important conundrum and it is this: If information is sent to you from a future event, then conceivably you could use that information to change the circumstances of that event. This wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that if the event exists already as a fixed moment in the future, then by changing it we create a causal paradox. In physics there is a famous example of this paradox. It is often referred to as the grandfather paradox or the intervention paradox. [Give description.] And so a fully determined future does not allow for time travel, nor for information to travel through time such as in precognitive dreaming nor precognition. And yet a fully undetermined future does not allow for these either – after all, how can we get information from an event that has no existence whatsoever. Even worse, both viewpoints are supported by ideas in physics with no reconciliation in sight. B. Einstein’s Determinism (Slide #8): The fully deterministic world is supported by the mechanistic Newtonian worldview as well as that of Einstein. In fact, there is a famous quote from Einstein and it is this: “the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.” Most people misunderstand this quote however. What Einstein was trying to say was that no moment has a special claim to “now”. All moments, all coordinates in time are equally real. It as the passage of time that Einstein thought was an illusion. And this is a very famous issue in philosophy. According to most philosophers, time can neither flow nor can we flow through time. Both require a rate of movement, or velocity, which is normally some distance over time as in miles per hour, feet per second, etc. For time to flow or us to flow through it, time would become the numerator, but we would be left without a denominator. It would be 3 hours per what? Or 10 seconds per what? In fact to have a flow of time you would have to have a second level of time to measure it against. Unfortunately the same paradox would apply to this suppertime. And so we’re left with Einstein’s static view of time, or block time, as can be illustrated in an Einsteinian diagram of the block universe. [Explain worldline/lifeline in block universe.] C. And so in Einstein’s universe, all events are equally real and fully deterministic. This is the view that many scientists implicitly hold, even though they may not express it explicitly. And so they can all to easily dismiss precognitive dreaming and precognition, because in their worldview it isn’t even possible. D. Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle: After Einstein’s revolution, there was another revolution in physics that threw into serious doubt a fully deterministic universe. This was the quantum revolution. Although we could literally spend months or years talking about quantum theory, today I’m just going to talk about two aspects of quantum theory, although they are arguably the two most important aspects. The first is Heisenburg’s Uncertainty Principle. Heinsenburg discovered that when observing a particle, such as an electron, we cannot know both its position and its velocity. In fact, in quantum theory, the idea is that they both do not exist at the same time: sometimes one property of a particle exists while the other does not and visa-versa. Long gone is the theory of the atom as a mini-solar system. Quantum theory has shown us that there is a ubiquitous uncertainty, a randomness in the universe. E. Well, Einstein could never accept this idea of randomness. You might know his famous quote “God would not play dice with the universe.” And yet it turned out that Einstein was wrong. Decades of experiments show that the universe is not deterministic but probabilistic. And yet Einstein’s static view of time with no moving “now” still makes holds up rather well for many equations in physics. In fact, many aspects of quantum theory are incompatible with Relativity, leaving physicists in a real lurch to find what is referred to as a Grand Unified Theory or a Theory of Everything. F. So where does that leave us in our discussion of time. We’ve got a fully deterministic static view of time and a undetermined probabilistic view of time. Neither of these really allows for the existence of precognitive occurrences. G. And yet a third option has been floated by several scientists, including Bierman and Radin and it is this. In trying to explain how the “presponse” can exist, Bierman has suggested that some future events are fully determined and some are as yet to be determined. So that an event in the future like a tiger jumping into your path might be a fixed event in the future, while your reaction to the tiger and thus your survival might be a matter of probability and conscious choice, i.e.; you could run away, jump off the cliff, try to feed the tiger a Cliff bar, etc. And so in this view, the future as well as the present and the past, would be composed of hard events and soft events – events that can be changed and those cannot. H. Although this view is appealing, especially for the presponse experiments, there are two real problems with this view. 1. One problem is that there are many instances of precognitive dreams or precognitive visions, in which the viewer decides to not even take the path that leads to the event. And therefore the event, even a “hard” event might be in danger of not occurring. 2. The other problem has to do once again with chaos theory. Remember that events in the world especially in the far future are especially sensitive to the “initial conditions” in the present moment. Therefore it would seem almost impossible to keep a future hard event completely isolated from the the rest of the world. 3. Both of these instances would require something like a “time cop” making sure that we didn’t interfere with certain events. V.
Quantum Theory (intrinsic uncertainty of future) – (Slide #9) A. And so again, the existence of precognitive events force us to look for a fourth way. This way arises from the second aspect of quantum theory that I want to explain to you today. And this aspect really encapsulates the essence of quantum theory. It’s referred to as the double-slit experiment. 1. DESCRIBE a) billiard ball vs. interference wave pattern b) collapse of wave function upon observation c) all paths are taken, all possibilities (virtual photons) interact with one another d) even one photon at a time e) interference with other possible paths across time f) may be the first instance of a physical precognitive event 2. If you think that’s strange it actually gets even stranger. DESCRIBE: a) Schroedinger’s equation b) Addition of mathematics describing collapse c) Everett – “ad hoc” d) MWI – parallel universes B. Deutsch’s Multiverse (Slide #10): Most people have a misperception about the many worlds theory. Recently a physicist by the name of David Deutsch produced an excellent book on the science of parallel universes. Deutsch is most famous for his discovery or invention of quantum computation, which is the next phase of the computer revolution. In addition, he is now the leading theorist in parallel universes as well. Deutsch explains parallel universes, not as parallel worldlines, separate snapshots of the universe at the same time or different times. In this way our entire life can be seen as a succession of parallel universes, sort of like a line of dominoes. Moreover, in Deutsch’s view each virtual photon interfering with one another is a real photon in a real physical place and what we are witnessing is the interference of these parallel universes. 1. And so if we come back to our discussion of time, we can extrapolate from Deutsch’s work and say that future events do have an existence after all, in that they exist in superposition with all the other possible versions of that event, and so we can get information from them in a way that is probably very similar to the interference wave pattern we see in the double-slit experiment. This theoretical model of the universe then not only allows for the existence of precognitive dreaming, but it also resolves the age-old debate of Free Will vs. Determinism. After all in Deutsch’s universe, he refers to this as the “multiverse” – in the multiverse future possibilities are already fully determined. What is not fully determined is whether or not we make an active choice among those possibilities. It is my feeling, as well as the opinions of some indigenous peoples like the Aguarana people of Peru, that precognitive dreaming comes often to warn us of the path that will occur if we do not make a conscious choice, and by conscious choice I mean a creative choice that does not rely on unconscious habitual patterns of being. C. OK, now we’ve uncovered a theoretical model of the universe that allows for the existence of precognitive dreaming, but what we haven’t fully addressed is why it occurs. Although I don’t pretend to have the answers, I do have some speculation that you might be interested in. VI. Intersubjectivity A. De Quincey’s definition of intersubjectivity. B.
All dreams come in the service of health and wholeness. Emotion
is never a metaphor; emotion is consciousness (Describe). C. Transtemporal Intersubjectivity (Describe). VII.
Panpsychism A.
Definition - Panpsychism is the doctrine that mind is a
fundamental feature of the world, which exists throughout the universe. Most doctrines of panpsychism are object – based.
[Describe] B.
Whitehead’s process-oriented relational ontology – (define
and describe) VIII.
Return to Precognitive Dreaming and Precognition A. [Presponse as Somatic Knowledge - describe] B. There are many examples in the literature where somatic knowledge was expressed through dreams. These are often diagnostic dreams, for instance about an illness, a pregnancy, etc. C. Hartmann’s (1991) Boundary Questionnaire – (describe relevance). In addition, it appears that some individuals manifest somatic knowledge as precognitive dreams, waking visions, or other expressions. Dreaming represents a unique chance for new states of intersubjectivity to emerge due in a large part to the fact that the ego’s defense mechanisms are largely inhibited while dreaming. D. Transtemporal dreaming, probably more than waking precognition, is very important to this research because is offers a first level unconscious strategy to incorporate nonconscious somatic information into a more conscious form. IX. Implications for our Understanding of Time (Slide #11 and Slide #12) – If time cannot flow and we cannot flow through it, then what are we left with? Well, in this instance I am reminded of how lightning strikes the ground. [DESCRIBE] Well the theory of intersubjectivity across temporal coordinates implies that a similar thing is possible; a co-arising of experience as opposed to a progression. It is my opinion that these new states of intersubjectivity brought on by the co-arising of experience lie at the very heart of precognitive dreaming, precognition in general, as well as perhaps our very existence in space-time.
|
|||
|
|
