I am currently peddling my wares around the nation. My peddling takes the form of an author's book tour, and my wares are my book The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives (Dutton, 2009).
My dictionary tells me that one of the definitions of tour is "a journey for pleasure." This suggests I may have signed onto the wrong kind of tour. A book tour can be literally disorienting, such as waking up in the gray dawn uncertain which day it is or which city you are in. Or when your mind becomes an echo chamber when you are asked the same questions over and over in interviews. Am I repeating myself? Did I just say that, or was it a week ago?
There are genuine pleasures as well, as when booklovers take time from their busy lives to honor you with their presence at bookstore talks and signings. And when they corroborate your book's theme by revealing the intimate details of their lives -- well, it doesn't get much better for an author than that.
My experiences on book tour have been more than a little weird. Events keep happening that validate the book's premises -- that people can sense future happenings that pose a threat to their existence (they sense nice, pleasant events, too), that the premonition sense is widespread, and that there is compelling scientific evidence that premonitions are real.
Consider Nine-Eleven. Currently, Google lists nearly 14 million Web sites devoted to "dreams of 9-11." Nine-Eleven generated the largest outpouring of premonitions of a national disaster ever received by the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. As I wrote, it seemed that hundreds of individuals sensed they should not fly that day; the four doomed planes were 79 percent vacant.
During my book tour, Air France Flight 447 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, carrying 216 passengers and 12 crewmembers to their deaths. Like the doomed planes of 9-11, the passenger vacancy was 77 percent. Immediately after the crash, Stefan van Oss, a middle-aged man living near Amsterdam, was interviewed on Dutch television. Van Oss held a reservation on the doomed flight. A close friend of his had a premonition that something bad would happen, and that if van Oss got on the plane he would never return home. Van Oss trusted his friend's premonition, canceled his reservation, and lived to tell about it.
Other events I wrote about have been sanctioned by similar happenings that have occurred during my tour. In the book I described how fifteen church choir members escaped certain death when their church blew up because of a gas leak, but they escaped injury because they were all late for choir practice. It was the first complete no-show in the history of their church, and suggested a collective, unconscious premonition of disaster. The odds against all fifteen individuals being absent on this particular night were placed at a million to one by Warren Weaver, the famous mathematician and expert in probability theory. During my tour, Bishop T. D. Jakes, who heads the largest African-American church in Dallas, had a similar experience. He escaped death when a gas explosion demolished part of his home. Jakes credits his survival to a premonition that he should cancel a meeting, which caused him to make last-minute plans to be somewhere else.
I have been flooded during my tour with life-saving premonitions people have freely shared. One involved a woman who had a dream premonition that she had breast cancer. She went immediately to her physician and pointed with a single finger to where she had seen the cancer in her dream. She could not feel a lump, however, and neither could the physician. A mammogram was done, which was normal. The woman was insistent; the dream was one of the most vivid she'd ever had. She pressured her physician to go further, so he, in turn, convinced a surgeon to do a biopsy at the site the woman had seen in the dream. Days later, a pathologist phoned the original doctor the biopsy report. "How did you detect this cancer?" he asked. "It's microscopic. It would have been impossible to feel or detect on a mammogram." "I didn't detect it," he confessed. "My patient did. In a dream."
And so it has gone. Nearly everyone, it seems, has a story. Including scientists.
There are hundreds of positive experimental trials testing one's ability to see the future, with odds against chance of billions to one, as I discuss in my book. A couple of weeks ago, yet another experiment surfaced from animal-behavioral scientists documenting the ability of finches to sense future danger. In a controlled study, the finches "pre-acted" to a video of a slowly crawling snake they would be shown later.
Finches reacting to an encounter with a snake before it appears; humans deciding not to fly on planes that later crash; or sensing a potentially lethal cancer before it causes symptoms or is detectable on physical examination: the capacity for premonitions, it seems, is widely distributed throughout nature -- an ability that can be as valuable, and as innate, as vision, hearing, and speech.
Larry Dossey, MD, is the author of eleven books on the role of consciousness in health, most recently The Power of Premonitions (Dutton, 2009.