The Door That Opened Twice

A few missing figures sent Dr. George Egely through three libraries in one afternoon. At the door of the last one stood the man he had dreamed about after lunch.

This file is Dr. György (George) Egely's own experience, told on little more than a page of his book Vízautók… antigravitáció… (“Water cars… antigravity…”, 2008). It is the third example in a chapter that asks why we do not know more about the world, under the question “Can the future be seen in advance?” (The first example in the same chapter is the street lamps of FILE 002.) The film tells the dream and the door. Here is what it could not hold: the whole afternoon as he describes it, the second case he tells right after it, and how he tried to explain both.

THE RECORDWhat he wrote

The calculation. In the early 1980s Egely had to make a heat-transfer calculation. He wanted to know whether a reactor core that melted down in an accident would also melt the concrete base beneath it. On the side, off the books, he wanted to work out whether ball lightning could melt its way through brick and concrete walls, as several of the ball lightning cases he had collected showed it doing. For this he needed a few figures: the thermal conductivity of concrete and brick, and how much heat various kinds of ash radiate and reflect.

The nap. He could not finish the calculation, got hungry and went to lunch. Back then he still ate meat, he writes, so after lunch he dozed off, and dreamed nonsense. A big wooden door opened, and out came János P., a former classmate, with big red boils on his face and nose. (He always had them, Egely adds in brackets, but somewhere else every week.) He had not seen him for some six or eight years, and they had not been close before that either.

The search. He woke with a start and went on with the calculation. His own handbooks did not have the figures. He went over to the library of the KFKI, the physics research institute where he worked; its holdings were very good, but the figures were not there either. He gathered his things in a hurry and set off for the library of the Technical University. He knew which handbook series he wanted, he had seen it on the open shelves before, and he knew his way around. It took him more than an hour to get there. He reached for the handbook, and it was not there: oddly, one of the departments had borrowed it. He was very annoyed.

The door. His last refuge was the OMIKK, the national technical library and information centre, next to the National Museum: fifteen minutes by tram. As he was about to go in, the big entrance door opened, and out came János P. Just as he had dreamed him, with big red boils on his nose and face. “I stood rooted to the spot,” he writes. The book does not say whether the two of them spoke, or what János P. was doing there, and we leave it there too.

THE SECOND TIMEA helicopter on the meadow

In fifty-some years, Egely writes, he had only two such experiences, and the first is the one that stayed deep in him. He was living in a flat on a housing estate in Budakeszi, just outside Budapest, with a large grassy meadow in front of the balcony. One dawn, half asleep, an image came to him: a big green military helicopter landing on the meadow. The whole scene, he stresses, was a single short flash of a picture, not a long sequence. The next evening, with a great rumble, a military transport helicopter really did come down on the meadow, because it had broken down. It had been carrying an observation tower to the game park.

EGELY'S NOTESReal, but not repeatable

For Egely these were real experiences, and he was the first to say he could not make them happen again. He had heard similar stories from others, and research colleagues told him of cases in their own families, but nobody collected them or put their name to them: in his reading nobody wanted to risk their reputation, because such events run strictly against the principle of causality. What he lived through with János P., he writes, could hardly have been chance.

EGELY'S LENSTwo hypotheses and a radio

Two kinds of hypothesis can be set up for such phenomena, Egely writes. In the first, we receive the information from spirits of another world; that possibility, he says, can be neither refuted nor confirmed by the methods of scientific inquiry. The second is “not much simpler”: to assume that in the electrodynamics of living things both advanced and retarded potentials can be used, that is, that we can move forward and backward in time.

The terms come from physics: the field equations have a retarded solution, which arrives after it is sent, and an advanced one, which arrives before; physicists normally set the second aside. His hypothesis is that living things may be able to use it.

Why, then, he asks, can we not build such a machine? A pocket radio, for example, that picks up not only the waves sent out in the recent past but also those that start out from the future. “These are hard, even awkward questions,” he writes, and in his view today's institutions push towards a simpler answer: do not even pay attention. “At most we stay stupid.”

The methods of science, he adds, would suit such research, at least at the level of observation. For some years, he writes, successful work of this kind went on in California and at Princeton, until institutional science quietly wore it down: “the herd spirit and reaction won”.

TODAYWhere the question stands

The physics he names. Advanced potentials are not Egely's invention: in 1945 John Wheeler and Richard Feynman built a theory of radiation on an even mixture of advanced and retarded fields. In that theory, however, once the matter that absorbs the radiation is taken into account, what remains behaves like ordinary retarded radiation: it offers no way to send a signal into the past. That living things can use advanced potentials is Egely's hypothesis, and he presents it as one; we know of no measurement that shows it.

The laboratories he mentions. His “Stanford Research International” we take to be the Stanford Research Institute in California (SRI International since 1977), where the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff began remote viewing experiments in 1972. The work later went on with government money and ended in 1995, after a review commissioned by the CIA. Its two reviewers agreed that the statistical results of the later experiments could not be put down to chance alone; they disagreed on whether that showed paranormal perception, which the statistician Jessica Utts accepted and the psychologist Ray Hyman did not, holding that other explanations had not been ruled out. Separately, the agency judged the work of no use for intelligence. At Princeton, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory (PEAR), founded in 1979, ran most of its remote perception trials as “precognitive”: the description was written down before the target was chosen. It closed in February 2007, a year before Egely's book. At the time its founder, Robert Jahn, spoke of his retirement and of diminishing returns; the Princeton Alumni Weekly reported that the lab had no viable long-term successor and that most of its funding was evaporating, and the student newspaper that many of its private donors had died; the work was to go on outside the university, in the founders' International Consciousness Research Laboratories. Most scientists rejected its results. Egely reads both endings as institutional pressure; the published circumstances do not confirm that, but they do not reduce either ending to a single cause. Both programmes tested laboratory protocols, not dreams like his, so they cannot confirm or rule out this afternoon.

What one remembered dream cannot show. The case rests on Egely's memory, written down about a quarter of a century later, and the book does not say whether he told anyone about the dream before he reached the OMIKK. No record of his dreams kept in advance exists that would let the ones that came true be set beside the ones that did not; his own figure, two such cases in fifty-some years, tells us they were rare for him, not against what background. Coincidence stays the ordinary explanation. What makes it hard to dismiss in his telling is the sequence: the same afternoon, a man he had not seen for years, at the door he reached only because three searches failed first. His account cannot settle it, and neither can we.

EGELY'S OTHER WORKLooking for what can be repeated

The door belongs, by Egely's own label, to what exists but cannot be repeated. Later in the same book he describes the opposite search. His basic idea, he writes, was to find a paranormal phenomenon that could be shown with simple technology and repeated well, yet not explained with today's knowledge. A decade-long struggle of experimenting followed before the vitality meter reached its present, fairly sensitive form; by 2008, he writes, more than 10,000 of them were turning around the world. It is still made today as the Egely Wheel: a small wheel designed to make the connection between a person's inner state and the wheel's movement observable through direct experience. If the stories in this series make you want to try it, the wheel is made and sold by us.

Sources

1. György Egely, Vízautók… antigravitáció…, Budapest, 2008.
2. J. A. Wheeler, R. P. Feynman, “Interaction with the absorber as the mechanism of radiation”, Reviews of Modern Physics 17, 157–181 (1945). mit.edu; “Classical electrodynamics in terms of direct interparticle action”, Reviews of Modern Physics 21, 425–433 (1949).
3. R. Targ, H. Puthoff, “Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding”, Nature 251, 602–607 (1974). doi.org; Ray Hyman, “Evaluation of a program on anomalous mental phenomena”, Journal of Scientific Exploration 10(1), 31–58 (1996), his 1995 report for the review. uci.edu; Jessica Utts, “An assessment of the evidence for psychic functioning”, same issue, 3–30.
4. “Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory”, Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research. psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk; “PEAR lab's ‘strange garden’ prepares to close”, Princeton Alumni Weekly, 8 November 2006. princeton.edu; “Weird science loses its home”, The Daily Princetonian, February 2007. dailyprincetonian.com; news report on the closure, Nature, 13 February 2007, doi:10.1038/news070212-6. nature.com
5. egelywheel.com: “Invented in 1994 by Dr. George Egely and refined over decades.” egelywheel.com

AI-assisted research, writing and illustration. Edited by Egely Wheel.