VIII. The Chinese Magic Disc, Lo King, which was commonly used

for divination.
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came home from the war unscathed.^ Freud concluded that, at least so far as he himself was concerned, telepathic dreams were no guide whatsoever to the future or to present events of which he had no conscious knowledge.
In any case, he drew a sharp distinction between psycho- analytic and telepathic phenomena for, as he argued during the lecture to the Viennese Psycho-analytic Society in which he related his "telepathic" dream about his son, telepathic processes even if they did occur, were not dreams but merely "telepathic experiences in sleep". Telepathic messages, which are caused by external stimuli lack the true characteristics of the dream, viz. condensation, distortion, dramatisation, and, above all, wish fulfilment, all of which are internal stimuli. This is true even when some so-called telepathic dreams reflect the dreamer's wishes, for it is not immaterial whether castles in the air are reached telepathically or by one's own volition.
Modern Freudians do not object quite so strongly to the incursion of telepathy into their chosen field. Telepathic pheno- mena and dreams are said to be mutually compatible since "experience shows that somnolence, with its obliteration of time and space creates particularly favourable conditions for tele- pathic contacts".^ Still, the question remains whether telepathic "messages" are mere fantasies, or whether they can provide real answers about the future.
Psycho-analysts usually avoid giving unequivocal answers to this crucial question, and prefer to state that telepathy falls out- side their field — they are concerned with man's psyche and not with his revealed future. Psycho-analysis is introspective and retrospective rather than prospective and not interested in predicting the future.
But then, even critical adherents of telepathy do not claim that prophecy or clairvoyance is a criterion of true telepathy. Telepathy, in the strict and original sense of its first proponent, the English psychologist F. W. H. Myers, is nothing but the transference of thoughts, feelings, pictorial concepts, and sensa- tions from one person to another, without any perceptible inter- vention of either the senses or of artificial means. It is a kind of
1 Sigmund Freud: Traum und Telepathic ( 1922), Collected Works III, p. 278.
2 Kemper, op. cit., p. 127.
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remote communication both in the waking state and in dreams, for which physiology cannot offer an adequate explanation, and for whose frequent occurrence there is a great deal of reliable evidence. Some persons are particularly telepathic, others less so, and most people not at all.
Clairvoyance, on the other hand, is the ability of perceiving remote objects and people or events in a state of trance or hypnosis, again without the intervention of the senses. Clair- voyants are alleged to have the gift of precognition, even though this gift is gainsaid by all the known laws of physics and biology. People with this gift are said to be able not only to practise pre-cognition but also retro-cognition, i.e. to look into the past, and thus to be particularly useful in solving difficult criminal cases. For this purpose they were consulted so frequently by the police that the Prussian government had to pass a special law against this practice in 1929. When similar laws were passed in other countries as well, clairvoyants had to revert to their more traditional role of "recognising" the future.
This fine distinction between telepathy and clairvoyance can hardly be maintained in practice since, by and large, most tele- pathists are also clairvoyants and, since, moreover, in most of the relevant experiments during past decades, it was rarely pos- sible to distinguish between the two.^ Psychology has long ago lumped them together with all other abnormal manifesta- tions of mental life as "parapsychological", a term coined in 1889 by the German philosopher Max Dessoir.* In France, psychologists refer to the same phenomena as "metapsychique" a term first introduced by the physiologist Charles Richet, and in the United States it is fashionable to speak of E.S.P. — extra- sensory perception — a term invented by the psychologist J. B. Rhine. All these terms may have slightly different shades of meaning, but in a field so shrouded in mystery, fine distinctions are not nearly as important as the facts.
As for these, they were remarkable by their absence. Until fairly recently, believers and sceptics alike looked upon telepathy and clairvoyance as the exception rather than the rule. For this
^ S. G. Soal and F. Bateman: Modern Experiments in Telepathy (London)
1954), p. 8 f.
2 Sphinx, Year VII ( 1889), p. 42.
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very reason, it seemed impossible to come to any general con- clusions on the subject. Those given to religious speculations would speak of miracles, and the others could only invoke our lack of natural knowledge.
Some spoke of secret rays, others of biological phenomena. After all, many animals can see in the dark, and birds have a very much better sense of direction than men. Parapsychological phenomena could easily be signs, not of superhuman qualities, but of a kind of atavism, which took some men back to their early stages of evolution. In any case, it was generally agreed that clairvoyance, prophetic dreams, and telepathic phenomena were altogether exceptional.
The English Dreamer
Then came an Englishman who averred the exact opposite: that all human beings have the ability of looking into the future to some extent, and that, given patience and practice, all of us could learn to make correct predictions. He was J. W. Dunne, one of England's first pilots and aircraft constructors and, though perhaps given to fantasy, a man well-versed in physics and particularly in mathematics. His ideas had taken SO years to mature, and even the prosaic title of the book in which he first published his ideas — An Experiment with Time — showed that he was a serious thinker and not a mere sensationalist.
In any case, the book which appeared in London in 1927, was an immediate success not least because Dunne had very skil- fully combined the description of his own prophetic dreams with a most complicated theory of knowledge. Most readers un- doubtedly bought the book simply to learn about the intimate experiences of a famous aviator, but there is no doubt that he managed to arouse great public interest in his philosophical ideas as well.
England is not only the classic country of ghosts — ghosts not only haunted Shakespeare's imagination but that of a modem Provost of Eton, as well — it is also the first country in which a serious attempt was made to turn parapsychology into a real science. In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research was founded
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in London with the object of carrying out an impartial investi- gation of telepathic and allied phenomena. Four years later, three English psychologists^ published a work, which, for decades to come, was to be considered the repository of all parapsychological knowledge, both at home and abroad.'* The book was remarkable more for its methodology than for its case histories. While the few Continental scientists who had tackled the subject had all concentrated on exposing doubtful methods and telepathic swindles, the English writers attempted to cor- relate parapsychology with theoretical physics and mathematics, and particularly with the new ideas about the fourth dimen- sion.
Thus Dunne found the field well prepared when he began to sow his seeds, and this despite the fact that his own dreams were singularly pedestrian. They were truly English dreams, steeped in Victorian prudery — ^psycho-analysts would, in fact, have been bored stiff by all his nocturnal Empire-building. Dunne's first dream occurred in 1 889 when he was staying at an hotel in Sussex. He dreamed that he was having an argument with one of the wait- ers as to what was the correct time. Dunne asserted that it was half past four in the afternoon and the waiter maintained it was half past four at night. Dunne woke up, looked at his watch and found that it had stopped at half past four. He concluded that it must have stopped at half past four the previous afternoon and that he had subconsciously remembered this and then dreamed about it. He wound the watch without altering the hands as he did not know the exact time. On coming downstairs next morning he made for the nearest clock in order to set his watch right, only to find to his utter amazement that it had lost no more than a few minutes — the time between the dream and his winding his watch. In other words it must have stopped during his dream, and not, as he had assumed, during the previous afternoon.
Dunne's next reported dream occurred in Sorrento, and was once again a dream about a watch. Thereafter, his dreams become a little more exciting. In Alassio, on the Italian Riviera,
1 E. Gumey, F. W. A. Myers, and F. Podmore: Phantasm of the Living (London 1886).
2 Max Dessoir: Vom Jenseits der Seek (4th ed., Stuttgart 1920), p. 114.
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where he was spending a holiday after being invalided out of the Army during the Boer War, he dreamed that he was in Fashoda, a place near Khartoum. In this dream he found himself talking to comrades from South Africa who had apparently crossed the whole of Africa on foot. On opening his Daily Telegraph next morning, Dunne read that the Cape to Cairo Daily Telegraph Expedition had just arrived in Khartoum. Dunne had known nothing about this expedition, though he must often have heard the term "Cape to Cairo" while he was in South Africa, where it expressed British colonial aspirations.
More thrilling still is Dunne's dream during the following year when he had rejoined his unit in South Africa. This time, he saw an island threatened by a volcanic eruption. He warned the French authorities who controlled the island to mobilise all vessels in order to save the four thousand unsuspecting inhabi- tants. When Dunne received the next batch of papers from London, the headlines proclaimed: volcano disaster in MARTINIQUE. PROBABLE LOSS OF OVER 40,000 LIVES. On another occasion, while holidaying on the borders of the Achensee in Austria, he dreamed of a horse that had apparently gone mad. Next day he actually came across a horse behaving just as it had in the dream, and in the same surroundings.
How the prophesy in your sleep
So Dunne's dreams ran on through decades, through small and large events, through factory fires and railway disasters, all of which were confirmed by subsequent events, at least to some extent. True, all his reports were published after the event, but since nobody doubted Dunne's credibility, his exceptional clairvoyant talents were generally admitted. He himself disagreed that there was anything exceptional about him for, he said, what he did, everyone else could learn to do also. All that was needed was paying close attention to what happened before and after every dream, and this was easily learnt.
Dunne's recipe for getting the best out of dreams was in fact very simple, since it involved neither deep analysis, nor such awkward procedures as were used in ancient Greece, viz. falling
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asleep in special attitudes and in special places. Dreams are prophetic, and all we need do is to record them immediately upon waking, for, otherwise, they are quickly forgotten. In the absence of dream memories, it is also useiFul to jot down the first waking thoughts, for these are frequently influenced by the preceding dream.
Experimenting with a small circle of relatives and friends — men and women — ^Dunne put his method to the test and proved it — at least, to his own satisfaction. Thus his cousin, Miss C, who though she dreamed very little, had a truly prophetic dream within eight days of being instructed in Dunne's method. In this dream she saw a suspicious German woman (this was during the final stages of the First World War). Two days later. Miss C. came across a foreign lady dressed precisely like the suspicious figure in the dream. Not all the dreams investi- gated by Dunne referred exclusively to the future — some were clearly inspired by recent events, and in others past and future images were blended together. This was true also of some of Dunne's own dreams.
In order to determine whether precognition was possible in the waking state also, Dunne devised a new method: he would observe what odds and ends of images would remain in the mind after he had read a book and look for a chain of associations be- tween these images and future events. Thus, he found that, for in- stance, the word narwhal occurred in two books opened at random. However, on riper reflection, he concluded that this method was not as trustworthy a precognitive medium as the dream.
His method of having and remembering precognitive dreams, too, proved not as effective as he would have had his readers believe, for in 1932, when the London Society for Psychical Research carried out three series of tests based on Dunne's recipe,^ the results were extremely poor. The first series of tests with members of the society as experimental subjects proved a total failure, and the second series carried out with students from Oxford was inconclusive, since most of the original 22 volun- teers backed out or failed to produce the minimum of fourteen dreams demanded by Dunne. Of the 71 dreams supplied by the remaining students, four might conceivably have been called
^ Alfred Winterstein: Telepathic und Hellsehen im Licbte der modernen Forschung und wissenschajtlichen Kritik (Vienna 1948), p. 135 fF.
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precognitive, but only with some latitude, and of these three were produced by one and the same person.
More striking still was the failure of the third series of tests, to which Dunne himself presented himself as experimental subject, for of the 17 dreams which he produced, only one was even half-way precognitive. In this dream, he saw an American relative breaking his leg. Three days later he received a letter from the British Consulate in Los Angeles to the effect that this relative was destitute and about to be repatriated. That same evening he also read a detective story in which someone broke a leg under similar conditions to those of the dream. This double "coincidence" encouraged him, modest though he was, to list his dream as clearly precognitive. The fact that his own dream was, nevertheless, not nearly as precognitive as those of the Oxford student, was due to his age, for young people were characteristically more precognitive than their elders.^
What remained of Dunne's fame as a dreamer of true dreams after these unsuccessful experiments, was quickly forgotten after his death in 1949. Not that he was convicted of deliberate deception, but it becomes clear that he had modestly hidden the true character of his dreams from his fellow men. From the posthumous notes published by his widow, ^ it emerged that Dunne was no mere dreamer, but a theosophical visionary — a new Swedenborg, in fact. Like the Swedish visionary who not only "saw" the great fire of Stockholm from a distance, but also angels in the act of undressing, so Dunne, too, repeatedly dreamt of an angel which appeared to show him the path to true knowledge. On one occasion, he even saw God the Father dis- guised as a common working man, and he frequently heard mysterious voices. Thus, in his original watch dream, what had happened was that an angelic choir had implored him to wake up and to look at his watch.
Now, such visions and auditory hallucinations need not necessarily detract from the precognitive value of dreams, but they are, nevertheless, parapsychological phenomena of a special kind, and usually indicate pathological states. Dunne was apparently quite aware of this fact, and therefore concealed it
1 H. W. Dunne: An Experiment with Time. Appendix to 3rd ed.
(London IP^S), pp. 215-251.
^ H. W. Dunne: Intrusions? (London 1955).
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from the public during his lifetime. He wanted to be thought an ordinary, if attentive, dreamer and saw his mission in con- vincing mankind that all human beings were as capable of dreaming up the future as he himself was. They might have been far more sceptical had he shown himself in his true prophetic mantle.
E. S. P.
During the last decade, the question whether precognition is a special gift or not has been the subject of detailed investigation particularly in the United States, where a new branch of psycho- logy is devoting its efforts exclusively to the study of so-called psi-processes, i.e. processes apparently contradicted by generally held scientific principles. Among psi-processes, E.S.P. (extra- sensory-perception) phenomena such as telepathy and clair- voyance play a leading part.
E.S.P. research is largely the work of J. B. Rhine of Duke University in North Carolina, though his ideas are no longer restricted to Duke University alone. E.S.P. research prides itself on working with sufficient material to exclude mere chance results as far as possible, and on having introduced adequate controls which act as safeguards against experimental error and deliberate deception. Mass tests of this kind tend to involve a high degree of organisation and skill and must be prepared by experts. Thus the methods of the 1927 B.B.C. enquiry involving some 25,000 listeners, had to be rejected out of hand as being open to interference by professional clairvoyants and other interested parties. Modern E.S.P. research prefers to restrict its test to a small number of experimental subjects, who are given a large number of strictly controlled tests.
E.S.P. research being a young discipline, it has not yet ven- tured to experiment with such difficult and complex phenomena as prophetic dreams. Intead, its activities are restricted to investigating precognition in very simple processes. Here, the favourite method is to ask the subject to guess which cards will turn up next in a so-called Zener pack which consists of cards with one of five symbols: circle, plus sign, rectangle, star, and wavy lines (see Fig. 26). The subject is asked to predict a
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137
sequence of 5, or sometimes of 25, cards, while the experimenter, in a control room from which he cannot communicate with the subject, checks the actual results. An English electrical engineer who was also a great Psi specialist, G. N. M. Tyrell^ substituted a system of illuminated boxes for the Zener cards, and claimed that his box was more effective still in excluding external factoi's.
26. Zener-cards used in parapsychological research.
But no matter which method is used, the principle remains the same. In a pack of twenty-five Zener cards containing 5x5 symbols the chances are one to five that a given card, e.g. a circle, will lie on top of, say, a star. Probability considerations alone show that, though in the short run this ratio may not be maintained, it is certain to be the limit if only the game is con- tinued long enough.
But does the human mind, in fact, react precisely like an automatic selector? This question cannot be answered in the affirmative a priori, for it might be argued that, because of various personal factors, people have a greater or smaller faculty for guessing correctly, i.e. of being more (or less) clairvoyant than, say, a calculating machine.
Now, hundreds of thousands of experiments particularly in England and America have shown that while most human beings lack any special predictive gift, there are some ( including school children) who are particularly precognitive. A mass experiment carried out by Rhine and Gibson with 27,500 tests on adults and 12,500 tests on children indicated that the latter are generally more precognitive than the former. It also emerged
1 G. N. M. Tyrrell: Apparitions (London 1953). S. G. Seal and F. Bateman op. cit., pp. 82-87.
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fairly clearly that great intelligence and a good education are negative rather than positive precognitive influences. Thus primitive Canadian Indian children were far more clairvoyant than particularly intelligent London college students. ^ A very interesting series of tests was carried out by Gertrude Schmeidler of New York City College (1943-1948), who divided her experimental subjects into sheep and goats, ^ the sheep being those who were optimistic or neutral about the results, and the goats those who were sceptical about E.S.P. The sheep produced considerably better results (1-3:5) than the goats (0-98:5), and this despite the fact that the number of subjects had been kept so large that even a number of proficient clairvoyants among the sheep could hardly have affected the out- come. Hence, it could be argued that goodwill and faith alone, are sufficient to turn every human being into a clairvoyant.
Nevertheless, leading psi-experts are not fully convinced of the existence of this feculty, even in exceptional cases. Thus, two of the most experienced English experimenters ^ assert that "at present, there is insufficient confirmation by experiment that non-inferential precognition really exists, though there is a certain amount of evidence which suggests that it is a possibility". In other words, after three decades of the most diligent experi- mental work, the experts are no further than they were when they began.
But even if E.S.P. results had been far more convincing than they are, they could tell us little about the phenomena they were originally meant to explain. The experiments are far too simply devised and take place under quite different psychological con- ditions from those of prophetic visions. The idea of basing the experiments on the very simplest factors was, of course, an excellent one, if only to establish unobjectionable techniques. However, in order to be of practical significance, the method must also be applicable to the more complicated phenomena involved in so-called everyday clairvoyance. So far, this has been found impossible to do, and the value of E.S.P. experiment is
1 A. A. Foster: E.S.P. tests with American Indian Children. J. of Paraps. Vol. VII (June 1943), pp. 94-103.
2 G. R. Schmeidler: Separating the Sheep from the Goats. J. Am. Sy. for Psy. Res. (1945), Vol. 49, pp. 47-50.
3 Soal — Bateman, op. cit., p. 174.
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consequently very limited. The fact that human beings cannot predict a series of cards correctly is no proof that they cannot predict personal events correctly.
There is in fact a great deal of evidence that if human beings have the faculty of precognition at all, it is usually associated with complex processes. Intuitive predictions, no matter whether they are true or false, have always a dream-like quality, and this means that they are anything but simple. If we wish to solve the problem of precognition experimentally, we must, above all, raise it from the card and number level of the fair ground, and return to the more inspired level of the world of dreams.
Is time reversible^
It is here that we face the greatest obstacle: our logical reluctance to accept the possibility of non-inferential prediction, i.e. the possibility of arguing the future from non-existent facts. All theories, which assume that the future can be seen intuitively, start from the belief that there is a special faculty or a mechanism which enables people to do so. The purely prophetic theories assume that this faculty is given man directly by a higher, omniscient, and eternal power' — God — ^for whom past, present, and future are one, and who may grant a favoured few an occasional glimpse into the future. Those who are not satisfied with this explanation try to reduce or to eradicate the difference between past and future by arguing that the distinction exists in man's consciousness alone, and that, for instance, in dreams the line of demarcation breaks down enabling man to see time in its full extent — ^past, present, and future. This dream-like faculty, which runs counter to the classical notion of three-dimensional perception, involves the construction of a new concept of time.
For this construction, time must somehow be turned into space. No longer is time the Aristotelian concept for measuring movements or the Kantian basis of perception ; it has become an independent fourth dimension.
The term "fourth dimension" made its debut in the middle of the 18th century in the French Encyclopedia, and has haunted man ever since. It became tangible — too tangible — only towards
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the end of the 19th century, when Newtonian physics was being assailed from all sides. The first broadside was fired by the English mathematician C. W. Hinton in his: "What is the Fourth Dimension?" which appeared in 1887. Spiritualists who read the book were deeply disappointed, for Hinton's Fourth Dimension was completely despiritualised into the field in which all spatial processes took place. All space was said to have a fourth dimension, i.e. an extension in time. The point in time which we call the present is nothing but our point of observation, for past and future are one. Forty years later, the visionary Dunne took up this speculative theory, and added a good pinch of fantasy to it, while physicists such as Einstein and Minkowski, by including it into their new world-picture, gave it a somewhat more prosaic meaning. Meanwhile, Schrodinger and de Broglie had introduced fifth and even higher dimensions into their wave theory, and mystifiers the world over were quick to turn this advance in physics to their own advantage.
They were given unexpected help by the cinema. The new art of conjuring up life from changing shadows, had shown that still frames could be made to give the impression of continuous progress in time, and, what was more curious, it appeared that by running a film backwards, time could, in effect, be reversed. The first of these two phenomena was used in support of Bergson's contention that continuous time did not really exist, and was no more than a sequence of individual moments from which the human eye constructed a continuum. The reason why it could do this, was that man's memory could be turned both backward into the past and also forward into the future. Thus every still in the film points clearly to its successor, and in life — just like in the film — the future is already contained in the present.
Still more revolutionary in its "philosophical" consequences was the technique of running films backwards. While the first impact of seeing someone dive out of the water, or a racehorse galloping back to the tapes, may cause great amusement, even films shown in this way appear to have an inner logic, and may give rise to the impression that psychological events may be similarly reversed. True the old objections to the reversibility of physical events — ^for instance, the fact that, having once melted ice into water, the water cannot be turned back into ice
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with the same amount of work — still held good, but man's faith in absolute irreversibility was dealt a severe blow by the cinema.
Further dimensions
Dunne drew on some of the new knowledge in constructing his new theory which, despite its mathematical embellishments was pure fantasy. Thus he developed the fantastic notion of a five- dimensional world which contained not only the entire past but also the entire future of the four-dimensional world. In waking existence, observers in this five-dimensional world — and that means all of us — behave just as if they lived in a four-dimen- sional world, but in their dreams they soar beyond it to survey the future and the past with greatly enhanced powers of imagina- tion. Still, the five-dimensional world was by no means the ulti- mate world, since it contains a "real" time-dimension which can only be surveyed from a six-dimensional world, and so on ad infinitum.
This notion that time is multi-dimensional is also held by more down-to-earth philosophers than Dunne. ^ Thus Prof. C. D. Broad of Cambridge^ has suggested a five-dimensional picture. To visualise the mechanism of precognition, we must imagine the second time-dimension as a line perpendicular to the hori- zontal time axis of the four-dimensional world. This perpendi- cular line can be perceived by men endowed with precognitive powers. Now, while the whole thing looks extremely convincing on paper, paper is, after all, at best four-dimensional. It tells us little about the ability of events to cast their shadows before them.
Paradoxically enough, this question is most readily answered in the affirmative by strict evolutionists, who are commonly no friends of E.S.P. No matter how they envisage the detailed processes of evolution, they are bound to assume that the future is somehow included in the present. Still, a given cause can have a great number of effects, and none of us would, for instance, be able to predict the exact effects of throwing a burning cigarette out of a train window. On the other hand, even the least com-
1 Michel Souriau: Le Temps (Paris 1937), p. 55
2 C, D. Broad: Mr. Dunne's Theory of Time in Philosophy X, No 38.
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petent of detectives may trace the fire, once it has started, back to its original cause — in this case, the cigarette. Parapsycholo- gists, however, claim that they can predict the effects of certain causes and, unlike biologists, they will apply their predictions to the individual rather than to the race.
Even so, the public seems to have lost interest in the perfor- mance of E.S.P. virtuosos. While they were as popular as foot- ball heroes only 30 years ago, few people will be able to tell you their names today. Even in variety shows they no longer command large fees for, unlike diviners in other fields, their stock is at very low ebb at this moment.
This is due neither to the fact that their powers have waned over the years nor to greater scepticism on the part of the public. The real reason is that means of communication have improved so greatly, that we need no E.S.P. to tell us what is happening, say, to our poor aunt in Australia. Most men prefer the tele- phone or the radio to keep in touch with the present.
Parapsychology, like washing powder, is subject to the laws of supply and demand — ^hence its decline. Possibly a new fashion may see it in full cry again, but if the present tendency continues it may well happen that man's parapsychological faculty will wither away even before science has had the final say on the subject.