We need to grasp what the addiction to prophecy was like. The Kwisatz Haderach's first recognition of his peculiar relationship with the future came with awareness of "terrible purpose" and of dreams which-when he stopped to ponder them-had sufficient "reality" about them to make their coming true possible. His first waking prediction was Mentat-like, probabilistic. Huddled in the stilltent with Jessica he dealt with "data, evaluating, computing." His adolescent picture of time was spatial: a globe with radiating avenues, a road shadowed by hills, a surface resembling a windblown, undulating dune. In the terminology of the infinity calculus, he perceived n-paths from one point in one dimension. He mentioned "terrain" and "available paths," Probability, uncertainty, choke, multiple paths dominated his sense of seeing the manifold futures lhat branched before him. At this point Paul knew only existing facts, past events lhat would only later become known to others: he was Baron Harkonnen's grandson; Jessica would give birth to a daughter. All that Paul possessed of prescience then was a glimpse of the terrain of time, extrapolations from past events, and hints about two possible paths ahead (one of them the gene-mingling holy war). Genes, skill, training and the ever-present spice converged to give Paul Muad'Dib the dreamlike vision of a rippling relief-map scanned at eye level. From this spatial representation he moved, in prescient technique, into the complexities of memory concepts. After guiding the escape ornithopter through a sandstorm and landing it, he recognized the desert landscape as it had occurred in a vision he had had on Caladan. But the sensed image was subtly different from the visionary image: the original had been absorbed by memory, then altered in memory by experiences that had occurred in the meantime; what he saw in the present lay before him as if viewed "from a different angle." When he and Jessica moved toward the first encounter with Stilgar, Paul did not know what was going to happen: his presence in the "now" landscape had altered the memory of the "once-seen" terrain of the future. Such alteration of the farmer-vision by being a participant in present-fact is one source of the proto-Kwisatz Haderach's fallibility. There is also another difficulty: just the attempt to see the future affects the future. This problem was especially important when Paul tried to see himself in the future: not only was that vision dependent on choices he had not yet made, but also his choices depended on what he saw along the different paths toward his future. The feedback cycle, with decision altering decision, was a vortex, a trap. Paul discovered a way to sidestep the trap. Instead of trying to peer forward and thus see ahead, the visionary imagined himself as being in the future and looking back from there. After he swallowed the Water of Life that Jessica had transformed, he saw that "the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future.