Precognition?

My Mom came to visit over Memorial Day weekend. I'd been looking forward to her Sunday and Monday visit, partly because we'd planned to go to a Merchant-Ivory movie, "Before the Rains" (I love their visually stunning movies, most of which are set in India) and then to have dinner at our favorite Indian buffet -- kind of an India themed outing. I knew nothing about the movie, other than its producers and its setting.

Strangely, Sunday morning, I began to be upset about something, dreading something. I was tired, though I'd had a good night's sleep. I couldn't figure out what I was so concerned about. I checked in with myself, checked in with my guides. It didn't seem to be about me, or Mom, or my husband, or... well, anything I could think of. I began to get a headache. It was bad enough that my husband asked if I even still wanted to go to the movie, and I replied that yes, I still wanted to see it.

But Mom came, and we drove down to Menlo Park to find the movie theater, early, of course, because Mom's like that. (Yes, that annoyed me a little, but hey, the point is to hang out together, and maybe it was better to hang out away from home, so it was really fine, except that my body just wanted to be sitting at home.) We had an hour to kill, so we just walked up and down the main street of the town, window shopping (Menlo Park the kind of town where most everything is closed on Sunday, anyway.) And though I really like being outside, and it was a perfect day, cool and sunny, and everyone was getting along famously, I just felt worse and worse.

Anyway, it finally came time to go to the theater, and we found seats. Now there was another 15 minutes to wait, this time in light too dim to read (and I always have a book for waiting times). Generally, I like dim light, but the dim fluorescence hurt my head so much that I had to keep my eyes closed to avoid the pain, which at this point almost made me feel nauseous.

The trailers began, and at least I could open my eyes, because the lights had gone out. The nausea dissipated, but my head still hurt. The movie began. About half an hour into the movie (and I'm not giving away a lot here, because the movie keeps you guessing long after this), one of the main characters, and a very sympathetic one at that, commits suicide. Immediately, I felt better! What was going on?

In a word, precognition. In his wonderful book, "Entangled Minds", Dean Radin describes both individual experiments and meta-analyses of many experiments on precognition -- and finds the odds against the existence of presentiment varying from greater than 320 to 1 down to 25 to 1, depending on the study.

Here's one study:

Dick Bierman, at the University of Amsterdam, used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study the blood flow in 10 adult volunteers, as follows:

"... participants located inside an fMRI were asked to look at computer-projected images. After each picture, they were asked to remain as calm as possible, to not think about the pictures they had already seen, and to avoid anticipating the upcoming pictures. the pictures in his test inclded 18 erotic, 18 violent, and 48 calm images. the pictures were selected at random on each sucessive trial. Each trial began with the participant looking at a fixed point on an otherwise blank screen for 4.2 seconds, then a picture appeared for 4.2 seconds, and then the picture disappeared and the trial continued with a blank screen for 8.4 seconds...

"When all the data were in, he examined the daya from males and females separately because he expected tat the responses to the emotional pictures might depend on gender...

"The results showed presentiment effects in most of the individual brains... For females there was a significant presentiment effect for erotic images (odds against chance of 25 to 1) and for violent images (odds of 50 to 1). For males, there was no difference for the violent images, bt there was for erotic images (odds of 50 to 1).

"Lest we forget what's going on in this experiment, it's useful to be reminded what these results mean: The brains of both men and women were activated in specific areas before erotic pictures appeared, even though no one knew in advance that those pictures were about to be selected. In oter words, the brain is responding to future events."

So next time you feel weird, or crummy, and can't point to something that relates to you to explain it, consider that you may be feeling the future!