People ask: If precognitive experiences are so rare and inconsistent that we can't trust them, how can they offer a survival advantage? I believe the answer is that animals are much more in touch with their premonitions than we are. Even aboriginal peoples are more precognitive than you and I. We have been socialized to ignore the thoughts that seem arbitrary or irrational because they are not connected to our sense experience.
I have had instructional dreams when I was troubled about what I should do. The most potent precognitive dream occured around the death of my ex-husband. In the early morning of May 29 2022 I had a dream where I saw my ex-husband looking beat up. bruised. . He was making off like it was no big deal. I woke up yelling at him "Go to the hospital! Go to the hospital! Go to the hospital!" Later that day I was watching a youtube video. When what I was watching ended with no break or ad a song came on by a group I had never heard of; completely unfamiliar. Scars in Heaven. by Casting Crowns. I listened to it a couple of times and then forwarded the youtube video to a friend. So I documented the date. Early the following morning my son called me and told me his dad had died. My ex-husband didn't die from a beating. He had breathing and heart issues. I had not been in contact with him for a few years and didn't know how much his health had declined. There is more to this . For at least a week prior to his death, a lovely small bright blue bird kept coming to my bedroom window, flapping against it. At times it would sit on the ledge and look in. I had never seen this bird before. I got the impression it was a messenger from the other side. I thought it might be my mother. After my ex-husband died I knew it was him. He had painted the walls in his house about the same color of the bird. The bird continued with it's behavior for a while until I told it to go away. I didn't want it to be hurt flapping against the window. I have not seen that kind of bird again.
Thank you, Alice. Several friends of mine have shared stories with me over the years about precognitive dreams when a loved one dies. Let's keep telling our stories.
When my older neighbor died there was a crane oddly hanging out on the roof of the house behind his. Not normal for my suburban neighborhood. Who knows.
I have had around 100 precog experiences, ranging from simple 'stii life' views to movie-like actions. A couple times precogs showed me a situation where I might be hurt if I did something. I avoided the action and avoided the harm--the one which comes to mind is crossing a street at a certain crosswalk would lead to getting hit by a car. I avoided that crosswalk. A couple other times precogs showed me that if I acted in my normal manner, I would not accrue a benefit. When the action came up in real life, I acted out of character and the good event came true.
Josh wrote, regarding Mark Twain's vivid and specific premonition of his brother's death,
"Maybe we can get hints from our future selves, but we have to experience the event in order to send the hint backward in time. The fact that we have had a premonition means that the event is unavoidable. As in the case of Oedipus Rex, our very efforts to avoid a predicted calamity will be woven by fate into the calamity’s cause."
Perhaps several mechanisms are at work, huh?
One might send oneself a warning or a jolt of perception back through time, but if it is an event already ordained, then what might be useful?
In 2006 I had a dream twice, the same dream. I needed to jump out of a plane that was going down to soft farmland below. I had a chance to live, but I had to decide what part of my body to sacrifice. I decided to sacrifice my left arm and shoulder, to do a left forward shoulder roll (at least the second time I did.)
A couple of weeks later I was riding my bicycle down a steep hill at about 45 miles per hour, my son following, when I hit a patch of sand in a tight turn, and went into the side of the hill, choosing a narrow track that became a ramp into a jump to the hairpin continuation of the road below.
Choosing that path in the moment is the last thing I remember.
I proceeded into a 12-15 foot jump at 45 mph. My son said that he thought I would "stick it", which I did, but my sternum came down onto my handlebar stem hard enough to collapse the front wheel and a very sturdy steel front fork. Somehow I had taken off my t-shirt and tied it around the stem a few minutes before.
I did a front shoulder roll shirtless, shattered my helmet and left a lot of skin on the road. I separated my left shoulder completely, collapsed my left lung, broke a couple of ribs, and vaguely remember walking a bit before the ambulance arrived, and thanking the guy who called the ambulance.
It is potentially the case that my double dream allowed me to prepare with the cushioning t-shirt, which protected my heart from a potentially fatal contusion, and the left front shoulder roll strategy.
A couple of times as a teen I had perfectly clear deja-vu experiences, wherein I was frozen in the experience until it concluded, at which point I could speak.
Animals clear out before a tsunami, but humans don't, I have read.
I have read that people are able to influence the output of random number generators in experiments, slightly, but statistically significantly, but I don't think I rigorously investigated the experimental methods, either.
I have seen that prayer improves ICU outcomes in prospective, randomized studies.
Again, it seems to me like more than one premonitory or causal mechanism may be at work.
Thank you, John, for this story. I think that Radin's conclusion from his 1988 self-experiment and also from the large internet data set was that yes -- potential futures can send us messages that help us avoid the worst -- maybe help us avoid injury completely.
Three years ago, in a long phone conversation with my ex-girlfriend, she told me she was dating a man who could not hike or bicycle with her because he had permanent injuries from an auto accident. I encouraged her to give him another chance saying, "You never know -- I could be disabled tomorrow." Two weeks later, I was on a bicycle when a car crossed a double yellow line to pass, gunned the engine, and came straight at me for a high-speed, head-on collision. I don't understand how I survived. My legs were mangled and my pelvis was shattered, but I somehow avoided injury to vital organs, spine, and brain.
I am a Cartesian dualist. Biology is directly influenced by Mind, and Mind is distinct from matter. Mind is its own motive force. Mind has idiosyncratic behaviors of its own that can be characterized only generally, never with scientific certainty or statistical precision. All of biology is influenced by Mind, and probably some physics as well.
Scientists of old who believed in a "elan vital" weren't so far wrong.
Besides being a fascinating and intriguing experience reading this—another Bravo Josh—more accurately feeling this on a deeper level; it brought to unexpectedly write this.
Premonition. In 2014; I felt an urge to sit down immediately at my laptop and write an email to send to my boyfriend. An image had come to me—of a fortress surrounded by a moat—with crocodiles and alligators and me in the moat in a small boat with paddles. I had no idea why I was writing at first. In a nutshell, I said ‘I feel like there is danger ahead; and I need to get to you inside this fortress, surrounded by foreboding challenges in this moat, and there’s not a moment to waste. He had been getting up at 4:45am everyday; would read 3 newspapers; worked out in his home gym everyday and went to a 5:45a Spin class; had a large team of sales pros he led while meeting a personal 20 million $ a year sales quota; was raising 2 daughters as a single Dad; and the list goes on. I wrote that he doesn’t have to exercise and workout as much as he does; 🏋🏻♀️ and that I would love him just as much, even if he was quote ‘in a ‘full body cast’. I didn’t alert him the email was sent; but it was within only a few moments he responded to the email with an intense emotional response: ‘Everyone wants to change me’; ‘How do you know this?’ etc. He wanted to meet me for dinner the next night (Talulas Garden) to discuss. He was wound up and pacing when I left my office and met him in the lobby of the Suburban Station building where I was working. During dinner; I noticed that all the people in the restaurant felt ‘far away and distant’; though the tables were very close together and it was full. We were deeply intimately connecting, and it felt like all the people were not ‘real’; then he dropped a utensil: and when it hit the floor, (for both it was really loud we jolted) and we merged souls. We both experienced a ‘pause’ simultaneously, as if everyone in the restaurant ‘froze’ or stopped moving; and then they all just returned to animation. We knew it, but we didn’t speak of it. From then we went ‘back to the usual relationship patterns’; but it did not feel the same. Ir felt elevated, like the ‘dimension’ (for lack of a word that could best describe it) that we were living in had experienced a major shift. Fast forward to a Friday night to Saturday night spent together. We went to Standard Tap in Northern Liberties for food. On way after parking (he brought his own bowling ball and accessories and it was really heavy); he stopped me suddenly in my tracks and said “I can have fun, sleep in, enjoy myself!! I gave him a big hug. At the restaurant, surprisingly our server was a close friend of my then best friend; she was a bartender there but took someone’s shift as a favor. We ate, chatted and then went to North Bowl and had a long wait for a lane. We went upstairs to play air hockey and pinball and had so much fun like two college kids, and eventually got our lane. We bowled 2 games, and his were mostly strikes and a few spares; he was seriously that good. We got back to my place late at about 1:00a. When I woke up the next morning; he was already wide awake asking me what time it was (as he tried to sleep in and not know the time he should get up); it was 7:30a. He read the newspaper and I made coffee and fresh squeezed OJ; but he would not eat the breakfast I had planned to make for us. He wanted to go down to my gym in my loft building. He did multiple pull-ups snd lifted weights and corrected my form on a couple machines. We spent sometime upstairs and he left late afternoon Saturday. Sunday he was meeting his oldest best friend/brother and lifetime best friend in Red Hook NJ for a pre-world soccer game. That night and Monday I did not hear from him which was unusual; and I felt something was shifting. Tuesday he said he was really hot at the game and felt off on Sunday night and Monday, but was feeling better. He said he bought tickets for us to see the Avett Brothers in NJ for Saturday night. We were going to spend the weekend at my vacation home I had at the time; he was going to his 16 year old daughters moms house in Toms River NJ to take pictures of her first prom; and he would meet me at my place after. I was a looking forward to it! On Wednesday we were texting and he was going out for his Wednesday night Quizzo at Fados with his best friend Damian and I was going out with my best girlfriend. Thursday morning I was at my office. I had left for a meeting in another office. When I came back; there was a message on my phone from his older brother ‘Call me’. I did. He said ‘Kevin is dead; I have to call his 2 daughters now and tell them (16 and 21); call me back later. He shared later that at the soccer game, Kevin had been experiencing some pain in his chest. He said he should go to the ED immediately and have it looked at; no. Go to a cardiologist tomorrow, no. Then don’t workout at least. He said he wanted to wait until he visited his 21 year old daughter in TX who just graduated as an engineer and got a new job; with his 16 year old daughter, in about 2 weeks. His brother told me he went to his weekly spin class on Thursday at 5:45a. A close friend from college happened to be in the class. He had a heart attack on the spin bike during the class; he was only 53. He died on route to the ED. To go back a week; he sent me an email the Thursday prior. It said quote “I went to spin class today. It killed me”. I had forgotten about it until a few days later. He had changed his FB profile picture on Wednesday night from ‘Colonel Wilhelm Klink’ from Hogans Heroes, to a picture of a smiling happy kitten (he had a beloved cat named Tommy on behalf of his best friend oldest brother). He had hung a just framed print of Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Almond Blossom’ over his bed and had texted me a picture of it Wednesday night. The following Friday—I had a meeting scheduled in a professional office nearby—and was escorted in to take a seat and wait. The door was closed and I was in there alone. I looked around and on the wall above me was VVG’s ‘Almond Blossom’. A facebook memorial page was started; with hundreds of posts and pictures by family, friends and coworkers. June 6 2024 will be 10 years—I still cry a river whenever there is a new post—particularly by his daughters; such as high school graduation and college grad (for his 16 year old); their weddings, etc. Both myself and Tommy his oldest brother; had premonitions and foreshadowed to Kevin. He also seemed to know but not ‘know consciously’. There are many more details left out here; including my own personal emotional and cognitive experience of all of this, and the extraordinary traits and details about him. I emerged the knowing ‘‘Tis Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”—Shakespeare; and “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” —Kahil Gibran to name a few. 🧚💚🙏
When you have a logical basis & a premonition in the same direction, you might wonder if the conscious mind is manufacturing visions to support its own beliefs. Or you might say that this is double evidence that urgent action is called for.
People ask: If precognitive experiences are so rare and inconsistent that we can't trust them, how can they offer a survival advantage? I believe the answer is that animals are much more in touch with their premonitions than we are. Even aboriginal peoples are more precognitive than you and I. We have been socialized to ignore the thoughts that seem arbitrary or irrational because they are not connected to our sense experience.
I have had instructional dreams when I was troubled about what I should do. The most potent precognitive dream occured around the death of my ex-husband. In the early morning of May 29 2022 I had a dream where I saw my ex-husband looking beat up. bruised. . He was making off like it was no big deal. I woke up yelling at him "Go to the hospital! Go to the hospital! Go to the hospital!" Later that day I was watching a youtube video. When what I was watching ended with no break or ad a song came on by a group I had never heard of; completely unfamiliar. Scars in Heaven. by Casting Crowns. I listened to it a couple of times and then forwarded the youtube video to a friend. So I documented the date. Early the following morning my son called me and told me his dad had died. My ex-husband didn't die from a beating. He had breathing and heart issues. I had not been in contact with him for a few years and didn't know how much his health had declined. There is more to this . For at least a week prior to his death, a lovely small bright blue bird kept coming to my bedroom window, flapping against it. At times it would sit on the ledge and look in. I had never seen this bird before. I got the impression it was a messenger from the other side. I thought it might be my mother. After my ex-husband died I knew it was him. He had painted the walls in his house about the same color of the bird. The bird continued with it's behavior for a while until I told it to go away. I didn't want it to be hurt flapping against the window. I have not seen that kind of bird again.
Thank you, Alice. Several friends of mine have shared stories with me over the years about precognitive dreams when a loved one dies. Let's keep telling our stories.
When my older neighbor died there was a crane oddly hanging out on the roof of the house behind his. Not normal for my suburban neighborhood. Who knows.
fascinating!
I have had around 100 precog experiences, ranging from simple 'stii life' views to movie-like actions. A couple times precogs showed me a situation where I might be hurt if I did something. I avoided the action and avoided the harm--the one which comes to mind is crossing a street at a certain crosswalk would lead to getting hit by a car. I avoided that crosswalk. A couple other times precogs showed me that if I acted in my normal manner, I would not accrue a benefit. When the action came up in real life, I acted out of character and the good event came true.
In such cases it's often hard to know what would have happened to you if you had not heeded the warning. It makes them hard to document.
Josh wrote, regarding Mark Twain's vivid and specific premonition of his brother's death,
"Maybe we can get hints from our future selves, but we have to experience the event in order to send the hint backward in time. The fact that we have had a premonition means that the event is unavoidable. As in the case of Oedipus Rex, our very efforts to avoid a predicted calamity will be woven by fate into the calamity’s cause."
Perhaps several mechanisms are at work, huh?
One might send oneself a warning or a jolt of perception back through time, but if it is an event already ordained, then what might be useful?
In 2006 I had a dream twice, the same dream. I needed to jump out of a plane that was going down to soft farmland below. I had a chance to live, but I had to decide what part of my body to sacrifice. I decided to sacrifice my left arm and shoulder, to do a left forward shoulder roll (at least the second time I did.)
A couple of weeks later I was riding my bicycle down a steep hill at about 45 miles per hour, my son following, when I hit a patch of sand in a tight turn, and went into the side of the hill, choosing a narrow track that became a ramp into a jump to the hairpin continuation of the road below.
Choosing that path in the moment is the last thing I remember.
I proceeded into a 12-15 foot jump at 45 mph. My son said that he thought I would "stick it", which I did, but my sternum came down onto my handlebar stem hard enough to collapse the front wheel and a very sturdy steel front fork. Somehow I had taken off my t-shirt and tied it around the stem a few minutes before.
I did a front shoulder roll shirtless, shattered my helmet and left a lot of skin on the road. I separated my left shoulder completely, collapsed my left lung, broke a couple of ribs, and vaguely remember walking a bit before the ambulance arrived, and thanking the guy who called the ambulance.
It is potentially the case that my double dream allowed me to prepare with the cushioning t-shirt, which protected my heart from a potentially fatal contusion, and the left front shoulder roll strategy.
A couple of times as a teen I had perfectly clear deja-vu experiences, wherein I was frozen in the experience until it concluded, at which point I could speak.
Animals clear out before a tsunami, but humans don't, I have read.
I have read that people are able to influence the output of random number generators in experiments, slightly, but statistically significantly, but I don't think I rigorously investigated the experimental methods, either.
I have seen that prayer improves ICU outcomes in prospective, randomized studies.
Again, it seems to me like more than one premonitory or causal mechanism may be at work.
Thank you, John, for this story. I think that Radin's conclusion from his 1988 self-experiment and also from the large internet data set was that yes -- potential futures can send us messages that help us avoid the worst -- maybe help us avoid injury completely.
Three years ago, in a long phone conversation with my ex-girlfriend, she told me she was dating a man who could not hike or bicycle with her because he had permanent injuries from an auto accident. I encouraged her to give him another chance saying, "You never know -- I could be disabled tomorrow." Two weeks later, I was on a bicycle when a car crossed a double yellow line to pass, gunned the engine, and came straight at me for a high-speed, head-on collision. I don't understand how I survived. My legs were mangled and my pelvis was shattered, but I somehow avoided injury to vital organs, spine, and brain.
Life is actually a bit mysterious...
:-)
I am a Cartesian dualist. Biology is directly influenced by Mind, and Mind is distinct from matter. Mind is its own motive force. Mind has idiosyncratic behaviors of its own that can be characterized only generally, never with scientific certainty or statistical precision. All of biology is influenced by Mind, and probably some physics as well.
Scientists of old who believed in a "elan vital" weren't so far wrong.
I keep "trying" things and seeing what works.
:-)
Besides being a fascinating and intriguing experience reading this—another Bravo Josh—more accurately feeling this on a deeper level; it brought to unexpectedly write this.
Premonition. In 2014; I felt an urge to sit down immediately at my laptop and write an email to send to my boyfriend. An image had come to me—of a fortress surrounded by a moat—with crocodiles and alligators and me in the moat in a small boat with paddles. I had no idea why I was writing at first. In a nutshell, I said ‘I feel like there is danger ahead; and I need to get to you inside this fortress, surrounded by foreboding challenges in this moat, and there’s not a moment to waste. He had been getting up at 4:45am everyday; would read 3 newspapers; worked out in his home gym everyday and went to a 5:45a Spin class; had a large team of sales pros he led while meeting a personal 20 million $ a year sales quota; was raising 2 daughters as a single Dad; and the list goes on. I wrote that he doesn’t have to exercise and workout as much as he does; 🏋🏻♀️ and that I would love him just as much, even if he was quote ‘in a ‘full body cast’. I didn’t alert him the email was sent; but it was within only a few moments he responded to the email with an intense emotional response: ‘Everyone wants to change me’; ‘How do you know this?’ etc. He wanted to meet me for dinner the next night (Talulas Garden) to discuss. He was wound up and pacing when I left my office and met him in the lobby of the Suburban Station building where I was working. During dinner; I noticed that all the people in the restaurant felt ‘far away and distant’; though the tables were very close together and it was full. We were deeply intimately connecting, and it felt like all the people were not ‘real’; then he dropped a utensil: and when it hit the floor, (for both it was really loud we jolted) and we merged souls. We both experienced a ‘pause’ simultaneously, as if everyone in the restaurant ‘froze’ or stopped moving; and then they all just returned to animation. We knew it, but we didn’t speak of it. From then we went ‘back to the usual relationship patterns’; but it did not feel the same. Ir felt elevated, like the ‘dimension’ (for lack of a word that could best describe it) that we were living in had experienced a major shift. Fast forward to a Friday night to Saturday night spent together. We went to Standard Tap in Northern Liberties for food. On way after parking (he brought his own bowling ball and accessories and it was really heavy); he stopped me suddenly in my tracks and said “I can have fun, sleep in, enjoy myself!! I gave him a big hug. At the restaurant, surprisingly our server was a close friend of my then best friend; she was a bartender there but took someone’s shift as a favor. We ate, chatted and then went to North Bowl and had a long wait for a lane. We went upstairs to play air hockey and pinball and had so much fun like two college kids, and eventually got our lane. We bowled 2 games, and his were mostly strikes and a few spares; he was seriously that good. We got back to my place late at about 1:00a. When I woke up the next morning; he was already wide awake asking me what time it was (as he tried to sleep in and not know the time he should get up); it was 7:30a. He read the newspaper and I made coffee and fresh squeezed OJ; but he would not eat the breakfast I had planned to make for us. He wanted to go down to my gym in my loft building. He did multiple pull-ups snd lifted weights and corrected my form on a couple machines. We spent sometime upstairs and he left late afternoon Saturday. Sunday he was meeting his oldest best friend/brother and lifetime best friend in Red Hook NJ for a pre-world soccer game. That night and Monday I did not hear from him which was unusual; and I felt something was shifting. Tuesday he said he was really hot at the game and felt off on Sunday night and Monday, but was feeling better. He said he bought tickets for us to see the Avett Brothers in NJ for Saturday night. We were going to spend the weekend at my vacation home I had at the time; he was going to his 16 year old daughters moms house in Toms River NJ to take pictures of her first prom; and he would meet me at my place after. I was a looking forward to it! On Wednesday we were texting and he was going out for his Wednesday night Quizzo at Fados with his best friend Damian and I was going out with my best girlfriend. Thursday morning I was at my office. I had left for a meeting in another office. When I came back; there was a message on my phone from his older brother ‘Call me’. I did. He said ‘Kevin is dead; I have to call his 2 daughters now and tell them (16 and 21); call me back later. He shared later that at the soccer game, Kevin had been experiencing some pain in his chest. He said he should go to the ED immediately and have it looked at; no. Go to a cardiologist tomorrow, no. Then don’t workout at least. He said he wanted to wait until he visited his 21 year old daughter in TX who just graduated as an engineer and got a new job; with his 16 year old daughter, in about 2 weeks. His brother told me he went to his weekly spin class on Thursday at 5:45a. A close friend from college happened to be in the class. He had a heart attack on the spin bike during the class; he was only 53. He died on route to the ED. To go back a week; he sent me an email the Thursday prior. It said quote “I went to spin class today. It killed me”. I had forgotten about it until a few days later. He had changed his FB profile picture on Wednesday night from ‘Colonel Wilhelm Klink’ from Hogans Heroes, to a picture of a smiling happy kitten (he had a beloved cat named Tommy on behalf of his best friend oldest brother). He had hung a just framed print of Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Almond Blossom’ over his bed and had texted me a picture of it Wednesday night. The following Friday—I had a meeting scheduled in a professional office nearby—and was escorted in to take a seat and wait. The door was closed and I was in there alone. I looked around and on the wall above me was VVG’s ‘Almond Blossom’. A facebook memorial page was started; with hundreds of posts and pictures by family, friends and coworkers. June 6 2024 will be 10 years—I still cry a river whenever there is a new post—particularly by his daughters; such as high school graduation and college grad (for his 16 year old); their weddings, etc. Both myself and Tommy his oldest brother; had premonitions and foreshadowed to Kevin. He also seemed to know but not ‘know consciously’. There are many more details left out here; including my own personal emotional and cognitive experience of all of this, and the extraordinary traits and details about him. I emerged the knowing ‘‘Tis Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”—Shakespeare; and “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” —Kahil Gibran to name a few. 🧚💚🙏
When you have a logical basis & a premonition in the same direction, you might wonder if the conscious mind is manufacturing visions to support its own beliefs. Or you might say that this is double evidence that urgent action is called for.