State of Protest

Book Review: The Power of Premonitions by Larry Dossey.

Author Larry Dossey knows his target audience. So do I. The enthusiastic blurbs on the book jacket from the likes of Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson practically spell it out for you. The promotional material for the book states that “This is a book for the skeptical mind, but it’s also for the believer’s heart.” Clearly, Dr. Larry Dossey is writing for the very specific but gargantuan target audience of Oprah viewers. I had guessed as much based on my first impressions, and was therefore completely unsurprised to find that according to the bio in the book, Dr. Dossey has indeed been featured on Oprah more than once. I have no objection to Oprah or her viewers, but, generally speaking, they do not require a lot of proof beyond a vague reference to a study and a parade of personal anecdotes.¹

For the most part, Dossey’s book reads like a relatively harmless Oprah discussion about intuition and premonitions. While I consider myself open-minded enough to discuss and consider both ideas, I am skeptical enough to demand a distinction between the two. This is a distinction that Dr. Dossey explicitly refuses to grant in the final paragraph of his Author’s note:

I’ll interchange [the word] premonitions with the terms precognition, future knowledge, and foreknowledge. Premonitions are also commonly referred to by a host of colloquialisms such as gut feelings, instinct, intuition, hunches, vibes, or sixth sense. If you wish, pick your own term. Be inventive, like a friend of mine who prefers to call her premonitions Factor X. (Author’s note, p. xvi)

I object to the use of one word to cover such a wide group of concepts. While these words — instinct, hunch, vibe, premonition, and gut feelings — certainly have some overlapping areas of definition, one could make a valid argument that instinct and even intuition could easily be the product of subconscious inductive and deductive reasoning. The mind takes in a tremendous amount of information, and it is not unreasonable to think that the subconscious mind might acknowledge danger when the conscious mind is doing something entirely different.

Let’s say you meet someone who claims to be a brick layer from Boston while you’re trying to make flight arrangements for yourself. Later on, you might have a gut feeling that this person was a liar, even though you didn’t consciously notice his southern accent and baby soft hands. This is entirely different from having a dream that the garbage truck is going to back over your child on the following Tuesday, yet Dossey insists on grouping these ideas together and then addressing them as a single type of phenomenon. This is not so different from grouping horses and unicorns together and calling them “Equine Types.” One of these concepts is easy to accept, the other, not so much.

This might seem a bit like nit-picking, but to some people outside the target audience, the distinction is critical. Dossey mentions premonitions using his broad definition, not mine, in connection with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (p. 17), terrorist attacks (p.31), and the like. It seems pretty easy for the average Oprah viewer to accept that one person might have a premonition that saves a loved one, while accepting the accidental deaths of the loved ones of others as part of “God’s plan.”

There is a calming, nonsensical balm to the idea that “everything happens for a reason.” If your child dies, it’s for a reason. If you have a dream that saves the child’s life, that’s for a reason too. But what about those who take a closer look at this? What about the grieving parent who wonders if lack of divine intervention means that “God” is punishing them? Or what about those of us who see no value in calling divine intervention a “miracle” when, by definition, any god who could intervene in the death of a child, but refuses, would essentially be a killer? Is it justice to look down on the unlucky, then, because they must either be ill-favored by God or refusing to heed their natural-born psychic abilities?

For the mentally unstable, this magical thinking might prove to be seriously dangerous. Dossey goes as far as to acknowledge this (p. 169) in a section called “cautions,” where he tells people to “think twice before intentionally cultivating premonitions” if they have any kind of mental illness, childhood trauma or maltreatment, any mood disturbances such as major depression or neuroticism, history of substance abuse, or even in the case of someone who is abnormally sensitive. Isn’t a person who has prophetic dreams being “abnormally sensitive”? Or is Dr. Dossey simply covering his legal bases in case someone who has read his book decides that doing the bidding of their intuition, their God, or their Rice Crispies requires killing someone (as in the case of Deanna Laney)? Oddly enough, most of the Oprah viewers I know have been known to take the Prozac at some point or another.

Dossey attempts to throw skeptics a bone, but comes off as a tease in the section called “Premonitions do not contradict the laws of nature,” (p. 181). Here, he employs a double-whammy of linguistic and scholarly imprecision that renders the entire section meaningless:

Skeptics have long argued that premonitions cannot happen because they violate the laws of nature. Because there is no consensus on the nature of time, it’s not clear what laws premonitions might be violating. It’s not the laws of nature that are being violated so much as the assumptions we make about how things are supposed to be. Time appears to flow in one direction. But as we know, not everything is exactly as it appears.

Is this an argument in favor of premonitions being natural (as opposed to supernatural) or is it the voice-over to a new movie about time travel? Dossey then briefly touches on current speculation in theoretical physics about the nature of time/space, quoting Brian Josephson, a Nobel physicist at Cambridge. He also quotes a physicist named Richard Shoup of the Boundary Institute. I had to look up the Boundary Institute. It is more accurate to say that the Boundary Institute is of Richard Shoup than vice versa — he created it in 2000 with another scientist named Dean Radin, and its address is a PO Box in San Jose, California.

Dossey provides my favorite WTF moment just one page later, when he suggests by way of begging the question, “Can we affect the past?” and “Retro-Prayer: praying for the past” (p. 184), in which he cites a study conducted by Leonard Leibovici on the effects of prayer on disease ten years after the fact. He has to insert a little disclaimer:

I should add that Leibovici is an avowed skeptic of the notion that people’s intentions or prayers can affect another person remotely, whether in the past, present or future. He interprets the outcome of his study not as evidence that healing intentions or prayers changes the past, but as proof that research in this field produces such strange outcomes that it can’t be trusted, including his own carefully constructed study.

I find it strange that Dossey includes a study while completely disregarding the opinion of the person conducting it. I also find it heartbreaking to think about some of Oprah’s viewers praying for their dead husbands or kids to not truly be dead. It is, of course, less upsetting and more amusing to think of them praying fervently for good things that have already happened to them, and counting it as evidence for the power of prayer and their own psychic prowess.

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Also see JNTB’s review: The Power of Premonitions

1. Newsweek’s Take On Oprah’s Medical Advice [<]

Tags: Book, book review, Dossey, Logic, Premonitions, Review, Science

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Atheism, Logic, Religion, Review, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.