Precognition

Precognition

TYPEPsychic ability / cognitive claim

FIELDParapsychology

ALSO KNOWN ASPremonition, second sight

NOTABLE CASEAberfan disaster and the British Premonitions Bureau

STATUSUnverified

Precognition is the reported ability to perceive or know about a future event before it happens, through means that cannot be explained by ordinary inference, information, or chance. It is one of the most widely reported categories of psychic claim, most often taking the form of dreams, sudden feelings of dread or certainty, or fleeting visions that appear to "come true" some time later.

The term is distinct from simple prediction or educated guessing — a precognitive claim specifically involves knowledge that the person had no ordinary way of obtaining at the time.

Types of precognition

Precognitive dreams

The most commonly reported form: a dream, often vivid and emotionally charged, that appears to depict a specific future event in detail, followed by that event occurring in a way the dreamer finds impossible to dismiss as coincidence.

Presentiment

A vaguer, non-visual variant — a physical sense of unease, dread, or unaccountable anxiety in the period leading up to an event, without any specific image or narrative content. Several parapsychological studies have attempted to measure presentiment physiologically, by tracking participants' skin conductance or heart rate in the moments before a random, emotionally charged stimulus is shown to them.

Déjà vu (a related but distinct experience)

Déjà vu — the sense of having already lived through a moment that is in fact new — is often confused with precognition but is generally treated separately, since it involves a false sense of *past* familiarity rather than genuine advance knowledge of what is *about* to happen. Mainstream psychology treats déjà vu as a memory-processing quirk rather than a paranormal claim; it's noted here mainly to distinguish it from precognition proper.

Notable investigations and claims

The Aberfan disaster and the British Premonitions Bureau

On 21 October 1966, a colliery waste tip collapsed onto the Welsh village of Aberfan, killing 144 people, 116 of them children, when it engulfed Pantglas Junior School. In the disaster's aftermath, psychiatrist John Barker collected accounts from bereaved families describing dreams and drawings, made by both children and adults in the days before the disaster, that seemed to foreshadow it.

Struck by these accounts, Barker founded the British Premonitions Bureau in 1966, inviting members of the public to submit premonitions in advance so they could be logged and checked against subsequent events. Over roughly eighteen months, the Bureau collected around a thousand submissions. The large majority did not correspond to anything that later happened, and the small number of apparent hits were not sufficient to prevent any tragedy — the Bureau closed in 1968.

Card-guessing experiments

From the 1930s onward, parapsychologist J. B. Rhine's laboratory at Duke University tested precognition using Zener cards — a deck of five simple symbols — asking participants to guess the order of a shuffled deck before it was dealt. The approach became a standard early template for laboratory psi research, though critics raised persistent concerns about shuffling methods, recording procedures, and statistical interpretation.

"Feeling the Future" (2011)

In 2011, Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem published a set of nine experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, arguing that participants' responses could be measurably influenced by stimuli they had not yet been shown — in effect, a reversed-time version of well-established psychological effects. The paper drew unusual attention for adapting mainstream experimental methods rather than parapsychology's own specialised protocols, and became a flashpoint in psychology's broader replication crisis: subsequent attempts to replicate the findings largely failed, and critics pointed to methodological and statistical issues, including flexible stopping rules and after-the-fact analysis choices.

Scientific perspective

Mainstream science does not recognise precognition as an established phenomenon. Proposed non-paranormal explanations for reported cases include confirmation bias (recalling the "hits" among many dreams and feelings while forgetting the far larger number of misses), the sheer number of dreams a person has over a lifetime making coincidental matches statistically likely, vague or elastic imagery that can be retroactively matched to almost any outcome, and ordinary anxiety or pattern-recognition about a genuinely foreseeable risk (as in the case of Aberfan, where engineering reports had flagged the danger of the tip years earlier).

Related concepts

• Psychic ability generally
• Parapsychology, the field most associated with formal precognition research
• Retrocognition — the claimed mirror-image ability to perceive past events rather than future ones