Can the Future Reach Back? Eric Wargo on Precognition, Time Loops & Dark Visions

SPEAKER_00 0:25

I am here with a very special guest. I'm very lucky. I can see some people on television or hear them on podcasts, and Eric is one I've heard on both. I recently saw him on uh Archive X, Unexplained Phenomena in episode three about an episode focusing on precognition and the question of do we really have free will? And I was really blown away. And I wanted I know Eric can go much deeper than he did on that episode. So I wanted to bring him on and and share his insights because I think the audience will find him very insightful and informative. So, Eric, Dr. Eric Wargo, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Thank you for having me, Bob.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Hey, hey, I uh you know it must be difficult if you go to a cocktail party and someone asks you what you do. So uh depending on how many drinks you've had, what's the quick uh pitch that you give them and and probably a different pitch if you want to talk to someone longer versus if you don't want to talk to that person, I would imagine.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

You know, well, A, I don't go to I I don't go to cocktail parties or parties of any kind anymore. I've got little kids, and so you know, I don't socialize basically. I'm right with you. It's just my socializing right here. You know, and uh well uh well that's not true. I mean I do, you know, have to sort of interact with like my kids, you know, friends, parents, and stuff like that. But I don't really I mean I don't I don't volunteer that I write about this stuff. I mean if they find out about it, you know, or it becomes apparent, you know, when they come over to my house and see all my UFO paintings and stuff like that. It's like little hmm, and they'll start acting asking questions. But uh other other than that, it doesn't really come up, you know. I don't I don't I don't volunteer it as like well, what do you do? Well I I I'll talk about my day job. I don't talk about I don't talk about my paranormal research and writing.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Well what do you put in your tax return? Is it author? Is it uh researcher? What do you what's what's the main like science writer?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Science writer science writer, I'm a science writer, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Okay, and you have a PhD in anthropology before? Yeah, um yeah, yeah. I gotta get to one thing first. I saw on the Why files on another podcast. It was an interesting side discussion. Um so before we get into the mysteries of the universe, Eric, let's talk about the mysteries of your elect of your electric bill, because you have a is it called a monitor lizard? And they require a lot of heat throughout the year, especially in the cold winters, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Yeah, absolutely. It's it's a it's uh it's a drain on the budget, uh, to be sure. But yeah, yeah. He's just you know, monitor lizards are becoming increasingly popular uh as as exotic pets, and they are pretty exotic, but uh they are they are very cool, very cool animals. They're not not like a you know a gecko or something like that. I mean, they're very they're smart, uh they're they're you know, and you can build a sort of bond with them the way you might with uh with uh you know with a mammal. I mean it's different than a mammal, but it's they're they're very cool animals.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Yeah, but what I mean when you look into the the monitor, what what's your what's your pet's name? Sunflower is his name.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

He's actually not, and I I have to be clear, it's not my pet, it's my daughter's pet. It's my daughter's pet. But you pay for the bills. I do all I pay the bills, I clean its poop, and I, you know, feed it live insects every other day. And yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Wow. I yeah, I I could have used a monitor lizard. I have that one invasive fly that keeps showing up, you know, right before they die, before it gets caught. So uh anyway, yeah, that's great. So you are not just an author and a researcher, you're an experiencer. You had a UFO, you saw you saw a UFO in 2009. And how did that change your trajectory and your professional career, your philosophical, your religious beliefs, and your personal journey to where you are today? Because it seems like it might have impacted it.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Yeah, I mean, it it uh it was definitely a turning point, but not in the way that it it is for a lot of experiencers. I mean, mine was not an up close and personal, you know, nothing high strangeness about it at all. It was, you know, we were uh fully awake with my you know that my girlfriend at the time, uh you know, waiting, waiting for the actually we're waiting for the fireworks to start on July 4th in Philly. And uh uh but uh you know, there was this weird object, and it definitely wasn't a Chinese lantern or anything like that, and it wasn't you know anything. I've I've I've seen tons of stuff in the sky. I've been, you know, an astronomy enthusiast my whole life, and I know what a satellite looks like, I know what planes look like and helicopters and all that, and it was not any of those things. It was basically orange orbs, you know, which are not which are widely reported. They're you know, there's like one of the biggest categories of UFO, I think. But they were it was a pair of them, and they were kind of dancing and moving across the sky. Dancing was like, you know, I was kind of like, and you know, my girlfriend saw it. I tried to film it, but it was like it was too dim, and uh, there was too much light pollution to like really show up in the in the video. But but no, it was like it really, it was interesting, and then the next day I did some uh some digging online and discovered that a lot of people I think this was on Mufon's site, and I think I discovered that that that there had been several reports of that thing on in in eastern Pennsylvania that same night. Uh so you know what I saw was seen by other people. Um, and so that, you know, hey, I had never heard of Mufon before then. Uh so you know, I I called an investor or I emailed the investigator for my region and you know, gave a report. And uh and and that experience got me to read about the topic. And that's that was what the turning point was for me, was was read my reading experience after uh my and my encounter, you know, it was uh you know going down the rabbit hole. Who did you read? Who is the author?

SPEAKER_00 6:29

The one or two authors you read had the most impact? Was it Jacques?

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Yeah, well, it would be Richard Dolan, first of all, and and then but Jacques Vallet. I mean, you always you you inevitably you end up finding Jacques Vallet's work. And you know, Richard Dolan, amazing. You know, I was I was blown away by his uh UFOs and the national security state, the volumes one and two of that. Those were two of the first things I read, and I was like, whoa, this is really interesting. I, you know, I'd always been, you know, in the back of my mind interested in UFOs, but I never thought, I never realized there was real research on this and that there was such a history. And that so that was you know mind-blowing. And then of course I started reading Jacques Vallée, and then you know, and that's what led me to my research on on parapsychology, because uh uh Jacques Vallée was talking about the comma and confluence of psychic phenomena with UFO phenomena. Uh and that was that was even more mind-blowing, honestly, to me than the UFO stuff. I mean, I didn't have you know, I had no problems with you know UFOs, and at the time I was a newbie and I assumed it was ETs and stuff like that. But psychic phenomena were a different story. That was like really, I I was really a skeptic about that stuff. And but I here was a smart, uh, very, you know, smart, thoughtful uh person who I really respected, uh taking it very seriously and giving me reason to take it seriously. So at that kind of, you know, I wound up writing on my blog about UFOs for a while, but I sort of really diverted into the parapsychology topic.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

And your blog is a good point to introduce your blog to the listeners. What's it called? The night shirt or something something or the night shirt, yeah. Okay. And what is it? All parapsychology, basically, kind of, or or is it really?

SPEAKER_01 8:19

No, no, it's a I would say it's you know uh the la first of all, I haven't really added to the blog at all in the last couple of years, but it's still it's got a lot of stuff that I'm like yeah proud of. A lot some of it I've tried to sort of export to other sites. You know, I've sort of moved some of it. A lot of those, a lot of the material on the blog be turned into my books uh you know the years. I mean, like they were sort of rough drafts essentially for what I wound up writing books on. Uh, but then also a lot of stuff on science fiction. Uh yeah, so and a lot of ufology stuff that I kind of have not written about much in books. And I probably won't because I'm you know, I'm not a ufologist. I'm not I don't follow the field closely enough to compete with compete with uh the people out there now because it's such a it's a huge field now. It's a very crowded uh field. But yeah, those there's a lot of ufology on there and science fiction stuff and yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

May I ask you, um, is ufology. Everything has like two sides or three sides. So when it comes to UFOs, are they from our galaxy? Are they interdimensional from other galaxies? Are they demons or are they other just entities? Are they future versions of us? Where did uh Richard Dolan write about that got you to think, yes, I think this is what they could be? Where does his camp sit?

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Well, I have no idea what I don't know what Richard, well, I I I know vaguely that Richard Dolan sort of is an advocate of the sort of breakaway civilization hypothesis, which I is uh is makes a lot of sense. I I think it's a perfectly cogent and there's a lot of reason to go that direction. I'm I'm more in the Mike Masters camp that it's that it's time travel, that it's that that these are time machines and that's our future you know descendants. I mean, I think that's in the world in another dimension.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

Do you think it's in in our galaxy, in in our universe? Or us.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

It's no, it's us. I mean it's us traveling backward in time. Yep. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's there the the the the fourth dimension is the is the dimension of time, and that's what you need to be thinking about. This idea of interdimensional is a just a sort of a hand wavy term, it's really means nothing to a scientist. There's no, you know, there are a lot of any whatever you want to measure as a dimension. Uh, but space-time consists most physicists agree that space-time consists of four dimensions, uh, you know, and the fourth dimension is time, and we don't experience it the same way we experience those other three dimensions. Yeah. Uh so it took humanity, you know, uh, you know, millions of years to uh get to the point where we figured out, oh wait, time is a dimension. And that was, you know, honestly, that was H. G. Wells and then Einstein 10 years later. Uh, it was sort of a big paradigm shift in our thinking right around the turn of the last century.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Um so before we get into um kind of a deeper dive on on some things, I want to kind of set the table, if you don't mind, with a couple terms, if you could explain them. When I've done research on you and checked on some of the books, these terms came up, and I wondered if you could just quickly define them for our audience and the relevance in terms of um what what you're studying. The first is the block universe and fixed time. And I think the block universe is what you just mentioned, four dimensions. That's right. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Yeah. So the I the idea is you need to try and you it's really hard. We can't really visualize it. So we visualize it. You get visualize it by getting rid of one of those spatial dimensions and visualize a brick, just a big and and make it glass so you can sort of see inside it. 3D. And 4D. In this, in this, in this brick, you know, every object, everything, every particle, every person, every planet is a world line. Okay, it's a it's a worm extending through that brick, you know. Some it's extending some some distance through that big glass brick. And particles themselves are like spaghetties that come together and weave and come, you know, come together and create objects and then dissipate and create new objects, and you know, but it's all they're all world lines extending through that. That that's what the glass block universe means. It's a it's just a synonym for what uh scientists in Einstein's day called the space-time continuum.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

And what about like fixed time? Is there such a thing as fixed time, or is it just kind of it's not linear like you and I are experiencing right now, where we start the interview, we end the interview. It is all in its past, present, future. Is that what it it means for time?

SPEAKER_01 12:41

Or it it it means that our consciousness, you know, whatever you want to call it, our awareness. I'm not a fan of the term consciousness for various reasons, but our awareness of things, let's just put it that way, sort of is like is like a cursor in a video editing like program that scrubs scrubs from one end of that, you know, continuum to the other.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

And it only goes one direction ordinarily. And that's why this is so confusing. I mean, there's something about our something about the human brain or whatever that sort of limits us to perceiving time in this particular way. Uh and but the idea is that that's really kind of an optical illusion, not an optical illusion, that's a cognitive illusion. Uh that's it's just a sort of an unbreakable illusion. There are a lot of examples, really cool examples in psychology of optical illusions that you just you can know it's an illusion and you cannot unsee it. Uh you know, you can you just cannot unsee that it this the illusion, even though you know full well what it is. Well, I think that's time is gonna be in that category, or the way we experience time linearly is going to ultimately end up in that same bin of of illusions.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

So time is not a man-made convention, but it's something we we kind of put a label on, but we probably have labeled incorrectly, basically, right? Uh uh in terms of Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Well, you know, we have a whole history of ways of measuring time and ways of of conceptualizing time and and so on. And those are cultural, uh, they involve technology, they involve history, and there's you know, lots of you know, lots of things go into how we talk about time and how we uh think about time. Uh and uh, but you know, it's uh you know, time may be something very different from from how we usually think of it.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

Very interesting. So that leads into the second term: time loops and retrocausation. Um retrocausation as you define them, can you explain how retrocognation is different than precognition? Because they seem to go hand in hand a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

They go they go hand in hand. So retrocausation is the physical the physical principle that allows something like precognition. And we'll put precognition set aside and get to that in a minute. But what what is what does retrocausation mean? So we uh science uh since uh the enlightenment, so that's in the last uh 400 years, I guess, has uh insisted that causes go a single direction in time. Okay. This was actually not a belief held by the ancients, but uh but beginning in the early 1600s, uh with Francis Bacon, in fact, uh he sort of laid down the rules of scientific thinking and reasoning. And one of them was to uh eliminate any notion that that there could be any causal factor from the future or from or sort of a causal factor of like purpose uh or forward forward-mindedness about matter, okay. Uh all causes had to sort of push from behind, okay? And so that's how we think about cause. It's it's you know, the billiard balls hitting each other and you know, over time or dominoes falling, you know, those sort of models of causation. Now, more and more that idea as the sort of rule of of scientific thinking is breaking down at the highest levels of physics. Um, in fact, it's been breaking down sort of for a century, but you know, it has the news hasn't trickle trickled down to most people yet. But it's uh there's a growing uh sort of population of physicists who now think, you know, the secret to all these quantum, spooky quantum mysteries going on uh at the smallest scales really may have to do with the fact that actually causes go both directions and that that that cause is bi-directional, and that uh and that uh sometimes there's a lot of terms used for this, uh temporal symmetry, time symmetry, um whatever. There's a lot of different uh terms that they sometimes use to this, but the basic idea is that events, an event at time point B in the future can influence something happening at time point A, uh maybe not the same way or with the same like potency as as a previous cause influences it, but nevertheless, causality does go in both directions. And there are specific uh uh circumstances that sort of uh amplify that retrocausal effect, uh including quantum computers. And guess what the brain is increasingly thought uh to be or to involve is quantum computing. So the idea would be that uh not only can you know causes travel in both directions, uh, but the brain might be able to get information not only about its past, sort of you know, through memory, uh, but also about its future. So that's I think that's the basis. That's the sort of physical and biological basis for uh my hypothesis about precognition and how it works.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

And time loops and time loops is what? Is that cycle that it can go back and forth? It's not linear, is that what the deal is?

SPEAKER_01 18:14

More specifically, it's the wrinkle that that that this fact of retrocausation adds to any causal story that involves a freely willed human. Because so say I, you know, have you know, I don't know, I get an inspiration that turns that that in fact is some inkling of something that's gonna happen in my future, even though I'm not aware of that fact, that part of it. Uh, and that inspiration gets me to do something, create an artwork or whatever, which then leads to the effect that I was in fact precognizing when I had that inspiration. So it's a causal loop. All right. Now, causal loops are a perfectly acceptable notion in Einsteinian physics, because even though Einstein and those people didn't accept retrocausation per se, they accepted time travel, uh, the idea you could go backward in time. So essentially what I'm describing as retrocausation in the brain is a kind of time travel. It's just information traveling backwards in time. Uh and when you have that, when you have anything traveling backwards in time, you automatically have a time loop because that influence back in time uh then influences the future situation that sent that influence back in time. So you have a causal circularity, and that's what I I call it a time loop because it's a catchier phrase. It's a good it's a causal loop is a more accurate way of of characterizing it.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

All right. And by the way, in Archive X in the fourth episode, which just came out, there it's on mediums, and there's a medium who saw a girl being kidnapped, you know, when she was like four or six, and a couple years later that was her. She saw the room and everything. So it's great, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

See, see, I think that that a lot a lot of the sort of things in the paranormal world that have their own names are may some of them may all be this phenomenon. I mean, that I think mediumship is one mode through which people get information about the future. They may not interpret it that way. They may interpret it as getting information from the afterlife or whatever. But you see this a lot in mediums, uh, is is these kind of self-fulfilling, you know, the these these things which they think are about somebody else, uh, turns out to be about them. That's true of like precognitive dreams as well, you know. Uh so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

It's very interesting. Um, the long self, quote unquote long self. What would you explain that as?

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Well, that's just that worm, you know, we were talking about. That's just, you know, we are we have an existence that that that winds through the block universe for, you know, ideally several decades. Uh and uh and we are not so this idea that the past is good dead and gone and the future is completely indeterminate and irrelevant is wrong. I mean, we are uh we are I I think in continuous communication across across that worm, that that that four-dimensional uh uh being that we are. Um and that it's manifest in things like dreams and creativity. Um and uh aliens, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:36

And aliens too, because because if they go back to it, maybe they don't suffer.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

Aliens, no, aliens, well, I would say more likely aliens are are those time traveling, those time travelers using space using time machines. I mean, that's that's a more physical version of what we're talking about. But I'm talking about information in an individual's head extending across their lifespan. Um so in a In other words, there's not just memory, which is sort of you know our ability to retain and learn from experience and carrying it forward through time, but there's you know what I sometimes call premary, which is the being influenced by events, learning experiences, traumas, whatever, that lie ahead of us in time. Uh, and that's what comes through in in people's dreams when they actually don't pay any attention uh to their dream life. Uh and with this idea you know, with a bel you know, with the belief in the possibility that this is true, they'll start noticing it all the time. Uh uh so yeah, I think this is a very important hitherto unexamined factor in human psychology.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Well, and it's a good segue to the last one, which is precognitive creativity.

SPEAKER_01 23:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:46

Which is our creativity isn't our spur. Oh, I just this I just thought of this idea. It's more of it comes from the past. All ideas come from the past, basically, right? Is that it? Or would you add anything to it?

SPEAKER_01 23:59

Or uh Yeah, well, yeah, the I think I think inspiration has often, at least, uh demonstrably has a precognitive component to it. Uh that is to say, you know, there are a million examples. I mean, I've written two books about this, and I could fill two more already uh with other other examples of artists who, you know, unknowingly, this is almost never a conscious thing, it's always unconscious, but they they are pulling from from some ideas from some ether, and they'll they'll conceptualize it as the collective unconscious or or whatever, uh, or God, or whatever. I mean, they'll they that you can conceptualize it however you want to, but information you know comes to us uh and it always feels like from nowhere. I mean, that's why the title of my first book on this is from nowhere, because that's the the the universal description of an artist describing uh inspiration. Okay, uh the idea just emerges. Uh well, guess what else just pops into existence? I mean, uh a time traveler coming from the future would just pop into existence, you know, right? Because there's no backstory to it. Okay, they're they're coming from another direction in time. Um, I think that's uh so you know, we could talk about a million different examples. I could give you a million different examples of artists who clearly were drawing on their own future experiences when they created some of their uh best works, but also some of their worst works. I mean, Phil Dick was doing this uh his whole life. He was one of the unique artists who was aware of it. He was he was he was fully aware of the author, yep.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Yeah. What about you? You're an artist. Has it affected you? I know you do some UFO paintings. Um has has that affected you, the precognitive create uh activity and in work that you've done?

SPEAKER_01 25:56

Um, I it's hard to say. I'm too close to my own work, and it's it's it's it's hard to tell. I'm not um uh you know, I I do a lot of photography. You know, I've had accidents in photography that that seem like that's that's funny, you know, that that uh but I I haven't had any like like lightning flashes that this was precognitive, but I notice it in my kids' art all the time.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

Interesting. Wow, really?

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Yeah, yeah. They're you know, my kids are just kids are very artistic and they don't they haven't been uh taught to self-censor uh in all kinds of ways. And so they'll they'll say stuff that then comes true, they'll make art that then like resembles like something that that they see on TV later. It's um yeah, it's it's it's amazing. It's amazing to watch this in children, honestly, because because uh they're perfect examples of yeah, creativity and I think precognition that is sort of uh uh uninhibited. Uh but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:02

I think you know if you forgive me for throwing out a potentially absurd one, the Simpsons. You always hear about the Simpsons having precognition about what's going on in the world. Any thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 27:11

Or uh well, I okay, so I left that out of my book because I don't know, I just don't know enough about the writing room, the sip the Simpsons writing room. I don't know who's you know who's contributing what to those ideas. I I'd have to delve deeply into the history of the Simpsons, and I I don't have time to do that. But there are enough other examples that uh that you don't need to you don't need to go to the Simpsons.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

I mean there's just a million oh yeah a million examples of I had a uh there's a gentleman that writes a series of books called Cinema Symbolism, you know, and the symbolism in films I've kind of precognition of what happens later on. Like there's a lot of examples about you know the towers and stuff. So yeah, uh guy's named Robert Sullivan IV, and he's he's gonna be back on again. But yeah, very interesting. My co-host, which wasn't on this, he couldn't make it for this episode. He's uh traveling, he thought it was tomorrow, but he was in the film disclosure. So I'm trying to find out is there any uh stuff in disclosure that this guy would talk about. But um anyways, uh let's go to your television experience. Let's go to uh Archive X episode three. We're gonna cover a couple things. One is Andrew Paquette. This is how did you meet Andrew Paquette and why is he so unique in the world of people who have dreams and things that come true?

SPEAKER_01 28:27

Yeah, I've actually never met him. And he was like filmed on a he was filmed on a separate day when I was there, but I knew his work very well. Even from he was his book was one of the first that I read back in 2011 when I first started researching precognition. I mean, his his book, I'm not sure what it came out around that time. Uh and uh yeah, so I've been aware of him for for a long, long time. And uh I'm not sure if we've communicated by email. I mean, there are a lot of there are a lot of precogs out there. I mean, they one of the one of my disappointments with that episode was that they they did not convey how massive this phenomenon is and how common uh these kinds of people are who have routine precognitive dreams. I mean, I since I started blogging on this, and then especially after Time Loops came out, I get, you know, I've had I've gotten hundreds of emails from from people telling me incredible stories, and I've uh I've you know interact, I've worked, you know, sort of collaboratively with a few of them, uh, you know, and and it's when they have, you know, when they discover that they've had one precognitive dream, if they're a dream journaler, uh, which I recommend everyone keep a dream journal, keep a dated dream journal. Uh, but if the when they go back, they'll discover, oh my god, I've had a ton of these. Uh and uh often, here's one of those sort of cultural framings that I can't think kind of disguises the topic. They'll often think it's synchron synchronicity, they'll use that word synchronicity, uh, you know, because that's most people haven't even heard the term precognition, but they know that term, synchronicity, and that's what this feels like. It's a coincidence, you know. It's like, oh well, yeah, it's like I was just dreaming about this, and here I, you know, I was just dreaming about that old friend, and suddenly today I get a call from them or whatever. Um so you know, they they'll grasp that that kind of Yunion term to talk about it. Yeah, but it's these are all manifestations of precognition.

SPEAKER_00 30:21

How would you describe the difference between coincidence and synchronicity? Because they sound like they're you know the same thing, but they're really not, right? Coincidence is just random, it just happens, you know, like the hour, a clock is right twice a day or something. And synchronicity is everything's kind of connected. Is that accurate?

SPEAKER_01 30:37

Well, that's the that's the meaning of that's the original meaning of Jung's term. It's a meaningful, uh, it's he it was an a causal connecting principle. That was his definition. Uh and it it sort of made sense, sort of, of meaningful coincidences, you know, coincidences that feel interesting, you know, meaningful. Like this is, you know, it's not just, you know, it's not the stop clock, you know, telling you the rewrite time. It's like, you know, these experiences are too personal and too impossible, you know, to explain that way. Uh and likewise, you know, the connection between a dream and then an event that plays out the next day that is almost exactly the same as your dream, you know, psychologists will try to dismiss it by saying, oh, it's the law of large numbers. Coincidences happen, you know, in a in a big universe, and everyone's gonna have these experience, these, these coincidences sometimes, you know. But uh what they're what they're overlooking and don't know is that these things happen uh always and people just don't pay attention. Most people don't pay attention to their dreams. Uh A. B, if they do pay attention to their dreams, they don't write down their dreams. Uh C, they if they do write down to their dreams, they don't go back to their dream records afterwards and compare and look at connections between things that happened later. Um so people will notice a precognitive dream on those rare occasions when they have a dream about a big event in their life and they play and it plays out and they remember that dream. Okay. They'll notice it then, and that then that often happens around things like deaths, you know, deaths and disasters, you know, on you know, 9-11, for instance, and or the Titanic. I mean, there's like you know, hundreds of people, your thousands. I would I would bet every American had a precognitive dream at least once about the 9-11, but just wasn't aware of it. I mean, we dream throughout the night, and we all remember like maybe one dream if we wake up in the morning, if that. Um so my guess is that these are happening like nightly, and and you know, the fact is when you start keeping a dream journal, I mean, I was blown away. I I had look, I had kept a dream journal, a dated dream journal on my computer, you know, detailed for uh uh a decade and a half by the time I became aware of precognition in the early 20s, you know, and uh and you know, because I had a mental block against it. I had told you I had a sort of these prejudices against this idea. So it never even occurred to me, yet I could point to examples when my dreams had in fact played out the next day. I had a 9-11 dream. I had a you know, a couple dreams about things weird, very unusual situations happening at work, you know, then and then they played out the next day. Most precognitive dreams are about mundane, you know, relatively mundane, you know, uh situations, embarrassing little situations at work, or you know, weird little things that happen in your home or with your kids or whatever. They're they're they're not those kind of uh monumental dreams about deaths and assassinations and terror attacks and things like that. Uh and so they don't stand out. You know, it doesn't stand out in your memory that you had that dream, uh, and then you don't, you know, you don't remember the dream when the event occurs. But when you keep a dream journal, boom, and you but keep a dream journal and go back to it every day to sort of like look for those connections, it's like holy crap. I mean, I've had, you know, I've I've got I've had hundreds and hundreds of precognitive dreams, and it's like it's it's you know, for it's mind-blowing uh initially, you know, the first you know, couple years of your adventure with precognitive dream work is you know truly mind-blowing and transformative.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Um may I ask about a personal one that you've had, or uh is it is there one in particular regarding that you had a precognition either about a family or about an event?

SPEAKER_01 34:52

I've got a lot of favorite ones I talk about in my books and my classes. So like I'll give two examples. Like one one perfectly illustrates um the principle that these are often about very mundane things. Okay, so I had a dream about I woke up and it was just a few flash images, but they were black and white distinctively, and they looked like this old new wave uh European film. And there was just like there was a there was a sailboat on the water and a cart and intersection and two people having a tense interaction on a boat, okay. And I I woke up and I like I wrote that, I I just wrote down the images in my in my journal, but I like I free associated on it. This is important. I just like what does this remind me of? Well, it it reminded me of this. In fact, I I immediately rem knew where these scenes came from. And it was an old uh old uh Polish movie from the 1960s called Knife in the Water that I had seen like years and years ago. I had no reason to be thinking of this movie, but this came up in my dream. Well, the next I go to work uh you know, a couple hours later, and I went into the office kitchen to get a knife to peel my apple that I'd brought as a snack. And what do I discover when I walk into the kitchen? But the sink had backed up and it was like full of like muddy, gross water, and there was one object gleaming in the bottom of the sink. And guess what it was? It was the knife that I was that I was looking for. And so that's the kind of thing that happens. The you know, it's not always some you know monumental uh thing uh that that your like precognitive antennae are sort of uh detecting. It's it's these little upheavals. I mean, I it was mundane, but honestly, it was the biggest event in my morning, and it was and it became important because all you know is yet another example of of dream precognition. Now, another, you know, I'd say a more profound one, I think it was probably a couple years later. I mean, I've had a lot, but but I had, you know, I was I had this, it was a lucid dream, and uh I was I I was flying through this land this prehistoric landscape, and I thought, oh cool, I'm gonna see some dinosaurs, you know. And I I can't ever control my lucid dreams. But anyway, I landed between these two creatures uh that were coming together to fight. And uh they were it was very disappointing because they were dinosaurs, they were like kind of nondescript animals that I knew came from the period before the dinosaurs, you know. They weren't as like spectacular as dinosaurs, you know. But anyway, I you know I had to fight to hold them apart. Anyway, that evening, I got first issue uh of a magazine I'd subscribed to. I had forgotten about it, in fact, uh, for my kid, uh called Prehistoric Times. And it was and it's a and it's a magazine of paleo art and toys, dinosaur toys, like that. Anyway, I'm flipping through this magazine with my daughter, and I turn the page, and there's boom, there's those two animals, uh exactly the scene in my dream, exactly what I what I saw. And I I had no knowledge of of this beforehand. I had no knowledge, you know, I didn't know what these creatures were, I didn't, you know, I didn't know what these specific things were. Anyway, like mind-blowing to have these experiences. I've talked at this point to hundreds of people uh who report these things. And and once they report one, they start noticing them again and again. So it's you know you know, I think there's a very common thing.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

I have to start. I'm probably the worst student for this because I think I have to do that because I do have dreams, I'll see people that'll pop in, or I'll feel like I'm in a uh I'll have weird dreams about being lost in the city and not being able to get home, or about you know not finishing weird stuff, you know. So I think I need to do that. I think let's talk about Andrew, a couple of things about Andrew Paquette, because he's had like world-affecting things. Like could you please provide a couple details about him and what was so fascinating? And he's like the poster child of what you should do because he does a journal and he paints a picture of what it looks like, and then he'll even go to like the Barclays bank, you know, which has the date time stamp it, you know, of certain things as well. So there's a story of that with uh 2000 and 911, and uh just turn it to you if you could share that, please.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

Well, you're conflating two stories actually that are in that episode. Uh Andrew Piquette had a ton of 911 dreams, but the artist who painted uh actually he's also an artist. I think he does draw or paint his dreams, but yeah, uh David Mandel was an art teacher in Britain who in London who on September 11th, 1996, ah, you're running woke up, woke up with a dream where the twin towers were crashing into each other. He he drew it and took it to his Barclays bank and had his little photograph with his drawing. And then a couple months later, he had a dream of planes hitting the towers. And then, you know, five days, five years to the day. This is by the way, a very common thing in precognitive dreaming that you'll dream about a big event that's either a year later or multiple years later on the same date. It's a very common thing. Um anyway, yeah, that's so so yeah, David Mandel's story is fascinating. But Andrew Piquet had a number of dreams uh that were you know seemingly precognitive of 9-11. One of his most interesting dream in that in that episode, though, was the one it wasn't actually a dream. It was that precognitive inkling that this woman he was about to meet on the other side of a door uh was going to die by suicide.

SPEAKER_00 40:38

Ah, I remember that, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:39

It wound up and it wound up transpiring, but he sort of wrestled with, you know, should I tell, you know, I I can't tell this person, whatever. This is incredibly common. I I so many of the emails I get are from people who predicted, who had a dream or an inkling about someone dying, and then that happened. Uh, and then they wind up living with terrible guilt uh about this because uh they first they think, oh, I should have maybe I could have warned them. Well, first they don't realize that that it was precognitive until the event happens. And so, oh my God, you know, it's like this was real. I should have warned them, I could have stopped it, uh, or or maybe somehow I caused it because people are confused about this stuff. They think that maybe, oh, I put out energy into this is something I hear all the time. I did I put out energy into the universe that caused this somehow. And, you know, because our culture lacks this concept of retrocausation to account for and time loops to account for how these things occur, uh, people feel terribly guilty when they discover that they've had a precognitive dream about death or disaster. This is one of the one of the big themes in my book, Precognitive Dream Working the Long Self. In fact, it's one of the reasons I wrote the book because I was getting so many uh some this story, this some sort of similar story uh was I was hearing so often of people having precognizing death uh and then feeling guilty about it.

SPEAKER_00 42:11

What's what would be your preference? Say I had a dream about you, and would you want me to tell you about it? Would you want me to send you an email and say, you know, this is probably nothing, Eric, but I had a dream that boom, boom, watch out for a car. Would you would you want someone to tell you personally, or would you rather not?

SPEAKER_01 42:28

I I guess I'd rather not. I I'd rather not I'd steal about it too much. I'm I you know I'm I tend to be anxious anyway. And actually one of the one of the kind of phases you you often go through on this path of precognitive dream work is going through a phase of real fear, like, oh my God, I don't want to have a dream about you know something happening to my kids, my kids, you know, or whatever. Like that becomes like uh and I don't know, I've kind of gotten past that because most most dreams are precognitive in a very oblique, symbolic, uh way or ironic way. And things come true in things you've dreamed come true, but in a way that you don't expect, and often with a kind of wit to them, the kind of wit that that um that is kind of sort of feels like a trickster. And I think I think that's an effect of you know, uh we are I think a lot of trickster-like effects in our lives, uh, especially if we're sort of sensitive to sort of stuff, are the result of sort of the indirect way that information travels through time in our brains. Uh so long that's a long answer to your question.

SPEAKER_00 43:47

Someone had a dream about me and told me about it. I mean, and it's like it wasn't sure if it was me or someone else, but it wasn't like it was a little nerve-wracking a little bit. And I wasn't happy to hear it. I mean, I don't blame, I'm not angry about it, but I didn't if I had my choice, I'd rather not hear about it. Yeah, it was several years ago. Um so yeah, that's why I asked that. Now, Andrew Paquette, he also had a dream that saved his life, right? That was on the show as well that he feels saved his life, an attack.

SPEAKER_01 44:10

Yes, yeah, yeah. That this also is very, very common. Yeah, yeah. So there's like the it there's both sides to it. You know, people often think of these death and disaster dreams, but uh dreams, you know, arguably save people's lives all the time. Uh there's tons of examples of this. I've heard tons of examples of this. Uh driving, and often it's not, it's not even dreams. It's often sort of uh, I think psychically sensitive people will be driving, you know, driving along, or they'll be the passenger in a car and they'll suddenly have a like a flash of what's about to happen. And that forewarning kind of enables them to uh to Avert disaster. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:55

I had someone on my show recently. Um, and he had uh he used to go to work and there was a fork in the road where you can take more of the country slow road or more of the highway, and a voice will tell him not to go the country slow road, and he wanted to find out what's gonna happen, so he went there, but he was on high alert. And because he was on high alert, he avoided a a truck spinning at him and he was able to just get out of the way by turning the wheel. So there's yeah, I've seen some of my guests have had the exact same thing. Um in this episode three, I know what you would want to get across to the audience that maybe you didn't have a chance or that was on the cutting room floor. Are there a couple of things, you know, besides how how prominent you know precog is there are a few other things you'd want to bring out to people's attention as well that you think were kind of missed opportunities?

SPEAKER_01 45:38

I think that's the big one. The the this is not I don't believe it's a rare phenomenon at all, and it's not like something confined to a few, you know, a handful of people who are somehow psychically gifted. Now, there certainly are there certainly are those people, and uh Amaris, the Jane, the the uh remote viewer interviewed on the on the show. Certainly, she is not only has an innate gift, sort of the way you know some people are born, able, you know, with musical gifts and and and so on. So yeah, there's a there's variation, human variation, but nevertheless, I think it's a basic part of our cognition, really. It's a basic part of our innate operating system in l in life. I think it's also basic to animals and even uh bacteria, you know. I think that that this ability to sort of respond to to uh to things ahead in time, I think is maybe central to uh to life, you know, not just not just human life. Um and it gets buried, it just gets buried by a lot of cultural weight, cultural baggage. We're not aware of it. It offer it generally operates uh unconsciously um uh you know, through you know, things like that. That's a question I have.

SPEAKER_00 47:01

That's a question I have, uh Eric, if you don't mind. Do you believe precognition is generated from our mind or from something external, you know, communicating something to us, or even our future self? What's your thought on that?

SPEAKER_01 47:14

Well, the future self is our self. I mean, that is internal. I mean, that's that's the point is you can think um, you know, to get materialistic about it. I'm not, you know, I'm I'm on the fence about where I stand in terms of the materialism versus antimaterialism debate. I kind of get tired of the debate, frankly. But uh, you know, the the brain, if you want to just reduce it to the brain, or just let's talk about the body, but our body extends through time, and it's the same cells, you know, same the same particles and so on. Well, you know, technically the particles get replaced and so on, but the you know, it's there is the you can think of the self or the body as a wire that goes through time. And just like uh say the wire that connects, you know, if you're like syncing up your smartphone to your computer, you know, in the old-fashioned way using a wire, information is traveling in both directions when you're syncing up that. So I think we are wires that carry information both directions.

SPEAKER_00 48:14

What do you think happens when we dream at night? What do you think? Uh is it just for because I need to sleep, or do you think it's because why do you think the purpose of dreaming is? Because there's you write a lot about dreams and yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:26

So so the consensus, the uh the the consensus in psychology and cognitive science is that dreams are the formation of new memories. Okay, they're the format you have sort of a short-term memory buffer of things that happened that day or the past couple days. And dreaming is where your body, your, your, your cortex is actively rewiring, and it's sort of taking that stuff. Um, and the hippocampus is really important to this, is taking those short-term memories and and transferring them into your long-term memory store. Okay. Uh now, storage is kind of an old metaphor that they've kind of gotten away from, but nevertheless, that's the that's the general idea. Now, uh I think that the same thing is happening with future information in in dreams, that it's getting woven into our uh our our memory, basically, uh so that those dreams are not just taking recent events, but they're taking future events uh and weaving them together.

SPEAKER_00 49:26

So in episode three, Dark Visions of uh Archive X, one of the questions was do we have free will or not with free with precognitive? What's your take on that? What's your how do you come away from that?

SPEAKER_01 49:38

Yeah, well, we could talk for hours at that one, and then everybody asks it because it's like uh, you know, it's like it's one of the big hangups. It's one of the big cultural hangups that uh keeps that has kept the topic of not only precognition, but retrocausation uh from sort of off the table uh in in science, both in culture generally, or at least you know, Western culture and in the culture of science. Um, because we are very committed as Westerners, as you know, Europeans and Americans, uh to this kind of notion of liberty and freedom and uh the idea that we are free actors and and you know we're we're creating the future. We're not, you know, the future isn't already there. Uh so that idea of the block universe is really repugnant to a lot of people when they first hear it, okay? Um, and they then have trouble reconciling, uh they have so much trouble reconciling this notion with uh with free will that they just reject it, you know, out of hand. Well, now that can't be. And oddly enough, this is true even for physicists who ought to be guided just by the science, right? I mean, they should be, you know, looking at the evidence uh and not be sort of biased by their philosophical preferences. And yet, uh, in the history of physics, uh, a sort of need to uh protect this idea of free will has kept the idea of retrocaus causation from like getting the attention that it really deserves. Uh over the decades, ever since the 1920s, physicists have started to propose that maybe retrocausation was the explanation for quantum phenomena, but it keeps getting proposed and then just getting rejected because no one wants to go there to that question of free will. Now, what do I think? It's complicated. I mean, we can't help but experience free will. I mean, we can't, you know, I I'm, you know, I have no idea, uh, you know, the paradox of precognition is you don't know what's gonna happen in the future. Okay. Even with pre-cognition, you do not know what's gonna happen in the future. Uh I'm acting freely, uh, I'm always acting freely. Uh, and you are too, I'll bet. But uh there is nevertheless a point of view on my free actions right now, from which those actions are all in the past and part of a film strip that you could scrub through. Uh, and you can imagine aliens like in the movie Arrival, you know, if you've seen that movie, you know, they they they have this four-dimensional perception of space-time, and they can sort of scrub back and forth, and they they know what's going to happen 3,000 years from now, and what, you know, and they don't have that that that sense of an open-ended future the way we do. Now, that sound again, that sounds repugnant to people from our culture, uh, because we we just hate that. It feels like we're imprisoned, like, but that that imprisoned feeling comes from the belief that we could somehow know or see the future and not be able to prevent it. But the fact is we don't we can't see the future. We can't know the future, we can't know how the future is influencing us until it happens. So um, I I look, I my my background, my you know, you sort of mentioned my spiritual, my spirituality. Well, my spirituality is sort of Zen Buddhism, okay? And uh I've had profound uh experiences uh in meditation of the block universe, of this, you know, of this idea of the block universe. And it is blissful. It is like holy crap, this is the it's the best thing ever. But you can't, it's hard to convey that to someone who is sort of steeped in this, this, these kind of preconceptions about free will. And I'll I'll add that like in the in like a Zen context, the last thing you want it to do is have free will. I mean, you you are your best self when you are, say, doing a martial art and you're not thinking about it, but you're just acting and it's all perfect. You know, you're part of this big machine and it's like it's beautiful and perfect. Or if you're piloting a plane, a jet plane, you don't want to be thinking about free will. You want to be, you know, you want to be doing the exact right thing, or doing an art, you know, any any kind of art where we're you know expressing yourself spontaneously, that's that's your best self, you know, or being super witty, you know, you're not thinking about free will, you're not thinking about it, you're just doing it. And it just comes out. Uh, and that's the state you want to be in. Uh so I tell people just just set aside this idea of free will. It's just, it's just a it's a hang up. Uh and and if and if you take this block universe as sort of a uh object of meditation and think about it and think about retrocausation and what it means and and have these experiences yourself, it like you may have like an awakening. Where's like, oh wow, that's this is like a more profound way of seeing things than you know just always being hung up on this you know, idea of free will.

SPEAKER_00 54:55

So I'm gonna throw out another word uh and see what manifestation. What do you think? Precognition, you know, where you have an idea and it's up to you if you how you react to it. What are your thoughts about people manifesting, having thoughts and focusing on things and thinking they can change their reality? Do you think there's any credence for that or just a bunch of well we all we can all change our reality?

SPEAKER_01 55:15

I mean, we're that's what we're doing every second, second, second. We are change, we're changing the present into the future, and we're changing it in different directions. So we're always in you know changing things. But as far as manifestation, I I'm I believe that that it's misrecognized precognition, that that that that intention, that intention is actually often precognition, which we reframe as our own agency. Uh uh and I give some examples of this in in in a couple of my books. But uh yeah, I think that I I'm not a believer in intention. Uh I think that our intentions are disguised our our future selves, sort of disguised, uh disguised as our own free will, uh, pulling us uh in a certain direction. I mean, it's just a one way that we can experience that. Uh so I'm yeah, I'm not a believer in that sense of manifestation.

SPEAKER_00 56:10

So a lot of great information on this episode, Eric. What would be, you know, the crib notes, the key takeaway that you would want people to walk away from this episode? What's the one or two things you think they should be aware of? You know, would it be being awake, writing down dream journals? What are some takeaways you would have for people watching this?

SPEAKER_01 56:30

Yeah, pay attention. Pay attention, keep a dream journal. Uh precognition is real and it manifests in all kinds of ways, but I don't want you to take my word for it. I want you to discover it in your own life. That's uh that's what will convince you. And uh just be open-minded enough to it to keep a dream journal. Uh pay attention. Just pay attention because uh when you do that, you know, amazing things happen. I mean, unfortunately, we live in a society where our attention is stolen by electronic, you know, distraction. Distractions all the time. So yeah, pay attention. That's pay attention and keep a dream journal. So those two things, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:09

Well, that's great. And uh what book of all the you've written like five books, I think. Which books based on this topic that would it be the time loop one, which books would be beneficial for people to pick up on Amazon and read based on our conversation today, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 57:23

Well, it depends on whether you're particularly interested in the dream topic, in which case would be precognitive dream work and the long self, which is devoted, you know, to that question. If you're interested in creativity and art and artists, I would get from nowhere. That's uh my book about about art and creativity, because it's um uh, you know, this is people think of precognition, though they're gonna think about prem premonition, dream premonition, stuff like that. But it's so it's just as prevalent in the lives of artists and creative people. Uh and and I I think that's a hugely fascinating topic.

SPEAKER_00 57:56

What about time loops? That's your probably most pop famous one, right? The one that sold the most.

SPEAKER_01 58:00

Yeah, yeah. Well, that sort of covers everything and it has a lot and it and it gives a lot of space to the sort of physics and potential neurobiology underlying it. It there's a bit about dreams, it's there's a bit about creativity. Uh, it goes into depth on um uh both Freud and Jung, who I believe like understanding their work and their lives uh is hugely illuminating to the study of recognition. It goes into a lot more detail. So I mean, if you're interested in a deep dive, read time loops. But if you're sort of more narrowly focused on uh on dreams or on creativity, I would say the two other books.

SPEAKER_00 58:38

And what's your next book? Do you have another, or are you just taking a break from it, or you know, is there another book you have that you're working on?

SPEAKER_01 58:44

I, you know, I've got I've I've had a lot of ideas and I'm sort of on hiatus from uh from writing for the time being. I'm just kind of I'm you know, my my kids are driving me, you know, I'm exhausted. I can't uh you know, I'm I you have young kids or older kids? Young. I mean they're they're still young, so like age six and ten. Uh so you know they're they're they're a handful, and I'm um yeah, so yeah, there will be more there will be more books. Uh I can't tell you which of the various ideas I've had will manifest.

SPEAKER_00 59:19

But well, if I dream of something, I'll send you an email what it should be on. I'll send you a little bit of a question.

SPEAKER_01 59:23

If you dream, if you dream that I'm gonna win the lottery, then I do want to hear, I want to hear what the lottery ticket numbers are. So, yes, in that case, uh, but but yeah, I don't want to hear the.

SPEAKER_00 59:35

Yeah, I'm gonna tell you, I'm not a good person. If I dream that you win the lottery, I'll probably write down the tickets, you know. Maybe share it with you or something. Right. Um, thank you so much. And finally, what's your website? Is there a place where people can go to follow all things about you? Because you're in a lot of podcasts. You're on you're on TV shows. You I assume you give lectures. I mean, you're at book signings, maybe. So, where can people follow you in the next couple months, or what's the one place they should go?

SPEAKER_01 59:58

Oh, well, okay. I mean, my website is ericwargo.com. Uh, but uh I actually teach courses uh pretty regularly uh at Morbin Anatomy. Um so in fact, I'm going to be teaching precognitive dream work uh in the long self. I'm gonna be teaching a course version of that book starting starting in a month and on December 6th is the first day. So it'll be a five-week course. Uh so you can find information about that either on my website or by going directly to morbinanatomy uh.org, I believe. And uh yeah, and sign up. Uh that's a good way to to sort of get a dose of of my ideas. So yeah, those those two things.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:38

I'll leave you with a big heavy question. What do you believe in an afterlife that energy goes on and that we keep going on? Or do you believe in reincarnation? Or what's your or would you rather not comment?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:47

Is it just that a I don't, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I mean you could I would give you a different answer every day. You know, you know, some part of me thinks yeah. I mean, I I I don't think and I think I gave this answer to, I think AJ asked this question on the Y files too, and I I'll give you the same answer. I don't, I don't, whatever I consciously, you know, could say, I think I believe, um I I believe that unconsciously we cannot help but believe in an afterlife. I don't I just don't think it's possible to not believe in it. So what I consciously think or not think, you know, it would be it would be a lie if I said I don't believe there's an afterlife, because even if intellectually I'm skeptical, you know, deep down, I I don't think it's possible not to believe that. So on some level I do, you know. So um, you know, I'm of two minds, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:40

Yeah, you're on the fence, and when you die, we'll see where you fall or where we fall, you know. Um, I always thought that death would be the ultimate truth because there's so many lies and misperceptions in this in this world that we deal with. So I've always felt like death would be the ultimate truth. So Eric, thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed talking to you. I enjoyed see listening to you on the podcast and and on the Archive X. I encourage people to check it out. And uh great stuff. I mean, I I I've done 150 episodes, I haven't done anything on precognition before, so this is awesome. Uh, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:09

Yeah, well, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.