The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life
Author: Theresa Cheung
Date: 2018-10-16 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Non Fiction; Spirituality; Psychology; Metaphysics; Paranormal
Description: An in-depth study into the cutting-edge science of ‘sensing’ the future, or precognition—from a cognitive neuroscientist and the bestselling author of The Dream Dictionary In this groundbreaking book, bestselling author Theresa Cheung joins forces with cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, PhD, Director of the Innovation Lab at The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). Together they reveal revolutionary new research showing that sensing the future is possible; they also provide practical tools and techniques you can use to develop your own powers of precognition. Precognition is the scient
Publisher: Watkins Publishing

“This book is a major contribution in our understanding of reality and the dormant potential for the so-called supernormal that exists within all of us. Read it and discover the power of time within your mind.”
Deepak Chopra, MD, Chopra Foundation

“An immensely enjoyable and stimulating guide to precognition that not only makes a powerful case for its reality but also shows us how we can develop it as an ability. After reading this book, you will never take the normal linear view of time for granted again.”
Steve Taylor PhD, author of Spiritual Science and The Leap

“It seems that the ‘other side’ might be in ‘another time’. In this book we have a mystic and a hard-core scientist using fascinating and accessible examples to demonstrate the remarkable possibilities of precognition and how to access it in your own life.”
James Van Praagh, New York Times bestselling author and spiritual medium

“This easily accessible book on the human capacity to foresee future events presents personal accounts as well as recent scientific insight. What is more, it is about a practical mind technique, probed and tested over the last decades, which might enable us to better sense the future.”
Marc Wittmann, PhD, Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, Germany

“In this lively and engaging guide, Dr Julia Mossbridge and Theresa Cheung skilfully and responsibly provide indispensable advice to budding precogs.”
Caroline Watt, PhD, Koestler Chair of Parapsychology, University of Edinburgh

“Attention all truth seekers, whether you’re a skeptic or believer, you are in for an amazing journey. Read this important work and unlock The Premonition Code.”
Jim Harold, author and host of The Paranormal Podcast

THE
PREMONITION CODE

The Science of Precognition

How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life

Theresa Cheung and Dr Julia Mossbridge

Preface by Loyd Auerbach
Foreword by Dean Radin, PhD

To all the Positive Precogs who will emerge from this work: this book is, was, and has always been, for you. May you bloom more beautifully than we ever expected, while keeping your roots in the ground for strength, nourishment and stability.

Theresa Cheung
Julia Mossbridge, PhD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Deepest gratitude to our publisher, Jo Lal, and to the owner and CEO of Watkins Publishing, Etan Ilfeld, for being ahead of their time and seeing the potential of this book from the very beginning. Thank you to Paul Simpson for his outstanding editing, John Tintera for falling in love with the book, and thanks also to Vicky Hartley, Vikki Scott, Adele Lee, Jillian Levick, Slav Todorov and everyone at Watkins Books. You are a joy to work with.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed their amazing stories to this book as well as all the scientists and remote viewers we reference and/ or interviewed along the way who are studying the reality of precognition. Special thanks to the incredible science team at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) for their mindopening research and support of this book.

Thank you to Matthew Cooper for setting up our evergrowing Facebook page, Alexander Vassiliev for his visionary Telegram PremCodeX channel, John Hibbs (www.hibbsco.uk) for the calming website design and Mark Boccuzzi (www.windbridgeinstitute.com) for his exciting work on the Premonition Code website. Sincerest thanks also to Dr Dean Radin and Loyd Auerbach for their compelling Preface and Foreword.

Theresa: Special thanks to my agents, Jane Graham Maw and Jennifer Christie (www.grahammawchristie.com), for their wisdom and support, and my publicist, Lyndsey Mayhew Delany (www.lyndseymayhew.com), for always being so brilliant and inspiring.

Above all, my sincerest gratitude to Dr Mossbridge, who has been an inspiration to work with from start to finish. Julia isn’t just the “Time Lady”, she is the future of consciousness research. I couldn’t be more honoured to co-author this book with her.

Last, but by no means least, thank you to Ray, Robert and Ruthie for your love, support and understanding as I went into self-imposed exile to complete this book. You inspire me every time. And to my mother in spirit, thank you from my heart too. You set me off on the journey to become a dream author with a powerful dream and the beautiful synchronicity of this book being published on your birthday means a great deal to me.

Julia: My most special thanks to Theresa, who told me I would be writing this book with her and was delightfully spot-on in her intuition. Without her ability to smooth over my scientist’s lingo, this book would be three times longer and impossible to read. Bravo to a brilliant woman with whom it has been a delight to co-create.

I am very grateful to have been supported by a fellowship from the Bial Foundation (97/16) during the writing of The Premonition Code.

Heartfelt gratitude to all the people with whom I’ve worked and continue to work, including the folks at the Institute of Noetic Sciences; Northwestern University Psychology Department; Mossbridge Institute; Focus@Will; Hanson Robotics; Soul Rider; California Institute of Integral Studies; Lia, Inc; and LOVING AI. Each of these teams has brought to me things that I could have never predicted, despite my abilities in that area. How much I love you all, and appreciate your aliveness, uniqueness, support and kindness.

Without my off-the-charts helpful assistant Brenna Barry-Martinez at Barry VA solutions, this book could not have happened. Thank you, Brenna, for Writing Fridays and Deadline Days, as well as managing media and conference requests with such grace.

To my father and my two moms, as well as my outstandingly compassionate and knowledgeable sister, Jenny: you believed in my work, even when my research sounded crazy to you. There’s just nothing better than you sharing your North Star by showing me the way to my own.

Finally, to Joseph and Brooks: may your futures be exactly right for you, and may I continue to be included in them. I love you always, and I feel your support and love every day.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Theresa Cheung was born into a family of psychics and spiritualists. Since leaving King’s College, Cambridge with a master’s in Theology and English she has dedicated her life to the study of the unexplained and writing books to raise awareness of the supernormal potential within ourselves and the world around us. The author of numerous bestselling titles, including two Sunday Times Top 10 and the international bestselling Element Encyclopedia of 20,000 Dreams and The Dream Dictionary A to Z, Theresa’s books and encyclopedias have been translated into 30 different languages.
www.theresacheung.com

Dr Julia Mossbridge is the founder and Research Director of Mossbridge Institute LLC; a Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences; a Visiting Scholar in the Psychology Department at Northwestern University; the Science Director at Focus@ Will Labs; President of Lia, Inc.; and an Associated Professor in Integral and Transpersonal Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is the 2014 winner of the Charles Honorton Integrative Contributions award from the Parapsychological Association for her work on precognition. Julia’s PhD in Communication Sciences and Disorders is from Northwestern University, her MA in Neuroscience from the University of California at San Francisco, and she received her BA with highest honours in neuroscience from Oberlin College. Dr Mossbridge is also the co-author, with Imants Barušs, of Transcendent Mind: Re-thinking the Science of Consciousness. www.mossbridgeinstitute.com.

CONTENTS

Preface by Loyd Auerbach

Foreword by Dean Radin, PhD

Part 1: Back to the Future

Chapter 1: Ahead of Ourselves

Chapter 2: Making Time

Chapter 3: The Case For Precognition

Part 2: Decoding Precognition

Chapter 4: About Time

Chapter 5: Time After Time

Chapter 6: In Time

Part 3: Mindsight

Chapter 7: Timeless Questions Answered

Chapter 8: Tomorrow Land

Appendix A: A Sample Controlled
Precognition Session

Appendix B: Looking Forward

Chapter Notes

PREFACE
by Loyd Auerbach

Every day, so many people – myself included – consult an oracle that helps them make decisions about simple things such as what clothes to wear and what to expect when outdoors. We may consult the oracle multiple times in a given day, and seem fascinated to learn what we’re in store for the next day and several days ahead. Then the oracle’s wisdom proves to be only partially correct, wrong on the timing, or completely off base, and we are surprised by the unexpected changes in what appeared to be a certain future. But we are so used to the oracle only having partial success with predicting the future that most of us just shrug it off.

I’m talking, of course, about the weather: the TV and radio news weather people, the weather sites, and even the Weather Channel – all working from the perspective of the science of meteorology to predict patterns and specifics in the weather hours, days, and even weeks from now.

Human beings are planners, so naturally we want to know what to expect when it comes to the weather, which affects us in so many ways in our day-to-day lives. That meteorology can be sometimes so accurate, and sometimes so far off base in predicting the future, due to the fact that the planet’s weather systems can be influenced by unexpected or undiscovered variables, can easily be compared to the sometimes accurate/ often incorrect information about the future that precognition brings to us humans, whether to professional psychics or average people.

That doesn’t mean the information, even when it turns out to be incorrect, is not useful, just that the outcome, the predicted future, did not happen as a premonition or prediction or forecast presented. To paraphrase the great Jedi Master Yoda (as Julia, Theresa and myself are all Jedi at heart): “The future is always in motion.”

When I first encountered Julia Mossbridge’s name years ago, I could not have foreseen events that led to her asking me to write the Preface for this wonderful book. Though I can’t recall the exact year, I do remember that her name stuck with me because at the time I discovered and read the first of her papers on a parapsychological theme, I noted that she was with my alma mater, Northwestern University, and that this made me smile. I found her research both interesting and thoughtprovoking.

The first time I really chatted with Julia was at the 2014 Parapsychological Association Convention, held in Concord, California (for which I was the Arrangements Chair). I instantly took a liking to her due to her manner and energy (and the fact that she commented on my “energy” in a positive way certainly helped). Prior to that, I read several of her papers, always being impressed by the research and thinking in them. The two of us spent more time together in September 2017, travelling to and participating in a “Psi College” event in Port Townsend, Washington, hosted by two of my good friends, psychic/medium Ankhasha Amenti and parapsychological educator Neil McNeill. Julia’s presentation on the subject of time was fascinating to all, myself included.

Theresa Cheung got in touch a few years ago to interview me for her website blog and popular author page on Facebook. She’s been writing bestselling spiritual books and encyclopedias for close to two decades – several about my favourite subject, the paranormal – and has continued to share posts on her page about my work and my books.

Julia Mossbridge’s scientific research, experience and thinking is what you’ll get from this book, combined with Theresa Cheung’s anecdotal stories sent to her by her readers, her spiritual perspective, and her desire as a writer to ensure Dr Mossbridge’s research, previously hidden in academic journals, is easily understood by the general rather than specialist reader. It’s a winning combination between science and spirit. But more than that, you’ll see their passion for the topics of time and precognition. The latter is becoming more and more prevalent in parapsychological discussion as some of our colleagues have put forth the idea that most, if not all, ESP is a form of precognition.

If you’re anything like most humans, who have a fascination with what the future holds, you’ll both enjoy and get a lot out of this book. I predict you may even learn a few things (but don’t let that stop you from reading it!).

http://www.parapsych.org/users/profparanormal/profile.aspx

FOREWORD
by Dean Radin, PhD
Chief Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences

Old clouds

In April 1900, the British physicist William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, gave a lecture to the Royal Society of London. At the time, the Royal Society was the most eminent scientific organization in the world, founded in 1660. Lord Kelvin stated that his discipline had been so successful in unravelling the mysteries of the universe that physics was, for all intents and purposes, complete.

Complete, that is, except – as he put it – for two “small clouds”. He was referring to two phenomena of physics that remained a puzzle. The clouds were known as the “luminous ether” and the “ultraviolet catastrophe”. They both concerned physical properties of light that were not explained by the best physical theories of the day. Both clouds were assumed to be minor issues that would be mopped up soon, either by scientists discovering that they were actually non-problems, possibly due to mistaken interpretations of experimental data, or perhaps the problems would eventually be explained after making a few minor adjustments to existing theories.

Eight months later, German physicist Max Planck proposed a radical solution to one of Lord Kelvin’s “clouds”. His idea was the origin of quantum theory, which changed the world by sparking the development of modern electronics, computers, communications, and ultimately the whole Information Age. A few years later, Albert Einstein explained the other “cloud” with an equally radical notion, and that became the origin of the theory of relativity. Einstein’s ideas changed the world by ushering in the Atomic Age. In both cases, gaining a better understanding of two clouds completely revised our assumptions about the nature of space and time, and that in turn led to transformations in technologies, economies, politics, the balance of power – nearly everything.

Planck’s and Einstein’s ideas arrived like a bolt out of the blue, and both were fiercely debated for years before they were finally accepted. Today we call the physics of Lord Kelvin’s time “classical physics”, which we understand as a special case of a more comprehensive understanding of the physical world. No longer are common-sense notions of space and time taken as self-evident absolutes. Instead, today they’re understood as exquisitely flexible relationships.

Some scientists today assert (with the same misplaced confidence displayed by Lord Kelvin) that now we understand just about everything there is to know about the physical world. They are sure they know what is and is not possible. To them, precognition is flatly impossible because today’s theories don’t allow for such nonsense. Some philosophers also believe that precognition is impossible because they think the idea of knowing the future is logically incoherent.

What these scientists and scholars forget is that our theories about reality are always provisional. Our college textbooks are revised into new editions every couple of years because our understanding of reality is continually advancing. There are dozens of clouds, anomalies and puzzles lurking around the edges of the known, and there are a near-infinite number of puzzles that lay beyond the known. Sometimes anomalies are discovered to be mistakes, but persistent clouds – especially human experiences reported throughout history and across all cultures – are indications that something about our current understanding of reality is seriously out of whack.

Just as Lord Kelvin’s two clouds could not be explained by minor changes to the physics of the 19th century, when we finally close in on an adequate explanation for precognition and other psychic phenomena, our understanding of reality, and the workings of civilization itself, are likely to go through some radical changes.

New clouds

Today we’re faced with two new clouds, known as qualia and quanta. The first concerns the nature of consciousness while the second is an unexpected effect associated with Max Planck’s wild idea. Qualia refers to conscious awareness and quanta to the discovery that, at the quantum scale, objects are exquisitely sensitive to being observed. Both of these clouds raise questions about the role of consciousness in the physical world, and both are major challenges to the scientific paradigm of materialism – the assumption that matter is the basis of everything, including mind.

Most scientists are taught that science is synonymous with materialism. As a result, many assume that qualia and quanta are not problems after all. Both of these clouds are viewed as aspects of reality that just magically emerge, somehow, from the material world. So, like Lord Kelvin, they imagine that these two “consciousness clouds” will eventually be completely understood in mundane, material terms.

The problem is that there’s growing evidence that this assumption is wrong. Instead of wispy cloud puffs fading away in the light of existing theories, these clouds are far more likely to be thunderheads that forebode coming superstorms. They are the leading edge of a host of related clouds, each more challenging than the last. They include the nature of genius, savants, near-death experiences, mediumship, channelling, cases of reincarnation, psychic phenomena and mystical experiences. No one doubts that there are geniuses and savants among us, but explanations of such people remain complete mysteries, and interpretations of the other commonly reported effects are considered highly controversial because they aren’t explained by materialistic concepts.

If materialism doesn’t work for explaining qualia and quanta, then what does? In developing new explanatory frameworks, it is important to make sure that we don’t blithely throw away previously useful ideas without having something even better to replace them. Indeed, some scientists express the fear that a new paradigm will come along that forces them to throw away the textbooks that they relied upon for so long (or that they wrote!). Not surprisingly, there is strong resistance to throwing away knowledge that formed the basis of one’s career and worldview. So we need a framework that does not encourage that fear.

We need a way to think about reality that allows for, and even predicts, all the anomalies associated with consciousness, including precognition. Fortunately, there is such a way, and it only requires one adjustment to our existing assumptions. Rather than consciousness being a side effect of brain activity, we instead consider consciousness to be fundamental – in fact, more fundamental than the physical world itself. Philosophers have discussed this idea for thousands of years; it’s called idealism.

To illustrate why this relatively simple shift in worldview is compatible with the existing scientific paradigm, imagine that our academic disciplines are arranged as horizontal slices within a pyramid. The bottom layer of the pyramid is, in accordance with the doctrine of materialism, the physical world. Above that layer is chemistry. Above that, biology, then the neurosciences, with psychology sitting at the top. Materialism asserts that somewhere in the upper tier of this pyramid, conscious awareness somehow emerges, just like biology emerges out of chemistry and chemistry emerges out of physics. Core elements within each layer of the knowledge pyramid permeate all layers above it. For example, electrons are key concepts in physics, but they also exist in many new forms in chemistry, biology, neuroscience and so on. Based on this pyramid model, it’s hard to imagine how something as ephemeral as consciousness – which rests atop the knowledge pyramid, conceptually far removed from physics – can perceive through space and time.

It should be noted that quantum physics, which is located at the very bottom of the physics layer, would allow for connections and events that take place outside of space and time, but most neuroscientists today do not consider deep physics to be relevant to understanding how the brain works. As the discipline of quantum biology matures, perhaps evidence supporting a “quantum brain” will be found, and that will open a tiny door toward the idea of consciousness operating beyond space and time. But a quantum brain still has a big problem: it does not explain qualia – subjective awareness. This is why an increasing number of scientists and scholars are beginning to embrace the idea that conscious awareness is a basic property of the fabric of reality. It does not arise from lower levels. It just is.

With this in mind, let’s revise our knowledge pyramid by adding a new bottom layer. Let’s call it awareness. The new layer can be imagined as a primordial proto-substance that is prior to – i.e. it transcends – physics, including ideas about space, time, energy and matter. All of the physics that we know today, including quantum physics, emerges from this fundamental awareness, so all of the explanatory power of materialism remains intact for all levels above it. Plus, just as electrons permeate all layers above physics, now we see that consciousness, too, permeates all levels above it, including the brain. In other words, within this view, matter does not create the mind, but rather the mind (or more generally, consciousness) creates matter.

And because the consciousness we are considering comes about before space and time, suddenly genius, savants and psychic phenomena are no longer weird anomalies. They begin to make sense, because all of these exceptional forms of consciousness share a commonality – they do not appear to be bound by the everyday limitations of space and time.

Precisely when science will adopt consciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality is still too soon to say. But that it will happen seems increasingly certain. After reading this illuminating book, you may be able to use precognition to peer into the future and specify that day when everything changes.

28 March 2018
www.deanradin.org

PART 1

BACK TO THE FUTURE

CHAPTER 1

AHEAD OF OURSELVES

“For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

John F Kennedy

Imagine going to pick out a new car in the year 2035. After test-driving it – of course it runs on an alternative fuel that has one by-product: water – you meet with your Positive Precog Sales Associate. You have to wait a few minutes, because she’s not quite done with her meditation hour. As you wait, you check out the awards on the wall of her office. “Best Precog Assessment of Traffic Patterns, 2021”, “Positive Precog Coach of the Year, 2028, 2034”, “Most Airbag Recalls Averted, Western-Canadifornia region 2033”, “Positive Precog Hall of Fame, 2019–2035”. You are excited, but also nervous. You really want her to approve this car for you. You like it a lot; it self-drives like a dream, and the mobile holographic teleporter is the highest resolution you’ve seen. You can’t wait to host cross-country parties in it with all the glitterati, dead and alive. But you know that if she says you’ll die in the car, you can’t buy it. The company won’t let you; it would be bad for their numbers. You wait, tapping your bionic forefingers on her hammock posts as she gently swings back and forth.

You hear a chime ring, and there she is, having jumped out of her hammock, standing in front of you. She’s a bit dishevelled, but friendly. “Oh, it’s you. Hi! Yes, the car’s fine. I saw it this morning in the shower. You’ll have fun. It’ll take you places. You’re good to go. Remember: I can’t be sure that you’ll be 100% accident-free, of course, but I didn’t see any major accidents, for what that’s worth. I sealed up the paperwork this morning, before you came. Now, enjoy!” She hands you a packet of papers, and you’re off. You’re thrilled, and so is the company. Since she started working for them, they’ve had only three accidents in their cars for the past three years. Not bad.

To be sure, this story is highly speculative, but it is the direction that we see the world going once precognition is normalized and the world realizes that harnessing its power can create massive disruptions that can positively transform every aspect of our lives. How could we ever get there? And what sort of science supports the possibility that we might even think about it?

Well, it starts with you, and your willingness to participate in perhaps the largest scientific experiment on precognition ever attempted. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover – from the science of time and precognition to the practical teaching of it, to an understanding of the ethics and life changes that come from using precognition every day.

We’ll start with your experience and move on from there.

• Have you ever had a feeling something was definitely going to happen and it actually does?

• Have you ever had a dream and then seen it play out in your daily life?

• Have you ever avoided something horrible by listening to your intuition, even if you didn’t know what you were avoiding at the time?

Chances are you probably dismissed such flashforwards as coincidence, but we believe this book will radically change your mind. It will show you that we all have the potential to sense and change our futures. And we’ll use stories and science to help you understand how it all works.

We’ll begin with a story reminiscent of the movie Minority Report, based on the classic 1956 short story by Philip K Dick. The movie was set in a world where three gifted humans called Precogs have special powers to see the future. The Precogs predict crime before it happens, so the future can be changed for the better. If you think that kind of thing can only happen in the movies, you’re in good company. But consider one of the many accounts we have received from people who, like you, are interested in understanding how they could have received a glimpse into their future, sent to us by Gary.

“I was a travelling salesman a few years ago. I was on the road a lot. One night I had this really vivid dream. I was driving down a road I did not recognize. I passed a church and then came to a sharp corner. Before I had a chance to slow down in my dream the headlights of an oncoming car appeared in front of me. The car was travelling very fast and I woke up at the moment of impact. I was sweating and shaking. It was as if I had actually been there.

“The dream was frightening but after a few days I forgot all about it, until I found myself driving to collect a delivery down a road I had never driven down before. But it wasn’t really unfamiliar. I had seen it already in my dream. Things got really eerie when I saw the church that had appeared in my dreams and, sure enough, there was the sharp bend in the road just after the church. It was exactly how I had dreamed it. In an instant I found myself slowing right down and as I did this other car came hurtling around the corner at a crazy speed. Seconds later a police car followed in hot pursuit. Now, that police car hadn’t been in my dream but everything else had; the road, the church, the sharp bend and the speeding car coming around it. I truly believe that my dream allowed me to take evasive action just in time to avoid a head-on collision. It was a f****** miracle.”

Of course, this is just an anecdote, and like every story we present to you, it cannot be verified scientifically. While we only report stories that we believe to be true, it is possible that some of them are not accurate. But on balance, these stories are important, because they give shape to how premonition feels to different people. And when you combine these premonition stories with clearly explained scientific results, you’ll have a better picture of what premonition is as well as how it may work.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves (so to speak) with excitement. So, let’s get right back to basics by outlining what exactly a premonition is, how it compares to precognition, and introducing ourselves along the way.

What is premonition?

The word premonition comes from Latin roots: “prae” or “pre” (before) and “monere” (to warn). As you might figure out from the name, originally premonitions were considered to be forewarnings of negative events. Now, however, people use the word to mean receiving any information about a future event, positive or negative.

Having a hunch that an old acquaintance will make contact, dreaming about a plane crash, feeling excited by a “knowingness” that you will win a raffle, being sure a relative that is not ill will die soon soon … these are all examples of premonitions, assuming the event you predicted does occur. If you have any correct insight about a future event, we call that a premonition – whether that insight is an emotional one like excitement, a physical one like sweating and heart palpitations, or a cognitive one like a sense of “knowing”.

Past present

Centuries ago, prophets and oracles were consulted about their premonitions. Some thought the future was fixed, but others believed it could be changed by choices made in the present; that is, by free will. This argument still rages among scientists, but most scientists believe that the future is really a set of possibilities that have different likelihoods – what will happen is not fixed, but not totally open, either. For example, if I drop something one second, there is a high probability that in the future, the object will go in the direction of whatever the forces are that are most strongly acting on it. In other words, we’d all be very surprised if one second a ball was dropped in Switzerland and the next second it was on the moon.

On the other hand, the location of any particle in the next moment is not certain, it can only be predicted using probabilities. This uncertainty may allow a bit of tweaking to go on. And a little bit of tweaking can have a major impact, potentially producing a different result in the future – or in the past. Recent results from experiments in quantum mechanics suggest in a mind-tangling way that a choice made in the future sometimes seems to actually cause what happens in the past. The technical term for this is retrocausality. Experiments revealing retrocausal effects suggest that whatever is going on right now is in some kind of relationship with whatever is happening in the future – and that relationship is not just in the usual forward direction (more on retrocausality in Chapter 2).

If you are intrigued by the idea of using your awareness of the future to alter your present in a positive way, you are reading the right book. But you may want the reverse. We are sometimes contacted by people who, because of traumatic brain injury, an accident, or circumstances of birth, are able to see “too much” of the future. If this describes your situation, you are also reading the right book. It is very important to both of us that people learn how to manage and interpret their premonitions, because while knowing the best course to take in a business decision is helpful, knowing when everyone around you will die is not usually a life-affirming experience.

So, as you learn about precognition and start fine-tuning your precognitive powers to sense the future, we can’t emphasize enough that this discovery process can be a surprising and sometimes difficult one. It’s critical to hold to two convictions: first, the future is not set in stone, and second, while you can likely affect it, you may not have complete power to change it in the direction you desire. As you learn to sense the future, what you will glimpse is a potential future. Whether it plays out is up to you in addition to many other forces.

But what exactly is precognition? The difference between precognition and premonition is so subtle that for the purpose of this book we will be using the terms interchangeably. However, it is worth explaining this difference, however subtle, even though it will generally be ignored hereafter.

What is precognition?

In short, precognition is the scientific name for a group of abilities that have to do with knowing or using information about the future without drawing on information from the five senses, memory, or logic. Premonitions are one of those abilities – a premonition is a feeling or sense about a future event. But precognition includes premonition as well as other ways of knowing, so precognition is the umbrella term that includes premonitions.

Precognition is a more scientific name for the ability to be influenced in some way by events in the future, or the ability to know information about events in the future. Anything known in this way can be called a precognitive experience, as long as the future events you are predicting aren’t predictable using memory, logic or your five senses.

You may have heard of precognition as future vision, fortune telling, prophetic vision, or future sight. It’s using an alternative means (sometimes called a sixth sense) to tap into a source that shows or tells you what will happen in the future, or that tells you what to do now so you can move toward positive outcomes or avoid negative ones – even if you don’t know what those outcomes are. Confusing? Yes, we know. We’ll try to sort it out with some examples.

If every Thursday you get a call from Aunt Millie, it’s not precognition to feel like she’ll call on a Thursday. If it’s raining, it’s not precognition to bring an umbrella out so you don’t get wet. If a particular subject in school is difficult for you and you haven’t studied for a test, a dream that you might fail the test would not be considered precognitive, though it might be tragically accurate!

These are examples of what precognition isn’t. So what counts as precognition again? Okay, let’s start with some examples of precognitive experiences … many of which would be called premonitions as well.

• For some reason, you find that you consistently have visual “flashes” of people who will be helpful for your business in the upcoming weeks. They come “out of the blue”. Some are strangers now, but you will meet them later; some are known to you. The flashes are so common and accurate that you feel confident in using them to help you build your business.

• You dream about a woman driving her new yellow car off a bridge and jumping out before the car hits the water. You wake up in a cold sweat, and you remark to your partner that the dream feels very real. You record it in your dream journal, and you comb the news to see if it was something you heard about the previous day. There was nothing like that in the news – just some stories about the economy. In the evening, you hear a newscaster describing the same incident, which happened that afternoon. There are many correlations between your dream and the story (it’s a woman, she jumped out early, she drove off a bridge, the car was new), even though some are not accurate (the car was blue, not yellow).

• You are climbing Mount Everest. You wake up in the middle of the night and have a strong urge to pee. It’s ridiculous – you have no oxygen, it’s freezing, you are exhausted, and you could just go back to sleep and hold it in. Nevertheless, you decide to go. When you come back, members of your climbing team are covered in snow, hit by an avalanche. You try to save them, but you cannot, and you find yourself grateful for listening to your body, even as you mourn the loss of your team.

• Turning on your car radio, you like to play a game. What will be the lyrics of the first song you hear? You like this game because you’re correct more than you’d expect to be by chance alone.

• You dream that you will win the lottery, and you are given the lottery numbers. When you wake up, you write them down. Later you forget to enter the lottery, but you find out that the numbers you wrote down would have made you a winner. You curse your forgetfulness, but you are amazed at the “coincidence”.

These examples represent most of the types of precognition that people experience. In later chapters, you’ll hear more stories, in more detail, as told by the people we interviewed for this book. While these types of experiences cover some common types of precognitive abilities, they do not represent the whole array of ways that people seem to get information about future possibilities and probabilities.

Of course, these examples could be called coincidental, and it is always possible that what you think of as a precognitive experience is actually a coincidence. Determining whether a particular type of experience is really a genuine precognition and whether a particular person has consistent precognitive skills generally requires scientific analysis and controlled tests.

In this book, we’ll introduce you to the different types of precognition, discuss the science behind premonitions and precognition, and explore ideas about how to change your precognitive skills in the direction you desire. Note that we don’t just say “how to improve your precognition”, because some people who have keenly accurate precognitive abilities are not interested in getting more accurate. For example, some people only want to be warned when there’s an upcoming problem they can prevent. So, we will discuss how to improve your precognitive abilities as well as how to make your precognitive abilities your friend and not your enemy.

Other psychic skills – a brief note

You may have heard about, or maybe you have experienced, other psychic skills. Maybe you’ve heard of telepathy (two minds sharing information), clairvoyance (seeing things in the present beyond the range of ordinary human perception), and psychokinesis (changing or moving things in the physical world using only your mind). We want to point out that while some people who are precognitive might also have a few of these skills, we are not going to discuss them much in this book.

Here, we want to focus on a deep exploration of temporal intuition, mental time travel, premonitions and precognition – that is, getting information that is not present in the current moment in time and can’t be gathered from the past.

The Premonition Code team

Now that you are getting a sense of the scope of this book, let us introduce ourselves as your personal guides on this exciting journey through time. The Premonition Code is written by two authors for a reason – we present two very different perspectives, and both are important.

Theresa is a Cambridge university academic and bestselling dream author who approaches the subject from the layperson’s point of view. Along the way she will be asking the questions most of us will ask about premonitions.

Dr Mossbridge is a cognitive neuroscientist and experimental psychologist. In the scientific community, she is known for her research on precognition and time-related topics. You’ll be introduced to her cutting-edge research about precognition, which until now has largely remained hidden in scientific journals.

Together, we will be presenting and decoding the highly credible science behind premonitions. And as your guides to the world of your own precognitive abilities, we will be offering you a unique opportunity to learn how to navigate your future by leading you through new insights, robust exercises, and our own experience-based wisdom.

Let’s begin with Theresa’s premonition story and follow on with Julia’s so you can see where we are both coming from, and why writing this book was an inevitable collision – as if we had both seen our own wrinkle in time showing us where our lives were always heading.

Theresa’s story

Around 20 or so years ago, a premonition in a dream saved my life and the lives of my unborn children. I have absolutely no doubt about that. I also think that this dream was the catalyst for my career as a spiritual writer and popular dream expert.

At the time, I was at the start of my career as a paranormal journalist and writer. I had spent about a year researching and writing features when I had a vivid dream – one of those dreams that you don’t instantly forget upon waking. Instead of being a jumble of incoherent symbols and images, it was absolutely clear, almost like watching a movie. When I woke up it felt so real I questioned whether I was dreaming. (Years later, I would call those kinds of dreams night visions, as they are so strikingly vivid and realistic when compared to the surreal nature of symbolic dreams.)

In my dream I was wandering in a field of flowers and feeling very content. I even felt the sun shining on my skin and was enjoying that awareness of warmth and light. I came to a point in the field where there were two directions I could head in. The road to the left was filled with beautiful things and I saw my beloved cat, Krystal, who had passed away 15 or so years earlier. I wanted to head down that path to pet her, but then I heard my mother calling my name and telling me – just like she always used to do whenever I felt anxious or afraid – to “take the right path”. I couldn’t see my mother but that didn’t trouble me as I sensed her presence. What did trouble me was the right path. It was filled with shadows. I couldn’t see the way ahead or what lay ahead. I didn’t want to take that path, but I knew my mother wanted me to. She told me the right path was always the path of my intuition and I had to follow it. At that point, I was jolted wide awake.

When I woke up, I lingered in bed longer than usual, reliving the dream in my mind’s eye. My mother had passed away several years before and I missed her wisdom and warmth greatly. The dream gave me a feeling of connection to her again, and for that I was grateful. When my mother was alive she had always told me to follow my heart, and I silently promised her that even though I wasn’t published yet, I wouldn’t give up on my dream of establishing myself as a writer of spiritual books that would help make spirituality mainstream. However, although I felt comforted by the voice of my mother in my dream, I also felt extremely anxious. I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was the shadows on the right-hand path that scared me. They were so intensely dark in the dream. Nonetheless, in my dream I knew there was no option but to listen to my mother and follow the path to the right.

Feeling restless and anxious to get moving, I got up and tried to shake off the feeling of unease by going for a run. The exercise helped relax me, and a few hours later I was busy with my morning and feeling energized. I was also feeling excited as I had my first radio interview lined up. It was about a series of articles I was hoping to write for the local newspaper, focusing on ordinary people whose lives had been touched by the extraordinary. One of those stories in particular was about a woman I had interviewed who claimed to see angels. This article was attracting a lot of interest.

Normally I’m very organized, but for some reason that afternoon I had the time of my interview wrong in my mind. When I checked my diary and saw the correct time, I was running late. I realized I should have been on the road already. I leapt into the car to drive to the studio, and soon sensed that if I was to get there on time, I would need to put my foot down. All was going well on the roads and it looked like I would get there in time until I got stuck behind two massive trucks travelling at what seemed like 20 miles an hour. They were probably going much faster than that but when you are driving in a hurry, every vehicle in front seems slow. I tried to overtake them but couldn’t get a clear view of the oncoming Traffic, so I had to settle for a frustratingly slow crawl.

Finally, we reached a junction and I had a clear choice. I could turn left and follow the slow-moving trucks along a shorter route and reach the studio in the nick of time, or I could turn right, free myself from the trucks and take a more circuitous route. I was just about to turn left and chug slowly along behind the trucks until I reached my destination, when out of nowhere my dream flashed powerfully into my mind’s eye. Once again, as I had in my dream, I heard the voice of my mother calling my name and gently telling me to take the right path. It felt like déjà vu. I had been here before. Without hesitation, and not really understanding why, I turned right.

As I suspected, the journey took longer than the route originally planned and I turned up at the studio about five minutes late. Those were the days before cellphones, so I hadn’t been able to tell them I was on my way. They assumed I wasn’t turning up. I begged them to let me rush in and join the host, but they wouldn’t let me. Worse, the network didn’t have another slot to schedule me in. It was disappointing for me, of course, and, although I didn’t know it at the time, I would have to wait another ten years before I was invited on to a radio station again to talk about my paranormal research.

As I drove back that day, I felt frustrated and angry at a missed opportunity and the time wasted. If only I had set off a few minutes earlier and avoided those trucks. If only I had got the time of my interview right before rushing to get there too late. I became even more irritated when the Traffic slowed to a crawl and then a halt. My irritation soon turned to horror when I gradually edged closer to the scene of what was clearly a terrible accident. Close to the junction where I had turned right instead of left as I had intended, the truck I would have been following on the left-hand path had clearly swerved off the road. Three or more cars – it was hard to tell in the chaos – had smashed into the truck and into each other. The car immediately behind it – which would have been my car – was a mangled wreck, and the two cars behind that also looked smashed and battered.

Later that evening, I turned on the television to hear the local news. Images of the accident flashed onto the screen. A stray dog had run into the road in between the first and second truck. The second truck driver had slammed on the brakes and caused a pile up. Although the truck driver and dog were unharmed, a recently married couple was in the car immediately behind, and there was another driver in the car behind that. All three had died on impact.

By telling me to take the right path, the voice of my mother as recalled from my dream had saved my life that day. I had not expected to ever find proof that we are more than our physical bodies, but I felt like I had been given it all the same through a premonition in a dream.

You might think I would have been elated. After all, I’d been born into a family of psychics and spiritualists and had been frustrated all my life by my inability to glimpse the unseen when I was surrounded by people with what we called “the sight” – and now I finally had tangible direct experience. Instead, I felt wretched and not worthy. Why had my life been spared and not the lives of those three people? It all felt so random and senseless, rather than miraculous.

That night I had another powerful dream, where I believe I connected to the three victims of the accident in spirit and was reassured that they were fine and all was well. I’m fully aware that my night vision can’t be proved scientifically and may be wishful thinking, but it gave me great comfort. I woke up the following morning filled with a burning ambition to make those spirits who had died that day proud, and to be worthy of the chance I had been given to spread the word that there most definitely is more to this life than meets the eye.

Prior to the dream that saved my life, I’d always been fascinated by dreams and their meanings. But from that day on, dreams gradually took centre stage. I started to scrupulously keep a dream journal in earnest and began to notice themes and patterns coming up in my dreams. I also took note of dreams that later seemed to play out in real life. I researched the different interpretations of dream symbols and recorded them all in a database.

I found dream interpretation utterly fascinating, and as so often happens in life when you pour your energy into something, life reflects that energy back to you. You can call it the law of attraction – or simply getting back what you give out – but in 2005, after writing my first Sunday Times bestselling spiritual title, my publisher at the time, HarperCollins, offered me the amazing opportunity to write The Element Encyclopedia of 20,000 Dreams. It was a massive dream interpretation resource that took over a year to write, and it went onto become an international bestseller. The slimmed down paperback version, The Dream Dictionary, continues to be regarded as a dream interpretation classic and is stocked in bookshops all over the world.

Three years ago, I first got in touch with Dr Mossbridge after hearing about her pioneering research on intuition at IONS, because I wanted to include her thoughts in a book I was writing at the time. Of course, it was only a matter of time before my fascination with dreams and premonitions and her brilliant research into precognition, intuition and mental time travel would inevitably combine to form the book you are reading right now.

For me this book isn’t just a book, it is a calling. And as Julia will now explain, that feeling of being called to write The Premonition Code resonates powerfully with her too. We both want this book to change and empower lives, and for everyone to find ways to sense their future and care deeply about that future they are creating for themselves and this beautiful planet.

Julia’s story

The tone I was taking with my son unsettled me. Even so, I yelled at him again: “No, you have to go out and check that you locked the garage door after you put your bike away!” Why was I yelling at my 13-year-old about something so unimportant? Hadn’t he been through enough? First, I’d divorced his father, then, a few years later, moved in with my new boyfriend. Now this same boyfriend – who was more like a stepdad to my son at this point – was dying from a lung disease. But, apparently, I required my kind and conscientious son to double check that he’d locked the garage door once he’d put his bike away after riding home from school, and he had to do it now.

I’m grateful my boyfriend intervened between the shallow breaths he was taking from his oxygen tank, gently telling me that if I was so desperate to confirm the security of our garage door, I might consider doing it myself. So, with both of them looking at me as if I’d lost my marbles, I marched out to the garage. Satisfied that the garage door was locked, I returned back to the house, still annoyed. On the way back, I saw it: the electrical meter was on fire. There was no smell, no sound, just a slowly building fire. On the other side of the wall, opposite the fire, was my boyfriend’s oxygen tank.

I ran inside, turned off the main power to the house, called the fire department and told everyone what had happened. It seemed that I’d wanted to check the garage door so desperately not because there was a danger of someone breaking into the garage, but because I had to see the fire and stop it. It was as if the future had reached out, gently pulled me forward, and showed me what needed to be done. Yet again.

I say “yet again” because this was one of many times that the future has leaked some information into my present consciousness, one way or another. Sometimes I feel compelled to do something, but I can only guess later why it needed to done, and I question whether I am drawing connections where none really exist. Other times I see an event – in a dream or in a flash of “knowing” – and I feel compelled to work toward changing the outcome (if it’s a negative event) or ensuring it (when the event is positive). At the times I am able to work toward changing or ensuring the predicted event, sometimes this seems to make a difference, and sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. Finally, and most often, throughout my life I have known mundane information before I should have known it. For example, one of my favourite games in school was to guess what numbers my math teacher would use to demonstrate a concept, or to guess the words on a vocabulary test before the test was given. I noticed I was not correct all the time, but I was correct enough to keep playing the game.

Perhaps partially because of the usefulness of this mundane skill, I was an outstanding student, getting straight As and graduating from college with highest honours in neuroscience and a minor in computer science. I was a modest drinker even in college, but I found I could ace tests when I was hungover after a night of indulgence. Sometimes I think I even did better the less I paid attention to the test and the more I felt sick or spacey. It was like my unconscious mind could take over and put the correct information onto the page without interruption from my overly analytical conscious mind.

At graduate school in neuroscience, I focused on trying to understand human experience by studying how the brain processes pain and stress. I wanted to know the answer to the question: what’s going on inside people’s heads when we suffer? Later, as I finished my PhD in psychoacoustics, which is all about the psychology of sound, I became fascinated with timing. How do we figure out the order of sounds, even when some sounds take longer to process than others? How can drummers learn to decode time differences of 1/1,000 of a second, when most people just can’t hear those kinds of subtle time differences?

At this point, I was using my premonitions as just one of the tools in my day-to-day toolkit, but I wasn’t thinking about them scientifically. At least not consciously. Sure, every so often I’d dream of the slides that would be used by one of my professors the next day in class. Or I’d realize that the data I was recording in my experiments followed the curve of an equation I’d dreamed about a year before. But I thought that was just my quirky way of doing things – it was just my good student’s intuition and it didn’t have anything to do with my research interests or my life’s work.

What was my life’s work again? I had asked myself that question so many times, and every so often, when I was quiet, I could hear a mysterious answer: to teach and learn about time. Going back over the years, I noticed that after I got my PhD, I was researching how the timing of events worked in hearing, and later in vision. I was even teaching college students about these things. And, sure, I had competed for and received a grant to investigate whether the body predicts future events in some kind of non-sensory or extra-sensory way.

But the answer, “to teach and learn about time”, bothered me, because I have always felt a pull toward trying to help people feel better, and I couldn’t figure out how teaching and learning about time would help people feel better. I simply let this tension exist for a few years, even though it would bother me from time to time.

A few years later, when I finished my study about how future events can be predicted by our bodies even though we don’t know it, I was hooked. My other experiments were related to timing but not to precognition per se, and this research began to fall away from my focus. I thought, Here is evidence – statistically validated and scientifically controlled – that the way most people think about time is wrong. I felt it was also evidence that the way we think about what is going on in the physical world might also be wrong. I got excited – my lifetime of precognitive experiences might not just be a long line of coincidences and wishful thinking. There might be some meaning there, some kind of way in which the future pulls us forward – for real.

It took me another ten years of investigation, research, thoughts and dreams to see how grappling with the mysteries of time leads people to change their lives for the better and experience more love and compassion for themselves and each other, but now I think I get it. When other people ask me now what my calling is, I say, “To teach and learn about love and time,” because most people don’t make the connection between love and time – I didn’t, not for a decade – so I now make the “love” part of my purpose explicit and obvious.

The connection is this: when you recognize how connected you are to your future and your past selves, the only response is love. Love for yourself – for all the things you did even though you didn’t understand why, only later to discover the purpose of those steps, and for all the events that will happen in the future as you move toward what inevitably calls you. And this includes love for other people, as you see their words and deeds as related to their own life paths, called from their own futures, which have nothing to do with you or your worth.

Once I made this connection, I wanted to tell the world about how to integrate our past and future selves, and how to navigate our futures together. But as a research scientist, I knew my usual avenue of academic books and articles wouldn’t cut it. So I laughed pretty hard when Theresa called me one day to tell me that, without asking me, she’d already pitched The Premonition Code to her publishers and they liked it. I can’t prove any of the experiences I’ve had were genuine precognition, and neither can anyone else. But I am in the habit now of thanking my future self for pulling me forward on my path.

What lies ahead

We both feel called to be here, writing this book. That’s not a scientific statement, but it truly reflects how we feel. And we both believe that something drew you to read this book. What if you are meant to read this book, and to use the information we offer in it to create the best possible future for yourself? We hope that by the end of this book it will feel like you are able to trace the threads that will lead you into your best future. Whether you are developing your precognitive powers for the first time or looking for renewed energy and enthusiasm in understanding precognition, we are writing directly to you.

If you want to develop your precognitive abilities, there is absolutely nothing stopping you. As with any skill, you just need coaching, discipline, self-acceptance, persistence, determination and patience. In fact, if you don’t think you have what it takes to become productively precognitive, we predict this book will change your mind!

The inspiration behind this book is our experience that sensing the future with accuracy can fundamentally change you and the world for the better. You will have begun your journey to becoming a precog by the end of this book – but not a precog in the Minority Report sense, because they were not capable of living in the real world. They had no partners, freedom or relationships. Sounds very un-fun!

Instead, you will be on the way to becoming a Positive Precog, which is radically different, because you will be learning a way of living that allows you to flourish through your newly discovered ability to work with events in time. As your precognitive powers grow with the ideas and exercises in this book – so too will your ability to sort out events in time and guide yourself toward events that help you, whenever possible. Forgive us if this sounds fanciful, but it’s pretty cool to be a Positive Precog!

Whatever term you prefer to use for yourself, as you read this book we can guarantee you mind-opening insights into the scientific reality of premonition, tools and techniques that are likely to boost your innate precognitive abilities, and the ability to guide yourself toward future possibilities in a completely new way. Along the road, we’ll invite you to join an online community of practising Positive Precogs to be found at www.thepremonitioncode.com, and, if you work hard and do well, you can make the Hall of Fame for scientifically screened Positive Precogs.

So, what can you expect in the pages that follow? In the next chapter we will continue to unravel the mystery of premonitions by explaining what we know (and don’t know) about how time works. Chapter 3 will go into detail about the scientific evidence for precognition. Throughout these two chapters you will find some compelling case studies. These won’t be the overreported famous examples, like those about people who saw the sinking of the Titanic or Lincoln predicting his own death. These are good examples, but most of us have already heard about them, and they can seem too remote to feel real. No, we’ll bring you stories from ordinary people in all walks of life, who have sent their experiences to Theresa over the years for her books or whom Julia has interviewed for her research. Although in some cases the names of these people have been changed to protect their identities, in other cases, individuals have asked that their names be used because they want you to know that they feel comfortable with the experiences they report.

From Chapter 4 onwards, the book will change gear and tone as we invite you to truly enter into the training work of The Premonition Code with us. You will see how personality types relate to precognitive potential, and we will bring you tools, exercises and techniques to build a practice called controlled precognition. This science-inspired training programme is designed to increase the likelihood and accuracy of your precognitive ability, as well as keep your abilities within the realm of reality and not delusion. If you choose to follow this programme even one time, you will become part of a global scientific investigation into the nature of precognition. Finally, we end Part 2 with a chapter describing how your life is likely to change as you continue to practise as a Positive Precog.

PART 3 wraps it all up with some questions that Theresa has been wanting to ask Julia for years now; chances are you’ll want to hear the answers too. Finally, we leave you with some conclusions about our vision for the future: a community of Positive Precogs, working together to help the world become a better place. Your journey to the future won’t stop there, as Appendix B will offer recommended reading, websites for precog-related organizations, and related apps.

As you move along, at the end of each of the three parts of the book we’ll invite you to take an online quiz, so you can be sure you are understanding the material. In the training portion of the book (Part 2), we’ll also show you how to practise controlled precognition online, on our website. At this point, we’d like to invite you to register online at www.thepremonitioncode.com so you are ready to go when the time for the Part 1 Quiz arrives at the end of Chapter 3. On our website, registration, joining the community of Positive Precogs and using the online training programme are all entirely free.

Back to the future

Precognition is a gift that can save and transform our lives. It has shown Theresa and Dr Mossbridge that we are connected to ourselves over time, and because of this realization, we can appreciate and transcend the present moment. Precognition is a starting point, a breakthrough each of us can use to enter into a stronger relationship with our lives, ourselves, and each other. Premonitions are not ordinary dreams or hunches or coincidences, just as this book is no ordinary book. Both precognition and this book have great power in them, as they demonstrate how we can live in connection with all our tomorrows. And as with anything that has great power, there also comes great responsibility to create our best possible futures for ourselves and our world.

CHAPTER 2

MAKING TIME

“Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.”

Steven Wright

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to whoever asks, I do not know.”

St Augustine

What really is time? Most of us think of it as some kind of flow of events from the past through the present and into the future. We remember the past, live in the present, and the future is unknown. Precognition, however, makes a nonsense of that common definition, suggesting that the future can be glimpsed in the now.

A thought-provoking story sent to Theresa by a woman named Rachel illustrates that this kind of “remembering the future” is possible.

On the evening of her daughter’s fourth birthday, Rachel had a dream that was so vivid she woke up thinking it had actually happened.

“A lot of my dreams are a collection of random images, but this dream felt like a story with a beginning, middle and an end. In my dream I was playing with my daughter in a house made entirely of glass. We were playing catch with a ball and laughing and going from room to room. When we got to a room at the front of the house I heard birds singing – the sound was so loud it distracted me and I missed catching the ball my daughter threw to me. The ball flew into the glass and the house shattered with splinters and shards everywhere. I heard my daughter screaming. I woke up absolutely terrified and covered in sweat, with screaming still echoing in my ears. I was so unnerved I went into my daughter’s bedroom to check she was sleeping safely. The memory of that dream stayed with me strongly.”

A few weeks later, her daughter was invited to a friend’s house to play.

“The mother seemed keen for me to drop my daughter off and return a few hours later to pick her up. I would normally do that, but something made me hesitate. Perhaps it was because this was the first time my daughter had played at this particular friend’s house? Whatever it was, I told the mother that if it was okay with her I would stay while the children played. The mother invited me in. My daughter rushed off with her friend to play in the conservatory where there was a doll’s house. The mother brought me a cup of tea and asked if I wouldn’t mind watching the girls while she went to the shops. I said that was fine and took my cup of tea into the conservatory. The moment I entered I felt like I had been there before. It was like the glass house of my dream, as it had huge glass windows on three sides from ceiling to floor. I heard birds singing loudly. My dream flashed into my mind and without hesitating I told the girls to come with me into the kitchen.

“A few moments after we left the conservatory I heard this almighty shattering sound. I rushed in and a cricket ball had been thrown through the window of the conservatory right above where the doll’s house was positioned. It had come from the garden next door, where two teenage boys had been larking about. There was glass splintered everywhere and I shudder to think what might have happened if the girls had still been playing there.”

Precognitions like Rachel’s complicate our everyday definitions of past, present and future, as they suggest that it is possible to know or remember specific details about the future even before it happens.

All the time in the world

Even though philosophers and scientists have a difficult time defining time, one thing is for sure – if we could discover a way to make more time, we might be able to solve every mystery and cure every disease. We would have all the time in the world to heal broken hearts, learn about every subject, correct all mistakes and become infinitely wise in the process. Life would feel unending, and without the pressure of the ticking clock to motivate us, we could succumb to boredom and complacency, or we might learn to enjoy the luxury of having more time – that is, after we put in all the hard work understanding how to create more time.

Today, scientists who study time generally don’t focus on ways to create more of it. But there is another approach that offers some of the same consequences of “making time”, and that’s being able to access information about the future before something happens. With such forewarning, it would then sometimes be possible to do something to either bring that future event to pass or to avoid it. Perhaps in this way, Rachel was able to help two children avoid a traumatic, and potentially fatal, experience.

But it can work in the opposite way as well. We’ll illustrate a precognition of something positive with an example from Dr Mossbridge’s life.

When Julia was a young divorced mother and still in graduate school, she was looking for an apartment to rent that would be right for her and her son. She dreamed that a neighbour, Maureen, had decided to rent out the bottom floor of a duplex she owned. Maureen said that Julia could take a tour of the upper floor to help her visualize how Maureen would refurbish the bottom floor. To entice her to agree to rent the place, in the dream Maureen said Julia could choose the colour of the walls if Julia signed the lease that day.

Julia woke determined to bring this event to fruition, so later that week, when she bumped into her neighbour Maureen, Julia told her she was looking for a place to rent and asked her if she knew of anything. Her neighbour said sure. She had decided to rent out a duplex – and the bottom floor would be available in about a month. Maureen apologized that they weren’t yet done renovating the bottom floor. Just as in the dream, she offered to give Julia a tour of the top floor, and then at the end of the tour, Maureen sweetened the deal by saying that Julia could pick the colours to paint the walls if she signed the lease right then. Julia did exactly that, and lived in the apartment with her son, very happily, for three years afterwards.

Coincidence? Seems doubtful. Actual precognition? More likely, but we can never be sure. If you had this experience, would you wonder about how such accurate information about the future could be predicted in a dream? You bet you would!

Somewhere in time

To understand how getting information from the future might make sense, we need to understand how the flow of time works and how the present relates to the future. Unfortunately, neither of these things is well understood. So here we’ll talk about what we know, and what we do not.

Let’s begin with the physicists. They don’t seem to agree on whether the flow of time exists at all. Some physicists think that the flow of time is a complete illusion and we live in a series of ‘nows’ that are static and not flowing in any sense of the word,[a] while others feel time is so essential to the workings of the universe that it is like a fundamental force.[b] To make things more confusing, for most physics equations, time can go in either direction (forward or backwards, +t or -t). This doesn’t really match with our everyday experience, even though the equations work out. Suffice it to say that so far, physicists have not been super helpful in improving our everyday understanding of the flow of time, although they are working hard on it.[c]

What about philosophers? If you think time is completely subjective or mental and does not or cannot exist in the physical world, you are in good company with the likes of John McTaggart[d] and St Augustine.[e] In contrast, if you feel that time is both a physical fact as well as a mental experience, you will be in good company with most present-day philosophers, who think of time as the thing that describes how change happens; the thing that we try to measure by using a clock.[f] That’s not really clear either, but it seems a bit ahead of the physicists – maybe.

How about the psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists? Most of them focus their investigations on the mental experience of time as opposed to physical time. People generally agree that there is a kind of order to the events we experience in our lives, which, when put together, we call the flow of time, temporal flow, or the “stream of consciousness” as psychologist William James famously put it.[g] Many psychologists and neuroscientists studying time and time perception try to understand this mystery by trying to figure out how the mind and brain create a sense of temporal flow.[h] The subjective sense of temporal flow is all very interesting, but it won’t get us precisely where we want to be, which is to understand how precognition of actual physical future events might actually be possible.

Understanding the science of precognition can be thought of as understanding how we might access information about events that occur in the future of our own personal temporal flow, relative to our own personal “now”. This sounds like mental time travel rather than physical time travel, and that is a reasonable way to think about it. It could even be completely accurate. But you can also think about the science of precognition in physical terms, as trying to understand how future physical events can influence past physical events. Either way, when we have premonitions, it feels as if the future is pulling us forward both physically and mentally. This is how it felt for Jo, who was two months shy of her 44th birthday when she found out she was pregnant.

“I was warned that at my age my baby was at a higherthan-normal risk for developmental abnormalities and severe disability,” she recalls. “Every parent wants a healthy and happy child and the very idea of knowing that from the start your child may be limited or held back in some way by the judgements and prejudices of society is a nightmare.”

About a month after she found out she was pregnant, her doctor strongly advised her to have an amniocentesis test to help determine whether the foetus had a chromosomal defect, like Down’s Syndrome or spina bifida. “He told me that the procedure was simple and relatively painless. I didn’t even need medication or an overnight stay in hospital. The procedure was relatively simple, as my doctor had said it would be, but by far the worst part was the week-long wait for the results to come through. Before I got pregnant a week seemed to be no time at all, but now, with this burden hanging over me, it seemed like for ever. I’ve been a good sleeper most of my life but during that week I don’t think I got more than a few hours each night. I tossed and turned, longing for the seven days and nights to pass but also wishing they would never come.

“One night a couple of days before my test was due, I eventually managed to fall asleep around midnight. For the first and only time in my pregnancy, I actually dreamt of giving birth. My doctor delivered my baby – which was unusual because I had already been informed of my midwife delivery team – and then handed him to me. I remember looking down at his tiny face and seeing a dimple on his cheek. Then I heard my doctor pronouncing him healthy. My sister came in and she was carrying an enormous cuddly blue elephant with ‘It’s a boy’ written on one of its paws and ‘angel’ written on the other. I handed my baby to my husband and lay back in my bed, taking in the details of the delivery room. When I woke up the next morning, my anxiety had gone completely. I felt calm and in control. Back in real life, my husband held my hand and told me that whatever the results were, we would get through this. I hugged him and told him that I was fine. I wasn’t just saying this to comfort him – as I knew how nervous he was – I really meant it. I knew that everything was going to be fine.

“I really can’t explain why or how, but I know that my dream was a premonition, a vision of my future. I have never felt so peaceful and calm in my entire life before or since, and although we wanted the sex of our baby to be a surprise when I gave birth, I also knew that it was going to be a boy.

“I surprised everyone, including myself, over the next two days with my resilience and calm. I slept like a baby (well, how babies are supposed to sleep). As my dream had predicted, the results of my test were negative. Five months later I gave birth to a gorgeous baby boy with a dimple on his cheek. Giving birth for the first time is a scary experience, but for me it felt like I had done it all before in my dream. The delivery room was the same and, most eerily of all, it was my doctor who delivered the baby, rather than my midwife, who was unexpectedly out of action that day due to a bout of flu. The only detail that wasn’t accurate was when my sister walked in. She was carrying a tiny bunch of flowers and not a cuddly blue elephant. As for my baby, his face, his tiny hands and his beautiful blue eyes were exactly as they were in my dream.”

After a few days in hospital, Jo returned home with her son held tightly in her arms. “There was a surprise waiting for me when I got home. While I was recovering in hospital, my sister and my husband had completed the nursery and there, sitting in the cot – you guessed it – was the blue elephant of my dreams, with ‘angel’ on one of its paws. I hadn’t told anyone about my dream, but there it was.”

How can this kind of “pull” from the future actually work? Time now to discuss some hardcore scientific concepts related to what we mean when we talk about the future pulling us forward.

Backwards in time

Part of why time seems as if it can only flow in only one direction is that we tend to have a lot of very rigid ideas about how one event can affect another event. These ideas are based on a really good source – it’s the way the physical world seems to work.[j] One of the most basic ideas we have as a result of our observations of the world is causality – the idea that thing A causes thing B if thing A happens before thing B and if thing A is necessary for thing B to happen. For example, to create B (an omelette) we first of all need A (the eggs) to be broken and cooked.

From when we are six months old, we can see that there is a normal order of events, and we start to develop ideas about the rules of causality and time. Six-month-old infants get bored when they repeatedly watch a video of one ball moving toward and hitting another ball, which rolls away as if it was launched by the first ball. They look away as if to say, “Okay, I got that. First ball hits second ball. Now show me something interesting!” When the researchers then play the video in reverse, the babies become captivated again – as if they are saying, “Wait, that is interesting. The second ball is now going backwards in time!”[k]

Of course, interpreting baby behaviour is difficult, and it could just be that the babies get excited about any new video they are shown. So, the researchers doing that study also showed a very similar video in which they put a space between the balls, so that the two balls didn’t hit each other. The first ball still moves and comes to a stop, and the second ball still rolls away after the first one stops, but there’s a space in between them, so it doesn’t look like the first ball causes the second ball to roll away. Again, babies looked at this until they got bored. And when the researchers reversed this video, the babies didn’t care. It wasn’t interesting in reverse, probably because there was no sense of the oddness in the reverse sequence of events, because causality was missing in the first place.k

Even though we use the concept of “cause” all the time in daily life, it turns out that the physical reality of causality cannot actually be proven. You can hit one ball with another ball trillions of times, and you will show that as ball A comes to a rest, ball B moves in the direction that ball A was going. But proving that there is anything more than a correlation between these two events has not been possible. Mathematician John von Neumann stated it like this: “We may [still] say that there is at present no occasion and no reason to speak of causality in nature – because no experiment indicates its presence…”[m] The problem is that any time you want to try to prove causality between balls A and B, you always end up with the counter-argument that instead of ball A causing movement in ball B, it’s just that ball A always stops at the point at which it touches ball B and ball B always moves away. There’s definitely a correlation between the two events, but not definitely causation.

Without any way to prove that one thing actually causes another, but with the desire to talk about causes and time, we are going to just make an agreement about what we mean when we talk about one thing causing another. And we have to leave it at that, without insisting that our agreement is some kind of reflection of physical reality. So here we’re going to say that event A causes event B when event A is necessary for event B to occur. Notice that the order of events is not mentioned in this definition. That’s on purpose! Event A causes B if event B needs event A in order to happen, period.[n]

Assuming event A causes event B (according to our definition), then if event A comes before event B, we can say event A pushes event B. But event A could also come after event B. In that case, we say event A pulled event B from the future. Of course, both pushing and pulling could be going on simultaneously.

For an example of this simultaneous push/pull idea, let’s take Dr Julia’s precognitive dream when she was a graduate student looking for a suitable place to live. In her waking life, she had the experience of remembering a dream about a nice apartment. Because she didn’t realize her neighbour Maureen had any rental properties available, and because she didn’t know this neighbour very well, Julia would have been unlikely to ask Maureen about apartments if she had not had the dream. So, we might think the dream pushed her to ask about apartments and eventually sign the lease.

Okay, but the dream itself sure seems to have been caused by an event in the future. This event seems to be the real-life experience of learning about the bottom floor of the duplex, touring the top floor, and being told about the ability to choose paint colours if she signed the lease that day. So, we might think this future experience in waking life pulled Julia toward having the dream.

And there we have it. Once you start looking at events in time this way, almost every experience, precognitive or otherwise, can be seen as both a push and a pull – in both directions in time. You drop a coffee cup and it shatters on the floor. If you hadn’t dropped it, it wouldn’t have shattered. But it’s shattered on the floor, so you must have dropped it. Did the shattering pull you to drop it? Or did your dropping push the shattering? Or both? It’s almost like the classic who came first – the chicken or the egg – question.[1]

Our long explanation about causes and all things A and B is here for a few important reasons. First, we want you to let go of the idea that just because time flows in one direction according to your daily waking experience, it must flow in that direction in the physical world. Second, we want you to recognize how hard it is to figure out the difference between pushes toward the future vs. pulls from the future. And finally, we want you to realize that every single event you experience – from brushing your teeth, to doing a presentation at work, to scolding your children for leaving their bedrooms untidy – could exist as a causal loop in which the past and future seem to be pushing and pulling simultaneously.

Wait, you might now ask – what exactly is a causal loop?

1. Human beings are not closed systems and neither is our experience of the world per se, so this law does not have anything to do with our psychologically perceived arrow of time and may have nothing to do with our experience of the physical arrow of time either.

2. Physicists don’t agree on whether the flow of time exists outside of human experience, and if the flow of time is only a psychological phenomenon, it is unclear why a physical law should be used to justify it.

3. About half of the physicists contributing to a recent volume published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science about the Second Law of Thermodynamics do not support the traditional interpretation of the Second Law (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-007-9164-2).

4. The Second Law has been reversed by “trading off” quantum correlations for a decrease in entropy (https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03323).

Circles in time

A causal loop (also known as a closed time loop or predestination paradox)[2] is a sequence of looped events where an event causes another event, which in turn seems to cause the first event. In a nutshell, each event in the loop is one of the causes of the next event and at least one of the later events causes an earlier event.[p]

It is possible that understanding the general idea of causal loops is absolutely essential to understanding how precognition might work. But the problem with causal loops is that you may start to think of everything as a causal loop, and that can drive you nuts. Let’s take the coffee-cup dropping example. Sure, we can say that one event is dropping the coffee cup and the other is the shattering of the cup on the floor. But what about the initial act of picking up the cup? And then there’s the sweeping up of the shattered remains. Maybe those are really the pushing/pulling events? Oh, but go one more step back into the past and one more step forward into the future, and now let’s look at the idea that you wanted coffee and the disposal of the shards of ceramic followed by finding an unbreakable, plastic mug in your cabinet. Maybe the plastic mug search pulled forward the original desire for coffee?

This kind of game is never-ending, and in time you start to go a little crazy and see that your birth pushes your death and your death pulls your birth. You can take any point in time and choose events on the left and the right of the timeline, centred around that event, and create a causal loop, depending on how you think of things. This kind of thinking leads quickly to what we call “fantasy thinking”.

When you are engaging in fantasy thinking and at the same time trying to understand precognition, you can take every dream and every thought that you have and try to find the future event that is pulling that dream or thought. For example, you dream you are in a plane crash the night before you go on a flight, and the next day you feel lucky that your flight doesn’t crash. But you decide your dream was precognitive, and you start obsessively combing the news for a plane crash. Within about four months, a plane crashes. So you decide that plane crash was the one you were dreaming about, even though there were no other correspondences between your dream and the crash. While fantasy thinking is vitally important to creativity, it is not helpful when developing your precognitive skills. Even in the forward direction in time, most causes and effects are not understandable in a simple way. Trying to figure out possible causal loops for everything is futile, and, more importantly, unnecessary.

We will address fantasy thinking and how to avoid it much more in Part 2, but for now it is safe to just say that while understanding the general concept of causal loops can help you think about the possibility of precognition, genuine precognition is not the same as a causal loop. If you were in a causal loop, you could think of yourself as being pulled from the future but without being aware of it. During a genuine precognitive experience, in contrast, some part of you is aware of the pull. It’s not just a causal pull alone – it’s like a message from the future. So, when you are having a genuine precognition, you have thoughts, feelings or behaviours that reveal that some part of you has received something like a message from the future. This message makes all the difference, because if you can communicate from the future to the past, even just to yourself, you might be able to at the very least prepare for – if not influence – the future.[3]

To illustrate how precognitions can help you prepare for the future, Dr Mossbridge has interviewed two professionals who work with dreams, both of whom described dreams about the impending death of a loved one. Dr Stanley Krippner, who is well known for his work on telepathic and precognitive dreams, shared two precognitive dreams about his father’s death that he had when he was in his forties. In the first dream, he saw a hearse pulling up to his childhood home. The driver took away his father, his nextdoor neighbour, and the father of a grade-school classmate. The first two – his father and his next-door neighbour – died a few months after the dream. The father of the grade-school classmate died within a year of the dream. The second dream was only a few weeks prior to his father’s death, and a month after the first dream. Dr Krippner says he can still recall the vivid images of this second dream, which showed his mother in the rocking chair in the living room looking forlorn. He had recorded both dreams in his dream diary, because at the time he had the dreams, he already knew the power of precognition as a preparation tool. His father had undergone his annual medical examination shortly before his fatal heart attack and was told that he was in perfect health.

And here’s an example from another dream-journal keeper. Magloire Aguirre has an MA in transpersonal psychology and is a certified coach in Bogota, Colombia. At least 11 of her dreams relate to her perfectly healthy father’s death from a bicycle fall in 2010. They range from seeing her father without a head; going to a family gathering with lots of relatives but feeling dread and not seeing her father again; comforting her family because her father had died; having strong emotions and a feeling that she’d lost a loved one; her mother giving her four black blouses to wear; seeing a bicycle rider falling and having concern for him; and seeing her father’s room in his house as dark and empty. Magloire sent Julia all the dates of the 11 dreams she had portending her father’s death.

After speaking with Magloire about her dreams, Julia made a graph of the number of relevant dreams in each month leading up to her father’s death on 3 July 2010 (Figure 1). This wasn’t a thorough scientific study. Julia didn’t record the dreams when they happened. And Magloire told Julia that she found these dreams by going back into her dream journals once her father died – when she had them, she did not think her father would die, so she interpreted them as meaning something else. But if we take Magloire’s retroactive dream analysis at face value, we can see that the relevant dreams generally increased in frequency as the date of her father’s death approached. This is exactly what is reported in studies of both spontaneous precognitive dreaming as well as laboratory tests of precognition – the frequency of precognition increases as the event being predicted nears.[r]

Magloire is happy she had her dreams, because she feels they helped prepare her for her father’s death, at least subconsciously. She wants to share her experience with the world so others will take their dreams seriously and connect the dots, if only to prepare for something important when it is out of their control.

When we dive into the work of becoming a Positive Precog (Part 2), we will discuss in more detail the importance of recording precognitions of all types. For now, it’s just important to point out that, in this case, it was as if the future was pulling both Dr Krippner and Magloire forward so that they could receive the helpful message that it was time to prepare for an emotional and difficult event.

Figure 1 Magloire Aguirre’s dreams in five three-month periods leading up to the date of her father’s death. This was not a controlled study; she determined dream relevance after the fact. The figure is only to illustrate her experience of an increased frequency of related dreams as her father’s death approached.

Pulls from the future, in the lab

We’ve been talking about causal loops as a conceptual idea. But an example of something that looks like a causal loop – one that has been shown in the lab – is something called a quantum delayed-choice experiment. This is not a book about physics, and we’re not physicists, so we’ll be very brief in describing this.[s]

Imagine you’re a physicist. You make a decision about how to measure a particle only after that particle seems to have already travelled along a path that would normally make it land in a certain place. The weird thing is, this “delayed choice” in how you measure the particle actually seems to influence where the particle ends up appearing. What makes this a causal loop is that your decision is made after the particle is able to turn back and change its course. In other words, your future decision seems to influence the past of the particle. It’s as if the particle “knows” that in the future you’ll make a particular decision, and it travels accordingly.[t]

One group of physicists who showed this so-called “retrocausal” effect over a large distance in space said, “No naïve realistic picture is compatible with our results. … It is therefore suggestive to abandon such pictures altogether.”[v] In other words, we should give up the idea that causes are always going in the forward direction in time and also that causes can only occur when other objects are in the same area of space. How do we leap from a physics lab to humans having precognitive experiences? Well, you can take the idea of giving up our usual notions of space and time and combine this with the idea that some biological processes rely on quantum effects that are consistent with the possibility of this kind of retrocausality.[w] We’ll leave the full-fledged argument to the academic journals, but if you didn’t already think so before reading our brief summary of these ideas, hopefully now you are starting to realize that maybe physical time isn’t exactly what we once thought it was.

What does this kind of thinking mean for those of us who aren’t quantum physicists? It means that although our waking daily experiences tell us that causes generally move in the “pushing” or forward direction in time, when you look closely enough, you see that there seem to also be hidden physical pulls from the future. And it is possible that we might already be harnessing these pulls right now, in our own bodies.

So, are we saying that maybe we can listen to physical clues in our waking lives or use a dream “memory” about being in an accident to help avoid it? Yes, we are. But wouldn’t that mean the causal loop would break down? The future event wouldn’t happen, because we would have avoided it as a result of our precognition!

We agree – this is an apparent paradox. Luckily for all of us, there are at least two ways around it: the many-futures approach and the near-miss approach. No one knows if both, one, or none of them are how causal loop paradoxes are resolved, but given that causal loops occur, the apparent paradoxes must be resolved somehow. So, we’ll talk now about the many-futures approach and the near-miss approach, both of which originated in physics – but we’ll discuss how they apply to precognition, not physics.

Many futures

First, there’s the many-futures approach to precognition, which is taken from the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.[x] If you’ve ever watched the movie Sliding Doors, you’re thinking along the right lines: alternative futures. Here’s the idea. Imagine that at each point in your life, a new future splits off, so while a pull might be coming from a future in which you actually do have a car accident, by responding to this pull you might be able to enter a new future in which you do not have a car accident. By your actions in the present, you influence the future you enter into, and leave behind a parallel future that is less desirable.[4]

If things worked like this, we would only say that we experienced precognition in those cases where we actually have the future experience corresponding to the past precognition. Assume that we split off from the car-crash universe after having a dream about it, because we are more careful as a result of the dream. It could be a minor split (the car crash almost happens) or a major split (there’s no car crash at all). In the latter case, we wouldn’t call the original dream precognitive at all – there would be no event in our alternate future that corresponded to the original experience. While it’s true that we only say that a dream about a car accident was precognitive if the car accident occurs or “almost happens”, that’s not proof that the many-futures solution is correct. It just shows that we have a definition of what “precognitive” means, and it means that the many-futures solution is consistent with our definition.

Near misses

The idea that a car crash can “almost happen” and still be consistent with a precognition about the car crash brings us to the second way to resolve the apparent paradox. This “nearmiss” idea is taken from physics as well. It’s akin to the idea that many different routes can result in arriving at the same place.[y] If the important outcome is surviving a car crash, there are many different ways to get to that result.

For example, let’s say that after you dream about being in a bad car accident with a truck, you become extra careful and observant of trucks when you drive. As a result of your heightened awareness, you see a truck just before it hits your car, and you swerve to avoid it. The truck only sideswipes you, and you interpret your dream as a warning sent from the future of something worse that could have happened if you weren’t being careful. You still had a very minor accident, you were not hurt by it. So, the dream makes sense (the bad accident almost happened), the important outcome happened (you survived), and the push/pull loop is complete.

If things worked like this, then when we used any of our conscious precognitions to avoid bad events, we would always end up changing the events our dreams showed us. But, in a way, this kind of difference between our dreams and reality is unavoidable! As soon as we have an idea about something happening in the future, we necessarily alter what happens without even trying to alter it, because now we experience something happening that we predicted earlier … not something happening in a way that surprises us. So the differences we see between a dream of a car crash and the actual near-miss don’t really prove that this theory is true. They also don’t prove it isn’t true.

An example of the near-miss phenomenon is a story from UK parapsychologist Serena Roney-Dougal. In a conversation with Dr Mossbridge, Serena shared a dramatic car-accident dream that might have helped her survive a potential accident. An interesting element of this dream, and one that makes it very convincing as a genuine precognitive experience, is that Serena doesn’t own a car. Serena rarely drives, so she generally borrows or rents cars when needed. That means that compared to a person who drives every day and is much more likely to be in a car accident, it is more difficult to chalk her dream up to coincidence.

Serena dreamed that she was driving on a six-lane highway in the fast lane. All of a sudden, her car was spun around and she was going the wrong way, meeting the traffic going in the other direction. She woke up panicked. She realized it was a strong, scary dream, but could be symbolic of something else in her life. Anyway, when would she be driving in real life?

Ten days later, she’d forgotten the dream. She was due to take her completed PhD thesis into her university, and she’d arranged to use a neighbour’s car. For a short part of that journey, she would have to take a six-lane highway. She had her daughters in the backseat, as her supervisor wanted to celebrate the completion of her thesis and her daughters decided to join her. Serena was driving in the fast lane, going about 80 mph, when a stone shattered her windshield into a glass web. She was temporarily blinded by the shattered glass windshield. Somehow, she moved the car safely across three lanes of traffic to the shoulder. That was when she remembered the dream from ten days previous.

According to the near-miss approach to resolving causal loop paradoxes, it is possible that Serena’s subconscious mind remembered the dream, and as a result, it gave her the presence of mind to guide her car to safety. The idea is that some of her was prepared and as a result of this preparation, loss of life was avoided.

Our discussions of the many-futures and near-miss approaches, as well as everything we have been talking about in this chapter, are meant to prepare you for the very real possibility of precognition being a kind of mental time travel into the future to get information about physical, actual events.

What dreams may come

In the next chapter, we’ll describe some of the types of scientific evidence for precognition, and we’ll talk about what you need to know in order to judge if any of your experiences are likely to be precognitive. After that, we’ll move onto helping you master your precognitive skills using the tools and techniques for your controlled precognition practice in Part 2.

Understanding the science and how it can potentially validate premonitions is important, but before fast forwarding to the next science-packed chapter, we’d like to acknowledge that there may be a spiritual dimension to precognition. For the spiritually minded, there seems to be an eternal part of us that is separate from our bodies and our conscious minds, and which can travel across space and time. An example is a dream that a young man named Rory sent to Theresa about his life purpose calling him in the night.

When Rory was about ten years old, he went to his first concert. “From that day on I longed to be able to learn to play the piano with a teacher who visited my school for private lessons every Tuesday. My mum died when I was only a baby and my father was struggling to raise me and my two other brothers alone. Money was always tight. I loved my father deeply and didn’t want to add to his burden, so I never mentioned my musical ambitions to him. I knew we couldn’t afford lessons or a piano.

“One night in my final year of junior school, I had a dream. In it, I had my first lesson with the piano teacher who visited my school. In the lesson we did nothing at all but I loved every minute. I looked outside the window and saw that it was dark outside. Then my teacher started to play the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”. When I woke up, the haunting melody was still running through my head. The music fired me up so much that I knew I had to talk to my headmistress. She was very supportive. I don’t know how it happened but I was granted six months of free tuition, which would only continue in senior school if I showed promise. And, true to my dream, in my first lesson my piano teacher simply wanted me to listen and be inspired by an exquisite piece of piano music, and the piece he chose was “Moonlight Sonata”!

“Far from being stressed that my piano playing would cost too much, my father came home one night with a secondhand electronic keyboard so I could practise every night. Since I listened to my dream I haven’t looked back. Music is everything to me, and ten years later my hope is to work in the music industry. I think that dream was heaven sent.”

Rory believes his dream was from the spiritual realm, but he also believes that his dreaming mind wasn’t showing him the future in the dream. The future was his to make, but he believed the dream showed him a potential future that would happen if he followed a certain course of action. This is like the many-futures idea. If he hadn’t plucked up the courage to ask for lessons, his dream may never have come true.

Is this precognition? Perhaps. But more importantly to those of us with a spiritual bent, stories like this suggest there may be an invisible power or consciousness in the universe that you can tap into with your thoughts and dreams to help yourself and others thrive. Whether you are spiritually inclined or not, precognitive experiences, and learning how to understand and interpret them, can give you the inspiration and power to create the future of your dreams.

Ripples through time

We hope this chapter has helped you make sense of premonitions from Julia’s scientific perspective. We’ve quickly breezed through some very heady topics – causality, causal loops, quantum effects, and different ways to resolve the paradoxes that seem to emerge from causal loops – and you can find out more by checking out the books and scientific journal articles referenced in the notes at the back of this book. The basic point of all the scientific ideas we threw at you is that there is a lot of disagreement about how the flow of time works and how or whether one thing causes another. If you take home one idea out of all of these, make it that the everyday feeling that the future has no effect on the present is not necessarily true. As a result of the current uncertainty about time and causality in philosophical and scientific circles, it is not at all unreasonable to talk in a serious way about the possibility of genuine precognition.

We also hope that our brief mention of spirituality has opened your mind to the idea that there may be a spiritual perspective as well. Both Theresa and Julia treasure the spiritual aspects of precognition, because premonitions can act as reminders that there may be an eternal part of us that exists outside of time and space. There may well be a scientific explanation for this eternal part, and if one is found, science and spirituality will become happy partners. Much of Part 2 will be devoted to the spiritual and wellbeing components of becoming a Positive Precog, and we will continue to marry those elements with scientific research as we go.

1 Here, physics buffs might chime in with some concerns about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Okay, physics rock stars! As you know, the Second Law states that in a closed system, disorder is very unlikely to decrease – and as such, you may believe this means that there is an “arrow of time” that is set by the Second Law, and this arrow goes in only the forward direction. As a result, you might also think that any talk of a future event influencing the past is bogus. We would ask you to consider four ideas.

2 Here we are not specifically talking about closed timelike curves, but causal loops in general.

3 For those concerned that the idea of messages from the future suggests such a message would be travelling faster than the speed of light, a few thoughts: 1) “message” here is used colloquially to mean “information” – essentially a correlation between present and future events that can’t be explained by deduction or induction but is not necessarily a signal; 2) recently it has been suggested that superluminal signalling is not actually prohibited by special relativity (Weinstein, S, “Superluminal signaling and relativity”, Synthese, 148(2), 2006: 381–99); and 3) the no-signalling theorem(s) may actually be logically circular (Kennedy, J B, “On the empirical foundations of the quantum no-signalling proofs”, Philosophy of Science, 62(4), 1995: 543–60.)

4 Note that in the movie Minority Report, the future was considered set in stone, which was part of the problem of the Pre-Crime Programme. However, at the end of the movie it becomes clear that the future envisioned did not occur, suggesting the idea that futures unfold probabilistically rather than definitely.

CHAPTER 3

THE CASE FOR PRECOGNITION

“My phone rang, and although it wasn’t a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.”

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara

“For the universe, the two directions of time are indistinguishable, just as in space there is no up and down.”

Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Time,
Ludwig Boltzmann

About 90 per cent of the time, when we tell someone we are working on a book about precognition, the person we’re talking to will spontaneously share a story of a dream, compulsion or flash of insight that appeared to predict the future. It’s as if a bubble has been burst and they have just been waiting for the right moment to tell their story and the right person to hear it.

No sooner had Theresa announced on social media that she would co-author her next book with a scientist and write about premonitions than the stories started to pour in from her readers. Some of them were “a premonition saved my life” stories – like the one below from Krysia.

In the summer of 2008, one of Krysia’s friends offered to let her family use their outdoor swimming pool on his farm. “My children were so excited!” Krysia told Theresa. “The night before we were due to go I had a ‘premonition’ in a dream. I saw a big outdoor pool, and at one end there was a very tall hedge that ran the length of the pool. I had my back to the hedge and could hear the children laughing and splashing, then suddenly I heard a rustling behind me and just as I turned a large black dog with a huge head jumped out of the hedge and went for me – I woke up in panic and fear at this point! I’m a reiki practitioner so I had to use my training to calm myself down.

“The next day, on our way to the farm, I asked if they had a large black dog. I was told that they did actually have Rottweilers who guarded part of the farm, but they were behind locked gates and on long chains during the day. I told my friend about my dream and asked him to check that the dogs were definitely locked behind gates. I was told that they were three quarters of a mile away from the pool and had never ventured from their area. Upon my insistence, he phoned ahead and confirmed that it was safe. We had a wonderful time at the pool and returned three times thereafter.

“Before each trip I had exactly the same premonition and I woke up in fear, and by the third trip I knew how to instantly calm that fear. Each time, I always asked my friend to confirm that the dogs were locked up. On the night before the fourth outing, the premonition was stronger – I heard screaming and a dog snarling.

“We were having a fantastic afternoon. My friend and her children had joined us for my birthday. I was on my phone, with my back to the hedge, when I heard a rustling in the hedge behind and I knew in that moment that my premonition was coming true. A large Rottweiler with the biggest head I had ever seen jumped out at me. The children were in the pool and they started to scream.

“Because of my premonition, and the rehearsals of calming my fears when I woke up in panic each time, I felt prepared. I stood calm and in total control. I didn’t give the dog any eye contact and amazed myself with my inner strength and ability to take control of my fear using my reiki training. The farmer’s children told me the dog’s name, so I spoke very calmly to him and was even more amazed when he laid down behind me – placing his mouth gently around my ankle!! It took the farmer ten minutes to arrive and retrieve his dog with just a whistle. My friend was shaken up and apologized to me for not phoning in advance. I later found out that some months after the dog had been put down, as he had seriously attacked a member of the family.

“I believe that if I hadn’t been ‘pre-warned’ this was going to happen, I would have reacted with fear and would have suffered injury or, worse still, one of the children could have been maimed for life.”

Claire’s story wasn’t as personal, but is equally thoughtprovoking. She was about ten years old in 1986 and was out playing with some friends. “We were about to cross a road when I had one of many precognitive visions I experienced as a child,” she recalls clearly over 30 years later. “I saw a beautiful bird soar into the sky and then explode. I felt intense panic and decided to stop playing and go home. Later that day, as I was watching the news with my mum, I saw the space shuttle Challenger explosion when it broke apart after about a minute of flight, killing all on board.”

This spontaneous sharing of personal and public premonitions isn’t just limited to when we’re talking with non-scientists. Dr Mossbridge has found that when scientists are talking just with her, they too will bring up their own precognition stories. They are usually eager to share and get her opinion, even if their eyes dart left and right every so often to be sure none of their colleagues is overhearing them.

Why are so many people interested in telling their precognition stories? We think it’s because it is exciting to imagine the shroud that seems to hide our futures could be lifted, even if temporarily so. Indeed, stories about experiences that seem precognitive have been recorded for millennia. One of the earliest examples of precognitive dreaming can be found in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, which is regarded as one of the earliest surviving works of literature. It dates back to c2100 BC. Throughout the epic, dreams are often interpreted as visions of the future.

The Bible contains at least 15 stories referring to precognitive dreams.[a] But none of those stories, and none of yours or ours or Lincoln’s or Mark Twain’s, can be said to be scientifically shown to be genuinely precognitive. That’s because even when we have records of the precognitions written down before the events they predict, the events themselves could be coincidental. We also don’t know about all the dreams, compulsions and insights that end up being ignored because they don’t predict anything, and this number could easily outweigh the number of experiences that accurately predict future events.[b]

For example, Dr Julia has about one seemingly precognitive dream every other week, with Theresa finding events in her dreams playing out in her daily life in some way every month or so. Other people have more, still others far less.

But invariably, it is clear that most of our dreams are not precognitive. The statistics are difficult to calculate, partly because there are so many details in dreams that are difficult to count. Should the colour of a woman’s dress count as one detail (colour) separate from another (dress)? What if it turned out to be a skirt of that colour, rather than a dress? Or a dress of another colour? This kind of problem makes it so that within even a single dream that was recorded right after someone remembered it, it is difficult to determine the percentage of details confirmed by a future event. So, while some precognitions seem so detailed and timely that many people including ourselves feel they must be precognitive, we still can’t say for sure that they are.

So, you might ask, how do we know that someone has had a genuinely precognitive dream experience? To be honest, we can’t at present, not with 100 per cent certainty. Outside the lab we can at least improve your chances of correctly figuring out whether an experience was genuinely precognitive. Inside the lab, there are a few ways we can do the same trick, giving us a little more confidence.

Testing time

First, let’s talk about spontaneous precognitive experiences, the ones that just occur to people without trying, and what the standards should be for accepting these experiences as genuine precognitions. Then we’ll dip into lab work and talk about the kind of tasks and experiments that reveal precognition at work.

Precognitive dreams are by far the most reported psychic experiences by Westerners – but this wasn’t always the case. Before dreams were taken seriously in the West (largely as a result of Freud and Jung’s work) and during the time when séances were commonplace in Europe and the United States, visions of ghosts were the most reported psychic experiences.[c] So it looks like reports of so-called paranormal abilities follow generational trends, just as fashion and music do. These trends tell us that the number of people reporting precognitive dreams and other types of precognitive experiences doesn’t always reflect how many people are actually having premonitions. Instead, these numbers tell us a lot about how acceptable certain extraordinary experiences are.

In recent times, it looks like precognitive dreams are probably the most common precognitive experience reported (or perhaps the most common precognitive experience asked about on surveys) – somewhere between 15 and 30 per cent of people in the regions surveyed (Europe, US, Australia and Russia) will admit that they have had them. Other precognitive experiences are reported at about the same rate.[d] The events predicted by precognitive dreams seem to happen about 40 per cent of the time on the day after the dream – with lower rates of occurrence as the delay increases.[5] So it’s really rare to have a precognitive dream that predicts an event as far as a year after the dream itself, but it happens. Precognitive experiences of other types (for example, intuition or waking precognition) also show this same pattern, even in the lab – as the delay between the precognitive experience and the event tied to the precognition increases, the accuracy of the precognition decreases.[f] We think of this as another way that precognition can be thought of as a “memory” of the future. Memories fade away from conscious awareness with time, and so too it appears memory of the future may as well. That is usually the case. But sometimes memories of the future reach back for decades, as is the case with scientist Bruce Damer’s extraordinary childhood vision of his future research.

Origin of life – an early teaser of things to come

Dr Bruce Damer is eccentric, happy, fun, and brilliant. A computer scientist, space mission designer and origin of life researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), he will tell you more than you ever thought to ask about the computer equipment and other artefacts he has stored in his 5,000-square-foot barn (he calls it the “DigiBarn”), where he has created a museum of computing. It is the DigiBarn that drew his eventual collaborator, UCSC professor David Deamer, to him. What eventually arose from that connection was a revolutionary and controversial model suggesting that life on Earth began not in the sea, but in fluctuating volcanic pools on land. These hot and frothy pools, their model proposed, were perfect for creating “protocells”, hollow spheres of fat-like molecules called lipids encapsulating long chain polymers that together evolved into life’s cellular units. While still controversial, this idea has recently been accumulating a weight of compelling scientific evidence.[g]

The question of the origin of life is fascinating, but what does this have to do with precognition? Well, it turns out that Dr Damer was visited by a sort of imaginary protocell in a vision when he was a teen and its molecules talked to him. Bruce told Julia in an interview that when he was 14, he went for a fortuitous walk in recently thawed springtime fields near his home in central British Columbia, Canada. He saw a mariposa lily poking up through the ground and, being a curious kid, knelt down to check it out. He then wondered how, from a simple seed or bulb, this beautiful and geometrically complex flower could emerge. He stood up and asked himself, “What fundamental process led to all of these plants?” He then had the experience of his mind probing back billions of years and returning with a conclusion and a new question: “They must have all originated from a single seed, a sort of chemical programme made up of molecules. But how could that happen?”

After posing this question, young Bruce had a conversation with a vision, and the vision itself urged him to pursue his life’s work. In his own words: “In front of me, in my mind’s eye appeared this ball of small molecules. I’d recently read about Albert Einstein’s teenage thought experiments, so I assumed this was how new insights came to people. I focused on this seething mass of molecules with the intent to ask how they could have self-assembled into more complex forms, when suddenly they asked me: ‘Figure out how we made a copy of ourselves!’ I was taken aback, but responded to it, ‘Well, an automobile needs a bigger machine called a factory to make a copy of itself, yet I don’t see a bigger machine hanging around to make a copy of you, so it’s implausible!’ The ball of molecules then winked at me, transmitting the thought: Work on it! ”

Understanding how that ball of molecules learned how to replicate itself – in other words, how a simple protocell underwent the process of becoming all life on Earth – was what challenged the youthful Bruce Damer. And, 37 years later, in 2013, his breakthrough moment came in another thought experiment, which revealed a system of cycling protocells capable of evolving but also sharing innovations, thereby able to lift ever more complex forms into being.

Was this vision simply a motivation for his life’s work, driving him on for decades? Or was it a precognition sent by his future self or from some other mysterious time-shifted source? However you might interpret it, a causal temporal loop seems possible. A clue to this loop came from another point in the interview when Dr Damer told Dr Mossbridge that he had had an even earlier vision, suggesting that future versions of himself were able to communicate back through time. When he was about to turn ten, he wanted to mark that milestone, so he went on a long walk in his neighbourhood. He found himself at the edge of a slough, and asked, “What could I do right now that would have a really positive effect on my future?” Suddenly a vision opened up in his mind’s eye, a line of all his future selves extending to the horizon. They were all busy doing slightly different but interesting things. He felt pleased and began to look forward to this future.

Showing remarkable maturity and awareness, the young Bruce decided it would be a good idea to make a deal with these future selves, then and there. He asked them to agree to a written contract, which he held up on an imagined piece of paper. It said: “You will all agree to not send negative thoughts back to the prior, littler selves because they did their best at the time.” One after the next, the future selves each “signed” the only-positive-thoughts contract. Once this was completed, he described experiencing a rush, a sort of force pulling on him as all the doors to the future swung open. He then saw his future path as one flowing, forward movement with no turbulence returning back down to his present. Given this earlier experience, it’s no surprise that just four years later he experienced receiving a clue from the future, setting his life’s work. From a very young age, Bruce felt he was in communication with his future selves and that he also possessed an intimate relationship with some kind of bigger, guiding system. This gave him an abiding sense that his life’s path was somehow mapped out through his intentions toward destinations lit by delivered visions.

We don’t all have to have visions like Bruce Damer’s to connect with our future selves or to develop our precognitive abilities. Each of us will do this in our own way, as we discuss in detail in Part 2. But Dr Damer’s experiences illustrate just how incredibly powerful it can be to take seriously messages and visions that seem to come to us from the future.

Taking precognition seriously

Taking seriously information that we seem to get from the future is both essential for developing your abilities as a Positive Precog and tricky to navigate. That’s because taking precognition seriously really means considering all the evidence you receive and determining which evidence you can believe, which is critical for your development as a Positive Precog. What it doesn’t mean is automatically assuming the information is correct and genuinely precognitive.

This is tricky to navigate, because you have to remember that just because one piece of information is precognitive and potentially significant doesn’t mean that the next one is. We’ll discuss this more in Part 2, but for now, let’s go over some examples so you can make a better guess about whether an experience is genuinely precognitive.

To be reasonably convinced that genuine precognition has occurred in your daily life, you would need to meet all of the following criteria:

• Two or more correspondences between the precognition and the event.

• A reasonably short delay (less than two weeks) between the precognition and the event (more than two correspondences between the precognition and the event should be required for longer delays).

• No way of predicting or causing the event yourself in the normal course of your daily life, even using your unconscious mind.

• Extra credit if you record the experience before the event occurs (so you don’t fool yourself with false memories[h]).

Here are a few brief examples to illustrate these points:

• A computer professional Dr Julia met at a workshop told her that he was precognitive – he called out a winning bet at a craps table, and another time he knew he would win a raffle prize. While these occurrences are exciting when they happen, they are just as likely to be precognitive as they are to be coincidences, because there is only one correspondence between the insight and the predicted event.

• A teacher called Pat wrote to Theresa after reading one of her books and told her that on the day before the start of a new school year she had a dream. In that dream she met Lisa who had just joined the school. In the dream, Lisa had brown curly hair and was crying her eyes out with embarrassment because she had red socks on when everybody else wore black. The school uniform was red jumper and black trousers or skirt, but socks were regulation black. The dream was so intense that when Pat woke up she took a pair of her own black socks to school with her in case someone wore the wrong colour socks, as she knew how important fitting in was to young children. Sure enough, during morning registration there was a girl called Lisa with brown curly hair wearing red socks. Already a few of the other girls were teasing her, and she looked upset, knowing there was a whole day to get through in red socks. The incident happened the following day and was accurate on three points – the girl’s name, the colour and texture of her hair, and the colour of the socks – so it can be classed as precognition.

• Dr Josie Malinowski has her PhD in psychology with a focus on dreaming. She has only ever had one dream she believes could be considered precognitive, but she’s more inclined to see it as a funny coincidence. She had decided to take part in an International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) “precognitive dream” contest, in which people try to dream on a certain night of a target video or event they will witness the next day. She absolutely failed to get the target right, even though she remembered five dreams. One of the dreams was a memory of when she was four years old and the ceiling collapsed near her childhood bed due to a rainstorm. When Dr Malinowski went into her lecture hall to teach the following Monday, the ceiling had collapsed due to a rainstorm (correspondence 1), right above where she would have been standing to teach at the lectern. She thought it was an uncanny coincidence. The following Monday, she went into her office in an entirely different building to find that a radiator on the floor above her office had leaked, so much so that the ceiling had collapsed (correspondence 2) right onto her desk. Both events were within 10 days of her dream, and neither of them could be predicted by her, using the usual means.

• Here’s another example where the delay between precognition and event was much shorter. This one was offered to Julia and Theresa for this book by Jason Debord, the lead moderator for the past five years of the Reddit dreams forum. One of the dreams that most impressed him was that of a woman who dreamed she heard a knock on the door. She says that in her dream, she went to the door, looked through the peephole and saw a male stranger. She opened the door and the man shot her with a gun. In real life, she says she woke up, heard a knock (correspondence 1), looked through the peephole and saw a man that she felt was apparently like the one in her dream (correspondence 2). Needless to say, she did not open the door, so we do not know if he held a gun. This event is borderline in terms of its classification as precognitive, because it is possible that the knock occurred during her dream. If so, that first correspondence would have to be removed, leaving only one correspondence.

• Dr Lance Storm, a parapsychology researcher in Australia and a colleague of Julia’s, sent her several precognitive dreams that he’d had. This is Julia’s favourite: “I dreamt that I was a cornet-player or trombone-player in a small brass band. Later that day, at the request of my mother, I paid a visit to the State Library of South Australia to research the meaning and history of her family name, Blowes (note that I had not mentioned the dream to her). As it turned out, Blowes is an Old English name derived from the word ‘bellows’ and means quite literally a ‘horn-player’. Upon reading this, I immediately recalled the dream of the previous night of myself as a horn-player (the son of a woman who came from a line of horn-players so to speak). I wondered how I could have known of this derivation when even my mother was not aware of it.” If Dr Storm knew prior to the dream that he would be asked by his mother to research the family name, it would have been on his mind, at least unconsciously. So his unconscious mind could perhaps have figured out the association between “Blowes” and horn-playing. If so, the dream would be considered useful (it gave him the answer to his question) but not precognitive. However, upon checking with Dr Storm, he revealed that the request from his mother had been made on the same day as his library trip, meaning that he had no idea about the request prior to his dream.

• Craig Hendricks, a 65-year-old retired US Army officer Sergeant 1st Class who now lives in San Diego, California, tells a story of a compulsion he had while in the Joint Inter-Agency Task Force in Baghdad. Here, the correspondences between his behaviour and the event were not conscious, but we can infer them. “We had a trailer, there were 20 of us with our computers. We were doing research. One day as I was sitting there in this air-conditioned space, it occurred to me that I needed to get an ice tea. I never drank ice tea. We had plenty of cold water and it was 112°F outside. But I had this thought – ‘I really want some ice tea.’ It was almost a conversation within my own mind. I said, ‘Nah, don’t think so.’ The thought came up again, ‘Go get some tea.’ I said, ‘No, I really don’t think so.’ The internal voice was really insistent. ‘You need to go get some tea!’ And I said, ‘I refuse to. It’s ridiculous. I will not.’ Finally, it asked again, and I decided it was a good time for a break. I left my office, sweating like a dog, and walked to the compound to get the ice tea. It was so hot that I took a break before walking again. Then I headed back to the trailer. The trailer was in a security compound, and when I returned, it was all secured. I wasn’t allowed in. I wondered why, and later found out that about a minute after I’d left, a 120mm rocket had impacted right next to the trailer; stuck like a dart into the ground. It would have killed anyone in the vicinity – but it was not fused correctly. It could have killed me just by impact, even if it didn’t explode.” So, what are the correspondences here? Well, they are not as obvious, but this is an important example of a life-saving compulsion that seems precognitive, so we’ll walk you through them. The feeling of urgency and the leaving of the trailer to go to the compound were the two big correspondences. Think of it this way: if Craig had just felt that he wanted ice tea but not in an urgent way, the story would not seem so precognitive – he would have been feeling he wanted ice tea when the rocket hit. Or if Craig urgently felt he wanted something to drink, but he just got some water from the trailer, no impressive precognition. In order for us to call this experience a genuinely precognitive one, Craig had to decide he urgently wanted to do something that could only be achieved by leaving the trailer and going far away in order to avoid the rocket strike.

• Here’s a spontaneous precognition story with all the important elements: Dr Alma Bond is a writer and a retired psychoanalyst who has recorded her dreams for 50 years, although this particular dream she did not record prior to the occurrence of the event, so she does not get extra credit, unfortunately. One of the dreams she recorded was that she opened a newspaper, and on page 5 there was a story that five train cars had fallen off the track at 5th Street and Wyoming Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The next morning, she opened the paper and, sure enough, there on page 5 was the story, just as she had dreamed it. Let’s count the correspondences: 1) page 5; 2) story about trains; 3) five train cars; 4) fell off the track; 5) 5th Avenue; 6) Wyoming Avenue; 7) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Pretty impressive – and there is no way she could have used unconscious cues or her own actions to create the event. If it’s true, and we have no reason to doubt it, it was almost surely a precognitive experience, at least for her. Why “at least for her”? Well, she didn’t know about the event as she was having the dream, but someone might have – in other words, it could have been a case of telepathy! However, since the dream was not about the train derailment but about finding the story in the paper, this seems to count as a full-fledged precognitive experience, and an extraordinary one at that.

• Thought nothing could top that one? Wrong! Here’s a precognition experience with all the elements plus extra credit. According to a newspaper story in January 2018,[j] a Virginian named Victor Amole dreamed about the numbers 3-10-17-26-32. He had never had a dream like that before. He decided to enter the lottery using those numbers. In fact, he entered four times. He won, each ticket being worth $100,000. Five numbers (five correspondences), all recorded before the event. In this case, the odds of anyone’s dream of five random numbers being accurate are easy to calculate – according to the Virginia lottery, they were 1 in 278,256 for that draw.

From the streets to the lab

These stories are plentiful; statistically, if you ask three people, at least one of them will report a precognitive experience (and it will likely be a dream, as we mentioned before). Theresa has collated several thousand premonition stories in her database, but as important as these stories are to the people who have them, and as real and valid as the precognitive experiences feel to the people who have had them, they’re not scientifically verifiable. As a result, a lot of people ask Dr Mossbridge how scientists studying these kinds of phenomena verify precognition in the lab. The answer she gives is, “It depends what we’re looking for.”

Let’s say you are a psychologist interested in carefully studying precognition, and you hear from several people you trust that a particular individual is gifted in precognitive dreaming. For instance, the person in question has kept a dream journal for years and has predicted multiple public events, and you have reason to believe that the journal wasn’t forged. To figure out if this person can provide evidence of precognitive dreaming in a highly controlled environment, you might invite them into a lab and ask if they’d be willing to spend a few nights there.

Figure 2. Schematic showing fundamental elements of a precognitive dreaming protocol for a single dreamer; based on the work of Krippner, Honorton and Ullman.[k]

You might ask them to try to dream about an experience you will show them the next day; what we refer to as a target experience. A target experience in a precognition experiment is a sensory experience that is randomly selected as the event a person is trying to predict. It could be a slideshow, a rock concert, or a video, for instance. Before conducting the experiment, you would have created a target pool – a set of target experiences to have at the ready. But the target experience on a particular day is only selected after the attempt at prediction is complete, so in this case, you would only choose the target experience from the target pool after your dreamer has recorded their dreams. Things are done in this way so that no one – neither the dreamer nor the experimenter – knows which experience will be the target. Again, that’s because the target is selected by a random process from the pool of targets, only after the dreams are recorded. Once you’d done this for several nights, if you were very careful, you would send the recorded dreams and a list of the target experiences to three outside judges, who wouldn’t know which dreams matched which target experiences. These judges would then try to find the dreams that most closely match each target experience. After doing all that for several nights, you’d crunch some numbers and figure out whether there was evidence that this person was precognitive dreaming at a rate beyond what you would expect by chance.

Then, even if you’d found impressive evidence from that study, you’d do the same thing again, with the same person, because you’re careful – very careful. After all, if even one person on the planet can really dream precognitively in a consistent way, that’s very important news.

If this is how you think you’d go about looking into precognitive dreaming, you’re following in the footsteps of Dr Stanley Krippner, Dr Charles Honorton and Dr Montague Ullman. This triumvirate of careful researchers worked with a psychic or “sensitive” named Malcolm Bessent, and they published two outstanding papers about their results.k The results of both experiments were clear – it is highly statistically unlikely that Bessent’s dreams corresponded closely with the target experiences only by chance.

One night, for instance, Bessent had two dreams along the same lines. Here is an excerpt of his statement about the overarching themes in his dreams that night, and how he thought they might relate to the future target he would be shown: “I feel the target may be involved with politics in some way and have something to do with authority-type figures…” After this statement was fully complete and all his dreams had been recorded, the random target experience was selected from the target pool, using a random process. It was titled “Police” and it consisted of “slides showing police on foot, on motorcycles, and in patrol cars. The police were shown arresting people, giving tickets and enforcing the law through both violent and non-violent means. The slides were accompanied by theme music from various James Bond films.”

Notice that if this were a single experience, we would not call it precognitive – there are not enough exact correspondences. But independent judges were able to match the theme to the slides and music of this selected “Police” target experience, and did not match the same theme to other slides and music of the non-selected experiences. And they were able to do this relatively consistently throughout two studies, with each set of dreams. So, this is an example of how controlled studies can reveal precognition in a convincing way, even when a single example would not impress anyone.

Other methods of testing for the accuracy of precognition address different questions. Instead of asking if a particular person can consistently demonstrate precognitive ability, you might ask if everyone has some level of precognitive ability. In that case you’d use a relatively large population of participants, instead of a single participant. And if your opinion were that precognition is generally accessed unconsciously, only to erupt into consciousness at opportune times, you’d do experiments that would focus on unconscious behaviour rather than conscious attempts to predict the future. That’s primarily how Dr Mossbridge, her colleagues and many researchers before them have done things for decades.

Instead of going through all the results from this way of testing precognition, here is a summary: there is statistically impressive evidence for both conscious and unconscious precognition, based on careful studies.[m] One additional piece of information that is critical for you to know in your quest to become a Positive Precog is that unconscious precognition – in other words, precognition that we don’t notice in our daily lives because we’re not conscious of it – seems to be abundant and relatively commonplace. One example of unconscious precognition is responding faster when a word revealed after you respond matches a picture that you see before you respond.[n] In this case, the future word seems to have strengthened people’s response to the picture, even though the word comes after both the picture and the response, and even though they have no idea this is happening.

Another example is the physiological changes that occur consistently before emotional events (and not before boring events). These are changes in heart rate, sweat, respiration and behaviour, and they occur seconds before events artificially created in the lab and randomly selected. And they happen in people as well as animals.[p]

Because of these recent results, precognition is becoming a hot topic in the research world. A quick Google Scholar search through the past two decades of research (1998–2018) turns up 1,570 articles containing the words “precognitive” and “research” and “precognition”. In the 20 years before that, only 431 results show up for the same search.

This doesn’t mean that the science of precognition is uncontroversial. Check any Wikipedia entry for any of the researchers we have discussed here – or just read the entry for “precognition”, and you will see that the mainstream scientific view, which Wikipedia represents well, is: “As with other forms of extrasensory perception, there is no reliable scientific evidence that precognition is a real ability possessed by anyone and it is widely considered to be pseudoscience. Specifically, precognition appears to violate the principle that an effect cannot occur before its cause.”[r]

Regardless of what Wikipedia editors think about precognition (and Julia has tried to correct the Wikipedia record a few times without success, as have others[s]), the laboratory evidence for precognition was strong enough back in 1996 that Dr Jessica Utts, who was at that time a Professor of Statistics at University of California at Davis, and who was asked by the US Congress to examine the evidence for psychic skills based on classified work supported by the US government, stated, “Precognition, in which the answer is known to no one until a future time, appears to work quite well.”[t] As she has examined more evidence related to precognition over the past two decades, she has stood by this statement, even when she became the President of the American Statistical Association in 2016.[v] In other words, a person who actually performed the research and knows statistics disagrees with Wikipedia editors. Whom should we believe? We’ll let you decide.

Julia could spend a long time talking about all the elegant methods that have been developed over the years to test for precognition in the lab, but Theresa has reminded her that most readers are probably eager now to get to the next part – about how to improve your precognitive abilities and make any precognitive experiences you already have work for you. So, the previous paragraphs are offered as a very brief summary of some of the most important things that Dr Mossbridge would like to say about the basic science of precognition. There are many books that will take you more deeply into the fascinating world of scientific research into precognition,[6] and we will come back to some of the scientific insights critical for developing precognitive abilities in Part 2.

Future present

After reading Part 1, you know more about precognition research than most people on the planet. You know that spontaneous precognitive experiences are quite common, you know how to figure out whether your experiences might be genuinely precognitive, and you have a sense of the kinds of experiments precognition researchers use to examine the phenomenon. Test your knowledge on the Part 1 Quiz at the Premonition Code website, and impress your friends! Or just yourself!

Heading into Part 2, we want you to feel confident that the common experience of having a premonition has been investigated scientifically in many ways, and the overwhelming evidence is that precognition exists. In Part 2, we will start from the assumption that precognition is real, and we’ll teach you to develop your precognition in a way that we believe will help support your happiness and growth. We will also lead you toward some places on the Premonition Code website where you can try your hand at testing your abilities free of charge, and you can return to this online spot to see how your abilities progress as you work through Part 2. The whole process is all in the service of becoming a Positive Precog. We’re so excited to share it with you, and show you that your future can be present in your dreams and waking visions.

5 Note that there is a problem with these types of studies, because memory drops off with the delay between the dream and a subsequent event. This might be a confounding factor because a year after a dream you might forget you had the dream even if an event is closely related to it.[e]

6 In addition to the resources already cited in this chapter, you will find some recommended reading for the interested student of precognition research in Appendix B.

PART 2

DECODING PRECOGNITION

CHAPTER 4

ABOUT TIME

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

Our Precarious Habitat, Marie Curie

“It is very hard to resist the view that the subliminal self exists outside temporal conditions as we know them, or at any rate exists in a different kind of time. Time, as we know it, may be a special condition applying only to the physical world or to our conscious appreciation of it.”

George Tyrrell[a]

It’s about time we told you how we plan to help you become a Positive Precog. After all, you’ve become familiar with the science of precognition in the past three chapters, so you’re ready. Let’s dive right in then and take a look at two Positive Precogs we know. After that, we’ll discuss what the research tells us about personality traits and characteristics related to precognition abilities. The idea here is for you to understand ways in which you are suited to undertake the Positive Precog training programme.

“Mark”: a glimpse of life as a Positive Precog

Mark[7] is fun, interesting, joyful, weird and forever kind. He likes hanging out with his friends to make videos about the quirkiness of daily life, and he is involved in a theatre troupe in his hometown. He also plays five-string banjo, not to perform, but just because he likes it. Mark is a meditator – he finds that meditating each day for 20 to 30 minutes works best for him, and on the days that he doesn’t meditate, he misses it. When he was first developing his Positive Precog skills, he kept a notebook of all the “coincidences” that he noticed in his life. But now, sensing future possibilities is second nature and he simply goes with the flow.

Mark is an intuitive thinker; he doesn’t spend too much time analysing his decisions. Instead, he gets a good feeling about a life choice, and he has learned to trust that feeling. Even so, if that choice turns out to have a negative impact on himself or someone else, he shifts his perspective easily and tries to make things right. Friends seek him out for counsel; they know he’s often right, and, even more importantly, he’s compassionate, so even if he’s wrong about his advice, they know he’ll be kind and want to help push them in a positive direction.

Mark uses his precognitive gifts in two ways – first, to help make good life decisions, and second, as a consultant for Fortune 500 companies: US corporations that rank in the top 500 for revenue. Mark is hired by these organizations to give advice about future, seemingly unpredictable, possibilities. He gets more requests than he accepts, because he always makes sure that the individual or company contracting for his work is up to his ethical standards and understands that he cannot promise 100 per cent accuracy. Mark’s track record is decent enough for this kind of thing that he now makes about half of his living as a Positive Precog. Of course, sometimes he works for free, when a detective or police department asks him to predict where a criminal will be next, or where a missing person can be found. Mark has helped solve enough crimes and saved enough children from abductors that he feels good about this volunteer work.

Mark never claims he’s 100 per cent correct, and he never lies about what he senses. When something is not clear, he says so. He just reports what he “gets” intuitively, nothing more. That’s why he’s so successful and happy. He is honest and true to himself and with others. Mark is what we call a successful Positive Precog, because he’s satisfied with his ethical, kind and happy life.

“Rachel”: another look at life as a Positive Precog

Rachel[8] is spontaneous, loving and altruistic. She is absolutely fascinated by all things unusual and has just started her own podcast in which she invites people she admires to talk about their paranormal research. She is never happier than when spending time with her family and the ten dogs that they own. She is terminally curious and loves to learn. She has not just one but three academic degrees. She is also a fully qualified yoga instructor and her weekly classes are always oversubscribed. She believes yoga helps her enter a state of flow in which being creative, energized and sensing the potential of the future feels natural and effortless to her.

A careers advisor at a prestigious university, Rachel sees her work not as a job but as a vocation and an undercover opportunity for her to use her ability to sense the future in a really positive way that can help others. She believes that within every one of the students who consult with her there is unlimited potential and it is her job to help them discover and then believe in that potential within themselves. Over the years, Rachel’s ability to be uncannily accurate about the ideal future career choice for students who work with her has earned her a reputation as a “psychic”, but she would be the first to say that she doesn’t see herself in that way. She simply trusts her intuition about people and sees the highest possible version of them and what they might be doing. She admits that sometimes she may get it wrong and ultimately all she can do is offer her advice based on what she senses about the future of a student. The decision about what direction their lives should take is ultimately up to them.

Above all, Rachel is unflinchingly honest and dependable. People simply trust her, and their trust is justified. After spending time with her, people leave feeling empowered; their lives enriched.

The “REACH” principles for Positive Precogs

These character sketches were intended to show you samples of what your life might be like as a Positive Precog, ranging from Mark’s more overt approach to Rachel’s under-the-radar approach. But of course there are as many ways to be a Positive Precog as there are to be a human being. However, all Positive Precogs strive to embody five “REACH” principles:

• Respect for the unknown

• Ethics in our use of precognition

• Accuracy of our precognitive skills

• Compassion for ourselves and others

• Honesty in all our dealings

This is not to say Positive Precogs have to be perfect; that would be impossible and not at all desirable. When there is a belief in our own perfection there is no room for growth and evolution, and that’s not a positive or fulfilling way to live. Positive Precogs are forever learning and evolving, but along the way they are absolutely committed to being as consistent as possible in striving toward the REACH principles.

All those who strive toward the REACH principles can proudly call themselves Positive Precogs. Don’t get us wrong here: you can make money as a “psychic” without being positive or precognitive, just as you can also be a Positive Precog with precognitive skills that are imperfect. Here are two brief stories to explain what we mean.

Julia visited a “street psychic” when she was in New York City. Dr Julia Mossbrige had never visited a street psychic previously, and she thought it would be intriguing to see how that kind of session would go. After telling Julia some vague information about her personality that would be obvious to anyone who was intuitive about people, the psychic told Julia that she would never be happy in love until a curse was lifted, and the curse would be lifted only after Julia gave her $100. Needless to say, Dr Mossbridge left the psychic’s office in disgust, ready to go meet her husband, to whom she is still happily married. That so-called “psychic” failed the REACH principles: she seemed to have little respect for the unknown, no ethics, no accuracy in her precognition (or, if there was any attempt at accuracy, it failed), and little compassion or honesty.

Something similar happened to Sarah, a colleague of Theresa. Sarah visited a Tarot reader who told her a few things about her life that were largely accurate but likely to be explained by cold reading. For example, she told Sarah she was married (Sarah was wearing a wedding ring) and that Sarah had travelled extensively recently (Sarah was sporting a beautiful sun tan at the time of the reading). The reading ended with the “psychic” telling Sarah that her husband was probably going to have an affair but it was possible for Sarah to stop that happening if she signed up to her online “love guru” courses. These would help her keep her man bewitched. Sarah was extremely anxious when she shared this information with Theresa. Of course, Theresa did her best to reassure her that this wasn’t a genuine reading and strongly advised her not to sign up to the love guru scam. She didn’t and made the brave decision to talk to her husband about the reading; he was able to reassure her that this was a scam.

Now contrast all that with Tawna’s story. Tawna is an executive assistant to a coach in Southern California and is in her early thirties. She has had many precognitions, which she traces back to an early near-death experience when she almost drowned in a pool when she was not yet three years old. She feels her precognitive experiences are reflections of the events she saw when she was dead, when she remembers feeling like she was cradled in loving arms before coming back to life.

When she grew up, she realized she was able to predict the names of people she would meet and the issues in their lives. She then became interested in how the unconditional love that she remembered from her near-death experience might help her harness her precognitive abilities to help people.

One day Tawna was sick and taking a nap in a chair. She woke up after a dream that shook her to her core. In the dream, Tawna was seeing through someone else’s eyes, using someone else’s body. This person was driving, going very fast, and they turned to the left, going too fast around a curve. A woman in the passenger seat was saying, “Careful, careful!” But the person driving sped up, saying, “No, I got this.” Tawna felt herself lose consciousness and fall out of the person’s body. She woke up and felt like she was about to faint; the dream was very realistic, and she was confident that she needed to take it seriously. She called her sister to ask if she or her husband would be on the road that day, and to tell them to drive carefully. She posted her dream on Facebook for all her friends to see. She told everyone she knew to drive carefully. Despite her efforts, eight hours later, one of her friends was crossing the street and an SUV killed her on impact.

Tawna’s precognitive skills were excellent. They didn’t tell her who would be hurt, but she knew enough to take her dream seriously and act on what she did know. She told her loved ones about her dream, indicating that it wasn’t a 100 per cent sure thing, but it was nonetheless important just to consider being careful around cars on that day. Tawna strives for the REACH principles and can easily consider herself a Positive Precog.

Amanda, who wrote to Theresa after reading one of her books, has another compelling Positive Precog story. Over the years she has discovered that her dreams often play out in real life, and wherever possible she tries to use the information she gets in her sleep to make a positive difference in her life or in the lives of others. She also had a powerful experience of a waking precognition five years ago. On that occasion she went to bed one night and woke up feeling considerable pain on the right side of her face. At first, she worried that she might have had a stroke, but a test of her blood pressure showed that not to be the case. The pain stayed with her for several hours but eventually it faded.

The next morning Amanda rang her mother to tell her about the pain she had experienced. She urged her mother to visit the doctor to check her blood pressure, which she duly did, only to be told everything was fine. Amanda forgot all about the experience until the day afterwards when she got a phone call from her daughter’s school. Her daughter had been involved in an incident during a chemistry class. An experiment had gone wrong and her daughter’s hair had caught fire, burning the right side of her face. It took two years for the scars to finally disappear, and to this day Amanda believes she sensed the pain her daughter went through before it happened. Although there was nothing she could have done to prevent it happening, knowing that she had sensed the accident was a reminder to her that when there is love between people, that love perhaps creates an invisible bond that can transcend time.

We picked these extremes to be polar opposites for a reason. The point is simple. Work toward embodying the REACH principles and everyone, including you, will be happier for it. We will return to these principles throughout Part 2, especially in Chapter 6, where we discuss the changes you can expect in your life as you pursue your Positive Precog practice. For now, we will move on to trying to understand what makes Positive Precogs tick.

Positive Precogs and personality types

While all Positive Precogs are unique, there are certain personality, physiology and behaviour traits that seem to facilitate performance on laboratory precognition tasks. We’ll outline them here briefly, but first we want to ask you to take them all with a grain of salt. That’s because even when a trait is correlated to precognitive ability across multiple studies, the relationships are not ever all-or-none. They just show that there tends to be some association between the trait and precognitive skill. Okay? Grain of salt! Now that we have your agreement on that, let’s discover what kinds of traits might potentially enhance your pursuit of accurate and useful precognition.

Here’s a cheat sheet to guide our discussion. Precognitive skills in the lab have been consistently related to variations in each of these:

• Openness to experience

• Extraversion

• Belief in precognition

Openness to experience and extraversion, two of the “Big 5” personality traits (the others are conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism), have been associated with precognitive experience and performance across several studies, including meta-analyses that combine many studies into one analysis.[b] Someone who is “open to experience” is a person who appreciates art and creative expression; values emotion, adventure, quirky or unusual ideas; is curious and seeks knowledge; and strives to have a variety of experiences in their life. Someone who is “extraverted” is a person who is assertive, sociable and seeks stimulation when around other people.

We want to underscore that most studies show a weak but positive relationship between these personality traits and precognition – so that means you are slightly more likely to have precognitive experiences and abilities if you’re open to experience and/or extraverted. Don’t get despondent, though, if you don’t feel this describes you. Julia certainly falls into that category most of the time. She is assertive, adventurous and sociable. Theresa, on the other hand – who, like Julia, has had experiences as a Positive Precog – doesn’t quite fit into that category. Indeed, Theresa would probably describe herself as more of a conscientious introvert – never happier than when writing her books!

So, while extraversion and willingness to take reasonable risks are two of the most studied of the traits we are looking at, the relationship is still not strong and, as Theresa’s case shows, there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to being a Positive Precog. In her own completely non-scientific research on precognition, based on the thousands of stories sent to her over the years, Theresa feels that creativity and compassion may also be common personality factors.[9] Many people who write to her have careers or lives where they are required to be highly creative and/or compassionate, for example in the performing arts, writing, teaching, counselling and the caring professions. However, Julia believes that a far more consistent correlation found in laboratory studies of precognition is that a person’s belief in precognition is associated with their performance.

So, people who believe that precognition is real score better, on average, on laboratory precognition tasks than people who think precognition is essentially coincidence.[c]

What does all this mean for you? Well, it means three important things. First, you should have even more faith that precognition is real, because it’s hard to understand how controlled laboratory experiments in precognition, using random number generators that predict a future event after a person has registered their guess, could somehow reveal consistent differences in scoring based on any type of personality traits at all. So, the fact that there is a consistent relationship between all three of these traits – openness to experience, extraversion and belief in precognition – and laboratory precognition performance suggests even more strongly that precognition is real and some people are better at it than others.

Second, it means that if you’re not open to experience or extraverted, that’s fine – we can work with that. You can still become a Positive Precog. But the data on belief in precognition as a predictor for precognition scores in the lab is so strong that it’s unlikely you can become a Positive Precog without believing in precognition, or at least believing in the possibility of precognition being a reality. Of course, at this point we assume that anyone who has read this far believes that there might be something to precognition. And that’s good enough to go down the Positive Precog road.

Thirdly, in case you’re afraid that experiencing precognition and taking it seriously means you have to believe in everything else, you can relax. People who experience precognition are not necessarily more likely to believe in witchcraft, superstition, religion, spirituality or the afterlife any more than people who do not experience precognition.[d] Of course, those people who have actually had precognitive experiences are more likely to believe in precognition itself.

There are a few less thoroughly studied traits that may be related to laboratory precognitive skill. These have been shown in at least one study to have a significant relationship with scores on precognitive tasks or other laboratory measures of precognition (like physiology). Here we’ll briefly talk about two of them: meditation practice, and gender or hormonal status.

Remember UK precognition researcher Serena Roney-Dougal, the woman who dreamed about cutting across lanes of traffic to get to safety? Well, Serena and several others did three studies with long-term meditators, 11 of whom were Tibetan Buddhist monks. She asked them to do the usual kind of conscious precognition lab experiment. They predicted what images would show up next on a computer screen, and the images to be shown were determined only after the meditators made their predictions. They found a strong correlation, especially in the Tibetan Buddhist monks, between the number of years of meditation and performance on this task.[e] In addition, another group found stronger precognitive brain activity in long-term meditators, but not a group of nonmeditators.[f] The key point here? Maybe start meditating if you want to become a Positive Precog!

Finally, gender differences – which may actually be due to differences in reproductive hormones – have been associated with performance on laboratory precognitive tasks. The picture is confusing: on some tasks, men do better; on others, women do better. On certain tasks, for women at least, their performance may depend on what stage they are in their menstrual cycles, or whether they are pregnant. So far, these results are currently under investigation in a series of experiments supported by the Bial Foundation in Portugal and being conducted by Dr Mossbridge. Although there are some interesting preliminary results, we won’t mention them here, because they could be misleading. (You can check out the Premonition Code website research section for updates on what she’s found.)[g]

Take-home messages for Positive Precogs in training? One, choose a precognitive task for your training that men and women both have succeeded at – if you continue on with our training programme, you won’t have to worry about this. Two, if you’re a woman, chart your performance with your hormonal cycles and see what you discover.

In summary, if you want to become a Positive Precog, the science so far tells us that precognition performance might be more reliable if you are sociable and open to new experiences, believe precognition is a real skill, meditate, and map your precognition performance as it relates to hormonal changes over time. None of these are absolutes, but they are parameters to play with during your Positive Precog training.

Remote viewing: precognition by another name

By the time you’ve reached this chapter, precognition has become a word you hopefully feel fairly comfortable with and a concept you are willing to consider. However, there are other names for precognition, and under certain conditions, we believe “remote viewing” is one of them. You may be familiar with the US government programme, popularly referred to by one of its code names, “Star Gate”. From 1972 to 1995, various US government agencies had the aim of matching what they believed to be a Russian programme of training psychic spies to gather intelligence.[h]

Let’s get back to the present day and introduce you to one of the world’s foremost experts on “remote viewing”, Dr Edwin May. Learning about his work will teach us more about remote viewing and its relationship to precognition.

In the summer of 2017, Dr Mossbridge sat in a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto, California, having lunch with Dr Edwin May. He was showing her printouts of the slides he had presented at the 2017 meeting of the Parapsychological Association in Athens, Greece.[j] Enthusiastic and frustrated at the same time, Ed asked Julia to name the most compelling evidence to support remote viewing – the ability to perceive information that is not currently available to the usual senses. She knew he wasn’t talking about the usual meta-analyses and lab studies, because they tend not to be convincing to anyone but the scientists who are willing to analyse them. So, Julia told him she believed that the best evidence is application – the evidence showing that applying these abilities actually does some good and is useful.

Ed answered, “Bingo!” and showed Julia a bar graph, each bar belonging to a government agency with which his team of “remote viewers” had worked as psychic spies. There were 19 US government agencies on the slide, including the usual suspects – Army, Navy, Secret Service, and the “alphabet” agencies such as the CIA. The height of each slide represented the number of times each agency returned to his team to task them with another spying mission. For example, the CIA returned 41 times over the years with new missions, one of the other alphabet agencies 172 times. Overall, 17 of the 19 agencies returned with new missions.[k] The question to ask yourself is: why would they do this if remote viewing was not real and useful?

The answer is, a few return missions would definitely occur, even if these sessions weren’t useful – that’s for sure. Governments all over the world try lots of different means of gathering intelligence, and they try them more than once to determine whether or not a particular method is useful. But 172 times? That’s either a sign that this “remote viewing” method Dr May’s team used was giving them good information, or they have a penchant for throwing money away. Although there is always a decent argument for the latter, the argument that the team was providing some sort of useful intelligence is supported by the fact that one of Dr May’s most celebrated remote viewers, Joe McMoneagle, received the Legion of Merit award at least partially for the work he did on Dr May’s team. The unclassified portion of that work included identifying hostages who were held during the fall of the American embassy in Iran in 1979. Among his many remarkable feats, McMoneagle also remote viewed a Russian submarine that was being built underground and correctly predicted its launch. That story is too good to pass up, so we’ll give a few details here.[m]

Joe was working at the time with one other military remote viewer for the National Security Agency. They were told that there was a very large building that was of great interest to one of the agencies, and it was not clear what was going on inside. Joe and the other viewer were not told where the building was, but they were tasked with explaining what was being done within its walls. They didn’t know that the building was in Russia or that railroad tracks were being used to bring materials inside. They also did not know that the Russia experts at the CIA had the predominant belief that an armoured vehicle was being built in that building.

Joe and his fellow remote viewer performed independent remote-viewing sessions over several weeks to determine the contents of the building. Both of them saw that the building was partially flooded on the bottom floor, and that the building contained gantries and large pieces of steel. Joe also saw bright lights from welding, and the black metal sides of something. Over the course of a few sessions, both viewers independently came to the conclusion that this was a submarine. Joe also noticed that the launch tubes on the submarine were at the front of the vessel, slanted in an unusual way. He knew that, if corroborated by other evidence, this detail would be important to the functionality of the submarine, because it meant it could launch missiles while moving. Over several more sessions, it became clear that this was a submarine almost as large as a Russian aircraft carrier, with four to five decks. Joe and his colleague were not allowed to speak to each other about their impressions during the course of the sessions, and they did not. But once they had each completed all of their sessions and had handed in their reports, they spoke to one another and realized that they’d sensed many of the same things.

Regardless of this independent corroboration, their report was met with scepticism by Robert Gates, who at the time was in charge of the Russian desk at the CIA. He wrote on top of their report something like “total fantasy” and returned it back to Joe’s group. It didn’t make sense. But Joe was upset that his work was being ignored. He felt compelled to write something like, “fantasy will be launched in 112 days” beneath Gates’s remark and he returned the report to Gates (Joe thinks it was 112 or 114 days, he doesn’t remember now).

Lieutenant Commander Jake Stewart, who seemed to believe there might be something to the report, arranged to make sure the National Security Council examined the area of interest near the time Joe predicted the launch (about four months from the time he wrote the note). What they found when they looked was that the Russians had indeed built the first Typhoon-class submarine, and had launched it from the building.

When telling this story, Joe underscores how important it was for the remote viewers not to know the preliminary conclusions about these future events. When a question is related to national security, a good remote viewer does not want to be filled with possibly misleading ideas about the answer.m

But why are we talking about remote viewing in a book about precognition? First, it’s because remote viewing an event not known until the future is not really what it sounds like – as if you see something far away in space. Instead, here we are addressing the type of remote viewing in which you perceive (not necessarily “see”) something in another location in time. When the future event is unknown, remote viewing is in large part what we call controlled precognition.

The idea that remote viewing of unknown future events is probably the same as controlled precognition comes from several sources. First, from listening to the experiences of several remote viewers and remote-viewing researchers that Julia has engaged with over the past decade, including viewers and investigators Joe McMoneagle, Paul Smith, Marty Rosenblatt, Courtney Brown, Brett Stuart, John Vivanco (all of their websites are provided in Appendix B), as well as academic researchers Dr Ed May,[n] Brenda Dunne,[p] Dr Roger Nelson,[r] Stephan Schwartz[s] and Dr Dean Radin.[t]

The second source for the idea that remote viewing of future unknown events is essentially controlled precognition is scientific evidence. Even though remote viewing was popularized as a telepathic-type task in which one person would go out and look at a target location and another person (the viewer) would try to describe that location,[v] scientists realized that their results were just as good, or perhaps better, when no one knew what the target was until a future time when it would be revealed.[w] In addition, many of the government-sponsored experiments in remote viewing, like Star Gate mentioned above, had to be precognitive because that the targets were not chosen until the remote viewings were finished.[x]

This equivalence between remote viewing the unknown future and controlled precognition is useful for anyone who wants to become a Positive Precog, because if you accept this equivalence, there are decades of remote-viewing experience to learn from in terms of how to control and improve your precognitive ability. In the next chapter, we’ll take you through our best consolidation of this experience when we show you how to actually practise controlled precognition. Exciting times ahead!

To prepare you fully, we’re going to talk now about a key skill you’ll need before you dive into the next chapter. It’s called the Higher-Self Handshake.

The Higher-Self Handshake

Aside from the wealth of knowledge from the world of remote viewing, the Positive Precog training programme also relies on the Higher-Self Handshake, an agreement you’ll make with your “higher self”. This might sound New Age, but we promise it’s not. It is a serious agreement you will make every time you practise controlled precognition between your conscious mind (what you might think of as yourself, your ego, your everyday waking awareness) and what has been called your superconscious mind[y] – the part that can process nonconscious information and use the thoughts, dreams and visions that result to guide you intelligently toward a positive outcome.

We call the superconscious mind your “higher self” because every time we imagine the “superconscious” we picture a mind flying through the air with a red cape, and flight isn’t a skill that the superconscious has. “Higher self” evokes an image of a wise part of ourselves, floating above us, giving us good ideas. That’s a more useful image.

In the next chapter, we’re taking you step-by-step through the process of practising controlled precognition. But, to follow those steps, you need to make a cooperative agreement between your conscious mind and your higher self. The Higher-Self Handshake is so important because controlled precognition is all about trying to figure out what is actually true about a target future event that is not yet known. The conscious mind is very used to knowing something about what it’s trying to predict – we spend a lot of our everyday waking lives making conscious decisions based on a little bit of information. We’re good at that – it’s cloudy, but there are no thunder rumbles, and the weather calls for only a 40 per cent chance of rain – so we decide it’s likely we’ll be safe without an umbrella.

But controlled precognition is a completely different animal. There is zero logical information to draw from, zero information from our senses in the present moment, zero information from our memories of the past. Most of us don’t usually ask our conscious minds to work with situations like this any more than just taking a “wild guess” or “stab in the dark”. So, the conscious mind likes to decide it has more information that it has, because that’s how it is most comfortable. During attempts at controlled precognition, the conscious mind has a tendency to overindulge in its own ideas about what is going on – a process that some call “filling in the blanks”, or, to use a more technical term, “analytical overlay”.[z]

Meanwhile, there are a bunch of unconscious thought processes that inform and educate your higher self, and these provide a bunch of information, process bits and pieces of data in parallel, and handle complex decisionmaking processes.aa Those are really useful skills! But are they great for editing out information that seems related to a task but is actually unrelated? Nope. Are they good for keeping you focused on a particular task and not offering up ideas that are off-task? Not at all. Your higher self is great at solving difficult problems that seem impossible to your conscious mind, including predicting future events (see the scientific evidence in Chapter 3), but it needs the direction and discipline of your conscious mind to be successful at controlled precognition.

This is the critical purpose of the Higher-Self Handshake: to get both parts of you agreeing that each will do what they do best, and hand off the results to the other part. There is a work-sharing situation going on, and it’s best for you to understand that essential collaboration now, before going into the actual work. In this work breakdown, you have what’s called a “task” – which is always the same, really. It’s to accurately predict a future event. You also have “information” – the sensory and conceptual information that comes in[10] about that event.

Given those two things, here’s a list of the work required, broken into each part’s duties:

The conscious mind:

• Sets the intention for a task

• Keeps focus on the task

• Notices any “filling in the blanks” and marks it down

• Discerns whether input from the higher self is useful or not

The higher self:

• Connects to the target

• Learns sensory and conceptual information

• Reports all the information to the conscious mind

As you can see, both your conscious mind and your higher self will need to do the best they can do at their parts of the work breakdown. The Higher-Self Handshake is all about opening up a clear communication channel between these two. To do that, you’ll use intention. You’ll use intention a lot in your work as a Positive Precog, so it’s worth pointing it out now – intention is the way almost everything gets done when it comes to asking your mind to do something. Your mind is not a physical thing – you can’t push or pull your mind. Your brain is physical, but we have no idea where to push or pull your brain to get precognition to work – so you will just have to use what you have, which is your will or intention. You will use it to task your mind and shape what happens as best you can.

Let’s do that right now, in the Higher-Self Handshake exercise. Once you do this exercise, you’ll truly be a Positive Precog in training. In addition to aiming for the REACH principles we’ve already discussed, this means you will need something very practical – a notebook or recording device (cellphones work great) on which you can record your experiences. Get that now, before you do this exercise, so you’re ready to record your experience once you are done with it.

EXERCISE: THE HIGHER-SELF HANDSHAKE

What you need: a place to record your experience, a quiet place
Time requirement: 1–5 minutes

1. Close your eyes and imagine your “higher self” in front of you. If this sounds silly, that’s fine. Who cares? It’s your imagination. It doesn’t have to be real. It’s just a visual representation of a part of yourself that we all know exists – the part that processes nonconscious information and helps you solve problems. Go ahead and imagine it as a tomato or a superhero or a unicorn that barfs rainbows.* Whatever you feel best represents your higher self, imagine it in front of you.

2. Once you have an image of your higher self, sit or stand across from it as your conscious self. Remind yourself, as your conscious self, that you have some very important skills, and that your higher self has other important skills. Both are necessary. Ask your higher self to shake your hand and agree that each of you will use your own skills, and let the other one use theirs. Put out your hand and imagine shaking on it.

3. If your higher self agrees to shake, great! If not, ask your higher self what assurance it needs before it is willing to be in agreement and work together with you. Give your higher self that assurance.

4. You’re done! That’s the Higher-Self Handshake! Everyone does what they’re best at and agrees to work together. Write down a quick note of how it felt and what you learned.

* Julia imagines her higher self as a telepathic squirrel. Theresa’s higher self is (predictably, given the spiritual books she writes) a purple and brilliantly white unicorn – with wings!

In the next chapter, we’ll shorten the Higher-Self Handshake to a simple intention stating that your higher self and your conscious mind will work together to complete the given task. For now, congratulations! You’re a Positive Precog in training.

One last step before diving in

Okay, it seems like we’ll never get there, but trust us, it’s almost time. Yet this is really critical – your higher self and your conscious mind should start working together even before you practise your first controlled precognition task. How? By paying attention to spontaneous precognitive events and insights. It’s easy – and it’s important. From now on, commit to yourself that each day you will write down or record these three things in your notebook or on your device:

1. Dreams (put your notebook next to your bed so you can easily record your dreams in the morning) and any events that they seem to predict

2. Premonition experiences

3. Strong impulses or insights related to future events

By recording these spontaneous experiences related to precognition, you are setting yourself up for a much better result when you begin practising controlled precognition – in two ways.

First, you will learn to differentiate between dreams, experiences, impulses and insights that are accurately predictive of future events and those that are not.

Second, you will be telling your higher self that you seriously want to start listening to what it can tell you – you are improving the communication channel with it. This is hugely important, because the more it sees you are taking it seriously, the more your higher self will want to work with you. Pay attention, write down what you experience, sift through the data – do this and you’re well on your way to launching into a successful Positive Precog training programme.

Rewind

You might want to dive directly into the work in the next chapter, and that’s great – enthusiasm counts! But it’s worth reminding yourself of what you’ve learned in this chapter already.

First, we described the Positive Precog REACH principles:

• Respect for the unknown

• Ethics in our use of precognition

• Accuracy of our precognitive skills

• Compassion for ourselves and others

• Honesty in all our dealings

Next, we explained some of the scientific results related to personality traits and precognition and we talked about how these aren’t wholly reliable predictors of success. We also described remote viewing and we talked about how it is essentially the same thing as controlled precognition as long as the future event is unknown at the time of the viewing. We introduced the Higher-Self Handshake, and we tried to nag you to get a notebook (or a note-taking recording device) and to use it to record your potentially precognitive experiences.

It is likely that, given the training programme we have here, you will be able to get at least basic information about future events that are not known at the time you are getting the information. In other words, it’s likely you can do some accurate controlled precognition. That’s why we care about things like the REACH principles and the Higher-Self Handshake. We don’t want you to just be able to get the information. We want you to learn how to use that information skilfully, ethically, and in a way that helps you live a life that feels more full and complete than your life feels now.

That’s why all this matters to us; that’s why we’re here, writing this book, talking with you. We strongly believe there is a powerful spiritual dimension to our lives. When we constructively engage with it, this dimension allows the peace that surpasses all understanding to ripple through us, across time.

7 Because of the nature of his work, “Mark” has to remain anonymous.

8 Also a pseudonym for confidentiality reasons.

9 There is some evidence for creativity and empathy as traits related to precognition, but this evidence is not well replicated, and some of it relates more broadly to other psychic skills, like telepathy.

10 From wherever it comes; you can speculate based on Chapters 2 and 3.

CHAPTER 5

TIME AFTER TIME

We must give up the insane illusion that a conscious self, however virtuous and however intelligent, can do its work singlehanded and without assistance.

The Education of an Amphibia, Aldous Huxley

“Some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth.”

Van Veen in Ada, Vladimir Nabokov

At this point, we are hoping that we’ve got you curious enough that you’ve experimented with the Higher-Self Handshake and are starting to record your synchronicities, intuitions, insights, dreams and premonitions in your Positive Precog notebook. If so, you are now ready to begin the Positive Precog training programme.

The Positive Precog Training Programme

Welcome to the true heart of The Premonition Code. We are excited because we have created a way for you to get a sense of precognition for yourself. There are many books about being psychic and doing remote viewing on the market, but as far as we know this is the first time a method for controlled precognition has been taught alongside a scientifically sound practice platform. We’re speaking of our Premonition Code website (www.thepremonitioncode.com), which provides a training and experimental platform that follows the instructions in this book. Further, with our users’ permission, Dr Mossbridge and colleagues will harness the controlled precognition sessions available on the website for scientific analysis.

In 1964, James Randi, a Canadian-American magician and sceptic, famously set up the One Million Dollar Paranormal challenge,[a] in which he offered $1 million to anyone who could demonstrate consistent psychic ability. Although over a thousand people have applied to take it since then, none were successful, and the challenge was terminated in 2015. Over the years, Theresa has lost count of the number of times people have contacted her and held up the unfulfilled Randi challenge as “proof” that psychic abilities are not real, and anyone who claims to have those abilities is a fraud. Until Theresa discovered the work of scientists researching precognition, such as Julia, there was little she could say in reply that would speak to these people from a logical, scientific perspective. Dr Mossbridge’s controlled precognition training in this chapter is a game-changer. It aims to not just answer but perhaps replace the Randi challenge, and, more importantly, creates a scientifically sound way for anyone to practise the type of precognition that has been used for years in the US government. Anyone who tries it and joins our Premonition Code website will have the opportunity to become part of scientific experiments into the reality of precognition.

Whether you plan to try controlled precognition for the first time or whether you are hoping to get your already existing precognition skills under control, this chapter is for you. It’s a “how-to” chapter describing the best step-by-step process that we know of for training you in controlled precognition from a scientific perspective. However, if right now you are only interested in the ideas related to precognition and being a Positive Precog, and you want to learn more about these, please move on to Chapter 6, as controlled precognition practice will require time and deep focus and concentration. You can always come back to practise here when you’re ready.

Precaution

What needs to be pointed out before we go further is that this work can be disquieting and disorienting if too much information about the future floods in, or strange and inaccurate information shows up. If too much accurate information shows up at first, it can lead certain people to become delusional in their thinking. This is especially true for people who have already had multiple spontaneous precognitive experiences, or for people who have a family or personal history of mental illness. This is our warning to you below, and it’s important enough that we put it in bold type.

WARNING

We are going to take you through a process that will put you in touch with deeper parts of yourself and allow you to access information that is normally not thought to be accessible. This work can be surprisingly transformative. It requires a positive, loving, supportive environment. Please know that if you feel disquieted, delusional or disoriented as a result of doing these steps, you should take a break immediately and make sure your environment is supportive. If you need to check out your emotional and psychological health with a professional, please do that, then come back to these steps only if and when you feel ready. You can still be a Positive Precog in training and take a lifetime to complete the first step. What is most important is that you feel safe, psychologically healthy and positive in this work. In fact, controlled precognition likely gives the most accurate results when you are feeling safe, psychologically healthy and positive.

Precog in progress

As we discussed in Chapter 4, what we present here is drawn from anecdotal evidence collated by Theresa, scientific reports, casual discussions, training programmes (especially those by John Vivanco[b] and Joe McMoneagle[c]), and Dr Mossbridge’s own experience in learning and using controlled precognition for practical use. What’s inspiring to us is that when people do these steps in order, correctly and regularly, they don’t just become more intuitive about their future, they also begin to experience positive impacts in multiple areas of their lives (see Chapter 6). We think this is because people form a closer connection with their higher self, or superconscious mind, each time they work through these steps. That is why the subtitle for this book is “How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life” – because we’ve observed that it really can.

These steps will not work perfectly for everyone. So once you try this suggested method a few times, you will need to adjust anything that seems to not work well for you, until you’ve got something that does. In other words, you’re the experimental participant, dutifully going through the steps of each of the exercises we’ll give you. Simultaneously, you are also the scientist. You must figure out what does and doesn’t work for you, making adjustments as your experiments go along.

As long as you understand that you must play an active part in making sure that you are able to be positive, calm and grounded in this process, and that you must adjust what we offer you so that it works for you, let’s begin.

Six steps to every controlled precognition

The Positive Precog training programme is a series of six practical steps that you will practise repeatedly, with the goal of being able to use controlled precognition to receive information from the future. As you practise these steps, you will become more skilled and start to learn more and more about how you view future events.

The Six Steps:

Step 1: Prepare

Step 2: Reverse the polarity

Step 3: Connect to the target

Step 4: Learn and discern

Step 5: Disconnect from the target

Step 6: Experience the target

In this chapter, we will walk you through each of these steps and tell you how to use the Premonition Code website to practise them. What we can’t tell you is how the precognition part actually works, and the reason for that is simple. We don’t know (and neither does anyone else) exactly how the information you will receive is given to your higher self, nor can we tell you how your conscious mind will know how to edit this information and keep your higher self on track. The mechanics of what is actually going on are not clear, but how to do basic controlled precognition is clear, and that is what we are going to help you learn. It will then be up to you to practise the steps regularly, for as long as you want to become a Positive Precog.

You need to think of these six steps as your foundation, the starting point for your life as a Positive Precog. To explain with a metaphor – if you wanted to learn to play the piano, your starting point would be practising scales every single day so you could build greater and greater speed and skill. It’s exactly the same here. Scales aren’t really musical pieces, but they help train your mind and your fingers to master the music you want to play. In the same way, the training in this chapter isn’t going to predict your future, but if you keep practising these six steps, over time you will find yourself using the skills you develop here to actually start to sense the future in your daily life.

Now that you understand the roadmap, we’ll move on to describing what to do in each step, followed by a box summarizing each step for easy reference. For an actual stepby-step example of an imperfect but representative controlled precognition session by Dr Mossbridge, please see Appendix A.

Step 1: Prepare

This step is the foundation that supports and underlies all the other steps. You need to prepare practically, physically and mentally for the next five steps, and without this all-important preparation, you won’t achieve positive results.

Practical Preparation: You need several things for your practical preparation:

•  15–30 minutes set aside

•  plenty of blank paper

•  a pen

•  a writing surface

•  a chair or standing desk

•  your choice of optional relaxing music[11]

•  a task

Making the time and assembling the other things – that’s easy. But what do we mean by your task? It turns out that every time you do a controlled precognition exercise, the task is always the same: to accurately describe a target you will experience in the future.

So, what can this target be? First and foremost, it has to be something that you can’t predict using any means other than precognition. Also, for now, avoid letters or numbers, which are too difficult to start with (though you can gradually learn to get them as well). In any case, while you don’t want to know exactly what your target is ahead of time through any usual means, you do need to have a plan about how you will eventually find out about your target in the future. If this sounds confusing, don’t worry. We already have a plan for you.

We’ve stocked the Premonition Code website with hundreds of photographs, and one of them will be your target. Specifically, it’ll be the one that shows up in Step 6. Don’t worry, that will make sense when you get to Step 6 (“Experience the target”). For now, just know that at the website, we already have a plan for you to experience your target in the future, and it is impossible for you to have any practical idea what that target will be until you get to Step 6, even if you turn ahead to that page now.

There are many ways to arrange appropriate targets; the Premonition Code website is just an easily accessible one that is specifically designed to coach you through these steps. But regardless of your plan to choose your target, we have to repeat here that the target must be randomly selected. You might be tempted to ask a friend to pick a paragraph out of an audiobook and send it to you. Or you could ask that friend to send you a random video from YouTube. These might seem like good random targets, but the problem with targets selected in this way is that you know your friend well, so you might be able to predict the kinds of topics or videos they would choose to send you when left to their own devices. In this case you won’t be practising controlled precognition so much as educated guessing.

Educated guessing is useful, but here we are trying to train you, in a controlled way, to get information from a target that is otherwise unpredictable. We are training you to become Positive Precogs, not clever guessers, and if you don’t stick to random targets, you might be training skills other than precognition. Just use random targets that are not known by anyone until the future, and if you get good at predicting them, you’ll know you’ve improved in controlled precognition and not just educated guessing.

Physical Preparation: You need to make yourself comfortable, so your body isn’t distracting you from your controlled precognition session.

Try out your pen – do you enjoy the way it rolls over the paper? You’re going to be doing some writing and drawing, so make sure your pen is one you enjoy using. Is your chair comfortable? If not, swap it out for a better one if possible. If you choose to listen to music or brain entrainment sounds, turn your sounds on, and set the volume to a comfortable level. Clear your writing surface of everything distracting, and just keep the paper and pen in front of you.

Now write at the top centre of your page a few words about how you feel physically right now. Writing down how you feel now will be useful so that later, when you’ve done a lot of controlled precognition sessions, you can discover that your best work is when you’ve just eaten dinner, or had some exercise, or whatever. It’ll help you track what works best for you. If you’re female, you might consider writing down where you are in your menstrual/hormonal cycle.

Mental Preparation: Your mental preparation is to ground yourself in the present moment.

First, write the date, exact time and time zone at the top right of the piece of paper. Next, take account of how you feel mentally and emotionally, and write a few words about that beneath the words you wrote about your physical state.

CONTROLLED PRECOGNITION CHECKPOINT:
STEP 1 – PREPARE

1. Practical Preparation:

a. Set aside 15–30 minutes
b. Get paper, pen, writing surface, chair or standing desk
c. Choose optional audio and headphones
d. Select your task (a plan for how you will get a target)

2. Physical Preparation:

a. Make yourself as comfortable as possible
b. Try out your pen to ensure you like the way it feels
c. At the centre top of a piece of paper, write how you feel physically

3. Mental Preparation:

a. Write date, time and time zone in upper right of paper
b. Write how you feel mentally and emotionally under your comments about your physical state (2c)

Step 2: Reverse the polarity

In this step, you write down an intention that supports you in “reversing the polarity” – shifting the focus from acting to receiving. For so much of our lives, we are in a “doing” mode. We feel we need to take action to get things done, and of course in many cases action is the only way forward – but not always. Sometimes we have to reverse the polarity and just receive. This is one of those times.

The idea is first to reverse the usual polarity of making effort in your daily life and thinking you are in control of the outcome. Next, replace that habit with receptivity to whatever appears. This “reverse the polarity” practice is the essential next step in a controlled precognition session, because it allows your superconscious or higher self to communicate with your conscious mind.

At first, it isn’t always easy to “let go” and enter a receptive mode, so it works best to create an intention designed to help you reverse the polarity. This intention should also contain a summarized version of the Higher-Self Handshake (Chapter 4). Go ahead and write down this combined intention, right under where you wrote about your mental and emotional state.

I am letting myself go into receiving mode to receive exactly the right information about the target during this controlled precognition session. I allow my conscious mind and my higher self to do exactly their correct jobs and only their correct jobs.

As you get more practised, you might end up changing the words around, but try this wording to begin with. See if you can feel a shift as you move into a receiving mode, but also please know that it’s okay if you don’t feel anything at first. By the way, the reason we are asking you to write down your intentions is that writing down your goals dramatically increases your chances of achieving them, even when your unconscious mind is in charge of pursuing them.[e]

CONTROLLED PRECOGNITION CHECKPOINT:
STEP 2 – REVERSE THE POLARITY

1. Make the intention to move into receiving mode and enact the Higher-Self Handshake.

2. Write down this combined intention under where you wrote your mental/emotional state.

Step 3: Connect to the target

While it is the conscious mind that makes intentions, your higher self is the one that will connect you to the target. That means you have to use your conscious mind’s role of keeping focus on the task to let your higher self have the freedom to connect to the target.

Another way of looking at this is that you have to give your conscious mind something to do so your higher self can connect to the target without being bothered or distracted by your conscious mind. You’ll do two things to allow this.

First, make up an eight-digit number to correspond to the future target for this session – for example: 4365 2821 – this is called a tag. Really, it can be any eight-digit number, but it needs to be specifically for this session. Next time, you’ll need to make up a new number.[12]

Write your tag down on the page underneath your intention. Don’t over-think this. Just write down the first eight numbers that surface in your mind. Your conscious mind needs the eight-digit tag to identify this particular controlled precognition session, and your higher self will use it to connect to and focus on the future target.

Second, draw a squiggle – don’t worry about the shape of it. Just draw it however you want. Some people call this a transit line. How it looks doesn’t matter in the slightest, but as you draw it, set the intention to “transit” (connect) to the target. Meanwhile, your higher self will also be connecting to the target, in whatever way it achieves that.

Once you are done with your transit line, get four to ten new blank sheets of paper for Step 4.

Step 4: Learn and discern

Now you’re ready to receive information about the target, from wherever your higher self gets its information. This information will come from mental impressions or sounds, smells, images, feelings of movement, and/or physical sensations like burning or tickling. You may experience all of these very clearly or they may feel like faint imaginations that go flitting by. The information can also come in words or songs that appear in your mind. Regardless of how it comes, you will record the information using the steps we describe below, which include both writing down words and sketching pictures. Writing this stuff down is the “learn” part of “learn and discern”.

CONTROLLED PRECOGNITION CHECKPOINT:
STEP 3 – CONNECT TO THE TARGET

1. Make up a new eight-digit tag for this session and put it under your intention.

2. Under the tag or next to it, draw a transit line (squiggle) and as you do, mentally intend to connect to the target.

3. Get 4–10 blank sheets of paper ready for Step 4.

The “discern” part is what happens right after you get each piece of information. Immediately after each piece of information comes in, and after recording it, discern whether that piece of information is something that is truly coming from your higher self or whether it is what we call “analytical overlay”. Analytical overlay, or AOL for short, is a “filling-inthe-blanks” process that usually ends in a firm belief about the target that is woefully incorrect.

For example, let’s say you are sensing things like: red, round, shiny. And you draw a picture of an image that’s coming to you – it’s a sphere, bright red, with nothing around it. Given this situation, your conscious mind might say “it’s obviously an apple” and you might be tempted to put “apple” on your list of words and draw a stem on a circle in your sketch. But you don’t sense a stem or an apple with your higher self – instead, the ideas of stem and apple seem to be imposed by your conscious mind, which is making a deduction based on what you’ve already sensed. If you are properly discerning, you will write down something like “My conscious mind says ‘it’s an apple’” or “AOL (analytical overlay): Apple”. Then you will keep going and getting impressions from your higher self. This is good, because it turns out that the future target is later revealed to be a red balloon floating in the sky, not an apple.

If you were sure it was an apple, you might stop the session prematurely. You wouldn’t get the information that makes you later realize you might be sensing a balloon.

There are seven basic substeps within the Learn and Discern step, and we’ll describe each one in turn. You’ll learn to do scans of different elements in the target, then a general summary. Don’t worry – it may sound complicated, but you will have examples of each step (Appendix A), and soon you will find the whole process both easy and quick.

Having said that, the first few times, don’t rush through here. Take your time. Most practised Positive Precogs can do a full controlled precognition session in 10–15 minutes. However, the first few times you do it, it will take a bit longer.

Step 4.1 Begin your scan

In this step, you will focus on just one element of the target – the element that you intuitively and quickly select by drawing an ideogram – a miniature squiggle that represents one of the eight basic types of elements in a target (Figure 3). Ideograms are meant to quickly tap into your higher self’s bounty of information about the future to give you a sense of an aspect of the target area to explore.

• On a new sheet of paper, title the page “Scan-1” (on subsequent scans, label Scan-2, Scan-3, etc).

• Write the tag in the upper left corner.

• Next to the tag, without thinking, draw a small ideogram from the set of ideograms shown in Figure 3 or your own list.

Figure 3 Examples of quick, miniature squiggles or “ideograms” used to connect intuitively with your future target. You can use these and keep this page for reference or you can make your own. The point is to have some quick, small, simple symbols that allow you to nonverbally express the type of element of the target you are currently sensing.

Step 4.2 Sense what the ideogram represents

Once you draw your ideogram and explore it a bit, you will have a sense of what it is and what it’s not. At first you might draw a mountain ideogram but sense that it is actually vegetation. Don’t worry about being correct. Your interpretation of ideograms will improve with practice.

How will you sense what the ideogram represents? You will put your pen in and around the squiggle and each time you put your pen there, you will connect to what the ideogram represents in the target. What does it feel like? Is it squishy, sharp, open-air, closed off? Natural, alive-seeming? Moving? Still? Write anything you feel down on the paper.

Without concern about whether your ideogram was correct in terms of its stated definition, write down what you sense that this part of the target you have connected to actually is. Choose from this list:

• an animal subject (eg: human or non-human, living or dead)

• fluid (eg: ocean, river, spray from a hose, milk)

• energy (eg: movement, light, electricity, fire, sound)

• a mountain or hill (eg: natural peaked or rounded elevations)

• a human-made structure (eg: buildings, cars, dolls, pencils, ladders)

• space/sky (eg: stars, moon, clouds, other planets),

• vegetation/food (eg: flowers, trees, meat, fruit)

• an idea (eg: words, metaphors, maps, messages)

Step 4.3 Write down words/phrases associated with the ideogram

Now it’s time to continue putting your pen in and around the ideogram, each time connecting with the element of the target that it represents. What do your senses tell you? Don’t neglect sounds, smells, tastes or physical feelings. Write down any words, phrases, even song lyrics that come to you.[13] And remember – if you start to build up an opinion about what this ideogram represents, write down your opinion with “conscious mind says:” or “AOL” next to it, because any strong opinion is probably wrong at this stage.

Step 4.4 Draw any images/shapes associated with the ideogram

Sometimes an image or shape will flash in your mind – it could represent something that is dominant in the element you are focusing on, or it could represent a small portion of the element. Either way, just draw the image or shape, if one shows up in your mind, and then move on to the next step. These images or shapes are just another way of getting information about the target, and you will learn over time whether you can trust your images/shapes or not. Certain people specialize in shapes, sounds, smells, movement or words. You will find your specialties as you continue to practise with truly random targets.

Step 4.5 Connect internally with this element and ask questions of it

Sometimes it feels like a good idea to get more information about the element that you are working on after completing the previous steps. One way to do that is to imagine you are connecting to the element from the inside, essentially blending, morphing or merging with the element. Don’t worry – later on we will un-blend, un-morph and un-merge, so this situation won’t be permanent! But sometimes it’s a good way of getting information.

How do you do this? As usual, leave it up to your higher self. Just write down “merge” “morph” or “blend”[14] with the element you are working on, and then ask a question of this element, such as “why are you important to the target?” or “what is your purpose?” Write down whatever answers you get, even if the answers are strange.

Step 4.6 Go back to Step 4.1 until you feel done

Do 2–3 scans, and optionally more, until you feel done. Put each new scan on a new page, to separate out your previous impressions from your new ones. Make sure to put the tag on every scan and number your scans each time, so you can remember their order later.

Step 4.7 Summarize consistent impressions

Once you’ve done as many scans as you feel make sense for this target, get a new sheet of paper. On this page, which you can label “General Summary”, try your best to summarize your findings using a sketch and a few useful notes. What elements left you with the strongest impressions? How are things arranged? If you sensed water and a stone structure, is the stone structure on the side of a body of water or under it? Try to show the relationships you sense between all the elements you explored. Do you sense that something is on, over, under, next to, or inside something else? If so, draw the elements in their positions, to the best of your ability. Only you will ever look at this (unless you invite someone else to look), so don’t worry about your artistic ability or lack thereof!

CONTROLLED PRECOGNITION CHECKPOINT:
STEP 4 – LEARN AND DISCERN

1. Begin your scan.

a. On a new sheet of paper, write down Scan-X (X is the number of the scan in this session: 1, 2, 3, etc.).

b. Write down the tag.

c. Quickly write down an ideogram next to the tag, without thinking.

2. Sense what the ideogram represents.

a. Put your pen in the ideogram and allow yourself to sense what this ideogram feels like, writing any information that shows up.

b. Without concern about whether your original ideogram was correct, choose what the ideogram represents and write it down.

3. Write down associated words/phrases.

a. Put your pen in the ideogram and write down words or phrases that come to you.

b. If you think you know what this element is, write it down as “AOL”.

4. Draw any associated images/shapes.

5. Connect internally with this element and ask questions of it.

a. Write down “merge”, “morph” or “blend”.

b. Write down a question for the element.

c. Write down the answer(s) that come to you.

6. Go back to Step 1 and repeat 1–2 times and optionally more, until you feel done.

a. Get a new piece of paper for each scan.

b. Write the tag on each scan.

c. Once you feel you’ve completed enough scans, go to Step 7.

7. Create the General Summary.

a. Sketch the elements that are most consistent and made the biggest impressions.

b. Draw their relationships in the target.

c. Write down any words or phrases that are necessary to fully describe the target.

Step 5: Disconnect from the target

One of the alarming and disconcerting things about controlled precognition is that even if you don’t blend/merge/morph with the elements you explore in a target, they can still feel like they “stick” with you after you’re done if you don’t properly disconnect. This is not a big deal, but it can be irritating. You You will be exploring a lot of elements as you practise controlled precognition, so you really want to avoid this.

For this reason, at the end of every session, but before closing it out completely, it is crucial to disconnect from the target. Even if you haven’t connected internally with any elements in a session, it’s worth just writing “unmerge, unmorph, unblend” at the end of the session, because some people actually merge, morph and blend in their intentions without realizing it.

Once you’ve written those three words, write the tag for the session, followed by “EOS” or “End of Session”. Then draw an exit transit line, which is a squiggle made with the intention of taking you out of your controlled precognition session and disconnecting from the target.

CONTROLLED PRECOGNITION CHECKPOINT:
STEP 5 – DISCONNECT FROM THE TARGET

1. Write “unmerge, unmorph, unblend” on either the General Summary page or a new page.

2. Write the tag for the session.

3. After the tag, write EOS or “End of Session”.

4. Draw an exist transit line.

Step 6: Experience the target

In this step you’ll experience the actual target with your conscious mind for the first time. In a way, a good controlled precognition session is the reverse of normal memory. Normally, you would see a photograph and then later be able to recall certain parts of the photograph. Here, we’re calling to mind certain parts of a photograph, then later seeing a photograph. But in order to see the photograph, you first need to formally record what you saw. Otherwise, you’ll be tempted to add something to your precognition session that matches the target, and that won’t teach you how to do controlled precognition. We need stark reality to inform us on the accuracy of what can seem like ethereal work.

As we mentioned earlier, the Premonition Code website has a training area, and all you need to do to see your target is to login to the training area and tell the site you are ready for a training session. Once you pass through the steps outlined above, you will have two graphs in front of you. Each will profile two different photographs (although you won’t see the photographs yet). These graphs are specifically focused on the eight types of elements we described in Step 4.2. How much of each particular image is focused on each of those elements is represented in each graph. These graphs are paired so they are fairly different from each other. For instance, one graph might show that the photograph it represents contains mostly vegetation, while the other might profile a photo containing mostly people.

One of these graphs represents your target image, the other does not. The website will not choose which one is your target until you choose which of the profiles most accurately matches your controlled precognition session.

After you select and submit your choice between the two graphs, the website will randomly choose one of the two photographs associated with the profiles it showed you, and you will see whether you chose the correct profile.[15]

While choosing the correct profile gives you a nice feeling at the beginning of your Positive Precog training, being correct is not critical. Especially as you start your Positive Precog training, what is most critical is to understand how what you sense is related to what the target actually is. That will allow you to know what to trust, and what to discount, in future sessions. To this end, record everything you learn and any insights you have in your Positive Precog notebook.

A devoted practitioner of any skill will sometimes get frustrated with themselves, never mind their expertise. At those times, take a moment and look through our Controlled Precognition Troubleshooting Guide (see box) to sort things out and get back on track.

CONTROLLED PRECOGNITION CHECKPOINT:
STEP 6 – EXPERIENCE THE TARGET

1. Login to the training area on the Premonition Code site:www.thepremonitioncode.com

2. Move through the steps as required.

3. Choose the graph that best matches the information you recorded in your session.

4. View the selected image.

5. Record what you learned in your Positive Precog notebook.

CONTROLLED PRECOGNITION
TROUBLESHOOTING GUIDE

This handy guide can come to your aid when you’re struggling with controlled precognition.

Problem: Too much incorrect detail, fantasy thinking, analytical overlay (AOL), filling in the blanks.
Solution: Have your conscious mind instil discipline by making sure every word you write down is an adjective and not a noun and that anything you draw isn’t recognizable as a particular object, animal or person. Until things improve, you’re going only for the “feel” of something and the appropriate ideograms, and that’s it.

Problem: No information comes through, you’re drawing a blank.
Solution: Have a talk with your higher self in which you mostly listen. Really feel into what it has to say to you, and build your connection with it. It needs to trust you, and your job is to show it compassion, love and deep listening so that it will speak with you. Once you feel you have a better connection, try another controlled precognition session and pay attention to see if you are shutting down input from your higher self with any back-talk or resistance. If so, apologize and keep going.

Problem: You described a target perfectly, but it was tomorrow’s target and not today’s.
Solution 1: Go back to doing controlled precognition once a week so the signals are less likely to get crossed in time. Solution 2: Keep doing controlled precognition every day, but add an intention to your sessions about only getting information from the correct target for today.

Problem: You’ve described some targets very well, but you can’t always do that, and sometimes you’re way off.
Solution: Accept that this is the way things work with controlled precognition. Practise self-forgiveness and keep going. No one is 100 per cent accurate and most people who practise controlled precognition go through dry spells. Over time, learn to track your dry spells and consider whether there is anything that connects them – such as stress at work or home, time of day, or the point in your menstrual cycle (if you have one). Consider not practising as much during those times so you don’t frustrate yourself.

Problem: After practising controlled precognition, you feel disoriented and unhappy, obsessive or delusional.
Solution: Check in with appropriate mental health professionals, make sure you’re in a supportive environment, read Chapter 6, and consider taking a break from controlled precognition practice.

Practice makes precogs

Let’s stop for a minute and notice all the work you’ve done to arrive here. In previous chapters, you’ve read about the science of time, precognition and precognition-prone personalities.

In this chapter, you’ve learned in detail about how to do a controlled precognition session, and you can look at Appendix A to see Dr Mossbridge’s practice session.

What we can’t do for you is the most crucial piece – practise. We can’t make you do the very work that is most needed for your future as a Positive Precog. You have to want to do the work and put in the time. But what we hope we have done in this chapter is set things up to make it easy to do that work, over and over and over and over again, in a fun and informative way.

Welcome to your Positive Precog practice

The Premonition Code website is not only a place to practise your controlled precog training, it’s a place to keep track of your progress – you can see a running tally of your controlled precognition scores there every time you visit and do another exercise. And for those of you who want to try to be the best, it’s a place to see if you made the cut. The Positive Precog Hall of Fame (www.premonitioncode.com/PositivePrecogHallofFame) reveals the top Positive Precogs, based on three factors: 1) section quiz results, 2) volunteer work[16] and 3) controlled precognition accuracy scores. Finally, in the community forum portion of the website, we invite you to ask questions of other Positive Precogs and learn from them. (You will probably already have visited our website, as we’ve referred you to it several times already, but we’ll talk more about it and what it can offer you and help you with in the last chapter of the book.)

While natural talent has a large part to play in ability, practice does improve our ability to learn and discern what is accurate and what is not. So, practise, practise and practise some more. And have fun doing it too! The more relaxed and happy you are, the more receptive you are likely to be. We hope you’ll feel a little excited as well. Yes, you are training your individual precognitive powers, but by reading this book, joining our website and working through the six-step programme and other training there, you also become part of a global scientific experiment designed to investigate precognition.

At first, you might want to do just one session a week; later, you’ll be able to do at least one a day. Whatever you do, keep learning – about yourself, about each target, and about the unknown.

What do we mean by “learning about the unknown?” Well, something that’s fun to do once you have confidence in your abilities is to ask someone – maybe another Positive Precog – to make you a target set. Tell them a few questions you are interested in answering, and ask them to match the questions with eight-digit tag numbers. Your list would include questions that you don’t know the answer to but are interested in finding out. For instance, “How does time work?” “What is consciousness?” “How can I improve my precognition?” These are “idea” targets, and when you don’t know which idea target you are addressing (because your friend will only give you the eight-digit number associated with the question), you may get answers to them that are enlightening. Then you can try to do a session using the tag. Some of the targets in the Premonition Code target set are like this, so it will be interesting just to see what you get for those. If you make your own target set, you can choose the questions that really matter to you and see if you can get some useful answers from them. Of course, for these kinds of targets you won’t know for sure if you answered the question correctly. But if you have a decent accuracy rate and you try answering the same question more than once and get similar answers, this suggests your insights might be correct.

We’re so excited. We can’t help but think of lots of ideas for you to explore – and you’ll have many more when you start interacting with other Positive Precogs in the community forum. But for now, just commit to practising. Enjoy – play. This is a wonderful discovery process. And it’s just beginning.

As we describe in Chapter 6, we’ve found that practising controlled precognition regularly can lead to incredibly positive changes in all areas of your life. What’s more, we believe that Positive Precogs can shape the future. We dream of a time when the scientifically evaluated Positive Precogs inspired by this book and our website can be consulted on a variety of issues, and offer us all much-needed guidance, comfort, direction and hope.

11 Many people like to use “brain entrainment” sounds as they work these steps, using earbuds or headphones. This includes binaural beats, amplitude-modulated sounds, and spatial angle modulated sounds (for example, see www.monroeinstitute.com or www.sacredacoustics.com for more information about brain entrainment via sounds). There is as yet no scientific evidence that these sounds work better than silence for controlled precognition, but anecdotal evidence suggests that alpha and theta entrainment could help with controlled precognition. Alpha and theta brain entrainment may help induce a less analytical state of awareness, and endogenous alpha activity has been associated with precognition, but not consistently. In any case, always use sounds like this with caution, and check with a doctor before using them if you have a seizure disorder. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Julia has also found evidence that the streaming audio produced by the company called Focus@Will (www.focusatwill.com) can help with unconscious access to precognitive skills, but those results have yet to be replicated by even Dr Mossbridge herself. Also, Julia has equity in the company, so there’s a conflict of interest to be aware of here. However, the results are what they are.[d]

12 Actually, it can be any number of digits, but it’s useful to be consistent over time because later you can start a whole new set of practice sessions that use six, nine or ten digits for their tags, and this difference can help you differentiate between the sessions. Also, don’t worry about making sure your number isn’t the same as a previous session. Your mind knows what you intend regardless of the number you choose for your tag.

13 At the beginning, when you are first learning, some particular words or images will likely come to you over and over again – just write them down and move on. Over time, this phenomenon will likely go away.

14 John Vivanco, who teaches transdimensional remote viewing and is one of Julia’s favorite teachers, uses “blend” for subjects and “morph” for structures or non-animals. Julia uses “merge” and/or “blend” for all things that are living and “morph” for everything else. Develop your own strategy and use what works.

15 Note that we could create the website so it always affirms your choice, which would be very encouraging but not helpful in training precognition. As you will discover, we didn’t do this. Your feedback images really are randomly selected after you make your choice about the correct profile, and this selection process totally ignores which profile you selected. We want to train you in controlled precognition, and this can be a frustrating process. We want to encourage you to keep practising, but we will never lie about your progress.

16 Volunteer work can include responding kindly to novice questions in the Premonition Code community forum, moderating/flagging posts in the community forum, working with local law enforcement agencies, and doing free-form judging for sessions from other Positive Preogs. See more about volunteer opportunities on the Premonition Code website.

CHAPTER 6

IN TIME

“Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”

Beyond 1984, Ray Bradbury

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson

It’s time to talk about what happens when people take their precognitive abilities seriously and work with them carefully and positively. As we mentioned briefly in Chapter 5, pursuing controlled precognition can and will bring life changes along with it – like any practice does. While this chapter is largely devoted to describing the incredibly positive changes that can be experienced by by practicing Positive Precogs in daily life, we cannot spend the whole chapter just thinking positive without impressing on you the importance of making sure things don’t slip into the negative. To make that impression, we’ll turn to a story of James, a well-trained precog who would like us to learn from his experience.

James was trained in controlled precognition by a wellknown remote-viewing teacher, and he showed excellent ability. He decided to use this ability to provide corporate consulting to Fortune 1000 organizations that wanted to improve their strategies by tapping into future events. He employed other precogs to do the same. It all seemed to go well until he had an experience in which he felt very negative, unhealthy feelings after several remote-viewing sessions. It was as if he had tapped into something that was “clinging” to him after he left the sessions. It’s very important to note that he was not in a supportive environment, in that his life partner didn’t believe in this work and his religious tradition was not supportive either.

As we warned in Chapter 5, pursuing controlled precognition in an environment that is not supportive can be destabilizing, and it seems that this was the situation with James. The destabilization affected James’s wellbeing. He felt that he was becoming depressed and paranoid. He had difficulty seeing the positive in people, especially men. None of this helped him feel healthy, and he knew he was in trouble.

Fortunately, James was able to detach from pursuing controlled precognition and take a sabbatical. During this detachment, James set about repairing himself. When Julia met with him over lunch during that time, she asked James how he was doing. He said that prayer and positive thinking were key to his recovery, and Dr Mossbridge agreed wholeheartedly with that plan. It seemed to her that James was on the mend, and that he might eventually choose to pursue controlled precognition as a Positive Precog. But if he did go down this road, it is likely that he would be pursuing controlled precognition in an environment that felt supportive to him. Also, he would need to find a way to integrate his work more smoothly with his religious convictions.

Because in this chapter we are primarily discussing the positive changes we think you can look forward to as a Positive Precog, we feel it is essential to revisit the REACH principles (repeated at the top of this chapter). James’s story teaches us that our environment is key. But why? Well, the people around us, if they are supportive, will help us practise the REACH principles so that we avoid a destabilized state. The REACH principles form the operating agreement for Positive Precogs and practising them in a consistently supportive environment is our goal.

“REACH” PRINCIPLES

• Respect for the unknown

• Ethics in our use of precognition

• Accuracy of our precognitive skills

• Compassion for ourselves and others

• Honesty in all our dealings

How to truly practise the REACH principles

How can James or anyone in an unsupportive environment practise the REACH principles? It’s an important question to ask – not just for James, but for anyone who has already run into disorientation or destabilization as a result of their spontaneous precognitive abilities. We have heard from some of these people, and they tend to be desperate to control their abilities so they do not feel like “freaks” at the mercy of their gift. As we explore what James could do, we are also exploring what anyone could do to turn their relationship with precognition in a positive direction if they feel it has become disorientating for them.

The first change would be to take a thorough inventory of your relationships – are they supportive of who you are and the gifts you have to offer? If not, the first change you need to make is to find one or two people whom you trust, and talk with them in confidence about your practice of controlled precognition. Tell them about your intention to be a Positive Precog and share with them what that means to you. Tell them why it is important to you to try out your gifts in this area.

This will be a different conversation for each person, but the basic idea is that you need a few people in your life who accept and love you for who you are, especially when who you are is someone who has something controversial to offer. If precognition is a big part of your life, you need to tell them about that. You can expect three responses – scepticism (from science-minded people who haven’t read the literature about precognition or don’t believe it), concern (from people who fear you are messing with things you don’t understand), and support (from people who are open enough to support what you are interested in).

Dealing with scepticism is easy – don’t try to convince anyone. Just let them know that controlled precognition is important to you, you feel that it is likely to be real, and you would like their support in trying this out. If they don’t support you, move on to the next person. Concern is a little tricky, because anyone concerned about you is already in your corner, so that’s a start. But if their concern is so great that they can’t be supportive, consider thanking them and moving on to the next person. Your goal is not to find someone who agrees with you about precognition, but someone who is supportive of you pursuing controlled precognition responsibly.

If you have a history of mental illness, people with whom you discuss controlled precognition will likely be concerned for you, as they should be. Anyone with a personal or family history of mental illness is more likely to be destabilized by experiencing access to information about future events. So, if you know that you have a history of mental illness, make sure you share your history with your support people, and ask them to help you monitor your behaviour for signs of delusions or fantasy thinking. In addition to being destabilizing, delusions and fantasy thinking are enemies to achieving accurate controlled precognition. Controlled precognition is a technical skill in which there is no place for delusions or fantasies.

One of the great things about the “accuracy of precognitive skills” principle included in the REACH principles is that in practising controlled precognition with only future, randomly selected targets, you will receive, over time, honest feedback from the real world about your abilities.

If you’re having trouble locating people with whom you feel you can share your intention of being a Positive Precog, consider checking out the community page on the Premonition Code website. We’ve made available a forum in which you can find other Positive Precogs and get to know them through discussions on the forum. You are always free to ask anyone you meet there to be a support person for you.

Once you’ve found one or two support people, review the REACH principles with them. Brainstorm with your support people about how they can support you in upholding these principles. If you have strong religious or spiritual convictions, it might be helpful if one of your support people shares your religious or spiritual background. That way, when you get to the REACH principle of “ethics in our use of precognition”, this person can help you make a list of the ethics in your tradition that apply to controlled precognition.

Regardless, at the very least we strongly suggest that you adopt the Positive Precog Ethics (see the box below), which we think integrate well with most spiritual and religious traditions. Note that these ethics are written as if all Positive Precogs will work with clients. While it is possible to be a Positive Precog without working with a single client, once you are out of the closet as a Positive Precog, you will have interactions with other people asking you about your skill or seeking your advice about their futures. If you treat these people with the ethics we describe for interactions with clients, you will be well on your way to having a positive experience in your life as a Positive Precog.

POSITIVE PRECOG ETHICS

• Communicate clearly about your level of accuracy; do not tell anyone that you are 100 per cent accurate.

• Let clients know that you are one of several Positive Precogs working in the field; do not tell anyone that only you can perceive the future.

• Inform your clients that you cannot change events for them in the future, you can only give them information.

• Teach clients that any precog only offers information about probabilities, not certainties.

• Only work with clients who seem to want to use the information to help themselves or others in positive pursuits, not efforts to harm.

• Only work on missing persons cases when the assigned law enforcement officer(s) and/or the family requests you or your team.

• Communicate clearly about your specialties and your preferred way of working with clients.

• Warn clients, in your way, that at times getting reports about future information can be destabilizing for them.

• Communicate clearly about your fee structure when negotiating a paid job.

• Respect the religious and spiritual sensitivities of the client.

• Respect your own religious and spiritual sensitivities in all your work.

• Only refer potential clients to another Positive Precog if you believe the other Positive Precog is ethical, as is the potential client.

The road ahead: positive changes to expect in your new life as a Positive Precog

Let’s assume you have your supportive environment in place and you’re practising the REACH principles, including the Positive Precog Ethics. What can you expect in terms of life changes when you are a practising Positive Precog?

This question led to an interesting discussion between us. As her scientist self, Julia said, “We don’t really know for sure, because this book is the first time the Positive Precog programme is going global and we really don’t have enough data to carefully address the question.”

“Okay,” replied Theresa. “But what do we know, even based on our own observations?”

“Well, that’s another thing entirely – we know a lot!” Dr Mossbridge conceded.

Theresa triumphantly concluded: “Let’s talk about what we do know, anecdotally. Let’s reveal how this training has changed our lives for the better and how it could change the lives of people reading this book!”

So, in the pages that follow, we will discuss how being a practising Positive Precog can change your life for the better. But it is important to make clear that what we’re sketching is a loose picture based on our experiences as well as the positive changes we see in the lives of people we would call Positive Precogs.

If you continually practise any discipline and if you follow the REACH principles appropriate for that discipline, your life will change in many ways – regardless of the discipline. But there are some specific changes that you can expect if the discipline you are practising is controlled precognition or simply developing your awareness of spontaneous precognitions. Here we’ll tell you all about the changes you can expect in your sense of yourself, your health and wellbeing, your time worldview, your spiritual awareness, your relationships, your financial situation, and your career. We think that covers just about everything!

An extended sense of yourself

Remember back in Chapter 3 when we discussed the evidence for precognition, and we included a section about scientist Bruce Damer’s experiences as a child? In one of the stories, his “future selves” appeared and he asked them to sign a contract to only send positive energy back in time. As you keep track of your spontaneous precognitive experiences or if you pursue controlled precognition as a practice, this kind of thinking will become commonplace. In other words, you will start to think of yourself as not just this version of your body that exists right now as you read this, but instead, as all past and future versions of your body and mind. As a result of this shift, your sense of self can feel more permanent and connected in both time and space.

Imagine a line drawn through time, where each point in the line is wherever you have been and wherever you will be, from birth to death. Physicists call this your “world line” – the map of your entire existence in space and time. Similar to this world line, as you become more comfortable with your own precognitive experiences, you will probably start to include your past and future selves as part of your definition of yourself. This is a reasonable response to having first-hand experience with accessing information from the future. It doesn’t mean you always know what your future self will do, or that the future is necessarily determined at the present moment. But thinking of yourself as all of yourself – through time and space – is a shift that is likely coming your way as you continue your training as a Positive Precog. Fortunately, connecting with yourself in this way is likely to make you more compassionate with yourself (the “C” in the REACH principles) – and, as a result, more compassionate with others (also the “C” in the REACH principles).

In addition to embracing connections in time, this shift in your sense of self will probably also embrace connections in space. That’s because, as you practise controlled precognition, you’ll notice that not only are you able to sometimes perceive uncannily accurate information from the future, but also this information can be from locations that are distant. You might end up thinking about these connections in space like the Iroquois, a Native American Indian tribe, have done. They speak of a long body. Your long body would include your mind, your body, the minds and bodies of people with whom you have relationships, the tools you use, and the places you live.[a] Again, this feeling of connection can be very positive.

Any feelings of compassion you have for yourself as a result of extending your sense of yourself over time will also extend to those in your long body. And guess what? When compassion is passed around to others, it turns out that the originator of the compassion is more resilient to stress.[b]

That brings us nicely to the changes you can expect in health and wellbeing as a result of your Positive Precog practice.

Health, wellbeing and self-transcendence

Many of the health and wellbeing effects of your Positive Precog practice are predictable if you allow the practice to give you an experience of what is called self-transcendence. Selftranscendence involves working toward something positive that is larger than yourself and your individual concerns, connecting with others in an authentic way, and fostering an internal sense of truth. Moving beyond yourself is a natural outcome of the shift in your sense of self that we have already talked about – you will naturally see the connections between yourself and others. Working toward something positive that is larger than yourself follows easily – once you are clear about the connections between yourself and others, it is so much easier to see how the wellbeing of others affects your own.

When it comes to connecting with others as your true and authentic self, the Positive Precog programme fosters this in two ways. First, if you practise the REACH principle of “honesty”, your ability to be authentic with others will have to go up! You can no longer lie about what you are really feeling and thinking. This doesn’t mean you need to tell everyone each thought that you have; just that if you are asked a direct question, you need to answer it honestly and compassionately. Second, and equally important, as you continue to experiment with precognition and seek to improve your accuracy at controlled precognition, you will learn much about your foibles and flaws as well as those of others. You will learn there are actually no secrets. So, any attempts to hide your thoughts and feelings from others will naturally float away over time the more you practise. While your ingrained habits will still show up every so often – Julia still gets defensive sometimes even when she knows someone else is offering her some useful feedback, and Theresa still gets impatient when a detailed approach is required – in the end you will admit your mistakes and show your true colours. And that will bring you closer and make you more connected to everyone in your life – as your true self.

When it comes to an internal sense of truth, what develops for some Positive Precogs could be called faith, and for others a sense of awe and humility in the beauty of the universe. Regardless, this internal sense of truth is not at odds with actual reality. It is just a very personal way of understanding and being in relationship with the universe.

But wait, weren’t we talking about health and wellbeing? Yes! So why all this talk of self-transcendence? Well, that’s because the two are intricately linked. Having experiences of self-transcendence are directly related to your health and wellbeing. People who more regularly work toward something beyond themselves, who connect authentically with others, and who have an internal sense of truth – in other words, people who score higher on a scale of self-transcendence – have better physical health and more positive moods.[c] In fact, psychiatrists feel that self-transcendence is so important for wellbeing that the World Psychiatric Association released a statement in September 2015 asking all psychiatrists and psychological professionals to discuss spiritual, religious and self-transcendent ideas and experiences with their patients.[d] This recommendation has thus far been slow to catch on, as is any major change in protocol. Yet it is clear that many people would be better off with mental health professionals who were aware of the benefits that self-transcendence can bring to wellbeing.

Your time worldview: an essential piece of the puzzle

It’s important to mention here that not every experience with precognition will bring self-transcendence. But there is an important idea we want to tell you about here: how precognition affects your wellbeing might depend on your worldview (your personal belief) about how time works.

What do we mean by that? Don’t worry – you can change your worldview about time, and we think your Positive Precog practice will do just that. But if you go into this work thinking that the future is pre-written, any information you get from the future will serve to prove that to yourself. Then if you have a dream or other spontaneous precognition about something bad happening, you will probably feel helpless and defeated. That won’t feel self-transcendent, at least not in that moment.

Because no one actually has a complete and proveable grasp on how time works, what seems to work best is to adopt a worldview about time that includes three ideas. We call these ideas the Positive Precog Time Worldview.

POSITIVE PRECOG TIME WORLDVIEW

• Events in the future can influence events in the past and vice versa.

• The future is not written in stone.

• No one has complete control of the future, no matter how hard they try.

In practical terms, holding to these three ideas means that if you have a spontaneous precognition about an event you want to either avoid or move toward, it’s best to work toward the outcome you want using the information you have. If you don’t get the outcome you want, you can still feel good about your efforts, forgive yourself, and move on with your life.

This idea about how your time worldview influences your feelings about precognition is made clear in the work of Mary Stowell, a psychologist who did her dissertation work on individual experiences of precognitive dreaming.[e] In her detailed, in-depth study of five women who had repeated precognitive dreams, she found that the women who seemed well-adjusted and who had a healthy relationship with their precognitive experiences were those who tried to influence events in the direction they wanted, using the information in their dreams. Equally, whenever things didn’t work out for them, they did not blame themselves or their dreams. Instead, they felt that their experience of the event they dreamed about had completed a loop in time and made them marvel at the mysteries of the universe.

Although five women is admittedly a small and biased sample, this observation is consistent with our own. Here’s our own example of the Positive Precog Time Worldview in action.

Kathy Spindler, a realtor in Southern California, had a dream about a disastrous birth when she was eight months pregnant with her second child. Earlier in the pregnancy, she experienced some spotting, but that went away and all was well, so at the time of the dream there were no signs of difficulty. Fortunately, her worldview was consistent with the Positive Precog Time Worldview, and she used her dream positively, to prepare her for what seemed to be coming.

Like many precognitive dreams about terrifying events, Kathy’s dream felt so real that she was extremely upset for a couple of days. She talked with her priest and cried a lot. In the dream, her baby was born but it was limp and grey. Something terrible was wrong. She didn’t know what, but the doctor ran out of the room with the baby, and she couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl.

After a while, the power of the dream subsided. A little while later, Kathy caught a strange flu and told her doctor about it – but everything was fine. Labour was a bit early by one or two weeks, and it was a hard labour. She remembers almost grabbing the doctor and saying, “Something’s wrong.” But she thought he would think she was a “crazy pregnant lady”. Unfortunately, events unfolded as in her dream. The baby was born, he was limp and grey, and the doctor ran out of the room with him. She did not know he was a boy until someone told her after the doctor had left. It turned out he had contracted listeriosis in the womb and had microscopic lesions in all of the tissues of his body. The baby survived, and has grown into a fine adult today.

Dr Mossbridge asked Kathy about how she felt about the dream now. “In retrospect I believe my dream prepared me to handle the immediate situation a little better,” Kathy explained. “The baby’s father was there and he was a very tough guy, ex-marine, and he fell apart at that moment. But I held it together. I could handle it better because of the dream. My focus was on the baby – I just wanted to hold my baby – but after the doc ran out of the room I was able to be calmer and more supportive to my husband who was sobbing and clinging to me. I felt I couldn’t carry him too, but he needed for me to carry him in those moments. And when the doctor told us about the listeriosis, the dream prepared me for that as well.”

Notice that Kathy doesn’t blame herself for not being able to change things, and she is grateful for the insight and poise that the dream gave her. This is all in line with the Positive Precog Time Worldview. If you can learn to adopt that worldview, practise the REACH principles, and pursue your Positive Precog practice, you’ll be much more likely to enjoy your life and continue practising.

Spiritual awareness

You might think that precognition and spirituality are ill-suited companions, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Regardless of your spiritual or religious beliefs at the beginning of this path, training to be a Positive Precog is likely to increase your awareness of spiritual themes and your feeling of connection to what we call, for lack of a better term, the nonphysical world. Why? Because we usually associate the physical world with at least a passing sense of absolute space and time. Things don’t seem to show up in the wrong order in time in the physical world, and it doesn’t seem to us like objects pop into and out of existence in space.

But precognition is working on either completely nonphysical principles or physical principles that don’t behave in an everyday way. So people who practise controlled precognition or track their spontaneous premonitions will naturally begin to wonder about the existence of a nonphysical world and what the laws would be in such a world. This experience makes people less likely to laugh at spiritual and religious ideas about miracles involving space and time, including faith healing and communication with ancestors after death. Of course, not laughing at something doesn’t mean that these types of “miracles” actually occur in the physical world,[g] but it does mean that if you are carefully engaging in precognition as a practice, you will likely be more open to these ideas.

PRECOGNITIVE CONNECTIONS ACROSS
GENERATIONS: LOVE AT ITS DEEPEST LEVEL

Pregnant women can see or sense a future child’s personality or appearance, sometimes even before conception.[f] But once the child is born, it is difficult to verify whether a mother’s memory matches reality or not. The same is true for fathers. Memory is notoriously bad, but these types of trans-generational experiences can be tremendously motivating.

For instance, Mountaineer Aron Ralston, who amputated his own arm to save his life when he was trapped between a boulder and a rock wall for five days, had a spectacular vision of his unborn child. His story of survival against the odds was made into an Oscar-nominated movie called 127 Hours. During his ordeal, when he thought he was going to die, he had a vision of a small boy who encouraged him to fight for his life. At the time he wasn’t married, but months later he met his future wife and they went on to have a son named Leo, who, according to his memory, perfectly fit the description of the boy he saw in his vision. Perhaps love, at its deepest level, is what connects us through time.

Also, Positive Precogs practising the REACH principles will remember to respect the unknown. That means not dismissing something you don’t understand, but instead, looking at the evidence, thinking about it, and listening to your intuition. For these reasons, Positive Precogs who continue practising are likely to consider exploring spiritual and religious life more often than they did prior to starting down this road. If that happens for you, remember to revisit your list of ethics and make sure you can keep to them in the context of your spiritual or religious exploration.

Relationships

It’s easy to see how a practising Positive Precog might have more fulfilling relationships. If we are feeling self-transcendent more often, being more honest with others, respecting the unknown, and having more compassion for ourselves and others, all of that’s really going to improve our relationships. But what about precognition in particular? How does really using your precognitive skill help or hurt your relationships?

This is where the Positive Precog Ethics come into play. Most of the dos and don’ts in that list are there to protect your relationships with other people. How you can use precognition to hurt your relationships is to ignore those ethics. You can tell people you are 100 per cent accurate, and that whatever you report to them is set in stone, or you can help people who will use your precognitive skills to hurt others. If you do any of those things, precognition will hurt your relationships – no doubt about it.

But how can precognition help you connect more completely with other people in a way that supports both you and the other person? Three words: developing good boundaries.

You might think that developing an extended sense of yourself would actually reduce your ability to set limits with people. If everything is one big pot of soup, how can you have boundaries? It turns out you can, and the more you practise being a Positive Precog, the more you will. That’s because you’ll find you need them.

At some point in your life as a Positive Precog, you will begin to have the feeling that there are no secrets, and that everything is essentially connected. At the same time, you’ll realize that you live in a world where most people don’t know this. And you’ll recognize that even some people who do know this do not regularly behave in a way that you feel is consistent with the REACH principles. All of these insights and a few mistakes will quickly help you learn the value of protecting your mind and body from external influences. Developing good boundaries comes naturally in the process of acknowledging that there are ways people can negatively impact your mind and body, combined with the desire to keep your mind and body feeling good.

We’re not talking about mysterious ways of people influencing you on some ethereal plane. These kind of negative influences can be as simple as other people poking fun at your spiritual beliefs or asking you for precognitive insights without respecting your work. Without dwelling on negatives, it is clear that the path to positive relationships really does include good boundaries – and there’s nothing negative about having those. Dr Mossbridge has a story from her own life as a Positive Precog to illustrate this more clearly.

Dr Mossbridge loves line dancing. One woman in her line dance class, we’ll call her Karrie, is always full of fun and joking energy. Julia warmed to her immediately. After a series of walks outside of class, they became friends, and Julia felt comfortable sharing with Karrie her work as well as her life as a Positive Precog. At the time, Julia was specifically working on a skill of dreaming about answers to questions asked by other people before they go to sleep. The rules were loose, but Julia told these few rules to Karrie when she said she’d be interested in asking a question of Dr Mossbridge. The only rules were:

1) Write down a question about your life on a piece of paper just before you go to bed.

2) Don’t tell me the question until after I email you my dreams.

Julia’s job was to go to sleep with the intention of providing a good answer to the other person’s question. She’d developed this technique in her work relationship with a US law enforcement agent, and their work never seemed to require any rules other than those two.

The next day when she sent Karrie a set of intriguing dreams that seemed to be about intimate relationships and vulnerability, Karrie told her that she had asked a question about where her gloves were. Karrie was annoyed that she was missing them. Julia didn’t help her find her gloves, but she had no interest in doing so. Karrie apologized to Julia, because she intuitively felt that this was a misuse of Julia’s time, and Julia forgave her. They are still friends now, and still joking around in line dance class and outside of it.

This experience with Karrie helped Dr Mossbridge develop better boundaries. So now she has added two new rules to her repertoire:

3) People should only ask questions that focus on nontrivial matters.

4) No one has to tell her the question after she emails them her dreams (so they don’t feel embarrassed to ask important personal questions).

By creating good boundaries as a result of time and experience, we can form lasting and satisfying relationships with friends, family, co-workers and any clients we decide to have in our Positive Precog practices. Fortunately, as Julia’s story shows us, we can all learn to create clear boundaries at any point in our development as Positive Precogs.

Your finances and career

You will find that money and career are the most-discussed topics after you reveal to someone that you have precognitive skills. “Can you pick the winning lottery numbers?” “Can you make money on the stock market with precognition?” “I bet it’s easy to make career choices, right?” These are the kinds of questions that people ask Theresa and Julia over and over again. The answers are, in order:

1) Yes, you can pick the winning lottery numbers, but your chances are pretty close to zero, just like anyone else’s.

2) Yes, you can make money on the stock market with precognition.

3) Yes, you can use precognition to make career choices that benefit your future.

The last two are the most compelling to Theresa and Dr Mossbridge, so we will primarily discuss those. If you’re interested in winning the lottery with controlled precognition, researchers Stephan Schwartz and James Spottiswoode made a valiant effort but failed – at least read Stephan’s account of what they did if you are thinking of taking this on.[h] We think you’re better off just being sure to write down your dreams, and if you get one with numbers in it appropriate for the lottery, try those numbers.

Let’s start with making a profit on financial markets such as the stock market. This chapter is not supposed to be full of scientific stuff, but Julia can’t help but point out that making a profit on the stock market using controlled precognition is something that several researchers have examined – so it’s on the mind of at least some scientists.[j]

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, it’s time to talk about a project that has been years in the making – the Soul Rider LLC. Full disclosure here: Julia has intimate knowledge of this project because she is also an advisor for this US-based company that manages capital funds. In other words, Soul Rider makes educated investments in financial markets, like any other fund management company, and Dr Mossbridge benefits when Soul Rider does well. What’s interesting about Soul Rider is that the investments are considered “educated” not because the advisors involved know anything about the stock market (though some of them do), but because controlled precognition is used to pick the investments.

How does it work? Well of course there’s some “secret sauce” that we can’t talk about here, but what you need to know upfront is that the folks in charge at Soul Rider, Marty Rosenblatt and Michael D Austin, are drawing on two years of experience from the Applied Precognition Project Institute (APPI),[k] which uses controlled precognition to get information about future movements of the market.

The basic idea is pretty simple. Everyone participating as a precog uses their own method, but each of them is similar to the step-by-step method we outlined in Chapter 5. Their goal is to predict the image they will see in the future when they are shown the target. There are two potential targets, and each one is associated with a change in the direction of the market. Once enough precogs vote on the image they think is the correct target, the managers do some calculations and figure out how to place a good investment based on these votes. Then, when the actual market direction is known, the image associated with the correct change in the market is shown to the precogs. Voila! Not so different from what you are learning to do if you are practising with the Premonition Code website.

So, does it work? Well, at least in the case of the APPI (which partners with Soul Rider) from the years 2015 to 2017, the growth of the funds under management produced annualized returns of 63 per cent in 2015, 155 per cent in 2016, and 22 per cent in 2017. That’s using all of their precogs – when just the best performers are included, annualized returns averaged 215 per cent. That doesn’t tell us whether in the next year these numbers could go south, but it does tell us that there is a decent track record.

In any case, it should be clear to even those not interested in financial markets that there is a rich avenue for exploration here. We don’t want you to blow your own life savings on the financial market: there are a lot of tricks to the trade and before you invest independently, you should learn them. If you want to get involved at the level of being on a precog team, it shouldn’t be too hard if your precognition skill is good to excellent. Just make sure you get paid for your work, because you can be sure that other people are making money from your skill!

That brings us to using precognition to make good career choices. This is one of our favourite uses of precognition, because it works so well. As a practising Positive Precog, you already have all the skills you need to use precognition to further your career. You just have to enlist them.

Even without practising precognition, simply using the basic REACH principles and keeping to the Positive Precog Ethics and Time Worldview are going to help you in your career, because others around you will feel your confidence, integrity and sense of peace. These attributes usually lead to positive changes in your career because confidence, integrity and peace are characteristics that most people want, and many people believe are contagious. So, in a very basic way, you will be more likely to perform well at work and in job interviews.

But another way that being a Positive Precog can help your career is by literally helping you sense the outcomes of alternative paths that you are considering. Our favourite way of doing this evokes Dr Damer’s future selves. It’s a brief exercise we call Your Best Future Choice, and we’ll take you through it right now.

BRIEF EXERCISE: YOUR BEST FUTURE CHOICE

What you’ll need: ten minutes per choice, a friend or another Positive Precog you trust, and your Positive Precog notebook (or cellphone) to record the choice that you end up making as a result of this exercise.

1. Do your version of the Higher-Self Handshake to get in good communication with your higher self.

2. On the piece of paper in front of you, write down your choice by separating it out into each of the possible choices.

Example:

• I choose to go back into education.

• I choose to do something entirely new.

• I choose to ask for a promotion.

3. Give these choices to a friend, and have your friend assign eight-digit tags to each.

4. Without telling you which tag goes with which choice, ask your friend to randomly tell you one of the tags.

5. Use your controlled precognition skill with the tag (see Chapter 5). You are connecting with your future self in each of these circumstances, and asking how it feels. This time, it’s not a picture that will be the target, so you are instead scanning feelings and images of your future life related to the tag. The trick is, you don’t know which circumstance you’re connecting to – so you’ll have to just see how the target feels, as usual.

6. Keep doing Steps 4 and 5 until you’ve used controlled precognition to look at all your choices.

7. When you’re done, ask your friend to reveal which tags go with which choice. Usually one will be the clear winner, in terms of how it felt – but if more than one choice looks good, it is likely that either one will benefit your career, so you can either redo this process and try again or just choose one with confidence.

You’ll probably notice that the Your Best Future Choice exercise can be done with any choice – not just career choices. Once you grasp that you can get information from different versions of your future selves, it’s fun to try to steer yourself toward the most joyful, healthiest, safest and most interesting outcomes in all areas of your life.

Positive Precog boosts

We can’t say exactly how your life will change when you start Positive Precog training in earnest, but change it most certainly will, and likely for the better. As well as practising controlled precognition and the REACH principles as much as you can, there are certain simple things you can do in your daily life that will boost your ability to sense the future (see box). Theresa often recommends these habits to her readers and has seen significant improvement in her own precognitive ability when she practises them diligently every day. Incorporate them into your life and watch it transform; but do give it time – sometimes it can take three or so weeks of daily practice for them to yield results. We will run through them briefly here, with more details and advice on our website.

POSITIVE PRECOG BOOSTS

• Intend to remember your dreams and write down your dreams every morning.

• Meditate for three minutes a day (or more).

• Observe and record strong feelings.

The first Positive Precog boost is to intend to remember your dreams. Dreams are one of the most common ways for precognition to express itself. Many people struggle to remember their dreams or say they don’t dream, but that is simply because they have gotten into the habit of forgetting their dreams. Almost everyone dreams, and most of us have thousands during the course of our lives.

It’s very easy to boost your dream recall. Before you go to bed at night, tell yourself that you will remember your dreams in the morning. Let it be your last thought before you drift off and then, when you wake up, immediately record any dreams you have on a notepad or by speaking into a recorder. Keep that notepad or recorder by your bed so you can grab it right away. Anything that captures your attention when you wake up will banish dreams from your memory. Don’t wait until you brush your teeth or get dressed. The dream will most likely be forgotten by then. If you don’t think you have dreamed at all, give yourself a few moments when you wake up to see if anything comes to mind. If you still don’t recall anything, just write down, “I don’t yet remember my dreams, but maybe I will later on.” That gets you into the habit of writing just upon waking, no matter what.

The second way to boost your precognition is to learn to meditate. Why? Remember that receptive state we talked about in Chapter 5 when you don’t try to control or force anything but are simply open to anything that appears? We called it reversing the polarity. Meditation encourages you to enter that state of receptiveness which is so conducive to precognition and, as an added benefit, research shows it also has significant benefits for health and wellbeing. Many people think meditation is an art that takes years to master, and while that it is true in some ways, it is also really simple to begin.

Here’s an easy introduction to meditation that requires no more than five minutes and which can be done anytime, anywhere.

• Find somewhere where you can feel comfortable and won’t be disturbed.

• Close your eyes.

• Breathe naturally; don’t try to control how you breathe.

• Notice how you breathe, the movement of your body as you breathe in and then out. If your mind wanders, simply return your focus to your breath.

• Do this for two or three minutes, and then try for longer periods.

• Open your eyes and return to your daily life.

The third Positive Precog boost is to pay more attention to your feelings. Feelings are the language that your higher self speaks. Everyone and everything we encounter in our lives inspires feelings in us, even if those feelings are illogical.

Feelings seem to leave an imprint in time, and this may be a big part of what we pick up on in premonitions. But sometimes it is easier to get in touch with your feelings during moments of quiet and calm (or during meditation). Writing down how you feel in a journal is another way to get in touch with the precognitive wisdom of your feelings. Many of us focus on our thoughts during the day rather than our feelings. We need both our thoughts and our feelings, but focusing on your thoughts alone keeps you from being aware of your feelings, and reduces your communication with your higher self. Paying greater attention to your feelings every day will certainly give your precognitive training a serious boost.

Onward, into your future!

Well, there you have it. We’ve given you our best guesses at how your life will change as a devoted practising Positive Precog. Your own story will be unique, and it could easily take you further than we’ve imagined here.

It can be both daunting and thrilling to think about all these changes, so check what you’ve learned by taking the Part 2 Quiz at the Premonition Code website. Everyone is headed toward interesting times, but as long as you stay true to yourself, the REACH principles, the Positive Precog Ethics and the Positive Precog Time Worldview, your Positive Precog practice will thrive and it is likely that you will too.

For now, you know enough to move onward, confidently into your future. But if you find yourself with some nagging questions and a need to understand the transformation that Positive Precogs might bring to the world, stick with us through Part 3, “Mindsight”. In Chapter 7, Theresa asks Dr Mossbridge all of the questions that she still has about precognition and time – it’s likely you might share some of these. And, in Chapter 8, both Theresa and Julia describe their vision for a community of Positive Precogs, working together for a positive future.

PART 3

MINDSIGHT

CHAPTER 7

TIMELESS QUESTIONS ANSWERED

“I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin.”

Neo in The Matrix

“Do you think things always have an explanation?”
“Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we’re not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”

Meg and Mrs Murray in A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

The fact that you’ve read this far shows that you have curiosity, courage and commitment. We are convinced that if you keep practising what you have learned and are learning in this book and via our website you have what it takes to become a Positive Precog. Your future is exciting, and we welcome you as a member of the Positive Precog community!

We appreciate that a lot of what we have shared with you has been challenging to process, to say the least, especially if you are not a scientist. Julia is a scientist, so all this is second nature to her. But Theresa isn’t. Before working on this book with Julia, her understanding of the subject was based on her own personal experience of precognition and the many stories her readers have sent to her about their premonitions over the years. She was convinced the only evidence for precognition was anecdotal. When she discovered a few years ago that there were a number of credible scientists like Dr Mossbridge out there actually studying precognition as a reality, it was lifechanging for her. She knew that a book had to be written, but the challenge was to present the science previously hidden in obscure academic journals in an easy-to-understand way.

We hope we have achieved our goal of writing a book that can be easily understood and valued by scientists and non-scientists alike, but chances are you will still have many unanswered questions. So, in this chapter you will find a series of questions that Theresa senses may still be running through your mind, because they were all questions she had herself.

We hope that the answers Julia provides here will offer you greater clarity and insight into the reality of precognition and the scientific evaluation of it. But, if you are still confused after reading this chapter, please do visit our website and submit your questions there to the community forum. Our volunteers will do their best to answer questions from everyone who connects with us.

Time now for Dr Mossbridge to answer some timeless questions!

Question time

Can anyone become a Positive Precog or are some people more naturally gifted than others?

I have a feeling that the correct answer to every question you ask will be, “Well, we don’t know for sure yet,” but for this question, I feel that’s especially true. A massive study of training techniques is needed, as is an equally massive talent search. Precognition is still controversial in scientific circles, especially among those who haven’t read the existing studies. Finding funding for these massive studies is crucial, because it generally comes through private donors and not government resources. Government agencies tend to be under more careful scrutiny, so most do not tread publicly in controversial waters.

Okay, having said that, here’s my one-sentence answer: anyone can become a Positive Precog. Now here are some caveats: a Positive Precog is someone who is pursuing the REACH principles, who is following the Positive Precog Ethics, and who adheres to something like the Positive Precog Time Worldview. In terms of precognitive skills, you are striving for accuracy – and anyone can strive. Most people will improve in some ways with practice. And yet there are definitely some people who have natural skill. They too are likely to improve, in some ways, with practice.

Think of it this way: anyone can say they are a student of music. Being a Positive Precog is like being a student of music – it implies you are pursuing a better knowledge and skill of music. But some people are born gifted, and that’s fine too. In order to be a Positive Precog, gifted and non-gifted individuals alike need to pursue the REACH principles, follow the Positive Precog Ethics, and adhere to something like the Positive Precog Time Worldview. Your skill at controlled precognition is a separate issue, and you will discover in time and with practice what your skill level can become.

I’m still confused about the difference between intuition and premonition. Can you explain further?

Intuition is a very general sense of knowing something, when you don’t know how you know it. Part of the work of the unconscious mind seems to be to give us intuitive feelings about things, and we don’t know how we arrived at those feelings or hunches. These intuitions can be based on unconscious or forgotten sensory information – like when you don’t realize that we hear thunder, but you have the intuition that it might rain soon.

Meanwhile, true premonitions are essentially spontaneous precognitions about future events. They are a form of highly specific intuition. But in the cases in which premonitions are truly precognitive, we call them “genuine precognition” because we are sure no unconscious sensory information has ended up producing the premonition. The only way to be sure of that is with experiments in the laboratory or in online experiments in which people predict the next future event.

These experiments ensure that no one – ideally not even the computer software itself – can predict what the next event will be. We designed our controlled precognition practice sessions on the Premonition Code website to be exactly like this, so you can be sure that if your score is above chance performance after practising for a while, you are probably using the kind of intuitive skill that scientists would call precognition.

Why do I say “probably”? Because some of the time you can do well by chance. That’s why your score must be above chance, over time, for you to know that you’re tapping into your precognitive abilities.

What happens to my brainwaves during precognition?

This is a woefully under-explored research topic! Why? Well, first, your question is kind of hard to answer. The brain is a big place, and there are lots of different meanings to the word “brainwaves”. Sometimes people are referring to spontaneous rhythmic brain activity that they hear about, like alpha and theta waves; other times they are talking about brain activity that occurs every time a person experiences a stimulus, called stimulus-evoked responses.

There are other types too. But both rhythmic oscillations and stimulus-evoked responses have been examined in a handful of precognition experiments, and the results seem to indicate that alpha activity may be involved in some types of precognition and that the right hemisphere may be involved in prediction-related stimulus-evoked responses. Alpha is brain activity oscillating around 8–12 cycles per second, and the right hemisphere is famous for being called the more creative hemisphere, though it’s not that cut and dried. The problem is that there are so few studies, and the results of these are inconsistent. To read more about brain activity and extraordinary abilities in general, check out the books and the article at this endnote.[a]

The other problem is that even in a controlled setting, precognition can occur before it’s “supposed” to occur. Remote viewer Joe McMoneagle tells a story about being in a study in which researchers planned to examine his brain activity in an fMRI scanner while he did a remote viewing. Problem was, the morning of the experiment, all the information just came to him before he was placed in the scanner. Nothing happened when he was actually in the scanner, of course. He had received the download too early. Moral of the story? People who have the highest level of precognitive skill can figure out the task and also the target before they’re in the laboratory. Because they may be nervous about making sure they do well, they might be that much more likely to get the information when they’re at home in a familiar environment, getting ready to go to the experiment. This could be solved by a 24/7 monitoring procedure, but that study waits for the future.

Am I right in thinking that remote viewing is precognition by a different name?

Sort of! I and many others would say that it is – but only when no one knows the target ahead of time and the target is in the future. Those are two different requirements, really.

Let’s take the first one: no one knowing the target ahead of time. If the target is in an envelope and someone else knows what it is, some scientists think a person skilled at telepathy or clairvoyance could figure it out. Or here’s an extreme example – if a computer program is the only thing that “knows” the target, but it knows the target at the time a person is doing the remote viewing, some scientists would argue that the person could use clairvoyance to get the information from the computer. However, you can have a situation, like with the archaeology remote viewing that Stephan Schwartz has done, in which the target is not known by anyone – the point of his archaeology experiments was to see if remote viewers can work as a group to find unknown artefacts – but the target is in the past in some sense, and also in the future. The information about the target can be retrieved from the past through remote viewing, but the feedback that determines whether the remote viewers are correct is in the future. You might call this retrocognition mixed with precognition.

That leads us to the second requirement: to really be strictly equivalent with precognition, the target in a remote viewing session needs needs to not only be unknown at the time of the remote viewing (to anyone at all), it also needs to be in the future. There has to be no other time but in the future from which a viewer could get information about the target.

If both of those conditions are met, then yes, I’d say remote viewing in that case is the same as precognition. Much of the remote viewing done for government work and some of the experimental work as well was done under these conditions, so we know that when skilled practitioners perform precognitive remote viewing, or what we call controlled precognition, it works at a rate beyond what you’d expect by chance.

What exactly have governments been doing about remote viewing? How can I find out more?

A lot of what governments worldwide have done with remote viewing is classified or not publicized, I assume. Finding out more would mean joining the right governmental agency and getting yourself in a position to understand what has been going on. It would be cool, at least in my view, just to be able to analyse the data and test some pet hypotheses!

But if you don’t want to do this, the best resources I know of for the US work are the first two volumes of Dr Ed May and Dr Sonali Marwaha’s series of unclassified government archives about the Star Gate project.[b] Like most technical works, they are a bit expensive, but if you’re a serious student of precognition and remote viewing, this set is absolutely worth it. You can also try to comb through all the unclassified documents at the Freedom of Information Act website (https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/home) – but that’s a huge pain, and Ed and Sonali have done all that for you.

What if I’ve tried several times and don’t sense or see anything during my six-step controlled precognition practice? What would you advise I do?

The thing is, your unconscious mind is smart. There’s usually a reason when absolutely nothing at all comes up; having absolutely no feelings, thoughts or sensations is actually a very unusual state. Your mind has to try hard to make that happen. So, if it keeps happening, this might suggest that controlled precognition is not for you, not right now at least.

Your unconscious mind, particularly your superconscious or what we call your “higher self”, might know that getting involved in controlled precognition would be destabilizing for you. Likely because you would learn about parts of yourself that are not great for you to access without some kind of safe help. So maybe it’s saying “no” in the way it knows how to do that. This is fine, and you should listen.

If you still want to pursue controlled precognition, seek a mental health professional that you trust and start exploring what might be hiding in your subconscious. Odds are, once your unconscious mind feels like controlled precognition is safe for you, you’ll come back to it and it will be much better for you and less destabilizing than it would have been before seeking help.

Usually, however, the problem is the reverse: so many seemingly random images, thoughts and sensations come up that people feel overwhelmed and end up with garbage in their controlled precognition sessions. That’s why the six-step controlled precognition protocol was created, so you can learn to carefully perform controlled precognition, learning to weed out the fantasy thoughts and concentrate on those impressions that are delivered to you without further elaboration by story telling.

What if I don’t remember any of my dreams?

That can happen for many reasons. One is that you might have had a traumatic experience, and you might not be ready to re-live it in your dreams. If this is the case, I would say don’t worry about remembering your dreams. You can use controlled precognition to sense the future, and if you want to work with a mental health professional to work through the trauma to make it safe to remember your dreams, then you can do that independently.

If you’re sure you want to remember your dreams, here’s a list of things to try. When we’re lucky, life is long … try them all!

• Write down your dreams every morning, and when you don’t have any, write down, “I don’t remember my dreams right now, but I might later. And if I do, I’ll record them.” That gets you in the daily habit, and it sets an intention that tells your subconscious that you’re ready to start remembering dreams.

• Make sure you get enough vitamin B-6, found in eggs, nuts, vegetables, wholegrains and milk, as it seems to enhance dream clarity as compared to a placebo.

• Try to go to bed at a time that feels good to you.

• Turn off wi-fi at night in your house, if you have a router.

• Don’t look at any screens within one hour of going to bed.

• Stretch before bed for five minutes, and as you stretch, think about how you would love to remember your dreams. It’s like a fun TV show in your mind.

• Before you go to sleep, write down on a piece of paper next to your bed, “I will dream about something interesting and write it down when I wake up. I’m looking forward to it!”

Can you choose what event you sense and when you will see it, or are premonitions random?

Controlled precognition is the only way I know about to choose what to sense ahead of time – and even then of course you only know what you sense, not what the target actually is. The target is revealed later, and you may or may not be correct. Premonitions are generally defined as spontaneous – meaning they occur when they occur, and they’re about what they’re about. I don’t necessarily want to say they’re random, because through further research we may learn that they occur more often in particular situations or at particular times of the menstrual cycle in women.

Actually, I’m not convinced anything is truly random. Sometimes I think when we say something is “random” that means “we don’t understand the how this works yet”. I guess that puts me on Einstein’s side of the “God doesn’t play dice with the universe” debate – which is the unpopular side in most scientific circles. That’s a familiar feeling for me, so I’m comfortable with it.

But I think what you’re asking is really, “How can I control my premonitions?” You can’t – not spontaneous ones. But I’ve found that by practising controlled precognition on a regular basis, my disturbing premonitions are reduced and seem to be channelled into my controlled precognition or my intentional dream work. That’s comforting, and I recommend it to anyone who is bothered by frequent negative premonitions.

Why does precognition often manifest as trivial and vague in detail?

Yes, isn’t that interesting? In terms of trivial precognitions, there used to be a Saturday Night Live skit called “Ed Glosser, Trivial Psychic”. You can find it on YouTube. He predicts things that people don’t care about at all, like a child almost slipping on a floor but catching himself and being totally safe. It’s funny because it’s true – I hear so many reports from people who say things like, “For some reason I seem to know the name of the girlfriend of guys I’m about to meet in a bar.” Maybe they’re right, but who cares? I have a thing for dreaming about pictures I will be sent by friends the next day. That sometimes seems like a waste of time to me. On the other hand, maybe these kinds of things just keep us aware that we can get information about future events, and it’s our mind’s way of practising.

As to vague details – most of the time our precognitions are not vague, they are very specific. Precognitive dreams especially often seem very clear and realistic. However, some of the details are usually wrong, so I think that’s what you mean. These incorrect details are why people can seize upon spontaneous precognitive experiences like dreams and say, “It looks like you dreamed about a car accident, and then later decided it applied to the car accident you saw on the road.” And those remarks are correct – it does look that way. And maybe that is even what happened!

Our minds can play tricks on us, and the whole reason for controlled research is to try, as best as we can, to isolate the factors in any phenomenon so we can be sure the phenomenon is not just a trick our mind is playing. However, even after reading this research, a hard-lined sceptic might talk back even to the guy who dreamed the lottery numbers correctly, saying, “Well, if people are really precognitive, why didn’t you get lottery numbers for two nights in a row?”

I think the answer to that is that precognition is similar to memory of the future. After you win the lottery, are you more likely to remember the numbers that won or the numbers for the next day? In other words, check out what you remember about the past. Are they mostly mundane or emotional events? How detailed are your memories? Do you get details wrong? If don’t have a super-memory, it’s about emotional events for the most part. Your memory is not that accurate, and you have already got some of the details about what happened two minutes ago wrong. Another possibility is that details in precognitions are wrong because precogs are sensing probabilities and not actualities; the idea is that we sense what is likely to occur, and some of the details are off because the probabilities and the actualities don’t totally match.

Testing these theories would be fun. For example, I wonder a lot about whether people who have incredibly detailed memories do very well in controlled precognition training programmes. It would be fun to find out. Also, there is some research showing that we actually do sense probabilities and not actualities when we do precognitive tasks in the lab or online. Maybe these ideas can work in combination to help us better understand precognition.

Please explain what déjà vu is. Is it the same as precognition?

There are scientists who study déjà vu. They think that we get a sense of what is going on based on all our sensory systems, and at every waking moment we mark what we think is going on as “now”. After we are done with one “now”, we go onto the next. When we do this, the previous “now” is marked “past” or “familiar to me”.

All that makes sense to me, and there is research to support that it’s true. But I don’t agree with their next step: most of the scientists who study déjà vu seem to assume that déjà vu is always a mistake in which a new “now” is wrongly labelled “familiar to me” or, on the other hand, an old “now” is recalled and labelled “now”. Either way, most of them don’t think about whether déjà vu could be a precognitive anticipation of a future event that has not yet occurred at the time of precognizing it. That makes sense to me, because as I mentioned in Chapter 1, before I started doing experiments in precognition I used my precognitive experiences to help me in my life, but I marked them as unscientific. I assume some of them are doing the same, and others may not have any precognitive experiences to begin with. It’s not so easy to learn about the whole field of precognition research without allowing yourself to go outside of what you think you know. Very few researchers who are new to the field continue to remain sceptical once they take the existing data seriously, but when they do, their thoughtfulness usually benefits the field.[c]

Anyway, déjà vu can’t be exactly the same as precognition all the time, because scientists can stimulate certain parts of the cortex and make déjà vu happen, and in those cases it’s clearly linked to a mistake of the brain in mislabelling events. My best guess is that sometimes spontaneous déjà vu is precognition, and sometimes it isn’t.

What in your opinion is the best scientific evidence we have to date for the reality of precognition?

There are several types of answer to this question. One is to cite a bunch of meta-analyses: these use statistical methods to examine data from bunches of experiments that are related to the same hypothesis. We’ve already done that in Chapter 3, and these studies end up convincing almost no one. The same kinds of meta-analyses convince people that certain medicines cure diseases, but it doesn’t work with precognition or telepathy or any of those things. At least in the case of precognition, I think the reason the statistics don’t work is that precognition sounds too wild to be true for people who haven’t experienced it. Unless someone has had repeated compelling experiences themselves, most people will think precognition can’t exist, regardless of statistics. We’re just not at a time in history when people readily acknowledge that their linear concept of time is likely to be false. But that will change. I’m looking forward to that.

The other answer to this question is to shift the question over to what I think people really want to know, which is, “How can I convince a friend or relative that precognition is real?” The answer to that is easy – and no, it’s not “Give them this book,” though I suppose that might help! But the correct answer is that you can’t. You just can’t convince other people of anything except by giving them direct experience. You can’t force them to try to practise controlled precognition for the number of tries it would take to convince them.

What you need to do is convince yourself. If you practise controlled precognition and your score is significantly above chance after you do maybe a hundred trials or so, that’s pretty convincing, I would hope. My guess is that when more and more people try it out themselves and use the tools available, more people will become convinced. Also, when more and more people learn about the applications that are quietly being created to make stock investments and protect countries from threats by using controlled precognition, more people will see the value in researching precognition.

Until then, make sure you connect with one or two other people who are open-minded and willing to at least look at the evidence and think about it for themselves, and another one or two people (at least) on the Premonition Code website’s Positive Precog community forum or other precognition communities (see Appendix B) who are actively practising controlled precognition. It’s funny how we can get information from the future – but changing people’s minds? That takes good old-fashioned time!

Do people with precognitive abilities really work with the police to help solve crimes or find missing persons?

Absolutely. This is because precognition tends to travel with other abilities such as telepathy. Also, precognition alone is useful: finding out where someone will be, if they are missing – or where you, as a Positive Precog, will learn that they are – is a very important skill. Most law enforcement organizations and precogs are quiet about this, some in both camps are louder.

I tend not to trust precogs who want to make a big deal out of using their skills in this way. That’s because anyone who has excellent precognitive gifts is likely to feel compelled by their clear connections to other locations in time and space to help out. If you’re an Olympic swimmer, it’s being a bit of a braggart to talk about how awesome it was that you saved a baby by diving into the River Thames. The best response, if a reporter asks, is something like: “I’m like everyone else. It always feels good to use your talents to help others. It’s my way of giving back.”

How can I tell the difference between a premonition and anxiety about the future?

Such a great question! This is important. Here I’m assuming you mean a negative premonition – because premonitions of winning the lottery are generally just fun and not anxietyproducing.

You can go pretty nuts believing all your own paranoid thoughts about future events. On the other hand, you can go pretty nuts assuming that all intuitions are false and being meticulous about trying to understand the logical reason for every thought you have.

There’s a middle ground, and that’s the one to seek. The way to get there, I believe, is to be a practising Positive Precog. This is a big part of why I wanted to write this book. In other words, if you practise the REACH principles (Chapters 4 and 6), follow the Positive Precog Ethics, and adhere to something like the Positive Precog Time Worldview, you should be in that middle ground. You won’t trust every one of your premonitions, nor will you think that premonitions are always wrong. You’ll look for ways that you can internally differentiate paranoid thoughts or anxieties from premonitions. You’ll be the scientist of your own premonitions.

For me, I find that my anxious thoughts are often freefloating and can jump from one anxiety to the next. And I feel helpless when I have that experience. For me, accurate premonitions tend to be more specific and goal-directed. I’m not anxious about anything else but this one event that I’ve sensed, and I am focused on doing what I can do to change the potential future that the premonition is about. At the same time, there’s a confidence that I’m not being victimized – I don’t feel helpless. This is how I sort through the few spontaneous negative precognitions I still have, but it is very well worth you taking the time to figure out your own way.

The most important thing to say here is that if you have many negative premonitions that don’t come true, you should check with a mental health professional, because these could be debilitating paranoid thoughts instead of premonitions. And if you have a lot of premonitions that do come true and it’s interrupting your life, I would suggest either seeing a mental health professional who is open-minded enough to believe you, or doing controlled precognition practice on a daily or weekly basis and setting the intention to have your mind focus its precognitive abilities on those sessions.

How do I know I’m not imagining things (wishful thinking, for example rather than having a premonition?

This sounds like you’re talking about positive premonitions. With these that’s easy – you’ll know soon enough! In the meantime, enjoy the ride. If you have the premonition that you’ll win a contest, you’ll find out if you’re right after the contest.

The problem comes when you make life decisions based upon them. Like people who have premonitions that they’ll win the lottery, so they invest their life savings in it – that’s no good. Don’t do that. You could be wrong. Premonitions that are truly precognitive can still be wrong if we are seeing probabilities and not actualities, which is likely.

We all need multiple sources of information with which to make decisions. Precognition is a great one if you can practise controlled precognition and get good at it. But also use common sense, advice from experts, other forms of intuition, and your own research to make good decisions.

Having said all that, I find that, for me, premonitions that are positive and accurately predict future events come along when I don’t even want them. I have always wanted a premonition that would make me feel confident in entering the lottery, but I’ve never had it. Meanwhile, I’ve had quite confident premonitions in other situations – just before winning an award that was to be a surprise, or knowing that my ticket would be chosen for a raffle. I can’t make myself feel this way, though I’ve tried. But when the feelings just appear out of nowhere, I have complete confidence they’re right, because they’ve always been so. At the same time, this doesn’t mean I’ll continue to have this experience in the future … so I don’t gamble on these feelings. Nor, I think, should you.

Can I use my precognitive skills to predict the stock market or winning lottery numbers?

Possibly! Predicting lottery numbers is tough, but maybe you’ll figure out a way. The stock market seems to work well so far. We discussed both of these in Chapter 6 when we described how being a Positive Precog can change your financial life. There is more than one person out there quietly using their precognitive abilities to predict stock changes. It’s my bet that some really successful day traders are precogs in plain sight.

This all sounds great, but there’s an important caveat I’ll state here again – don’t bet the farm. Precognition isn’t always correct, so using it in an informed, methodical way is the key.

If I sense an impending accident or natural or man-made disaster, what should I do with that information? Is there anywhere I can report it without people thinking I’m mad or paranoid?

This is a huge problem. People email me a lot with this one.

There are people around the world who are quite gifted in precognition. So how can we harness those gifts? There are people who run dream databases and premonition registries, but as far as I can tell, these are volunteer efforts without scientists working on the back end to maximize the use of the data to increase accuracy.

One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that I want more people to come forward, harness their precognitive skills, and contribute to what is a growing worldwide effort to use intuition of all types to predict events and help avoid problematic ones.

IARPA, the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, has made a very useful contribution in this area. In their “superforecasters” project, they’ve screened a talent pool for people who are particularly good at predicting future world events. There’s a fun New Scientist article about this effort,[d] a book,[e] and of course at least one scientific article[f] too. They don’t mention precognition, and all of the predictions made by their superforecasters could have been made based on careful analyses of world events. But it’s also possible these superforecasters use precognition without even knowing it. To find out, we could create a study examining the precognitive skills of superforecasters.

In any case, I assume it’ll be a while before we have a Google Map that allows us to move forward in time and look at scientifically based precognitive predictions of any area of the world (believe me, it’s number one on my list of things to do – see the next chapter). Until we’ve created that, the best thing you can do is call in your tip anonymously to a hotline and don’t make a big deal of it. As per the Positive Precog Ethics, don’t claim you’re always right or that this event will happen just as you predict. Just leave the tip and let it be. If they think you’re paranoid or crazy, so be it. You’re done with your part.

Would you say Nostradamus was a precog?

A lot of Nostradamus’s predictions are so far ahead in time that they’ve become difficult to interpret – so people interpret his stuff however they want. To really determine if he had precognitive gifts beyond average, we would have to test him in the lab, which is currently difficult to do. But see my answer to the next question, about time travel.

Is time travel possible? Is there any chance it will ever take place?

I think this totally depends on what you mean by time travel. Let’s break it down into bullet points:

• Mental time travel. Here we use our minds to get verifiable information about presently unknown events that are in the past or future. This is accurate precognition or retrocognition, both exemplified by Stephan Schwartz’s remote viewers, who pinpointed multiple hidden artefacts by using their minds.[g] This kind of time travel we already have, and we are just beginning to learn how to use it well.

• Physical time travel on the quantum scale. Here, quantum particles share information with the past and the future, so that changing the state of a particle in the future, for instance, predicts the state of a particle in the past. The later change of state works to predict the state of the particle in the past, even if the particle in the past no longer exists. This kind of time travel we already have too – it was demonstrated in 2012.[h]

• Informational time travel on the quantum scale. Here we can pass enough information about a quantum particle from one location to another in time, so that the particle can be completely recreated or “teleported” in time. It seems to me that this ability will be coming soon (watch this space!), because the essential elements already exist: the realization that quantum particles can be entangled in time (see above), and the ability to teleport quantum particles.[j]

• Mental, physical and informational time travel. This is the whole shebang, and it’s what appears in most science fiction books and movies about time travel. An entire person can literally go somewhere else in time. This kind of “time machine” or process does not exist for people who are living right now in early 2018. But, again, we have all the pieces, and it is hard to believe that we won’t be able to combine them, especially if we become motivated by sensing the future and discovering that there are major disasters that could be averted with careful use of mental, physical and informational time travel. However, it’s also possible that using just one of these methods will be able to tweak the minds or bodies of the people who need to make the decisions to avert these disasters, and if so, we ought to explore that easier route instead. In fact, it seems so obvious to me that in the future we will be doing this (or already are doing this, depending on how you want to say it) that I would not be surprised if some of the seemingly strange decisions that are made on the world stage right now have been calculated to be exactly the ones necessary to avert certain disasters in the future. Before we stop travelling down this admittedly odd and clearly dangerous road, I’d like to point out that if we are doing this in the future, we might be able to detect it right now by looking at how probabilities are shifting. So maybe the first order of business should be to create methods to detect mental, physical and informational time travel so we can figure out when it’s being done and guard against its nefarious use. On the other hand, the problem with this proposed research programme is that what looks bad from here might be just the right thing for the future. In this line of thinking, probably the right thing to do is to let our future selves do their (or our?) meddling and see what we can learn from it.

This brings us to the last question, about the future of precognition research.

What is the current focus or future direction for scientists studying precognition?

This depends very much on the scientist. There are about 20 scientists worldwide studying precognition in an out-of-thecloset way, and about five more closeted researchers of whom I know. These are scientists at research institutions in the United States who have shared with me and my colleagues that they are studying precognition quietly.

But in terms of where I personally think the field should go, sure! I’ll speculate happily.

Here’s what I’d like to see in the next three years, but also check out what other researchers think,[k] and a more comprehensive discussion in my previous work.[m]

• As I mentioned in my answer to the previous question, I think we need a method for looking at alterations in the probabilities of world events and decisions of world leaders so we can determine whether future versions of ourselves are using time travel to influence the course of events. If we can figure out a way to detect this, potentially we could bootstrap this information to determine how we are doing it. Essentially, we could build our first time travel “machine” (or process) by examining the effects of the “machine” we will build. Talk about a causal loop!

• Here’s a more mundane but very important idea. I’d like to see massive online replications of several key precognition experiments with ten thousand participants and up. These would draw on quantum-based random number generators and we’d ask every participant to do some memory and time perception tasks as well so we could correlate those with precognition performance. We’d get data on personality type, meditation background, belief in precognition, and personal experiences with spontaneous precognition. At the Institute of Noetic Sciences, we are working on a portion of this goal – our PsiQ app for Android phones, which is free, has already been downloaded more than four thousand times. It includes only some of these requirements … but it’s a start, and if you download it, please realize you are helping us develop our next round of experiments based on your results.

• I agree with Dean Radin and others in the field that a fruitful way forward is to do a talent analysis in which we find people who consistently score well and bring them into the lab to look at their brain activity and psychophysiology, among other measures, as they do the same task. This has the potential of telling us what measures can, and can’t, give us insight into the mechanisms of precognition.

• What about a comprehensive long-term analysis of how controlled precognition works in a group setting, in which multiple skilled Positive Precogs use controlled precognition to get good information about future targets of importance? Consciousness researcher Stephan Schwartz writes about what he calls the “Mobius Consensus Protocol”,[n] and it seems to work well to combine data across remote viewers. This kind of protocol could be examined on a broader scale. Then it could be tweaked so that we could be more sure of the results and could use them to prevent terrorist attacks and also move toward positive futures.

• Let’s create a special team of scientists who are also Positive Precogs to guide precognition research itself! Scientists can learn a lot about precognition by training ourselves in it and using it to guide our research paths, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and skipping ahead toward more fruitful avenues.

• Overall, I want to see the integration of precognition research with mainstream basic psychology, neuroscience, mathematics and physics research. This would go a long way toward normalizing precognition research so multidisciplinary expertise can help solve this fascinating and important mystery. The non-profit Institute of Noetic Sciences or IONS has a head start here, with a world-class science team currently consisting of a neuroscientist who wrote the computer program (EEGLAB for Matlab) used in almost every EEG lab in the world (Dr Arnaud Delorme); an Oscar-winning computer scientist and engineer (Loren Carpenter); an award-winning parapsychologist with expertise in engineering and physics (Dr Dean Radin); a clinical psychologist with expertise in human transformation (Dr Cassandra Vieten); a naturopathic physician researcher (Dr Helané Wahbeh); a molecular neurobiologist studying epigenetics (Dr Garret Yount); and a cognitive neuroscientist and experimental psychologist with expertise in technology development (yours truly, Dr Julia Mossbridge). All of us are interested in the psychology, neurobiology, physiology, physics and applications of precognition. If you share our wish for rigorous research on precognition, consider donating to IONS at www.noetic.org

CHAPTER 8

TOMORROW LAND

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

“We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.”

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr

Precognition tells us that there is far more to this life than meets the eye or that we have allowed ourselves to believe or imagine. It also tells us that the future or the unknown isn’t “out there” but already alive within us – pre-existing in our bodies, our senses, our feelings, our thoughts, our spirits or our consciousness. In other words, the answers we are seeking and the amazing future we hope for is already there within us, waiting for us to just “see” it.

This “inside out” approach to life isn’t irrational or crazy. It is our firm opinion that it is the sanest and most hopeful approach. It is also our firm belief that carefully and positively developing your precognitive ability can change your life for the better, as it helps you understand that your future is already within you. The journey into your future begins from the inside out.

Future directions

We hope you will practise controlled precognition as much as you can, while being safe. We also hope Chapter 6 will have inspired you in your daily life to practise the REACH principles, Positive Precog Ethics, adopt the Positive Precog Time Worldview, connect with other Positive Precogs and record your precognitive experiences and dreams in your daily life.

Be receptive to the right answers coming to you, however they appear, and set intentions to receive information about the right answers whenever you have a question. We highly recommend meditation as a way to encourage this receptive state. Our website has more information about the very latest research and other approaches related to boosting your precognitive skills and understanding your precognitive dreams.

Developing your precognition will help you find your calm centre, because you will discover that your strength and your potential future lies within you. You can become strong in that knowledge, being the go-to person in a crisis and a calm helper and a defender of those who are vulnerable. It may be that others will find your serene and wise approach to life empowering and be inspired by your belief that what is invisible is more important than what is obvious to an outside observer. An ability to sense beyond the here and now will probably create greater empathy for yourself and for others. The world needs more people who experience the world through their deeper senses, like you.

However, developing your precognition won’t make you infallible or superhuman, fix all your problems, or heal all the wounds hurting yourself or the world. What it can do is encourage you to look deep within yourself for answers, and in the process evolve into a wiser version of yourself. This search for answers and this evolution have no destination. They are continuous processes. They never get dull, because once you start developing your precognitive skills and opening your mind to new possibilities, you discover in your overwhelming curiosity that everything is exciting and fascinating. Wonder comes back into your life, and you won’t want the learning or glimpses into your future to ever stop.

We believe that everyone can become a Positive Precog, but those that choose to do so and practise controlled precognition are truly extraordinary. They may be hidden among the normal but their ability to somehow “know” or “sense” what the future holds can inspire and motivate us all to look within for answers, develop our own precognitive skills, and grow into our best possible future selves.

What we see coming: the Precog Economy and the Positive Precog Council

Precognition is already a powerful tool, even though we’re just beginning to understand how to use it. As Dr Mossbridge and others make further discoveries about how precognition works and how to increase its accuracy, it’s easy to imagine that its power and influence over every aspect of our lives will grow. What will that be like? Suspend disbelief and allow us to speculate wildly about two elements we think are very positive and are on their way to becoming realities.

The Precog Economy

Using precognition in applications such as stock market trading and consulting for corporations who want to anticipate future trends is just a beginning, although we imagine that these kinds of applications will become more popular and openly discussed as their utility is made clear. We think this will drive the emergence of what we call the “Precog Economy” – a whole system of goods and services based on controlled precognition and other related forms of precognition.

In the Precog Economy, it is possible that Positive Precogs will not be the only type of precog around, of course. For example, there would almost certainly be precogs who are willing to do illegal work, or work that leads to hurting people. But Positive Precogs can be sure to enjoy making their livings by using their skills for purposes designed to help, rather than hurt. And it is possible that Positive Precogs might have better precognitive capacities than precogs working on the grey market, because practising controlled precognition tends to show you aspects of yourself that are less than attractive, and help you heal those. Any precogs working on the grey market might have to avoid certain aspects of themselves, making them more likely to miss crucial information about targets that remind them of their dark sides.

In addition to financial markets and corporate consulting, we envision that in the Precog Economy, there will be jobs for precogs at every level of education, health care and government. They might train children and college students to improve their precognitive skills and make better decisions about their futures, at least in areas where this would be allowed by the prevailing religions and laws. But certainly they could help schools and governments prepare for potential future threats and opportunities, define needs for curricular changes to adapt to future worldwide trends, and be available for intelligence gathering for government agencies. Positive Precogs in hospitals, doctors’ offices and health care clinics could be part of a team of professionals who provide hints about prognoses and potential pitfalls of particular treatments.

Professional precogs, whether they are Positive Precogs or not, would have to be good at their work to maintain their positions. So precog trainers, testers, mentors and coaches would probably be commonplace as well. One of our favourite benefits of the Precog Economy is that people who have skills that are currently under-recognized could use these skills to lead the world toward a new way of doing business that would take into account both historical lessons and the most positive direction of the future.

The Positive Precog Council

In the Precog Economy, how will precognition be used to make the world a better place beyond helping make better products and increasing wealth? It is our hope that the UN or other worldwide organizations that aim to serve the world will foster the development of a Positive Precog Council. A Positive Precog Council (PPC) could be a group of hundreds of Positive Precogs, each with different specialties and styles. Care would be taken to group members of the PPC into teams appropriate for these individual characteristics. For instance, Positive Precogs who work best at discovering new long-term solutions to environmental problems would be on the PPC Environmental Team, while those who excel at the fast-paced world of terrorism precognition would sit on the PPC Anti-Terrorism Force. Global weather disasters, earthquakes and geomagnetic storms would be predicted, saving lives in the process, by pairing the PPC Future World Natural Event Team with meteorologists and geologists.

We also think that in the Precog Economy, technologists will work with precogs to create technology that can be used by the public to predict future events, even including untrained precogs. As Julia mentioned in Chapter 7, one of her long-term goals is to create a map of the future, drawing from controlled precognitions, spontaneous premonitions, and dreams. It would be like a Google Map, where you could search any location in the world and move forward in time for any duration. Crowd-sourced predictions in the near future would be sharper than the fuzzy ones three months or a year down the road, but you could still take a look at a map of the place in the world you planned to visit next week and see if there is any positive or negative prediction activity by pre-registered and tested precogs in that area. Those places marked for massive negative events that have been predicted by multiple independent pre-registered Positive Precogs with top-secret clearance, who have been working “blind” (without knowing they were forecasting for that particular area), would be earmarked for extra emergency personnel and potential evacuation – because it would be very difficult for anyone from outside of this system to fake this kind of result in order to harm people. As a result, we’d experience a global reduction in the spread of disease, the effects of terrorism, and the influence of major storms.

Sure, all this sounds far-fetched and like a movie rather than real life. On the one hand, that’s the point – we want to get you thinking about possibilities and how you might want to contribute your precognitive skills to the world. On the other hand, it’s not actually that far-fetched, given what’s already happening today. There are a few efforts around the world that we know of, and certainly many of which we are unaware, that seem to be honing this type of PPC vision. We give a list of some of these in Appendix B.

The effort that we want to highlight here is the long-term project, led by Stephan Schwartz, to use his “Mobius Consensus Protocol”[a] for combining and assessing information from groups of precogs. The goal of his project was to predict what the world would be like in 2050, and how that would occur. The protocol Stephan designed was similar to data gathering and analysis in the intelligence community, detective police work or investigative journalism. It focuses on information from many sources that is consensual across large numbers of independent precog sessions, but is not predictable from current events.

Between 1978 and 1996, approximately four thousand people in nations around the world from all kinds of backgrounds were asked to answer a series of standardized questions and to give their precognitive impressions of major world changes that would occur by 2050. When Dr Mossbridge interviewed Stephan, he told her that he began thinking about the 2050 project while working several years earlier as the Special Assistant for Research and Analysis to the Chief of Naval Operations and he was appointed a member of the MIT/Secretary of Defense Discussion Group on Innovation, Technology and the Future. It was made up of prominent academic futurists from many disciplines. To Stephan’s alarm, one of the strongest agreements the group reached based on traditional intellectual data was that there was a high probability of a nuclear exchange in the future as well as great social unrest due to overpopulation and a scarcity of resources. Stephan, who had extensively studied the use of oracles in pre-modern cultures, decided to look at the future using the same remote-viewing protocol he had successfully employed in other application settings like archaeology, where he had successfully located previously unknown sites and provided very specific information as to what would be found at those sites.[b]

To his surprise, one of the first consensus points to emerge from his sessions with precogs was that by 2050 there hadn’t been a nuclear war. Instead, terrorism was the real threat the world faced. There was also agreement on a series of epidemics – the first one, the precogs agreed, was a blood disease that would spread out of Africa from primates to humans and kill millions of people. At the time, Stephan went to a friend who was a haematology specialist with the US National Institutes of Health to ask about this, and he was told that medicine knew nothing about such a disease. Two years later, in 1981, HIV emerged. Other predictions included climate change (unknown in the 1970s and 1980s), the decline of antibiotic medicine, the rise of genetic engineering medicine, the end of the carbon energy era and the emergence of some kind of cheap and plentiful energy source. As to the identity of this energy source, when Stephan was doing these sessions in 1996 and analysing the data, he showed some of the descriptions of it to some people at MIT; they felt that the descriptions might be the way that a lay person would describe Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) technology.

These could all be coincidences, or they might not be. Certainly the project is not a controlled scientific study in the sense that there’s no way to verify some of the data until 2050. But, given what you know about precognition by now, do you think it would be a good idea to find out about these types of techniques that use precogs to make real-world predictions? Do you think it might be smart to continue investigating how to assess and increase the accuracy of controlled precognition? Do you think that a Positive Precog Council might be an important contribution to helping the world move toward a better future? We do. And we hope you do as well.

The book is coming to its close now, but the journey on the road to becoming a Positive Precog and working toward creating the Positive Precog Advisory Circle continues on our website. We hope you will join us there and support our efforts to work together to make positive changes in the world.

The Premonition Code website

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re proud of the Premonition Code website at www.thepremonitioncode.com, and we like to tell you about it. This is for a good reason, beyond pride. We believe it’s the first website that makes it easy for people to practise controlled precognition without having to see the targets ahead of time. But there’s more there. You’ll find links to relevant research, lists of events where Theresa or Julia and other scientists and precognition or dream experts will be speaking, and the Positive Precog community forum. You can also register there for webinars on basic and advanced controlled precognition training. These webinars were especially designed for Positive Precogs by Dr Mossbridge, working with remote-viewing teacher John Vivanco.

When you join the website, you will enter a community of open-minded and perceptive people. Most will be practising controlled precognition. A few of these people will enter our Positive Precog Hall of Fame, based on their volunteer work, scores on chapter tests, and controlled precognition scores. Entry to the Hall of Fame means that you can say with absolute confidence that you are a scientifically evaluated Positive Precog.

Remember how, in 1964, James Randi famously offered a million dollars for someone to prove their paranormal abilities? A thousand people applied. Nobody ever won the prize – which isn’t surprising as Randi, although a brilliant mind, had a magician’s bias toward disproving these abilities. Since it was his million dollars, he would have to be convinced to give it up.

Scientists who regard alleged supernormal abilities as data that needs to be evaluated and tested in a controlled environment are the people who should be evaluating precognition, although magicians can be very helpful to these scientists in order to make their scientific experiments trickproof. Objective scientific testing for precognitive ability is what we tried to create for you on our website. The individuals who pass our scientifically controlled testing will truly have earned their place in the Hall of Fame. But we look forward to learning from all of you about how precognition works and how to develop it in others.

This doesn’t mean those who don’t make the Hall of Fame should just give up. First, you can keep trying to enter the Positive Precog Hall of Fame for as long as you like, as there is no limit to the amount of training and testing you can do to qualify. Your controlled precognition scores just have to be above chance after the initial training period. Second, there is tremendous value in doing controlled precognition as a practice in itself, and the great majority of people will find that they are content to be a Positive Precog in training, evolving at their own pace and making significant breakthroughs along the way. Theresa is one of those people. Remember, there is so much more to be learned from the journey than the destination, and this is same for precognition training and testing.

Everyone who joins our site becomes part of a global scientific experiment into the reality of precognition. Our website is the place to discuss your premonitions and hunches with like-minded souls, and for us to record them, so that if they play out in your life you have a record to prove to yourself you were not making it up. It is also the place for you to continue your training and evolution as you create an amazing future for yourself and others. We discourage competition on the website so we can foster a community that learns and grows together. You’ll also find links on our website to our social media presence, where regular updates will be posted.

And yes, it’s time for your last Premonition Code quiz, the Part 3 Quiz, which you can find on the website as well, and will allow you to consolidate some of the essential ideas we touched on in Chapters 7 and 8.

Future forward

We hope this book has opened your mind to the scientific reality of precognition as well as your own controlled precognition practice. In so doing, we hope that we have also opened you up to your ability to imagine and create a beautiful future for yourself and others.

If you are still sceptical about whether precognition is possible, that is absolutely fine. Be forever curious. Ask deeper questions about precognition, prediction, decisions and the future. The people who ask questions are the people who push the planet forward. They see the future and remember that the most powerful and life-changing questions always begin with two words: ‘What if’.

What if you could sense your future and the futures of others?

What if you could create the best possible future for yourself and the planet?

What if you could reach back in time and influence something important to change the present?

Well, you will see. Until tomorrow!

APPENDIX A:
A SAMPLE CONTROLLED PRECOGNITION SESSION

This appendix contains a single controlled precognition session, in hopes that you will better understand the instructions given in Chapter 5. This is a session done by Julia in which (like all controlled precognition sessions) she was unaware of the target until after completing the session. In Julia’s experience, this is a session with relatively good accuracy, but not the best. So it is fairly representative of her average level of ability; your average level could be better or worse, but you won’t know until you try many such sessions. Figures show all the basic steps and offer some extra information that can be useful to those seriously pursuing controlled precognition.

Example of a controlled precognition session, Steps 1–3. The purpose of these steps is to prepare practically, physically and mentally, to “reverse the polarity” (go into receiving mode), and to connect to your target with the transit line. The eight-digit number written on the left side is the “tag” – the reference number you create for your target.

Example of a controlled precognition session, Steps 4.1–4.5. The purpose of Steps 4.1–4.5 is to learn and discern about one element of the target, represented by a small squiggle called an ideogram. The eight-digit tag always appears on each scan to identify the session. This scan is labelled “Scan-1”. Note the “AOL” (analytical overlay) label indicating that Julia thought the target was a horse, but was sceptical enough about the strong beliefs of her conscious mind to mark this impression as analytical overlay. Once she wrote that, she was able to go back to receive and openly notice she was sensing about this element of the target – something about this subject being muscular or bony and not fatty.

Example of a controlled precognition session, Step 4.6. The purpose of Step 4.6 is to return to Steps 4.1–4.5 to learn and discern about another element of the target. The eight-digit tag always appears on each scan to identify the session. This scan is labelled “Scan-2”. Julia felt two scans were enough for this target, but other targets require greater or fewer scans; it is up to the person doing the session how many scans feel appropriate.

Example of a controlled precognition session, Step 4.7. The purpose of Step 4.7 is to summarize consistent information in the scans and arrange the information as it seems to be in the target. The eight-digit tag always appears on each scan to identify the session. This page is labelled “General Summary”.

Example of a controlled precognition session, Step 5. The purpose of Step 5 is to disconnect from the target. The eightdigit tag always appears on each scan to identify the session.

Example of a controlled precognition session, Step 6. The purpose of this step is to experience the target. Here we are showing “image profiles” of two randomly selected images, similar to the image profiles shown on the Premonition Code website when you are doing a controlled precognition session there. While the target image has not yet been selected, two potential images (one of which will be the target) have been selected and the profiles of these images are shown to the user. Each profile shows the proportion of the related image that contains each of the eight elements: animal/human, water/ fluid, energy/fire, mountain/hill, structure, space/sky, plants/ food, words/ideas.

In this example, the profile on the left indicates that its associated image consists of a human-made structure, while the profile on the right indicates that its associated image has animal or human subjects, a little bit of water, and vegetation or food. Black-and-white versions of the actual images related to the profiles are shown here for clarity, but when actually selecting the correct profile on the website, no images are shown when the profiles are displayed. The user selects which of the two profiles is most similar to the information in their session. In this case, Julia would choose the profile for image B, because she saw animal or human subjects, some water, green plants, and no human-made structures. Once she selected the profile, the website would pick one of the two associated images to be the target and show that image to her. In this case, image B was the randomly selected target image, so she would be correct.

Step 6, continued: Learning from your session

No session is perfectly accurate, so it’s important to learn from your mistakes. You would normally write your insights in your Positive Precog notebook, so you can track back later and see what is consistent and what is not. However, Julia’s notebook is a disaster area (she was working hard on good handwriting in these sample sessions), so we’ll type out her insights on this session here.

1. Ah, the target is two ladybugs on a green plant! For some reason even with multiple insects I tend to get the word “lonely”. More than I do with people. So I might have guessed from the word “lonely” that these were insects, I suppose.

2. As to the cough and allergy stuff – turns out people can be allergic to ladybugs. I don’t know if I am, but given my allergies, I would not be surprised. Or I could be making up a story about the relationship between my cough and the target. Not sure.

3. In the general summary, I drew these “feet” – I think it’s interesting that I knew I was confused about what were the feet and what were the plants – it turns out ladybug feet look a lot like this.

4. I wonder if the “twoness” of what I drew in the general summary here should have told me there were two subjects (two ladybugs). I wish I picked up on that. Maybe next time. Or they could be two examples of feet of the ladybug – or both messages at once.

5. I think it’s interesting that I felt these were muscular or bony subjects, not fatty. That is definitely true for ladybugs. I have never picked up on an insect that way before.

6. About the word “elegant” – I’ve often thought of ladybugs as elegant – ladies in the sky.

7. I like that I got the water in the image – even though there are only little drops of water on the plant. Ladybugs like water, of course.

8. I notice that yet again by merging with the subject I get decent answers – looking for food, feeling connected to the earth, being in open space. None of these are present in the profile of the other, non-target image.

9. I thought it was a water lily; I can’t tell by the image, so who knows. It is definitely a green plant associated with water (at least it has water droplets on it).

10. Curious I didn’t get the vegetation element as an ideogram – I got water. Ah well, I will try harder to sense vegetation next time.

Considering that this image could have been a photograph of almost anything,17 Julia did a decent job. This is not a formal test of precognition – no one can determine if someone is precognitive or just a lucky guesser after one session. It takes many sessions to find out if you really have a good track record. The point is that Dr Mossbridge is still learning, and so will you be – for as long as you’re a Positive Precog!

APPENDIX B:
LOOKING FORWARD

Recommended reading

Auerbach, L M, Psychic dreaming: a parapsychologist’s handbook, Warner Books, New York, 1991

Barušs, I and Mossbridge, J, Transcendent mind: Rethinking the science of consciousness, American Psychological Association Books, Washington DC, 2017

Broderick, D and Goertzel, B (eds), Evidence for psi: Thirteen empirical research reports, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2014

Buchanan, L, The Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a “Psychic Spy”, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2009

Carpenter, J C, First sight: ESP and parapsychology in everyday life. Rowman & Littlefield, Boulder, 2015

Cheung, T, The Element Encyclopedia of 20,000 Dreams: The Ultimate A–Z to Interpret the Secrets of Your Dreams, HarperCollins UK, London, 2009

Cheung, T, The Dream Dictionary from A to Z, HarperCollins UK, London, 2009

Dossey, L, The power of premonitions: How knowing the future can shape our lives, Hay House, Inc., Carlsbad, 2009

Freke, T, Soul Story: Evolution and the Purpose of Life, Watkins, London, 2017

Jahn, R G, and Dunne, B J, Margins of reality: The role of consciousness in the physical world, ICRL Press, Princeton, NJ, 2009

Kastner, R E, The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics: the reality of possibility, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012

May, E C and Marwaha, S B, Extrasensory Perception: Support, Skepticism, and Science, Praeger, Santa Barbara, CA, 2015

May, E C and Marwaha, S B (eds), Anomalous cognition: Remote viewing research and theory, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2014

May, E C and Marwaha, S B (eds), The star gate archives: Reports of the US government sponsored psi program, 1972–1995, Vol. 1–2, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2018

McMoneagle, J, Remote viewing secrets: A handbook, Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Newburyport, MA, 2000

Peake, A, The labyrinth of time: The illusion of past, present and future, Arcturus Publishing, London, 2017

Radin, D I, Supernormal: science, yoga, and the evidence for extraordinary psychic abilities, Deepak Chopra Books, New York, 2013

Radin, D I, The conscious universe: The scientific truth of psychic phenomena, HarperEdge, San Francisco, CA, 1997

Radin, D I, Entangled minds: Extrasensory experiences in a quantum reality, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2006

Radin, D I, Real Magic, Listening Library, 2018

Rovelli, C, The Order of Time, Penguin, London, 2017

Schwartz, S A, The Alexandria Project, Delacorte Press, New York, 1983

Schwartz, S A, The secret vaults of time: Psychic archaeology and the quest for man’s beginnings (Vol. 12), Hampton Roads Publishing, Newburyport, MA, 2005

Schwartz, S A, Opening to the infinite: The art and science of nonlocal awareness, Nemoseen Media, Langley, WA, 2007

Sheldrake, R, Science and spiritual practices: Reconnecting through direct experience, Coronet, London, 2017

Targ, R, The reality of ESP: A Physicist’s proof of psychic abilities, Quest Books, Wheaton, IL, 2012

Tart, C T, Broderick, D and Goertzel, B (eds), Evidence for Psi: Thirteen Empirical Research Reports, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2014

Williams, B J, Psychic phenomena and the brain: Exploring the neuropsychology of psi, Institute of Parapsychological Research, Inc, Gladesville, NSW, Australia, 2015

Wittmann, M, Felt time: The psychology of how we perceive time, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016

Zackay, D, “The evasive art of subjective time measurement: Some methodological dilemmas”, in R A Block (ed.), Cognitive Models of Psychological Time (pp. 59–84), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1990

Zimmerman, E J, “Time and quantum theory”, in J T Fraser (ed.), The voices of time: A cooperative survey of man’s views of time as expressed by the sciences and by the humanities (pp. 479–99), George Braziller, New York, 1966

Zohar, D, Through the time barrier: A study in precognition and modern physics, Paladin Books, London, 1982

Organizations supporting precognition research

Note: The authors were not paid to include the organizations or apps you see below in this appendix. They have had positive personal experiences with all of these resources. However, no resource is personally guaranteed by the authors. Use common sense and listen to your intuition when choosing to work with or donate to an organization, take classes from an instructor, or use an app.

Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences www.aapsglobal.com

Founded in 2017, AAPS is a global non-profit membership and education organization whose mission is to promote open-minded, rigorous and evidence-based enquiry into postmaterialist consciousness research.

Australian Parapsychological Research Association (APRA) www.parapsychology.org.au

Founded by neuroscientist Vladimir Dubaj, the APRA is a non-profit, Australian-based organization dedicated to the research of parapsychological phenomena through scientific research and education.

College of Psychic Studies
www.collegeofpsychicstudies.co.uk

Founded in 1884 by a group of eminent scholars and scientists. Based in Kensington, London, the college runs talks, workshops and courses in psychic development where modern methods are used.

Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS)
www.noetic.org

Founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, IONS conducts, advances and broadens the science of the interconnected universe, reaching new understandings about the nature of reality and our extended capacities.

Koestler Parapsychology Unit (KPU)
www.koestler-parapsychology.psy.ed.ac.uk

Research group based in the psychology department of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Established in 1985, it consists of academics who teach and research various aspects of parapsychology.

Mossbridge Institute, LLC
www.mossbridgeinstitute.com

Founded in 2015 by Dr Mossbridge, the Mossbridge Institute was founded to co-create positive technological and social change in the world using the power of unconditional love and a scientific understanding of the nature of time.

Parapsychological Association
www.parapsych.org

International professional organization of scientists and scholars engaged in the scientific study of psi (or ‘psychic’) experiences.

Rhine Research Centre
www.rhine.org

Advances the science of parapsychology, provides education and resources for the public and fosters a community for individuals with personal and professional interest in PSI.

Society for Psychical Research
www.spr.ac.uk

Founded in 1882, the SPR was the first organization to conduct scholarly research into human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models.

Society for Scientific Exploration
www.scientificexploration.org

Since 1982, the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) has provided a critical forum for sharing original research into conventional and unconventional topics. Subjects often cross mainstream boundaries, yet may have profound implications for human knowledge and technology.

Theoretical and Applied Neurocausality Laboratory at UCSB
www.tanclab.org

TANClab is a nonprofit research centre at the University of California, Santa Barbara, founded by physicist Stephen Baumgart with the goal of designing rigorous experimental protocols to test whether unconscious knowledge of future information can be detected through behaviour and physiology (e.g. EEG, pupil size). The ultimate aim is the development of software and technology that use these unconscious signals to predict meaningful real-world events.

Windbridge Institute, LLC
www.windbridgeinstitute.com

Launched in 2008, the Windbridge Institute, LLC is dedicated to conducting world-class research on phenomena currently unexplained within traditional scientific disciplines.

Organizations supporting precognition practice, training and/or forecasting efforts

Applied Precognition Project (APP)
www.appliedprecog.com

Applied Precognition Project’s mission is to publicly explore, research and apply logic and intuition/emotion to predict future event outcomes, enabling participants to evolve personally while contributing to the elevation of global consciousness. APP also organizes an annual conference on applied precognition.

Farsight Institute
www.farsight.org

The nonprofit Farsight Institute is dedicated to the research and public education of remote viewing, and asks viewers to predict world events in the coming months. Some of the predictions seem highly speculative, but they are all intriguing.

Monroe Institute
www.monroeinstitute.com

The Monroe Institute advances the exploration of human consciousness and the experience of expanded states of awareness as a path to creating a life of personal freedom, meaning, insight and happiness. World-renowned remote viewer Joe McMoneagle teaches courses in remote viewing at the Monroe Institute.

Premonition Code Website
www.thepremonitioncode.com

Launched on 1 October 2018, the Premonition Code website is the world’s first online controlled precognition training tool designed for Positive Precogs, and using blind methods so precogs do not have to view potential targets in order to score their work. The website also provides a Positive Precog community forum, links to recent research, informative videos, and information about controlled precognition trainings and events.

Remote Viewed
www.remoteviewed.com

Long-time remote viewer Daz Smith, based in the UK, has amassed remote-viewing documents, remote-viewing sessions/ results and resources available online at Remote Viewed. Daz also publishes Eight Martinis – a free and inspiring magazine offering interviews with remote viewers and discussions of topics related to remote viewing and precognition.

Remote Viewing Instructional Services
www.rviewer.com

Paul Smith, who served with the US Army in the Star Gate remote-viewing programme, teaches Controlled Remote Viewing. His website includes an excellent article on how/ when to contact authorities if you have a premonition.

Right Hemispheric
www.righthemispheric.com

Long-time remote viewer John Vivanco, based in the United States, provides remote-viewing classes (transdimensional remote viewing) as well as philosophical insights into remote viewing and controlled precognition.

Technical Intuition
www.technicalintuition.com

Brett Stuart, author of Remote Viewing: The Complete Guide, offers an online classroom specializing in an array of advanced consciousness abilities.

Soul Rider, LLC
www.linkedin.com/company/the-soul-rider/

The Soul Rider LLC partners on invitation-only financial markets forecasting, using proprietary methods in collaboration with the Applied Precognition Project.

Apps and websites for precognition practice and intuitive decision making

AmIPsychic?
www.amipsychicapp.com

This app uses games to help you test two purported psychic abilities; one of the games (the card game) tests precognition. However, it is based on forced-choice precognition, and people are usually quite bad at this.

Choice Compass
www.choicecompass.com

Invented and patented by Dr Mossbridge, Choice Compass is an app that uses the built-in camera on your smartphone to help you choose between two options by analysing heart rhythms that are related to your feelings about the choices; in other words, it helps deliver the power of the subconscious mind in a convenient app.

ESP Trainer
www.espresearch.com/iphone/

Invented by remote-viewing researcher Russ Targ, the ESP Trainer app (only available for iPhone) allows you to test your precognitive ability using a simple prediction game. This app, derived from a NASA programme, is based on forced-choice precognition. However, it does allow you to pass on trials where you are not confident.

Focus@Will
www.focusatwill.com

Dr Mossbridge is the Science Director at Focus@Will, and in her work there she found that listening to their scientifically designed streaming music while doing a precognition task improved performance on that task. This work still needs replication, but the result is intriguing.

PsiQ
Search “PsiQ” on the App Store

A team at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, led by Dr Mossbridge, created PsiQ to test precognition in two ways: implicitly (unconsciously) and explicitly (consciously).

A true random number generator is used for each of the games/experiments, and you can see where your score sits as compared to other players. (Not yet available for Android phones.) One of the precognition experiments uses forced choice (implicit; Future Feelings) and the other uses free response (explicit; Hidden Gurus).

CHAPTER NOTES

Chapter 2
a Barbour, J, The end of time: The next revolution in physics, New York, Oxford University Press, 2000; Callender, C, “Is time an illusion?” Scientific American, 302(6), 2010: 58–65.

b Smolin, L, Time reborn: From the crisis in physics to the future of the universe. Toronto: Alfred A Knopf Canada, 2013; Schneider, J, “The now, relativity theory and quantum mechanics” in M Bitbol and E Ruhnau (eds), Now, time and quantum mechanics, Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France, Editions Frontières, 1994, pp. 131–53.

c See this link for a discussion of a debate among physicists about time: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-debate-over-the-physics-of-time-20160719/
d McTaggart, J, “The unreality of time” in R Le Poidevin and M McBeath (eds), The Philosophy of Time, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993 (original work published 1908), pp. 23–34.

e Augustine, St, Confessions, R S Pinecoffin (ed.), Hardmonsworth, Penguin, 1961.

f Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/time/#SSH3a
g James, W, The principles of psychology (Vol. 1), Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981(original work published 1890).

h Wittmann, M, Felt time: The psychology of how we perceive time, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2016.

j Scholl, B J and Tremoulet, P D, “Perceptual causality and animacy”, Trends in cognitive sciences, 4(8), 2000: 299–309.

k Leslie, A M and Keeble, S, “Do six-month-old infants perceive causality?” Cognition, 25(3), 1987: 265–88.

m Rosen, R, Essays on life itself, New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 1999.

n Barušs and Mossbridge, Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness, Washington, DC, APA Books, 2017.

p Ämin, B, Causal loops, Doctoral dissertation, Università della Svizzera italiana, 2017.

r Honorton, C and Ferrari, D, “Future telling: A meta-analysis of forcedchoice precognition experiments, 1935–1987”, Journal of Parapsychology, 53, 1989: 281–308; Orme, J, “Precognition and time”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 47, 1974: 351–65; Sondow, N, “The decline of precognized events with the passage of time: Evidence from spontaneous dreams”, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 82, 1988: 33–51.

s Here’s a wonderful video of John Wheeler, the originator of the delayedchoice idea, talking about this type of experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u54IPWqF6no
t Wheeler, J A, Mathematical foundations of quantum theory, A R Marlow, ed., New York, NY, Academic, 1978; Aharonov, Y and Zubairy, M S, “Time and quantum: Erasing the past and impacting the future”, Science, 307, 2005: 875–9; Jacques, V, Wu, E, Grosshans, F, Treussart, F, Grangier, P, Aspect, A, Roch, J-F, “Experimental realization of Wheeler’s delayed-choice gedanken experiment,” Science, 315(5814), 2007: 966–8; Peruzzo, A, Shadbolt, P, Brunner, N, Popescu, S, and O’Brien, J L, “A quantum delayed-choice experiment”, Science, 338, 2012: 634–7;
v p. 1221, in Ma, X S, Kofler, J, Qarry, A, Tetik, N, Scheidl, T, Ursin, R and Jennewein, T, “Quantum erasure with causally disconnected choice”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(4), 2013: 1221–6.

w Lambert, N, Chen, Y-N, Cheng, Y-C, Li, C-M, Chen, G-Y and Nori, F, “Quantum biology”, Nature Physics, 9, 2013: 10–18; Vattay, G, Kauffman, S and Niiranen, S, “Quantum biology on the edge of quantum chaos”, PLoS One, 9(3), 2014: e89017.

x Everett, A, “Time travel paradoxes, path integrals, and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics”, Physical Review D, 69(12), 2004: 124023.

y Echeverria, F, Klinkhammer, G and Thorne, K S, “Billiard balls in wormhole spacetimes with closed timelike curves: Classical theory”, Physical Review D, 44(4), 1991: 1077.

Chapter 3
a Krippner, S, Bogzaran, F and De Carvalho, A P, Extraordinary dreams and how to work with them, New York, SUNY Press, 2012.

b Wiseman, R, Quirkology: How we discover the big truths in small things, New York, Basic Books, 2007.

c Rhine, L E, “Frequency of types of experience in spontaneous precognition”, The Journal of Parapsychology, 18(2), 1954: 93.

d It’s difficult to parse out all the different ways people have been asked about precognitive experiences – sometimes they are mixed in with other types of extraordinary experiences – but reading these references will be a good start for the eager student. Irwin, H J and Watt, C A, An introduction to parapsychology, McFarland, 2007; Haraldsson, E, “Representative national surveys of psychic phenomena: Iceland, Great Britain, Sweden, USA and Gallup’s multinational survey”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 53(801), 1985: 145–58; Krippner, S and Faith, L, “Exotic dreams: A crosscultural study”, Dreaming, 11(2), 2001: 73; Castro, M, Burrows, R and Wooffitt, R, “The paranormal is (still) normal: The sociological implications of a survey of paranormal experiences in Great Britain”, Sociological Research Online, 19(3), 2014: 16; Lange, R, Schredl, M and Houran, J, “What precognitive dreams are made of: The nonlinear dynamics of tolerance of ambiguity, dream recall, and paranormal belief”, Dynamic Psychology: An International Interdisciplinary Journal of Complex Mental Processes, 2000. (http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/dynacon.html; retrieved 17 February 2016); Parra, A, “Phenomenological examination of premonition experiences in dreams and waking states: A survey study”, Australian Journal of Parapsychology, 13(2), 2013: 187–212.

e Sondow, N, “The decline of precognized events with the passage of time: Evidence from spontaneous dreams”, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 82, 1988: 33–51; Dunne, J W, An experiment with time. Pickle Partners Publishing, 2016 (originally published 1927).

f Honorton, C and Ferrari, D, “Future telling: A meta-analysis of forcedchoice precognition experiments, 1935–1987”, Journal of Parapsychology, 53, 1989: 281–308.

g Damer, B, “A field trip to the Archaean in search of Darwin’s warm little pond”, Life, 6(2), 2016: 21; Van Kranendonk, M J, Deamer, D W and Djokic, T, “Life Springs”, Scientific American, 317(2), 2017: 28–35.

h French, C, “Fantastic memories: The relevance of research into eyewitness testimony and false memories for reports of anomalous experiences”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10(6–7), 2003: 153–74.

j Mazza, E, “Virginia man wins the lottery by playing numbers from a dream”, Weird News, 2018 (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lotterydream-numbers-jackpot_s_5a79402be4b00f94fe9456f0?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009;accessedon7February2018).

k Krippner, S, Ullman, M and Honorton, C, “A precognitive dream study with a single subject”, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 65, 1971: 192–203; Krippner, S, Honorton, C and Ullman, M, “A second precognitive dream study with Malcolm Bessent”, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 66, 1972: 269–79. (Note that the second paper can also be found in Appendix B of this book: Ullman, M, Krippner, S and Vaughan, A, Dream telepathy: Experiments in nocturnal ESP, Oxford, Penguin, 1973.)

m For a scholarly review of research on conscious and unconscious precognition, complete with rebuttals and a rebuttal to those rebuttals, see Mossbridge, J A and Radin, D, “Precognition as a form of prospection: A review of the evidence”, Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 5(1), 2018: 78–93; Mossbridge, J A and Radin, D, “Plausibility, statistical interpretations and a new outlook: Response to commentaries on a precognition review”, Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 5(1), 2018: 110–16.

n For instance, see Daryl Bem’s experiments in retroactive priming and retroactive facilitation of recall: Bem, D J, “Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 2011: 407; Bem, D, Tressoldi, P, Rabeyron, T and Duggan, M, “Feeling the future: A metaanalysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events”, F1000Research, 4, 2015.

p This is called “presentiment” or “predictive anticipatory activity”: Mossbridge, J, Tressoldi, P and Utts, J, “Predictive physiological anticipation preceding seemingly unpredictable stimuli: a meta-analysis”, Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 2012; Mossbridge, J A, Tressoldi, P, Utts, J, Ives, J A, Radin, D and Jonas, W B, “Predicting the unpredictable: critical analysis and practical implications of predictive anticipatory activity”, Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 2014; Schwarzkopf, D S, “We should have seen this coming”, Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 2014; “We Did See This Coming: Response to, We Should Have Seen This Coming by D S Schwarzkopf”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.03179.

r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precognition; accessed 19 January 2018 at 5.23 p.m. PDT.

s Martin, B, “Persistent Bias on Wikipedia: Methods and Responses”, Social Science Computer Review, 2017: 0894439317715434.

t Utts, J, “An assessment of the evidence for psychic functioning”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 10(1), 1996: 3–30.

v See more at her website: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/

Chapter 4
a Tyrrell, G N M, “The modus operandi of paranormal cognition”, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 48, 1947: 65–120.

b These studies have shown the relationship between extraversion and/or openness to experience and either spontaneous precognition or precognitive skill in the lab. Note that not all studies show this relationship, and the relationship is likely to depend on the type of experience or task being used to assess precognition. Hitchman, G A, Roe, C A and Sherwood, S J, “A reexamination of nonintentional precognition with openness to experience, creativity, psi beliefs and luck beliefs as predictors of success”, Journal of Parapsychology, 76(1), 2012: 109–45; Honorton, C, Ferrari, D G and Bem, D J, “Extraversion and ESP performance: A meta-analysis and a new confirmation”, Journal of Parapsychology, 62(3), 1998: 255–76; Palmer, J and Carpenter, J C, “Comments on the extraversion-ESP meta-analysis by Honorton, Ferrari, and Bem”, Journal of Parapsychology, 62(3), 1998: 277–82. Zdrenka, M and Wilson, M S, “Individual difference correlates of psi performance in forced-choice precognition experiments: A meta-analysis (1945–2016)”, Journal of Parapsychology, 81(1), 2017: 9–32.

c Luke, D and Morin, S, “Exploration of the validity and utility of a reward contingency in a non-intentional forced-choice precognition task”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 78(917), 2014: 207–18; Luke, D P, Delanoy, D and Sherwood, S J, “Psi may look like luck: Perceived luckiness and beliefs about luck in relation to precognition”, The Parapsychological Association, Inc. 51st Annual Convention & The Incorporated Society for Psychical Research 32nd Annual Convention, August 2008, p. 111; Zdrenka, M and Wilson, M S, “Individual difference correlates of psi performance in forced-choice precognition experiments: A meta-analysis (1945–2016)”, Journal of Parapsychology, 81(1), 2017: 9–32; Storm, L and Tressoldi, P E, “Gathering in more sheep and goats: A meta-analysis of forced-choice sheep-goat ESP studies, 1994–2015”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 81(2), 2017: 79–107.

d Rattet, S L and Bursik, K, “Investigating the personality correlates of paranormal belief and precognitive experience”, Personality and Individual differences, 31(3), 2001: 433–44.

e Roney-Dougal, S M and Solfvin, J, “Yogic attainment in relation to awareness of precognitive targets”, Journal of Parapsychology, 70(1), 2006: 91–120; Roney-Dougal, S M, Solfvin, J and Fox, J, “An exploration of degree of meditation attainment in relation to psychic awareness with Tibetan Buddhists”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 22(2), 2008: 161–78; Roney-Dougal, S M and Solfvin, J, “Exploring the Relationship between Tibetan Meditation Attainment and Precognition”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 25(1), 2011: 29–46.

f Radin, D I, Vieten, C, Michel, L and Delorme, A, “Electrocortical activity prior to unpredictable stimuli in meditators and nonmeditators”, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 7(5), 2011: 286–99.

g For students interested in examining the relationship between gender and precognition, here are some good places to start: Mossbridge, J, “Examining the nature of retrocausal effects in biology and psychology”, AIP Conference Proceedings, 1841, 2017: 030004. 10.1063/1.4982775; Radin, D and Lobach, E, “Toward understanding the placebo effect: investigating a possible retrocausal factor”, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 13(7), 2007: 733–40; McCraty, R, Atkinson, M and Bradley, R T, “Electrophysiological evidence of intuition: Part I. The surprising role of the heart.” Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine, 10(1), 2004: 133–43; Radin, D and Borges, A, “Intuition through time: what does the seer see?”, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 5(4), 2009: 200–211; Tressoldi, P, Martinelli, M, Scartezzini, L and Massaccesi, S, “Further Evidence of the Possibility of Exploiting Anticipatory Physiological Signals To Assist Implicit Intuition of Random Events”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 24, 2010: 411–24.

h See the first two volumes of the unclassified portions of this work: May, E C and Marwaha, S B (eds), The star gate archives: Reports of the US government sponsored psi program, 1972–1995, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2018.

j This organization is a scholarly one. Here is a description from the website (http://www.parapsych.org; accessed on 2 September 2018): “The Parapsychological Association is an international professional organization of scientists and scholars engaged in the study of psi (or ‘psychic’) experiences, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and precognition. The primary objective of the PA is to achieve a scientific understanding of these experiences. First established in 1957, the PA has been an affiliated organization of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) since 1969. The PA is a non-profit, nonadjudicating organization that endorses no ideologies or beliefs other than the value of rigorous scientific and scholarly inquiry.”

k The unclassified portions of this work: May, E C and Marwaha, S B (eds), The star gate archives: Reports of the US government sponsored psi program, 1972–1995, Vol. 1–2, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2018.

m For more info, see Joe McMoneagle’s excellent talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLvOXZI_qvU where he discusses his experiences as a government remote viewer. Some of the information in this section was also taken from a private conversation with McMoneagle as well as his talk given to a group of remote viewers in March 2018 via http://www.appliedprecog.com/
n May, E C and Marwaha, S B (eds), Anomalous cognition: Remote viewing research and theory, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2014.

p Jahn, R G and Dunne, B J, Margins of reality: The role of consciousness in the physical world, ICRL Press, 2009.

r http://www.mindmattermapping.org/who-we-are/roger-nelson
s Schwartz, S A, The secret vaults of time: Psychic archaeology and the quest for man’s beginnings (Vol. 12), Hampton Roads Publishing, 2005.

t Radin, D, The conscious universe: The scientific truth of psychic phenomena, San Francisco, CA, HarperEdge, 1997, pp. 138–42.

v Puthoff, H E and Targ, R, “A perceptual channel for information transfer over kilometer distances: Historical perspective and recent research”, Proceedings of the IEEE, 64(3), 1976: 329–54.

w Dobyns, Y H, Dunne, B J, Jahn, R G and Nelson, R D, “Response to Hansen, Utts and Markwick: statistical and methodological problems of the PEAR remote viewing experiments”, Journal of Parapsychology, 56, 1992: 115–46; Nelson, R D, Dunne, B J, Dobyns, Y H and Jahn, R G, “Precognitive remote perception: Replication of remote viewing”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 10, 1996: 109–10; May, E, “Advances in anomalous cognition analysis: A judge-free and accurate confidence-calling technique”, in May, E and Marwaha, S B (eds), Anomalous cognition: Remote viewing research and theory, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2014, pp. 80–88.

x Utts, J, “An assessment of the evidence for psychic functioning”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 10(1), 1996: 3–30.

y Assagioli, R, Psychosynthesis: Individual and Social, Vol. 16, New York, Psychosynthesis Research Foundation, 1965.

z McMoneagle, J, Remote viewing secrets: A handbook, Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2000.

aa Hassin, R R, “Yes it can: On the functional abilities of the human unconscious”, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(2), 2013: 195–207; Dijksterhuis, A, Bos, M W, Nordgren, L F and Van Baaren, R B, “On making the right choice: The deliberation-without-attention effect”, Science, 311(5763), 2006: 1005–7.

Chapter 5
a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_Challenge
b See John Vivanco’s website at righthemispheric.com for more information about Transdimensional Remote Viewing training, a course that informed almost every idea in this chapter.

c Read Remote Viewing Secrets by Joe McMoneagle for more details about ideas and processes that also informed almost every idea in this chapter.

d Mossbridge, J, “The Influence of Streamlined Music on Cognition and Mood”, 2016, arXiv preprint arXi610.04255.

e Bargh, J A, Gollwitzer, P M, Lee-Chai, A, Barndollar, K and Trötschel, R, “The automated will: nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals”, Journal of personality and social psychology, 81(6), 2001: 1014; Schunk, D H and Swartz, C W, “Goals and progress feedback: effects on self-efficacy and writing achievement”, Contemporary Educational Psychology, 18(3), 1993: 337–54; King, L A, “The health benefits of writing about life goals”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(7), 2001: 798–807. https://www.dominican.edu/academics/lae/undergraduate-programs/psych/faculty/assets-gail-matthews/researchsummary2.pdf

Chapter 6
a Roll, W G, “Psi and the long body”, Australian Journal of Parapsychology, 8(1), 2008: 6–28.

b Cosley, B J, McCoy, S K, Saslow, L R and Epel, E S, “Is compassion for others stress buffering? Consequences of compassion and social support for physiological reactivity to stress”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(5), 2010: 816–23.

c Vieten, C, Cohen, A B, Schlitz, M M, Estrada, M, Radin, D and Delorme, A, “Engagement in a community-based integral practice program enhances well-being”, International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 33(2), 2014: 1–15; Kim, S S, Hayward, R D and Reed, P G, “Self-transcendence, spiritual perspective, and sense of purpose in family caregiving relationships: a mediated model of depression symptoms in Korean older adults”, Aging and Mental Health, 18(7), 2014: 905–13.

d Moreira-Almeida, A, Sharma, A, Janse van Rensburg, B, Verhagen, P J and Cook, C C H, WPA Position Statement on Spirituality and Religion in Psychiatry, 2015.

e Stowell, M S, “Precognitive dreams: A phenomenological study. Part I: Methodology and sample cases”, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 91(3), 1997: 163–220; Stowell, M S, “Precognitive dreams: A phenomenological study. Part II: Discussion”, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 91(4), 1997: 255–304.

f Krippner, S, Bogzaran, F and De Carvalho, A P, Extraordinary dreams and how to work with them, New York, SUNY Press, 2012.

g For a scholarly discussion of these ideas, see Baruss and Mossbridge, Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness, Washington, DC, APA Books, 2017.

h Schwartz, S A, Opening to the infinite: The art and science of nonlocal awareness, Langley, WA, Nemoseen Media, 2007.

j Smith, C C, Laham, D and Moddel, J, “Stock market prediction using associative remote viewing by inexperienced remote viewers”, Journal of Scientific Exploration 28, 2014: 7–16; Kolodziejzyk, G, “Greg Kolodziejzyk’s 13-year associative remote viewing experiment results”, The Journal of Parapsychology, 76(2), 2012: 349–68; Harary, K and Targ, R, “A new approach to forecasting commodity futures”, Psi Research, 4, 1985: 79–88; Schwartz, S, “Through Time and Space: The Evidence for Remote Viewing”, in Broderick, D and Groetzel, B (eds), The Evidence for Psi, McFarland, New York, 2014.

k http://www.appliedprecog.com/

Chapter 7
a Broderick, D and Goertzel, B (eds), Evidence for Psi: Thirteen empirical research reports, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2014; Williams, B J, Psychic phenomena and the brain: Exploring the neuropsychology of psi, Gladesville, NSW, Australia, Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research, Inc., 2015; Mossbridge, J A, “Characteristic Alpha Reflects Predictive Anticipatory Activity (PAA) in an Auditory-Visual Task”, International Conference on Augmented Cognition, Springer, Cham, July 2017, pp. 79–89.

b See the first volume of the unclassified portions of this work: May, E C and Marwaha, S B (eds), The star gate archives: Reports of the US government sponsored psi program, 1972–1995, Vol. 1–2, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2018.

c Schwarzkopf, D S, “We should have seen this coming”, Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8(332), 2014; Wagenmakers, E J, Wetzels, R, Borsboom, D, Kievit, R and van der Maas, H L, “A skeptical eye on psi”, Extrasensory perception: Support, skepticism, and science, 1, 2015: 153–76; Hyman, R, “Pitfalls in parapsychological research”, Psychological Science under Scrutiny: Recent Challenges and Proposed Solutions, 2017: 271–94.

d Frood, A, “Work the crowd”, New Scientist, 237(3166), 2018: 32–5.

e Rötheli, T F, “Book Review of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner”, 2016.

f Mellers, B, Stone, E, Murray, T, Minster, A, Rohrbaugh, N, Bishop, M and Ungar, L, “Identifying and cultivating superforecasters as a method of improving probabilistic predictions”, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(3), 2015: 267–81.

g Schwartz, S A, The Alexandria Project, New York, Delacorte, 1983.

h Ma, X S, Zotter, S, Kofler, J, Ursin, R, Jennewein, T, Brukner, Č and Zeilinger, A, “Experimental delayed-choice entanglement swapping”, Nature Physics, 8(6), 2012: 479–84.

j Bouwmeester, D, Pan, J W, Mattle, K, Eibl, M, Weinfurter, H and Zeilinger, A, “Experimental quantum teleportation”, Nature, 390(6660), 1997: 575–9.

k May, E and Marwaha, S, Extrasensory Perception: Support, Skepticism, and Science, Santa Barbara, Praeger, 2015. (Note: Volumes 1 and 2 are both excellent, but Volume 2 has more ideas about future directions.)

m Barušs, I and Mossbridge, J, Transcendent mind: Rethinking the science of consciousness, Washington, DC, American Psychological Association Books, 2017.

n Schwartz, S A, Opening to the infinite: The art and science of nonlocal awareness, Langley, WA, Nemoseen Media, 2007.

Chapter 8
a Schwartz, S A, Opening to the infinite: The art and science of nonlocal awareness, Langley, WA, Nemoseen Media, 2007.

b Schwartz, S A, The Alexandria Project, New York, Delacorte, 1983.

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