Where Was It Before the Dream?: Time Loops and Interpretation

How do you critique a miracle?Writers often draw on dreams for their inspiration, and those dreams are often precognitive, foreshadowing upheavals in the writer's future. It means that literature may often be prophetic, and that standard critical approaches focused solely on an author's prior influences or present life context are inadequate to fully understand the miracle of literary creation.This exercise in "psychic deconstruction" examines the works and lives of six imaginative (and in most cases, dream-inspired) writers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, J. R. R. Tolkien, Stanislaw Lem, Joan Lindsay, and Franz Kafka. Wargo shows that some of their greatest masterpieces—Coleridge'sKubla Khanand Tolkien'sThe Hobbit, for instance, as well as Kafka'sThe MetamorphosisandThe Trialand Lindsay's beloved Australian classic,Picnic at Hanging Rock—were premonitions of how the author would look back upon their work or career in hindsight: with longing, curiosity, regret, or often some mix of emotions. The most dazzling and original inventions of the literary imagination, from the monster in Shelley'sFrankensteinto the magical beings and objects of Middle Earth or the inscrutable intelligences in Lem's novels about alien contact, likeSolaris, are really strange, biographical time loops preserved in amber.Wargo, who has a PhD in anthropology, is the author of several books on precognition and creativity that have received strong acclaim. Jeffrey J. Kripal (How to Think Impossibly) called Wargo's bookTime Loops"the most significant intellectual work on a paranormal topic in the last fifty years." D. W. Pasulka (Encounters) said that if Wargo'sFrom Nowhere"was taught in schools of art (and science!), the consequences would be transformative." Yancey Strickler (author ofThis Could Be Our Futureand cofounder of Kickstarter) said Wargo'sPrecognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self"is as mind-bending as it gets."Read more