The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Posts tagged with “Precognition”
Feeding the Psi God: Precognitive Dreaming, Memory, and Ritual
I’ve mentioned several times the debt I owe to J.W. Dunne and his 1927 book An Experiment with Time. Dunne was not a scientific researcher or a parapsychologist by training, but a military man and aeronautical engineer who became interested in questions of time and its structure after becoming aware of uncanny examples of apparent […]
Psi, the Enjoyment Body, and the Electric Power of Yes
Like many people, I am fascinated by synchronicities that occur in my life, and I even see them as signposts on my life’s path. Yet the “nuts and bolts” side of me agrees with Arthur Koestler in his wonderful 1972 survey of ESP research, The Roots of Coincidence: Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity is a […]
Prophecies, Time Loops, and Bubble Realities: La Jetée and The Sacrifice
If precognition is real, then we have to take account of the range of sci-fi effects it would produce, effects that go beyond the strictly ‘prophetic.’ Because we fail to see how our consciousness is receptive to the future and how our actions contribute to, and only in a minority of cases confirm, that future, […]
Don’t Look Now: Witches, Weird Sisters, and the Eroticism of ESP
Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 paranormal thriller Don’t Look Now, based on a Daphne du Maurier short story (and now finally released on the Criterion Collection), is one of my desert-island top 10 (probably top 5) favorite films, and it is hands down the greatest Fortean film ever made. Short of UFOs, it has everything you could […]
Coincidence, Chaos, & Archetypes in Our Science-Fictional World
You don’t have to be a hardheaded materialist skeptic or an atheist to be troubled by the idea of synchronicity. The fundamental mystery—or really, outrage—of synchronicities is they seem arranged, stage managed, in a way that is impossible without imagining an active higher intelligence taking interest in guiding us and arranging the events of the […]
Scarabs & the ‘Send’ Button: Synchronicity as Misrecognized Psi
During the weeks I was researching my previous post on 9/11 and premonitions of trauma, I had a very powerful, uncanny experience that contained, in miniature, all of that post’s themes. It began with an unusually bad day at work, where I’d felt extremely guilty over a group email I had sent to coworkers that, […]
When Is It Hyperfootball Season?—Rethinking Eternalism
There are rumblings from the Internet that graphic novelist and magus Alan Moore is soon to drop a million-word novel on the world, called Jerusalem. It shows great courage and faith, in a world that no longer reads books, that Moore has stretched out his text as much as possible instead of compressing his ideas […]
Psi of Regret: Pitfalls of Prophecy from Patanjali to Paul Muad’Dib
It’s been over twenty years since I last read Dune, but inspired partly by the phenomenal documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, I recently re-read Frank Herbert’s masterpiece and a few of the sequels. Although the latter are uneven, I need hardly say that Dune itself holds up magnificently. It is still the one novel I would put […]
