It’s
Déjà Vu All Over Again
Philip
Liebson
Chicago
Literary Club
April
25, 2011
I
would first like to thank Arthur Diers for his superb introduction and drink a
glass of water.
It’s déjà vu,
all over again.
It
was September 28 1951 at Yankee Stadium. Ninth inning. Ted Williams was at bat and Yogi Berra was
catching for the Yankees. Allie Reynolds was pitching a no hitter and two were
out. The count was 2 and 2. Reynolds pitched and Williams popped up. Yogi got
under the ball and … dropped it! Reynolds pitched again. Another pop up. Yogi
caught the ball this time and the no hitter was Reynolds’s and the pennant was
the Yankees’.
The
second popup must have been a déjà vu for Yogi and perhaps the origin of the
phrase attributed to him “It was déjà vu all over again”. Dramatic as this was, it was eclipsed five
days later by Bobby Thomson’s shot heard round the world at the Polo Grounds.
Others have attributed Yogi’s comment to the result of watching Roger
Maris and Mickey Mantle hitting back to back home runs frequently.
That
strange feeling that you are experiencing something you have experienced in the
past, lasting for a brief period, knowing for that brief period what will
happen next is quite common. It was the basis for a Rodgers and Hart song Where
or When:
“It
seems we stood and talked like this before.
We
looked at each other in the same way then.
But I can't remember where or
when...
Some things that happen for the
first time
Seem to be happening
again." - 1937
One of the eeriest experiences I have had
transposed me from one participant in the event to another, over a period of
several decades. When I was 11 years old in summer camp I was on a horse for
the first time and was in back of the pack going down a Connecticut dirt road.
My horse was named Sunspot, perhaps for his unpredictability or his ability to
influence strange effects around him. While the other was riding briskly,
Sunspot was taking his time inspecting the leaves beside the road. The fact
that I had on sneakers rather than more solid shoes prevented him from
responding to my kicks to have him move forward. Quite suddenly a speeding car
came up behind us. This stimulated Sunspot beyond my imprecations and he
started a swift trot, not quite a canter that left me lying in the road,
fortunately uninjured, and the car screeching to a sudden stop..
It’s
now over 30 years later. I am driving with my wife over the same country road
to see my old camp for the first time since there. There in front of me are 7
campers on horseback- I slow down anticipating myself on the last horse- not
quite but almost in the twilight zone. Not quite déjà vu but an eerie
coincidence.
The
phenomenon of repetitive experience was exaggerated to the extreme in the movie
Groundhog Day. However, in the late 1930’s, Morris Bishop, a Cornell historian
and poet, published a poem in the New Yorker about such experiences, which he
entitled “ We Have been Here Before”.
I think I remember
this moorland,
The tower on the
tip of the tor;
I feel in the
distance another existence;
I think I have
been here before.
And I think you were
sitting beside me
In a fold on the
face of the fell;
For time in its work’ll go round in a circle,
And what is
befalling befell.
“I have been here
before” I asserted.
In a nook on a neck
of the Nile.
I once in a crisis
was punished by Isis,
And you smiled. I
remember your smile.
I had the same sense of persistence
On the site of the seat of the Sioux;
I heard in the tepee the sound of a sleepy
Pleistocene grunt it
was you.
The past made a promise before it
Began to begin to begun,
This limited gamut brings you again. Damn it,
How long does this
have to go on?
This
feeling could have been attested by Nathaniel Hawthorne who in 1863 visited
Stanton Court, a 15th century manor near Oxford, who stood by the
enormous late medieval kitchen. He was gripped by a strange sensation. To quote
him:” I was haunted and perplexed by an idea that somewhere or other I had seen
this strange spectacle before, The height, the blackness, the dismal void,
before my eyes, seemed as familiar as the decorous neatness of my grandmother’s
kitchen.”
Another experience that is akin to this is the
feeling that you have been to a place before even though you are visiting it
for the first time. For example, in The Moon and Sixpence, Somerset Maugham
describes the situation of an English doctor of Jewish descent who visits
Alexandria for the first time. To quote the author:
“It
was like a thunderclap…a revelation.”Something seemed to twist his heart, and suddenly
“.he felt exultation, a sense of wonderful freedom. He felt himself at home,
and he made up his mind that he would spend the rest of his life in Alexandra”.
“I thought I would go to a Greek hotel..
[and] I knew where to find one. And you know, I walked straight there, and when
I saw it, I recognized it at once”.
I do not speculate that he could have been
there in an earlier life although it has been such a possibility has been
proposed not only by Morris Bishop but also by CS Lewis. Jack Lewis as he was
known to his friends was an Oxford fantasist and his novels and short stories
were replete not only with déjà vu but also time travel, parallel universes,
out of body experiences, of which we will discuss in a more general way.
At this point I will describe another of my experience that caused a revelation.
This occurred in 1992. My wife was oversees studying and I decided to take a
little vacation in California. Renting a car I felt compelled to driven north.
After stopping for the night in Mendocino, I proceeded further north and found
myself driving through a forest of sequoias called the Avenue of the Giants. I
felt that I HAD been there before and drove through the 20 miles of forest, and
turned back, deciding to stop for the evening at a motel several miles south.
Something was pulling me and I drove back and parked in the middle of this
forest, compelled to walk around a circular path of about a half a mile several
times, and sensing something akin to exaltation. Never before had I had that
experience and never again.
Déjà vu, or the sense that at least for a few seconds you are
experiencing something again with an inexplicable sense of familiarity, has
been experienced at least once by most people. The term was coined by the
French philosopher and researcher Emile Boirac in the late 19th
century, and has been described metaphorically as a breeze blowing through the
conscious mind, more common than ESP experiences. Boirac himself was deeply
involved in research into what has been described as paranormal experiences or
sensations and also coined the term metagnomy- knowledge acquired without the
senses- the early term for extrasensory perception (ESP).
The term déjà vu of course is French for already seen and a multiplicity
of other phenomena have also been described, all with French terms such as
jamais vu, never seen, a familiar situation not recognized by the observer, and
déjà visité, already visited but never really been there, as was described by
Hawthorne and as we shall see with the ladies at Trianon. In each case there
is a subjective sensation of an
“inappropriate familiarity of the present experience with an undefined past”,
the accepted scientific definition of déjà vu credited to psychiatrist Vernon
Neppe, who has described a total of 21 types of déjà experiences other than vu
itself. These experiences have been themselves classified among several causes
including disorders of memory, disorders of the ego state, recognition
disorder, manifestations of epileptic firing, and so forth.
One example of a vivid déjà vu experience was described by someone many
years later who was 11 years old at the time of his experience. To put it in
his own words, on a trip to Washington DC and Williamsburg, Virginia, “we made
a brief stop in Monticello...We had taken the tour of the house and the garden
and were left to do our own thing for a few minutes…I wandered to the far side
of the garden where there were a couple of out buildings that were used for
storage and greenhouses during the colonial period. When I walked into the
first building I immediately recognized everything inside. Everything from the
walls, floors, and windows to the antique tools hanging on the walls were
instantly familiar. …I ‘knew’ that I had been there before”. This was experienced
by the technical director of the Arkansas Paranormal and Anomous Studies Team
who had not visited Monticello before.
I myself must credit much of
the information for this talk derived from the book. The Déjà vu Enigma by
Marie Jones and Larry Flaxman, psychologists who are into paranormal
experiences. Of course, experiences of the paranormal are always intriguing but
we will limit this talk to aspects of déjà vu and other experiences of memory and time.
Both Freud and Carl Jung had their comments on déjà vu. Freud associated
the phenomenon with the mother’s genitals indicating that “there is…no other
place about which one can assert with such conviction that one has been there
before”. Jung believed that there was a collective unconscious of which such
experiences were derived, and that déjà vu was derived from accessing a
repository of the memory bank of humanity.
There are more prosaic suggestions about the possible causes of déjà vu.
As an anomaly of memory it is possible that there could be a neurologic overlap
for a few seconds between short term and long term memory so that something
that is visualized or perceived for the first time may seem to have been
experienced before. This could be explained by a short circuit by which the
event is stored in the memory bank before the conscious part of the brain
perceives it and reflects the information from the rapid memory bank. This is
analogous to pain from a lower extremity. There is a drawing away of the
extremity from the source of pain before it is even perceived through the
action of fast sensory nerves and then the feeling of pain sensed by way of the
slow sensory fibers.
There is another theory that is based upon the possibility that one eye
can record the event an instant before the other eye, interpreted by the brain
as a fast recollection of a previous vision. However, déjà vu has been
experienced by one eyed persons so that the theory may not apply universally.
The idea that some of our experiences were
indeed vestiges of past lives has been found in fantasy literature, and back to
Jack Lewis. In his unfinished novella, the Dark Tower, a group of Cambridge
dons are discussing the possibility of time travel and affects on experiences.
One of the characters brings up the actual experience of two English ladies early
in the last century while visiting Trianon, an estate of Marie Antoinette. They presumably saw a whole scene from a part
of the past long before their birth. These real life ladies published a book in
1911 called An Adventure in which they described the appearance of the palace
and gardens on 10 August 1901 exactly as they believed it would appear to Marie
Antoinette in 1792. In regard to this
deposition, Lewis has one of his characters remarking that “ it might have
dawned on you that there is a great deal in your mental picture of, say,
Napoleon or Pericles, which you can’t remember in reading in any book…”.
Apparently, the ladies of Trianon were able to find other objective
checks that proved the accuracy of their visions of the past.
The Dark Tower, from which this previous quote was drawn, involved a
parallel universe inhabited by duplicate individuals who could exchange places
through a portal called a chronoscope.
The idea of parallel universes has many authors. A physicist, Hugh
Everett, proposed in the 1950’s that in using some of the concepts of quantum
mechanics, there are many other worlds existing in parallel in space and time.
It is speculated that although we may cease to exist in one universe, we may
continue to exist in other universes, thus affording the ability of a human to
live out a new life after death in this universe.
Another speculation relates to the concept of
“dark matter”, invisible matter that may occupy 80% of our universe. Dark
matter particles could form invisible counterpart earths that co-rotate and
share the same gravitational field of the visible Earth, based upon
computations in 2008 by scientists at Princeton and the University of Arizona
that a dark matter biosphere the size of Jupiter could be present coupled
gravitationally with the Earth. In this dark matter biosphere, dark plasma life
forms could have evolved. There is further speculation that dark plasma life
forms could have formed symbiotic relationships with the carbon based bodies of
humans, with continued existence in the dark biosphere when the carbon based
bodies die.
Here also we find a reflection in the works of Jack Lewis whose character, Professor Ransom, meets creatures in his travels to Mars
called eldila, who “do not eat, breathe, or suffer natural death, and to that
extent resemble thinking minerals…they regard space as their true habitat and
the planets to them are not closed world but moving points.. perhaps as
interruptions”.. in their system [from Perelandia].
Although déjà vu is a common experience, there are some bizarre
experiences reported that are susceptible to scientific explanation. One of
these is termed the Out of Body Experience. This term was coined in the 1940s
and has referred in many instances to astral travel. Here again Jack Lewis has
utilized this phenomenon as early as 1944 in his book Perelandia where his
protagonist Ransom travels to Mars and Venus to do the bidding of the good
eldils against the bad eldils using a coffin-like structure propelled by a good
eldil. This is somewhat different in conception than the OBE where person feels
that he or she has left the physical body and travels into space. These
experiences frequently are the result of drug use or extreme mental or physical
trauma. As with many other apparent paranormal phenomena, the experience can be
induced by stimulation of the right temporal-parietal junction of the brain. The
OBE experience involves various stages in the following order: inward attention
with withdrawal from the environment, a stage of immobility of the body, a
sense of being pulled away from the body, the beginning of space travel where
the mind feels free of the body, although there is frequently a sense of a thin
cord still attached to the body, and finally re-entry. The sensation of the
experience is NOT the feeling of a dream but a reality. Other stimuli to this condition involve
extreme physical effort such as marathon running or high altitude climbing. In
both situations, there is a sense of bilocation, being both on the ground and
above visualizing yourself from below.
The explanation for this phenomenon, suggested by neurologists, is a
mismatch between visual and tactile signals. Although this phenomenon appears
bizarre, in fact about 10% of people experience at least one such event. OBE’s
may be part of a near death experience. More on the latter later.
As
you may expect, psychologists and other groups have international meetings
about these phenomena and scientific studies are presented and discussed. One
of the problems with such studies is that surveys conducted to determine
incidence depend frequently on a self-selected group of participants, such as
internet users or persons especially susceptible to suggestion. For example, in
1999 there was a survey presented based upon responses from internet users in
regard to OBEs. Of the first 1000 or so responses, 85% reported having an OBE
experience, 45% indicating self-induced OBE’s. Also, 38% reported being able to
move through physical objects such as walls during their experiences. Needless
to say, these phenomena can keep some neurologists in business conducting
studies of brain arousal.
As you may gather, many of these experiences reach hyperbolic extremes.
For example, a book by a Preston Dennett entitled Out-of-Body Exploring: A
Beginner’s Approach describes the experiences of someone who indicates that he
had hundreds of OBE experiences lasting from seconds to hours. Among his
travels through time and space, he met with spirit guides and saw the presence
of a Higher Power represented by a Light, similar to Jack Lewis’ eldils..
At
least one investigator, Dr. Bruce Goldberg, suggests that OBE’s are travel in a
fifth dimension where all time is simultaneous and one can travel into the past
or future. One wonders that if this is so, can you influence history? One
science fiction writer in a short story had a time travel company that could
get people to go back in time, but only keeping to a pathway that would not
disrupt the environment. Sure enough, one visitor accidently stepped on an ant
and when returning to his future time found the environment radically changed.
Let us suppose that you could travel back in time and could change
things. What would you do? Perhaps bet on the results of sports activities or
get the battleships out of Pearl Harbor before December 7th. I am
sure that if you contacted the Navy Department in 1941 and told them about the
necessity of doing so the only persons to heed your request would be the FBI or
the local asylum. One thing I would do if I were back in 1951 is send a message
to Chuck Dressen not to put Ralph Branca in for Don Newcombe. In 1941 I would
urge Hugh Casey not to throw a spitball to Tommy Henrich.
There are of course books and plays about time travel. One of the
interesting ones I read was Time and Again, by Jack Finney that was published
in 1970.The government has a secret project headed by a Dr. Danziger to develop
time travel to various periods and the hero, Si Morley, who works as a
draftsman, is recruited to go back to 1882 in New York. He is established in an
apartment in The Dakota, on Central Park west and 72 St, which was opened
around that earlier time, outfitted in clothes and journals from that period
and provided similar meals from that period to get him adjusted, and one snowy
night in an experiment goes out into Central Park across the avenue. It is a
veritable blizzard and the only vehicle he sees is a horse drawn carriage. He
returns to his apartment and the next day his researchers from the government
office grill him about his experience and he is unable to establish that he
went back in time (examiner: damn it didn’t you check the street lights?) until
Morley adds that after he came back to the Dakota he looked out the window and
saw the Museum of Natural History, 7 blocks north. Of course, in 1970, there
were large buildings obscuring the Museum from his apartment and his trip
therefore a success. He repeats his trips and finally spends time in the
Manhattan of 1882, getting used to the archaic horse drawn busses and the faces
of the people (they look different). There are many anachronistic slips as when
he starts talking about Czechoslovakia to his dinner partners at a time when
there was only the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He finally decides to stay in old
New York which to him was an easier time when the air was cleaner and the
rivers flowed fresh. Going back, he encountered the man and woman who would
become the mother and father to Dr. Danziger, the head of the future government
time travel project and contrived to prevent them from meeting for the first
time and thus there would be no Dr. Danziger and the future and no time travel
project.
There are of course several centers
concentrating on consciousness raising especially developed to OBE. One such center
is located in Portugal and is named a Projectarium, where in an igloo-shaped
building persons with OBE experiences are evaluated. The official description
of the site is “a self-experimentation laboratory of the International Academy
of Consciousness”. For the experience of 25 acres of oak and cork tree groves
in a pleasant location of Portugal, it may be worth the trip alone and perhaps
most of the consciousness raising may be produced outside the igloo.
The neurologic evaluation of OBE has even been distinguished by
appearance in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, which is very
careful in publishing investigations of the highest scientific quality. The
article was from the Department of Neurosurgery of the University Hospital of
Antwerp Belgium and dealt with an OBE repeatedly elicited during stimulation of
the right superior temporal gyrus which mediates self perception, suggesting
the activation of this region at least as the neural correlate of the
disembodiment associated with OBE associated with co activation of another area
that integrates body orientation in space.
If you will recall the movie American Beauty, the Kevin Spacey character
is shot and killed but for seconds after the shooting his whole life is spread
before him in an expansion of time. This portrayal comes from the hypothesis,
that when we are very near death, we relive our lives over for the actual
extended period of our lives and in fact never die in our own experience, a
sort of extended Groundhog Day.
We
have all heard the cliché about your life unfolding during an experienced
crisis. This situation has been of special interest in persons who experience
what is termed near death. Of course those who have died cannot bear witness.
We
have discussed the conjecture that people live in separate universes and that
death in the present universe may still allow a continued life in alternative
or parallel universes to which we also belong. A psychologist, Raymond Moody, Jr, has worked
with several hundred persons who had clinically died but survived and from
information derived from these experiences developed a series of stages of what
is now termed near death experience (NDE). It is common initially for the
participant to hear the pronouncement that he or she is dead or something to
that effect, followed by an auditory sensation associated with deep peace or a
movement through space that feels like travelling at a rapid speed through a
dark tunnel. Following this is a sensation of rising upward out of the body,
then meeting dead relatives or guardian angels near the tunnel’s end. Following
this is the meeting with a spiritual being, masked in a brilliant light who
goes through the person’s life events and leads to a feeling of compassion and
peace, or as TS Eliot ended the Waste Land, Shantih Shantih Shantih- the peace
that passeth understanding. Since the person survives he or she then returns to
the body, however reluctantly. Thomas
Mann, whom we would consider a rational person not usually persuaded by such
testimonials offered a similar experience in Buddenbrooks about a child dying
of typhoid that in his coma contemplated the choice of a peaceful death or the
return to a less salubrious life and chose death.
One of the conundrums about such situations is whether consciousness
resides in the brain. Although it seems logical that such is the case, nobody
has ever isolated consciousness as an entity and although we see life from the
top of our head, who knows whether our streams of consciousness might actually
be located in nether parts, although we can eliminate the limbs and most of the
organs in the thorax and abdomen. It has been postulated that the experiences
surrounding near death may be due to
shutting down of neurotransmitters, endorphins secreted in the brain under
these circumstance that lead to a “high” m stimulation of the temporal lobe,
the influence of lack of oxygen on the development of hallucinations, or the
reliving of the experience of the birth canal- cf Freud. For the record, about 70% of Americans believe
in life after death.
In regard to the Moody classification of near death experiences
mentioned above, Dr. PMH Atwater, another psychologist who has done research on
NDE with over 3000 subjects, records the feeling of a black void or a purgatory
like state before the transcendent state of the heaven-like experience. It is
unfortunate that Dr. Atwater did not have a chance to interview Dante on his
researches into these states. Or perhaps, she should have asked her subjects
whether they had ever read the Divine Comedy.
We can go even further back to Plato’s Republic in which a mythical
soldier is described who experiences near death leading to the sense of an afterlife
and reincarnation.
At present there is a large study being undertaken in 25 US and UK
institutions involving 1500 heart attack survivors to determine whether an out
of body experience can occur in those with transient cardiac arrest or virtual absence of brain
activity. The principal investigator, Dr. Sam Parnia, does not use the term
near-death, rather indicating that these patients have to all accounts actually
died. As of this date there is no record yet of a publication of this study.
However, an earlier pilot project resulted in the evidence that, to quote Dr
Parnia, “mental and cognitive processes continue for a period of time after a
death has started”. At least one case of an out of body experience has been
recorded at a time of the temporary
absence of electroencephalographic activity.
An intriguing theory about the experience of near-death was proposed
related to the strangeness of the concept of near death to the living person-
causing the individual to experience memories from the prenatal period onward-
and in fact many such individuals report memories that were long lost. The
question arises whether all memories are actually retained in our long-term
memory banks.
The result of near death experiences is physiologically increased
activity of our friend the left temporal lobe and changes in personality and
outlook. These personality changes include higher self esteem, value of life
and compassion for others and greater ecologic sensitivity. Is there some way that a controlled
intervention of this nature could be implemented in certain congressmen?
We
have all had the experience of time dragging on, and a sleep of several hours
can seem like minutes. In situations of danger such as combat, time slows down.
On the other hand, driving over distances that are somewhat boring can lead to
long stretches of time passing by rapidly.
Unlike situations of danger in which there is a focus on a specific
visual stimulus such as a gun pointed at you, these long stretches of boredom lead
to a lapse in conscious awareness. Reported bizarre experiences involving time
lapses include that of a woman driving from home to hear a lecture several
miles away. The woman was perfectly relaxed but to her an apparent few minutes was
actually two hours and she found herself still driving and many miles from her
destination. She had no recollection of what happened. The experience of
missing time involves a sort of autopilot by the brain in which the individual
continues to function efficiently although unaware of his or her surroundings. Another
situation involved a group of explorers in a wooded area who were only about
100 yards from their vehicle and walked back to it but found that 2 hours had
elapsed by the time they reached the vehicle. This was not one individual but a
group of them. There was no way that this incident could be explained
rationally as involving one brain malfunction.
Neurologic research using MRI suggests that the brain has a default
network that activates during day dreaming or boredom accompanied by increased
activation of an executive network, both of which participate in continue the
undertaking of routine activity during the boredom off driving or daydreaming.
Somewhat akin to this is the phenomenon of the time storm or time warp.
Individuals involved in this type of experience appear to enter a vague foglike
environment and exit it hours later in the same spot. Others find themselves
hundreds of miles away. In some cases people have been shown to disappear from
security cameras and turn up hundreds of miles away. Is it possible that there
are black hole phenomena on earth or local Bermuda triangles? No rational
explanation for this of course.
Several documented examples are found in the book Time Storms by Jenny
Randle, in which the common factor was a peculiar cloud that could transport
people and even vehicles possibly into an unknown dimension. Randles explains
it in terms of quantum physics, a rather complicated subject but one in which
there is evidence that subatomic particles can disappear and reappear- a quark
of nature so to speak.
The effects of quantum mechanics on subatomic particles are fascinating
and challenge the concepts of progression through time. First of all, a
particle like an electron can exists in several places at the same time and at
different energy levels. Not only that, but a subatomic particle can behave
like a particle or a wave and a particle meeting an anti-particle of similar characteristics
can cause one of the particles to move backward in time. So at least for small particles,
time travel may be possible.
I
provide several examples from Randles’ book Time Storms to allow you to refute
these experiences at your leisure:
“In
Oxford Maine in October 27. 1975 in a wooded area at 3 AM two young men heard a
strange sound. They got into their car to investigate and it was soon enveloped
in a colored glow. The two instantly found themselves a mile away with the car
pointing in the opposite direction. They subsequently suffered severe
disorientation.
In
Linhares Brazil in April 20th 1981 a representative of a chemical
company left his home to travel a few miles to a meeting. He never arrived and
his car was found on a side road a few miles from his home. Five days later his
wife received a frantic call from him- he said that a strange white glow had
enveloped his car and he became disoriented finding himself on a strange road 5
days later – April 25th- about 600 miles from home.”
These are perhaps examples of what are termed fugue states where the
person has a temporary blackout of memory function and may find themselves in a
different location under a different name. The characteristics of a fugue state
are three: sudden and unexpected travel away from the usual environment with no
recall of the past, assumption of a new identity or confusion about a person’s
identity, and severe stress or neuropsychological impairment. This indeed happened
to Agatha Christie in 1926. She apparently vanished and appeared 11 days later
at a hotel 100 miles away under an assumed name and she herself was unaware of
the intervening time interval and had no idea how she used that name- but she
was able to drive to the hotel and spend over a week presumably with normal
activity but without an iota of memory about the time interval. Her stress may
have been due to her husband’s alleged affair.
Déjà vu is somewhat different from a
paranormal state termed precognition, which may be even more common. Whereas
déjà vu involves living through a familiar scene for apparently a second time,
precognition involves watching a scene, perhaps in a dream or daydream, and
then living the event at a future time. Obviously, it is difficult to attest to
the validity of precognition unless the person reports the scene before the
event takes place in reality. This indeed happened at least one in 2001 where a
woman called into a radio call-in talk show describing a precognition of an airliner
crash with some specific details. Six hours later, an airliner crashed in an
extremely similar manner. Unfortunately, she failed to describe the identifying
number on the airplane’s tail beforehand.
Clairvoyance is unlike precognition in that there is a vision of a scene
in a distant location at close to the same time. This has been observed
especially in close relatives such as twins or siblings. The poet Wilfred Owens’s
brother Harold had such an experience while on board a warship sensing the
death of his brother at the end of World War I. On Armistice Day, about a week
after Wilfred Owen was killed, Harold was on a cruiser off the coast of Africa
and as he reported:
” I drew aside the door curtain and stepped inside and to my amazement I
saw Wilfred sitting in my chair. I felt shock running through me…looking at him
I spoke quietly: ‘Wilfred, how did you get here?’ He did not rise and I saw
that he was involuntarily immobile’. ..He did not speak but only smiled his
gentle smile...He was in uniform and I remember thinking how out of place the
khaki looked amongst the cabin furnishings. With this thought I must have
turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty…I
felt terribly tired… and went into a deep oblivious sleep. When I woke up I
knew with absolute certainty the Wilfred was dead”.
Somewhat coincidentally, the ship that
Harold Owen was aboard. The Astroea, was launched the day Wilfred Owen was
born.
One of the most remarkable documented experiences of clairvoyance occurred
in 1883 when Byron Somes, a reporter for the Boston Globe, was in the office
sleeping off a hangover. He awoke from a terrifying dream but seemed so real
that like a good reporter he wrote down the details. The dream involved
earthquakes and explosions with huge mortality. After finishing his notes he
wrote the word IMPORTANT on his notes, left them on his office desk and went
home to sleep. It so happened that on that very day a disturbance occurred in
the Straits of Sunda in the Eastern Pacific which turned out to be the eruption
of Krakatoa. Another reporter found the notes on Somes’ desk, assuming that Somes
had some knowledge of an important event otherwise not yet reported in the
United States. The Globe printed the story which was picked up by other
newspapers although the news of the Krakatoa eruption had not been communicated.
When Somes appeared he indicated that he had derived these notes from a
nightmare, a very realistic one, but had otherwise no idea what was happening
in the Far East. The newspaper was about to print a retraction when news came
from California about tsunamis hitting the coastline and causing the
disruptions very closely described in Somes’ original report.
Then there are the strange disappearances. You have perhaps heard about
Judge (aptly named) Crater, who stepped into a taxi in 1930 and disappeared.
That remained a mystery for several years. Of course he could have experienced
a fugue and changed his identity but an observed disappearances can be even
more bizarre. We go back to a bright sunny afternoon of September 23, 1880 in
Tennessee. David Lang is walking across his front yard near his wife and
children. A carriage is arriving with a guest. David turns to greet his guest
and after a few steps vanishes. This is witnessed by 5 people. His wife screams
and become hysterical. At the site of his disappearance there is no trace. He
never returns. The following Spring at the site a circle of yellow grass is
found 15 feet in diameter. On a quiet evening at around that time the two
children playing nearby seem to hear their father’s voice calling for help over
and over and finally fading away. Of course, it is always possible that the
visitor, the carriage driver, David Lang’s wife and his two children did away
with David and hid the evidence. However, the visitor happened to be a judge
and judges don’t usually get involved in such activities. Incidentally, it had not
been ascertained that the judge was the disappeared Judge Crater who went back
to an earlier time.
In regard to our own experiences in time I
have postulated that our perception of time is based upon our visual sensation
of objects and that the movement of objects, especially small ones, with short
time spans cannot be observed by us. For example, if we could magnify or expand
a time interval so that we could see changes in mega-seconds it is possible
that we would have an entirely different experience of the environment around
us. To make this concept clearer let us say that we can contract time so that
within what we consider second a million years go by. We would see mountains
growing and diminishing and other changes that we cannot perceive in our own
time frame. Similarly if we travelled close to the speed of light time would
slow down so that it is possible that what we perceived as an hour might take
several decades and our appearances would change. This reminds me of a limerick
appearing in the book One, Two,
Three…Infinity by the astrophysicist George Gamow:
There once was a fellow named Fisk
Whose fencing was exceedingly brisk
So
fast was his action
The Fitzgerald contraction
Reduced his epée to a disk.
In regard to the seemingly inexplicable disappearances of people perhaps
if we could expand time we could understand how someone could conceivably
disappear by some mechanisms that works in mega-seconds, a time frame too small
for our perception. Our problem is that we sense a comfortable Newtonian
universe, but actually. beyond our senses, a more disorderly universe where
there are warps in times and space, and I might add, with strings attached. It
is hard enough for us to gather in fully what is available to our senses
without the ability to comprehend what may indeed be a universe of dark matter
or even separate universes. In quantum
mechanics, we define the state of a small
subatomic particle by measuring it in one state but the object at the same time
might be in several states, only one of which can be perceived. Do we not also perceive
the universe in a state we can only measure with our limited senses? With
extrasensory perception of the kind that can perceive time warps, mega-seconds,
and higher dimensions we might better be able to explain some of the mysteries
of the paranormal experiences.
Finally, to conclude,
I
would first like to thank Arthur Diers for his superb introduction and drink
this glass of water.
It’s déjà vu all over
again.
Sources
Joes MD, Flaxman L. The Déjà vu enigma. New
Page Books. Franklin Lakes, NJ 2010.
Lewis CS. The Dark Tower & Other Stories. Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich. New York and London 1977
Lewis CS. Perelandra. ANovel. MacMillan New York 1944 (Sixth
Printing 1955)
Stallworthy J, Wilfred Owen. A biography. Oxford University
Press and Chatto and Windus London 1974
p. 287
Finney J. Time and Again. Scribner paperback edition.
Published by Simon and Schuster. New York 1970.
De Ridder D, Van Laere K, Dupont P, Menovsky T, Van de
Heyning P. Visualizing out-of- body experience in the brain. N Engl J Med 2007;
357:1829-1833.
Bishop, M. We have been here before. The New Yorker Oct 29 1938 p. 28
Internet:
Freedman DH. Time
travel redux.
Herbert W. “And I feel that I’ve been here before”
Wagner S. Paranormal phenomena. Time storms in the matrix.
References
Dennett, P. Out-of-body Exploring: A Beginner’s Approach. Charlottesville,
Va: Hampton Roads, 2004.
Goldberg, B. Exploring the Fifth Dimension: Parallel
Universes, Teleportation and Out-of-Body Travel. Los Angeles Calif: Bruce
Goldberg. 2009.
Randles, J. Time Storms: Amazing Evidence for Time Warps,
Space Riffs, and Time Travel. Berkeley Books, New York, 2002.