Precognition (from the Latin 'before', and 'acquiring knowledge') is the purported psychic phenomenon of seeing, or otherwise becoming directly aware of, events in the future.
There is no accepted scientific evidence that precognition is a real effect, and it is widely considered to be pseudoscience. Precognition violates the principle of causality, that an effect cannot occur before its cause.
Precognition has been widely believed in throughout history. Despite the lack of scientific evidence, many people believe it to be real; it is still widely reported and remains a topic of research and discussion within the parapsychology community.
Precognitive phenomena Precognition is sometimes treated as an example of the wider phenomenon of prescience or foreknowledge, to understand by any means what is likely to happen in the future. It is distinct from premonition, which is a vaguer feeling of some impending disaster. Related activities such as predictive prophecy and fortune telling have been practised throughout history.
Precognitive dreams are the most widely reported occurrences of precognition. Usually, a dream or vision can only be identified as precognitive after the putative event has taken place. When such an event occurs after a dream, it is said to have "broken the dream".Inglis (1985), p.89Wyndham Lewis; "You Broke My Dream", The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories, Chatto and Windus, London, 1927.
In religion In Judaism it is believed that dreams are mostly insignificant while others "have the potential to contain prophetic messages". Others hold that dreams have meaning, and bad dreams require amelioration. According to the Book of Genesis, God granted Joseph precognition through prophetic dreams and the ability to interpret the dreams of others.
Precognition has a role in Buddhism with dreams believed to be 'mind-created phenomena'. Those dreams which 'warn of impending danger or even prepare us for overwhelming good news" are considered the most important.
History Throughout history it has been believed that certain individuals have precognitive abilities, or that certain practices can induce such experiences, and these visions have sometimes been associated with important historical events. Despite the lack of scientific evidence, many people still believe in precognition.Peake, Anthony; The Labyrinth of Time, Arcturus, 2012, Chapter 10: "Dreams and precognition". A poll in 2005 showed 73% of Americans believe in at least one type of paranormal experience, with 41% believing in extrasensory perception.
Antiquity Since ancient times precognition has been associated with dreams and trance states as well as waking premonitions, giving rise to acts of prophecy and fortune telling. Oracles, originally seen as sources of wisdom, became progressively associated with previsions of the future.Inglis (1986), Chapter on "Precognition"
Such claims of seeing the future have never been without their sceptical critics. Aristotle carried out an inquiry into allegedly prophetic dreams in his On Divination in Sleep. He accepted that "it is quite conceivable that some dreams may be tokens and causes [of future events]" but also believed that "most [so-called prophetic] dreams are, however, to be classed as mere coincidences...". Where Democritus had suggested that emanations from future events could be sent back to the dreamer, Aristotle proposed that it was, rather, the dreamer's sense impressions which reached forward to the event.Aristotle. (350 BC). On Prophesying by Dreams. Trans. J.I. Beare, MIT. (Retrieved 5 September 2018).
17th–19th centuries The term "precognition" first appeared in the 17th century but did not come into common use among investigators until much later.
An early investigation into claims of precognition was published by the missionary Fr. P. Boilat in 1883. He claimed to have put an unspoken question to an African witch-doctor whom he mistrusted. Contrary to his expectations, the witch-doctor gave him the correct answer without ever having heard the question.
Early 20th century In the early 20th century J. W. Dunne, a British soldier and aeronautics engineer, experienced several dreams which he regarded as precognitive. He developed techniques to record and analyse them, identifying any correspondences between his future experiences and his recorded dreams. He reported his findings in his 1927 book An Experiment with Time. In it he alleges that 10% of his dreams appeared to include some element of future experience. He also persuaded some friends to try the experiment on themselves, with mixed results. He noted a strong cognitive bias in which subjects, including himself, were reluctant to ascribe their dream correspondences to precognition and determinedly sought alternative explanations.Dunne (1927), pp.62-3. "The waking mind refuses point-blank to accept the association between the dream and the subsequent event. For it, this association is the wrong way round, and no sooner does it make itself perceived than it is instantly rejected. The intellectual revolt is automatic and extremely powerful." Dunne concluded that precognitive elements in dreams are common and that many people unknowingly have them.Dunne (1927).Flew, Antony; "The Sources of Serialism", in Shivesh Thakur (Ed). Philosophy and Psychical Research, George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1976, pp. 81–96. He suggested also that dream precognition did not reference future events of all kinds, but specifically the future experiences of the dreamer. He was led to this idea when he found that a dream of a volcanic eruption appeared to foresee not the disaster itself but his subsequent misreading of an inaccurate account in a newspaper.
Edith Lyttelton, who became President of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), regarded his theory as consistent with her own idea of the superconscious.Lyttelton, Edith. Our Superconscious Mind. Philip Allan. 1931. In 1932 he helped the SPR to conduct a more formal experiment, but he and the Society's lead researcher Theodore Besterman failed to agree on the significance of the results.Inglis (1986) p.92.Dunne (1927), 3rd Edition, Faber, 1934, Appendix III: The new experiment. Nevertheless, the Philosopher C. D. Broad remarked that, "The only theory known to me which seems worth consideration is that proposed by Mr. Dunne in his Experiment with Time."C. D. Broad; "The Philosophical Implications of Foreknowledge", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 16, Knowledge and Foreknowledge (1937), pp. 177–209 An Experiment with Time was widely read and "undoubtedly helped to form something of the imaginative climate of [the interwar] years", influencing many writers of both fact and fiction both then and since.Anon; "Obituary: Mr. J. W. Dunne, Philosopher and Airman", The Times, August 27, 1949, Page 7. According to Flieger, "Dunne's theory was so current and popular a topic that not to understand it was a mark of singularity."Flieger (1997) p.46. Major writers whose work was significantly influenced by his ideas on precognition in dreams and visions include H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley and Olaf Stapledon.Flieger (1997) p.136.Stewart, V.; "J. W. Dunne and literary culture in the 1930s and 1940s", Literature and History, Volume 17, Number 2, Autumn 2008, pp. 62–81, Manchester University Press. Vladimir Nabokov was also later influenced by Dunne.Vladimir Nabokov (ed. Gennady Barabtarlo); Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time, Princeton University Press, 2018.
In 1932 Charles Lindbergh's infant son was kidnapped, murdered and buried among trees. Psychologists Henry Murray and D. R. Wheeler used the event to test for dream precognition, by inviting the public to report any dreams of the child. A total of 1,300 dreams were reported. Only five per cent envisioned the child dead and only 4 of the 1,300 envisioned the location of the grave as amongst trees.
The first ongoing and organised research program on precognition was instituted by husband-and-wife team Joseph Banks Rhine and Louisa E. Rhine in the 1930s at Duke University's Parapsychology Laboratory. J. B. Rhine used a method of forced-choice matching in which participants guessed the order of a deck of 25 cards, each five of which bore one of five geometrical symbols. Although his results were positive and gained some academic acceptance, his methods were later shown to be badly flawed and subsequent researchers using more rigorous procedures were unable to reproduce his results. His mathematics was sometimes flawed, the experiments were not double-blinded or even necessarily single-blinded and some of the cards to be guessed were so thin that the symbol could be seen through the backing.Harold Gulliksen. (1938). Extra-Sensory Perception: What Is It?. American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 43, No. 4. pp. 623–634.Wynn & Wiggins (2001), p. 156.Hines (2003), pp. 78–81.
Samuel G. Soal, another leading member of the SPR, was described by Rhine as one of his harshest critics, running many similar experiments with wholly negative results. However, from around 1940 he ran forced-choice ESP experiments in which a subject attempted to identify which of five animal pictures a subject in another room was looking at. Their performance on this task was at chance, but when the scores were matched with the card that came after the target card, three of the thirteen subjects showed a very high hit rate; Rhine now described Soal's work as "a milestone in the field". However analyses of Soal's findings, conducted several years later, concluded that the positive results were more likely the result of deliberate fraud.Hyman (2007). The controversy continued for many years more. In 1978 the statistician and parapsychology researcher Betty Markwick, while seeking to vindicate Soal, discovered that he had tampered with his data. The untainted experimental results showed no evidence of precognition.Betty Markwick. (1985). The establishment of data manipulation in the Soal-Shackleton experiments. In Paul Kurtz. A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology. Prometheus Books. pp. 287–312.
Late 20th century As more modern technology became available, more automated techniques of experimentation were developed that did not rely on hand-scoring of equivalence between targets and guesses, and in which the targets could be more reliably and readily tested at random. In 1969 Helmut Schmidt introduced the use of high-speed random event generators (REG) for precognition testing, and experiments were also conducted at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab. Once again, flaws were found in all of Schmidt's experiments, when the psychologist C. E. M. Hansel found that several necessary precautions were not taken.C. E. M. Hansel. (1980). ESP and Parapsychology: A Critical Re-Evaluation. Prometheus Books. pp. 222–232. Hansel found that in the experiments of Schmidt there was no presence of an observer or second-experimenter in any of the experiments, no counterchecking of the records and no separate machines used for high and low score attempts.
Science fiction writer Philip K Dick believed that he had precognitive experiences and used the idea in some of his novels, especially as a central plot element in his 1956 science fiction short story "The Minority Report" and in his 1956 novel The World Jones Made.
In 1963 the BBC television programme Monitor broadcast an appeal by the writer J.B. Priestley for experiences which challenged our understanding of Time. He received hundreds of letters in reply and believed that many of them described genuine precognitive dreams.Inglis (1986) p.90.Priestley (1964). In 2014 the BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Francis Spufford revisited Priestley's work and its relation to the ideas of J.W. Dunne.Francis Spufford, "I Have Been Here Before", Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, 14 Sep 2014.