In previous articles I have written about the inherent strangeness of the dreamworld and its ability to make a mockery of our dominant theories of time and space.
But it’s not just the sleeping state that can show us glimpses of a reality in which all things that have existed, or will exist, somehow exist right now, in the infinitesimal sliver of awareness we call the present moment.
The same thing can occur when we are wide awake. And, as in the dreamworld, it can happen without us realising, until days, weeks, months or even decades later.
In the last year of my time at primary school, my teacher set the class a simple task: to imagine that we were living the life of a fictional ancestor, at any point in history, and to describe our experiences.
I had often wondered about the origins of my surname (Archer) and I decided to position my imaginary-self on a medieval battlefield.
I wrote at length about my equipment, including my sword, bow and arrows. I waxed lyrical on my unwashed hair, dirty skin and tattered clothing, and revealed the deep emotions that tormented an exhausted but resilient warrior. I recounted that I fought bravely, and I explained the tactics that helped us win the day, against an army many times larger. I concluded by saying that it was such an astonishing and unexpected outcome that the king personally congratulated on me on my martial skills; he smiled, patted my bow, and instructed me to adopt the surname Archer in memory of the victory.
English archers at the Battle of Crecy, 1346 [Credit: Wikipedia, public domain]
Upon reading this story, my teacher called my parents into school. He told them it was written with such clarity and conviction that he felt he had been transported back to in time. He was astonished that a 10-year-old could produce this kind of writing and suggested I would either end up being a historian or an author.
Jump forward 40 years. My young daughter is starting to ask questions about her heritage and I feel it necessary to investigate our family tree, so that she can have the luxury of knowing ‘where she came from’.
I log on to a genealogy website and start entering my close family history, including my dad’s date of birth. Within seconds, I receive an email telling me that this data is already part of someone else’s tree. The same email asks if I want this person to contact me. It doesn’t take long to decide that I do.
Three days later, I get an email from a guy (not just any old guy, but a relative) in Chelmsford. He informs me that he has been researching our family for over 20 years and has a spreadsheet with a wealth of information, including names, dates and places, and that he is happy to send it through. Assuming I’m interested.
His document arrives. I open it with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Blimey. It goes back and back. And back a bit more… twenty generations, to the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
I read the last (or more accurately first) entry and I am completely dumbfounded: it relates to an ancestor called Simon de Boys, who fought at Agincourt with such distinction - helping the English army to win, against overwhelming odds - that Henry V awarded him an annual pension of five Marks (the best part of a year’s wages for a skilled tradesman), on the understanding he changed his surname to Archer.
Later that day I speak to my parents, to check that they did not tell me any of this when I was a child. My father makes it crystal clear he knew nothing of our history, beyond a faint connection to the father he lost in the last days of the WW2.
How can such a thing be explained? How did I write accurately on family events, in the very distant past, that I knew nothing about?
Was it simply a really good guess, combined with a vivid imagination, on the part of my 10-year old self? Or did I achieve some deeper connection, one that was triggered by a seemingly mundane homework task?
My intuition tells me the latter.
It’s hard not to think of Dr. Eric Wargo’s ‘time loops’ theory. Not least because the true historical details of the change from De Boys to Archer have subsequently being brought into question. The surname Archer may have been adopted as early as 1401, more than a decade before the massacre at Agincourt.
Should this be the case, it would instantly rule out the (admittedly remote) possibility of me being the reincarnation of Simon De Boys. If he wasn’t a part of Henry V’s French campaign, there would be no Agincourt memories for me to recall.
Consequently, it seems far more likely that my 10-year old mind somehow connected with the information I gained the moment I opened the family tree spreadsheet (40 years later), rather than with the ‘real’ battlefield experiences of my distant ancestor (560 years earlier).
This idea lies at the heart of Eric Wargo’s model for precognition: namely, that we do not connect with the future events themselves, but with our conscious minds at the moment we learn about those events. In this case, my 1976-self connected with my 2016-self, and then constructed a believable story out of the information held in the cells of the spreadsheet.
Either way, the implications are clear: consciousness is able to function outside of the limitations imposed by the materialist interpretation of reality.
But, if there is no unidirectional ‘arrow of time’ where does that leave us?
What if our entire reality, including space, time and all the matter perceived to exist therein, is nothing more (or less) than a cloud of eternal consciousness; an infinitely complex coalescence of all the experiences which ‘have happened’, ‘are happening’ or ever ‘will happen’.
In this model, every conscious being in the universe is a minuscule but fractal part of the entire cloud, just as every fragment of a hologram contains the complete image.
Ordinarily, to preserve sanity and aid survival, individuated fragments only have access to the limited information they need to maintain their seemingly separate identities. But, occasionally, and very briefly, something impersonal pierces the protective bubble. A snippet of rogue, non-essential ‘other worldly’ information that instantly expands that individual's awareness.
In addition to precognition, such a model can, in one fell swoop, explain a host of experiences presently categorised as paranormal, including: Near Death Experiences, past lives, acquired savant syndrome, the alternative worlds of hallucinogenic drugs, ghosts, UAPs… the list is endless.
Given my own experiences, it's very hard to deny this idealist-based explanation. It certainly holds many advantages over a materialist model that categorically refutes the existence of any of these phenomena, despite the millions of people that report them, year after year.
Simon de Boys may have stood in muddy French field, on St. Crispin’s Day, 1415, anticipating imminent death at the hands of the French nobility. Then again, it’s entirely possible that he never made it out of Essex. But, either way, historical accounts of his exploits at Agincourt somehow made it into the consciousness of a boy growing up in the 1970s.
An arrow, fired at Agincourt, somehow pierced the bubble of my 10-year old mind.