3 - Foreseeing The Future

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 forseen 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 th6 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 his 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 busses is fixed, while a train can add or remove cars as the traffic demands. Second, subways and busses 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 fore-seeing 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" that 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 vue, the sense of the already seen, is quite intriguing. Dunne suggests that this curious experience (which almost everyone has had at one tune 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 vue 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 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.

If man can glimpse the future in precognitive dreams, it also follows that certain sensitive people may have the ability to step into a scene of the past. Knowledge of some past event or state acquired through other than normal sensory channels or inference based on sensory data is termed retrocognition.

In August, 1901, two English ladies, both estimable scholars, Miss C. Anne E. Moberly, principal of St. Hugh's College, Oxford, and Eleanor F. Jourdain, a member of her staff, suddenly and quite inadvertently, found themselves in the Petit Trianon as it existed in the time of Marie Antoinette. Not at all a rigid tableau or fuzzy vision, the scene was completely "live" and featured several gardeners and villagers dressed in clothes of another era and speaking an archaic French. Buildings existed that were not on current maps, and there were no other tourists about. Each woman confessed later that she had felt oppressed and nervous during the strange incident. Their story was afterwards confirmed by documents in the French National Archives.

Mrs. Coleen Buterbaugh is employed as a secretary to Dr. Sam Dahl, Dean of Nebraska Wesleyan College in Lincoln. On October 23, 1963, at precisely 8:50 A.M., Mrs. Buterbaugh stepped into an office in the old C. C. White building on an errand for the Dean. As she stepped into the two-room suite, she noticed that both rooms were empty and the windows were open. But as she moved farther into the room, she had "the strangest feeling that I was not in the office alone.

"I looked up and just for what must have been a few seconds saw the figure of a woman standing with her back to me, at a cabinet in the second office. She was reaching up into one of the drawers."

Mrs. Buterbaugh had never seen the woman before that instant. The woman was tall, slender, dark-haired, and dressed in the style of an earlier time.

"I still felt that I was not alone," Mrs. Buterbaugh later told Rose Sipe of the Lincoln Evening Journal. "I felt the presence of a man sitting at the desk to my left, but as I turned around there was no one there.

"I gazed out the large window behind the desk and the scenery seemed to be that of many years ago. There were no streets. The new Willard sorority house that now stands across the lawn was not there. Nothing outside was modern. By then I was so frightened, that I turned and left the room!"

Mrs. Buterbaugh appeared so pale and shaken that Dean Dahl feared she was on the verge of a collapse. At last he got the story from her, and, together, they went to see Dr. Glenn Callen, chairman of the division of social sciences, who had been on the Nebraska Wesleyan faculty since 1900. There, with the help of Dr. Callen's memory and old college yearbooks, Mrs. Buterbaugh identified the apparition she had seen as being Miss Clara Mills, who had died in that office.

Somehow, Mrs. Buterbaugh had walked into Miss Mills' office as it had been in the 1920's. In a 1915 yearbook, a picture of Miss Mills bore the caption: "A daughter of the gods thou art, divinely tall and most divinely fair." The picture and the description matched the appearance of the tall, dark-haired woman Mrs. Buterbaugh had seen in the office.

"I'm not one to imagine things," Mrs. Buterbaugh affirmed. "But when I close my eyes, I can see her just as Plain as day."

In 1916, Miss Edith Olivier was driving through a dreary October evening from Devizes to Swindon in Wiltshire, England. As she left the main road, she found herself passing along a strange avenue of huge gray megaliths, and she concluded that she must be approaching Avebury, which had originally been a circular megalithic temple approached by long stone avenues. Although she had never been to Avebury before, she had seen pictures of the area in archaeological texts.

When she arrived at the end of the avenue, she got out of the automobile and climbed on to the bank of a large earthwork. Here, she could view the irregularly fallen megaliths and the several cottages which had been constructed among them. On that particular night, in spite of the rain, a village fair seemed to be merrily in progress. Miss Olivier watched in amusement as she saw villagers walking about with flares and torches, enjoying the various booths and shows. If it had not been for the rain, which was becoming increasingly heavy, Miss Olivier would have watched the pleasant tableau longer.

When she visited Avebury again, some nine years later, she was puzzled to read in the guidebook that, although a village fair had once been an annual occurrence in Avebury, the custom had been abolished in 1850. In addition, she learned that the particular avenue of megaliths on which she had driven on her first visit had disappeared before 1800.

This kind of experience seems to lend a great deal of credence to the theory that a kind of persistent memory exists in the psychic ether associated with a particular place. Thomas A. Edison theorized that since no form of energy is ever lost, scenes of the past may become imprinted somewhere on this psychic ether just as images are registered on motion picture film. If this theory is established, it would explain such transgressions of the boundaries of the past, for a person of the proper sensitivity might be able to pick up the etheric images of past events in much the same manner as a projector runs a spool of film past a beam of light projecting an image of "life" on the screen.

 An alternate theory is that surviving minds, emotionally held to the area, may telepathically invade the mind of the sensitive and enable him to see the scene as "they" once saw it. It cannot be denied that some places definitely have their own "atmospheres," which often give sensitive people feelings of uneasiness - if not downright discomfort and fear. Whether this may be caused by surviving minds, a psychic residue, or the impression of a persistent memory in the psychic ether is a question that will be discussed again in relation to the appearance of ghosts in "haunted houses."

Excellent examples of what seem to be impressions caused by the collective emotions and memories of large groups of people can be found in those cases where battle scenes of the past have been "refought" for reluctant witnesses.

The Phantom Battle of Edge Hill is more substantial than many such reports because its authenticity is substantiated by so many witnesses of good standing. The actual battle was fought near the village of Keinton, England, on October 23, 1642, between the Royalist Army of King Charles and the Parliamentary Army under the Earl of Essex.

On Christmas Eve, several country folk were awakened by the approaching sounds of drums, marching soldiers, and the boom of artillery pieces. Thinking that it could only be another clash between soldiers of the flesh, the people fled from their houses to confront two armies of ghosts. One side bore the king's colors; the other, Parliament's banners.

Until two or three in the morning, the phantom armies had at one another in a spectral "re-run" of the battle that had taken place two months before. There was the sharp crackle of muskets, the boom of cannon, the neighing of charging horses, the screams and cries of the dying. When the king's army fled as it had done before, the Parliamentary forces stood about cheering and giving thanks for their victory. Then, slowly, the scene of spectral carnage faded, and the hillsides were once again quiet in the hush of a Christmas Eve.

When the frightened countryfolk made their way to the village and to William Wood, justice of the peace, they were met with violent skepticism. Wood and Samuel Marshall, the village clergyman, scoffed at the story and tried to shame the folk for using Christmas Eve to concoct such a foolish and fanciful tale. In order to shake the witnesses - who stood fast by their tale - the two men agreed to accompany them to Edge Hill on the next night. There, in spite of their unwillingness to believe in such happenings, Justice Wood and Reverend Marshall saw the entire battle re-fought in its minutest detail. Repeat performances of the ghostly strife were held on the two following evenings as well.

At last the word reached the ears of King Charles at Oxford. The king was hardly pleased that a ridiculous fantasy conjured up by simple countryfolk should be keeping the memory of his defeat at Edge Hill before the entire English public. He made his desire to squelch such a superstitious tale quite clear to Colonel Louis Kirke, Captain Dudley, and Captain Wainman, whom he dispatched to Keinton to expose the whole impossible business.

The three officers were highly skeptical men, who never believed anything they could not perceive directly with their own five senses. They went to Reverend Marshall and belabored him for being a party to the circulation of such preposterous rumors. They threatened to have Justice Wood removed from office. They interviewed villagers and countryfolk and tried to trip them up in some badly told lie. Frustrated that everyone in the village of Keinton and in the surrounding countryside stood adamantly by the story of a phantom battle at Edge Hill, the officers were nonetheless in a gay and light-hearted mood when they at last consented to sit out on the hillside on Saturday and Sunday nights to witness the ghostly encounter for themselves.

Incredulously, the three emissaries of the king's disbelief observed the phantom battle on each night. In addition to witnessing the incredible phenomenon, the officers were able to recognize several of their fallen comrades, particularly Sir Edmund Varney. When they returned with their report to King Charles, all three officers took an oath that their testimony was true.

Two young Englishwomen, sisters-in-law, were sharing a room on the second floor of a building where German troops had been quartered at Dieppe during World War II. The time was August, 1951. Nine years previously, nearly 1,000 young Canadians had lost their lives in the ill-fated Dieppe Raid.

On the morning of August 4th, the two vacationing Englishwomen were awakened just before dawn by terrible sounds of guns and shell fire, dive bombing planes, shouts, and the scraping of landing craft hitting the beach. The frightening cacophony continued until the coming of light and the sounds of normal activity. The women had, of course, cautiously peered out of the windows and stepped out on the balcony shortly after the nightmarish memory of sound had begun, but at no time did they ever see anything that would account for the simulated invasion. Even more peculiarly, no one else in the house was awakened or mentioned being disturbed by the sounds.

The young Englishwomen were so impressed by the ordeal, however, that they began to prepare a report to send to the Society for Psychical Research. Being possessed of unusual presence of mind, they had added much value to their report by keeping a record by their watches of the precise time which the phenomena began and the exact times of the ebb and flow of battle. S.P.R. investigators checked the ladies' report against the detailed accounts of the actual raid in the war office. The times, as recorded by the women, were often identical to the minute of the raid that had taken place nine years before. In other instances, their times were off by only a minute or two.

"Time," moaned a puzzled Saint Augustine, "what is it? If nobody asks me, I know. But if I am asked, I do not know!"

Obviously, the conventional idea of time existing as some sort of stream flowing along in one dimension is an inadequate one. In this view, the past does not exist: it is gone forever. The future does not exist because it has not yet happened. The only thing that exists is the present moment. But wait! The present does not really exist, either, since it is no sooner "now" than that "now" becomes part of the past. What was the future when you began to read this sentence is fleetingly the present and has already become the past by the time you read the next word.

If the past completely ceased to exist, we should have no memory of it. Yet each of us has a large and varied memory bank. Therefore, the past must exist in some sense; not, of course, as a physical or material reality, but in some sphere of its own. Similarly, certain researchers maintain, the future must also exist in some way in a sphere of its own. The subconscious does not differentiate between past, present, and future but is aware of all spheres of time as part of the "Eternal Now."

There are certain kinds of precognitive experiences that can be easily identified as part of the normal process of the subconscious. A woman dreams of coming down with the measles and laughs it off. She did not succumb to the disease as a child, why should she weaken as an adult? In two days, she is in bed with the annoying rash covering her body. Rather than judge this to be a prophetic dream, we might better regard the experience as an example of the subconscious mind being much more aware of the condition of the inner body than the superficial mind.

In other cases, a keen intellect and a great awareness of one's environment will enable one to make predictions. Much of the affluence our contemporary economy, from stock market juggling to hemline raising, is based upon the ability of certain knowledgeable people to make predictions concerning the preferences of a mass society.

In contrast to these "explainable" predictions, however, are the many examples of men and women who seem beyond any doubt to have experienced Precognitions. This "power of prophecy" rested not in some occult knowledge, but within the transcendent self, which seems to be aware of events that belong in the realm of the future for the superficial self.

Some "psi" researchers have presented tune in an analogy with a man riding on the rear platform of a train. The man looks to the left and to the right. As the train chugs along, he is able to see a panorama of new scenes as they come into his view. As the train continues, these scenes fade into the distance and are lost to view. They have become the man's past. But these scenes do continue to exist after they have passed from the man's view, and they were in existence before the man perceived them, even though he was only able to see them at the tune that they were his present. However, if another man were flying high above the train in an airplane, he would be able to see the train passenger's past and present, as well as future scenes which lie beyond the man's limited ground-level view. All would exist for the man in the airplane as an "Eternal Now."

The problem of time will not be an easy one to solve.

In the words of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: "It is impossible to meditate on Time and the mystery of the creative passage of Nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence."