INTRODU CTION

"I don't understand you," said Alice. "Its dreadfully

confusing!"
"Thats the ef/ect of living backwards," the Queen
said kindly: "it always makes one a little giddy
at first-"
"Living backwards!" Alice repeated in great
astonishment. "I never heard of such a thing!"
"-but theres one great advantage in it, that ones
memory works both ways. "
Tm sure mine only works one way," Alice remarked.
"I can't remember things before they happen."
"Its a poor sort of memory that only works
backwards," the Queen remarked.
-Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

ost of us assume, as Alice does, that whatever we can

remember has already taken place. If asked why we
don't remember scenes from our future, we might

answer: " Because, dummy, they haven't happened yet ! " But as
the Queen in Lewis Carroll's delightful book suggests, perhaps

we do have memories of the future, however nonsensical that

may sound. Consider the albeit radical possibility that the Queen
is right: memory does work both ways. That is , you are perfectly
able to remember the future just as well as you can recall the

I N T R O D U C TIO N

past. Further, consider that having a two-way memory could lead,

as the Queen suggests, to distinct advantages. For example, it
might help you deal with synchronicities and experiences of deja

vu, avoid health problems, make significant predictions about

your life, and offer many other benefits, as may become clear as
this book unfolds.
To begin exploring this idea, let's think first about the nature
of memory as we commonly know it-having to do with the recall
of past events. Certainly you remember your last vacation, as well
as a favorite restaurant you went to, or a show you saw, and so on.
And I'm sure there are some past experiences you don't remem
ber, though possibly your spouse does: " Oh, don't you remember
that day in Paris when we saw those flowers on the bank of the
Seine? " she or he asks, and you draw a blank.
Ever wonder why your companion remembers things that
you don't? The popular conception, based on brain research, 1
is that whether you recall any details or not, your memory con
tains a complete record of your past, as if it were a movie. You are
most likely, however, to recall only those events that made an
impression on you. That day in Paris, the problem was that you
simply weren't paying attention, and those flowers along the
Seine affected your spouse more deeply than they did you.
To be sure, sometimes we also forget events that have made
a great impression. Usually they have been traumatic, and we
don't want to remember them. In some such cases, though, deep
psychoanalysis can help us improve our recall.
Regardless, further analysis by memory experts indicates that
the popular adage is false: Memory is not restricted to only what
has made an impression on us, positively or negatively. To the
contrary, it turns out that actively working on one's memory
can greatly enhance it. And it turns out this work can lead to
remembering, not only the past, but also the future. As we will
discover, this effort plays a key role in the mind-yoga that allows
for time travel.
So, suppose you had been to the future and what you saw was
either so uneventful that you didn't notice or so scary that you

INTRODUCTION

simply decided not to remember it. According to what we shall

find out in this book, your ability to remember the future depends
on your ability to pay close attention to these future events, not
just idly glance over them as you may have done the flowers along
the Seine. With some guidance and analysis, perhaps you could
learn to recall the future with as much success as such procedures
can enable you to recall forgotten past events.
I've heard that some therapists use a technique called "past
life recall" to help patients deal with unexplained trauma and psy
chological problems they are encountering in this life. I have also
heard of a technique that enables people to " recall" future lives or
events so they are better prepared to face what seems inevitable
or unavoidable in the near or distant future. Whether this is pure
imagination or wishful thinking is difficult to say. Of course if you
only believe in the present moment-whatever that may be-such
a discussion seems pointless and perhaps unscientific. But sup
pose there were a reasonable scientific basis for believing in the
concrete existence of both the past and the future-coexisting
with the present in some yet to be determined manner. Then
what? In that case, both the future and the past would be as real
to you as the drugstore on the corner or the North Pole, even
though-sitting in your chair reading this book-you aren't at
either of those places now. You certainly wouldn't remember the
North Pole if you hadn't been there yet, would you? But that
doesn't mean the North Pole does not exist. By the same token,
perhaps the future is just as real, and the only reason we have no
memory of it is because we haven't visited it yet.
But let's suppose you had " been there and done that , " as they
say. What would it mean to have a memory of the future? Isn't
memory a record of what you did in the past? But if in the "past "
you went to the future, how would you deal with a memory of it?
Trying to think this way does make one, as the Queen puts it,
"a little giddy at first. "
Indeed, such ideas may seem like science fiction, but when we
examine what scientists are doing these days in terms of realizing
time travel and time manipulation, you will see that science fiction

I NTROD UCTION

has become science fact. My hope is that if nothing else, after

reading this book you will understand just what is meant by time
travel and why scientists are now taking it seriously.
Surprising as it may seem, a scientific basis for time travel was
established more than a hundred years ago; Herbert George
Wells wrote about it in 1 895 , and Albert Einstein and Hermann
Minkowski showed how it was theoretically possible in 1 905 and
1 908. In fact, more than fifty years ago, scientists were proving
time travel to be a reality. Documentation shows that in carefully
defined laboratory experiments, objects were observed that liter
ally slowed down in time, such that some of them lived nine or ten
times their natural life span.2
Sounds unbelievable? I'll explain more about that experi
ment shortly. In the meantime, let me tell you a secret: Some of
the remarkable people you meet in life are time travelers. A few of
these people know it; the others time travel without realizing it,
but they do it just the same. These are the people who appear
older than their years or, yes, often enough considerably younger.
I, too, time travel. In fact, I do it nearly every day, especially when
I find myself in creative activity-lost in my work, as we say. Later,
we'll look more deeply into this phenomenon, too.

S O M E P R E LIM I N A RY M E AN D E RI N G S
I N T H E TE M P O RA L STREAM
Just think what it would mean to live nine or ten times longer than
your putative four-score-plus years-that is, perhaps as long as
eight hundred years ! Or imagine that you live through ten years
of time while those around you only experience one second of
time passing, or that you experience one second of time passing
while those around you age ten years.
In the latter case, during those ten years each of them would
experience the earth daily rotating about its axis and note its yearly
movement across the solar system, but you would not. Traveling

I NT R O D U C T l ON

through time at this breakneck " speed , " you would grow one day
older while the world around you ages more than 86 thousand
years. In ten years of your life lived at this rate, nearly countless
generations of humanity would age more than 3 15 million years
enough time for you to see evolution on a scale beyond imagination.
The former case would be equally strange, since the world
and all of its processes would slow down terribly, so much so that
the world around you would grow strangely silent, dark, and still.
Even light would move very slowly from your point of view. Light
travels at more than 670 million miles per hour, but that hour
would stretch out for you to 36 thousand years , slowing light
down to a crawl of about two miles per hour for you. You can
walk faster than that! Since you wouldn't see light until it struck
your eyes, you would experience the world in flashes, like a
stroboscopic light show.
However, even this scenario isn't the whole story. It assumes
that you could hold on to the normal timing of your own bodily
processes and think as you normally do, with full neuronal coop
eration at your normal speed of functioning. But if your body's
processes slow down as well, things would get even more inter
esting. Consider your sense of sight. If the speed of light slowed
down, so would its vibrational rate, which means that colors
would change so drastically that they would be impossible to
see with your eyes. A similar slowing of all of the physical phe
nomena around you would result. In other words, the world
would most likely vanish from your senses if you were aging ten
years in one second.
Even more bizarreness awaits the time traveler who can move

backward through time. New paradoxes pop up, depending on

who moves relative to whom. If, for example, you move backward
through time while the world around you passes at the normal
rate of one second per second into the future, you will gradually
get younger while those around you age. If you move backward
into time even faster, you run into the paradox of just what hap
pens to you when you reach the moment of your birth. Do you
then need your mother to be present? Even worse, suppose you