Hypnotised into the Future

I stumbled out of the house, blinking in the bright light of the afternoon. I had just had a reading with a clairvoyant as part of my research for this book and I felt disorientated and muzzy. How could I have lost track of so much time, I thought, especially when each tick of the clairvoyant's watch was clocking up the expensive bottom line for my consultation.

We're all familiar with that sense of timelessness, often experienced during periods of intense focussed concentration, bliss, fun, meditation, daydreaming, dreaming or anaesthesia. Perhaps, during my clairvoyant reading, it was my focus and concentration on the psychic's words combined with the heady mix of receiving so much personal attention that lulled me into that timeless limbo. Or was it?

As I drove away I experienced a certain confusion. My attention to the road seemed perilously vague, and my physical body felt strangely without boundary. I felt floaty, ungrounded and imagined my body as a kind of blurred image seen through an unfocussed lens. I pulled over and stopped to breathe fresh air, feel the grass beneath my feet, look at the distant horizon and the busy landscape and, most grounding of all, eat a bar of chocolate.

Had we shared a journey into a different dimension, a timeless place, the clairvoyant and I, leaving me with interdimensional travel sickness? Was I simply temporarily maladjusted to my return into the world of linear time? Had we moved together beyond the physical limits of our bodies and exchanged information at a dizzying rate in the ethereal, invisible realms of our fused subconscious or unconscious minds?

Were my physical and mental co-ordination confusions symptomatic of my brain trying to regain its previous perception of myself, including the boundaries of my physical body, while also trying to incorporate the clairvoyant's view of my past, present and future life? Or would a new image of myself be required to fit in with all this new information from the psychic reading, assuming I chose to consider it of course? Would I move forward to live the future that befitted a person like the new me?

Or had the psychic simply informed me about my predetermined future which would necessarily occur in spite of my confused state of mind?

In the long run, some of the things she mentioned did happen, but in the short-term I wondered whether my symptoms were the result of some kind of hypnosis or trance. Could a psychic reader, knowingly or (most probably) unknowingly, hypnotise a client in such a way that the client then unconsciously carried out steps to ensure that the 'predicted' future occurred? Although I had not, to my knowledge, been hypnotised before, my post-reading symptoms left me wondering about this possibility and I needed to investigate it.

I started by contacting John Suess, a well-known and successful hypnotherapist in Queensland, and asking him to describe how hypnosis can change a person's outlook and achievements.

"We call it 'time progression'", explained John, describing the basic theory of therapy under hypnosis.

"The hypnotherapist helps the client to create a mental map by essentially taking a past situation into a similar future situation and discovering how it might be, given the changes we might have made."

In the case of a smoker wishing to quit cigarettes, for example, hypnotherapy begins only after a discussion to determine why the smoker wants to kick the habit. This is to check that quitting smoking will not bring about an undesirable outcome, such as the emergence of an alternative habit, or the surfacing of emotional issues which the smoking had masked and the client will need to be ready to handle. John is alert to the dangers of hypnotism and uses techniques that ensure, to the best of his ability, that he obtains both the client's conscious and unconscious agreement to the therapy at each stage of the process.

Getting the smoker, for example, to undergo time progression during hypnosis, and project him- or herself into the future scenario of being offered a cigarette gives the hypnotised client the opportunity to experience the nonsmoking alternative self. John continues,

"Now certainly on one level that's imagination, but on another level it's highly predictable. That is to say, how people perceive that experience will be, probably ninety-five per cent of the time, how it is involuntarily."

In other words, after making no-smoking choices during hypnotherapy and experiencing themselves as nonsmokers in a future situation, they almost invariably become nonsmokers. They powerfully envision and they become.

A caring professional hypnotherapist uses precise techniques to induce an hypnotic trance and chooses his or her words during the hypnotherapy process with integrity. The wrong words at the wrong moment could be disastrous. So could a psychic reader without training unknowingly induce a hypnotic state and invite the client to envision and experience a suggested future which then becomes a reality? Is a psychic, unaware perhaps of the power of hypnotherapy, capable of transforming the smoker into the nonsmoker, the single into the married, the married into the divorced, the underachiever into the achiever, the nonsinger into the singer, the financially struggling into the rich benefactor, the wealthy into bankruptcy, the sick into health and the healthy into sickness – the list is endless -albeit in innocence?

I was particularly mindful of the controversy over the use of hypnotism to uncover so-called repressed memories. Those who apparently recalled 'forgotten' or 'repressed' traumatic memories under hypnosis frequently absorbed these experiences into their conscious minds following the hypnosis session. In other words, they regained full sensual conscious awareness of the remembered event, together with an unshakeable insistence that it had really happened. Many hypnotists, however, argue that 'suggestions' about past traumas are easily implanted under hypnosis, and that the power of the hypnotic trance is such that the client, on resurfacing, then 'recalls' the suggestion as a 'real' remembered event, complete with associated emotional impact. The same arguments, of course, can be applied to the question of regressing people under hypnosis, not only to early childhood, but beyond into past lives.

Whether or not hypnosis restores genuine memories, implants a false past or transforms the smoker into a nonsmoker, one thing is for sure: the person who leaves the hypnotist's chair walks forward a changed person, a person with a new self-image and, presumably, a changed future. I asked John whether he believed hypnosis played a role in changing future outcomes during clairvoyant readings. He was of the opinion that genuine clairvoyants certainly exist, but that lesser scrupled hypnotists, or people with some degree of training in the subject, can and do earn public acclaim as psychics through applying simple hypnosis techniques. In between, however, he believes there are many clairvoyants working with genuine intent, blissfully unaware that they have not fully developed their psychic skills and that their success is, in fact, largely due to their unrecognised ability to induce suggestions.

"Some know it, some don't," John ventures. "They commonly won't look at you, but they're picking you up peripherally. They start by making some general statements and follow with some general questions, looking for feedback. This is what we call 'pacing you' in hypnosis. Then they'll start making some general suggestions about the past, and before long they've induced you into thinking about your past and living that. Then they get dangerous: they start making suggestions about how the future will be and you may well make it come true if they are received as posthypnotic suggestions."

I thought back to my disorientated postreading feelings and asked John what, in his opinion, a tranced or hypnotised person would feel like at the end of such a reading.

"Most people in trances don't know they're there", he responded. "The hardest thing to do in most people is to make them know or ratify trance experience. It is possible to chat to somebody and slip them in and out of trances without doing anything to ratify consciousness."

So, if you were a client being hypnotically tranced during a psychic reading, it seems you probably wouldn't realise it. However, my experience was to feel disorientated after the reading, so I asked John what posthypnosis symptoms might present in such a case. Apparently the response varies enormously.

"The more the information someone receives mismatches their view of the world, or the more vague it is, the more their brain has to search to make sense of it. When you're creating conflicts in people, you can get all the typical signs of a conflict: posttraumatic stress disorder being an extreme example. Alternatively some people become totally compliant, feeling wonderfully at peace, or just not thinking."

In the very least, it seems, the reaction, if it occurs, is after the event. My postreading confusion could have been the result of conflict induced through suggestion. Certainly in later months when I did experience hypnosis with John, I was always in a slightly different head space for a few hours after each session. I felt relaxed and light, but friends or colleagues sensed me as vague and spacey, apparently not my usual presentation! By contrast, under hypnosis I felt fully aware and conscious, although I was also aware that I was lolling around falling over the arm of the chair, strangely unable to sit back up properly: hardly fitting behaviour in front of a man I barely knew and in a professional situation! If I was at all hypnotised during my psychic reading, I was not aware of it at the time, maintaining my seated composure, as far as I recall. In general, though, John's descriptions fitted my experiences in the reading and he had confirmed that hypnosis may play a role in the successful outcome of some clairvoyant readings. Then he added another dimension:

Apparently you don't need to be under hypnosis to receive powerful suggestions directly into your unconscious. As an NLP (neurolinguistic programming) trainer, John is particularly aware of the use of nonverbal communication. Looking someone in the eye, for example, reinforces a word, while looking away reduces its impact. If you look someone in the eye and speak more firmly, this too increases its power. So does touching the person when speaking the key words. Now, take a simple sentence such as:

'I advise you to apply for the managerial position. Working as a building contractor could lead to bankruptcy and you don't want that to happen!'

A manipulator, wishing to be seen as supportive of his co-worker's desire to move into management but harbouring selfish reasons to keep him in the building contracting business, could use this sentence to deliver one message on the conscious level and an entirely different message on the unconscious level. This is how it works, according to John's theory.

The manipulator looks away from his co-worker for most of the sentence but turns to look him directly in the eye when he delivers the words 'managerial position', 'bankruptcy' and 'happen'. These three words are then given added impetus by saying them louder and tapping the co-worker's shoulder at the same time. The unconscious then receives the message: 'managerial position bankruptcy happen'. The co-worker has now, theoretically at least, been given two messages. The conscious message is to apply for the managerial position and the unconscious message is not to apply for the managerial position because of an implanted association with bankruptcy. In a battle between the conscious and the unconscious, it is the unconscious which usually wins! Our hypothetical co-worker is most likely to file the managerial job application in the bin.

The point of this example is to illustrate the theory that the unconscious can be programmed without obvious hypnotism and with no conscious knowledge of what is happening. This method could be used by anyone, psychic or otherwise, quite innocently, especially if that person usually speaks with emphasis and tends to naturally drive home important points through eye contact or touch. It would be easy to argue that an intense psychic reading with occasional strong eye contact, emphasised voice or touch, could deliver some powerful conditioning of the unconscious which then becomes a reality. It also satisfies my question, which is that a psychic, or any other person, need not be versed in the skills of hypnotherapy, or even happen upon the magical incantation to induce hypnosis, in order to affect the unconscious mind of another.

What I had learned from John until that point, then, was the possibility that some psychic readings may contain successful predictions because of a degree of hypnotic suggestion or direct communication with the client's unconscious which then acts out the predicted future under instruction. The argument here is not that there is no such thing as a genuine clairvoyant or that all psychic readings are really hypnosis sessions in disguise. Like John, I believe that genuinely skilled clairvoyants make accurate predictions which eventuate without the intervention of NLP or hypnosis. It is simply that, with no way of being able to guarantee the process being used, we need to be aware of the pitfalls. At the same time, I realised hypnosis could be a valuable tool for understanding the parameters which shape our future years.

Now, this is where the really exciting part of the story starts, a story which led me through both the elation of discovery and adventure and the fear that I might lose my sanity or find myself on the edge of something explosively powerful, if I progressed any further. The Hypnosis Project results will stretch your credibility and require you to think laterally as well as deeply. As a scientist I dotted as many i's and crossed as many t's as I could when travelling in such open territory. Our hypnosis sessions were held in private and each was recorded onto audio cassette tapes. After each session I transcribed the tapes and sent John a typed word-for-word copy to keep on file. No specific details were discussed with others, except in general terms as reported in this story. Observations were similarly recorded and sent to John as replica copies.

The project was triggered when I was interviewing John about his views on past life regression. He responded that whatever you can do with regression into the past you can do with progression into the future, and that an experiment with progression had been published in the popular press by a dentist who hypnotised a TV journalist two weeks into the future and had him read the news on the local television station. Three of the items actually occurred in that he had predicted an airline crash, the site of the crash, a school bus accident, and the name of the Russian general who was fired that day. All three became fact.

We began the project the week following the initial interview, with a simple hypnosis session to see if I was a good subject, as I hadn't consciously volunteered for hypnosis before. In typical scientist fashion I fought the induction suggestions, although I was also eager to get started on the adventure. If the results were to have meaning, I resolved, I would have to be as objective as possible. In retrospect this duality may have occasionally held back my willingness to progress into some areas. It can be difficult to be trusting and objective at the same time. On that first day, however, I consciously observed my upheld palm turn and fall into my lap despite my intention to the contrary, dropping the coin it had held, as the first battle was won. Unconscious mind: 1, Conscious mind: 0. Next week the real fun would begin!

"I'm worried about describing something negative, like crashes, explosions or deaths," I told John before we began. The story about the dentist and the newsreader haunted me because his three predictions involved death or job loss, and many of the precognitive dreams and visions which people had sent to me for my research were about disasters or deaths which later occurred. My own precognitive dreams and visions were generally either positive or apparently trivial. Even death previews, in my case, involved sharing the experience of the peace that would follow the particular death. It wasn't just a matter of wanting to enjoy only pleasant experiences under hypnosis. My deeper concern was ethical.

I was going into this whole thing as open-mindedly as I could, so I was starting with the assumption that all theories of precognition were feasible until proved otherwise. One theory was that the state of hypnotism was such that anything visualised strongly could happen, simply through the power of thought or word. If there was any truth in this theory, I wanted to take a responsible approach and look only for the positive.

Philosophically, of course, this was a naive statement. Enter the age-old question regarding any event objectively: was that a good event or a bad event in the long run? ‘Good’ events can lead to undesirable consequences just as frequently as ‘bad’ events can lead to good. For example, accident or loss of material possessions can lead a person to discover their caring or spiritual nature, while winning the lotto has been known to create havoc for the new millionaire. Scientific discoveries such as the use of atomic energy as a potential power source have been devastatingly abused. It's an ancient argument, but in the here and now of the hypnotist's chair, I wanted to stay with the positive, as I saw it.

John retorted that if I wanted to discover the true basis of precognition, I needed to open myself to finding that truth without restriction. People will use or abuse discoveries in any field, he argued, and it is they who take responsibility for their actions. I decided to place total trust in my quest and we went ahead with the project.

Under hypnosis I was asked to find myself somewhere in the future. As previously described, my conscious mind seemed totally aware. It was like being able to experience an event or vision while at the same time making dispassionate conscious observations. In this sense I was in two minds: the experiencer and the observer. It was the observer who communicated with John. It was the same observer who occasionally edited what I saw, or changed to another scene, or hesitated to give dates when asked. The transcript of that first session reveals much hesitancy and avoidance, at least on behalf of my observer self. I also took refuge in safety and proclaimed most events to be far in the future. That way, presumably, I wouldn't have to face the consequences just yet! Yes, my vulnerability is there in the black and white of that session’s typed notes.

The essence of the first session was that I described three scenes. Briefly, the first one concerned being present at a meeting where new communications technology was being discussed and trialled, but I was as reticent about the technology as I was about the session. Pressed for a date, I came up with a Wednesday in May 1998. That felt right. (Post Script, 1999: 1^st May 1998 turned out to be the day my web site was published. I am overcoming my reticence with the technological side of running a site.)

The second scene seemed to continue on in theme. No date was recorded but I perceived it as being several years later. I was investigating some kind of underground money deal involving an alternative society somewhere in America.

I dated the third vision as sixteen years into the future. I stood on a strangely silent beach watching a burning island. It had been a bird sanctuary but the birds had succumbed to an infection carried by wild pigs. Consequently it was being burned as a cleansing procedure.

My reaction on surfacing from this first session was to tell John that these three visions seemed to me to be dream material. For each I could see symbolism relevant to my life, reflecting especially my thoughts and concerns about the project. If I took each as a dream and interpreted it with respect to my thoughts at that time, they would have made perfect sense. I felt happy with that conclusion, but at the same time typed out the conversation we had had during hypnosis for future reference.

Since my dates were so far forward, of course, I cannot comment on the final outcome. However, around March 1997, a number of references from Scene One unfolded on one particular afternoon. I had travelled to Southport with others to edit some of my video tapes into a promo reel. I took a back seat from the technological-communications side which didn't really interest me. Around lunchtime I volunteered to go and buy lunch: a great excuse to escape the electronics. I ended up letting someone else drive my car while I sat in the passenger seat. On our return, when the car was stationary, I realised my windscreen had cracked. At that point I still had my purse on my lap, having spent a twenty-dollar note at the shops. The windscreen crack seemed strangely familiar, and I remembered the 'dream' I had reported under hypnosis.

Later, back at home, I checked the details with the transcript of the hypnosis session. They were not the same as the original script, but some details tallied. According to the transcript I saw a hairline crack in my windscreen while I was in the passenger seat of my car which was stationary. I was attending a meeting using communications technology in a place I described as being 'not Portsmouth but Australia'. (We were in Southport).) I was wearing new brown sandals (which was true) and had a purse on my lap. I mentioned twenty-dollar notes and thought that I must have been shopping. I said that I wasn't taking the meeting, I was 'just there' and added that we were making plans for the future, setting something up. I also noted that a cat was present and that the pictures on the wall contrasted in period with the technology: both statements were accurate.

There were other similarities. At the same time there was plenty that did not fit the original scene. I was surprised, though, that many elements appeared, all on the same day, albeit that the given date was much further in the future. Final observations will need to be drawn when that date has been reached.

I can see hints of Scene Two emerging at the time of writing: tenuous but worthy of observing. Tantalising as it is, I will have to reserve judgement on that one at this stage.

So, in summary, I felt session one related well to my dreaming mind and carried pertinent symbolism at the time.

The first scene witnessed during this session was very safe and domestic. 'Not again,' thought my conscious observer self. 'When will she get a bit more adventurous, take a few risks?' I started by watching sunlight warm a window seat and went on to describe the room which seemed very much like our lounge room, although I questioned whether it was. I gave the date as Monday 22 October. I thought we might have been to watch my fifteen-year-old son, Euan, playing his tenor sax in a band the day before and that there were about thirty people there and a bar. I noted, 'But he's young to play in a place with a bar.' I said the day before had had something to do with gold rings, though I added, in afterthought, that they might have been gold curtain rings. From there I was transferred to a plaza and was standing looking at a fountain, believing it now to be Friday. I said I was buying shoes.

I obviously thought I should get some adventure going for the second scene because I switched to 23 October of an undefined year and described a procession connected with Disney and metal chainlink, somewhere in America. President Clinton was there. At the end of the parade there seemed to be some kind of emergency, or curfew and I believed this was now Russia: 'Minsk'. By the time the political contract was signed I decided, while still hypnotised, that this was really just a dream.

Immediately after this session I felt dissatisfied. The second scene seemed very dreamlike and there was nothing I could do but put it on the 'we'll see' pile. The first scene was weak and particularly devoid of detail. My son was enjoying a good run of band gigs, so that part was foreseeable. We had just moved into the new house the week before so I had been observing decorating details, and I had no intention of buying new shoes. To top it all, when I looked at the calendar, Monday was 21 October, not the 22nd.

Back at home I transcribed the tapes and sent John his copy. Although my dates seemed slightly inaccurate, I decided to go along with the general theme of the second last weekend in October and wait to see if any of my mundane descriptions fitted. As far as the family (or anyone else) was concerned, they knew I was undertaking hypnosis experiments to try and predict the future, but they had no idea of content. They were, of course, suitably annoyed at being shut out of secret knowledge!

The first development took place the same afternoon as the session, when Glen announced that he had bought himself two new pairs of shoes that afternoon - a couple of hours after my session, as it turned out. It had been about twelve months since he last bought shoes. Well, it was a vague connection: after all, I was supposed to be the one with the new shoes. I somehow managed to engineer the totally offbeat question, 'Was anyone looking at a fountain today?' into the conversation, to which Glen replied, 'Yes, I spent the afternoon installing a papier mache fountain into a show'. Curious, but perhaps not curious enough. I wrote it down anyway.

A few days later I was moving our furniture around, looking for the best layout for our new home. I put an antique wooden blanket box under the window, thinking it suited the room. Later I sat on the box with a cup of coffee and lent on the window sill, enjoying the view of the neighbour's garden. I realised then that I had unconsciously created the window seat of my session. I wondered whether I would have put the box there if I hadn't been hypnotised. Perhaps this is a very simple example of carrying out something previsioned by the unconscious mind. Alternatively I may have unconsciously solved the problem of what to do with the window while under hypnosis and then simply applied it later in the week.

Now, that mundane example brings up another possibility: that what we imagine or see as the future is a result of the unconscious working out a creative solution to a problem or advancing a likely outcome to a situation before the conscious mind is ready to address it. In other words, our precognitive insights could just be the result of the unconscious projecting ahead. The unconscious generally has much more creative and insightful solutions to offer than the conscious mind, so we might well react with surprise when a 'prediction' is seen to come true. All that has really happened is that the unconscious has delivered. Perhaps.

But let's move ahead to the anticipated weekend. Yes, Euan did play a public performance that had not been booked at the time of the hypnosis. It was on the Saturday, not the Sunday. It was at an outside venue which he had not played before and the stage was side on to a beer garden, so the 'he's young to play in a place with a bar' comment noted during my session was solved. We enjoyed a beer while we watched and, yes, I counted about thirty people in the audience.

Saturday was the day the mysterious gold rings were predicted to appear. In the early evening we went to the movies and saw First Wives Club. It was opening night and we were last in so we were in the front rows and the screen was up close and large. Somewhere near the beginning of the movie the camera zoomed in on a wine glass as the three women dropped their wedding rings into the wine. A whole screen of gold rings loomed large before me. Was I originally correct in the hypnosis in saying they were rings (meaning finger rings)? My lateral thinking started working overtime in the cinema to find a place for the curtain rings. The best I came up with was that it was 'curtains' (divorce) for the three women in the movie, and that movie theatres have curtains in front of the screens. 'It's amazing what you can come up with if you want to', I mused, and settled back to enjoy the film.

On the Sunday we kept an invitation to visit friends for lunch. Throughout this two week period my scientific self had been working overtime to make sure I didn't wander into any shoe shops or stop and linger over fountains. If there was anything to prove here, I reasoned, it was going to have to happen with no conscious prompting from me. On the way to lunch Glen pulled the car over to visit some markets and I found myself reading the plaque on a fountain as we passed by, disappointed that I had come face to face with something from the session which I had been trying hard to avoid! We enjoyed our lunch. Our friends knew I was doing hypnosis experiments, but again had no idea of the content. During the afternoon the woman gave me two pairs of shoes she had bought for herself but which were too small for her. So my fountain and my shoes appeared two days later than mentioned in the hypnosis session, and the fact was that the shoes were a gift: I didn't buy them.

I was spooked, but the big question still remained: had I predicted, to varying degrees of accuracy, aspects of a fixed future, aspects of a possible future, or .... had I somehow attracted these things into my life, or even created them, by undergoing the hypnosis? If I did attract them, how did I do it?

Stepping neatly away from these emotional and ethical questions, I scientifically summarised the situation so far. 'The following correlations with the hypnosis session were noted with varying degrees of certainty: shoes (twice); band gig; bar at band gig; gold rings; fountain (twice); window seat (tenuous). The predictions had been for a long weekend period two weeks after the hypnosis session. Give or take a few days, this timing was accurate for the majority of the correlations.'

Let's go back in time a little now, because session three took place before the weekend of the shoes, and before we started getting more adventurous.

This time my wanderings took me to 8 December 1997, a day I believed to be a Wednesday. I saw myself in a room I described as containing 'movies, show reels on the shelves, storage space for cinema - not cinema, TV reels - films, people, man sitting, editing, green jumper, editing, editing film tape.' I went on to describe the film he was editing as 'a black and white film' showing 'female face, male face, looks like old movie, historical archives, these are archives.' I said I was involved in researching film archives because I was making a documentary film. I gave details, including some names and numbers, the title of the documentary and then added the name of the man editing the black and white film: 'Steven, the man in the green jumper is.'

The second scene was a flashback to childhood which concluded with the memory of going to a children's Christmas party where I entered a 'big black room' and, without warning, saw huge cartoon characters rushing all over the wall. It was, of course, my first movie, and I had no idea what was happening. I had not yet experienced television. This has always been a conscious memory, and I imagine the hypnosis session brought up the film link for a reason. Perhaps it was the first time my young developing rational mind was challenged by a radically different perception of reality. Whether or not that was personally meaningful, it was interesting to note that I went back in time when the focus was supposed to be on going forward.

In the last scene I was back in the role of researcher again, visiting an institute in Melbourne in March of an undefined year.

At the time of writing this book (April 1997), I have no idea what December 1997 will bring. The 8 December will be a Monday not a Wednesday. Back in October 1996, at the time of the hypnosis, I also had no idea that by February 1997 I would be recording four television programmes. As described earlier, (Chapter 1), the television opportunity came out of the blue, at least as far as my conscious mind was aware. It was preceded by a dream which contained shades of precognition, however, so I wonder how much of a part this hypnosis session played either in keying into that future area of work or in creating it.

The thing is, the man who offered me the position and acted as Executive Producer of the show, was named Steven, and he was Irish, which perhaps explains the green jumper. I didn't know of his existence or his name prior to our first meeting on set. One of the guests on my first show was a singer, chosen by Sue Manger, one of the producers. Sue suggested introducing the singer, Jenny Keyes, by playing a clip from a 1960s black and white film of one of her old television performances. Steven edited the film into the programme, and yes, she appeared singing with a male partner, thereby fulfilling the 'female face, male face, looks like old movie, historical archives, these are archives' observation, albeit ten months earlier than predicted. (I have to add here, that no one had seen the content of the hypnosis session or heard mention of any details. Since nothing had transpired from the session at that stage, it hadn't become a topic of conversation. It was still in the wait and see basket.)

I've had some remarkable experiences with precognition in my life. The examples given in Chapter 1 were but a few of so many. Even so, as the full significance of Steve, the editing, the film and so on dawned on me, I felt numb and expansive. Each time I realise a connection between a precognition and the actual event, I have the strange sensation of losing the contours of my physical body, feeling light and formless rather than solid and confined. It is similar to the feeling described in the introduction to this chapter, the 'spaced out, post psychic reading' feeling, yet, unlike the confusion generated by the reading experience, this is more of an enlightenment. If you ask me to describe that enlightenment, however, I just can't find the right words. Meanwhile, the Steven story did not stop there.

What is extraordinarily interesting and maybe revealing at this point, is that Steven edited the wrong song. Sue had chosen a segment where Jenny sang alone, but Steven chose the duet. It was Steven's mistake that resulted in more adherence to the original prediction: 'female face, male face'. Had my prediction foreseen Steven's change of mind, or had Steven unwittingly been subject to my unconscious plan? Also, if all this was connected in some way to the hypnosis session, why was it happening so much earlier than predicted?

As a result of those February shows, I have extended my career in television and we are in the middle of negotiating a series as I write. I found myself surrounded by supportive friends and colleagues who virtually formed a production team around me and then invited me in! I don't feel the choice was consciously mine. Fait accompli! How much of this was due to the hypnosis? Would it have happened regardless: was I truly seeing the future under hypnosis, or has my unconscious been marching to orders received back on 10 October 1996? Now put yourself in the place of Steven, or in the shoes of Sue, the producer, who had the film clip idea and ask the same questions. It gets scaringly interesting, doesn't it?

But these developments are way ahead of our story. Back at home at the end of October, looking at my two new pairs of shoes, I felt it was time to be more precise about our hypnosis experiments.

The first stage, I believed, was to begin to investigate the question of the ability of the unconscious, under hypnosis, to create the future. I wanted to know if talk of the shoes, rings and other things under the powerful conditions of hypnosis had somehow created, or manifested, them into my future. It was a difficult question to design an experiment around. Indeed, proper scientific analysis would require more than a few sessions and a multitude of scientific controls to be set up. Remembering that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and that scientists fear to go where angels tread, I planned our next session. Not as an angel, I hasten to add, but as a scientist willing to enter the world of mystery with my analytical skills to the fore, regardless of whether or not that would satisfy another scientist. I had to start somewhere!

To understand the experimental rationale I planned for this session, we need to review three possibilities here. I'm starting by assuming that the above stories demonstrate a correlation between the future described under hypnosis and some of the events which subsequently unfolded. The three main possibilities are:

1. The state of hypnosis is sufficiently intense that it amplifies any ability, proven or latent, that I might naturally have to predict the future with varying degrees of accuracy.

2. The state of hypnosis is sufficiently intense that the scene, vision or spoken description imprints on the unconscious in such a way that it acts on the suggestion and creates, to its best ability and by some mechanism, the best match in the future.

3. The state of hypnosis is one in which it is possible to transcend the present and experience either a predetermined or an already existing future. Descriptions of that future, and the predictions stemming from it, may differ slightly from the actual events for a number of reasons. For example, the future picture might be misunderstood or some of the substance lost in the interpretation. A second example is that such hypothetical 'time travelling' might access any number of alternative parallel futures, so that the actual future which I later experience in my own reality might differ from the alternative future I previewed.

There are other possibilities, but for the sake of argument, and for the sake of taking that first step of a thousand miles, I started with these.

I wanted to test number two: that the hypnotised unconscious plays a strong role in creating the future. It wasn't necessarily because I believed this to be the case, but I felt it was the easiest to test.

The difficulty in designing the experiment was to find some way of eliminating points one and three from the test conditions. The general idea was to select various subjects before I was hypnotised, tell John about these, and then ask him to discuss them with me once I was under hypnosis. The three subjects were each to represent a different category: a physical object, a number and a concept. By choosing the subjects prior to hypnosis, I successfully eliminated point three from the equation, that the state of hypnosis is one in which it is possible to transcend the present and experience either a predetermined or an already existing future, (unless, of course, I had seen these subjects during a previous hypnotic time travel session and had, in the meantime, forgotten!)

I still needed to eliminate point one which allows for the possibility that I already have an ability to predict the future, an ability which hypnosis merely amplifies. If this is true, then I might unwittingly use these skills when choosing my subjects prior to being hypnotised. In other words, I could be using accurate prediction skills to select subjects which are very likely to make an appearance in my future, and then reinforcing this possibility under hypnosis.

Most psychics say that in order to give a reading or make a single prediction, they prepare themselves in some way. It might be a ritual, it might be prayer or meditation - any process which effectively slows the psychic's brainwave pattern to a more receptive state. The general agreement is that they tune in before making predictions.

Based on this 'tune in to predict' assumption, I decided the best defence against point one was to think up my chosen three subjects while focussing on being alertly rational, as far away from tuned in as I could be. As a kind of control I also asked John to pick three subjects too, to keep them to himself and then to introduce them into our discussion once I was hypnotised. The rationale here was that it was unlikely that we would both be able to accurately predict subjects which might come into my life. John and I had no contact outside his hypnotherapy clinic, so he knew too little about my life to be able to make a good bet as to what might be coming up for me - unless, of course, he was psychic.

We chose a date of 4 December, two weeks after the hypnosis session, as the due-by date for the manifestation of our chosen subjects. The idea was to see which category, if any, came up, and how. Future experiments, I thought, could be planned based on these initial observations.

These were my subjects. The descriptions of how I specified them are crucial to the story.

Subject 1: A Physical Object: 'A Bunch of Flowers: orange and maroon'
When I told John 'A bunch of flowers,' he replied, 'What colour?' I looked down at the blouse I was wearing, a print fabric of large petalled orange flowers set amongst maroon strips and borders and said, 'Orange and maroon, like my blouse'.

Subject 2: A Number: '174 - a cheque for $174'
I realised as I said this that my number had also become a physical object by introducing the cheque, but I left it at that. At first I'd said '$174.80,' trying to make it such an odd number that I'd be completely surprised if it turned up. Then I thought that was being overprecise, and we left it at '$174.00'.

Subject 3: A Concept: 'The Chinese Wall'
By this I did not really mean the physical Great Wall of China, but that someone would mention the Chinese Wall as a conceptual reference in a conversation. I have no idea why I did not name it properly as the Great Wall of China.

John wrote these down and then silently added his own list. The hypnosis session was carried out and we discussed these subjects under hypnosis. After the session, John summarised his three subjects for my records:

John's subjects threw a whole new angle, as I will reveal later. For the meantime, we'll start with mine: the bunch of orange flowers, the cheque for $174.00 and the concept of the Chinese Wall.

Firstly an important aside about the hypnosis session itself. After we had discussed my three subjects, John encouraged me to describe the surroundings I found myself in before he introduced his items into the conversation. I described finding a letter in our home mailbox addressed in French to 'Madame'. Then I thought I was in 'somewhere like Tibet' looking at a leather satchel on 27 November. Invited by John to look inside it, I replied that it seemed to be empty but smelled of goatskin.

First off the rank the next evening was the address to 'Madame', which was a very encouraging start. We have a post office box, so receive very little mail addressed to our home. We had no connections in France at that time. That evening, in a Mexican restaurant, the waitress came to our table to collect our drinks order. Glen referred to me as 'Madame', not in an attempt at grandeur but as part of an old joke: the 'Madame will have - sorry, I shouldn't call you Madame, I don't even know your profession' one. Not at all funny and we had heard it before, though not for a long time and never directed to me. It also seemed bizarre in a Mexican restaurant. It was, however, an 'address' to 'Madame' with a 'French' reference and was a 'home' joke. Naturally, as always, the family knew nothing about the hypnosis project other than the fact that I had chosen three things to see if they came up within the next two weeks.

On 27 November Glen bought himself a new mobile phone. Apart from the prefix the number was 081 774: the precise digits of the predicted '$174.80' (with an extra 7 left over). Now, I hadn't programmed the eighty cents into the hypnosis session, remember. It was discussed prior to the session and then dropped in favour of the simpler $174. I asked Glen if he chose his number or selected it from a given list, but he said it was the first one offered and he liked the look of it so he took it. As a bonus they added a leather pouch for the phone, although they were out of stock and it was a few weeks before it arrived. Notice that the date of Glen's purchase, 27 November, was the date I gave in my hypnosis for the episode with the goatskin satchel. I wondered how much the satchel I envisioned under hypnosis predicted the mobile phone pouch. When it finally arrived it carried no identifying label, so I have no idea of either its country or animal of origin. It was, however, soft leather, as in the vision.

So, the number didn't manifest as a cheque and emerged in jumbled order: 081 774. In discussion with John later, he explained that the right brain, under hypnosis, will often remember the numbers individually, as, in this case; for example, '1', '7' and '4', rather than '174' (or even 174.80). The right brain also tends to sum the individual numbers together, as in 1+ 7 + 4 = 12. I have noticed the same predilection for number handling in dreams. This discussion took place at the end of the two week period. During the fortnight I had noticed that the number 12, or references to a dozen kept coming up. I had been confused, and even wondered whether John's chosen number item 2.5 had actually been 12, and that he had tried to throw me off the scent by telling me, after the session, that it was 2.5. Looking back at the 'right brain addition' idea, I could see an argument for having been hypnotised to create 12s during the test period. Applying the same addition principle to John's 2.5 (2 + 5) gives 7. Perhaps that was the source of the additional 7 in Glen's new phone number!

The Chinese Wall as a conversational concept did not manifest during the two-week period. At one point it seemed close when a chiropractor, standing in for my usual practitioner, told me a long story about his trip to China to study further techniques. He must have chatted on for about fifteen minutes and I was careful not to ask any leading questions because I didn't want to prompt mention of the Chinese Wall myself. He didn't anyway. Advancing a totally 'off the wall!' analysis, I could say he discussed some of the obstacles (walls?) encountered in working with the Chinese from an Australian perspective. The argument would be that I did indeed predict or manifest the concept of a Chinese wall, but perhaps that's stretching the limits a bit too far!

After the due date of 4 December, the Great Wall of China came up several times. On the 5 December I collected the free colour magazine from our mailbox and noticed a photograph of some people Glen knows through his business, so I started to read the accompanying article. It was a 'What's your favourite holiday destination?' type story. Half way through it was revealed that they enjoyed business related dress-up parties held on the Great Wall of China. (Now that's a concept to consider, isn't it?!)

On 8 December my brother introduced the subject of the Berlin Wall, but the Chinese Wall didn't come into the picture. That evening, however, he asked Glen which was the most impressive magic illusion stunt he had ever seen. Glen said 'Walking through the Great Wall of China'. Now by this time, because our project due date had passed, Glen did know about my interest in the Chinese Wall, although I think he might have given that answer anyway. Because the experiment was over, I mentioned it to my brother, who then told me he was sure he had read a piece in the papers during the week about a second Wall of China having been uncovered.

A month later, in January, I received word completely out the blue that a Chinese publisher had approached my agent with an offer to translate my second book, Dream It: Do It!, into Chinese. Was this another spin-off of the hypnosis experiment? Or had I tuned in to my then unknown Chinese publisher as he or she was reading my book, thereby choosing the concept for the hypnosis project? Or is China symbolically very deep and meaningful for me and therefore emerging on many levels in my life? Or was this 'just' coincidence, being several weeks beyond the chosen time frame for the Chinese Wall concept?

The bunch of orange and maroon flowers did not turn up during the test fortnight. About a week before Christmas, though, we were shopping at some markets and Glen bought me two outfits as a present. Pleased with his sale, the vendor tossed me a blouse off another rack and said, 'If that one fits, you can have it as an extra gift'. It did. The bright sunlight reflected gold colours against an orange background. It wasn't until a few days later, when the new blouse was in a pile of fresh laundry alongside the old blouse I had worn to the hypnosis session, that I saw the connection. Out of the sunlight the flower pattern, edged in gold, was actually maroon. Side by side, in indoor light, the two blouses were the same colour. The original hypnosis session had been carried out indoors, so these were the colours I had envisaged when I had looked down at my old blouse and said to John, 'Orange and maroon, like my blouse'. I didn't get a physical bunch of orange and maroon flowers during the test period, but in a way I received more precisely what I had asked for: flowers that are 'orange and maroon like my blouse'. It seems my unconscious had read 'like my blouse' literally, and manifested flowery fabric 'like my blouse'.

And how did John's chosen subjects go? Did they turn up during the test period?

His number, 2.5 did not, unless it added to the extra 7 in Glen's phone number as previously described. However, he had said that he had chosen it in his mind but had omitted to discuss it during the hypnosis session.

John's concept was a poem. While I was hypnotised he asked me about the poem. I described the content of a poem, which did not eventuate. However, on 27 November I had a phone call from a friend to say he was bringing a couple of his friends to a talk I was giving two days later. One of these friends was a well-known poet, Bob. I had already met Bob once earlier that month when he attended a previous talk and spent the time writing several verses about dreams. Apparently he had been following my dream talkback radio programme for several years and had been inspired to create a poem. He needed to see me in the flesh and in action to complete it.

So, prior to our hypnosis session I knew about the poem, but not about its content. Had John, in picking the concept of a poem for our session, picked the subject out of my mind? That had been my reaction under hypnosis, to think, 'Oh, John's picked up on that poem!'. After the session I thought it less likely, since a poem is a pretty broad concept. To return to the phone call from my friend on 27 November, I said, 'I'd love to see the poem Bob wrote', thereby breaking my rule and introducing the forbidden topic myself. 'He's dying to read it to you,' my friend replied, so I invited him to perform it in public at the close of my talk. In the event, not only did Bob perform his excellent poem, but he brought along two other professional poets to parade their stuff too!

Poems and poetry therefore did surface during the test period, apparently initiated by an outsider, prompted a little by me, but then tripling in effect with the appearance of three poets instead of the anticipated one in public performance.

John's physical subject was a bull. He introduced it into the hypnosis session with one simple question: 'Can you notice the bull?' My muddled response illustrates my surprise: 'The bull? The bull - yesterday there was a - yeah - it's a long story about bulls from yesterday, in my life. So the bull would be connected in the same way. I have - interesting - the bull in my life at the moment is Chinese pictures.' We continued to have a very rational discussion under hypnosis in which, as far as I was aware, my conscious observer self was telling John about how often the symbol bull had come up in my life that week. Under hypnosis I was already asking myself, 'Is John reading my mind?' Suddenly the thought of him picking a poem earlier as a result of tuning into my mind didn't seem so unlikely after all.

Well, the bull discussion could go on forever. Suffice to say that the day before a woman had phoned me about a dream concerning a bull which led her to a place of needle pines and a sense of spiritual insight. I was sitting at Glen's desk at the time, looking directly at a picture on the wall of a bull walking on water, titled 'I never knew I could walk on water'. That night I opened the book I had been reading and turned to the next page. The first thing I read was a description of a series of 12th century Chinese paintings known as the ten ox-herding pictures; a series illustrating the stages of spiritual enlightenment. The book described the penultimate scene as portraying pine trees. Maybe the dreamer who phoned me had seen the pictures and had forgotten them. It didn't matter because it was in my life that the bull was making its appearances now. Had John picked up on this, or was his mention of a bull just another in the line of examples which continued to come up for me for a while?

As far as the appearance of bulls in the test period as a possible result of my hypnosis, I must report that no physical bull appeared in my waking life, but I did have a very powerful dream featuring two huge and wonderful bulls on 2 December. Were my dreams applying themselves to the symbolism as a matter of course? Was the symbolism of bulls, begun prior to hypnosis, simply working its way through my system towards resolution of the deeper issue they represented? Or were the dreams 'manifestations' of the hypnotism project?

Head and body reeling with the enormity of it all once more, it was time to slip into dispassionate scientist mode to type up my conclusion.

'In summary, sufficient correlations to the original hypnosis experiment emerged to give weight to point two, i.e. that the state of hypnosis is sufficiently intense that the scene, vision or spoken description imprints on the unconscious in such a way that it acts on the suggestion and creates, to its best ability and by some mechanism, the best match in the future.'

Staggering though, hey?!

By this time I was beginning to feel rather ambivalent about continuing with the hypnosis project. I had discovered some extremely deep and convoluted connections between my dreams and events occurring for several other people in my life, and I was feeling the fear of uncertainty. I was trying not to analyse too much, just to roll with the project and record my observations, but my dreams were reflecting both a fear of progressing and a confusion with comprehending precognition and time. I felt I needed to take time out and rethink the whole situation. We decided to make session five the last one, at least in principle. John wanted to test my reactions if he used concept questions aimed at elucidating more concept based answers. This session was John's project and the transcript suggests that I gave the kind of responses he was looking for.

Under hypnosis I believed I was in 1857 where I described a geometrical analysis of astronomy; from this point we roved towards present time and I ambled on about models of 'holographic geometry' before I took refuge in a Slavonic carrot garden! My conscious observer self was thinking, 'Yes Jane. The edge of madness! Need for time off confirmed!' Towards the end, walking down a narrow road towards a church believed to be 'ten years in the future' I saw 'a bee or a wasp. I don't know what that's got to do with the church'. I finished off with some reference to that famous line, 'Death, where is thy sting', noticed a numbness in my ankles and mumbled something about the trinity: 'three, trinity, body, mind and soul, coming together of things. There's the bee again. The bee collects the nectar from a flower which blossoms. A bee is in a poem about death. The sting is painful. New beginnings, pain endings - all in the same creature, the bee.' I was beginning to sound like a rambling psychiatric case.

I was glad to finish that session, type up the transcripts and take a break.

That same day, while sweeping the front verandah, I knocked a wasp's nest and was immediately stung on my right palm. It was my first sting, that I could recall, since being a young child. It wasn't a bee, and although the little wasps nest had been there for months, I did ask for trouble by knocking it. A week later I received a Christmas present of a book from someone who knew that I had been stung by a wasp following a hypnosis session about a bee. I don't think I'd told any further details. The first page featured a piece about the symbolism of the bee in the Rosicrucian Order. A stained-glass church window design of a beehive was illustrated on the following page. According to the old Rosicrucian Order, the bee symbolised the soul and the beehive the place where the soul could grow. Had I known or read about this before and forgotten about it, or was I accessing information previously unknown to me? If so, where was I getting it from: the collective unconscious, the mind of another person, a past life, a parallel life, a spirit? Life was getting complicated, and this stung soul needed time out.

I didn't think we'd do a sixth progression hypnosis, but eventually I realised I had to go back and try one last thing, and that turned out to be the most challenging of all.

I rarely have headaches but I experienced some painful ones at this time and wondered if they had been brought on by the hypnosis or by the intellectual confusion. My experiments so far had indicated that, under hypnosis at least, the unconscious was capable of shaping, creating or manifesting some aspects of my future, occasionally doing so, apparently, by involving other people as actors in my created scenes.

Some of those created scenes were so complex (for example, Steven, Sue and the editing of the wrong piece of black and white film), that they seemed beyond the scope of one person's creation. After all, wouldn't everyone else have also been busy unconsciously creating their own futures, even without the accelerated help of hypnosis? Shouldn't we have been battling it all out somewhere in some kind of universal unconscious precreation committee? A battle of unconscious wills perhaps?

It all began to take on the proportions of the 'predicting the ripples created by the pebble in the pond filled with jumping fish ...' analogy which I described in Chapter 3's story on Margaret Stuart. In her case I was arguing that it seemed against the odds to be able to accurately predict a detailed future event by projecting present conscious and unconscious forces into the future. Surely, I argued, it is easier to explain detailed clairvoyant accuracy by saying Margaret simply saw a predetermined future. Although our hypnosis experiments strongly suggested that I was creating or manifesting aspects of my own future, exactly how much was I responsible for? I'd have felt much more comfortable, both ethically and scientifically, if I believed I was merely bringing some extra things into the framework of either a predetermined or a chance future, rather than creating it in its entirety. Where, after all, would such creation stop? On the other hand, if we are totally responsible for the creation of our futures to the delicate degree of bringing other people into our lives, then we can't react to these experimental results by ignoring the issue. On the contrary, awareness of and responsibility for ourselves and for others would be of paramount importance.

The problem was that I had tested the possibility that I could create aspects of my future and proved that I could. However, I still needed to test for aspects of a predetermined, fixed or pre-existing future. After all, several of the clairvoyants in Chapter 3 had indicated the possibility that free will and fixed destiny may, paradoxically, intertwine. This was, I have to admit, my own gut reaction too, but so far I had not sought any evidence for this. For my own mental stability, and hopefully to release the headaches, I needed to have one last hypnosis session to attempt to address the question.

The simplest solution, I decided, was to ask John to hypnotise me and then direct me to look for a predetermined, unalterable event on a specific future date and describe it. Then all we'd have to do was wait for the date to come round and see what happened. There were plenty of holes in the experimental design which was based on the supposition that my unconscious self would recognise truth and respond with integrity. I had no guarantee, but I did have headache pain to shift, so we did it.

I asked John to choose the date. He chose 2 January 1997. The transcript of the entire session is included here. All our sessions were of a similar length. It is important for you, the reader, to realise that we were not fitting future events to screeds of tape transcripts, wallowing through ten pages per session looking for two or three sentences which matched events. I'd also like you to experience the sixth session, and its outcome, in the same way that I did.

John always switched my tape recorder on just after he had finished the hypnosis procedure and as he was about to ask the first question:

JS: Good, I'd like you to go ahead and tell me about this predetermined event.

JA: I keep seeing a mountain and a camera - a mountain and a camera is Japan, isn't it?

JS: I don't know. Is it Japan?

JA: And water, crystal coloured water. A holiday resort and plains - plains as well as mountains.

JS: And what's happening?

JA: The emphasis is on the plains now.

JS: And what event is this referring to that's of significance to our interests?

JA: Something to do with horses …

JS: You can find that data. Tell me about it now.

JA: Famous horse race …

JS: Famous horse race …

JA: But not modern horses - not modern race …

JS: And what's significant about this horse race?

JA: I don't know. I keep seeing a wire with dots along it, like barbed wire, so …

JS: And is there a deeper level in the unconscious that can give us more detail?

JA: I've already been going down - down under the ground …

JS: To what?

JA: I keep seeing just like rooms under the ground, but I'm seeing bells as well - bells … so its confusing. Japanese writing, characters, scripts, bells ringing again, so it could be a ceremony. The horses might not be real horses; they might be made of wire, like frames. Yes, frames.

JS: That's right .....

JA: I'm not seeing anything there any more.

JS: Fine. And is there any information with respect to what may be a predetermined event that this information refers to on the second of January 1997?

JA: I don't know the answer to that but I'm seeing bright blue - as if bright blue is coming up from under the ground now … breaking through to the surface.

JS: Okay. I want you to let that imagery fade completely. On the very same day, I'd like you to be interested in discovering some event that has been influenced by the thought of man or men or human beings [my emphasis] - something that has been caused to occur for comparison as an influence of human thought, projections, ideas, wishes or even dreams. Now tell me, what's coming to mind now?

JA: A car like a jeep, a bicycle …

JS: And?

JA: Must be a parade. Streamers.

JS: Are there people in the parade?

JA: Can't see the people.

JS: Okay, what can you see?

JA: The car. Inside the car, the seats, the upholstery.

JS: What colour is the upholstery? Is it noticeable?

JA: Red - leather

JS: And if you look around and you see the edge of the car and the road in which it is moving …

JA: Black car. Asphalt road.

JS: What else do you notice?

JA: Cornfields, something yellow, like I don't know, it would be France or America. And my body's moving.

JS: To where, to what?

JA: I don't know. I see parachutes coming down in the fields. And the road is bumpy.

JS: And what significance can you put to these events and details, if anything?

JA: Celebration, flags, political celebration.

JS: Which country - do you know?

JA: France or America …

JS: Is there anything else you can notice now?

JA: Birds in a cage

JS: Which birds are these?

JA: Blue parrots in a cage.

JS: Where is the cage?

JA: In the mountains

JS: Oh, which mountains?

JA: Back in Japan again. Yellow road. Yellow line. Cartoon characters, characters and outlined in yellow … It’s going bizarre now. Big lake.

JA: It has a silver hand attached to it as if it's being given numbers, numbers like the face of a clock in the background. Clock with no hands. It was very beautiful. It's something for me, so that's strange.

JS: Intriguingly so?

JA: Yes.

JS: And when you've got enough of that, I want you to find again some event that has been influenced and shaped by the thought and actions of man - tell me what that is.

JA: Carved wood, a grandfather clock … grandfather clock … and a watch glass, like a little watch glass with water in the bottom - (What do you want a watch for?) - no … I'm just getting different symbols of time - sundial.

JS: Is there some significance you can place on it? Some meaning that would help?

JA: Well, yes, these are all things that measure linear time, aren't they? So there's two phases of time - yes - this is it - yes, this makes sense - Two types of time … you know, one we influence which is linear time, the one which we don't influence which is no time … and a little red bird like an embroidery …

JS: Gather all you can now, and all you need to gather to understand, and let me know when you've done that gathering … Is that all?

JA: A little red light so that must be stop!

JS: Okay - END.

I took the second half of the transcription to represent my unconscious solution to the paradox of predeterminism and creative manifestation. Then I waited for two weeks to see what 2 January would bring.

It turned out to be an uneventful day. We took an overnight guest to the station and spent the rest of the day at home. We were tired from the New Year celebrations, and I was also aware that 'delivery date' was upon me and I was determined to make it work hard to prove itself, if at all! 'So much for my 2 January predictions!' I thought as we sat down to watch television, settling on an interesting documentary on the Wright Brothers. Vaguely I thought there were slim connections between the programme and the hypnosis session, but saw no further correlations at the time, even though I did go and glance at the transcript. I was aware of still being fearful of what I might discover.

On 9 January I was discussing the hypnosis project in general with Kerry, a good friend, over lunch. When Glen came home the discussion turned to family businesses and by way of example Glen started to tell Kerry about the Wright Brothers documentary. When he used the word plane for the umpteenth time I suddenly had a blinding flash. How stupid! I couldn't believe I was so silly to miss it! I was sure the session started with me describing PLAINS (not planes), but it is the shape and sound of the word the unconscious often prefers over the concept. I went off to get the transcript and brought it back into the kitchen saying 'Sorry for being rude, but I've just discovered something. Keep on with your conversation and don't mind me. I'll explain later.' They chatted on and I underlined the word bicycle at the exact moment Glen said, 'They were bicycle mechanics actually'. I continued to underline words as follows:

JS: Good, I'd like you to go ahead and tell me about this predetermined event.

JA: I keep seeing a mountain and a camera - a mountain and a camera is Japan, isn't it?

JS: I don't know. Is it Japan?

JA; And water, crystal coloured water. A holiday resort and plains - plains as well as mountains.

JS: And what's happening?

JA: The emphasis is on the plains now.

JS: And what event is this referring to that's of significance to our interests?

JA: Something to do with horses …

JS: You can find that data. Tell me about it now.

JA: Famous horse race …

JS: Famous horse race …

JA: But not modern horses - not modern race …

JS: And what's significant about this horse race?

JA: I don't know. I keep seeing a wire with dots along it, like barbed wire, so …

JS: And is there a deeper level in the unconscious that can give us more detail?
JA: I've already been going down - down under the ground …

JS: To what?

JA: I keep seeing just like rooms under the ground, but I'm seeing bells as well … bells … so its confusing. Japanese writing, characters, scripts, bells ringing again, so it could be a ceremony. The horses might not be real horses they might be made of wire, like frames. Yes, frames.

JS: That's right .....

JA: I'm not seeing anything there any more.

JS: Fine. And is there any information with respect to what may be a predetermined event that this information refers to on the second of January 1997?

JA: I don't know the answer to that but I'm seeing bright blue - as if bright blue is coming up from under the ground now … breaking through to the surface.

JS: Okay. I want you to let that imagery fade completely. On the very same day, I'd like you to be interested in discovering some event that has been influenced by the thought of man or men or human beings - something that has been caused to occur for comparison as an influence of human thought, projections, ideas, wishes or even dreams. Now tell me, what's coming to mind now?

JA: A car like a jeep, a bicycle …

JS: And?

JA: Must be a parade. Streamers.

JS: Are there people in the parade?

JA: Can't see the people.

JS: Okay, what can you see?

JA: The car. Inside the car, the seats, the upholstery.

JS: What colour is the upholstery? Is it noticeable?

JA: Red - leather

JS: And if you look around and you see the edge of the car and the road in which it is moving …

JA: Black car. Asphalt road.

JS: What else do you notice?

JA: Cornfields, something yellow, like I don't know, it would be France or America. And my body's moving.

JS: To where, to what?

JA: I don't know. I see parachutes coming down in the fields. And the road is bumpy.

JS: And what significance can you put to these events and details, if anything?

JA: Celebration, flags, political celebration.

JS: Which country - do you know?

JA: France or America …

JS: Is there anything else you can notice now?

JA: Birds in a cage

JS: Which birds are these?

JA: Blue parrots in a cage.

JS: Where is the cage?

JA: In the mountains

JS: Oh, which mountains?

JA: Back in Japan again. Yellow road. Yellow line. Cartoon characters, characters and outlined in yellow … It’s going bizarre now. Big lake.

The words I underlined constitute thirty-five per cent of the total number of words spoken by myself in the transcript excerpt above. Some are literal correlations with the documentary, while many are expressed using the more symbolic language of the unconscious (dream symbolism, or right brain language: for the sake of the argument, assume these are equivalent.)

These were the connections with the documentary on the Wright Brothers, as I saw it.

JA: camera

We saw documentary (film) including many photos and lots of original film. A cameraman was taken on one of the earliest flights to film the event. The plane crashed and he was killed - the film survived. Significant to the history of photography, these would have been the first photos taken from a plane.

JA: plains - plains

Planes. Glen added that they chose the Kitty Hawk plains in USA for all their test flights (I didn't remember this from the documentary).

JA: The emphasis is on the plains now.

Whole emphasis of programme was on planes - and some plains too.

JA: horses

Old-fashioned transport?

JA: Famous horse race

Famous race to build a flying machine

JA: not modern horses - not modern race -

Not modern planes – old-fashioned planes

JA: wire with dots along it

Metal struts of planes? Also some of earlier flying machines in documentary

JA: The horses might not be real horses they might be made of wire, like frames. Yes. frames.

Wire frames of biplane wings.

JS: predetermined event that this information refers to on the second of January 1997?

JA: bright blue - as if bright blue is coming up from under the ground now … breaking through

Bright blue like skies? Strange perception of sky and ground from the air (e.g. in turning flight sky can look like it's coming up from under the ground). The invention and building of the first successful planes was indeed a 'breakthrough'.

JA: A car like a jeep, a bicycle

Interesting that I'm still on same topic. The Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics. On demonstrating the flying planes in France the Wright Brothers were declared winners of the Race to Fly and Glen recalls the documentary showing a parade complete with ticker tape streamers.

JA: parade. Streamers.

As above.

JA: Cornfields, France or America. … my body's moving.

I remember seeing acres and acres of what I thought were cornfields in the USA where they carried out the secret test flights and kept the plane in a secret hangar. The Wright Brothers'’ first trip overseas was to France where the French and others were demonstrating what they believed were the first flying machines. The Wright Brothers won. A third of the documentary was centred in France and the rest in America. Moving body? Flying??

JA: parachutes coming down in the fields … road is bumpy.

French competitors focussed on hot-air balloons, not winged machines. Glen thought parachutes were balloons. I wondered if they referred to some of the more bizarre and less successful 'flying' machines in the documentary. Roads there as well as flights would have been incredibly bumpy.

JA: Celebration, flags, political celebration.

The celebrations in France to declare the race won. The political component was that The Wright Brothers had hoped the USA government would buy the plans, but (as far as I can recall) it was the French who bought them.

JA: France or America

As above.

JA: Birds in a cage

They studied birds and bird wings. It was the realisation of the structure of birds' wings and how they moved the wing tips that led the Wright Brothers to design the bits on the plane wings that move to control lift (the engineer speaks!). Cage: could be as in 'caged' (ground bound), or cage could refer to metal strut structure of biplane wings. When one or two men laid flat in the biplane (like flying a hang glider, as shown in the documentary), the 'bird in a cage' image could be correct.

JA: parrots … cage.

Parrots are talking birds? Flying men as talking birds?

Our earlier hypnosis experiments with manifestation had shown that it was my unconscious/ right brain picture which manifested over my left brain ideas. (The 'orange and maroon flowers like my blouse', and the '$174.00', for example.) Also our initial hypnosis sessions had seen me describe what I believed to be meaningful dream material, only to be surprised later when some of the symbols from these dreams manifested in my future.

The question was, then, under hypnosis did I use the language of the unconscious to describe the documentary (the predetermined event on 2 January)? Or was the process still operating in the original direction, with my symbolic language creating the future event which, in this case, was the screening of the documentary film on the chosen date?

My initial conclusion had been that I must have seen a preview of the documentary on television or watched the film before and noticed it advertised again in the print media. It would be easy to register the fact, even unconsciously, and then trot it out for John on demand, in native tongue. I phoned SBS, the television company. It hadn't been screened in Australia before and I hadn't travelled overseas since it was made. It was not advertised in any form until after my hypnosis session.

Another possibility was that I had unconsciously accessed, through telepathy, the mind of one of SBS's documentary commissioning editors who had previewed the film.

However, the original purpose of this particular experiment was for me to agree, under hypnosis, to find and experience a 'predetermined, unalterable' event on 2 January. If I responded with integrity and did, in fact, do this, then do the results mean that the screening of that documentary on SBS had been a predetermined, unalterable event since the beginning of time? Did it mean, alternatively, that the screening at the time of the hypnosis, was predetermined and unalterable as far as the television programme planners were concerned? Or did it mean that the subject of the documentary, that is, the invention of the bi-plane, was the predetermined, unalterable event which was drawn to my attention on the agreed date? If so, then the invention, as indicated by the hypnosis transcript, falls into two fields. One was the aspects of the invention which were predetermined (e.g. the planes flying), while the second was the variables (e.g. France and America as locations).

I may have failed in my integrity and 'simply' found a future probable event, most likely by reading the mind of an SBS employee. If that was 'all' I did, then I still demonstrated an ability, under hypnosis, to access a future event and describe it in detail using the language of the unconscious, or the right brain. I have to draw that conclusion because I find the alternative - the idea that the whole documentary and its screening on that evening was manifested by my unconscious hypnotised mind - just too confronting to believe. Unless, of course, this world and my perception of it is all an illusion after all.

We will return to the mystery of the Wright Brothers’ prediction later in this book, but the immediate sequel to this story was that my headaches disappeared. I think I responded to John's closing command under hypnosis on that last session: "Gather all you can now, and all you need to gather to understand and let me know when you've done that gathering." I took time out before proceeding with writing this book, by which time the gathering was complete and the conscious understanding had emerged. I suggest you do the same. Take time for this chapter to sink in, to blend with what you may already know. Let it gather momentum and meaning at the deep unconscious level where all is understood.

General

• 4/1 An individual's future can apparently be changed through hypnosis. (The assumption is that the individual did not have a fixed future which included the fact that he would be hypnotised on a certain date and emerge a 'changed' person. The assumption may be wrong.).

• 4/2 Other processes, such as NLP (neurolinguistic programming), can be used effectively to programme a person's unconscious in a way that changes their belief system and therefore changes the way they approach their future life.

• 4/3 Either of the above processes, hypnotism or NLP, may be used wittingly or, more probably unwittingly in the course of some psychic readings, so that the client's unconscious then creates the future 'predicted' or programmed by the psychic. John Suess.

From the Hypnosis Experiments

• 4/4 Most visions under hypnosis seemed little different from dreams in content, symbolism, continuity/discontinuity or application in terms of meaning to my personal life and thoughts. The difference was that I was also conscious and therefore not totally immersed in the 'reality' of the dream.

• 4/5 Aspects of these visions (or dreams) surfaced in my waking life days, weeks or months afterwards, either as events or as physical manifestations. Frequently other people became the actors in the waking life versions of my meaningful visions or dreams. E.g. Steven & Sue.

• 4/6 Specific dates given under hypnosis were sometimes inaccurate, especially in relation to days of the week not matching dates. (E.g. Monday 22 October), and sometimes accurate, (E.g. 27 November).

• 4/7 There was some suggestion of unconscious problem solving under hypnosis resulting in automatic application of a solution at a future time. Prediction of future events could therefore be due to observation of aspects of the unconscious problem solving process. E.g. window seat.

• 4/8 I was able, using hypnosis, to manifest physical items, numbers and concepts into my life without any conscious follow-through process. Some appeared within the fixed time frame (two weeks) and some appeared a week or two later. These manifestations were not exactly as previewed in my conscious mind but were very strongly related. E.g. Fourth progression hypnosis. Within the parameters of the experiment I was probably creating these aspects of my future under the powerful conditions of hypnosis.

• 4/9 The hypnotist, John Suess, unknowingly demonstrated an ability to link telepathically with me (E.g. bull, poem), suggesting that our relationship during hypnosis may have been synergistic (mutually enhancing our results). This may not be the case in all hypnotist-subject transactions and may have been a contributor towards the success of our experiments.

• 4/10 The manifestations I apparently created came about in ways which involved other people, although this was not intentionally programmed into the hypnosis session. E.g. Fourth progression hypnosis.

• 4/11 The mismatch between the intention of my attempts at creating specific manifestations into my future and the actual manifestations which resulted can all be explained in terms of the difference between left and right brain language. E.g. Fourth progression hypnosis.

• 4/12 The right brain, largely responsible for dream symbolism and which may also be the agent (or intermediary) of visions, appeared to receive or generate visions or dreams under hypnosis while also shaping or creating aspects of my future. E.g. First progression hypnosis.

• 4/13 Aspects of some long-term predictions which emerged much earlier than the time frame stated under hypnosis tended to arrive grouped together, on the same day. E.g. crack in windscreen etc.

• 4/14 It may be possible to access a 'predetermined, unalterable' future event. E.g. Sixth progression hypnosis.