Can Our Consciousness Jump Through Time?

 

Scientists say our consciousness can jump through time, meaning it might reach beyond the normal flow of time. The idea that time is linear might be wrong. Our consciousness can sometimes access information from the future.

Have you ever wondered why sometimes your intuition, or what some call a “gut feeling,” turns out to be true? If so, it is possible that your consciousness might have traveled through time. Scientists have begun to believe in “Precognition,” a psychic phenomenon in which individuals see, or otherwise become directly aware of, events in the future.

Cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, who has studied this phenomenon deeply, has collected many stories of precognition. She recalled one account shared with her from 1989, involving a four-year-old girl. When the girl said goodbye to her father as he left for a business trip, she had a strong feeling that she would never see him alive again. Later, she was woken by a phone call and her mother’s scream, learning that her father had died in a car accident.

Dr. Mossbridge says that precognition is a special kind of intuition that’s about picking up information from the future. Unlike ordinary intuition, which might draw upon subtle observations from the present or the past, precognition involves knowing something that simply cannot be predicted based on anything in the present or past.

For instance, if a person wakes from a dream and suddenly knows their mother will die, even though there are no warning signs, that is precognition. Precognition is the scientific term for this unexplained process of receiving information about future events.

Dr. Mossbridge explains that since the age of seven, she has had dreams that seemed to show her events that would later happen in the real world. At first, she and her parents did not take these dreams seriously and thought they might just be strange coincidences. But when she began writing the details in a dream journal, she noticed that some of her dreams came true. She admits that sometimes her memory of the dreams was not exact, but many times her visions contained details she had no normal way of knowing in advance.

Because of experiences like these, Dr. Mossbridge began to wonder if time itself works differently than we usually think. Most people imagine time as linear (a straight line) — past, present, future — moving in just one direction. But her experiences suggested the future might already exist in some way, and that people can sometimes “remember” the future, just as they remember the past.

“There’s evidence for precognition and in physics for retrocausality [things in the future causing effects in the past]. Given that people email me constantly saying, ‘I have this problem where I am predicting future events and I don’t know what to do,’ or ‘I wish I could predict future events,’ I wanted to write a book that helps people get this under control in a way that’s positive and puts a frame around it that says you could do this in a way that’s ethical, in a way that helps the world, in a way that’s consistent with your religious beliefs, in a way that enriches your life,” Mossbridge said in 2018.

Dr. Mossbridge points out that the real issue is not whether precognition can be understood, but whether people are willing to believe it. She says many scientists resist the idea because they fear the unknown and because it challenges the simple, familiar idea that time must be linear.

Even physicists, who study the deepest rules of the universe, admit they do not fully understand how time works. According to her, the resistance to the idea comes not from logic, but from fear that the world might not be the way we assume it is.

There is an interesting study conducted by British psychiatrist John Barker in the 1960s to harness human dreams, premonitions, and intuitive visions as a way to predict and potentially prevent future disasters.

After the tragic Aberfan coal waste disaster in 1966, Barker collected and analyzed premonitions from ordinary people who had unusual dreams or feelings foretelling the event. For example, one mother found a drawing by her son, who died in the slide, that seemed to anticipate the disaster.

He believed that precognition, the ability to know about future events, was more common than generally accepted and could be systematically gathered and studied.

Barker, wanting to study these experiences, reached out to a London newspaper and asked readers to send him their dreams and premonitions related to Aberfan.

He received more than seventy responses, including from people who had dreamt about the village or had strong feelings that something terrible would happen. Some described their visions in detail before the event occurred, which convinced Barker that precognition, knowing about future events, might not be so rare.

This project eventually grew into the Premonitions Bureau, an experiment run through the Evening Standard newspaper. For a year, Barker invited people to send him their dreams or feelings about upcoming disasters, trying to see if any predictions matched actual events.

Each prediction was scored for how unusual, accurate, and timely it was. Similar projects had happened before, like the work of JW Dunne who, in the early 1900s, claimed to have experienced prophetic dreams and encouraged others to keep dream diaries. (Source)

Barker believed the Premonitions Bureau could have real practical value: if only a single major disaster could be prevented by acting on someone’s warning, the project would be justified.

In practice, Barker received some striking predictions. Notably, in the spring of 1967, Alan Hencher, one of the “Aberfan seers,” called Barker to predict a plane crash involving a French-built passenger jet.

Hencher described details of the crash, including the number of people who would be killed and that there would be only one survivor. A few days later, a Swiss airliner crashed in Cyprus, killing nearly the exact number of people that Hencher had predicted. The story made headlines in the Evening Standard and lent credibility to the idea of the bureau.

Unlike fortune-tellers at carnivals, who might just guess things by looking at people’s social media or reading body language, scientists and psychologists are seriously trying to figure out if precognition is real. They see it as one form of ESP, which stands for extrasensory perception. This means perceiving something without using the normal five senses. Humans throughout history, from shamans to mystics, have claimed to experience precognition, but modern science is still unable to explain it fully.

Another scientist, Dean Radin, has also studied precognition. He works at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and teaches psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

He has written several books, such as Entangled Minds, Supernormal, and Real Magic, all about consciousness and psychic phenomena. Radin agrees with Mossbridge that precognition is possible and that it suggests time might not actually function in the simple way we think.

According to Dr. Radin, “time is not how we experience it in normal life.” In quantum physics, which is the study of very tiny particles like atoms and photons, time may not behave at all like our everyday understanding. It may exist in a much stranger way. He believes consciousness itself, our awareness, our mind, may have the ability to move outside of ordinary time, reaching into the past or future.

To test this idea, Dr. Radin created an experiment in the 1990s while working at the University of Nevada. His idea was that if people really can sense the future, then their bodies and brains should react before an event happens.

In the experiment, volunteers were hooked up to a machine called an EEG, which measures brain activity. Each volunteer had to press a button on a computer to bring up a random picture. The computer would randomly show either a positive, pleasant picture (such as a sunrise) or a negative, disturbing one (like a car crash).

What Dr. Radin and his team measured was the brain activity in the seconds before the picture appeared. Strangely, the results showed that the brain often reacted as if it already knew what kind of picture was about to show up. If the picture was going to be positive, the brain stayed calm. But if it was going to be negative, the brain would show a spike in activity before the picture even appeared. This suggested that the brain somehow anticipated the future image.

The experiment was remarkably consistent, and it has been repeated successfully many times since then, with the same results.

In fact, Dr. Radin says these kinds of studies have been replicated about 36 times by other researchers. Even the CIA became interested, in 1995, they released previously secret research into precognition. After reviewing the experiments carefully, statisticians said the results were statistically reliable, meaning they were unlikely to be a coincidence.

Dr. Mossbridge argues that when so many experiments keep pointing to the same conclusion, the evidence should be taken seriously. But many scientists still dismiss it because it clashes with their belief in linear time.

According to her, most people have the ability to be precognitive, but because society often labels it as delusion or “nonsense,” people ignore or suppress it.

In many cultures, precognition is better accepted. For example, Radin studied Tibetan oracles. These individuals traditionally predicted the future and were consulted for guidance. He also discusses “remote viewing,” the ability to see things across both time and space.

In ancient times, shamans who could see the future could help their tribes by predicting the weather or knowing when enemies were coming. Some cultures also used natural substances, like ayahuasca or morning glory seeds, to open up this ability, sometimes referred to as the “third eye.”

As for a possible scientific explanation, Dr. Radin suggests looking at something called quantum entanglement. In physics, this is when two particles become linked in such a way that they instantly affect each other, no matter how far apart they are.

Albert Einstein once described this as “spooky action at a distance.” Dr. Radin says this might also apply to time. In his view, your brain in the present could be “entangled” with your brain in the future. This means that when something is going to happen later, you might feel it now as though it were a memory arriving early. This could even explain “déjà vu,” that weird feeling of having already experienced something that is happening for the first time.

by Vicky Verma at howandwhys.com on August 29, 2025