It’s been revealed by researchers that the majority of premonitions predict events likely to happen within a very short period of time. They believe that women are more receptible, or at least more likely to admit to having them, but premonitions can be experienced by almost anyone. Those who experience premonitions regularly can often discern how long the time delay between the dream and the developing reality is. For instance, on September 15, 1981, Barbara Garwell had a dream involving a prominent Middle Eastern man being shot at a stadium. She was aware her premonition would take 21 days to manifest, and on the 6th day of October, President Anwar Sadat was murdered at a mass ceremony taking place in a stadium.
Other kinds of the premonition phenomenon have appeared in equally strange ways. A notable theory is that mortally important events can trigger mass premonitions where many people in the affected community foresee an impending tragedy. One of these striking mass premonitions occurred at the Marfa colliery in Port Talbot, Wales. One day in 1890 over half of the miners in the town failed to show up for work because of a general uneasiness and feeling of trepidation. Some even reported the ‘smell of death’ arising out of the mine. In total, 87 miners went down to work that day, and none came back up due to an accident in the heart of the colliery. A similar phenomenon was said to have been experienced by numerous passengers previous to boarding the Titanic.
Undoubtedly, the largest modern source of premonition stories has been the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. This event alone has initiated a massive renewal in the belief of psychic forewarnings. There have been extraordinary stories of artists and creative people including the catastrophe in works composed before the fateful day.
A painter and self-confessed non-psychic, Charles Burwell III, created an unusual image between spring and September 2000. The picture depicted a disaster in a city of large pillars, but it caused Burwell so much grief that he chose to not finish it. In a similar circumstance, intelligence agents investigated an Egyptian calendar printed in May 2001. One the page for September, the decorative picture appeared to depict a passenger plane crashing into tall buildings with Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty in the distance behind it.
The World Trade Center case has instigated many premonition investigators to ask for individual experiences leading up to the disaster. A confidential website was started by the British Society for Psychical Research for people to log any experiences about the attack on the World Trade Center, or any other premonition. The concept of a predictions catalog is not anything new; a British Premonitions Bureau was originally set up in 1957. Throughout the first year, over one thousand premonitions were filed, and while they had some proven forewarnings, the bureau was shut down within a few years. Though, the idea does create some logical questions. Those who promote it state that if people logged their ideas, and the public took notice, it would help avoid horrid disasters and unnecessary loss of life. However, it would be unknown how accurate the premonitions actually were.
Many people are skeptical about the integrity of premonitions, and their doubts are based on logical reasoning. Experts suggest that a fair amount of premonitions are created by environment, people’s nature, and probable possibilities. Intuition, instinct, and common sense are just as effective as mystical messages. Other theories state that sheer chance proposes many realistic dreams will come true, at least in part at some point in time.
With many mysteries, people can interpret events in which ever way suits them, but there are still some impressive cases involving the premonition phenomenon. If we can only be warned before a tragic event, then many skeptics would truly be hushed.