Gary Lachman - Touched by the Presence: From Blondie's Bowery and Rock and Roll to Magic and the Occult (NEW 4/4/26)

It's the Opperman Report and now here is Investigator in Opperman.

Okay, welcome to the Opperman Report, I'm your host private investigator at Opperman.

You can find me at Opperman Investigations and Digital Friends at Consulting if you reach

out to me through my email, opermaninvestigations at gmail.com.

We have today Gary Lockman from Blondie, but he's also an author of many, many books

about his studies in the occult.

We had him on recently, as I said recently, but way too long.

About his previous book, we had him on Dark Store Rising, Magic and Power in the Age

of Trump.

But he's got a new book coming out, so I haven't out yet, November 18, 2025, it's coming

out.

By the presence from Blondie's Bowie and Rockin' Roll to Magic and the Occult, Mr. Lockman

are you there?

Yes, I am.

I'm here.

Hey, great to have you back.

Gary Lockman.

Okay, sure.

I'm here on your show.

Oh, yeah.

Anytime, man.

The audience loves you.

I know he loves you, man.

But before we get into these books in your study of the occult, tell us about yourself.

Who is Gary Lockman?

Oh, Gary Lockman.

Well, let's see.

Well, I used to be a musician.

In my musician years I was under the name Gary Valentine, and that was when I was playing

in Blondie back in the mid-70s and the CBGB days and the first couple of albums, and I had

my own band for a while, called The Know.

And I did some work with the G-POP, so that was Gary Valentine.

And then he kind of took a break and then Gary Lockman, who, my other identity, he came

in.

And he's someone who spent about 10 years after playing music a bit more than that, becoming

a writer, more or less, which is strangely enough what I wanted to do in the first place.

But then I had this period where I got Shanghai into playing rock and roll as it were.

So I had a kind of early career doing one thing creative and then transformed into this,

so the person who was myself in the first place.

So it's a weird kind of twist around, you know.

I've always been interested in how, book I've wanted to write, which I've nothing to do

with the occult, anything like that, was how some people who adopt a different identity

managed to do remarkable things that they wouldn't have been able to do as themselves.

So a kind of alter ego kind of thing.

That goes back to my fascination as a kid with comic books, because obviously, you know,

there was the everyday person, Clark Kent, my old man, a reporter for, you know, great

Metropolitan newspaper, who's really Superman.

So when you take on this other identity, you can do something that as your normal self,

you can't do.

So in a way, I think, I sort of did that in my life by, you know, starting out being

who I was and I had this rock and roll identity for a while, and I had to go through this

long kind of metamorphosis period going back to who I was in the first place.

Well, don't you think we all kind of do that?

Like I have my private investigator personality when I'm talking to clients and then I have

my radio host personality that I do, and I have my dad personality and my neighbor.

Don't we all kind of do that?

We take on this time and image your alter ego.

Well, I think I think you're right.

I think we, in our everyday lives, you know, you react differently to different people.

Yeah.

But over a long period, a kind of trajectory, you know, starting from, say, when you first

become more or less conscious of yourself, you know, adolescence into, you know, teenage

years, and then later on, along with all this sort of persona, you have to take on

her in order to deal with things, and that's one of the things they talk about in the book,

you know, the, I mean, I, you know, I was born in 55.

I came of age to say in the very, the late 60s, the very, the early 70s, and that, that

currency of the 60s, do your wrong thing, don't inform, you know, dance to the beat of

a different drum and so on and so on, you know, discover who you are, that, that still

had currency when I was a teenager.

So I sort of follow that sort of thing.

And that's, that's a long term kind of thing.

So along with all the persona that you have to adopt in order to deal with the world,

there is this other that's who you are, you know, and it's often a long battle in a

difficult struggle to maintain that against having to, because most of us kind of fall

into the persona, I mean, many, myself as well, you know, you tend to identify with whatever

role it may be, this, this is the existentialist stuff and then, okay, well, who are you when

you're not any of those roles?

And that's something that terrifies some of us when we have to face that, but when I'm

on the side of it, it's, it's, it's very liberating.

Very true.

Now, now, what about your interest in this magic and yet cult and stuff like that, was

this prior to your, your interest in being a musician, was this something you always

had in your kid?

No, not really.

I mean, I became interested in all that sort of magic and a cult thing around the same

time when I first started playing music with Blondie, this would have been in summer of

1975, 50 years ago, more or less.

And when I first started playing with Chris and Debbie, actually was living with them and

Debbie had a tiny, tiny flat in little Italy, in New York, on Thompson Street.

And I had got, you know, whatever, for reasons that people can find out in the book had to

leave my home and all this sort of thing.

And if I wanted to pursue this career, and basically she took me in, but then it seemed

to be too crowded, but, you know, Chris, Debbie, myself, her cats and all the amplifiers,

everything, crowded into this tiny, no, it's just tiny, I think it's 105, Thompson Street,

it's the address, if you want to check it out, if you're in New York, and there used to

be like an Italian social club downstairs with moustacheos, old ladies, we'd be sitting

out, you know, sipping espresso and things like that.

But in any case, so we found a bigger space on the Bowery, and this became the Blondie

loft, then this was said just about, you know, the other side of Houston Street from CBGBs

on the Bowery, and the fellow who had the lease on the building and so forth, there was

something like this, it's this fantastic, them buoyant, wild biker artist named Benton,

who was into the hell's angels, but he was also into Alice to Crowley, you know, the

notorious dark magician of 20th century and so on and so on, and he used to give impromptu

readings of the tarot deck, Crowley's thoth tarot deck, and he would read from his novel

diary of a drug theme and all this kind of stuff.

And I wasn't really interested in that kind of thing, I mean, my interest in that sort

was like from reading HP Lovecraft, you know, in Weird Tales, you know, fiction or the old

horror films from the 30s and 40s, universal horror films, things like that.

But I never took the magic stuff seriously, but he was, you know, I started getting into

it because of this guy and then I read some Crowley, so I got into reading Crowley, but

the book that really got me like doing what I'm doing now is by British writer named Colin

Wilson, just was called the occult and he came out like in 71 and you'd go to people's

places and this kind of debris from the previous kind of hippie generation.

So Crowley was cast in NATO and Timothy Leary's books and each and stuff like that.

And so I started seeing all the stuff and I remember borrowing this book, Tommy Morone,

he was the drummer from the Morone's at the time.

And it just blew me away.

I was all of 19, but it was a page turner and I didn't know that Wilson had already had

a career writing about existentialism and things like that, which I'd already read some

of it, sorry, you know, Nietzsche and stuff like that.

But this book is just, he looked at the occult as, you know, through a philosophy of consciousness

and psychology and all this kind of stuff and it was just fascinating.

And I just became fascinated at that point.

And my first foray into anything like that was not writing anything, well, I was writing

a song.

The song called Momobius Touch by Your Presence, dear, hence the title of this minimal

touch by your presence, it refers to the song.

And the song is about when Blondie, we were on our first North American tour and we were

on the support act for Iggy Pop.

And this was a resurrected Iggy Pop, maybe it was resurrected by David Bowie.

And David Bowie is actually in the band, he's in Cognito playing keyboards.

And this is long before the internet or mobile phones or anything like that.

So there really was the old fashioned grapevine and word got around it.

Oh, yeah, Bowie's always playing in the band, man, you know, always playing.

Strangely about that tour, we all flew to the gigs.

Bowie never flew, he drove everywhere.

And it's the same chauffeur in car that's in Manel Filter Earth, if you know the film.

Any case, long, tangential remark there, but this was, you know, on this tour, whenever

I wanted to call my girlfriend, who's in New York, and she wanted to call me, we both

sort of knew it at the same time.

Right.

And again, this is well before mobile phones or cell phones or anything like that.

We had to be in a certain place for a certain time to make a phone call.

And then we had shared dreams and all that.

So the song is about that.

And that was really my first kind of, you know, as I said, you know, essay into writing

about this sort of thing.

Now, was this something common like in the walk-in-roll scene of people being into Crowley

and stuff during that period?

Um, not that I knew of, I mean, stuff's currently I came to understand there was a kind of,

you know, scene there.

I mean, Crowley was like the Beatles had him on the cover of Swarajim Tapruz, and the

stones are into him.

So this was kind of like the previous generation.

And I, I mean, Chris, Chris and Debbie had a kitschy kind of, you know, half joke, half serious

interest and the kind of stuff.

So they would have, I mean, in this loft space where we live, there were like upside down,

you know, crosses and pentagrams.

And we had a statue of a nun and some of them, you know, put upside down cross on a forehead.

And there were these Tibetan Tonka, Tonka paintings, you know, that the Tantric yogis have.

And one of them had a scene of among being chopped up and being in a big pot and being eaten,

which is something that they used to do back in the old days.

I don't think health and safety will let you get away with it now, but it wasn't something

that was kind of shared, at least I mean, I was like somebody who got into it.

It wasn't like shared.

It wasn't, it was kind of like everybody thought, oh god, I got reason to this weird kind

of stuff, but you know, it's all right.

It's just fun.

And did you equally, or study the Bible and Christianity and other faiths like that as

well as delve into all these other things?

I'm not at the same time, but I was brought up Catholic.

And when I first went to university, we did, I'm maybe doing a class, you know, I mean,

I'm subsequently there.

I read all this sort of stuff.

I mean, I wasn't like satanic or anything like that.

It just was, I was more interested in potentials of consciousness and this is what Wilson's

book brought out.

I mean, Crowley was a kind of at first, for a 19 year old, kind of an impressive figure,

oh god, this guy climbed to Himalayas and did all this other stuff.

And I was just kind of half baffled and half kind of fascinated by this book of his called

Magic and Theory in Practice, which fell into my hands, which he considered his magnum

opus and it was written in, it was published in 1929 in Paris at first.

And it's impanetrable if you don't know anything about, you know, the history of magic,

which I didn't know at the time.

So I just found, you know, it was kind of, oh, what is this all about?

Like he talks about Kabbalan, it's spelled QAB and I thought, oh, shouldn't it be a you,

we have to do the Q, isn't that, you know, you know, what does that mean?

And then I started at the same time, I'm living on the bowlery and I'm reading this stuff

and it's so much about Kabbalan and the Hebrew alphabet, it's a part of that.

And I'm walking by, you know, Jewish delis.

And, you know, if you know, if you know Crowley's side in New York, it's like cats is deli,

all this kind of stuff.

And I'm looking at the window with like, you know, the Hebrew alphabet in the window,

thinking, oh, what is, oh, yeah, that is kind of weird.

What is this stuff stuff?

It was, you know, I was 19, you know, I was 19 just fascinated with it.

So this, like, yeah, this is 50 years ago.

So, you know, stuff is going to that initial kind of just introduction.

I spent some time, you know, turning it into a kind of serious,

understanding of all this sort of stuff, true influence and place in our culture.

And it's amazing, you know, you talk about New York back in the,

I was 19 in New York too, I know, a few years after you, you know,

the old Italian ladies with the mustache is down there,

smoking a drink on the express, and the cats is deli,

and what culture we had, man, we're never going to have that again, man.

Like if we were to know at the time how cool all that stuff was,

but we didn't, well, I thought people must have nostalgia for that time.

I mean, I know one of the things I see all the time,

you know, I go on Facebook.

I'm one of these old fogies just to go on Facebook.

But it's like, well, these New York in the 1970s images.

Oh, yeah, I know, yeah, I know, oh, yeah, I live there.

You know, I know where that was, you know, that, no, no,

that was fantastic place it isn't there anymore, you know,

it's a remarkable golden age or the, I mean, you know,

I lived on East 10th between, first and you have a new A,

then later, it's time to have a Harry Thompson street,

then on the Bowery, then my girlfriend, Lisa Jane Persky,

who was a writer and a photographer, and it's her presence that I'm in touch with

in the song, I wrote the song for her in the book.

She lived in Christopher Street, it was over in the West Village,

in the Grandest Village, in the gay, gay part of town.

And so I moved, she had a tiny, tiny studio flat there.

Yoko Loner was the superintendent of rebuilding

had been in the early 60s before she met John Lennon,

and you know, her mother used to see Peter Paul and Mary,

well, you know, if you know the references to the fogies from this,

you know, next stop, Grandest Village kind of,

so that was kind of the milieu, I moved into her,

with her in her place, say like 76,

and that was, oh, it was fantastic.

The walk from that place to CBGB's,

because she just took bleaker, so it was like, that was straight,

you know, from the Grandest,

far west village down to the east side,

and you can see the change, it's like, you know,

as you sort of hit, you know, I don't know,

we'll forget what I'm trying to think,

a Mercer street or something like that,

and it kind of will change.

Sorry, I'm going off on memory lane here, so.

No, no, it's great, I love hearing this stuff,

but I'm thinking, one of my memories of being like a kid,

in New York City at those times,

is like no air conditioning, no fresh water to drink.

You know, I love it, and walking it,

like it'd be like three o'clock in the morning,

and my pants were so heavy from the heat, the sweat,

and I just want to lie down in the middle of the street,

the way that, we'll never go back to,

we'll never have that kind of time again.

It didn't kind of spur a kind of creativity

that we'll just never have again.

Well, I don't know, I don't know myself, I can't say,

so I mean, I'm obviously biased from particular time,

but I mean, it is very different.

I mean, just in terms of, let's say,

I mean, the tech that's available now, my son,

who's a classical musician and classical violinist,

but he also makes these films, he's short films,

and he just does it on his, he did one of me,

actually, for the book that I'll be smearing on my blog,

at some point, you know, by the time the book comes out.

But he just does it on his phone.

He has some other, some of the, a couple of the cameras,

but it's remarkable he can do,

and I remember back in the day when we had the band,

if you had a crappy cassette recorder,

that you could bring and say, oh yeah, well, we got it.

I guess that's the, it's like, oh my god, you know,

it's like, it's just like, it's nothing.

So I guess, I don't know.

I mean, there's certain advantages,

but I don't know, you lose the kind of edge.

I mean, I'm, but I think the interesting thing

about that time for me in New York with Blondie,

and you know, Patty Smith, and the Ramones,

and Talking Heads and Television,

and just before, in the early 70s,

there was a revival of all the early 1950s,

do-up kind of, it was kind of nostalgic.

Rock went through an early nostalgia,

and if you remember, Sean O'Naught,

you know, they were the band in early 70s,

who did all the old D-walk numbers,

and then Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis,

and others from that time had revivals,

and there was this kind of return to the roots of Rock,

and I think one of the reasons was that,

was that it had become very top-heavy with the groups,

like yes, and members of Lake Impala,

of our King Crimson, who are these remarkable,

Richard Rosy Muso bands, you know,

incredible Prague rock bands,

but you had to go to the Juilliard School of Music

in order to play rock and roll,

and I think one of the things that happened in New York,

it was like, it was a response to that,

and that's what was exciting to me,

when I first saw bands like New York Dolls,

and who played the simple, stripped-down rock,

it was just very exciting, you know,

it was just three or four chords, and you figure,

oh my God, I could have played that.

And that's what was exciting about my first-order

playing New York, going to CB's and seeing all these bands,

when there was hardly anybody, you know, in the place,

most of the audience was other bands,

that they were writing their own stuff,

and the stuff was, you know,

it was fairly simple to play, but it was good,

it was very, it was, you know, it was, it was songs again.

And yeah, so that's, that's, for me,

that was when, again, I'm 19 and playing in a rock band,

I'm writing songs and all that kind of stuff,

so it was a remarkable time for me.

So then you became attracted to this magic in the occult.

Were you seeing actual magic miracles,

like what, what, what, describe the magic?

Oh no, I just was reading, no, no, I was reading,

I just was reading, just, I'm, I'm an inveterate,

you know, addictive reader,

so I just was reading a lot of it.

And it wasn't until, I mean, I think started happening.

I mean, I said, I was having these shared dream experiences

until the path that experiences with my girlfriend at the time.

And then later, I started writing my dreams down,

and I had read a book called An Experiment with Time,

by Felon M. J. W. Dunn, that had been written in the 1920s,

and Dunn was an area-nautical engineer,

but he came to see that bits and pieces of his own personal future

were turning up in his dreams.

It wasn't like Christmas predicts, it was sort of like

what he read in the newspaper two days later,

or, you know, bumped into somebody or heard,

you know, overheard a conversation about.

So it was, as if a film, but, you know,

it was had been spliced incorrectly,

so bits of the film that should have been later occurring earlier.

And so I just, I was intrigued by this.

I mean, I just was read.

I've always been, you know, just, just,

omnivorous readers, I was reading everything constantly,

and I started just writing my dreams down,

and I discovered that my God, he's right.

I discovered that I had bits and pieces of my own future

were turning up in my dream, and many, many years later,

I wound up writing a book about this,

called Dreamy Ahead of Time,

and I wrote that during the first COVID-19 lockdown here,

about five years ago in 2020,

and this is about my experiences,

we've talked to the dreams and synchronicities,

you know, meaningful coincidences,

but in terms of kind of magic and ceremony,

magic, I got deeper into that, per se,

when I moved to Los Angeles,

and I had left blondie, and I moved to L.A.

with my girlfriend, Lisa, because she was actress,

and she was pursuing film career,

she had, but he had a few things,

and so she figured she had,

she did a lot in New York, on off Broadway,

theater, and stuff like that,

but she wanted, you know, she knew she had to go to L.A.,

she wanted to pursue a film career,

and I decided to go with her,

and while I was there, I remember,

there used to be a fantastic old bookshop

on how the good boulevard go to Gilbert's,

that people like David Bowie, Jimmy Page,

and the filmmaker Kenneth Hanger,

or all Crowley fans,

else Crowley fans, used to frequent,

and I went there once, and again,

this is long before the internet,

so they had an old-fashioned bulletin board,

and there was a notice for a kind of Crowley group,

so I just kind of took down the information,

and well, I've been reading about this stuff for a long time,

you know, I don't know,

just, okay, let's see, I'll get in touch with these people,

and this guy knocks on the door like a couple days later,

and basically asks me if I'm ready to, you know,

commit myself to a suit of the knowledge and conversation

of your Holy Guardian Angel,

which is an actual specific technical, magical practice,

which is, it's not, it's not magic-like-making things happen,

and you know, anything like that,

it's a more spiritual, meditative sort of practice,

and in any case, long story short,

I wound up joining this Crowley group,

and so this would have been 1978,

and I think I was initiated into it,

in the ceremony by a fellow named Grady McMurtry,

who was somebody who actually knew Crowley in his last days,

and Crowley was like, this was someone who was in the US military,

and he was stationed in England for a while,

and he visited Crowley in his last days,

Crowley was living in a place called Netherwood,

and part of England called Hastings down by the English Channel,

and he revived this society of the group,

called the OTO, after Crowley's death,

this fellow came back to California,

or it was in California, and eventually revived this society,

that's called society,

the Crowley's called the Ordo Templi Orientist OTO,

which is still around now.

I still know some people who are involved in it,

they're very nice, and so I'm pretty sure this guy,

and again at the time, I've got a bit of about 20,

I don't know, maybe a bit more in there,

and it was all very enthusiastic,

and I'm never the armchair magician,

or the armchair, whatever, like, let's check it out,

so I'm empirical in that way,

and it was interesting, but after a while,

I just thought it wasn't for me,

and sadly, a lot of the people who get involved in Crowley,

he says do what that will, which is not supposed to mean,

do what you like, but I think a lot of people

don't know the difference,

or at least many of the ones that I met,

at least at that time, and I just became disabused of it,

and I just, initially it was just more interesting,

conscience was per se, and this was one of the things

I got from reading Colin Wilson,

so I was reading his books as much as getting into

the forms of magic and stuff like that,

but it's all very fascinating stuff,

I mean, I met it going to the Golden Dawn,

people ate WB8s, and some of the Nobel Prize winning poet,

and all of that, and so it's a fascinating,

and it was a wonderful time to be interested in that kind of thing,

because there's a lot of stuff coming out.

There were a lot of L.A. at the time,

it was a fantastic book lovers city,

if you're someone like myself,

used to be many, many, many secondhand bookshops,

and you could find these books,

and there were also a lot of publishers

who were putting out new editions of them,

of stuff in public domain,

so they didn't have to pay royalty,

so it was cheap editions, so it was all fascinating.

I mean, a lot of magic is about books, it's about reading.

I mean, I know this was visual,

some practices and stuff like that,

but a couple of questions.

Because you mentioned that you were initiated into this,

was there an actual ceremony,

and when the state do it as the world isn't as people think,

then what does it really mean?

Well, I mean, I think, well, I'm just saying,

the way Crowley says it,

do it with the world is not, it's your true will,

so it's not just what you want to do,

it should be something,

it's you're finding your true will,

like I was saying, as I was saying earlier about,

we grow up, and there's part of ourselves that's us,

but then we develop different persona

in order to deal with the world,

different personalities, as you were saying, you know.

And the true will would be, okay, who are you without all that?

And in a way, it's more,

if you know the Tao, it's kind of more Taoistic,

and even Crowley himself refers to this,

that he uses will, but it's kind of not,

I mean, it's not willfulness,

but it's sort of like you have your own way,

you have your own path,

and each on our own path, you know,

you look at the stars, you know,

one of Crowley's

good aphorisms is every man and every woman is a star,

and this is the notion, look at the stars,

they move in their orbits,

they don't crash into each other, you know.

So if we are in our own orbit or true orbit,

and you know, then everything will be fine,

we just have to follow that orbit,

so that's the deal with that will,

but in my experience, and if you know,

anything about Crowley's own life, you know,

this was easily transformed into well,

oh no, I mean, whatever I do is my orbit,

but everybody else, it gets in their way,

oh no, it's their fault, so, you know,

he basically did whatever he wanted,

and sat, I mean, this is one of the things,

I think was Crowley, I think,

well, I think he actually had moments of brilliance,

he was intelligent, you know, character, you know,

but he just had this, you know, enormous ego,

and was oblivious to the people,

and basically he was a spoiled brat, you know,

he grew up, he inherited an enormous fortune,

after, you know, he liberated himself

from this fundamentalist Christian family,

but then he, you know, he just went through the fortune

pretty quickly, and then the rest of his life,

he spent basically spending other people's money,

but he was a good, you know, rock on tour,

good story teller, interesting character to the year round,

and I think he did some actual work,

and if you're interested in magic,

he did wet together,

and Eastern and Western techniques,

and he kind of modernized it and things of that sort.

But, you know, I just, after a while, I just,

I just outgrew it, basically.

But yeah, there was an actual ceremony,

it was kind of a couple of the six ceremony,

I had to go through certain,

I mean, this is a long time ago,

this was in 1978, so I mean, I'm doing,

I have a kind of, you know, kind of image in my head

of doing it, and what I remember,

I mean, I remember, it must have been around Christmas time,

and it was outside of L.A.,

and it must have been near a harbor or something like that,

because I remember boats going by,

and in lights on the boats, it said,

Felice Navidad, so, I mean, you might think,

of that as a synchronicity,

this is my being born, my birth into this magical life,

and all that, but, you know,

I took the certain kinds of vows you have to take,

and you, you know, all that sort of thing,

and I attended, you know,

some rituals and ceremonies and things of that sort,

but after a while, I just kind of outgrew it, more or less.

And when you're being nervous though,

do you know these people that you trust them enough

to go out there and do this with them?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I met someone before, I mean, no, I mean,

you know, I mean, well, it's funny,

because someone else asked me the same thing,

I thought, maybe it made me nervous, I'm scared.

Maybe I'm parsifal, maybe I'm parsifal, you know,

fools rush in or angels,

I don't know, I just thought, okay, let's check it out, you know.

I mean, hey, I'm rocking roller, man.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying?

You're not meant to do.

I can go handle this ceremony somewhere

out in Orange County.

Let me tell you.

And then you mentioned before,

you would write down your dreams,

and then you would, you would be able to predict your future

or what could you change your future?

No, no, no, no, no, no, it's the same thing.

No, I would find out the next day,

or two months later, or next week,

that I wanted something I had dreamed of.

Oh, there, oh my God, I dreamt that.

So it wasn't I woke up and thinking, oh my God,

this is gonna happen, there wasn't no premonition,

I just write the dream down, and then, oh,

I mean, the very first one I remember writing down

after reading this book is I dreamt that I was someplace

and someone handed me a red guitar,

a red strata caster, a fender strata caster.

And hey, it said, you know, check this out.

I didn't have one, I didn't know anybody you had one.

And this is, this is in the days when I was a musician.

And I remember meeting up with a friend of mine,

we were just walking around, and we go here,

and we go there, and we bump into somebody,

and we bump into somebody else,

and you wind up at somebody's place

that hadn't been before.

And, you know, oh, Gary here, check this out,

and he hands me a red strata caster.

And I started strumming, oh, this is the dream.

Now, okay, and then the next one was,

I had a dream about being in an intimate situation

with the woman at the time that I would have liked

to have been, but had not yet, and I didn't know

if there was going to be any chance of that.

And then, like the next day, that's what happened.

And I thought that's when it sold me,

and I said, well, this stuff works, you know.

And just so, I just kept doing that.

And I just, over the years, I just collected them.

And what had happened many, many years later,

like 2019, when I was 40 years later,

really, well, I was here in London,

I was giving a talk about hypnagogia,

you know, the in-between sleeping and waking.

You know, as we fall asleep at night,

and as we wake up in the morning,

we go through this liminal state.

That's a bit of both.

And at the end of the talk, I tagged on some accounts

of pre-cognitive dreams, because that state

is often very partial to those things happening.

It's a state in which it often happens.

And I described some mine,

and then I said, if you know, check it out, do what I did.

Just write your dreams down and see what happens.

And somebody tweeted the next day

that they had been at the talk, and they did,

as I said, and they had a pre-cognitive dream.

And they explained what it was and all that.

And so, I got in touch with my publisher,

and I said, well, look, you know, I just gave this talk.

I just wondered, you know, would you be interested

in the book about this?

And they said, yeah, so I spent the sort of spring,

early summer of 2020, writing it.

And I still have them in boxes here,

stashed away.

I've had all these dream journals from 1980s, 90s, and, you know.

Well, let me ask you this, though,

that what is the benefit, though?

Are these things going to happen anyway?

Like, just because you write it down, okay?

Well, now I've proven, okay, it happened,

I dream got it, it happened.

But if you didn't write it down, would that not have happened?

What is the benefit?

I mean, I don't do any benefit.

I'm, I'm, you know, it's kind of scientists, sort of,

or as natural as, oh, this is a strange phenomena.

This tells us something, this just happens.

Somehow, bits and pieces of my own future come to me

ahead of time before they should have.

And the ones you know about are what I call the 2Ds.

And this I talk about in the book and in talks

I've given about this, the 2Ds.

It's the disasters and the Darby, as they call it, the Derby,

as they say here.

So it's about horrible disasters like 9-11,

or I don't know if you know the Aberfan 1 in 1960s here in Wales

when there was a huge cold slip and down a hill

and it's smothered a school and part of a town and killed

to people.

And someone who was dealing with the post-traumatic stress

wasn't called that.

But, you know, of people who, you know, were involved in this,

was interested in dreams and all that.

And he got one of the newspapers to put in a notice saying,

if anyone had any dreams about this happening beforehand,

get in touch.

And many, many, many, many, many, many people did.

And including sadly, tragically, a little girl who

told her mom that that morning when she went off to school,

I had this strange dream.

But it was black stuff coming down the hill and all that.

So.

And then there's all, there were many, many,

much evidence of, you know, a pre-echo of 9-11 in a variety,

different, there's a painter who painted series of paintings

about it.

It was like an album covers and news.

I mean, there's a lot, the thing is there's lots

of scientific evidence, statistical evidence

for pre-cognitive effects.

And it's this kind of thing, if it was about anything else,

there wouldn't be any debate about it.

But the fact that it's about something

we consider paranormal, it still is in this hazy land.

But I mean, I'm, I'm, that's fine and dandy.

But I tell you the truth, I mean, to me,

the anecdotal material is much more convincing.

And that's, you know, it could just happen.

So I've had some dreams, which have personally

have helped me where I realize in the midst of some situations,

oh my god, I dreamt this.

And I was able to, you know, keep it from escalating,

as we say, or something like that.

So, I mean, that's, but I mean, or the other one,

as they said, we know is the dreams that people,

you know, they dream winners at the races,

stuff like that.

So these are the ones we hear about.

But 95% of accounts of pre-cognitive dreams

are about things that we would consider inconsequential,

let's say, or trivial, or every day.

I mean, I don't want to say trivial,

or it's inconsequential because the youngian will argue,

oh no, nothing's inconsequential in dream.

But I just mean there'll be about every day sorts of things.

And you would wonder, oh, why did I have a pre-cognitive dream

about that?

So there is a strange character to them

where what's interesting about them

is the fact that the pre-cognitive, if the dreams weren't

in themselves, they wouldn't particularly stand out.

And it's not something I look for.

I've just kept this practice up.

So I still wear my dreams down.

And at different times, I'll have a few, oh yeah, OK,

that seems like one.

And I'm fairly stringent criteria

for deciding whether I would consider that.

And one of the other things is people often say, oh,

you think it's pre-cognitive, but it's that deja vu effect.

Wow.

But in my experience, the phenomenology of deja vu

or what I call the pre-cognitive tingle

is very, very different.

deja vu was always an element of uncertainty.

Did this happen before?

There's always that.

But when I find myself in a situation

in real life that I had dreamt of that day or two days

or whatever before, what happens is what I say,

the pre-cognitive tingle.

And I say, oh, yeah, this is it.

So there's no uncertainty about it for me.

This is my own experience of it.

So it's a different sort of thing.

What about that deja vu experience?

It can often end dreams, very vivid dreams,

where you have a memory of something

that happened in your life, and it's so freaking vivid.

Do you think this is another timeline, perhaps,

or something like, because if this is a time element

to this pre-cognitive dream, what do you make it at?

Well, that's one of the things.

And in the book, dreamy time, I do devote.

It's half devoted to dreams as it were

and half devoted to time, because that's the other,

dreams in themselves are mystery enough.

But then you have the pre-cognitive dreams

that stuck to the mysteries involved.

So it's mystery of time.

So yeah, it's like, how could that happen?

And you know, you also, I mean, not the opposite,

but let's say the polar of the pre-cognitive dreams

is like you say a dream of like some past event

that comes back to you.

Or even in your own life, your everyday life,

every waking life, you have suddenly a memory comes back to you.

And it's like, well, I think, again,

I think this is the potentials of consciousness.

This is the kind of stuff that I became fascinated with.

There's one of the things Colin Wilson talked about

in this book of his The Occult,

and which I subsequently became very influenced by.

And I talk about it in my own book,

Touched by the Presence, is this kind of peculiar power

or certain kind of memory where it's not, you know,

the facts, but the memory comes back

and it's not just the factual that, oh, I know I did that.

It's like, oh, my God.

And the famous example, if you know the novel

by Marcel Pruss,

a remembrance of things past that begins with the character,

he's, he tastes a bit of this kind of French,

like pastry called Madeleine.

And he dips it into like a herbal tea and he tastes it.

And he suddenly has this feeling of being outside of time

and he doesn't know what it is and my God.

And then he realizes, oh, yes, when I was a young boy,

my holidays, my aunt used to give me a taste

of her Madeleine dipped in this kind of tea

and he knew that factually.

But the reality of it came back to him.

And it's not nostalgia.

It's not like you're nostalgic for it

and you're pining for it.

No, it's like, it's like, and it's, our brain has that.

I mean, it's a famous story in the,

in the things 1950s, there's a, maybe a bit earlier,

but the neurologist called Walter Penn Field

and he was operating on someone, the brain operation.

And the brain doesn't feel any pain.

So strangely enough, you don't have to be anesthetized.

And if someone's going to operate in your brain,

you can stay awake, basically, because there's no pain.

So in any case, but he accidentally touched

some bit of the brain and the patient,

secondly, was sent back to an earlier time.

But in complete 3D, HD, more vivid than any of our attempts

to recreate reality in our high-tech stuff.

So we have potential, the brain has potentials

who've stored everything that's ever happened.

But we don't, in practical sense, as you say,

what you said, but we don't need to have that.

We would, if all those memories kept, you know,

there's a wonderful story by Jorge Luis Borges

called FUNES, the Memories.

And it's about a character who knows everything

is going on everywhere in the world.

That is, okay.

The members, everything that ever happens.

And he's completely passive and can't do anything.

He's like, you know, but so, luckily,

there's an editing, you know, app from the name,

that edits it out.

But one of the things that Wilson would say,

and other people say, yes, we need that,

but sometimes it works too well.

And it edits out lots of stuff that would be good

for us to know about.

So, you know, there's all the useful practical stuff

we need to do.

This, I don't know if you know this book,

The Master in his Emissary.

My, this fellow, Ima Gilchrist.

He's a neuroscientist, but he's also an English scholar,

you know, but you know, writes, you know,

criticism of poetry, you know that.

But he rebooted the whole left and right brain

kind of story, which had kind of got,

sideline.

And, but the thing is, is that, okay,

the left brain is geared towards survival.

It's geared to a dealing, it's practical.

It's utilitarian.

It's functional.

You know, what, what do we need to know about

in order to survive?

And it's, it's wonderfully successful at that.

That's why we're the dominant species on the planet, you know,

which, whether that's a good thing or not,

that's another story.

But the right brain is not interested in that.

It's not interested in practical things,

but it's interested in just the,

the business, we might say, of things.

There's a wonderful word, a German word,

is stick kite, which we, we don't have it in English.

It goes back to the German, the 15th century mystic,

mystic echart, and he said,

is stick kite, is this, this is the sheer factness of things.

So the, the left brain is interested in what something is

to classify it and order it.

And, you know, put it, put it in some kind of system

so that it can maneuver around things.

And, but the right brain is like just that it is.

And so, the over efficient left brain cutting out

all of that business, you know,

in order to deal with things, it makes it, you know,

we're very good at maneuvering through the world

and navigating through it and surviving,

but it, it, it, we seem to be living

in a kind of meaningless world.

You're of scientists telling us the, you know,

it's meaningless and philosopher is saying it's meaningless

and all that kind of stuff.

And then, but then every now and then, we know it isn't,

because you, you know, you get caught looking,

you see the sun coming through the leaves, you know,

or some other something like that.

And suddenly you feel this kind of,

and that's all the stuff that,

one side of the brain is editing out most of the time.

So, I mean, that, that, that's a real quick kind

of thumbnail sketch of all of this,

but that, that, that's the sort of stuff

I became fascinated with, you know,

because I had, I've had moments like that.

They're not big mystical moments,

but their moments were suddenly,

and it's usually something that you know about already,

and you take for granted and suddenly you see

in it in a different way.

And there's a wonderful phrase by,

who's a poet and a Blake scholar in essay as Kathleen Reyn,

who I, she died about 20 years ago,

where I had the great opportunity of meeting

her a few times in talking,

and a book of mine called Lost Knowledge of the Imaginations,

dedicated to her, which has this wonderful phrase,

where she says,

imagination doesn't see different things,

it sees things differently.

And that's, that's, I think that's the whole cue,

and that's the kind of thing I just became fascinated with.

Now, what about like the use of psychedelics, LSD,

or mushrooms, peyote, and ayahuasca,

these things?

Would you also go down those pads?

I've, I've taken LSD, I've taken mushrooms,

smoke marijuana, and stuff of that sort,

and tried other things.

I mean, there are other less salubrious drugs

that were, you know, popular back in the rock and roll

days and all that.

But, I mean, you know, you get interesting effects

and all that, you know, and I wasn't someone

who sort of went that way.

I mean, I, I, I, friends of mine who kind of in that,

either the, and, and the origin, kind of path.

And, or I'm a very good friend of mine here in,

in London, a, a, a, a fellow named Mike J,

who's written many books.

He's, he's, I guess he would call him an authority

on the, the history of the, the history of drug use,

and in different cultures.

And, he's written very interesting books about, you know,

particular drugs like Mescalin,

or drugs about, or histories of different self-experimenters

in the early days, like the American psychologist William

James and experimented with nitrous oxide and stuff

like that.

I mean, I have an interesting effect on that.

And, and in the book, that touched

what your presence, I talk about, you know,

my early experience of smoking marijuana and, and,

and taking, taking LSD, when I was all the 15.

So it was a bit early.

Yeah, no, me too.

Yeah.

Oh, I guess, yeah, so I don't know.

And, and, you know, it's set in setting.

So it's nothing else.

Timothy Leroy, whom, whom I actually met on a couple occasions.

He was right about that.

So, you know, wandering around and, you know,

when I grew up in New Jersey on some high octane,

you know, hallucinogen that played at night,

might have been the best introduction to it.

But, you know, what catches catch can take

what opportunities are available.

But I mean, I read all that stuff,

the castinatus stuff and all that.

Yeah.

All that, I mean, again, that was like,

there was all that kind of literature.

So it was the drug literature and poetry.

And, I mean, I grew up, I think,

I don't know if it's the case, again,

I'm biased in my generation.

But, reading was still a thing.

So I, my teens, like people,

we've got castinatus, Herman Hessa and Alan Watts

and the Beats and Kerawak and all that kind of stuff.

So, I mean, I was, all of that was the milieu.

And I was like, you know, coming of age.

And I can remember, there was a TV show,

it was in 1969 called Then Came Bronson.

Yeah.

And it was about a disaffected journalist

who puts his job and he gets a,

not a Harley, I think it's a Honda or a car,

or something like that.

And he just rides across the country in search of America.

You know, I reckon people weren't searching America.

There was that Simon and Garfunkel saw about that.

So it was this whole kind of people seeking out to go find themselves.

So there was, you know, all that kind of sensibility

and I came of age drink.

What about this, it's very popular now,

this theory of manifestation,

we can manifest things into your life.

And when two or more people agree on it,

I'm manifesting the same thing.

What have you studied that kind of thing?

Not in a sense of, for my own use.

But, well, I have to bring them up,

but I did do a book, a few years back,

called Dark Star Rising, Magic and Pound in the Trump.

And that does come into it.

Because Trump himself, I don't know if it's still the case,

but I would think it is.

He's a devotee of what's known as the positive thinking,

the power positive thinking.

Norman Vincent Peele, who was very, very popular pastor

and he's going to religious speaker in the 50s.

And so again, exactly when he died, but Trump used to go

to his sermons, he gave sermons in a church in 50 Avenue,

in New York, 29th Street.

And this book called the Power Positive Thinking,

it's a kind of Christianized version

of something like manifestation.

It's sort of thinking about something fervently

and devoting a lot of will and that kind of will,

and that kind of will from this too,

like really thinking about that kind of thing,

sends this message out.

And the idea that thoughts are things,

the idea that thoughts can affect reality.

But one of the things I think with Norman Vincent Peele

and Trump is that Peele quotes a line from psychologists,

actually called Menager.

He says that facts don't matter.

It's the interpretation of facts

of what you think about the facts that matter.

And certainly, I mean, when my book came out, 2018,

so it's about seven years ago, but now,

but the whole idea of alternative facts and post truth,

this was like the beginning of the dismantling of reality.

And the whole idea of manifestations

like reality is malleable.

Your reality is basically you can change reality

just by thinking in a certain way.

Although to tell you the truth,

this manifestation is also comes,

I think it's sort of talked about as a law of attraction.

Right.

Thank you.

You tracked this stuff to us, but that's actually

a misunderstanding of the Swedish scientists

and also religious, a mystic, a manual Swedenborg.

Because Swedenborg started out as a scientist,

then in his mid-50s,

had this complete kind of psychological change.

And he became a religious mystic

and he had talked about being taken to heaven and hell

by the angels and visiting other planets

and all this kind of stuff.

But he talked about when you die, when we die,

we first go to this intermediary realm

that he called the spirit world.

And it's while you're there that what he calls

your true affections, this will date me even,

badly, but with the spice skills,

you just say what you really, really want.

And that comes out, that becomes apparent.

And then you are attracted either to heaven or hell.

So it's rather than you attract things to yourself,

you are attracted to one of the others,

but this has been turned around.

But still, it is this kind of utilitarian,

practical kind of way of using these potentials

of consciousness.

And one of the things I say in the book

is not that different from what we call chaos magic,

which is a kind of do-it-yourself punk kind of magic

that started up in the 70s,

where they said, well, we don't need to use all the old

magical symbols, the circle and the candle

and all that kind of stuff.

We can use whatever is at hand.

It's sort of like I'm J. Trude and found art.

You pick something up in the gutter,

you bring it home, you put it on the mantelpiece,

it was junk and that was art.

I mean, I was living in New York,

that's happened all the time.

Chris Stein used to bring up all this stuff.

And I found, it looks like a pet chair,

I have a chair, whatever, it's just some crap.

And you bring it back and you put it in some place

and say, oh, yeah, that's, yeah, I see me, that's all.

I mean, but chaos magic sort of like that.

It's kind of, you use what's at hand.

But it's similarly, it's results-based

as a positive thinking.

And there's something, what is it?

There's something in achievable, achievable wish.

And I forget what the other one is.

There's something, a possible reality.

It's the kind of thing what you wish for

or what you try to make happen.

It can't be something that is weird

that couldn't possibly happen.

It should be something that could happen

or you having problems making it happen

and you just need a little nudge to me.

So an achievable wish, a possible reality.

And it's very similar.

I mean, they use very, very different techniques,

but the whole idea of some results-based magic.

So this is the opposite of what I said earlier,

this knowledge and conversation

of the Holy Guardian Angel,

which is not about making things happen.

It's about having contact with, sorry,

having contact with this pie yourself in some way.

You know, some angelic kind of higher mind in yourself,

which put you beyond the desire to make things happen.

But these chaos magicians say, you know, screw that,

you know, let's, I want stuff, you know.

I want to make things take place.

And so it is real or it's not.

And am I definition of that kind of magic

is what I would call induced synchronicity.

So if you know synchronicity is Jung's term

for meaningful coincidence.

So something that's happening in your head, in your mind,

and something in the outside world,

or so obviously and intuitively connected.

And that you can't help but think, you know,

someone or something knows that I'm thinking

and somehow arrange this.

You know, it's two, it's just two, two, meaningful.

So can you make those things happen?

And it's a long story,

but one of the things I talked about in the book

is this story of how if you remember the alt-right,

I mean, not around anymore,

Richard Spencer, all those guys,

I wonder what they think what's going on.

They claim to have used the internet

to help Trump win his first election.

Well, again, I can't get into this too long with a story,

but sort of weaponizing this cartoon figure,

Peppy the Frog, and somehow turning that character

into a talisman, which is a magical kind of emblem

that you infuse with magical intent and powers.

And that's somehow flooding the internet

with all those images of Trump and Peppy,

and Peppy is Trump looking over the, you know,

the Mexican wall and all this kind of stuff.

Somehow, bled from the internet into reality.

So this was what they called synchronicism,

which is basically an upgraded notion of synchronicity.

So if you think as I do is the internet,

is it kind of externalized the imagination.

So the idea that somehow, if you're able to

nudge or imprint on the internet something enough times

or in the right ways, it will carry over into reality.

They think, Gary, then what about like a music

that can you add, plant these kind of ideas or intentions

into lyrics and into music?

And I guess, I mean, I mean, again, this is what I said.

The magic goes back to books and writing and cells

and music is certainly something that's close to magic.

Because the spoken word is power.

When you're really working them, when they really work,

they reach below your conscious mind.

They reach below your critical mind.

They get to your viscera, you know.

So, yeah, I mean, you know, you probably don't even

need to be in planted.

You just probably need to have a good tune.

Yeah.

So like, it just get you and, you know,

everybody loves a good anthem, you know.

I would encourage you wanting to go back and listen

to our first interview, Dark Star Rising Magic and Power

in the Age of Trumple.

We really get into a lot of this kind of stuff.

But today, we've been talking about the touch

by the presence from Blondie's Valley

and rock and roll to magic and they're caught.

And I almost wish that someone else was asking this question.

Because so much is just so much beyond me.

But I'm fascinated by this.

Let me ask you a last question, because we are out of time.

Now, the afterlife, okay.

Now, since we've been on the show last, I was dying.

I was dying.

I was going, bro.

I was going to die.

I had all my heart, my heart, where I had food

where my heart had a launched heart.

I had only the last six months in my back to normal.

So I was, oh, no, well, I feel great now,

but it was horrible at the time.

But now, I spent so much time focusing on my mortality,

the afterlife, what does Gary Lockman think happens

in the afterlife?

Hmm.

Are you okay?

Well, it's funny.

You should ask.

I've just been putting together a PowerPoint presentation

for a talk about reincarnation.

I'll be giving next month.

I mean, I guess a part of me, the bit,

the residue of Catholic upbringing,

I still have the idea of purgatory.

So, and you find similar things like that in the Bardo,

you know, and then the Tibetan book of the dead.

Or Rudolph Steiner talks about it as well.

So, again, I mentioned Swedenborg, the spirit world.

So, some part of me thinks, okay,

you go through this kind of purging.

You know, you're shown variety of things where, you know,

you did this, this happened.

One of the things Steiner says, which I suspect

is probably something that we quite something

that go through is where you're shown all the effects,

the consequences of your actions

that you're not aware of.

You're not aware of the consequences of these actions,

but you did ask, whatever you did,

you bumped into that person, stuff like that.

So, but then you learn and you come back.

So, I don't know, I tend to think that,

well, one of the things I always say is,

I used to infuriate people for a while,

I worked at this new age bookshop in Los Angeles,

called the Bodhi Tree.

It's not there anymore, but in the 80s, 90s,

and you know, into the early 2000s,

it was like, you know, the biggest medical bookshop,

West of the Rockies, it was very, very famous.

Shirley McLean put it on the map with this book,

she wrote about her past lives and things like that.

But a lot of Buddhists who are working there, you know,

and it's all, you know, and I always say

that I had this certain, you know,

a predilection for this notion of the eternal recurrence.

When you don't, you come back,

but it's two exactly the same life you've had.

So, sort of like that film, Groundhog Day,

so it keeps coming back to the same day,

but this you come back to the same life.

And the philosopher Nietzsche had an idea

of another person who's influenced me,

a great deal of suspension and philosophy,

and he beat you, Spensky.

But, you know, it's nothing you could ever prove

one way or the other.

But, I mean, I don't know, I tend to think,

you know, you learn something on this level here.

You go back, or you go up forever

to some less material realm than this one.

You learn some things, you see some things,

you sort of made some mistakes,

and then you, you know, you figure out

what regiment you're gonna get in your sin back.

That's, because I think this is where the action is.

I think this, I think in the sense that I think there's some,

I always think about the great cosmic battle

between stupidity and intelligence.

And I think it's being fought here.

So, I think we need to come back

and incrementally, you know,

gain a little more ground for intelligence.

So, that's what I think.

Gary Locke, when I enjoyed this so much,

touch.

No, no, thank you, man.

And we do audience loves you too.

They always say, have Gary Locke come back.

Okay, man.

But I'm barely sweating through this one.

Oh, touched by the presence from Blondie's battery

and rock and roll to magic in the occult.

That isn't, it's not even out yet.

November 18th, 2025, you can pre-order it now.

And once again, we had him on previously

about the dark star rising magic

and the power needed to trump.

But what's this other word?

Dreams.

Oh, dreaming ahead of time.

That's ahead of time.

Yeah, it's been out for a couple years.

Dream ahead of time.

Experiences with pre-calculative dreams,

symphonies, and coincidences.

All incredible stuff, Gary Locke.

Thank you so much.

All right, thank you.

Good night, Seth.

Take care.

You're welcome.

Thank you.