Jeanne Van Bronkhorst - Premonitions in Daily Life: Working with Spontaneous Information When Rational Understanding Fails You

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

Premonitions in Daily Life: Working with Spontaneous Information When Rational Understanding Fails You 2013 by Jeanne Van Bronkhorst.

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First e-book edition 2013

E-book ISBN: 9780738735221

Book design by Donna Burch

Cover art: Swan: Fancy Collection/SuperStock

Cover design by Lisa Novak

Editing by Connie Hill

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Contents

: What Would You Do?

Part One: Inside a Premonition

: How to Recognize a Premonition

: Exploring Ordinary Premonitions on Your Own

: What Else Could It Be? Questions You Can Ask Yourself

Part Two: Common Assumptions

: Memory, Imagination, and Free Will

: Proof in Daily Life

: Premonitions in Popular Culture

Part Three: Meaning of Premonitions

: But What Does It Mean? Making Sense of Premonitions

: What Does It Say About Me? Premonitions and Self-Identity

: What Do I Do Now? How to Respond to a Premonition

: Who Can I Tell? Finding Community

: The Stories We Tell

: Putting the Psi in Science

: How to Approach Premonitions in a Clinical Setting

: Reading On

Acknowledgments

My heartfelt thanks to Susan Simmons, my good friend and brilliant editor. You alternately encouraged and challenged me, and taught me how to write for an audience larger than one person. This comma , is for you!

Many thanks to Charlie, Evelyn, Julie, Olivia, Phillip, and Roger, who took a chance in sharing their stories. Your warmth, humor, and many insights offer us a glimpse into the twisting, complex, splendid dance between memory and imagination in time.

I am grateful to Angela Wix, acquisition editor, and the Llewellyn staff for discovering and championing my book. I am grateful as well for the dedicated and passionate writers at the Canadian Authors Association, whose encouragement helped me hang in there, keep writing, and find a publisher.

And finally, my warm thanks to B. Alford for offering me a caring and honest appraisal of my first draft, may it rest in peace. Such friendships are rare and to be treasured.

INTRODUCTION

What Would You Do?

Imagine you are sitting in an airplane, dozing over the in-flight magazine as other passengers jostle past to their seats. All around are muted conversations, the soft clicking of overhead compartments being shut, engines idling. But as the plane backs away from the terminal, you wake with a start. In your minds eye you see one of the wheels wobble and fall away as the plane rushes down the runway, and you know the plane will skid and slide off the runway before it finally stops, with passengers and crewincluding youshaken and frightened.

What would you do?

Most people understand that fear of flying happens at any time. Even seasoned travelers know they will have occasional moments of anxiety, and they treat those moments as just thatanxious thoughts that have nothing to do with the actual flight. They push the feeling away, calm themselves with safety statistics, and settle back into their seats.

But if you are reading this book you also know another possibility exists. This sudden worry just might be a premonition, and that possibility brings up questions most people have not considered. What bit of information lets you know this is a warning of imminent danger and not just anxiety in a new form? If you decide your vision is a genuine premonition, what do you do next? Do you notify the pilot, force your way off the plane, warn others to get off the plane with you? Or do you quietly prepare yourself for a frightening but ultimately non-lethal accident? If you trust the warning, can you trust the limited nature of the accident you just pictured? What do you do with an intense and disturbing experience that has no good explanation?

Most people in modern Western culture have been taught that premonitions are not real. Premonitions supposedly belong to a distant past, before the Age of Enlightenment, back when superstitions and magical thinking drove peoples imaginations and beliefs. We have been taught premonitions belong to a pre-rational, pre-scientific time, and we are best off when we keep them safely back there.

It does seem that premonitions challenge everything this culture teaches about the forward direction of time, the law of cause and effect, free will, even what God has intended for us. Many people ask why they should throw away everything they already know about the world for such a rare, fleeting, random event that might never repeat itself.

The Problem with Premonitions

The problem with premonitions is not their rarity. Research has shown premonitions can happen to anyone: men and women, children and adults, scientists and artists, waiters, farmers, police officers, nurses and teachers, business consultants, students, engineers, and ministers, regardless of their personal comfort with them. Most people I know can tell at least one story of a moment in which someonemaybe a friend, maybe themselvesseemed to know what was going to happen before they should have known it.