Free Afterlife by Colin Wilson

But what of the following episode:
    One day … I saw my younger son look up the name of a street in the map of London because, so he told me later, he had ‘known’ that when he went out someone was going to ask him where it was and he did not know. This happened as he had foreseen within an hour.
    Here, if we rule out the very far-fetched explanation of coincidence, or some complex telepathy with a total stranger, the only other explanation seems to be that in some odd sense, the event her son ‘precognised’ had already taken place, and he was somehow receiving a ‘memory of the future’. In that case, the explanation of her sudden foreboding when her husband mentioned the name of the swindler was that she somehow ‘recognised’ it as that of a man who had
already
swindled them. Obviously, this totally contradicts our notion of time as something that flows only one way. But then, the experiences of psychics often seem to contradict our orderly notions of space as well. One of the basic laws of our world is that no one can be in two different places at the same time. Rosalind Heywood was also able to contradict this from personal experience:
    One hot night my husband was peacefully sleeping while I wriggled, restless and wide awake, at his side in the great carved bed. At last the excessive peace became unbearable. ‘I can’t stand it,’ I thought, ‘I shall wake him up to make love to me.’
    Before I could carry out this egoistic idea I did something very odd — I split in two. One Me in its pink nightie continued to toss self-centredly against the embroidered pillows, but another, clad in a long, very white, hooded garment, was now standing, calm, immobile and impersonally outward-looking, at the foot of the bed. This White Me seemed just as actual as Pink Me and I was equally conscious in both places at the same time. I vividly remember myself as White Me looking down and observing the carved end of the bed in front of me and also thinking what a silly fool Pink Me looked, tossing in that petulant way against the pillows. ‘You’re behaving disgracefully’, said White Me to Pink Me with cold contempt. ‘Don’t be so selfish, you know he’s dog-tired.’
    Pink Me was a totally self-regarding little animal, entirely composed of ‘appetites’, and she cared not at all whether her unfortunate husband was tired or not. ‘I shall do what I like,’ she retorted furiously, ‘and you can’t stop me, you pious white prig!’ She was particularly furious because she knew very well that White Me was the stronger and could stop her.
    A moment or two later — I felt no transition — White Me was once more imprisoned with Pink Me in one body, and there they have dwelt as oil and water ever since. It is only quite lately that I have become aware, though I seldom remember it, that I can deliberately identify myself with White Me and watch without feeling them — that is the point — the desires and repulsions that must inevitably toss all Pink Mes around.
    And in case the reader assumes this experience to be symbolic rather than real, she goes on to cite a case of a woman who had ‘split’ after the birth of a baby. One of her continued to lie in the bed while the other stood by its side. When questioned about the attitude of these two ‘selves’ to one another, she replied: ‘The Me outside looked on the Me in bed with profound contempt devoid of all feeling.’
    Experiences like these did nothing to shake RosalindHeywood’s basic agnosticism, imbibed from Haeckel; in a sense, there is no reason why they should. The existence of telepathy and clairvoyance is not in itself a contradiction of the ‘materialist’ viewpoint. Even experiences of precognition constitute no challenge to materialism. It may prove that our view of time as a one-way street is somehow mistaken; but the truth about time may be as logical and scientific as our present notions about it.
    What finally undermined Rosalind