Precognition is one of the most intriguing paranormal abilities. The ability to see the future is probably a talent that most of us have, but when we experience it, our left brains often interfere and hurl up all sorts of arguments about why what we’re seeing can’t be so. These left-brain objections and arguments are usually rooted in our cultural and societal mass beliefs, which prove to be quite powerful and persuasive. Nonetheless, we can tune into the future, usually when our need and desire are great. What we do with the information depends on our particular beliefs.
And that intro brings me to Igno Swann. He’s probably most famous for being the co-creator – along with Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff – of the remote viewing project at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s. This project eventually became the U.S. government’s Stargate project – psychic spying. Swann also wrote several books about remote viewing and psychic phenomena and this evening, I happened across one of them – The Nostradamus Factor: Accessing Your Innate Ability to See into the Future. We’ve owned this book for probably twenty years and as I paged through it, I realized I had never read it!
The premise is that any one of us can see the future- something that Swann didn’t understand until April 1988, when he was lecturing in Dermold, then in West Germany. He had been invited to give a series of lectures about psi research. He was billed as the famous American super psychic who had astonished scientists since his first formal laboratory experiments in 1970 (at Stanford).
Other speakers were there, too, some of them practicing psychics who were doing readings. The irony was that Swann didn’t do individual readings, and despite all his research into prophecy and prediction, didn’t provide any predictions about the future, either. He knew that many predictions turned out to be wrong and he felt he had a scientific reputation to protect.
After he gave the keynote address, he asked for questions from he audiene of several hundred people. The room was utterly silent. Finally, an elderly woman asked Swann to give the group at least one prediction. He was irritated about being put in this position and frantically sought a diplomatic way to get out of the situation.
As his irritation escalated into anger, he heard a rushing sound around him and had a sense of getting larger. “Then there was a clarity of some unfamiliar kind, which was somehow like liquid- and in this liquidness what seemed like a thousand pictures flashed through my consciousness. I had the distinct, lightninglike impression that most of the people in the audience already knew the future at some ‘place’ deep within them. And I knew their conscious minds were disconnected from this deep place.”
He felt he knew what they knew collectively, and an aspect of this “hidden knowledge” exploded into his consciousness. He blurted, “Okay, you want prediction? Here’s a prediction. The Berlin Wall will come down in eighteen to twenty-four months.” The translator repeated the prediction twice. After an initial silence, the people in the audience began to rise to their feet, clapping, and then the crowd, Swann, wrote, “became unglued.” People burst into tears, hugged each other, and some people even rushed to the podium and hugged him.
Swan couldn’t understand why he’d blurted the prediction. After all, at the time he gave this prediction, it looked as if the Berlin Wall would still be standing well into the 21st century. He felt his colleagues would believe he had lost his marbles.
However, nineteen months later, the Berlin Wall came down practically overnight. Swann felt vindicated. “I had one of the most rewarding experiences of my life…watching my prediction come true on real-time television right before my eyes.”
As he watched the wall coming down, he wondered if he could foresee other things. By the end of 1990, he had discovered the answer: yes. And that answer was one of the reasons he wrote Your Nostradamus Factor.
Swann – like Targ and Puthoff, Colin Wilson, Terrence McKenna, Whitley Strieber, Dean Radin, Caroline Myss, Mona Lisa Schultz, Lynn McTaggart, Jane Roberts, and many others – was a pioneer in consciousness research. He died in January 2013. His book is no longer in print. But there are so many astounding anecdotes in the book, that from time to time we’ll be posting some of them. Even though these stories are older, they are somehow perennial and have much to show us about how precognition – future seeing – can work for each of us.
Freud…wishful thinking? Nope. I certainly didn’t wish for my Dad or my boyfriend to die!! I wonder if this phenomenon of seeing into the future has something to do with the convolution of Time, that we simply don’t yet understand although Einstein and Tesla did. It’s an enigma. And complex. There are so many possibilities that could explain it, including the potential that our Souls “know” before we come into a life a few of the situations that are going to occur. I tend to believe certain things are etched in stone (by our already-existing and active free will) before we arrive, and most things are “penciled in” to life’s blurprint and are subject to choices when when are on the journey.
all my life, as well, i’ve had those precognitive dreams – from earliest childhood – by the time i was in high school, they were frequent enough that i would write them down, seal the piece of paper in an envelope and give it to a favorite teacher of mine to hold until i asked her to open them – anyway, on my “travel journal” blog, i’ve told of just a few of them:
https://thegypsytraveljournal.blogspot.com/2009/08/alan-alda-crash.html
https://thegypsytraveljournal.blogspot.com/2009/06/november-22-2007-dream.html
https://thegypsytraveljournal.blogspot.com/2009/06/dream-story.html
i think there is no doubt that we all have this “ability” – the capacity to see into the future – it’s a matter of awareness/openness – and some are obviously more in touch with that part of themselves than others – but it’s there in each of us –
neat post – always love reading about swan –
I have several times where I’ve seen future events in my dreams. Two times my telling the person involved did save their lives. One about a car accident and one at a construction site where I saw the person being covered in cement. That one was interesting because he wasn’t a construction worker but lo and behold he went to talk to someone about a bid and saw a cement mixer, saw where they were standing and then remembered what I told him and so they moved, a few seconds later something broke and cement came pouring out, right where they had been standing.
I also , during a past life regression where we were then sent to view the future, I saw 2 skyscrapers in NYC come crashing down. Yes, 9/11. I saw this in the ’90s and was so concerned because I had family there. My guides always told me that everyone that I loved would not be in the area when this happened, and they were correct.
It’s funny you do a story on Targ,as yesterday I was watching this clip on remote viewing and my new Kiwi friend who’s You Tube channel I’ve been going through mentions Targ in a book,but kept mispronouncing Targ’s name.I kept thinking to myself,isn’t this the guy Rob and Trish are always talking about ?
Well your post here answered that question for me.-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiR_ZUqBeEA&feature=c4-overview&list=UUP_3tf20Qq8ejrquOGj11kA
I should have said that you mentioned Targ in your post ,rather than did a story on Targ,as the post you wrote was more on Swann than about Targ.But he was mentioned in the post which was what I thought was a little coincidental after thinking about you guys and Targ.
Thanks for the link!
I feel we can see into the future but are ‘untrained’ to do so. We therefore only have flashes of things, which we sometimes overlook, and precognitive dreams. I have had dreams that have come true – have even dreamt winners of horse races, even though I know nothing about the sport. In the awake world I only have ‘feelings’ that, say, something bad is about to happen but not sure what it is. I’m sure we could train ourselves to see into the future, but do we really want to know?
Untrained: that’s a good way of saying it. I Like getting glimpses of the future .
Not just untrained, but there is also that Grandfather Paradox that prevents you to know too much. The author of this book https://www.my-big-toe.com/ calls it the psychic uncertainty principle. I’ve written a few comments here about a prophecy (at least two books and a person I love) that someone “very similar to me” (the uncertainty factor) is about to achieve some interesting things (I’ll call it for this occasion combination of parapsychology and sociology).
Look forward to hearing about this breakthrough!
Adele, I’m with you….many of my “future predictions” come to me in sleeping dreams, and I’ve kept a dream journal for several decades. However, I had one specific precognitive vision that I can never forget. From the time I was a little girl in the second grade, I began to have a mental “picture” come to my mind. It was always the same, and didn’t make sense to me because I was so young, and I would have it when my mind wandered or I was otherwise day-dreaming. In this mental picture, I was a teenage girl (somehow I knew it was me) sitting in the last row of a school classroom. A teenage boy came into the room and walked over to the teacher’s desk, handed her a note, and walked out. The teacher read the note, then called me to her desk and said, “Connie, you need to go to the office. Your family has come to pick you up. Your father has died”. I was always upset by this mental picture. It continued, off and on, until I was in the last half of my junior year of high school. I was sitting the the back row of my English class; a boy came into the room and handed the teacher a note, then left. The teacher called me to her, and told me to go to the office, that someone in my family had come to pick me up because my father had been taken to the hospital. The only difference between the years of that pre-vision and it’s manifestation was that my dad HAD been carried to the hospital and was comatose, but hadn’t yet died. So I saw this reality repeatedly over many years. One other one I’ve never forgotten happened when I was young, just 15. I kept dreaming that my then-steady boyfirend, Bill,who ws a quarterback on our school football team and very healthy, was laying dead in a casket, and a wreath of flowers shaped like a football was in front of the casket. In the dream, he was wearing a brown suit in the casket. I got up from this dream several mornings and went to the breakfast table in tears. My Mom had no patience with this. The week before school started, Bill was mowing the coach’s lawn and fainted. He was diagnosed with acute leukemia and lived less than seven days. In his casket, he was wearing a brown suit (that in reality I had never seen) and there was a flowered wreath shaped like a football in front of the casket. So yes indeed, people can see into the future, often when they don’t WANT to! My life is filled with such incidents, and I believe anyone who is attentive has the same abilities but they pass unnoticed.
Connie, We sure to have similar experiences on this level of psyche. For me, the pre-seen event is always something big. But this isn’t knowable at the time of the dream. Maybe our unconscious is trying to prepare us for what is difficult to come. I have yet to see any dream expert or even in the more modern explorations of the mind, come up with any more information on what our brains, minds, psyche (what ever we want to call it) can do regarding seeing ahead. I know Freud called such dreams wishes. You and I know this is not true for what we are talking about. I feel that the study of dreams has barley been explored – even though Freud and Jung did contribute a lot to the field. Maybe the Sennoi Indians were better at it.
Patricia Garfield contributed a lot of knowledge about lucid dreaming. Freud’s view seemed narrow to me.
I can’t see the future in my awake conscious mind – unless it is something very obvious but I have had a number of precognitive dreams. The only way I have been able to know that I was “seeing” into the future is because I write my dreams in my journal. The most true and amazing ones were dreamed about several years before they happened. If I had not kept a record I would not have been aware of this. I have had people, especially psychologists, dispute the fact that I was seeing the future. They gave me all kinds of rationale of why this did not happen. I am not what one would call “A true believer.” My Virgo moon is skeptical until proven. But once I have an experience of something no “expert” can take that away from me. I continually wonder and am in awe of the psyche to see outside of time – backwards and forwards.