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Beyond Biofeedback – Drs Elmer and Alyce Green

Twelve years earlier, at NOTS, I had meditated on the question of where to work and had experienced a short hypnagogic "movie." The grassy fields and the buildings where I could have a laboratory were clearly seen, but they were obviously not in the desert. My immediate question about where to work had had the limited objective of determining what job to take at China Lake, but I had not specified this. If my question had been more specific (for instance, What would be useful to do immediately?), perhaps the hypnagogic image would have been different; ask a general question and you are likely to get a general answer. As it was, the green grass, the tree-covered hill, and the buildings and tall clock tower of the image I saw did not exist where we were living.

If this image was significant, I felt at the time, it applied to a future possibility, and I merely stored it in my memory.

These buildings and the clock tower, it eventually turned out, were located on the west campus of the Menninger Foundation. Perhaps the reader will ask, How is this possible? What happened, anyway? I can only report that in answer to my mental question the image I described came into my awareness that day. I can also report that the image was correct. (This kind of experience-Precognition-is perhaps more prevalent than psychologists realize. Certain kinds of perception seem to be independent of space and time, even though we may hypothesize that they are projected into the space-and-time brain when they are consciously perceived).

After we decided to leave Chicago I focused attention again in this timeless domain, and saw some additional views of the laboratory. Again the institution consisted of a number of buildings spread out like a college campus over a grassy, tree-covered hill, but this time the large building with the clock tower, which could be seen from far away, was the most obvious feature. In one hypnagogic image I went into the clock-tower building and looked at a variety of American Indian artifacts in a small museum. There were also glass-covered cases containing manuscripts.

In another image, my work was conducted in another building, in which activity was coordinated by a highly respected older man (who turned out to be Gardner Murphy).Much electronic machinery was involved, and though I could not see exactly how it was used, it seemed to relate to human behavior.

A striking feature in one image was the appearance of small lines of light that came from far away and converged on my forehead. Each line, my mind "explained” in a subsidiary hypnagogic flash, was a connection with someone in the country who was involved in the same kind of work as I. It seemed that there would be a network of people all over the country working in the same general area. They would be aware of one another, and their work would be mutually supportive. It is possible for images to be wish-fullfilling, of course, but in my experience valid precognitive images have a kind of certainty connected with them. This feeling of certainty and validity leads, at least in my case, to a feeling of "Okay, let's see how the future unrolls."

In this case, the images were accurate.