So, yesterday I got out of bed, started getting ready for work, and a little voice in the back of my head said ‘you really don’t want to go in to work today’. Not that I ever do (who does?), but this was more than the standard ennui - like going into work would be a bad idea.
Luckily I have VPN access and can choose to work from home, which I did. And a damn good thing too, because right about the time I would have been in the middle of my 90 minute public transit commute, my period started. With a horrible gushing. About an hour after that, all of the rest of the fun first-day gastrointestinal pyrotechnics started, so I was very happy to be working five feet away from a bathroom I wasn’t sharing with anyone. Staying home saved me from some very embarassing leakage and a very icky shift.
So, Dopers, has this ever happened to you? I’m not looking for life-saving premonitions specifically, although if you’ve had any of those, let’s hear those too!
I’m pretty skeptical, but this one incident does stand out in my mind.
When I was about 13 or 14, I was washing the dishes after dinner (we didn’t have a dishwasher, or rather, we used it as a drying rack). Right over the sink was a cabinet where we kept plates, bowls and tucked in the corner, the largest cleaver, a butcher knife basically, because it was too big to fit in the drawer where we kept all the other cooking knives. The blade side facing away from the cabinet door, of course.
So I’m washing the dishes and this feeling of dread begins to build up in me. At first it’s vague and ill-defined, but as it builds up, I get the sense that it’s location based: that I shouldn’t be where I was at the moment. I actually tried to analyze it as it was happening, to rationalize it as a feeling of forgetting to do something, but the feeling kept growing and it definitely wasn’t that.
Finally it reached such a disturbing level that I decided I’d stop washing the dishes and come back to do the rest later. I turned off the water.
A fraction of a second after I turned off the water – having just pulled my hand back from the faucet lever – the cleaver fell out of the cabinet and fell with a heavy clatter into the sink. It’s not a big sink: had my hands been in there washing dishes, the cleaver would have gone right into them.
This cleaver was always kept well tucked against the side of the cabinet and into the back, away from the door, to keep just this from ever happening. It had never happened before. It has never happened again.
Subconscious sensing of the sliding of the knife for unknown reasons? Poltergeist giving fair warning? Who knows? But it freaked me out at the time.
Never had any myself, but premonitions were the subject of one of my favorite lines from the television version of MASH*:
Klinger: “Oh yeah, my mom had one of those about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”
Radar: “Gee, did she tell anyone?”
Klinger: “Nah, she didn’t get it until Dec. 9.”
Once while praying at night at an outdoor chapel in a local seminary, I got the distinct feeling that something would be difficult, no time frame or sense of terror, just the vague sense that there will be a hurdle in the road soon.
As I walk down the road, I see a motorcycle college cop with a flashlight. He sees me, demands I stop, and then starts questioning me about ‘what I was doing in the bushes.’
Apparently some girls I passed by were scared by my awkward hello and called the cops. I had to meet with the dean and give my story, and then meet again with the college police where-in I got pseudo-interrogated. I was never in any real trouble, but it sure was a pain in the ass.
The events of that night, highly distorted and dramatized, became rationale for two op-ed pieces calling for heightened security of that seminary. Go me!
We were eating dinner with my parents. At one point my father gasped and said he just had a vision of someone being with him at the table, but suddenly disappearing.
An hour later my uncle called to say my grandfather had just died.
I never witnessed anything like that before. Or since.
I’m not sure it counts, but the night Diana, Princess of Wales died I had a dream where she died in a car accident. But instead of a Paris street she was on a dirt road in rural Pennsylvania.
Don’t know if this counts because I didn’t really have any sense that it was going to happen, so I suppose not really a premonition. Also, it’s a bit silly. I was a little younger and was at soccer practice. We were all taking shots on net, and I went into the net to retrieve my ball. As I picked it up, I turned around while simultaneously bringing my right arm in a sweeping motion in front of my head. I was just in time to deflect a ball from hitting me in the face. It wasn’t even just raising my arm and leaving it there-- had I been half a second off the timing in my motion, my face would have been exposed. I didn’t have any thoughts of danger beforehand, and to this day I have no idea why I decided to move my arm like that as I turned.
K…more along the lines of the OP and less “I would have died!!!”
Back when I had periods (Mirena, learn it, live it, love it) I never kept track of my cycle. “How did you not menstruate all over your good sheets?” you ask? The night before my flow I would always dream about blood. Made for easy track-keeping.
One time in college during a ski trip, a group of about ten of us were playing “Bullshit” (the bluffing card game similar to Old Maid). When it came to my turn, The Pile of cards had gotten very large, as nobody had called Bullshit on anybody else in some time. The rank I was to put in was “fours” and I had one, and only one in my hand, in a hand with about 15 cards in it.
Suddenly I was gripped by an unshakable conviction that the person on my right, if challenged, would pick The Fourth Card From My Left. So I turned my hand face down and vigorously shuffled the cards around, while keeping track of where the four was and making sure it ended up fourth from my left.
I fanned my cards out face down in front of him and said, “Pick a card. Just one card. Any card.” He gave me an incredulous look, but I simply looked him in the eye with an evil grin and said, “Go ahead, do it.”
He picked – yes – the fourth card from my left. “Take it and put it on the pile for me… I call one ‘four’.”
Silence greeted my display of utter chutzpah, until one fellow called Bullshit on me. I gained the reputation for being a magician that night, when in fact it was simply some form of divine inspiration
I was waiting for the bus on a November Saturday in 1980 when I suddenly thought out of the blue “John Lennon is going to die when he is 40.” A friend picked me up and I told her about it. She said “He just turned 40. You’re just saying that because he is old.” I replied “No, Ringo Starr is 40 and he is not going to die soon.”
I’ve never had such a strong premonition before or since, though I did mention JFK Jr to three people in early July 1999.
Occassionally while driving, I will start to hit the brakes before I realize WHY I need to brake. It could be that I have excellent situational awareness, but I tend to think it’s my subconscious saying, ‘Hey, stupid! You can’t afford the insurance hike, so brake NOW!’
Nothing creepy, but once in college I had a dream about an old friend I hadn’t talked to or thought about in a couple of years, and he called me the next day.
It happened again with another old friend of mine a few weeks later, and I started to get a little freaked out, but then it never happened again.
One morning in 1998 I awoke with the image of Lambchop the puppet in my head for some strange reason. I hadn’t seen the show in years, but thought nothing of it. A little while later, I had the TV on the news, and heard that Shari Lewis had died. It was really creepy at the time, and I have never forgotten about it.
I have dreams that my period is starting the night before it does.
Other than that I often have premonitions. Usually as I am about to do something I get a very strong feeling that I shouldn’t or I have a very strong feeling that I should do something. Also I will have dreams that have a certain feeling to them that turn out to be true. The one easiest to tell you about is that one night I dreamed that I woke up, went to the kitchen and found our new Pergo floor water damaged. I really woke up and went to the kitchen and the whole kitchen floor had been ruined by a dishwasher hose coming unattached. The floor looked exactly as it had in my dream.
Once I was driving a new very small car home from work. It had a manual transmission. I was stopped at a red light, first in line, and when the light turned green the car refused to go. I kept stalling it trying to get into first. This rarely happened since I was an experienced manual driver. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong and thought the car had something wrong with it. A moment after the light changed, right when I would have been in the middle of the intersection a huge motorhome barreled full speed (probably 45 - 55) through the red light of the cross street.
When I was a child I would know what was in mail packages from relatives before we opened them and if something was lost I always knew where it was even if I never touched it. I lost the last gift in early adulthood and it drives me crazy that I can’t find things anymore.
I’ve had several premonitions that I couldn’t explain, but I think my most recent was an entirely self-fulfilled prophecy. I decided one day that I really wanted cookies. Chocolate chunk cookies. I had no chocolate chunks, though - just one large block of chocolate. So I decided it’d be a good idea to chop it up myself (never, ever think this - always leave chopping of huge blocks of chocolate to the professionals).
So I grabbed the chocolate, tossed it on the block and picked up a very long, heavy, sharp knife. As I was walking with it across the kitchen, I thought, “This is not going to end well. I’ll probably chop off a finger or something.” Sure enough, chop, chop, cho…OWWWW! Damnit, that stings!
I was hopping around the kitchen, swearing and bleeding through my second kitchen towel already, when my husband turned around and said, “Um, overly, what’s that on the knife?” I looked, and it was the tip of my pinkie.
Nothing dramatic or bloody here, just a small oddity about my childhood.
I grew up in a rural area where power outages were fairly common. On a number of occasions, little Balance weirded people out by looking up and saying, “What happened to the lights?” (or some variation on that theme) moments before the power went out. I presume that I was noticing some symptom of the problem that triggered the blackout, but I don’t remember what it was.
