Cases of foreseeing the future - what is the secret?
Cases confirming the reality of the phenomenon of foreseeing the future are easy to find. John Riley from the United States described how he had a premonition on September 11, 1981. He planned to fly a very early flight from Rochester, New York to Chicago, from there to Albuquerque and finally to San Francisco. He got up before dawn and therefore fell asleep as soon as he sat down in his seat on the plane. At 5 hours 40 minutes in the morning he was woken up by a flight attendant who was serving breakfast. During those few minutes of sleep, Riley reported to the flight attendant and the other passengers, he had an incredibly vivid dream, very similar to reality.
Riley dreamed of a helicopter falling like a stone from the sky onto the coastal freeway. Impressed by what he saw, Riley bought the latest local newspapers at every airport along the way, but found no reports of any disaster. It was only when he got to San Francisco and was driving from the airport that the news broadcast interrupted the music broadcast, it reported on the tragedy that happened nearby, in Fremont. The announcer used almost the same words and images in which John Riley described the wreck to his fellow travelers. The helicopter crash occurred six hours after his prophetic dream.
Curiously, when Riley later saw the details of the disaster, they were slightly different from his dream. For example, the weather was actually more foggy. In his dream, Riley apparently visualized the crash based on his first radio news encounter in the future moment that impressed him most emotionally. Since this acquaintance took place through a radio report, his dream was formed by the words of the announcer, but the details of the picture Riley had to draw in his imagination. Thus, he saw more general facts in a dream correctly, because the announcer described them, but there were mistakes in minor details, since they were not mentioned in the radio report, and they had to be invented.
In another case, Arctic scientist Dr. Peter Wadhams described a dream to SPR that he had on May 27, 1994. In a dream, he was in his childhood home, holding a double-barreled shotgun, and performing a series of actions. This vivid dream made a strong impression on Wadhams, but since he had never dealt with any guns, it all seemed rather strange to him. He had a dream just before he woke up at 7.20 in the morning. And an hour later, at breakfast, he saw on TV a report of how the police seized weapons during the raid. The report included a scene with a police officer holding a double-barreled shotgun in his hand and doing the same actions that Peter Wadhams himself did in his dream. It is likely that Wadhams somehow took the future TV news scene and incorporated it into the dream, as is often the case.
The problem with this kind of incident is that often the only evidence is from one person's words. But David Mundell, a Londoner who has vivid and often prophetic dreams, has devised an easy way around this problem. He writes down all his dreams, which seem prophetic to him, and draws sketches of the pictures he saw in a dream, and then he is photographed with this drawing in his hands in front of a bank or other structure, which has a light board showing the exact date and time. Subsequently, he has the opportunity to present these photographs as proof that he really foresaw the event.
Mundell has often demonstrated his remarkable abilities. A classic example is a series of dreams in which he saw "four square lights" rising from parked cars and falling "into a river or onto a runway." A photograph of him with sketches of pictures of sleep in the background of a bank clock indicating the date of an upcoming event was even discussed in a TV interview 24 hours before the predictions came true. The event that Mundell foresaw took place on March 9, 1994, when members of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) fired four grenade launcher shots from cars parked near Heathrow Airport. The mines hit the runway. This unexpected and one-of-a-kind terrorist attack matched the drawing and description of David Mundell with incredible accuracy.
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Lottery problem
People like Mundell are often asked questions: If they have the ability to see so clearly, then why don't they win the lottery by predicting the correct numbers? 1995 Summer - Dave Mundell was invited to television to participate in a program where this idea was tested. Mundell described some of his more mind-boggling dreams, including one that caused him to give up a London-Swansea express train ticket at the last minute, which then crashed. He showed the audience a ticket, which was replaced by the clerk at his insistence. The lottery number guessing experiment included all kinds of prediction methods, from fortune-telling by numbers to fortune-telling by tarot cards. As a result, six numbers were selected and recorded. Unfortunately, none of the participants in the experiment was successful. Only two out of six numbers turned out to be correct among the 7 drawn (out of 49 possible), which slightly exceeds the random level, but this is clearly not enough to win even the smallest prize.
The situation was somewhat better for Margaret Brumley from Darlington. Late one night, going to bed, her husband heard her muttering in her sleep, calling a series of numbers. He woke her up, and Margaret remembered that in her dream she had indicated additional numbers on the lottery ticket, which they usually did not use. The Brumleys decided to trust fate - and guessed 5 out of 6 possible numbers. As a result, they won a large amount of money.
Examples like this teach us a few things. First, attempts to force foresight are rarely successful. It works best when it happens spontaneously. Secondly, almost certainly Margaret would not have remembered what she had dreamed in a dream in the morning: this happened only due to the fact that her husband woke her up in time. Third, Margaret Brumley saw the nearest impending event in her life - the filling of new cells on a lottery ticket - and not what could be considered more emotionally impressive - the moment of receiving the win, when the guessed numbers were confirmed. But the moment of winning was delayed from filling the ticket for several days, which probably played a role during sleep: Margaret's subconscious preferred a less vivid, but closer in time event.
Does this give grounds to believe that the possibility of foreseeing the future increases as the coming event approaches? The research seems to support this conclusion. Several experiments have shown that more than 90% of successful predictions are fulfilled within 48 hours, and less than 3% refer to events that are more than two weeks from the moment of foresight. More than half of the predictions come true throughout the day. Researcher Alan Vaughan from America and British psychic Dana Zohar have convincingly proved this with detailed statistical tests.
Foresight and memory
1993 - Vaughan and Jack Hawke report to SPR about another experiment, according to which foresight acts like memory "in reverse." Recent events are well remembered, but the quality of the recollections quickly decreases as the distance from the event in time increases.
Memory studies conducted by psychologists provide an opportunity to shed additional light on the phenomenon of foresight. Emotionally colored events leave especially vivid memories and are much better remembered even after many years, in contrast to ordinary incidents that do not evoke strong emotions. It is well known, for example, that many people who in November 1963 were over 10 years of age can recall with absolute clarity the moment when they heard about the assassination of American President J. Kennedy. But ask them what they did on a particular day in November 1973 or even 1993, and only a very few will remember something intelligible. Thus, the emotional coloring of the moment is superimposed on the memory and reinforces it.
The same effect can be observed in the case of foresight: emotionally charged events generate more visions and “cast a shadow” from the future further into the past than small everyday events. This is a clear confirmation that memory and foresight operate in a similar way, through the same mechanism in the human mind.
Dissociation
The review, which was published in 1993 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders, is rich in food for thought. Two psychologists from Canada, Colin Ross and Sean Joshi, decided to find out if the phenomenon of foresight is associated with such a well-known mental state as dissociation. They found out that such a connection actually exists - and along the way they found that 17.8% of the population at some point in their lives experienced foresight.
Dissociation is, in essence, the ability of a person to be distracted from the outside world and concentrate more on his inner state, paying so much attention to the inner world that there is a danger of getting lost in it and even beginning to perceive it as reality. Of course, this does not mean that people experiencing dissociation are hallucinating. They are simply more capable of assimilating internal information that is blocked in people who are primarily oriented towards the outside world. Such information may seem like not just an illusion, but valuable and meaningful information.
This is precisely the idea that follows from the data collected by the US parapsychologist William Cox. He analyzed information about the trains that crashed and found that the number of passengers on such trains was significantly less than on other trains at the same time or on the same trains, but on different days, before the disaster. This can only be explained by the fact that people with the ability to dissociate subconsciously felt the impending disaster and decided to take another train or refuse to travel.
Ross and Joshi also drew attention to the recent discovery by psychologists that those who witnessed various paranormal activities (especially people who survived an alien abduction) were often abused during childhood. Skeptics are looking for ways to turn such impressive data into a means of "refuting" unusual phenomena. However, a study in Canada did not find a direct link between child abuse and later experiencing mysteries. Rather, it can be argued that those who suffered childhood abuse develop a good ability to live an inner life, seeking to hide from the traumatic reality of everyday life.
Probably, such people acquire the ability to dissociate and pay more attention to what is happening in their inner world. Sometimes the price of this can be an increased tendency to fantasize, but with the same success can develop a special sensitivity to foresight. Other people, on the contrary, learn to ignore inner experiences, considering them "just a play of the imagination." Trust in one's feelings is considered in modern society to be much less of an advantage than the ability to think reasonably. This suppression of part of the personality creates an imbalance and can be very costly for some of us.
D. Randalls