Disillusioned JW, I joined just to respond. Time Loops blew my mind, and continues to be one of my favorite books. I have been having intermittent experiences that sound very similar to what you describe.
When I become very sleepy, while trying hard to stay awake and think about various things, sometimes a mental image flashes into my mind for a second or so
Other times, thoughts will "pop" into mind that seem far more brilliant to me that what enters my mind during its normal mental state, and the thoughts are completely different than what I was thinking about before the other ideas entered my mind
These correspond to my experience as well.I'm compiling a phenomenology of the experience:
- it tends to occur 1-2x a month,
- occurs when I'm drifting off to sleep,
- it always has an unusually vivid quality (noticeably different from normal hypnagogic imagery),
- it appears to be involuntarily (once I did specifically ask to be shown events from my future, provoking a vision an hour later, but have not been able to recreate since),
- it seems random with no context,
- ends up being a pre-echo/pre-memory of something that I see the next day, and
- I immediately recognize it the next day once the experience gives context to the vision from the night before.
- tends to be about very mundane things, and
- always provoke a feeling of astonishment when I recognize the context and make the connection to the night before.
Wargo hypothesizes that strong emotions associated with the future event are what cause "pre-memories" to be detectible in advance, but in my experience it's not strong emotions per se. Specifically, it's the feeling of astonishment/wonder when the context is revealed. I know this because I had a mundane vision one night, and the next day a harrowing and anxiety-provoking experience unrelated to the vision, yet only the mundane experience was precognized, not the harrowing experience. So strong emotions in themselves don't appear to be sufficient.
Another, perhaps related, phenomenon is discovering elements of my dreams that correspond to experiences that I have within the first few hours of waking up the next day. The obvious rational response is it's just confirmation bias, but I record my dreams meticulously, and at this point I am absolutely certain that this phenomenon cannot be explained away by cognitive bias + the apparent randomness of dreams.
I have to conclude that at least some future events already exist, completed in time. Whether this set of events actually contains all events (rendering free will an illusion) remains to be seen.
I personally believe that each of us is numerically identical (the same instance) not just to our self in the moment, but to our self in all moments in time. In perdurantism, this is called a 4-dimensional spacetime worm. Wargo calls this "the long self." I consider this numerical identity to be a mechanism of information "transmission." You can know something instantly without that information having to travel through spacetime by conventional means, because you are identical to the self that experiences that information at a later time.
I also believe this mechanism of identity explains quantum nonlocality; entangled particles separated in space and/or time can correlate spins or other properties beyond what is mathematically possible, precisely because they are the same particle. They only appear to be discrete and separate entities, because we make a conceptual distinction between the two that does not exist in reality. No transmission of information through the electromagnetic spectrum is required if you already are both sender and recipient; just at two different spacetime addresses.
In terms of trying to learn more about these experiences, I have found the second half of Mind-Matter Interaction by Heath to be a really useful phenomenology. Distant Mental Influence by Braud is also a valuable reference.
I have tried to find correlations between the experiences of a pre-sleep vision or a precognitive dream and other variables, like nutritional supplements, orientation of Earth's geomagnetic field/sidereal time, etc. and nothing seems to correlate, except being physically very relaxed.
Curious to learn more about your experiences, excited to find that I'm not the only one experiencing this.
