by Brad Steiger

In her book, Hidden Channels of the Mind, Louisa E. Rhine, wife of world famous “psi” researcher, Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke University, tells of a Maine man who reacted to a precognitive dream in the same way any normal well-adjusted twentieth century man might – he disregarded it. His rejection of the psychic warning may have cost his son’s life.

The central figure in the case is nameless in Mrs. Rhine’s book, but his personal data is on record in the files of the parapsychology laboratory at Duke University. The man’s 14-year-old son, Walter, was an excellent swimmer, who often went swimming in a nearby stream with his neighborhood friends. In a dream, the man saw his son swimming below a certain big tree above the dam and drown. When he arrived at the stream, Walter’s body had not yet been located, but a man named John McC – was attempting to reclaim it from the water.

When the man awakened troubled and upset, his wife calmed him by saying that dreams never come true. In order not to tempt fate, however, she suggested that they not allow the boy to go swimming next day.

In the morning, the father dismissed it all as a silly dream and quickly began to busy himself with the routine details of running his store. When Walter came in later to tell his father that he was going to go swimming, the man was too preoccupied to even think of the dream.

Within a tragically short period of time, an excited friend ran into the store and told the man that he had better get down to the stream in a hurry. Walter had been diving and had not come up. When the father arrived at the swimming hole, he had a sickening realization that the scene and the circumstances were exactly as they had been in his dream. The body had not yet been found, but John McC – – – was diving for it. The father’s sorrow was accentuated by the knowledge that his son’s life might have been saved if he had heeded the warning that had come to him in his dream.

Is it possible to avoid foreseen danger? “The answer,” Mrs. Rhine writes, “is especially important to anyone who has had an experience that could be a preview of a coming catastrophe. If the impression is a genuine instance of precognition, must the calamity occur no matter what he does?”

The question is probably as old as man. Can man change the course of future events or is everything inexorably preordained? It is perhaps not so much a question of man’s free will as it is a matter of what constitutes time.

“In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of our nature,” wrote A.S. Eddington, “time occupies the key position.”

What is time? Precognitions have been noted regularly not only in the literature of psychical research but in that of science itself for more than 2,000 years. The Bible includes a remarkable collection of divinely inspired prophecies and promises. Throughout the several centuries of cerebral man’s existence, a large and impressive argument has been building up which declares man’s conception of time as an absolute to be a naive one. A great number of recent “psi” researchers have speculated that the common concept of time might be due to the special pattern in which man’s sensory apparatus has evolved. It seems evident from the marked occurrences of precognitive dreams that some people do occasionally break loose from the evolved sensory pattern to receive a glimpse of the true order of the universe.

Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) was one of these people. When he was a young man, he had a dream that his handsome brother, Henry, who served on the same Mississippi River steamboat as he did, would be killed.

In the dream, he saw his brother lying in a metal casket. On his breast lay a spray of white flowers with one red rose at its center. In the morning, Clemens told his sister of the eerie dream, then decided to put it off as “just one of those strange things.”

When he returned to the steamboat, Pennsylvania, he learned that he had been transferred to the A.T. Lacey. He bade his brother good-bye and they made plans to meet in Memphis. The Pennsylvania was pulling out that day. The A.T. Lacey would not follow for another two days.

By the time Clemens’ steamship pulled into Memphis, the Pennsylvania was only a violent memory of a terrible explosion that the citizens of Memphis discussed in excited spurts of conversation. To his horror, Clemens learned that his brother’s ship had burst into flame just as it approached Memphis. He finally located his brother, who, critically wounded, had been taken to a hastily improvised hospital. For four days and nights, Clemens was seldom away from his injured brother’s bedside. The sorrowful vigil ended only when Henry died.

Exhausted after four sleepless nights, Clemens went to his boarding house to rest before attending to his brother in the mortuary. When he arrived at the funeral parlor, the establishment was filled with the bodies of other victims of the Pennsylvania disaster. Henry’s body was the only one that had been placed in a metal casket. The casket, Clemens was told, was a gift from the ladies of Memphis, who had been impressed by Henry’s youth and unusual handsomeness. As the tearful Sam stood looking down at his brother, a lady stepped up to the casket and laid a bouquet of white flowers, with a single red rose at its center, on Henry’s chest.

One thing seems certain about true precognition: whether it comes about through a dream or the vision of a seer, the percipient does not see possibilities but actualities.

In view of this, some researchers maintain that the age-old query, “Can the future be changed?” has no meaning. The foreknowledge of the future, of which some level of the subconscious is aware and of which it sometimes flashes a dramatic bit or scene to the conscious in a dream or trance, is founded on the knowledge of how the individual will use his freedom of choice. The “future event” conditions the subconscious self. The level of the subconscious that “knows” the future does not condition the “future event.” The transcendent element of self which knows what “will be” blends all time into “what is now and what will always be.” For the conscious self, what is now the past was once the future. We do not look upon past events and feel that we acted without freedom of will. Why then should we look at the future and feel that those events are predetermined? That a subconscious level in the psyche may know the future, these researchers insist, does not mean that the conscious self has no freedom of choice. Simply stated, if the future could be changed it would not be the future. In a true precognitive experience when one perceives the future, he has glimpsed what will be and what, for a level of subconscious, already exists.

On a July morning in 1952, according to a case in the files of Louisa E. Rhine, a woman in New Jersey attempted to avoid the death of a child as she had foreseen it in a precognitive “vision.”

In this glimpse of the future, which had occurred as she lay resting in a darkened room, she envisioned the aftermath of a dreadful traffic accident. A child had been killed and lay covered on the ground. Because the child was covered, the woman could not identify the victim.

In the morning, she told her next-door neighbor of the strange dream and begged her to keep close watch on her five-year-old child. Next she phoned a son, who lived in a busy section of the town, and admonished him to keep an eye on his two small children. She had another son who lived in the country, but she felt there was little need to warn him to be wary of traffic. Nonetheless, it was that son’s little Kathy who was killed that same day when a township truck backed into her.

There are, perhaps, five types of precognitive experiences. At the most elementary level is subliminal precognition, or the “hunch” that proves to be an accurate one. There is no slur intended in labeling this type of experience elementary. Some hunches – as we shall see a bit later – have saved lives. Next, would come trivial precognition, which takes place only a short time before the actual occurrence of a rather unimportant event. Then, in the area of full-blown, meaningful precognitions, which indicate a power of mind not limited by space or time, there are beneficial, non-beneficial, and detrimental pre-visions.

In a beneficial premonition, the transcendent self may over-dramatize a future event in such a way that it proves to be a warning which is acted upon by the conscious self’s characteristic reaction to such a crisis.

To take a final example from Mrs. Rhine: A young mother in Washington State awakened her husband one night and related a horrible dream. She had seen the large ornamental chandelier that hung above their baby’s crib, crash down into the child’s bed and crush the infant to death. In the dream, as they ran to discover the terrible accident, she noticed that the hands of the clock on the baby’s dresser were at 4:35.

The man laughed at his wife’s story, rolled over, and went back to sleep. Although she felt foolish for doing so, the young woman slid out of bed, went into the nursery, and returned with the baby. Placing the sleeping child gently between them, the woman fell at once into a deep sleep.

A few hours later, the young couple were awakened by a loud, crashing noise. The sound had come from the nursery, and the couple found that the chandelier had fallen into the baby’s crib. The clock on the baby’s dresser indicated the time as 4:35.

For the young woman’s deep level of subconscious, the falling of the chandelier was a present fact that was still a future fact for her conscious self. The absence of the baby in its crib was also a present fact to the transcendental self because it was aware of how the conscious self of the young mother would react if she knew the safety of her child was threatened. To stimulate the woman to action, the deep level of her psyche formulated a dramatic precognitive dream with an attached tragic ending. The future, therefore, had not been altered by the woman’s action, only implemented.

Volume L, Number 3 of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research carries a fascinating account of statistical research conducted by William E. Cox, which seems to indicate that subconscious fore-warnings (or “hunches”) may keep people off accident-bound trains.

Cox selected passenger trains for his study for two basic reasons. First, the passenger-carrying capacities of airplanes, ships and buses is fixed, while a train can add or remove cars as the traffic demands. Second, subways and buses do not keep the kind of accurate records of passenger traffic that would be required for such a narrow statistical study as the one Cox was about to conduct. To prove his hypothesis, Cox needed to obtain both the total number of passengers on the train at the time of the accident and the total number of passengers on the same train during each of the preceding seven days, and on the 14th, 21st, and 28th day before the accident.

Cox compiled separate statistics for Pullman passengers. He reasoned, quite logically it seems, that, as Pullman passengers had usually reserved their space on the train sometime in advance, they would be less likely to give credence to a subliminal precognition or a hunch that they should not carry out plans made previously. Also, someone who has established a thought-pattern of a business or pleasure trip and has been contemplating the activity for a number of days would probably have a mind that was hyperactive rather than in the relaxed state so conducive to “psi” phenomena.

The statistical tables compiled by Cox demonstrated the astonishing evidence that passengers did avoid accident-bound trains. In a study that concerned eleven train accidents, seven of the eleven carried fewer coach passengers than they had carried on the previous day; six carried fewer passengers than they had the same day on the preceding week, and four carried the lightest loads of the eight-day period.

In an investigation of seventeen accidents involving Pullman passengers, ten of the trains carried fewer passengers than they had on the same day of the previous week. Five carried the lightest load of the eight-day period. Cox later extended his research to include thirty-five accidents, and found that his data applied to eighty per cent of the cases. With the final results of Cox’s figures, the odds are better than 100 to 1 that some form of “psi” was involved rather than pure chance.

Cases of detrimental precognition are interesting to analyze, because in these instances, the act of foreseeing seems almost to have helped to produce the unfortunate result.

A graphic example of detrimental precognition would be the dream that occurred to Ralph Lowe on the night before his horse, Gallant Man, was to run in the 1957 Kentucky Derby.

Gallant Man, an odds-on favorite to win, had the added advantage of being ridden by Willie Shoemaker, one of the top jockeys in the United States. Mr. Lowe, therefore, could not be blamed when he awoke in anger and consternation at what he had witnessed in his dream. He had “seen” Gallant Man leading the pack coming down the home stretch. It appeared to be an easy victory for the Derby favorite. Then, inexplicably, Willie Shoemaker pulled up and allowed another horse to cross the finish line ahead of Gallant Man.

That morning before the race, the disturbing dream still adding to his already nervous state of mind, Lowe told Shoemaker, “Don’t pull him up short, Willie!”

The jockey frowned at the owner’s peculiar admonition. Why would Lowe say such a thing? No jockey in the history of the Kentucky Derby had ever pulled a horse up short of the finish line.

That afternoon, when the race was run, an incredulous crowd at the Derby saw Willie Shoemaker mistake the 16th pole for the finish line and pull up Gallant Man. Iron Liege pounded by the horse that had had a comfortable lead coming into the home stretch and won by half a length.

Mr. Lowe’s precognition had indeed been an accurate and certainly a detrimental one. If he had not planted the notion of pulling the horse up short in Willie Shoemaker’s mind, the incident might never have occurred to the experienced jockey.

In 1934, H.F. Saltmarsh issued a report to the London Society for Psychical Research in which he had made a critical study of 349 cases of precognition. Saltmarsh established the following conditions which would, in his estimation, make a case of precognition wholly satisfactory:

(a) It should have been recorded in writing or told to a witness or acted upon in some significant manner before the subsequent incident verified it.

(b) It should contain a sufficient amount of detail verified by the event to make chance coincidence unlikely.

(c) Conditions should be such that we can definitely rule out the following as explanations: telepathy and contemporary clairvoyance, auto-suggestion, inference from subliminally acquired knowledge and hyperaesthesia.

Saltmarsh used these criteria to proclaim 183 of the 349 cases as being wholly satisfactory cases of precognition.

One of these, the “Case of the Derailed Engine,” will serve as an illustration of the sort of experience that Saltmarsh deemed as truly precognitive.

A minister’s wife and daughter were staying at lodgings at Trinity, near Edinburgh, Scotland, on July 15, 1860. It was a bright Sunday afternoon, and between three and four o’clock, Mrs. W. told her daughter to go out for a short walk on the railway garden – this was the name she had given a strip of ground between the seawall and the railway embankment.

The daughter had only been gone a few minutes when Mrs. W. distinctly heard a voice within her say: “Send for her back or something dreadful will happen to her.”

Mrs. W. was seized by a sense of foreboding which progressed into a feeling of terror that soon had her trembling and physically upset over the nameless dread. She ordered a servant to go and bring her daughter home at once.

The servant, seeing her mistress visibly distraught, set out immediately. Mrs. W. paced the floor, more upset than ever, fearful that she would never again see her daughter alive.

In about a quarter of an hour, the servant returned with the daughter, who was safe and well. Mrs. W. asked the child not to play on the railroad embankment and obtained her promise that she would sit elsewhere and not on the spot where she usually played.

Later that afternoon an engine and tender jumped the rails and crashed into the wall where Miss W. had been playing before the servant brought her home. Three men out of five who were there, were killed. Much later, Miss W. and her brother visited the scene of the tragedy and saw that the smashed engine had crashed into the precise spot where she had spent two hours with her brother on the previous Sunday afternoon.

Saltmarsh theorized that what we call the “present moment” is not a point of time, but a small time interval called the “specious present.” According to his theory, our subconscious minds have a much larger “specious present” than our conscious level of being. For the subconscious, all events would be “present.” If, on occasion, some of this subconscious knowledge were to burst into the conscious, it would be interpreted as either a memory of a past event or a precognition of a future event. We know that the past is neatly cataloged somewhere in our subconscious. Some “psi” researchers, such as H.F. Saltmarsh, believe that all events – past, present, and future – are part of the “present” for the deeper transcendental mind.

In his book, An Experiment with Time, J.W. Dunne gives many examples of his own precognitive dreams, which he recorded over a period of several years. Dunne firmly believed in sleep and dreams as the prime openers of the subconscious and formulated a philosophy, which he called “Serialism,” to account for precognition. In Dunne’s view, time was an “Eternal Now.” All events that have ever occurred, that exist now, or that ever will be, are everlastingly in existence. In man’s ordinary, conscious, waking state, his view is only of the present. In sleep, however, the individual’s view might be sufficiently enlarged to allow several glimpses of the future. Although Dunne’s theory is considered too deterministic by the majority of “psi” researchers and has been, generally discredited, the philosophy of “Serialism,” as advanced in An Experiment with Time, offers the challenge of bold and imaginative thinking.

One of Dunne’s theories in relation to deja vu, the sense of the already seen, is quite intriguing. Dunne suggests that this curious experience (which almost everyone has had at one time or another) of “having been here before,” is due to the stimulation of a partially remembered precognitive dream. When the conversation becomes familiar or the new location becomes suddenly recognizable, one may, according to Dunne, simply be remembering a precognitive dream, which had been driven back into the subconscious.

Who has not known this strange feeling of having been with precisely these friends in this particular room and hearing exactly this dialogue at some former time? The fact that psychologists have chosen to call this uncanny sensation deja vu has certainly done nothing to explain this eerie phenomenon.

Such a mystical sounding term would have meant little to explain things to Chauncey Depew, who was once a runner-up for the Republican Presidential nomination and who delivered the speech nominating Colonel Theodore Roosevelt as candidate for Governor of New York. Depew’s ringing oratory clinched the nomination for Roosevelt and set the dynamic “Teddy’s” political career in motion. But who would have believed Depew if he had told anyone that he had lived through that political convention at some time in the past and had even delivered that identical speech? What is more, Depew remembered exactly when the “other time” had taken place, because he had taken notes throughout the entire experience.

He had been sitting on the porch of his country home on the Hudson just one week before the convention. Relaxed, gazing idly at the opposite shore, Depew was suddenly puzzled to see the pastoral landscape become transformed into the Convention Hall. Blinking his eyes incredulously, Depew saw the delegates taking their seats, and heard a temporary chairman make the motion to proceed with the nominations. Then, Depew heard himself giving a rousing speech for Colonel Roosevelt. When he finished, the convention erupted into wild cheering, and Depew took his seat with a pleased smile as a triumphal march began around the hall.

At that point, the raucous political scene faded, and Depew once again found himself staring at the quiet Palisades across the Hudson. Although he was completely baffled by the strange phenomenon that he had just witnessed, Depew was not one to waste such a wonderful opportunity. Grabbing paper and pen, he quickly jotted down the speech he had just heard himself delivering. It was this same speech that he repeated with the same success a week later.

Excerpt from ESP: Your Sixth Sense