Chet Snow

United States, 1945-

Sources: Chet B. Snow, Mass Dreams of the Future. 1989, Deep Forest Press, PO Box 4, Crest Park, CA 92326.

Snow also has a web site.

Summary

In 1983 Dr. Chet Snow, an historian working for the Air Force, met Dr. Helen Wambach, a Berkeley psychologist skilled at regressing people into past lives (she had also written two books on the subject). Snow worked with her and made good progress: he was an excellent hypnotic subject. Wambach described to him a major project that was underway: in cooperation with Beverly Lundell and Dr. Leo Sprinkle, she was gathering data from identical "future-life workshops," in which hundreds of people were "progressed" ahead to potential lifetimes in the periods 2100-2200 A.D. and 2300-2500 A.D.

Wambach asked Snow if he wanted to try it. They picked out a date just 15 years in the future — Snow's birthday in July, 1998 — for the initial progression. As he relaxed into the trance, he found himself by a wooden horse corral on a bleak, windy day, in the Arizona desert. Though it was midday, the sky was nearly black. He checked on the horses and then returned to the ranch house, where he joined a dozen other people. They shared a meager meal. Gazing about the room, Snow noticed that one corner of it was badly damaged, and he remembered that that had happened in a large earthquake that had occurred earlier in the year. Snow grew distressed at the desolation of this future scene and the anguish he experienced within it, and Wambach brought him back to the present.

Of that initial experience Snow says:

I was both intrigued and a bit frightened by what that "future" vision seemed to imply. Especially as this was not some surrealist science-fiction fantasy with exotic rockets or faraway planets with strange alien creatures. The kind of thing I'd read about for years. No, it was just a short "hop" of about 15 years ahead, filled with things that, at that point in my life, I certainly never would have imagined for the late 1990s! [Mass Dreams, pp. 4f]

Recalling and writing about the experience was he returned home, Snow remembered (premembered?) that the drastic change in the Arizona climate had not, as far as he could tell, been due to a nuclear holocaust (and ensuing "nuclear winter"). He hadn't been worried about radiation or anything like that.

Still, there had obviously been major dislocations, socially as well as meteorologically, and his group in the desert was entirely on its own, locked in a grim battle for survival. He remembered a strong fear of discovery by other human beings. Apparently, though, his group had consciously prepared for this situation and was strongly united.

Several months passed before Snow and Wambach were ready for another crack at the future. This time, Helen has him tiptoe into the difficult period, by moving him first to Christmas day, 1996. He finds himself at the same ranch, but in drastically different circumstances: the sun is shining in a bright blue sky, and the mountains stand clear and beautiful in the distance. His group is hard at work preparing, figuring out the best means of food storage. There has been a major drought in the Midwest in summer '96 (spot on!), and food prices are expected to climb sharply.

Helen has Chet watch the TV news. There is a spot on the President's speech on the economy. Snow describes him:

It was someone much younger than Ronald Reagan and he had more prominent ears. The face seemed vaguely familiar but I didn't recognize it in the short TV clip shown. I got the feeling that this man had been a United States senator or prominent governor in the 1980s but not someone I'd have predicted as President a dozen years later. [p. 11]

(So, I guess we know who's going to win the election [it's Oct. '96 as I write this]. The nasty little question that must be asked, however, is, Were these sentences in the original 1989 edition of Mass Dreams, or did they somehow sneak into the 1993 edition? Anybody have an old copy around?)

The next news story is about the situation in Jerusalem, where a radical Jewish group is intent on kicking all the Arabs out of the Israeli-occupied territories, especially Jerusalem. They want to tear down the Dome of the Rock mosque and rebuild the Temple there. (This goes quite a ways beyond constructing an archaeological tunnel under the mosque, but since the purpose of the dig is to turn up evidence of said temple, it's definitely in the ballpark.)

The weather is already freaky in (Snow's vision of) late 1996, with records for heat and cold, rainfall and drought, being set all over the place. There has been widespread flooding of major coastal areas.

The world economy is in a tailspin, and nothing seems likely to fix it. (Oct. 15, 1996: the Dow cracks 6000.) Trade wars and tariff barriers have gutted efforts to end the crisis.

The folks on the ranch are learning to ride horses. Gasoline hadn't been rationed, but it had gotten more expensive. (Indeed!)

Helen edges Chet ahead a year, to the end of 1997. Life on the ranch is much the same, though more independent and self-sufficient. Crops are getting difficult to grow in the bad, unpredictable weather. Chet watches TV again: more economic problems, more trouble in the Middle East, more bad weather. Business as usual.

They cautiously move ahead one more year, past July 1998, to the end of the year. Sure enough, things have gone to hell in a handbasket. No more TV news: they don't even have a TV (or maybe it's out in the barn). They do have a radio, though, and there are still broadcasts coming out of Phoenix and Santa Fe; so they know that large chunks of the West Coast have gone missing in the Pacific Ocean, as the Ring of Fire has ignited, triggered by an eruption of Mt. Fuji. There is water all the way into Nevada and Arizona.

The badly damaged ranch house has been abandoned in favor of yellow plastic tents, and there's some tunneling going on, into the cliffside.

The government has pretty much been turned over to the National Guard (with the Prez and Congress putatively still in charge).

The earth shakes almost constantly, and the climate is miserably cold and wet. It's nearly dark at noon, with all the dirt and ash tossed up by the volcanoes and quakes.

Russia has taken advantage, gallumphing back into Berlin and on to West Germany. Yugoslavia is again racked by civil war.

Japan no longer exists.

Tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions have died.

Snow finds himself feeling depressed, because so much has been lost, but also peculiarly relieved, because he and his friends had known something of the magnitude of the changes that were coming, and feel lucky to be alive at all.

Wambach and Snow jump ahead two years (skipping 1999 entirely). There's some good news. The sky is lighter; their group is larger; and a grass-roots, New Age network has come into being (and stayed in being!), relying about equally on ham radio and telepathy for its communications. Through it they learn from friends up on Pikes Peak that the boys in Cheyenne Mountain have staged themselves a little military coup and imposed martial law on the whole Rocky Mountain Penninsula. (The bad news, Dorothy, is that there is no Kansas anymore.)

Two years later, and Snow is headed for Canada on horseback, part of an exchange with a group in Alberta, north of Edmonton, where it's now quite temperate. Snow is to be a New Age radio announcer (though using the old-fashioned hardware sets, since not everyone in the listening audience has tuned their head set yet). It seems the resonances of his voice trigger in people "new awareness of themselves as total beings."

Commentary (Oct. 1996)

Snow moved to Sedona, Arizona in the early '90s. He is a popular figure on the New Age lecture circuit. Perhaps influenced by other Sedonans who are of the 2012 persuasion, or perhaps because 1998 is now so near — and yet so far, if it is to be the 1998 he envisioned — Snow now appears to be sliding his expectations for Apocalypse off into the next century. Certainly, he has offered the opinion that things might not need to turn out as he saw them, when he saw them.

Still, he emphasized in Mass Dreams (p. 13) that everything was to remain quite normal as late as December, 1998 (excepting high food prices and extremes in weather), and so far his vision is more accurate than not.

Snow's Apocalypse has to be called Caycean, both in the enormity and the particulars of its Earth Changes; and in fact he mentions Cayce in this context: "Something had happened similar to what Edgar Cayce and many other psychics had predicted" (p. 14). Which makes Snow's prophecy itself predictable, if he had read Cayce before he was hypnotized, which he quite likely had.

Update: May, 2005: Life appears to be good in Sedona this year — no black skies at noon, no great quakes. And Dr. Snow's Web site is offering "sacred sites travel to Da Vinci Code, Mary Magdalen, France, Mother Meera and crop circles." There's also a "Mass Dreams Boutique." Gotta love these New Age economic survivors.

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