The Power of Premonition (part 1)

Amanda, a young mother living in Washington state, awoke one night at 2:30 a.m. from a nightmare. She dreamed that a large chandelier hanging above her baby’s bed in the next room fell into the crib and crushed the infant. In the dream, as she and her husband stood amid the wreckage, she saw that a clock on the baby’s dresser read 4:35 a.m. The weather in the dream was violent. Rain hammered the window, and the wind was blowing a gale. The dream was so terrifying she roused her husband and told him about it. He laughed, told her the dream was silly, and urged her to go back to sleep, which he promptly did. But the dream had so frightened Amanda that she went to the baby’s room and brought the child back to bed with her. She noted that the weather was calm, not stormy as in the dream.

Amanda felt foolish—until around two hours later, when she and her husband were awakened by a loud crash. They dashed into the nursery and found the crib demolished by the chandelier, which had fallen directly into it. Amanda noted that the clock on the dresser read 4:35 a.m. and that the weather had changed. Now there was howling wind and rain. This time, her husband was not laughing.Amanda’s dream was a snapshot of the future—down to the specifi c event, the precise time it would happen, and the change in weather. Such a premonition is not unusual.

Surveys show that about three-fourths of Americans experience what they call ESP, or extrasensory perception.Common among these events are premonitions, which often occur in dreams. They also happen in waking hours as a hunch, an intuition, or a gut feeling that something is going to happen.

The Pattern That Connects

Why do premonitions exist? Why does any human ability exist, such as our capacity to see, hear, smell, touch, walk upright, run, and think? When biologists want to understand why a trait has arisen, they always ask, "What is it good for? What purpose does it serve?" If a trait helps us to stay alive and reproduce, it is likely to become embedded in our genes and passed down through succeeding generations.So it is with premonitions. "Premonition" comes from the Latin prae, "before," and monere, "warn."

A premonition is literally a forewarning, usually of something unpleasant, such as a looming natural disaster or an impending threat to our health. Premonitions, therefore, help us survive, and survival is the great theme running through the premonitions that people experience. True, there are lesser themes. For example, people may see the winning lottery numbers in a dream; they may "just know" where to fi nd the last remaining parking space in downtown Chicago; or they may intuit the exact moment when a long-lost friend is going to call on the phone. But incidents such as these are swamped by the jaw-dropping accounts of people whose lives were saved by their ability to see beyond the present.

The actual premonition may be nothing more than a subtle feeling that something is not quite right, leading them to cancel a plane trip the day of its crash; or to anticipate a road hazard lying around a bend in time to avert it; to schedule a medical test that leads to the discovery of a problem that might have been fatal had it gone undetected; or to take innumerable other intervening actions.In addition to helping us survive, premonitions deliver clues to something else: an element in the great "pattern that connects," as ecologist-philosopher Gregory Bateson put it. Premonitions suggest that we are linked with every other consciousness that has existed, does exist, or will exist, that we are part of something larger

than the individual self. Many outstanding scientists have realized this. The renowned physicist David Bohm, for example, said, "Each person enfolds something of the spirit of the other in his consciousness."

Nobel physicist Erwin Schrödinger believed that minds do not interact with one another like separate billiard balls but are in some sense united and one. "To divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless," he said. "There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousness . . . in truth there is only one mind."

By linking minds across space and time, premonitions reveal the oneness of which these scientists speak. They suggest that in some sense we are infinite or nonlocal in space and time. When we deeply sense this, we may become "transparent to the transcendent," as mythologist Joseph Campbell put it. The profound spiritual contribution of premonitions often goes unnoticed by those who regard them only as a nifty tool to glimpse the future. People conceive the transcendent in a variety of ways, of course—God, Goddess, Allah, a universal intelligence, the Absolute, an all-pervasive sense of beauty and order, and so on. It is not important how we language the transcendent.

What matters is that we recognize our identity with it. As physicist Freeman Dyson put it, "There

is evidence . . . that the universe as a whole is hospitable to the growth of mind . . . Therefore it is reasonable to believe in the existence of . . . a mental component of the universe. If we believe in this mental component of the universe, then we can say that we are small pieces of God’s mental apparatus." As Gregory Bateson said, "The individual mind is immanent, but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages outside the body, and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology." Today most scientists claim that our brain somehow produces consciousness (never mind how), which, they say, is confined to our physical body and limited to the present moment. Premonitions say otherwise; they suggest that our consciousness may work through our physical brain but that it is neither produced by the brain nor confined to it.