{"id":2322,"date":"2011-05-02T15:01:42","date_gmt":"2011-05-02T19:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=2322"},"modified":"2011-05-02T16:31:33","modified_gmt":"2011-05-02T20:31:33","slug":"the-white-queen-gambit-when-the-body-reacts-to-an-event-before-it-happens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2011\/05\/the-white-queen-gambit-when-the-body-reacts-to-an-event-before-it-happens.html","title":{"rendered":"The White Queen Gambit: when the body reacts to an event before it happens"},"content":{"rendered":"

First the adventure, then the discussion. Here is a personal experience of a phenomenon that has long intrigued me: how the body sometimes seems to \u201cknow\u201d about a future event and responds as if that event has already taken place. An older term for this is presentiment<\/em>. Given the present context, I think of it as anticipatory symptoms.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I went to my doctor\u2019s office for an annual physical. A new medical assistant took my blood pressure to get us started. Though she did not faint, but my blood pressure was much<\/em> higher than normal in the initial reading, much higher even than it had been when I had hobbled into that office two months before with a serious knee injury that had not yet been diagnosed.<\/p>\n

I was startled by the blood pressure reading, since I was in excellent spirits and feeling no anxiety about this visit to the doctor.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you want to do next?\u201d the assistant asked. \u201cThe bloodwork or the EKG?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s go for the blood and get a little color.\u201d We briefly discussed how people react to having blood drawn. Personally, I have never minded the needle or the sight of the blood.<\/p>\n

The assistant found the right place and stuck a needle in my left arm. As she extracted the needle after filling the syringe, she started a gusher. I had never seen anything like it in all my years of giving blood or blood specimens. In an instant, my whole left arm was covered in blood, and blood was spattered all over my freshly laundered linen pants.<\/p>\n

The assistant squealed and rushed about, trying to stop the blood flow at the same time as she attempted to treat my pants with hydrogen peroxide.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re upset!\u201d she panted. The odd thing was that I really wasn’t upset at all. I responded quite philosophically, as if the incident had taken place in the past, even as the blood was still spurting and spattering.<\/p>\n

When things were under control, and she calmed down, I asked her to check my blood pressure again. \u201cI want to test a hypothesis,\u201d I told her. \u201cThere\u2019s hard laboratory research that suggests that subjects can exhibit physical responses to events before the actual events take place. I want to check whether the spike in my blood pressure came about because – in some way – my body knew<\/em> what was going to happen and had an anticipatory response.\u201d<\/p>\n

She gaped at me, her eyebrows climbing her forehead, but she obliged.<\/p>\n

She gasped when she gave me the new reading after releasing the pressure cuff. The first number had dropped by fifteen points; the second number had dropped by thirty <\/em>points. She was amazed because she thought that after the crazy turmoil of the blood gusher, my readings should have gone up, not down.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot if my body knew and reacted to what was going to happen ahead of time,\u201d I suggested quietly.<\/p>\n

When the doctor – a careful, conservative practitioner – came in and heard the data, he was quite impressed. \u201cMaybe there’s something in that theory,\u201d he allowed. He decided to check my blood pressure himself. The numbers dropped even lower.<\/p>\n

To my mind, this is pretty persuasive first-hand evidence of the possibility that the body, through its own ways of knowing, may anticipate and respond to an event that has not yet taken place.<\/p>\n

In my book Dreaming True<\/a>\"\"<\/a> <\/em>I described this as \u201cThe White Queen Gambit.\u201d As you may remember, in Through the Looking-Glass <\/em>the White Queen screams before <\/em>she pricks her finger. When her brooch-pin subsequently flies open and she does <\/em>prick her finger, she doesn\u2019t need to scream. \u201cI\u2019ve done all the screaming already,\u201d says the Queen. \u201cWhat would be the good of having it all over again?\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems that the body, or the energy field around it, has intricate antennae that are constantly scanning for changes that will affect it. Most of us know about this from everyday experience. You have a \u201cgut feeling\u201d about something. You feet a sense of dread or elation, a lifting of the heart or a churning in the stomach that has no evident explanation until a subsequent event takes place that would cause such physical reactions. When the event catches up with the anticipatory symptoms, you and your body may be quite calm and detached \u2013 because you\u2019ve done the screaming or the hyperventilating already.<\/p>\n

Scientific research into this phenomenon, sometimes described as \u201ctime-reversed interference\u201d, has been going on since the 1990s. Dean Radin ran tests in a University of Nevada lab at Las Vegas that involved showing subjects a series of photographs on a screen that were calculated to produce vividly contrasting somatic reactions, read by scanning heartbeat, perspiration, and so on. A photo of a peaceful rustic scene might be followed by hard porno or a picture of a gruesome crime scene. The very interesting finding was that many times subjects had the physical reactions a certain picture would be expected to produce moments before <\/em>the image came up on the screen.<\/p>\n

I told the story of my gusher in the doctor\u2019s office to Larry Dossey MD, one of the trailblazers for mind-body medicine in America, and asked him what he thought of my theory that the spike in my blood pressure was an anticipatory symptom. Dossey commented, \u201cI think your interpretation is right on target.\u00a0 People need to know that these \u2018presentiment\u2019 effects are not just laboratory curiosities but are phenomena that get played out in real life zillions of times, under our very noses, quietly, often without our realizing they\u2019re happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe we can all do a little better if we let our bodies tell us what\u2019s going down. This is a case of \u201cwhat the bleep we know\u201d that we don\u2019t usually recognize that we know.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First the adventure, then the discussion. Here is a personal experience of a phenomenon that has long intrigued me: how the body sometimes seems to \u201cknow\u201d about a future event and responds as if that event has already taken place. An older term for this is presentiment. Given the present context, I think of it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,30,8],"tags":[151,149,148,147,150,152],"class_list":["post-2322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conscious-living","category-precognition","category-synchronicity","tag-anticipatory-symptoms","tag-dean-radin","tag-larry-dossey","tag-presentiment","tag-time-reversed-interference","tag-white-queen-gambit"],"yoast_head":"\nThe White Queen Gambit: when the body reacts to an event before it happens - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2011\/05\/the-white-queen-gambit-when-the-body-reacts-to-an-event-before-it-happens.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The White Queen Gambit: when the body reacts to an event before it happens - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"First the adventure, then the discussion. Here is a personal experience of a phenomenon that has long intrigued me: how the body sometimes seems to \u201cknow\u201d about a future event and responds as if that event has already taken place. An older term for this is presentiment. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2322"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2327,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322\/revisions\/2327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}