Sam Knight is a writer at The New Yorker, based in London. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Financial Times, Harper’s and Grantland. ‘The Premonitions Bureau’ is his first book.
Slogan: “Predictions are impossible – and they keep coming true.”
But what do we mean by a premonition? The Cambridge Dictionary defines a premonition as “afeelingthat something,specialsomethingunpleasantgoes toto happen.”
Synonyms
Feeling (EMOTION)
Omen literary
Premonition formal
What is the difference between premonition and foreknowledge?
Precognition is a feeling of precognition that comes about in a “paranormal” way; for example through map reading or a psychic dream or clairvoyance. On the other hand, a premonition is simply a feeling, however powerful, that something is about to happen – usually it means something bad.
The Premonitions Bureau tells a story that began with tragedy.
Background: The Tragedy of Aberfan October 21, 1966
Aberfan is a mining village near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. There was a huge mining tip on a mountainside above the village, Tip Number 7, and this tip had a natural spring that rose below it and bubbled out into a stream that flowed down into the village below.
Heavy rains had led to a buildup of water in the tip, until it suddenly collapsed one morning and slid down the hill. A ten-meter wave of coal slurry not only hit a row of houses, but also Pantglas Junior School, killing 116 children and 28 adults, 5 of whom were the children’s teachers.
The ensuing inquiry firmly blamed the National Coal Board, which had received several previous warnings about the instability of this particular mine dump, number 7 after it was constructed in 1958, against regulations that mandated that no coal dump be mined on top. a spring, but the NCB had repeatedly failed to take action.
After this tragedy, a high-profile psychiatrist and psychologist called John Barker went to Aberfan to try and support the bereaved. Then he began to receive messages from people who had premonitions of this disaster. Most tragic of all was a premonition of one of the children who had died at school and had become worried when she told her mother about a dream she had had the previous night.
“Mommy, I’ll tell you about my dream last night.” Her mother kindly replied, “Darling, I don’t have time. Tell me again later.” The child replied, “No mommy, you have to listen. I dreamed that I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come over it.’
Two other children had apparently drawn pictures of the avalanche before it happened.
John Barker, then senior psychiatrist at a sadly derelict mental hospital he was modernizing, was deeply moved by the extraordinary reports he had received in the aftermath of this tragedy.
He decided, with the help of a newspaper, The Evening Standard, to set out to collect and collect other premonitions. How common were they? How did they manifest? Can they be recorded and used to provide early warning of impending disaster?
“A more predictable existence is, in theory, a less frightening existence anyway,” writes Sam Knight of Barker’s motivation. “Societies have always longed for prophets or for people who claim to look around the next corner.”
One day, John Barker received two premonitions about himself that seemed to suggest that his own death was imminent…
I won’t give any spoilers except to say that these premonitions turned out to be correct.
“It’s a story that is both elegant and eccentric, vividly depicting that brief moment in the 1960s when extrasensory perception was on the verge of mainstream acceptance. It’s also quietly terrifying, a reminder that even those who can see the future have no hope of avoiding it.”
Source The New York Times
Cassandra’s curse
The so-called gift of prophecy, assuming we accept that such potential exists, will feel as good as a curse. It’s called Cassandra’s Curse for a reason.
Cassandra (or Cassandra) was a tragic figure in Greek mythology; a Trojan princess, a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, and a priestess of the sun god Apollo. Apollo had given her the gift of prophecy, but when she subsequently rejected his sexual advances, he was unable to revoke the gift. He turned it into a curse so that Cassandra would see and speak the truth, only to be never believed.
Cassandra warned the Trojans to send Helen home immediately after Paris ran away with her and took her to Troy and took her from her husband Menelaus in Sparta. Kassandra had warned the Trojans that this would spell disaster for them all. They didn’t listen.
Then the Greeks came and besieged the land for ten years. Kassandra had warned them not to bring the giant wooden horse into the city. Again they did not listen. Greek warriors hid in it, and at night they crawled out, opened the gates and let all the Greeks in.
A massacre followed; the sack of Troy. The city fell. Cassandra, along with all the other surviving Trojan women, was first raped by Ajax, then carried away as a slave to Agamemnon and killed by his queen Clytemnestra when she returned with him to his own kingdom of Mycenae. Cassandra knew her own fate, but she could do nothing to save herself, while Helen was forgiven by her husband and taken home to be reinstated as his wife.
You could say it was Helen who was really the Trojan horse.
The name Cassandra has therefore come to mean a person whose accurate prophecies, generally about impending disaster, are not believed.
This old story from The Iliad, like this new book, The Premonitions Bureau, highlights the problem with predictions. If the future exists so that predictions can be made, what can be done about it? If the future does not exist, how is prediction possible? Some would say that the future, which is discovered, can sometimes be changed.
Actual predictions are rarer, but premonitions are not uncommon. John Barker believed that it was at least as common among the population as being left-handed, the experience of a premonition suggesting that we are all more connected than we understand or can logically explain.
The Premonitions Bureau is an intelligent, understated and quietly compelling book. It raises big questions with many fascinating, but often deeply sad anecdotes.
The book has been criticized by some reviewers for not offering a clear conclusion, but this is in the nature of the subject matter, and at least one conclusion can be drawn from this story that is obvious.
So what is the conclusion to draw?
John Barker had hoped that a Premonitions Bureau could help save countless lives through the agency of an official, centralized paranormal alert system. But this was never a practical possibility. Why not? A premonition can be an intensely powerful feeling, but it will usually, if not always, lack detailed information sufficient for anyone to act on it in a timely manner, even if they could and had the means to do so.
A true personal premonition
June 14, 2016
I was away from home in Carlisle because of my family’s graduation. We were having some quiet time in the mid-afternoon and I was playing with my tarot cards when I got a presentation about a terrible accident or impact that was about to happen. I was shown a threatening event involving rage/rage/evil (The Devil), a vehicle (The Chariot), and a shocking impact (The Tower).
My first thought was that we were about to have an accident with the car. Then I decided no, I didn’t feel like that was it. I asked my husband to check the tire pressure before the return journey, and it was fine, and I told my husband, “Whatever it is, I think we’ll find out soon. It will be on the news.”
A few hours later we saw on television the news about the terrorist truck attack in Nice.
“On the evening of July 14, 2016, a 19-ton truck was deliberately driven into a crowd of people celebrating.Bastille Dayon thePromenade des AnglaisinNice, France, resulting in the deaths of 86 people and the injuries of 458 others. The driver wasMohamed Lahouaiej-BouhlelaTunisianliving in France. The attack ended after gunfire, in which Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was shot and killed by police.” Wikipedia.
This experience was neither a premonition nor a foreknowledge. It was a combination of both, or somewhere in between. My feeling of unease did not come out of the blue. It occurred to me while I was looking, quite casually at first in my Tarot cards. I drew the cards The Devil, The Chariot and The Tower all in a row, an unusual scenario in card reading, and knew at a glance that I didn’t like it at all.
But whatever it was, what potential use did it have for anyone? It lacked actionable details, and even if there had been a heap of specifics, there was no outlet, no mechanism, no action or follow-up, as John Barker envisioned when he founded The Premonitions Bureau. And this was his big problem with it.
But if there is hope for all of us – and there is – it is exactly this. That we, as a collective species, have this innate, shared, mysterious human potential to sense what can happen to others, even across great distances, and to feel and care about people we’ve never met and who we will never meet.
