Human control of Premonitions

Although premonitions are impossible, they come true all the time. Two nights before the Aberfan disaster in 1966, when 116 children died as an amount of coal waste slid across a Welsh mining village, a 10-year-old girl called Eryl Maijones, had a premonition saying “ I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it”. She told her mother shortly before her death.

John Barker, a  42-year-old a eccentric consultant psychiatrist, proceeded to participate in a flashy experiment launched by the Evening Standard under its then editor Charles “Chilly Charlie” Wintour. It asked readers to write into “The Premonitions Bureau” to report their dreams or precognitions of future events. The bureau did not work very well – only 5 per cent of the predictions came true but it came to haunt Barker.

The percipients drawn to the bureau including a telephone exchange operator and a film technician, were so strange that interviewer David Frost infuriated Barker buy refusing to put some on air after observing them in the green room of his ITV television show.

 

Knight a British writer for the New Yorker and a former contributor to the FT Weekend Magazine,  amused scrutiny of postwar Britain, from sensational Fleet Street to rundown Victorian asylums filled with abandoned patients, small detail to paint on a powerful canvas, “ The hospital consumed 865 pints of milk per day. The grounds were infested with feral cats, which were a source of ringworm — nurses smoked constantly in part to block out Shelton’s all-pervading smell of a house locked up for years, in which stray animals had occasionally come to piss”. Knight traces the psychological and physiological roots of these intuitions. We are not just observers, we constantly attribute meaning to phenomena and imagine what will happen next in order to make cognitive sense of the world.

Many precognitions tell of death and disaster.  There is a generation gap between general-purpose clairvoyance and personal demise.  If you become obsessed with your own death, you can bring it on.

The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story by Sam Knight, Faber £14.99, Penguin Press $28, 256 pages.