Deja vu, synchronicity, causality, and time
Toward the end of his long and productive career, C. G. Jung began to write about what he called "meaningful coincidences", those things which sometime come together and are not only coincidental, but are somehow of import to the person(s) involved. He published his reflections in two papers: "On Synchronicity" (1951) and "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle" (1952). In these he provided examples of such synchronicities and outlined a hypothesis that the unconscious, at its deepest levels where it transcends space and time, is able to bring together in some as yet unexplained fashion the elements necessary that the conscious mind might somehow notice that something is afoot. Very often, these would be due to repressed and neglected aspects of the individual which consciousness refuses to acknowledge. Rather than appearing only in dreams, if the "psychic charge" is great enough, so to speak, the outer environment would become involved in the attempt to "wake" the inattentive ego.
Some of these could be quite striking. Jung's most famous example was of a patient who brought him dreams for analysis, but in her rationalism had little respect for the "messages" contained in them or for the unconscious. One day, she dreamed of a golden scarab beetle (as a piece of jewelry). After she had related this during her analytical hour, Jung heard noise at the window, went there and found a green-golden scarab-like beetle trying to get into the room. He gave it to the woman saying "Here is your beetle" and that provided the breakthrough that got the analysis really underway (Jung, 1951, par. 982; 1952, pars. 843, 845)
Actually, Jung his life long emphasized the prospective, future-oriented aspect of the human psyche, especially as evidenced in dreams. This teleological point of view contributed to his break with Freud, who insisted during most of his career that dreams were made up of nothing but Tagesresten (remainders from the day) and disguised wish fulfillments. Jung, in his writings and lectures, spoke of purposes and ends to be attained. Often the goal was in part to bring the conscious mind away from one-sidedness and back into balance with the rest of his nature and destiny. Thus dreams often serve a compensatory function within the psychic economy. The scarab incident, Jung wrote, brought the patient away from an overly rationalistic stance and made it possible for the analytical work to bring her back into contact with deeper, more feminine strata of her nature.
If we ask which came first: the dream or the beetle's arrival, it is clear that in terms of time sequence, the dream was earlier. Yet the latter could have been to some extent precognitive. Dunne (see previous section) would have thought so. If that was the case, then it would not be necessary to suppose that the unconscious of the lady somehow "arranged" for the beetle to come to the window. Rather, it "knew" it was coming and included this element in a striking dream. For lovers of paradox, it must be mentioned that most likely the only reason Jung went to the window to fetch it was that he was searching for something to help the person, and if it hadn't been for the dream, he may not have shown the beetle to her. That, at least, was arranged by her unconscious!
It is moreover fascinating that it was her instinctual side, possibly symbolized by the insect, which had been neglected (or repressed?) during her studies. In addition, Jung pointed out that the scarab was a symbol of rebirth in Egyptian mythology. Thus of all the coming future events, this one suited the needs of her unconscious, and therewith was it meaningful for her.
Jung mentioned that one can not speak of causality in such cases. He said, "... we cannot conceive how a future event could bring about an event in the present." (1951, par. 979). Or, perhaps more emphatically,
"... it would be absurd to suppose that a situation which does not yet exist and will only occur in the future could transmit itself as a phenomenon of energy to a receiver in the present." (1952, par. 840) (See also 1952, end of par. 856.)
Here Jung emphasized an important aspect of causality: not only should the effect follow its supposed cause in temporal sequence, but there must also be some form of energy transfer between them, if only by some mode of communication. The minimal amount of such communication, according to information theorists, is the simple yes/no, on/off, the most basic element of all digital computers. This is referred to as a "bit". Assuming a perfect receiver, the minimum amount of electromagnetic energy required to transmit such a bit is a photon, be it using radio wavelengths or visible light. As soon as the receiver or the transmission channel is noisy, the number of photons/bit must be increased.
The human eye consists of millions of light receptors, all functioning simultaneously (i.e., in parallel), each one registering the arrival (or not) of photons. A picture is said to be worth a thousand words; it contains millions of bits of information! Thus even the dark-adapted eye (i.e., at its highest sensitivity) requires a goodly number of photons in order to see anything.
In a precognitive dream or déjà vu, has one removed energy from the future? I think not. Jung reported on a patient of his who was comatose from loss of blood following a difficult delivery. She had the impression of leaving her body and observing the frantic nurses and doctors who were hard at work to restore her to consciousness. She was able to tell them what she had "seen" from her near-the-ceiling vantage point and it was true (1952, par. 950-2). Moody, in his 1977 book Life After Life, relates many such instances. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, in her research on the experience of dying, has met with such accounts, too. Here there is no question of normal energy being used for such "seeing", since there are no normal receptors (eyes) being employed. If photons had left the room at points where her pupils would have to have been, one would at least see two dark spots of absorption. Such spots have never to my knowledge been observed. In precognitive dreams and déjà vu, one can imagine that a similar sort of mechanism (not yet explainable) must be employed, even though there the viewpoint is usually the same as the person will have at the time the "dream" becomes reality. If there is an "out of the body" excursion to the future involved, it is to visit one's own there.
Thus from the standpoint of energetics, causality is probably not violated by precognitions (cf. Foster, 1969), i.e., no energy (as we know it) has been taken out of the future into the past. But we do sometimes have an impression from them upon which to base a decision and here one could speak possibly of the future influencing the present (Priestley, 1968, pp. 21Sff, refers to this as a FIP). The decisive word here is "impression". One is never completely certain that one has actually "seen" what is to come (cf. Flew, 1974). It would seem that only prophets have that sort of assurance (if they did or do). One is impressed when what one has seen actually turns out to fit the future facts, but one is never sure.
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There may be a few determinists around who still believe that there is no chance at work. Despite Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (which established that there is a fundamental limit as to how accurately we can measure simultaneously physical quantities such as position and momentum, energy and time at the atomic level), they would contend that only our measuring apparatus is (necessarily) blunt and that things nevertheless go the only way they can. I suppose they would say that the physicist's statistical description of reality is only required by this bluntness, not by anything more fundamental. The logical positivists, however, say that if you can not measure something (at least in principle), it makes no sense to speak about it.
There are some atoms (neon, for example) which can hold on to absorbed energy for a while (measured in microseconds) before releasing it in some direction in the form of a photon of electromagnetic energy. (Einstein predicted that this release could be "triggered" if the atom was suitably stimulated by another photon of the appropriate energy. This forms the basis for the maser and laser.) Such atoms are said to have meta-stable energy levels. Left to itself, the time of emission of the released photon appears to be a random affair. The decay of radio-active nuclei seems to be likewise unpredictable. There seems to be no cause for it, it just happens.
Thus, in spite of Einstein's fervent belief that "God does not play dice", there seems to be some random chance built into the scheme of things. It is difficult to know what the long term consequences are if an atom should "decide" to emit its photon or decay sooner or later than it does, but it could be that eventually macroscopic (i.e., noticeable) differences would gradually appear among the various alternative universes thus created. The number of these alternatives is obviously unimaginably large (infinite, if the time or the angle of emission is not quantized).
The decision of a person to take one course of action out of all his or her possible alternatives also leaves many possibilities open and creates such "branchings". Whether he or she actually performs his or her intended activity (or inactivity) sooner or later also, like atomic decay, multiplies them further. This is like Nietzsche's multiple worlds, except the multiplicity is in time rather than in space.
Remember the lady in the previous chapter who saved the ailing coachman from a probable fractured skull? As I remarked there, she changed the way things were going by her intervention and created a branching in the flow of time. The coach driver existed on one branch with an injured head (assuming the fall wasn't fatal), the branch "seen" in her dream. She chose (or created) another branch where he could be caught by the nearby policeman.
I must admit that it isn't entirely clear to me, but I belive that only one extra time dimension is necessary to contain all these other possible futures. It turns out that modern physics has recently come to entertain just this sort of idea in order to resolve certain philosophical problems now encountered in quantum mechanics. According to Douglas Hofstadter (1981), it was first proposed in 1957 by Hugh Everett III. The theory seeks to include the observer in the quantum mechanical description of a physical system. The problem is seen, for example, when a two-slit experiment is performed with photons or electrons which arrive at the detector array sequentially. With both slits open, an interference pattern gradually appears, the same as would be observed if the number of particles per second were increased to where they could interfere with one another. When one slit is closed, the pattern no longer appears. How do single file particles "know" that two slits are open if they can only pass through one of them? One can speak of the probabilities of the particles passing through one slit or the other, but how can probability patterns interfere with each other? It is as if the probability distribution (wave function) depended on what observation was being made. Thus the observer must be somehow included in any quantum mechanical description of the situation.
This is what Everett's theory sought to do by enlarging the number of time dimensions to two and allowing for alternate futures. A 1973 book is devoted to a detailed exposition of the underlying theoretical framework: Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, edited by B. S. Dewitt and N. Graham. See also Other Worlds by Paul Davies (1980). The idea of an extra dimension of time has also been treated by H. A. C. Dobbs in his 1965 article, "Time and Extrasensory Perception".
If the unconscious is able to leave one time-path and jump ahead to the same one or a nearby one (or even a far-out one?!), there is likely an added time dimension required, orthogonal to the others, so that movement within it will not take time in the other two. This brings the number of time dimensions to three, incidentally equaling the number of spatial dimensions. According to Priestley (1968), Ouspensky (1931) had much the same idea.
Dunne (1927) also argued that an observer watching himself made it necessary that we have an added time dimension, but he quickly found himself in an infinite regress mess with observers observing observers observing observers ... and an infinite number of associated time dimensions. He referred to it as a serial universe. Various authors have pointed out that Dunne should have stuck to experimenting and left the philosophizing to others more competent.
For their part the latter have not been idle. There have been numerous articles in the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research concerned with the philosophical implications of precognition. Probably the best anthology is to be found in The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, edited by P. A. Schilpp (1959). Other books on time which may be of interest are: G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time (1961) and J. T. Fraser, The Voices of Time (1966).
Before concluding, I would like to at least mention work published on synchronicity by Dr. M. L. von Franz. Particularly in her 1974 book, Number and Time, one finds elaborated the fascinating thought of Jung's (1952, par. 871) that synchronicities and the occasional success of divination methods are possible because of a fundamental order in the cosmos, order in its temporal unfoldment. Further, that the concept of number is an expression of this basic, archetypal ordering. The contention is that number and numbering has not been invented by man, rather discovered, brought to consciousness gradually through centuries of mathematical puzzling and development.
The unconscious is held to be aware of this underlying orderedness and to be able to draw on it in order to "create" synchronistic coincidences. She points out that this way of thinking is, in fact, typical of eastern, particularly Taoist, thought, and that it forms the basis of the I Ching. The goal, then, becomes to align oneself with the flow of this Tao, and to cease striving against it. I find it awesome and even frightening to think that the order thus postulated would include the future in such detail as one "sees" it in a precognitive dream or déjà vu. This is determinism of quite some caliber!
I personally prefer the relative openness of more than one time dimension when thinking about déjà vu and to reserve the Taoist point of view for a more "behind-the-scenes", pervading order, perhaps throughout the six (or more?) dimensions.