Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self: Interpreting Messages from Your Future

by Eric Wargo

A guide to dream precognition and its implications

• Outlines a set of clear principles to help guide dreamworkers, illustrated through real precognitive dream experiences

• Shows how to detect precognitive dreams through their characteristic features, explaining how dreams relate to memory and why dreams about future experiences are often symbolic or distorted

• Explores the mind-blowing implications of precognition for our lives, including how our present thoughts actually shape--or shaped--our past

Once only the stuff of science fiction, evidence has grown that precognition--glimpses of your future in dreams and visions and being influenced subtly in waking life by what is to come--is real. Your future thoughts and feelings shape who you are now. And your present thoughts and feelings shape--or shaped--your past.

In this accessible exploration of precognition, precognitive dreamwork, and a radically new biographical sensibility, the Long Self, that precognition awakens us to, Eric Wargo shows how dreamworkers can play the role of citizen scientists, adding to our understanding of this fascinating, almost unexplored dimension of human life. Wargo outlines a set of clear principles to guide dreamworkers, each illustrated through real dreamers’ experiences. Drawing on psychoanalysis and contemporary sleep science, he explores how precognition relates to memory, explaining why dreams of future experiences are often distorted and what those distortions probably mean. He discusses never-before-described dream features, including “time gimmicks” (symbols hinting at time distortion) and “calendrical resonance” (the tendency of dreams to foretell experiences exactly a year or years later). He describes why an understanding of precognition augments Jung’s theory of synchronicity by highlighting our own role in producing meaningful coincidences in our waking lives. He also shows how precognition manifests in other states of consciousness like lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, trance states, sleep paralysis, meditation, and hypnagogia.

We are at a major turning point in science’s understanding of time, causality, and the self. We are more than who we think we are from moment to moment--we are our past, present, and future simultaneously. When we understand this, a dream journal becomes a personal time machine, with mind-blowing discoveries in store for the traveler.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Magic, Paranormal, Philosophy, Science

320 pages, Paperback

Published March 30, 2021

Reviews

[Bogi Takács]

Library impulse borrow; popular occult nonfiction. It was a thought-provoking read, but I found myself disagreeing with the author quite often. His thesis is that all manner of parapsychological phenomena are real and can be explained with precognition (this is a preexistent theory, probably best-known in the formulation of May et al.*) AND also this precognition only works with one's own future reactions to events. This latter idea is - I think - new, and a considerable restriction.

It kind of reminded me of the type of fantasy worldbuilding that's sometimes called "hard fantasy" where there's one underlying concept for magic and all magic rigorously follows from that, with various complicated derivations that often inform the plot. The author actually mentions quite a lot of science fiction and fantasy works in the discussion, which I thought was fun.

However, I could immediately think of examples that would not work with the theory as outlined in this book. E.g., Wargo claims that sleep paralysis stems from precognizing already being awake a few minutes later. But with a little practice, sleep paralysis episodes can be reverted into lucid dreams, so you would not actually wake up right afterward. Yet you still experienced sleep paralysis. (Of course, one could claim that the intervening lucid dream was skipped over by the precognitive process, but why would that happen?)

I also don't understand what would happen if someone had a precognitive experience, wrote it up, had no feedback about it, but someone else read the writeup and got feedback about it, never telling the first person. In other theories, the second person could also affect what happened, but here with these restrictions, I don't think that would be possible. I don't think anyone seriously entertains that it works this way?? Of course, one could just say that precognition doesn't exist at all :) but even assuming it does, I still don't understand this.

In any case, the book gave me a lot to think about - including about fantasy worldbuilding, always a plus -, even if I ultimately wasn't convinced.
_____
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library

* - Actually they do not assume that *all* of those phenomena are real AFAIR, e.g., macro-scale psychokinesis, which really cannot be explained with precognition (at least I can't think of anyone even trying that?), is often claimed to be 100% fraud or misunderstandings. Wargo doesn't discuss this though. I would've liked to see at least an acknowledgement that this is a problem for the theory, but this is explicitly not a scientific book, so, IDK...

[Nik Maack · Rating 2 out of 5]

(Giving up at the 40% mark.)

The grass is wet. It's possible an elephant came by and sprayed water out of his trunk all over my lawn. Which raises the question: where did this elephant come from? Where did he get the water from? Why was he carrying it in his trunk? Why spray it all over my particular lawn? For the next 400 pages, we'll discuss this elephant situation at great length.

It rained. Of course it just rained. There was no elephant. My lawn is wet because it rained.

That's what reading this book is like. I found myself bored and annoyed, as the author spent page after page, speculating what the elephant's ears might have looked like, when he hasn't even convinced me his lawn really was wet in the first place.

I would very much like to believe that dreams are more than just noisy movies in my head while I sleep. I've experimented with lucid dreaming. Many of my dreams have been life altering and intense. Vivid beyond waking life. Fascinating and complicated and great. I would like to very much treat dreams as messages from the universe.

Despite my predispositions and desires, I cannot take this book seriously.

Here's how the author suggests you discover for yourself that precognitive dreams are real. Write down your dreams. Do some free association around the dreams to flesh out the content. Do this with a bunch of dreams over time. Then go back and read your dreams, and look to see if any of them turn out to be precognitive.

He claims that by doing this you will find overwhelming evidence that dreams are precognitive. Not only that, but he argues that MOST dreams are precognitive.

Here's another game you can play. The number 37 is magical. It really is. And it's everywhere. Have you noticed? Think about it. Keep an eye out for the number 37 and you'll see that I am right.

Suddenly you see the number everywhere! What does it mean? Is the number magical? Good lord! This is incredible!

That's the error the author is making. Look for patterns, and you will find patterns. To me this goes beyond the confirmation bias. A Christian sees a Christian world and a Hindu sees a Hindu world. Our beliefs frame our reality. Check to see that all your dreams are precognitive? Suddenly they are. Wowee zowee!

Slightly off topic digression: the conspiracy theory nut jobs who tell you that you need to "do your own research" are part of this same phenomena. If I can convince you to go do research on how fluoride in our drinking water is a mind control conspiracy, you might just go out and find all the videos and websites and articles that "prove" this. And suddenly you have communities of people that speculate who is behind this terrible fluoride madness.

After having established that precognitive dreams are real (what?) the author then spends many pages describing the elephant's ears. How does this phenomena work? Is it about emotion? Entropy? What does this say about free will? Do these precognitive dreams create time paradoxes or not? How did Carl Jung miss all of this, and come up with his ridiculous synchronicity theory?

And here, I think, is possibly the most annoying part of the book: the precognitive dreams are boring. Most of the events, which they supposedly predict, are boring. Even if the author is 100% correct, and precognitive dreams are real, they are boring as wet lawn and are even less useful.

I asked a friend of mine if he'd ever had a precognitive dream. He surprised me and said yes. He'd dreamt of a particular place on campus of Carleton University, and particular people around him, and the light being a particular way. Later, he found himself in that exact situation.

If we assume that this is precognitive (which is a stretch -- he worked at Carleton University and was there all the time) why should we possibly care in the slightest? What difference does it make? A brief flash that the universe is weird. Or that brains are weird. Or that reality is weird. But can you do anything with this? Is there any reason to get excited about it?

Even if we assume a dream somehow presupposes a huge event (9/11 or the sinking of the Titanic) so what? Dreams are vague enough that it's only in retrospect that we can make them "fit" what happened. And maybe the reason you dreamt The Titanic was going to sink is because you were anxious about that big dumb boat. Your brain ran a "what if" scenario, and it turned out to be accurate.

I stopped reading this book because of the author's unearned confidence in his theory. He's not a bad writer. He can be witty and entertaining. But his utter inability to critically look at his worldview became infuriating. He occasionally gives a pitying look at an imaginary skeptic who refuses to accept the reality of paranormal activity. But that's about as close to being critical of his theory as he ever gets.

This passage particularly riled me:

"Jung's acknowledgment of dream precognition in the sense I am using the term was, as Moss notes, 'grudging and very limited.' He admitted that prophetic dreams sometimes occurred, but since they seemed so rare, unreliable, and unpredictable, he felt that looking for them was not worthwhile. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy! They were clearly staring him in the face, but he preferred to give them other interpretations."

Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[Jonathon Wright-Wuthering · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice ideas competently expressed. Only bug bear is that, for an open minded / gullible chap such as myself, the book kind of over sells its concept; ideas are repeated and backed up and repeated and backed up again, which I'm sure is intended to win over a more skeptical reader and might very well succeed admirably at that. But if you're coming at this with an open mind it can feel like a bit of a slog to get from one interesting idea to the next. Glad I read it though.

[Elizabeth Lord · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been studying parapsychology for five years and decided to read this book because it was recommended to me by one of my instructors. The study of parapsychology delves quite frequently into precognition or presentiment but not much into dream precognition that I'm aware of. That being said, most ESP benefits from being in a relaxed state of mind and it could be argued that sleep certainly qualifies. Others in the field would state that all ESP is precognition.
I appreciate the depth of study that Mr. Wargo obviously has done and shared in this book on the subject and I found the stories about and regarding Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung to be especially interesting. He also discusses methodologies like those used by Theresa Cheung and Julia Mossbridge which utilizes the techniques of Remote Viewers. All of this is quite illuminating.
That being said, I always caution any researcher (or anyone else for that matter) not to extrapolate from the existing data, it can create monolithic thought which can be very difficult to overcome. What I am referring to is Mr. Wargo's claims that dreams are either exclusively precognitive or mean nothing. He also makes a strong argument for both the block time universe theory and the belief that there is no free will. Other studies in parapsychology such as Near Death Experience and reincarnation would argue against the no free will argument and the studies of precognition where the outcome was changed is also an argument against the type of block time that Mr. Wargo claims is true. Other hypotheses exist in regards to how time may influence precognition such as the collapse of the wave function. The only argument that can be made here is that there are interesting effects that should be studied further and most definitely be documented by as many people as possible.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book, that encourages the reader to start methodically writing down one's dreams and compare the dreams with events in the future, especially the next days or the same date in following years. Drawing on a wide range of personal, published and scientific sources the author sets out to have the reader experience by themselves that the stuff that dreams are made of is at least partly the future - although the author suspects that it's all future. He argues that dream consciousness has acces to personal experiences (and only personal experiences) from the future, or (to reverse the perspective) that experiences from your future self travel to dreams in the past, which of course goes straight against the mainstream materialistic-scientific perception of time; but experiments in the quantum domain and in brain research in recent years, which the authors quotes, do show effects going back in time.
Now for my personal experience. As soon as I started reading the book, I started documenting my dreams and comparing them to the next days events, and I must confirm that I have found a few remarkable echoes and agreements, especially in the first five days; mostly in the very short dream flashes in the state of being half asleep; after that, the "hit rate" decreased a lot, although I started remembering much more dreams in a story format. I got the impression that random dream content has more predictive value than the storyline dream content. But the usability of it is doubtful, since the author argues that the imagery is almost always distorted, and that physical-mathematical laws prevent the future from being changed; so it's not like dream precognition gives you more freedom of choice, rather the opposite: the future is fixed. What however occurs, according to the author, are timeloops, which are basically chicken-and-egg events where the chicken lays the egg from which itself hatches in the future. That sounds incomprehensible when I say it like that, and the practical examples the author provides have the same dizzying effect, because the mind is very much accustomed or built to seeing time as a lineair thing. The author has written a previous book about time loops, which may ar may not explain the concept better... haven't read it yet. The author for example mentions a dream which is caused by the experience of later remembering that dream... I find that idea hard to swallow.
In short, after doing the dreamwork for three weeks, I tend to believe that in in some way experiences from the future do find their way into dream images, which is revolutionary enough in itself; but the precognitive content seems to be rather random and sometimes trivial (which the author confirms). I very much doubt that the future forms the majority of dream content; in my experience dreams are still much more about processing your past and ongoing biography, fears and hopes. The book has failed to really convince me yet of the usefulness of dream precognition, or that dream precognition is a form of self-care of the mind, which the author believes. The randomness and insignificance of a lot of dream precognition does not match with selfcare being the cause of consciousness sending messages back into the past; and the point of the future being fixed, which the author is convinced of, also does not match well with the idea of selfcare being the purpose of dream precognition. To me it feels more like an unmanageable physiological/psychological phenomenon. However, for a person who sometimes fears that the materialistic and reductionistic model of reality may be sufficient to explain the whole of reality, it's rather cool to experience that random elements of the near future, which are quite unpredictable, can pop up in dreams. If only the dreamwork would show progressive results, that would be wonderful, but for me the first days where the most rewarding; as was the first half of the book. Like many authors who have discovered a new idea, the author tends to want to explain everything with this single concept. Still there are quite a few observations in the book which, from my scarce collection of personal data, I seem to be able to confirm.

[Barbara Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had many precognitive dreams, most about everyday experiences that were easily verified and a few about headline events such as September 11. I need no convincing that dreams offer a glimpse into the future. What this book offers is an explanation of how our dreams access the future...and the past, that is to say, our future and our past. An understanding of quantum physics would be helpful (I was always a humanities nerd) but the author is excellent at providing clear and often humorous explanations for what is a difficult concept to grasp. In a nutshell or should I say block universe, the past, present and future exist simultaneously. When you dream of a future catastrophe for example, he suggests you are previewing your experience of finding out about it, likely in the media, as opposed to dreaming about the objective event itself. This is an important and potentially guilt-relieving distinction for someone who pays attention to "big" dreams. I enjoyed Wargo's look at Freud and Jung as well as veteran dream researcher Ann Faraday and dream teacher Robert Moss. Some of Wargo's ideas about a lack of free will in the block universe raise questions for me though. Is everything really written in stone? Are all my choices preordained? Can I ever make a difference? I guess I'll ask my dreams.

[Georgia Roybal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was much easier to read than Time Loops. That said, it is still too wordy with long sentences and side trips into too many examples to make for smooth reading. All of this interferes with good understanding of the main themes.

Mr. Wargo is extremely committed to justifying his beliefs in precognition. He feels all of us have this capability. He states that the dreams are often symbolic and inexact. He feels that the precognition is initially not recognized and predicts our future reactions to the events rather than a depiction of the exact events. He feels many creative persons are more apt to act on these dreams.

He suggests writing down dreams no matter what time they occur. He also suggests writing down daytime fantasies and reviewing the dreams or fantasies on a regular basis to discern whether or not the dream is precognitive.

I have had powerful dreams so I believe they can have a life changing effect. I do feel that the dreams or fantasies can sense the future in a short time frame as energies and chemistries change and we can feel them. I am pretty agnostic about dreams that predate the incidents by months or years.

[Romann Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really 3.5 stars but bumped up for taking a big swing. It's an engagingly written thesis despite its inevitable reliance on anecdotal evidence. These anecdotes range from truly compelling examples to real stretches of interpretation.

The book gets some scientific details wrong, such as its consistent misuse of "the law of large numbers" (which in mathematics refers to the average of a large number of experiments converging to the statistical expected value and not to the inevitability of rare events). To its credit, it does not abuse an appeal to the mysteries of quantum theory (although it does slightly misinterpret that theory's uncertainty principle).

All in all, this is a practical book, and the challenge is for the reader to apply diligent dream journaling to test the book's central thesis. The proof, in other words, is not contained in the book but rather in the reader's experience. The book's main claim, that many if not all dreams are precognitive in nature, is genuinely interesting, and given how little we truly understand about consciousness and the mysteries of the universe, there might even be something to it. If nothing else, following the author's suggestions can get us in better touch with the mysteries of the little universe we carry in our own heads.

[Precious · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nice

[Nick Zwack · Rating 5 out of 5]

💡

[Derek · Rating 1 out of 5]

Garbage