The Power of Premonitions: How knowing the future can sharpen our lives

by Larry Dossey, MD

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New York: Dutton/ Penguin 2009. 288 pp. $25.95   Refs15 pp.

As always, Larry Dossey brings us an enjoyable feast of facts, personal experiences and discussions in this review of premonitions. The book is divided into chapters reviewing examples of foreknowledge, research explorations of precognition, and then various dissections of the material to appreciate how it informs our lives and our understandings of the world.

As Dossey notes, the collective evidence from research presents results with statistical analyses showing astronomically significant findings. These include explorations of predictions of the order of cards in a deck that haven't been shuffled yet; predictions of electronically generated information; and viewing remote places (that may be many miles away) prior to the time that observations are made by an experimenter dispatched to the randomly chosen location.

As fascinating as the evidence is, it is even more interesting to speculate on explanations for how it is possible for people to transcend the accepted boundaries of future time and perceive that which will occur in seconds, minutes, days or even years later. Dossey succinctly and clearly summarizes evidence and theories from modern physics that show our world to be a place where time is not the linear river we commonly perceive and accept it to be. Modern physicists predict, and their experiments confirm, that interactions of consciousness may occur with matter in ways that clearly cross the supposed boundaries between present and future.

Important philosophical questions are raised by these confirmations of precognition. Dossey points out that some have been troubled by the seeming implication of a predestination in the universe, if we can see what will happen in the future before it happens. This would mean, according to them, that there is no free choice. Dossey's reports, however, show that there are numerous instances where precognitive awarenesses led to people averting the perceived disasters. This has been validated in research as well, with statistics confirming that people avoid traveling on trains and planes that have accidents.

Considering that premonitions often come to people as dream-like images, frequently including dream-like distortions, one could also point out that no predestination need be postulated from premonitions. A person having a premonition that s/he is going to die may just be the way that the unconscious mind puts an exclamation point after the image that is intended by the unconscious as a warning about a dangerous situation where the unconscious mind actually perceives that the person won't die, but creates the image of dying in order to motivate the dreamer to avoid the danger.

Another way of looking at this, not suggested by Dossey, is that precognitive perceptions need not indicate a predestination in the perceived actions. There are reports of retrocognitive perceptions, in which people have glimpses of occurrences in the past. John Gribbin has collected a bunch of these in a book titled 'Time Warps.' I have never heard anyone suggest that because we can perceive events in the past they must have been predetermined. Similarly, there is no reason to suggest that glimpses into the future imply predetermination. These are just windows of awareness across the illusion of the separateness of past, present and future. As meditators, mystics and intuitives of many traditions tell us, all time is Now.

Dossey, as usual, provides a wealth of references for further explorations. In this book, the references are keyed in the endnotes to phrases on relevant pages, the pages being listed in the endnotes. No endnote numbers appear in the text. (What a boon to the author and to copy editors in sorting out the text for publication!)

I warmly recommend this book for anyone interested in premonitions.

Reference
Gribbin, John, Time Warps, New York: Delacorte/ Eleanor Friede 1979.

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