Premonitions in Dreams

About four out of ten reported psychic experiences involve some seeming awareness of the future. The term premonition is in general use, and the more clinical word precognition, ('before knowing'), tends to be used by parapsychologists. In descending order of frequency, premonitions come in the form of dreams, waking thoughts, waking imagery and sleep-onset, (hypnagogic), imagery.

We can define a premonition as an experience, (eg dream, waking thought, etc.), which appears to anticipate a future event that could not reasonably have been inferred from information available before the event. The fact that they mainly refer to unpleasant things is reflected in the term premonition itself, which derives from the Latin word praemonere - to warn in advance. Sometimes the person who has the premonition, (the percipient), doesn't know precisely what will happen but has a feeling that something untoward will occur - it's then a foreboding or presentiment.

Premonition refers to a situation when future events are foreknown or forecast. They are attributed by some people to the presence of supernatural or paranormal abilities. However, the distinction between precognition and ordinary evidence-based predictions is sometimes not made sharply. "Premonition" may be defined to include or exclude ordinary predictions, and this means a fallacy of linguistic ambiguity can lead to an overly supernatural explanation for predictions' accuracy.

Famous premonitions

• Abraham Lincoln's prophetic dream of his death and funeral, which he related to both his bodyguard and his wife mere hours before his assassination.
• Otto von Bismarck predicted the beginning of the First World War, by saying (shortly before he died in 1898) to Mr. Ballen: "If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans." Note that this is a good example of a premonition that could easily be due to a good intuitive understanding of politics, rather than being precognitive.
• The novelist senor Mark Twain predicted that Halley's [[KW]] Comet [[/KW]] would be seen on the day of his death, just as it did when he was born. Twain died weeks before Halley's 1910 appearance on May 18th.
• French apothecary Nostradamus is also believed to have predicted his own death.