Premonitions, Prophecy, and the Case for Foreknowledge

Foreknowledge of disaster is one of the oldest claims in the record, from oracles and prophetic dreams in antiquity to the premonition cases the Society for Psychical Research began collecting in the 1880s alongside its crisis-apparition casework: a dream of a shipwreck the night before news arrived, a sudden dread that kept a traveller off a train that later crashed. These spontaneous cases share the evidentiary weakness of all retrospective anecdote, they are remembered and reported selectively after the fact, and the SPR's own investigators were aware of this even as they catalogued the reports.

Precognition entered the laboratory with Rhine's Duke program in the 1930s, which added a temporal twist to the card-guessing method: subjects guessed a deck's order before it was shuffled, so that any hit could not be explained even by clairvoyant perception of a fixed, already-existing sequence. The claim stayed a minor thread of parapsychology for decades until 2011, when Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem published "Feeling the Future" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reporting nine experiments in which participants' responses appeared to be influenced by stimuli they had not yet been shown, results Bem framed as ordinary psychological effects simply running in reverse.