In Which I Begin to Come Out as Precognitive

I have been collecting evidence—mountains of it—that I (and you, dear reader) have a brain that by default can precognize the future.

This precognition can have a duration of a few seconds or moments into the future ...or a few hours ... or days…or weeks ... or, in fact, years.

I have gathered evidence that precognition pertains not only to dreams, but to waking. To everyday stuff that happens in the waking world. That an awful lot of what happens in my brain—and yours, dear reader—is…there really isn’t a great way to gloss this…from the future.

(Funny how that Romantic-period mark of authenticity, the em dash (symbol of the breath in the text, all-over-the-place punctuation that erases itself as punctuation), has become a mark that this was written by AI. It wasn’t, by the way. But I do have thoughts about precognition and artificial intelligence. Thoughts that align me with Alan Turing, but not your granddaddy’s Alan Turing.)

In the next few posts to say the least, I’m going to start to explain what’s been happening with my understanding of my body, that is to say my brain, since the night of November 30 2025. And the conclusions I’ve come to about bodies and brains.

I’ve been thinking about Philip K Dick’s word “precog” to describe myself. But I want to make it very clear that I don’t want to use it very much, because I don’t want to differentiate myself from others. Far from it. In fact, I have reason to believe that what makes me precognitive is a default aspect of my brain. Exhibit A? I’m a white person, trained through centuries of gaslighting to think of myself as a specially separated, skin-encapsulated, command-control ghost in a machine operating in a “here and now” distinct from a “then” and a “there,” with a memory of the past, but not a memory of the future (what could that even be?).

If I can be precognitive, anyone can.

Yes, gaslighted. Me, OOO and all. Well ideas are hard to shake, especially when they’re default. Especially when they’re wired into your behavior, your prethematic, you-don’t-have-to-think-about-it, default behavior. When you don’t have to think, you don’t have to “have” an idea, you just “live” it. It’s called ideology.

Wired, such that when I began to admit to myself that I am a “precog” (see above), with the help of the incredible Eric Wargo and the incredible Jeffrey Kripal (hello!), I felt as if I had discovered a vestigial hand hanging down out of my left armpit. A hand that had, in fact, been doing a lot of the lifting and carrying. A lot.

This feel of abjection was fatal to that command-control fantasy of my personhood. Eric Wargo writes about how the idea that the brain is somehow smeared out into the future is taboo for the same reason that all kinds of smears and stains are taboo: they say something about the body’s boundaries that white western thought, culture, living, just doesn’t want. Actively repels.

Think of a blue note. It’s not a static thing that can be described using western music theory. It’s in motion. It’s bending. It’s not perfectly “in between” a major third and a minor third (Leonard Bernstein, I abjure thee!). It’s a note that smears, that pushes and pulls. The blue note talks to the future. It tells you that something is going to be different. It’s why it’s so powerful, why it’s able to conjure cascades of irony, like a crack in a dam.

Imagine your brain was more like that blue note than a vowel sung by a choirboy.

After going through the ontological shock, however, I feel better. Much better. So much better.

And I truly think that if human beings are going to make it out of this defile, an engagement with what Jeff Kripal calls the paranormal and what Eric Wargo calls the unexplained (I like the negative!) is required. Essential. Pivotal. Those who do not understand the future are condemned to repeat it. Human beings are dealing with a moment in which the ability at least to know that the future can be different from the past is now key to surviving, living, coping. And that’s just the basics.

Somebody like me, a university professor, has to get it together and start talking out loud about all this.

I’ve been writing about the paranormal for a while. In particular, Humankind and Realist Magic have strong paranormal aspects.

Something to do with time loops is key to Dark Ecology.

So, what is a time loop? This is Wargo’s great insight. Once you start to think about precognition, you start to think about the implications, and the implications are that events in the future can cause events in the past, which can then cause the future events…a time loop.

The evidence is astounding. And the implications are astounding. It’s a lot. I’m gonna try to break it down.

And I’m going to show you how much of Hyperobjects (2013) looks like I copied it from Eric Wargo’s Time Loops (2018). Like a lot. A lot.

So much, that when I opened the book in 2018, I thought Eric had copied it the “normal” way! But he didn’t read Hyperobjects until 2022.

If you’ve ever written anything, you’ll know that writing has a strong paranormal feel to it. You feel like you’re channeling, you get into strange zones where you don’t know what you’re writing but you know it’s right.

If you’ve read or listened to me you’ll know that I say all the time that art is (from) the future, that emotions are (from) the future. I’ll tell audiences that I’ve never myself had an idea. Well it looks like my thoughts themselves precognized my discovery that I am precognitive. What if I in fact have never had an idea? That this statement isn’t just a cute “gee shucks” thing to say?

I already was far from saying it was just cute. I think acting is made out of attending-to, listening. But how far down the rabbit hole of this idea would you like me to go? Because I’ve fallen down into curiouser and curiouser spaces, I tell you, since November 30 last year.

It never felt like that anyway. I really don’t “have” ideas. The word “hyperobject” just popped in my head in summer 2008. Unbidden. Heck as far as I’m concerned now, I might as well have copied it from James Madden’s Unidentified Flying Hyperobject. Yes, I’ve gone there.

Jeff has gently encouraged me forever. The reason I’m at Rice is because in late 2011 I read something by Jeff Kripal in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and realized I had blown it by not accepting an invitation to apply for a job there.

I’m now writing about the paranormal directly, in a couple of projects: Hypositition with Dominic Boyer, and a book about covid called Living Backwards which I’m writing with Nicholas Royle.

I almost went there in Hell. You’ll know if you’ve read that book that I’ve had a number of powerful anomalous experiences. As time goes by I’ll be introducing you to those, too. My theory, like Kripal’s, is that the extreme abuse I suffered since birth, leading to Complex PTSD, cracked me open and made it impossible for me to live up (or down!) to the white western gaslighting.

But because of being very (very) dissociated, I was able to keep those experiences in a box, hidden in plain sight, all my life. All my life, until a dream on December 16 2025 made that utterly impossible.

A dream that, a few hours later and with the benefit of hindsight, was so obviously about a dog in distress next door, down to the dog’s name (I didn’t know it), a dream that in fact saved this dog’s life (the neighbors were out of town)…an experience that convinced me that I had precognized the texts those neighbors sent me a few hours later.

It was such a weird dream. So shocking. I woke up shouting, “No!” and crying with distress.

I’m grateful to Jeff and to my new friends Eric and Jim and Kelly Chase and Karin Austin and Harris Fishman and Scott Paskoff and John Price and Andy Wilson and my wife Treena and Amanda Focke and Joe Hedinger and…for helping me to talk about all this; David Dorrell, Heitham al-Sayed and Carlyle Coash, Wendy Lochner and Nicholas Royle and Federico Campagna, you’ve all been instrumental for me in helping me to get my thoughts together. And many others. I have to run to breakfast (with John!) right now, sorry if I left you off this list. I’ll make up for it.

See you in the next post.