Have you ever had a dream about your future that came true? What if we are all starring in our own sci-fi time travel movies? New mind-blowing research suggests that our future can change our present and our present can change the past.

BY HARV BISHOP

I was born as the result of a flat tire.

My parents met on blind date set up by Alice and Roger. Alice was a friend of my mom’s and Roger a friend of my dad’s. Roger met Alice when she had a flat tire and he stopped to help her out. That makes me, scientifically speaking, a third order effect of a random event.

As much as I may consider myself spiritual, whatever that means, and as much as I may feel in my gut that some things in life are kismet, I always have that flat tire staring me in the face. I have to accept that linear cause and effect is part of how the world works, and particularly that causes are often random.

Now for the other side of the coin.

Several years ago my wife Diane and I were planning to go to a movie in south Denver. The night before I dreamed that I was in east Denver and encountered a good natured but smart-ass woman store clerk. Like most dreams it seemed abstract and nonsensical and I forgot about it.

The next day we set out for the movie and I made some wrong turns (this was before GPS as a standard feature on phones) . Being male I’ll be damned if I was asking for directions. Forty five minutes later I was going in circles trying any turn that seemed to make sense. We clearly weren’t in south Denver. We finally saw something we recognized, a Whole Foods-style grocery.

We were in east Denver. “Hey, I’m going to I grab some of their tomatillo salsa,” I told Diane as I made an impromptu U-turn. Diane wasn’t in the best of moods given being driven in circles by my gender-based refusal to seek help, but she was open to some chips and salsa. Standing in line with the salsa, I was greeted by the good natured smart-ass woman store clerk from my dream. The dream came rushing back.

You can see my dilemma.

On the one hand, I respect randomness and that one event causes another event in sequential order. On the other hand, there aren’t words for how many unplanned, random turns it took us to arrive at that store at that time and to end up in the smart-ass clerk’s line among the many possible clerks I could have encountered. Of course science and the law of large numbers would say of all the dreaming people in the world the odds are high that somewhere someone will have a random dream that seems to correlate with future events.

In a complex world there are so many possible intersections and contingent causes for any one, even small, event. How the hell could my dreaming self have known where I would be unplanned and unintended and who I would meet there?

I’ve had other such occurances. I’m not unique. Many people report experiences with premonitions of future events.

Precognition raises difficult, mind-bending questions in the “real” world and in terms of the spiritual and paranormal.

How is precognition even remotely possible? If it is possible what does it mean? Do people who see the future see possible events or actual events? If it is the actual event are some things predestined? If it is predestined what about free will? And, why, as in my store clerk example, is precognition about often otherwise meaningless events? Why can’t I forecast the stock market?

Big as those questions are, research into unexplained psychic phenomenon by Dean Radin shows that intentions in the future can cause events in the past. You read that right. The effect creates the cause.

In his book Real Magic, Radin describes an intention experiment where people using the power of thought successfully “pitched” computer generated “curve balls” at a rate greater than the odds of chance. Mathematical analysis showed that the successful intentions weren’t pushing from the present to influence the future, but instead were in the future pulling the computer-generated balls into a curve.

The phenomenon, also seen in quantum physics experiments, is termed retrocausation and it’s enough to make your head hurt. It does mine.

After becoming obsessed with the implications of Radin’s experiment I came across two other mind-blowing and challenging works that included precognition and retrocausation. First, Eric Wargo’s new book Time Loops, and then more recently Mitch Horowitz’s newest book The Miracle Club. Horowitz’s book argues that retrocausation is the basis for how the Law of Attraction works!

Let’s bring this down to earth with an example. I began last week’s blog with the lead “I am writing these words on the balcony of our apartment in Paris.” This lead came to me last year long before we had access to an apartment in Paris or knew how, or even if, we would make our trip to Europe happen.

Conventional New Thought would say that intention magnetized and pushed events toward that Paris balcony. Radin’s experiments suggest the intention “moved” into the future and pulled events to it. Wargo would say my joy at writing those words on the Paris balcony in a future already present last year precognatively inspired the words of the lead and the resulting mental rehearsal. Horowitz would say there are many possible futures that we can sense in a timeless state of consciousness that accesses future and past and then we select from among those possibilities with our intentions. We don’t create those possibilities. They already exist. The Paris balacony was one of those already existing future possibilities.

These explanations have similarities and important differences, but in each theory we are living quantum-time machines.

What kind of world do we live in when the future can cause events happening to us now?

My take is that precognitive dreams or intuitions catch glimpses of possible futures that constantly shift like a kaleidoscope based on free-will choices. As Edgar Cayce’s son Hugh Lynn Cayce once said, clairvoyants can be wrong because they take a reading at a given point in time. It may look like a boat is going to collide with another on a river, but after the reading one boater may make a free-will choice to go ashore. The once probable event doesn’t happen.

The legendary psychedelic rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix was the only rocker in the late 60s willing to experiment with then new feed forward technology for his guitar. It makes a nice analogy for the evolving kaleidoscopic mix of influences I’m talking about. Unlike feedback, his system was engineered for his guitar to create unpredictable and random sound effects in the future that he would then have to respond to and improvise taking his song in wholly unexpected directions. The result was an intense mixture of probability, randomness and creative intent.

Similalry we navigate shifting circumstances, albeit imperfectly, with intuition and recognzing synchronicity as well as our creativity and intentions.

My parents were in each other’s orbit at a business school in Oregon. While they had not met, my dad had admired her from afar. If it hadn’t been a flat tire there could have been other synchronistic nudges and circumstances leading to their meeting.

Similarly my wife Diane and I shared several overlapping threads before meeting despite spending my early years in Denver while Diane lived 2,000 miles away in Miami. But there was a link; her mother had been born in Colorado.

Though they never met, my parents and Diane’s aunt and uncle and cousins shared the Denver ’60s folk music scene and common friends. I went to high school with Diane’s cousins. If someone had told my nerdy high-school self that down the road I would marry the glamorous cheerleader’s beautiful cousin I would have thought they were nuts.

Some years later, my lifelong neighbors used to take their granddaughter to ride horses at Diane’s aunt and uncle’s pasture. Later still, Diane’s cousin’s son was introduced to his wife by a student of mine from CU Denver.

Diane finally moved to Denver in 2000, and chose an apartment a mile from my home. We shopped in the same grocery stores and browsed the same bookstores. We even went to the same Denver-area New Thought church, but she went to the early service and I went at noon (what Catholics used to call the drunkard’s mass.)

We ultimately met none of those ways, but in retrospect there were many opportunities for synchronicities, greatly increasing the probability that we would meet.

In other words, randomness exists, and alternative, possible futures exist, but it can be massaged by intuitions and synchronicities. Kismet isn’t set in stone, but there are multiple paths creating a greater probability of any one special event happening.

I ultimately don’t know. And Horowitz and Wargo are also humble in their musings on the great mystery of time, precognition and retrocausation. Mine is one plausible explanation for how some important events occur in our lives, but what about precognition that reaches across greater expanses of time and with near-precise detail? I’m less certain my theory works with those examples.

For instance, Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novel Futility or the Wreck of Titan shared many details with the real-life Titanic striking an iceberg and sinking. The novel was published in 1898. The Titanic sank in 1912. Wargo analyses the book and the author’s reputed precognitive abilities extensively in Time Loops.

In another specific and time distant example, New Thought minister Harriet Hawkins had a detailed dream of a major move and career shift. She forgot about the dream only to realize it had come true six years later. Horowitz terms such events time collapses.

Next week we’ll look at her experience in light of Wargo and Horowitz’s books and the questions such detailed visions about the far future raise about predestination and free will.

In the words of Frank N. Furter, let’s do do the time warp again.

You might also enjoy reading about realizing your dreams with less work and more results here , three thinkers changing the way I look at spirituality here , and what Yogananda thought about the Law of Attraction here . And remember to subscribe to my newsletter for updates on new articles on the right sidebar. Thank you for visiting.

Mitch Horowitz’s The Miracle Club, Dean Radin’s Real Magic, and Eric Wargo’s Time Loops all have my highest recommendation.

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