I TOLD YOU SO!
January, 2012

In 1898 Morgan Robertson published his short novel, Futility, about an ocean liner named the Titan that crossed the Atlantic in April, collided with an iceberg and, because of the shortage of lifeboats, resulted in the deaths of many passengers. Fourteen years later, in April, 1912, the Titanic sank under the same circumstances. There were so many other similarities between fiction and reality as to raise the question about the meaning of reality and the nature of premonitions. Indeed, Ian Stevenson recorded nineteen incidents of premonitions that had occurred to persons within two weeks before the Titanic disaster. (see also Transcending the Titanic: Beyond Death's Door by Michael Tymn.)

Whether it’s Julius Caesar’s wife or Abraham Lincoln or Adolph Hitler or Nostradamus, history is replete with accounts of advance warning of impending disaster. So widely accepted was the belief that persons can and do have foresight into events of a cataclysmic and traumatic nature that after the Aberfan Coal Disaster in Wales in 1966, the British Premonitions Bureau was formed. Similarly, a Central Premonitions Registry was created in New York. The purpose of both was to register the premonitions and precognitions of persons so as to discern a pattern and therefore create an advance warning network. It did not work as well as it was hoped since many people reported their dreams after the event, or because they were so personal and trivial as to be meaningless in a larger context.

While premonitions and precognitions are similar in that they give an indication of a future event, there are differences. Premonitions (Latin – praemon?re “to warn before”) are more likely to be feelings, such as depression and uneasiness, about a future occurrence. Precognition is foreknowledge and is primarily a mental construct.

Bonnie McEneaney, in her book Messages: Signs, Visits and Premonitions from Loved Ones Lost on 9/11, has collected sufficient anecdotal information from the survivors of those who perished in the World Trade Center disaster to validate the belief that there is a connection between persons that transcends this life. While McEneaney records observations of signs and portents that lead the survivors to believe that their loved ones still exist in some form, it is the detailing of the premonitions that is most interesting. In many cases it was not specific insight, but rather a sense of foreboding. In one case it was sufficient for one person, on his way to work,  to turn around in Grand Central Station and arrive back home in time to see the collapse of the South Tower.

Several years ago I visited the aesclepeion at Epidaurus where patients were placed in a drug-induced sleep known as "enkoimesis,” while snakes, sacred to the god Aesclepius, slithered around them. When they awoke, they told their dreams to the priest-physicians who then prescribed the remedy for their ailments. Occasionally the dreams foretold other events in the lives of the percipients. Whether it was dream interpretation in ancient Egypt or Vision Quests in the sweat lodges of Native Americans, it is part of the human experience to seek and accept that which comes from beyond the dimension of sight and sound.

The nature of premonitions and precognition is under continuous scrutiny and I will leave it to scientists like Dale Graff to present a more detailed analysis of the phenomenon. Whether it is an aberration of the mind, or a warp in the space-time continuum, or a disturbance in the Force or Collective Unconscious remains to be seen. But it is not something to be ignored. When humans were more intuitive than empirical our perspective on existence was not so limited. We will continue to be amazed at how humans process eternity.                                  

Dr. Harry L. Serio