Premonition

The Mystica Encyclopedia · All entries · Rewritten September 2026

Premonition at a glance

Definition

The word premonition comes from Latin praemonere, "to warn in advance." In everyday use it means a strong feeling that something is about to happen, usually something bad. In parapsychology, a premonition is a spontaneous, often emotional form of precognition, the claimed ability to perceive future events. Premonitions may take the form of vivid dreams, sudden anxieties, visions or bodily sensations. Some researchers distinguish them from presentiment, a supposed unconscious physiological reaction to a future stimulus. Unlike deliberate forms of divination, such as astrology or tarot, premonitions are typically unsought: they arrive unbidden and are only recognized as meaningful when a later event seems to confirm them.

History and famous cases

Warning dreams fill ancient literature, from the dreams of Pharaoh interpreted by Joseph in Genesis to Calpurnia's dream before the murder of Julius Caesar reported by Plutarch and Suetonius. In the modern era, anecdotes multiplied. A story attributed to Abraham Lincoln, told years later by his friend Ward Hill Lamon, describes a dream of a corpse lying in state in the White House shortly before his assassination; historians note that the account is secondhand. Morgan Robertson's 1898 novella Futility, about a huge liner named Titan that sinks after striking an iceberg, is often cited as a premonition of the Titanic disaster of 1912, although skeptics point to the general similarity of ocean liners of the period.

In 1927 the aeronautical engineer J. W. Dunne published An Experiment with Time, arguing from his own dream diaries that dreams contain elements of the future as well as the past. The book was widely read and influenced writers such as J. B. Priestley.

Aberfan and the Premonitions Bureau

On October 21, 1966, a colliery spoil tip collapsed onto the Welsh village of Aberfan, killing 144 people, most of them children at the local school. Afterward, the psychiatrist John Barker collected reports from people who said they had foreseen the disaster. With the science journalist Peter Fairley of the London Evening Standard, he set up the British Premonitions Bureau to gather premonitions in advance, in the hope of preventing future disasters.

During roughly eighteen months the bureau received hundreds of reports, scored for unusualness, accuracy and timing. A small number were counted as hits, most coming from two regular correspondents. The project ended in 1968, after Barker's death, and no disaster was ever prevented by it. Similar registries were later set up elsewhere. Critics observed that the bureau's experience illustrated a basic problem: even when a few reports seemed to match later events, they were rarely specific enough about time and place to allow anyone to act on them in advance.

Scientific research and skepticism

Laboratory research on precognition, from J. B. Rhine's card-guessing experiments at Duke University in the 1930s to Daryl Bem's 2011 paper "Feeling the Future," has produced claims of positive results, but these have not survived scrutiny. Rhine's methods were later judged seriously flawed, and several independent attempts to replicate Bem's experiments failed, fueling a wider debate about research standards in psychology. There is no accepted scientific evidence that precognition is real, and it would conflict with the principle that effects cannot precede their causes.

Psychologists offer several explanations for convincing premonitions. With millions of people dreaming every night, some dreams will match later events by chance alone. People remember the rare hits and forget the many misses, and memories of a dream or feeling can be reshaped after the event to fit what happened. Worries about loved ones or dangers are common, so they are sometimes followed by bad news. Unconscious inference from subtle cues can produce a genuine but ordinary sense of foreboding, and cryptomnesia can make forgotten information feel like a revelation.

Premonitions in culture and belief

Belief in premonitions remains widespread and is found in many religious and folk traditions, where warning dreams may be seen as messages from God, ancestors or spirits. In modern spiritual circles, premonitions are often linked with intuition, clairvoyance and extrasensory perception. They also feature in countless novels and films. Whatever their explanation, the experience of a premonition can be emotionally powerful, and people who are distressed by recurring fearful dreams or anxieties may benefit from talking with a trusted person or a health professional.

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