Sensing the Future

Precognitive experiences can be startling and dramatic, particularly when they’re about a tragic event. Other times they are more of a nudge from the unconscious mind rather than a full-blown scene from a disaster movie. But precognition invariably begs the question: is the future set in stone like yesterday’s headlines?

If you dream that a large-scale disaster is imminent—the crash of a jetliner, for instance—chances are you’re not going to be able to do anything about it. Even if you know the airline, the flight number and the time of the event, it’s unlikely that the airline will ground a plane on the basis of your dream. However, if you’ve got a ticket for that flight, you can change flights or cancel your plans. In other words, you may not be able to prevent a future disaster, but you can alter your involvement in it.

In 1950, Life Magazine featured a story about a church fire in Beatrice, Nebaska that proved to be a stunning example of unconscious precognition and extraordinary synchronicity. A church choir was due to practice at 7:20 PM on March 1. There were fifteen people in the choir and all of them, for perfectly legitimate reasons, were late for practice.

The minister and his family were late because they were doing the laundry, another person had car trouble, someone else was finishing homework. Due to a flaw in the church’s heating system, the church exploded at 7:25 PM. The odds of all 15 choir members missing the opening of practice were later calculated at one in a million.

Unconscious precognitions could also have played a role in why so many passengers cancelled or didn’t show for flights that crashed into the World Trade Center. According to American Airlines records, one hundred and sixty-four reservations were made for flight 11 departing from Boston on September 11, 2001. Sixty-five people canceled their reservations prior to departure, and an additional seventeen were no shows. Similarly, one hundred and sixteen reservations were made on flight 77 that left from Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. that same day. Fifty-four people cancelled their reservations, and three more were no shows.

Some people who worked at the World Trade Center were delayed and late for work, others decided to stay home. Tardiness and absenteeism in the WTC probably weren’t anything unusual, but some people actively sensed the dangers on that day.

A notable example is the case of a Wall Street executive who twice sensed danger at the World Trade Center. One morning in 1993, Barrett Naylor stepped off a train in New York’s Grand Central Station, and had a strong feeling that he should turn around and go home. He listened to his inner voice and avoided the bombing of the WTC. Naylor experienced a similar premonition eight years later. On Sept. 11, 2001, his inner voice again urged him to go home, and he did. Naylor says he regrets not sharing that message with others because it might have saved lives.

Such incidents, when a precognition of disaster was consciously avoided, show that individuals can alter their futures. But if the future is open-ended, what are we actually seeing/feeling when we experience precognition? When you have a reading with a psychic and predictions are made about future events, what is the psychic actually seeing? A probability or a done deal?

Michael Talbot, in his classic book The Holographic Universe, has one of the best answers to this thorny question. In private correspondence with physicist David Bohm, the famous theoretical physicist, the two men discussed Bohm’s most controversial theory. Beneath the stuff of our daily lives, said Bohm, there’s an implicate order that unifies and connects everything. It’s a kind of primal soup out of which everything unfolds, even space and time.

“When people dream of accidents correctly and do not take the plane or ship, it is not the actual future that they were seeing. It was merely something in the present which is implicate and moving toward making that future. In fact, the future they saw differed from the actual future because they altered it. Therefore I think it’s more plausible to say, if these phenomena exist, there’s an anticipation of the future in the implicate order in the present.”