Precognitive Dreams & Premonitions


About four out of ten reported psychic experiences involve some seeming awareness of the future. The term premonition is in general use, and the more clinical word precognition, ('before knowing'), tends to be used by parapsychologists. In descending order of frequency, premonitions come in the form of dreams, waking thoughts, waking imagery and sleep-onset, (hypnagogic), imagery.
We can define a premonition as an experience, (eg dream, waking thought, etc.), which appears to anticipate a future event that could not reasonably have been inferred from information available before the event. The fact that they mainly refer to unpleasant things is reflected in the term premonition itself, which derives from the Latin word praemonere - to warn in advance. Sometimes the person who has the premonition, (the percipient), doesn't know precisely what will happen but has a feeling that something untoward will occur - it's then a foreboding or presentiment.
As both authors have had personal experience with precognition, they in turn, give their own accounts, starting with Dr Hearne:
My own particular interest in this area of parapsychology was thrust upon me as the result of a personal experience. I had never considered myself to be at all psychic, but one day something happened that made me consider that perhaps I had a slight ability in that field.
In 1981, I was living in Hull and used to visit a colleague, Robin Furman, perhaps once a fortnight or so. Robin lived in Grimsby and the journey involved crossing the Humber estuary - before the suspension bridge was opened. It was a journey I was very used to. However on one occasion, as soon as I sat on the ferry, I experienced a strange feeling of concern. I knew with absolute certainty that there would be some untoward event on the ferry trip. It was perplexing - I didn't know exactly what was going to occur - but something would! The feeling was so urgent that I wanted to tell the captain - but a moment's thought made me realize that he'd think I was mad. I could have still got off the boat at that point, but I was fascinated and intrigued by the episode and so remained to see what would transpire. It was rather cold so I sat below decks.
It was the last ferry of the day and darkness was descending rapidly. After about half an hour we were some 200 meters off the landing stage on the other side of the estuary, when there was sharp cry of "Man overboard!" I went up on deck. A man had somehow fallen off the bow of the ship. The captain stopped the engines and people peered into the blackness. There was no sound. The victim's young wife stood, shocked, holding a young baby in her arms. Everything was silent. As the minutes passed, we assumed the man had been swept away and drowned.
Eventually the engines were started and the boat circled the area. Suddenly, something was seen in the water. It was the man. He was dragged aboard with boat-hooks and a crew member performed mouth to mouth resuscitation on him. The boat docked and the man was rushed off to hospital. To be honest, I was excited about my seeming foreknowledge of the situation.
Next, David Melbourne maintains a strident belief in precognition, because, from time to time, he experiences the phenomenon himself. Following, is an account of one of his own experiences:
Having spent about fourteen years as a firefighter, I ocassionally dream about fires, which seems perfectly natural. Some of these dreams carry messages, while others appear to refresh my memory by bringing back faces of old comrades who had since been forgotten. This indicates that some dreams also serve yet another purpose, that of recharging the battery of our memory. However, to illustrate my point about precognition, let us examine an extremely vivid dream I had a couple of years ago.
In my dream, I found myself standing just inside the porch of a wooden house, gazing at a fire which had recently started next to the porch door. The fire was beginning to spread up the wall. Looking round, I saw an old-fashioned 'soda acid' type fire extinguisher. This was the kind where one struck a knob causing soda to mix with acid, which generated carbon dioxide gas within the extinguisher, in order to expel the water held within.
I struck the knob, only to find that there was little more than a dribble of water being expelled by the extinguisher. However, being extremely careful, I managed to put out the blaze. Just as the last flame died, the fire brigade turned up with a high pressure hose-reel.
When I awoke, I decided that because the dream was so extraordinarily vivid, it was a must for recording on paper for analysis at a later date. It is worth mentioning, that despite the startling clarity, I did not recognize it as precognitive, although upon waking, the memory was accompanied by a feeling of anticipation.
That same afternoon, observing our local ferry dock, I set off to collect my post. As I was getting into my car, I noticed smoke issuing from my nearest neighbor’s roof - the house was built from Canadian Pine. My neighbor informed me that there was a fire in the cavity of the wall, between the wooden exterior and the plasterboard interior - next to the porch door. He had called the local fire brigade. The sounds of fire cracking away behind the plasterboard were clearly audible.
At the time, all the owner was able to rig up was a garden hose which was supplied from a water tank. The absence of pressure resulted in little more than a trickle from the hose. I ran my hands over the wall, checking for heat, in order to ascertain the exact location and extent of the blaze. The fire seemed to be confined between two wooden partitions, which were about four feet apart.
Knowing that the island's fire crew consisted of part timers, I realized that there might be some delay - the members have to drop what they are doing, then make their way to the fire station, before they can get underway.
During the brief time I was assessing the situation, I was aware that the fire was beginning to get hold and was showing early signs of spreading into the roof. I had to make a snap decision, whether to wait an unspecified time for the arrival of the fire brigade or try containing the blaze with what little resources were available.
With the fire growing louder every second, I decided to punch a small hole in the plasterboard near the ceiling. That way, there would not be enough air to cause any acceleration of burning and at the same time, it would enable me to push the end of the hose through the hole and attempt to extinguish the flames.
The resulting hissing noise, as clouds of steam were being generated, was music to my ears. After a few moments, I instructed my neighbor to punch another hole about a foot below the first one. Again, the sound of hissing was encouraging. And so the procedure was repeated several times, as we worked our way down the length of the plasterboard.
Finally, the crackling ceased, and I decided that it would be safe to tear down the plasterboard to facilitate access to the interior surface. As the first section came away, the fire gave one final burst of defiant flame before being extinguished completely. At that point, the fire brigade turned up with a high-pressure hose-reel.(Continued In Precognitive Dreams & Premonitions Pt 2...) Clearly, my dream had portrayed a vision of the future. Although the events which I had been privileged to glimpse some ten hours earlier were not spectacular, they served a purpose. That same dream came to mind while I was considering whether to tackle the fire myself or not. Somehow, I knew that events would go exactly as they did, and there would be a satisfactory outcome.
Normally, my precognitive dreams are almost inconsequential - reflecting ordinary occurrences in my day to day life. So much so, in fact, that I often experience the feeling of deja vu and recall vague memories of a dream. Perhaps this phenomenon is as a result of each of us acting out part of an unremembered precognitive dream?
Returning to Dr Hearne's experience on the ferry, he found it so intriguing that it changed the direction of his studies, and led to serious research into premonitions which, after fifteen years, remains ongoing. In his own words, he now explains how that event initiated his studies, and the subsequent data uncovered as a result:
When I met my friend at Grimsby station, I told him earnestly of my presentiment. The experience had decided me to alter the emphasis of my parapsychological research from the artificial set up of the laboratory to the real world - where such phenomena are happening naturally.
I asked him if he knew anyone who'd had a premonition. He instantly told of an incredible case concerning his niece Lesley Brennan who - confirmed by witnesses - precognised the Flixborough chemical plant explosion. I began to realize that premonitions were frequent in the population. Surveys in fact show that seven out of ten people accept the existence of premonitions and that over a quarter of the population report that they have actually experienced such things.
As a result of several articles being published about my initial research in several national newspapers, literally hundreds of people wrote to me and completed questionnaires regarding their premonitions. Little research has actually been conducted into premonitions as such. Most scientific effort has gone into laboratory studies involving the statistical analysis of precognition using card or pattern guessing.
The data that I received from percipients showed that nine out of ten of reported premonitions were experienced by females. There was a possibility that a 'reporting bias' was operating in that perhaps men were unwilling to admit to being psychic. I got round that by asking the percipients who else in their family had premonitions. It was still overwhelmingly a female ability. About a quarter said their premonitions were always on a particular theme, such as plane-crashes.
As to the number of premonitions reported by these subjects, four out of ten said they'd had between two and ten, about a third said between 10 and 50 and about a fifth estimated that the total exceeded 50! This data shows that premonitions are not isolated or random phenomena but that they seem to be connected with certain people. Most percipients experienced their first foreknowledge between 10 and 15 years of age. The latency period between the premonition and later event was usually a day and a few weeks. The subjects were administered a personality test and observed to be significantly more neurotic than the 'normal' population. This finding could conceivably indicate that emotionalism (neuroticism) is part of the 'tuning-in' process in these people to enable them to pick up distress elsewhere.
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If premonitions were just a recent phenomenon in history we could be dubious about their reality, but the fact is that they have been reported in all cultures going back to the beginning of written records. Cuneiform-script clay tablets from Assyria and Babylonia testify that dreams including foreknowledge were experienced thousands of years ago. So too, the ancient Egyptians believed that dreams were messages from the gods and that knowledge about the future could be conveyed through the vehicle of the dream.
In fact, in ancient Egypt special temples existed (Serapeums) where dreams could be encouraged or 'incubated'. After fasting and various cleansing rituals the incubant would sleep in the temple and await a special dream - often about the future - which would be interpreted by the 'learned men of the magic library'. Several papyrii have been discovered listing different dream symbols. The notion of 'opposites' in dreams was an early one. Thus, to dream of a birth could refer to an imminent death.
An ancient Indian book of wisdom, the Artharva Veda, dating from about 3000 years ago, commented on premonitory dreams that the time of night that the dream occurs gives a clue as to when the later event will happen. A premonitory dream occurring early in the night will come to fruition later than one occurring near dawn.
The ancient Greeks were also fascinated by dreams. Aristotle pointed out that some apparently precognitive dreams of future illness in people may be 'prodromic' in that the dream may be aware of symtoms that are not yet available to consciousness. Also that some dreams may be self-fulfilling prophecies
The Bible, of course, refers to precognitive dreams. There are about 15 in the old testament - most of which helped change the course of history, and there is the one mentioned earlier in this book of the Pharaoh who dreamed of 7 fat and 7 thin cattle. Joseph decoded it as referring to seven years of abundance followed by 7 years of famine - warning of future events.
Most precognitive dreams concern unpleasant things that will happen. Many of them concern unexpected death to immediate members of a family or persons close to the percipient. Here is such a case:
'I had a recurring dream every night for a week. In the dream my mother, who was dead in reality, paid a visit and told me. 'You will not see Doug and Joy again. They will not be here long'. Doug and Joy were my brother and his wife.
The dream was very disquieting and I wanted to warn my brother but my husband told me not to be so 'silly'. Two days after the last dream I bought the local paper and on the front page were my brother and Joy. They had been killed flying to Spain. I had no idea they had gone on holiday.'
Other premonitions concern disasters but where the victims are not directly linked to the percipient:
'I was in the sixth form at school when I had the first of many, many experiences of seeing unpleasant events in advance. There was a boy in my form whom I didn't know well and he had a younger brother also in my school. The younger brother was about 13. One night, I had a dreadful nightmare in which I was crossing the nearby Lough in a sailing boat with the younger boy. The boat capsized. As it sank I extracted myself from the ropes and rigging, but I could see the young boy struggling to free himself. I tried to free him but was unable to do so. I awoke with a terrible sense of doom and fear.
During the day I met a friend, a lecturer at the university, who was a colleague of the boy's father and told her of my nightmare. That evening she phoned to tell me that the same young boy had apparently tried to cross the Lough that day in bad weather (he was apparently a good helmsman) and his boat had capsized. The boy was drowned.'
While events seem destined to happen, individuals appear to be able to take avoiding actions:
'After having completed my apprenticeship as an aircraft engineer, I left London to work in the midlands with a light aircraft maintenance company. One of my duties was to fly as Observer on air tests, with our Managing Director as pilot. Air testing can be dangerous, as the aircraft is taken to its limits such as stalling, spins and single-engine climbs.
At first I enjoyed the thrill of flying but I soon became dogged by a recurring dream of being sitting in the right hand seat attempting to pilot the aircraft with my boss sat next to me, unconscious. The problem was that I could not fly the plane.
After a while the dream began to haunt me every time I got into a plane to carry out an air test until one day my nerve went and I refused to fly.
The next air test crashed, killing both the Managing Director and the apprentice.'
An especially accurate variety of premonition identified from Dr Hearne's data is the Media Announcement Type. This is where the premonition comes in the form of some kind of public announcement (e.g. TV or radio news-flash, newspaper placard, etc) that is dreamed or hallucinated in some way. Perhaps one in 50 reported premonitions is of this type although many may go unnoticed because the precognitive element is not realized.
Some premonitions seem to be of fairly inconsequential events in the percipient's life:
'I was 20 years old and had just begun a new job as an assistant librarian in Newcastle. I dreamed that a Dutchman came into the library to ask about some Dutch language novels. In the dream I went to the file where such requests were kept and could not find it, but eventually tracked it down to the back room where another assistant was dealing with it.
The next day it did happen. The Dutchman came in about his request for Dutch novels. Instead of searching the file I went straight to my friend in the back room who was indeed working on that request then.'
A small fraction of premonitions actually anticipate happy events.
'I had a dream of someone telling me a horse was going to win, and its name was BEAN something. Over breakfast I asked my husband if he had heard of a horse by that name. He said he hadn't, and we joked about it because I have never had a dream about a horse winning and I am hopeless at picking a winner at anything. My husband sent my son to get the daily paper. My husband said he couldn't see a horse of that name listed.
As I sat down for a coffee at 10.30 I grabbed the paper and straight away I saw the horse listed - BEAN BOY. I was so excited I rang my mother, my sister, my brother-in-law and a friend, Harry, who likes a flutter. they each placed a œ1 bet on the horse. We put œ20 of the mortgage money on it. The horse won (at 7 to 1). I was thrilled.'
Dr Hearne's research approach has been two-pronged. Firstly, he has obtained large numbers of reported premonitions in order to establish categories, frequencies, latency periods, and so on and, secondly, to investigate a few individual percipients very closely.
Barbara Garwell, who lives in Hull, is someone whose premonitions Dr Hearne has studied over many years. Barbara is a very sweet, sincere, Roman Catholic lady in her 60s who has had premonitions since childhood.
She is good at assassinations. We don't mean that she's a Mafioso type - she seems to be able to pick up on major assassinations before they happen. For example, 21 days before the killing of President Sadat of Egypt, Barbara woke from a vivid and violent dream in which she saw some 'coffee coloured' men spray a group of dignitaries with machine guns at a stadium. The scene seemed to be the middle east.
President Sadat was actually killed, with several others, when he was taking the salute at a military parade in a stadium. Soldiers ran from a vehicle to the saluting base and fired kalashnikov guns. Although Barbara could not identify the country, the details were very accurate.
Also, in 1981 Barbara had another assassination dream - this time more symbolic - in which some German SS men featured. A man got out of a limousine. He had a 'pock- marked' face and she 'knew' he was an ex actor. One of the SS men drew a pistol and fired several shots at the actor, who fell.
Again, exactly 21 days after the dream, an attempt was made on the life of President Reagan. - a former screen actor - when he was entering a limousine. John Hinckley, the gunman, had been a member of a neo-Nazi group (the National Socialist party).
Intelligent analysis of both these dreams could, in retrospect, have led to a knowledge of what was soon to happen and to whom.
There are very many other startling premonitions that Barbara has received that are catalogued in Dr Hearne's book Visions of the Future (Aquarian), and her own book Dreams that Come True (Thorsons).
David Melbourne and Dr Hearne are quite sure that chance coincidence cannot explain her premonitions. Another explanation that skeptics put forward is that she selects only good ones to relate from many that do not come true. However, Dr Hearne tested that hypothesis in 1981 by collecting every single premonition she had in that year. Each was entered onto a form and sent to him. There were 52 in all. Two blind judges, (unaware), later rated each premonition for accuracy in any events that happened in the 28 days following. The judges also did the same for a control year, (i.e. not the actual year), but they did not know which.
The premonitions for the correct year had significantly higher scores than those for the control year. But the most interesting phenomenon was the consistent 21 day latency period which came out in several of her major premonitions. That unexpected factor must be important when the theory behind premonitions is gone into.
Some people who have premonitory dreams are fearful that they in some way are causing the later disasters. We don't think that is so. Often, people recognise the same disaster. It is not likely that they all happen to make the same event occur. It is more likely that they passively receive the future information.
It seems that the future is being formed a few months in advance. Major events become 'set', and can be detected by certain individuals, but the element of free will enables people to avoid future fixed events.
The negative attitude of official orthodox science, (which probably dates from the witchcraft era when the paranormal was linked with sorcery), is retarding the proper advance of knowledge in mankind. In fact, science is unscientific and fraudulent in this instance.
If a scientist were to conduct an experiment but refused to include some data because it would not fit in with his or her own theory, that scientist would be castigated for being unscientific. Yet that is precisely what Science does regarding parapsychology. It refuses to face the awkward facts.
There is also a strange breed of authoritarian, censorious people who wish to preserve the status quo - the skeptics. They seem to have a strict belief system of negativity. Such people, of course, are scientific ostriches and do not advance science one iota - they only hinder it. They are a liability to its progress. It is greatly insulting and patronizing for ordinary people to be told by some self-styled skeptic that what they know happened to them didn't really happen at all.
Worrying too, is the great scandal of the scientific journals, which would not even reply to a scientific paper sent in reporting the results of a parapsychological experience.
Ordinary people, as distinct from scientists - who are often blinkered and limited by their strict belief system - know that paranormal phenomena occur. The media, particularly television, which follow people's actual interests and beliefs, have begun to give more exposure to these areas. At one time, the paranormal could only be discussed very late at night - along with sex - programs on the paranormal now occupy peak viewing times. Science is being dragged kicking and screaming into reality.
What is the significance of premonitions? Premonitions, more than any other paranormal phenomena, are shouting to us that our ideas of the nature of the universe and ourselves are completely wrong. Whereas telepathy, say, could just about be explicable within science as we know it, precognition is totally at odds with the present scheme of things. Essentially, it provides an effect (the premonition) before a cause (the event).
Under the rigid system of science that currently prevails such a scenario is 'impossible' and so cannot be true. The trouble is, several things that have been 'impossible' in the past have turned out not to be so. It was 'impossible' that the earth should orbit the sun, or that other planets should exist.
'Standard realism' under which science operates is fine for everyday matters but hardly appropriate for areas such as high energy physics or the paranormal - where ordinary logic does not apply. According to science, premonitions cannot exist in the physical universe. At that point science washes its hands of such phenomena.
The evidence however, tends to suggest, (only physicists and mathematicians are foolish enough to talk about 'proving' something), that foreknowledge exists. In that case, by science's own reasoning, the physical universe cannot exist. The only alternative is that we live in a mind world - a mentalistic universe. Life itself is like a great dream. This is a staggering conclusion and tremendously exciting. It can encompass things like clairvoyance, miracles, synchronicities, coincidences, poltergeists and the whole panoply of the paranormal - where current science can only gape open-mouthed.
After all, when one considers it, it seems incredibly unlikely that we just happen to be alive now, in this perfect environment, just one time round. From this new perspective the concept of reincarnation seems most plausible. Anyone who thinks that science has just about explained everything is totally deluded.
Whereas the stick-in-the-mud skeptics look backwards all the time and wish to impose their scheme of thinking on others, what is needed are scientists who are prepared to throw all existing notions away and rethink things from the viewpoint of living in a mentalistic universe. What are its implications, predictions, hypotheses? Are there young scientists reading this who can progress science in that way?
Consider, then, the implications if an analyst was to interpret accurately a precognitive dream which foretold a specific disaster. If society was prepared to listen and take some form of evasive action, perhaps many lives could be saved. Working with the BBC's Out Of This World program, Dr Hearne identified seven premonitions warning of the 1995 Japanese earthquake!

Authors Details: David F. Melbourne Web SiteDavid F. Melbourne, who lives on a remote Scottish island, has been studying dreams for 25 years and is known all over the world for his accurate dream interpretations. Apart from the general public, he has analyzed dreams for celebrities and famous authors, all of whom have admitted a high degree of accuracy.