A second unusual event in my life that broke the rules of space and time happened in 1972 when I was a student in my third year at Oxford University studying medicine, neuroscience, and immunology. I was an unusual student in that I had a motorbike rather than a pushbike, which I tended to drive a bit too fast, believing that it was safer for a motorbike to be progressively overtaking cars and in control than to be stuck behind one car and pushed into the kerb by another.
I was living in a suburb of Oxford called Summertown in that third year. One night I had a dream in which there were two scenes. The first was of complete darkness, in which a small rectangle of light appeared in the top right hand corner of my field of vision. The dream then flipped to a second scene, in which an ornate stagecoach was racing at high speed along a rough road at night, the driver whipping the horses to go faster. On a corner of the rocking coachwork, a lamp with a candle swung on its hook. Suddenly, the lamp flew off to the right, smashed on the ground and the candle extinguished. I woke up alert and fearful, knowing that I had just seen my death on the motorbike.
I started driving very carefully after that, but after a few weeks nothing had happened and I drifted back into my old habitual ways of doing things. One afternoon I had to go into Oxford Centre for something. Dense storm clouds had gathered bringing an early darkness. The street lights had not yet come on so, as I set off and flipped the visor down, I could see virtually nothing except darkness. Then a bedroom light switched on further down the street, appearing in the top right corner of my field of vision. I was abruptly alert again, remembering the dream. I decided to carry on with my journey going very, very carefully. But again nothing unusual happened… and so having done what I needed I drove back having forgotten the dream.
Now anybody who knows the Banbury Road to Summertown in Oxford will know there’s an unusual road junction halfway along with offset traffic lights, where the incoming road on the left is closer than its opposite incoming road from the right. As I slowed down approaching it, a short queue of three cars had stopped at the red light, but the lights promptly flipped to red and amber, in preparation to go green. In the UK, this is an absolute gift on a motorbike. You just accelerate quickly and overtake all three cars at the same time, zooming away feeling great. I was just starting to do that when suddenly I remembered the dream again, and thought, “No, this is it!” Instead I twisted back the throttle and literally stood on the brakes, making a completely counter-intuitive move that brought me in behind the last car, which had just started to pull away.
From that position I watched something very unusual happen. All three cars started weaving side to side as if they didn’t know what to do, slowing down and pulling in towards the left hand curb. Totally unexpectedly, the front car then made a complete 180 degree standing spin as a handbrake turn in the middle of the road, and roared away in the opposite direction with grit flying from the rear wheels, weaving slightly with the windows darkened so that the driver could not be seen. It looked nasty and hateful. Stopped behind the last car, I looked on flabbergasted, awestruck, knowing that, judging that, had I done what had been natural to me I would have been beside that car when he spun it, knocked off to the right, and killed.
This memory remains fresh in my mind. Every day that I recall it, I am so grateful for that dream. It foretold the future by several weeks so accurately in its two scenes that it enabled me to recognise a danger as it arose, and to choose a completely counterintuitive action that turned me into an observer of a situation that must have been predictable at some other mysterious level of life… It truly saved my life.
Science and Truth about life
Of course, when I tell this account some people demur by saying, “Oh, it must have been just a coincidence.” But to me the dream having two related and importantly precise informational scenes turn that sort of a statement into, I am sorry to have to say it, intellectual cowardice. It is indeed deeply challenging to have one’s notions of cause and effect in linear time re-framed as ‘not the whole truth’, by accepting that unusual events can break that ‘arrow of time’ general rule. Prior information had alerted me to a future situation as it arose so that I could choose to step back in the present from ‘participator mode’ into ‘observer mode’ and watch it happen from a safe distance. That makes it a fact of life. Any scientific theory of life will need to include a way for that fact to occur in its account of truth.
‘Me avoiding death’ is not an experimentally reproducible fact, as the old Enlightenment (Newtonian) Science requires for its ‘truth criterion’, which is that a ‘scientific fact is reproducible by another team in another place and time’ (i.e. it is context independent). But increasingly in this century since quantum physics has overtaken Newtonian ‘classical physics’ to become the general truth, people are gaining confidence to speak about their unusual experiences. Like mine, many people have experiences that break the now outdated view of the universe as inanimate lumps of matter bouncing around randomly in a space-time container, with human experience relegated to mere subjectivity. I am now sharing these accounts, because in the decades following I have been able to reformulate a more robust theory than narrow-minded Newtonian physics, one that is consistent with some interpretations of quantum physics that are context dependent, and that will allow these unusual events while still accounting for the material stabilities that Enlightenment science has valuably recorded.
Interpreting the experience
The key point I’d like to bring out from this story concerns not so much the physics of space and time, but the personhood of the driver of that other vehicle. The fact of the dream and the subsequent event unfolding means that there must have been some sort of a relational connection between that person’s character and mine prior to the unfolding of that process-event in the space-time-matter that we are currently familiar within. He (I presume he) ended up frustrated by the way the process on that road unfolded.
You may recall that, in the 1/36 account of the rope ladder miracle, there was not only the unusual experience of feeling matter moving and stiffening from within without an obvious external cause; there also was an even more remarkable feature of that process-event. Also not clearly located in space was the angelic voice that I had heard, giving a personalised instruction, “Stop! Don’t look!” Yes, it is weird, but then so is quantum physics, and so is all of life an ongoing miracle of self-organisation that is yet to be explained by science.
Where is this going? Is it safe? Yes, it is safe to rehumanise the world from its currently dehumanised and aberrant ‘truth state’. To rehumanise the world will also restore a sense of the sacred to the material world we share and emerge from, and a respect for mystery rather that discounting anything that does not fit with preconceived ideas based on such a very limited and old fashioned evidence base. The key point that will make this forthcoming explanation safe is to know that life-enhancing processes are more robust and restorative than life-destroying ones, and that is because we participate in these life-enhancing processes in an utterly relational way through our embodiment and our inner heart life processes. It doesn’t matter if we have mental questions or confusion or even distress. The depth relationality works through every molecule and cell of our living embodiment as emergent truth. The truth criterion of this rehumanising sacred truth is that we simply choose to respectfully explore its relationality.
Returning to that unfolding event on the Banbury Road, there was an atmosphere of mystery and unpleasantness about it. What were the drivers of the other two cars experiencing? Had they had prior warning? I will never know; but if we are to start to rehumanise our worldview and to include a depth ‘conversational perspective’ of utter relatedness within our material lives, then we shall need to consider that the vicious spin in the middle of the road, the speed at which the car roared away, the darkened windows hiding the driver’s facial communications, the utter lack or care or concern for life, are all grief enhancing choices being made by that driver. They all distance that driver from his (or her) utter relatedness with other people’s life-enhancing processes. That in my opinion is the nature of evil. More could (and will) be said about that later; for now however the point that I would like to clarify about the dream foretelling this encounter is that I had been embarking on a life of prayer (for reasons to be explained later) which had been leading me into an intuitive way of living that sought life-enhancement for others for the renewal of life, and the healing that can come after brokenness and traumas. It may have relationally attracted some opposition at a depth level, but because of that unusual dream I am still here to tell the story.
To generalise that personal interpretation for those who are not too shocked to read on, it is as if the rules of physical matter somehow get put into a wider context of mutual change or synergy when a depth personal relationship moves among them. Rather than life emerging somehow from inanimate matter (as materialism suggests), there seems to be something here about a living relationship shaping the emergence of material behaviour through modulating the emergent physical laws of nature. In terms of the old materialistic science, even me choosing to pick up a biro is a mind-body interaction that philosophers find is an insoluble mystery. In quantum physics terms, however, at a deeper relational level of pre-quantum informational holomovement, we may safely find that humanity can meet the sacred in truly life-enhancing ways.
