What premonitions have you had?

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

First of all, let me begin by saying that I don’t believe that premonitions are anything more than coincidence. Having said that, I’ve had 2 dreams that I have shared with others (something that I rarely do) that had creepy parallels in real life.

The first involved a dream about the comic character Marmaduke. In it, I dreamed that I had bandaged Marmaduke. The next day, Marmaduke appeared with his leg wrapped up as a result of the kids playing doctor.

My second “premonition” happened just this morning. I dreamed that I was about to get on a rollercoaster but the car that was on the track flew off and killed the passengers. If you haven’t already seen it, you can read about what happened here.

So, what “premonitions” have you had?

#2

One day, I sat down to dinner, and for no particular reason, the name of former hockey great Maurice Richard flashed through my head a few times. After I finished eating, I read on the AOL news that he had just died.
Another time, I had the name of a town in the Middle East (Megiddo, I think), and there was a bus bombing there the same day, or the next.

I put even less stock in this than you do, but it’s interesting when it happens.

#3

I had a dream where my heart was ripped out.

I then woke up to news of a family friend who had just died of a heart attack.

Interesting indeed. However: imagine the number of random thoughts you have compared to those that have any paralells with real life.

#4

Agreed. Like I said, I believe that all premonitions are complete coincidence. But they are interesting and they can be spooky.

#5

I’m also a bit skeptical of premonitions. The one that stands out to me the most though, was 6 years ago. My dad was in remission from cancer, and was somewhat routinely in the hospital, but was getting better all the time. I was sitting in a class and had what amounted to a panic attack. Strange feeling, because I had never had one before. I couldn’t breathe well, I couldn’t listen to anything the professor was saying. As soon as it was over, I bolted, and got home, and just sat there by the phone. An hour later, I got the call from my mother that dad took a turn for the worse, and would die very soon. His turn for the worse coincided with my panic attack.

#6

Many moons ago, I was obliged to take public transit back home from the 'burbs after a night of watching cult movies with a bunch of giggling acidheads. Things had calmed down quite a bit, but were still a little wiggly around the edges.

When I got up to the ALRT platform, I recognized a friend-of-a-friend… a cartoonist that I had met once a couple of months before. “Hi, Wayne!” sez Mudd. “Pardon me?” I’m embarrassed to find that not only is the guy not Wayne after all, he doesn’t even particularly look like him. I explain that I’ve mistaken him for someone else and sheepishly hide my nose in a book until the train comes. Buddy gets on the Eastbound train, which spares me further embarrassment.

That is, until Wayne gets on the train at the next stop. “Hi, Wayne!” I say reflexively. His look of blank incomprehension tells me that I have made the same stupid mistake again. More mumbled apologies, and I get off the train and transfer to the bus that’ll take me the rest of the way home.

I’m doing better now. I manage to keep it together enough to restrain myself from greeting Wayne again as I pass him, seated near the front of the bus. I take my seat near the rear doors and open my book. (Robert Anton Wilson - I forget which.) I’m unable to concentrate on it, though. Why did I keep seeing Wayne everywhere? I’d hardly spoken to him when I met him – why was he on my mind? Well, the friend he was a friend of was an ex-girlfriend who I’d been happy to be “just friends” with for a healthy long time – he was her boyfriend, in point-of-fact. Was it some weird subconscious jealousy manifesting?

While I’m busy psychoanalysing myself, “Wayne” was ready to get off the bus, and stopped by my seat. “Hi, Larry,” he said. “Say hi to --------- for me, if you see her.”

Some time later, I had it from her that Wayne was a bit mystified as to why I’d snubbed him with such obvious deliberateness.

He moved to California shortly thereafter, and I never did see him again.

Just the twice. Or four times, if you want to look at it that way.

#7

I usually know the phone is about to ring a few minutes before someone I’m close to calls me.

Example: After working with another girl all summer, we went back to the same college town, but didn’t speak for a couple months. One day, I though “Hmm, really need to get ahold of Sarah before the end of the quarter.” I sat down to write her and email and got about a sentence in when she called me.

#8

I have this sort of thing fairly often but they are of zero use to me.

All of my ‘premonitions’ come on me as deja vu. Once in awhile my deja vu is just that vague feeling but often I am convinced it is something I have dreamt and on a handful of occasions the feeling was amazingly strong (I was sure I had viewed the place before). Unfortunately I almost never remember my dreams so I am always caught by surprise by this and find the ‘premonitions’ of no use whatsoever. Given my penchant for utterly forgetting my dreams I have this mild, abiding fear that I will have a premonition of the next winning lottery numbers and forget it only to realize I had the answer once it’s too late.

Of course there are plenty of rational explanations for deja vu type events that don’t rely on anything mystical. Mostly I expect that is what’s happening (brain glitch) but there are still those few cases where even trying to be skeptical with myself doesn’t get rid of the notion something cosmic just happened.

#9

Now that you mention it…I have this incredible ability to know when it is my parents who are calling when the phone rings. I even have witnesses. This was all long ago in the dark ages before caller ID. I’d have friends over and the phone would ring and I’d let it. My friends would ask why I won’t answer the phone and I’d tell them because it was my parents and for whatever reason (lots of reasons for this back then as I was usually in trouble for something) I didn’t want to talk to them. The answering machine would pick-up and you could hear my parents leaving the message. Over the course of years my friends went from ‘whatever’ to ‘chance’ to ‘amazed’ to ‘a little freaked’ to ‘thinking it was pretty cool he can do that’.

I’m not kidding…I was definitely correct better than (at a guess) 85% of the time. It even spooked me (and no, my parents did not call on anything like a consistent schedule…in fact they knew I would try to avoid them and call at all sorts of random times trying to catch me).

#10

Like Whack-a-Mole, my premonitions are actually deja vu experiences. They are also always of no consequence whatsoever.

Typically, I will dream about a conversation or a moment in time - the words someone is speaking, the way the light looks in the room at the time, the position I’m sitting in - and then completely forget about the whole thing. Later on, and since I don’t remember that I’ve dreamed it I don’t know how long (perhaps months or even years) I’ll be having a conversation with someone and it’ll hit me - I dreamed this!

One of my sisters does it too, and we’ve had moments talking together about ordinary things when we both realize at the same time that we’ve each dreamed that conversation.

I’ve never thought much about it other than to assume that I must be doing what I’m supposed to be doing at that given time. (A nice justification to give to staying up till 4 am talking to a friend.)

It would be nice if I dreamed winning lottery numbers, but it just doesn’t work that way for me.

#11

I used to have Star Wars dreams all the time when I was a kid. I remember one where Luke was hanging upside down trying to reach his lightsaber. Sure enough, about a year later when Empire came out, there he was hanging upside down trying to reach his lightsaber.

The first time I went to a Padres game in about 1982 I had a feeling that Rupert Jones was going to hit a home run his next time up in a few innings. He did.

Every once in a while I’ll think of a song title a few seconds before it starts playing on the radio.

#12
  1. Two years ago I had a very lucid dream where I was watching a couple of planes doing aerobatics .They turned and then came toward the ground.One of the planes and then the second aimed itself at the houses.The planes actually entered the body of the buildings ( I live in England and the houses were terraced -in long unbroken rows) and were astoundingly completely inside the buildings. I remember thinking that this was something to behold - why you could nt see from some angles that anything awful had happened at all. That was roughly sept 3rd 2001.
  2. I also dreamt that my Dad had somehow turned into a baby. He was crawling around on the floor and he banged his head against the corner of the fireplace.His head had a gash which was bleeding and he was trying to reach the chair.
    He died that morning of a massive heart attack -after falling to the floor in his living room.
  3. I dreamt that I found a baby under the bed in my daughters room.Thus wasnt the actual room my daughters shared. The beds were on opposite sides of the room and the baby was under some boxes and other general teenage stuff.I got the baby out and had to think about what we should do for the baby .I wasnt surprised to find it there and I just accepted its presence -although it was an annoyance to have to find baby food and clothes. This dream was so real I went into my daughters room ( the real one ) and told her about the dream. When I finished, I noticed she was crying . She said " Mum , Im pregnant ". Happy ending though - A beautiful granddaughter who brightens our lives.
  4. I have on several occasions picked up[ the telephone to call a member of the family ( different ones ) and before dialling have heard their voice on the other end. They were phoning me at exactly the same time. We have never found out who pays for the call though.
#13

Obviously, whoever did the dialing will pay for the call.
In the situation you described, the other party dialed your number and a link is established between their phone and your phone. One continuously-running machine sends a signal to your phone which causes something like two seconds of ringing followed by four seconds of silence. A totally different machine sends a similar signal back to the other party so that he knows that a connection has been established. These machines are not at all syncronized. So once the connection is established between the phones, the caller might hear a “ring” right away, but your phone might just be starting its four seconds of silence. During that four seconds, you happen to pick up the phone to place a call and to your surprise, there’s a person on the other end.

#14

Currently I’m having a premonition of winning the lottery. Every morning I think about it and how great it would be. Every evening I’m disgusted when I see that my ticket isn’t the winning ticket.
Soon though…Soon…

:smiley:

#15

I had a dream once, where I went into the conference room, and my boss was putting up the schedule for the following month. I looked at it and said, “Hey, you forgot to finish it. My segment is blank after the sixteenth.”

My boss said, “No, it’s finished. You’re getting fired around the middle of next month.”

And sure enough…

About two a.m. one Saturday morning, my wife woke up in a cold sweat. She thought her mother was calling her, and that something was terribly wrong… like her mother was extremely frightened, and calling for help.

My wife pondered phoning, but decided that calling her parents at two a.m. on a Saturday morning simply because she had a “bad feeling” was a bit much. She rolled over and went back to sleep.

That afternoon, her father came and got us. Basically, my wife’s mother was comatose; she’d gone to sleep Friday night and never awakened. He’d called 911 when he couldn’t rouse her on Saturday morning.

She died Sunday night without ever regaining consciousness.

It’s worth noting that her mother had not been sick or anything, and was doing fine. She died as a result of a complication from a recent surgery – something had abcessed internally, and no one noticed anything wrong until the abcess burst, spreading septic bacteria throughout her abdomen. Toxic shock is basically what killed her. She went from “fine” to “dead” in about 48 hours, with NO prior warning.

My wife still creeps out a little, when she thinks about that.

#16

The one that stands out was last fall, late October-ish. First abnormal Pap smear of my entire life. These are normally not that big a deal; you just repeat in a few months, and frequently the problem resolves itself.

But I had a really bad feeling about mine. After further testing, it turned out to be cervical cancer. (I’m OK now, though.)

#17

I posted this a while ago in another thread, but I’m posting it again anyway!

I woke up at about 3 in the morning. From my bed I could see my mum stood at the top of the stairs in her dressing gown. I heard my Dad’s voice from downstairs. He called my mum’s name and told her the police were here. I went back to sleep.

The next morning I asked my dad what the police had wanted. He told me the police hadn’t come, and I must of dreamt it. Well that night the police turned up at about 3 in the morning. My mum stood at the top of the stairs while my dad answered the door. And called her name, and said the police were here.

Wierd eh?

#18

My experience is somewhat similar to RotorHead’s.

When I was 10 or 11 my (step) Grandfather was supposed to come visit my family in Hawaii. His trip was delayed by a minor heart attack. He was kept in the hospital for observation but by all accounts was doing much better, nothing to worry about, etc. He was planning on rescheduling his trip once he got out of the hospital.

The next day, I was getting ready for school and my Mom was doing laundry. I heard a loud, thumping beat - so loud that I asked my Mom what that noise was. She looked at me a little oddly and said, “What noise - the washing machine?” and I told her, “No, that loud thumping.” I was a little concerned because she couldn’t hear it too - it was so loud that it was consuming my hearing, and I couldn’t really tell if was inside my head or not. I heard about 4 or 5 of the thumps and then it was silent. I told my Mom that the noise had stopped. A few seconds later it started again but only for 3 or 4 thumps. When it ended the second time, that was it. My Mom probably thought I was being a weird kid, maybe making things up.

About 10 minutes after my hearing the thumps, our phone rang. My Aunt called to say that Grandpa had suddenly had a very strong heart attack and had “died” but had been shocked back to life after a few seconds. His heart beat just a few more times and then he actually did die. Everyone else in our family was there with him, except for me, Mom and my Step dad. My Step dad was on another Island at the time doing some training. He didn’t have any means of communication and did not know that his Dad was in the hospital. Around the same time that I was hearing things, my Step dad went to the medic with chest pains - he thought he was having a heart attack.
My Mom thinks that it was Grandpa’s “way of saying goodbye”. I guess I just attribute it to how powerful thoughts can be. I asked my Mom a few months ago if she remembers me asking her about hearing those things. She remembers it as clearly as I do and still believes he was communicating with us.

I’ve also had a few instances of deja vu - but they were inconsequential. I can be having a conversation with someone and realize that I’ve already heard this exact conversation and that I know word for word what they’ll say. It’s only happened a few times, and once it was about ordering pizza :stuck_out_tongue: so I don’t think I’m getting earth-shattering premonitions or anything.