I can’t remember when a premonition saved me, but I certainly can remember dozens or hundreds of times when I had an irrational fear that something would go badly but it didn’t.

I mean, nothing life-saving or earth-shattering, and I don’t put too much stock in it now because memory’s a funny thing in general, but I’ve had ‘premonitions’.

Biggest one was the period when I went to boot camp as a reservist. I had a dream several months prior about a guy saying ‘Welcome to [specific base], welcome to hell’ in a thick French accent outside of a barracks. I wasn’t thinking about joining at the time. After I decided to join, got sent to boot camp and went to have a smoke on my first morning. Lo and behold, members of the Quebequois platoon that arrived the week prior were out there, and take a wild guess what I heard?

Idk, brain’s making predictions all the time and sometimes it gets an eerie hit. We don’t think about the ones that don’t come to fruition as much.

Nah. Most things can be logically explained.

I was taking a little me time at a cabin. Pretty remote, a 45 minute drive down a dicey mountain road to the beginning of civilization (a convenience store and a church). I was there solo to unwind.

One night I made a nice little fire down a hill from the cabin, maybe 40 yards away. Around 10, I put the fire out and started back up to the cabin. The porch lights were on and throwing some nice ambient light, so I decided not to turn my headlamp on and harsh the vibe with blue light. I couldn’t easily see the ground where I was starting from, but the path was well-maintained gravel and I was familiar the terrain.

After ten feet, I froze. I’m a person who struggles to trust my instincts sometimes. But my lizard brain was picking up on something not consciously perceptible, and I have never before or since had every part of my screaming that something was wrong.

I turned on my headlamp and saw, about twenty feet up the path, a fucking rattlesnake. Then I immediately started second-guessing myself. Do we even have rattlesnakes in this part of the country? And it didn’t even rattle, isn’t that their whole thing? Also it’s night, aren’t they active in the daytime with the sun? I stared without moving an inch, barely even breathing, just silently gaslighting myself. After a few minutes it continued on its way and finished slithering across the path back into the woods.

I ran up the rest of the hill and into the house. Promptly grabbed my phone and typed “rattlesnake [regional area I was in]” in the search bar. So, it turns out there are rattlesnakes there, and yeah their pattern is exactly the same as the one I saw. Something primal in my body knew, and I’m really glad I listened to it.

It’s impossible for me to distinguish between wise intuition or unnecessary paranoia so I generally turn off all those speculative type of thoughts that are not based in science or reason or logic.

But yeah I do get a lot of thoughts that I think are intuition or they might be paranoia, I don’t know what to make of it because I’ve been wrong so many times in the past. Usually just paranoid probably. But I always live cautiously, so so far so good, no harm has come and I’ve avoided many dangers I suppose.

Multiple times.

• Driving to the wake for a recently deceased friend, had been stopped at a light. Light goes green, and as I put my foot down to move, I hear her voice yell STOP. I take my foot off the gas, driver behind me honked as a truck blasted through the intersection, easily going double the speed limit. I went through the intersection, pulled over and had a small panic attack. The car that honked was someone also going to the wake, their been telling the close call story as I pulled into the parking lot. They maintained the truck came out of nowhere, had I not stopped I’d have been t-boned from the driver’s side.

• Travelling solo around Europe. I was in Germany, and due to go to the Netherlands to visit family. I’d given them my itinerary, so they knew my arrival time and didn’t have to worry. (Oma was delightfully fretful for me travelling alone.) When I got the train station I was uneasy waiting for my train and after a bit of indecision I hopped a train that went left earlier and took a longer, more scenic route. Arrived at my Oma’s to a full house of aunts, uncles and cousins. My originally chosen train had derailed.

• Driving the highway southbound on Vancouver Island, leapfrogging with three other cars. Had the sudden urge to get off the highway, and found this delightful little place where I had some lunch and relaxed. Got back on the road, and traffic was barely moving. After a while, drove past a three car wreck, the cars I’d been leapfrogging with earlier. It was ugly and I learned later there were fatalities.

If I have a sudden urge to do something other than what was planned, I listen. It’s served me well over the years.

No. I have had dreams that happened later in real life, precognitive (I used to set an alarm early, jot them down, and go back to sleep.) Not big, predictable events. I’d dream of someone I hadn’t seen in years, seeing them in a location, and then see them. Sometimes comically. Never in any way that was helpful.

Most notable example, I dreamed that I went to the local bank, they had a scale to weigh people. I got on the scale but it went backwards! I turned around and saw this girl Joann who I’d not seen since middle school. Wrote that down in my dream journal.

Couple weeks later - I am at the bank I dreamed about. I get on the scale, but it’s broken. Tells me I weigh 30lb. I turned around and who did I see? Joann, who I hadn’t seen since middle school.

I do not say this to convince anyone. It’s my own evidence, and I personally know the dreams were precognitive, only because I wrote them down and often wonder if everyone does this, are we all dreaming the future? It really pissed me off when it happened because it made me feel like the future had essentially already happened and we had no free will.

I guard my sleep more now and don’t do the dream journal, but do still have them somewhere. If I hadn’t written it down when I dreamed it I would have just thought I had deja vous.

When I was a child I was able to hear some sort of very high pitch noise when someone was approaching, like about enter the room or just from around the corner. I was about 3 or 4, young enough to think that was normal for everyone.

The noise was like the noise that I now think is some sort of tinnitus.

Nothing comes to mine for the moment but I’ll just note that I never quote realized just how many services (subroutines?) are active beneath my front of consciousness until somewhat recently. Our brains really are like Inside Out with various specialties around a conference table talking, with one or more hijacking the meeting occasionally.

I once accidentally scryed in a puddle: I “saw” a scene outside my friend’s house with police cars and bad vibes. I called them to see if they were OK but they absolutely refused to talk about it, then I started getting threatened online. I tried talking to my friend’s cousin about it too, but she said she promised not to tell anyone. It turned out this friend’s brother got in trouble for domestic abuse after attacking her (I only found out years later). He was likely the one threatening me online.

My best guess is that somehow I subconsciously figured it out and the reflection in the puddle kinda acted as a focal point for putting together details I didn’t even realize I’d picked up. I’d always been pretty good at intuiting some kinds of information, but this was a whole different level. I also haven’t really experienced anything quite like it since.

No

Have you ever experienced something you can’t really logically explain?

This question begs another question. For every time that you had one of these situations happen, how many times did you have the same sort of moment happen where it was either the wrong decision or an unremarkable moment?

If you have 20 premonitions, and only one comes true, then you don’t really need to logically explain that one, other that to say that unlikely things happen, given sufficient chances.

We humans have a tendency to remember the one time something happens and forget about all of the times nothing happens.

We have a lot more than five senses…

Close your eyes and clap your hands, now how did you just do that?

Proprioception is a sense of where our body parts are in relation to each other, and how we can walk without staring at our feet the whole time.

What you’re looking for is a “gut feeling” which is often your subconscious, but your gut has a shitton of neural cells too. And can function like a “minibrain”.

https://www.science.org/content/article/your-gut-directly-connected-your-brain-newly-discovered-neuron-circuit

Most likely it’s an actual “proto-brain” hold over from before organisms even had heads.

But anyways, most likely it’s coming from your subconscious, there are things it puts together and recognizes, and especially if danger is around then it’s just gonna flash a warning light and not walk your conscious mind thru the logic that tells you why there’s a warning light. Because it’s better to respond fast and later work out why the warning light was flashing.

So, an example would be before I learned about the correlations between prenatal testosterone, in group bonding, and facial width; it was a joke among a specific friend group that “don’t trust guys with skinny faces”.

Not that low prenatal testorone makes someone untrustworthy, just that in situations where you need to 100% count on people to have your back, the people most likely to not are the ones that are not biologically wired to blindly defend what they recognize as “us”, their in group.

But this is a thing on a wider social scale, guys with “rat face” are often cast as villains and betrayers in media, because on some level even tho we consciously don’t recognize why, we all just instantly distrust to some extent. Not from conscious logic, but individual lifetimes of experience and us just automatically picking up the pattern.

Prenatal androgen exposure, approximated via 2D:4D, was associated with prosocial behavior. In contrast to previous research in older children, higher exposure was related to stronger prosocial tendencies, which corresponds to earlier findings on fairness in adults. Our findings point towards a potential role of sex steroids in the early development of children’s social behavior, but they have to be interpreted with caution due to the small sample size of the current study. Nevertheless, they underscore the importance of integrating biological and psychological perspectives, while also highlighting the significance of studying the development of prosocial behavior within peer groups.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378378224001245

As a species we are prone to assigning meaning to coincidences (or even just stuff that happened).

Once working at the bottom of a radio tower with people up the tower. After about an hour and a half I remembered I should be wearing a hardhat.

5 min later one of the guys up the tower dropped a wrench and it hit pretty much where I was standing without the hardhat.