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Premonitions: How and Why You Can Sometimes See the Future

Premonitions: How and Why You Can Sometimes See the Future

Last updated on: November 8, 2026 at 5:54 am by Tom Rapsas

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Premonitions: How and Why You Can Sometimes See the Future 2026-11-08T05:54:23-07:00 Tom Rapsas

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A sudden premonition stops a traveler in her tracks, sensing a danger her mind can’t explain. Image by Gemini.

Have you ever felt the jolt of a premonition? It’s the intense feeling that something good or bad is about to happen, as if you suddenly got a glimpse into the future. And the funny thing is, premonitions don’t so much originate in your head as they do in the body—as if your gut has a sort of intuitive sixth sense.

In The Power of Premonitions, the visionary author Larry Dossey, who passed away a few months ago at the age of 85, describes them as “a literal forewarning.” They usually come in one of two flavors:

Premonitions can be mundane. Your phone rings and you know an old friend is calling before you even look at your screen—or you suddenly think of someone you haven’t thought about in months, only to receive a text from them saying, “I was just thinking about you.”
Premonitions can be dramatic. Like when a person refuses to board a doomed airplane sensing it will never reach its destination—or when days before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln dreamt that he visited the East Room, saw a casket, and was told the president was dead.

Behind the stories of premonitions lie a deeper set of questions**: Where are these glimpses of the future coming from?** Are they mere coincidences? A sixth sense that we can only occasionally access? Or messages from a universal consciousness, a place where the rules of past, present, and future don’t exist?

One theory of premonitions comes from Albert Einstein.

Before Einstein arrived on the scene, time was seen as a universal clock, ticking the same way for everyone. The past was gone, the present was constantly moving, and the future was to come. But in his theory of relativity, Einstein suggested that space and time were in fact woven together into a four-dimensional fabric called spacetime.

It’s complicated, but the takeaway of his spacetime theory is this: All time already exists, but the human brain is only able to recognize the past and present moments. Yet, occasionally, glimpses of the future slip into our stream of consciousness, resulting in premonitions. Dossey explains:

Past, present, and future are happening simultaneously, laid out in what physicists call a block universe. “Future knowing” would be a misnomer because the future and the present actually exist at the same time.

If this is true, why don’t we have premonitions all the time? While these glimpses of the future occasionally sneak into our thoughts, this knowledge would quickly overwhelm us. So, our brain acts as a filter, what the philosopher Henri Bergson referred to as a “reducing valve.” If our brains had to constantly process the “spacetime” coined by Einstein, we would be paralyzed by too much data and be unable to function.

A similar perspective comes from David Bohm.

Renowned quantum physicist David Bohm proposed that the physical world we experience, or what he called the “Explicate Order,” is only the outer surface of reality. Beneath it lies the “Implicate Order,” a deeper level of reality, where space and time no longer divide things, and where “deep down, the consciousness of mankind is one.”

In Bohm’s view, reality operates much like a hologram: Every individual part contains information about the entire whole. Because past, present, and future events are continuously enfolded together, a premonition isn’t miraculous. Instead, it’s a moment when information that already exists simply emerges into our everyday awareness.

As fellow physicist Henry Margenau explained, because each individual mind is an expression of what’s called the universal mind, “all things and processes—past, present and future—are open to its grasp.” A premonition is simply the human brain tuning into a future event that has in fact already happened.

How do you know when a premonition is legitimate?

What we sometimes think of as premonitions can also be our own paranoia or delusional thinking. So how do we know the difference? Fortunately, Dossey offers a list of four ways to judge our premonitions. Think of it as a screening process that can help inform you whether you should pay attention to what the future might be telling you or brush it off.

Four Types of Premonitions You Should Pay Attention To

#1. Pay attention to premonitions that are accompanied by physical symptoms.

Dossey believes that physical symptoms can alert us to premonitions that should be seriously considered. Something as simple as a headache that accompanies our premonition should cause us to stop and take notice. I’m reminded of the story of the New York man who had told his wife about a series of premonitions of his impending death. On the morning of September 11, 2001, he had a sudden and severe attack of vertigo—but insisted on going into the office, only to die when the second plane hit the Twin Towers.

#2. Pay attention to premonitions if they are intrusive and insistent, as if clamoring for attention.

Dossey tells the story of the great psychologist Carl Jung who, while returning home from out of the country by train, had the overpowering image of someone drowning. The image was so strong Jung couldn’t focus on the book he was reading. When he reached his estate, his grandchildren ran up to him and informed Jung that one of the boys had fallen into the deep end on his lake and had almost drowned.

#3. Pay attention to a premonition when it indicates death, no matter how fuzzy the details may be.

Dossey writes of psychologist Jerome S. Bernstein, who has described many premonitions that preceded tragedies, and believes a premonition is “a literal message to take action, for we may not have a second chance.” For instance, there’s the story from a few years ago about a Utah woman who, while at work, had a premonition that her husband was in grave danger. She rushed home to find him pinned underneath the SUV he was working on, arriving just in time to save his life.

#4. Pay attention to premonitions when they seem intensely real.

This often happens in dreams, when the dream is so intense and realistic you have the urge to write it down or share it with others. I once had a very real dream that a friend’s wife was standing outside an old Western courthouse, waiting to see a judge. In the dream, my friend had passed away, and his wife was waiting for the courthouse to open so she could collect on his will. It was later that same day that I received word that my friend had passed away, only hours earlier, in a tragic workplace accident.

Whether premonitions are glimpses of a universe where all time exists at once, or signals from a deeper universal mind, they remind us that our awareness extends far beyond our conscious thoughts. The next time your gut gives you an unexpected tug, don’t brush it off too quickly. Pause, listen, and pay attention to what your body and intuition might be trying to tell you. You just might be seeing the future.

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