Skip to Main Content

Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self

Interpreting Messages from Your Future

Published by Inner Traditions
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

LIST PRICE ₹741.00

PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER

About The Book

• 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.

Excerpt

From Chapter 2. Vaal and Redemption

How a Star Trek Episode Taught Me Memory Goes Backwards

After the Star Gate remote viewing program was closed and declassified in 1995, some of its guiding lights took their show on the road, teaching classes and workshops in remote viewing. Several now have published memoirs as well as guidebooks teaching their methods.1 Like many who get interested in psychic phenomena and ESP research, I also wanted to try my hand at it--who isn’t interested in finding out if they are psychic? So, in the years after my semi-conversion experience reading Daryl Bem’s “Feeling the Future,” I devoured these guides and followed their instructions, interested to explore and exercise my own remote-viewing abilities.

Remote viewers love “protocols,” so for an easy, beginner’s protocol, I asked my wife to print out random pictures from the internet while she was at work during the day, seal them in envelopes, and set one on the table next to my bed each evening I wanted to do a trial. It is before sleep at night that it is easiest for me to relax into a hypnagogic state, when psychic flashes are liable to arise, so that was when I attempted to sketch my impressions of what was in the envelope.

I’ll confess: I had very few “hits” doing this at first. Not to be discouraged, though, on my next attempts instead of going ahead and opening the envelope right after trying to psychically peer inside it, I waited until the next morning, seeing if my dreams might deliver useful images or information overnight. This produced interesting and, in a couple cases, amazing results.

. . . As I reveled in my strange, oblique dream-remote-viewing success and enjoyed watching the Star Trek episode “The Apple,” I realized that what I’d been doing hadn’t really been “remote viewing” at all, at least as the practice is ordinarily assumed to operate--and this is the point I want to make with this story. My dreaming mind hadn’t peered into the shut envelope; instead, it had picked up on the most emotionally salient event in the landscape of my near future: watching an old Star Trek episode in a state of eager excitement to confirm a psychic “hit.” The dream had been about precisely what I was right then doing, hours after the dream.

My second attempt at dream remote viewing, a few days later, followed the same pattern and the result was almost as striking. I placed another of my wife’s sealed envelopes next to my bed and again mentally requested a dream about what was inside it. I woke up the next morning and recorded some images of a sandy cave with some artifacts, including a long object that seemed to be a bone flute. After breakfast that morning, I drew from the envelope a photograph of an enormous white dog sitting next to a teenage girl in front of a warehouse--again, seemingly nothing to do with my dream. But again, just a moment’s free association on the picture came to the rescue.

The picture immediately called to mind a memory of a book I hadn’t read since my childhood: Island of the Blue Dolphins, by Scott O’Dell. I couldn’t remember O’Dell’s story very well at all--just that it was about an Indian girl who fended for herself for years after being abandoned on an Island in the Pacific, along with her dog companion. But I’d never forgotten the cover of the Dell paperback from the 1970s, which showed the Indian girl standing holding a spear, with the big white dog sitting beside her.

A quick Google search was able to confirm my recollection of the book’s cover, and publisher. I was also able to read part of the book online, and one of the first scenes I read--which I had not remembered at all from childhood--was about the girl, Karana, and her dog, Rontu, being trapped overnight in a spooky cave that contained idols and a skeleton of one of her ancestors. The skeleton was holding a pelican-bone flute.

So here again, it was a distinct “hit” from my dream. And, despite my conscious intention to peer directly into a closed envelope and see what was inside it, my dream had showed me instead a surprising and rewarding reading experience the next morning, one that had been stimulated by the target of that remote viewing attempt.

A skeptic would likely try to claim that my watching Star Trek and my reading a random chapter or two from The Island of the Blue Dolphins on the mornings after my dreams were only an effect of those dreams and not their cause. They might point out that, at least in the Star Trek case, my dream images could have been drawn from memory since I had remembered many aspects of the episode from my childhood, and even could suggest reasonably that the scene of Karana and Rontu in the cave with the bone-flute-playing skeleton had somehow been retained in my unconscious for nearly a half century. But that would leave unexplained why I specifically had those two dreams when I did--in each case, on the night before a previously unseen picture drawn from an envelope made me think of that TV episode, and that book, for the first time in decades.

Subsequent experiences replicated this pattern: When attempting to remote view a target using my dreams, my dream sometimes contained objects or themes that associated to what I did in the process of interpreting my results, not (directly) to the image in the envelope. In short, I wasn’t “perceiving” anything, either with the senses or with any “extrasensory” faculty. What it seemed to be was something more like memory, but in the wrong direction.

These experiences did more than help confirm for me the reality of psychic functioning. They also taught me a lot about the counterintuitive way dream precognition really works.

About The Author

Eric Wargo has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Emory University and works as a professional science writer and editor in Washington, D.C. He is the author of the acclaimed book Time Loops. In his spare time, Wargo writes about science fiction, consciousness, and parapsychology at his popular blog, The Nightshirt.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Inner Traditions (March 2, 2021)
  • Length: 320 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781644112700

Raves and Reviews

“This book will change how you see the world. Eric Wargo’s theories on dreams, time travel, and the inner workings of the mind are truly daring--and grounded in logical thought and methodical research. His reanalysis of Freud is worth the price of admission alone. is is as mind-bending as it gets.”

– Yancey Strickler, author of is Could Be Our Future

“Eric Wargo takes us on an exciting journey of discovery into the interconnected web accessible by the time-traveling aspect of our subconscious. He weaves past, present, and future together with insights from ancient wisdom, visionary writers, discoveries in physics, and a variety of precognitive dreams. You will be inspired to dig deeper--to partner with your ‘Long Self ’ to gain insight on the past and respond to the future to enhance your journey through life. As an active time traveler, you are part of the evolution of consciousness and a global caring society.”

– Dale E. Graff, author of Tracks in the Psychic Wilderness

“Here is the book for which I have been waiting, a paranormal practice manual to recommend to readers who ask for one thing: a practice, a way to cultivate their own superhuman capacities and will them out of the Matrix of Depression that is our modern world. Integrating the best insights from ancient and medieval memory theater, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, J. W. Dunne’s Experiments with Time, and the contemporary neuroscience of memory, Wargo shows us how to become our own mutants, how to shape and make ourselves from the future along what he alternately calls the ‘tesseract brain’ or the ‘Long Self.’ His message is a fantastic one: You are not puny and insignificant. You are vast—a Time Lord, a sci-fi special effects master, a highly evolved cosmic being. Wake up! (and record your dreams). We need you. And we are in this, and out of this, together.”

– Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Mutants and Mystics

“Eric Wargo is a new kind of intellectual whose refinement has emerged from his thoughtful response to the dogmatism that opposes new queries in science. Wargo’s profoundly exciting and thorough book on the question of dream precognition not only advances an important area of study but demonstrates the quality of intellectual dialogue that increasingly finds expression today within parapsychology. His writing and tone reawaken the reader to the excitement of radical and discerning inquiry.”

– Mitch Horowitz, PEN Award-winning author of Occult America

“Eric Wargo takes a new and refreshing look into dreams and their meaning by investigating their relationship to time and precognition. This book conveys a clear and concise message that expands on the fact that dreams are much more than they seem, which is a valued consideration by any serious oneirologist.”

– Lee Adams, author of A Visionary Guide to Lucid Dreaming

“Wargo’s thorough guide makes an intriguing argument for precognition that anyone can put to the test.”

– Publishers weekly

"A definite step into the quantum world of consciousness. I have often wondered if some of my dreams were warnings or simply clues about the future; after reading this book I have a much better and clear understanding of some of the deeper conscious levels I’ve experienced. One thing is for sure, we are not going to get any solutions that will solve our complex problems from the everyday level of awareness that most people have, and it no longer takes a genius to figure that out. It’s encouraging to read new information that is so vital in today’s world."

– Rahasya Poe, Lotus Guide

Resources and Downloads

High Resolution Images