I was reading a discussion thread on reddit about the oddest/creepiest thing that’s ever happened in your life, and I was struck by the number of people who said that they had an odd feeling of foreboding just before they learned something bad had happened to a person they were close to. They were things no one could have predicted, like an aneurysm or fatal car accident; there were some that were a little more predictable, like the person having a heart attack, but the timing of the feelings was hours or moments before they learned of the event, which makes it strangely prescient. This one in particular struck me as too uncanny to be merely a coincidence.
I was wondering what your opinion of this sort of thing is. I don’t believe in any kind of cognitive connection that can somehow travel miles and see the future, but it is odd how many people claim this sort of thing. You could say that the memories of how you felt just before you learned of the person’s tragedy have been altered to fit the narrative your mind has concocted, to give the tragedy some meaning and make you feel like you saw it coming. Is that the most prominent/correct explanation?
Yes, I’d say it was the latter. Going back and saying you had some sort of warning, no matter how brief, serves to make you think there was some sort of control to be had, meaning you might be able to prevent other such atrocities in the future and won’t be so helpless. Very similar to the “perfectly normal” person who turned out to be a serial killer. In reality, you knew something was off about that fellow, you just chose to ignore it. And sometimes that may very well be true, but mostly I think it’s just wishful thinking so you’re safe next time.
I’m pulling this purely out of my ass, but it is likely the universe is far more complex than we can fathom and time may not work the way we think it does, so maybe people are getting hints about a terrible event they are about to undergo which wouldn’t make sense to us in linear time.
I’ve heard too many stories (and had my own experiences with this) to write them all off as coincidence or wishful thinking.
That story sounds like BS. The friend had just ingested a bunch of pills, shrooms and booze, but was able to carry on a phone conversation without anything seeming off? Riiigth.
And how many times did somebody have a bad feeling something happened to their pal or SO, called them to check, got a normal answer, and promptly forgot their sense of foreboding?
The answer is this happens enough that the math works out. Just as stuck clocks are right twice a day, if enough people imagine things, once in awhile they’ll guess right. And those are the ones who end up in incredulous many-times-forwarded Facebook posts.
On every single airline flight there’s somebody who changed their reservation at the last minute for whatever reason. And usually somebody who was late, rushing, and missed the flight. On most of them there’s somebody aboard who had at least a momentary chill of phobia, if not a white knuckled ride from gate to gate.
So out of 100,000 flights we have two things: 99,999 sets of those folks had nothing unusual happen and their stories don’t make the news. And on the other, where something unusual or tragic did happen, the news will quickly find somebody to honestly tell each of these kinds of stories. Every. Time.
This is why online premonition registries are such a cool idea. Sign on, write what you feel is about to happen, it gets date-stamped, and later, people can assess the data objectively.
The OP invites the in-between answer of our remarkable human power of unconscious intuition. A friend might be in trouble, and we can hear it in their voice, even as they’re saying aloud, “No, everything’s fine.” With people we know very well, we can sometimes just tell. It isn’t supernatural or spiritual; it’s just unconscious pattern recognition.
As for the really woo cases, they’re mostly raw coincidence, mixed with a soupcon of selective perception. I’m driving down the road, and, for no reason whatever, the song, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” flashes through my mind. Around the next curve, there’s a dog in the road and I have to brake to avoid it.
Coincidence? Or proof of the cosmic Jungian overmind? Nah: coincidence.
I don’t really believe in it but I did have such a thing happen to me a few years ago. These are the 100% true, objective facts. My grandmother lived in Arkansas and had rather recently (a couple of months before) been diagnosed with terminal cancer but she was believed to be fairly stable although she was in late-stage care in the hospital. I live in Massachusetts and had started a a new job a few months before. I hadn’t taken a day off since I started because it was frowned upon because I didn’t have any backup yet and the position is critical. I woke up one morning and realized that I couldn’t go to work. I can’t even really explain why I did it but I called a manager and told them that I wouldn’t be in that day because my grandmother just died. I knew it just as plainly as the color of my shirt even though no one had told me anything of the sort. Then, I just waited by the phone and silently mourned while I waited for the call. Sure enough, about half an hour later, my father called and said “I have some sad news for you”. I said, “I already know” and then broke down. My grandmother died almost exactly the time that I woke up and made the call to work.
The only case I can think of was many years ago (I was 13) when my mother’s sister didn’t show up for a Mother’s Day party. The next day I woke up feeling terribly, both physically and mentally, and stayed home from school. Later that day the police called because my aunt was found in her apartment, having committed suicide. I suspect that I simply ate too much at the party, but it feels like I knew my mother would need some support that day.
We often talk about “bad juju” in my family, albeit jokingly. I tend to say that something is making my bones itch.
You don’t need to write them off as coincidence or wishful thinking. You can look into all the actual documented research on the malleability of human memory and how reinterpretation effects not only how we think about what we remember, but the details of our memories.
Speculating on the nature of time is fine and dandy, but why does this reversal of causality only effect human feelings in a vague untestable way? Why doesn’t it show up consistently in any sort of test, whether it be of someone’s conviction they have paranormal abilities or any sort of physics experiment?
It happenned to me about a month ago. On a Thursday night I had a dream that there was an emergency at my mother’s house. In the dream I called 911 and told them to go there, that I’d be on my way and if they arrived first to break the door down.
Next morning while I’m at work I get a call from my sister that she’s in the ER with our mother. She had a bowel obstruction that was causing great pain. Turned out she also has cancer but we didn’t know that then.
I didn’t tell anyone about the dream for several days because I thought they wouldn’t believe me.
It’s a combination of memories changing to fit what happened, and forgetting other times you had premonitions or bad feelings and nothing happened. Something like someone might have a bad feeling that there was something terribly wrong with their mother, and they called her and the mom is okay, but the mom’s sister was in a car accident. Then they might misremember that the premonition was that something was about the aunt, or that the premonition was vague about someone in the family, or something like that.
This is exactly true. I’ve had many vague, uneasy feeling when someone close to me is taking a long road trip, like I’m expecting to get a call that they were in a terrible accident, or even killed. But fortunately so far it hasn’t happened. I don’t think it’s anything supernatural, it’s just general anxiety. If something did happen, then it would sound like I did have a supernatural premonition, if you ignore all the other times I had bad feelings and nothing happened.
My mom woke up suddenly at three in the morning with the terrifying certainty that something bad was happening to her mother. It was bad enough that she couldn’t get back to sleep, but she didn’t call her folks to reassure herself, because that would have been rude.
It was horrible waiting until it was late enough to call. Time seemed to go so slowly. Fortunately, her folks got up fairly early in the morning, so it wasn’t much more than a few hours before she could call. They were both fine.
It was memorable enough that she remembered it years later, when we were old enough to hear the story and remember it. It might have come up because of something our other grandma said. Grandma L never had a whim or sudden thought that she didn’t embrace completely, as a message from the universe at large, or occasionally, as a message from God.
The other day, I had a strong premonition of my b.i.l. calling me to tell me my sister was dead.
Nope. Nothing of the sort was true. All’s well.
We tend to forget that our minds are constantly exploring possibilities and imagining events in advance. The idea that events can communicate themselves to our minds – how? magically? – is absurd. It’s just as stupid as the “visualize success” idiocy, where if you strongly imagine winning the lottery, you’ll win the lottery.
There is no magical telegraph from an airplane crash in Peru to the brains of loved ones in Maryland. The idea has no possible physical model, and it fails all statistical examinations. All you have are the spots on the chart that are inevitable: pure coincidence.
If you want a theory of non-linear time or some kind of reverse causality, let’s start at the ground floor with the math and the physics. Using these kinds of stories means you’re starting with something complicated and unreliable for your measurement system. If you can’t pull it off with photons and electrons (or whatever), there’s no point in even thinking about how it might work with a brain.
I’ve never had what I’d call a premonition, but I’ve had feelings of disquiet, as though the air was getting heavy and time was slowing down somehow. These are generally, although not always, the harbinger of some sort of bad news. I call them my disturbances in the force.
I liken it to my dogs, who hate storms and can always sense one coming long before humans can. They are sensitive to something - barometric pressure, maybe? - in the atmosphere and are reacting to that. I’m not sure what it is I’m picking up on, but I’d be willing to bet there’s a scientific explanation for it, just as there is for my dogs.