Precognition

“Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance.”  (Bertrand Russell, 1872--1970)

Precognition means future vision, the foreknowledge of an event.  It is roughly synonymous with premonition, clairvoyance and ESP.  One of the feature stories in last week’s New Yorker magazine was about people who seem to have a capacity for precognition.  I believe in precognition.  It happened to me on one occasion.

It was 1986 and the Denver Broncos were about to play the Cleveland Browns in the AFC Championship game.  The morning of the game, while dressing, I was startled by a sudden premonition.  It came from nowhere.  I was certain that I knew the outcome.  I immediately went to my wife and told her that the final score would be Denver 23, Cleveland 20.

The experience was intense.  It was not a guess.  I was certain of the outcome.  I had never before and have never since gone to my wife so sure of what was about to happen. But that morning I told her of my premonition.  Thank goodness I did, because she is my witness.  She will attest to the truth of what I’m telling.

So, there we were, watching the game.  Denver trailed in the fourth quarter, 20 to 13.  There was less than six minutes left to play and Denver had the ball on its own 2-yard line.  I began to doubt.  But then quarterback John Elway led the Broncos 98 yards downfield to tie the game with a touchdown as time ran out.  The game was won in overtime with a field goal, final score 23 to 20, Denver wins.  I was simultaneously elated, puzzled and freaked.  My wife, believing in this sort of thing, took it pretty much in stride.

Why then?  Why that event?  I’ve never understood why I knew something as trivial as the outcome of a football game.  I grew up in Denver where football is a religious experience. Little did I know.  If I was granted only one premonition in this lifetime, why wasn’t it about something truly big and important?  I’ve never again had the sense of precognition as I had on that day.  Yet, even though this happened to me only once, it did happen.

Over the years, I’ve tried to sort out the meaning of that seemingly irrational experience and incorporate it into my mostly rational belief system.  I am certain that what I experienced was neither a lucky guess nor a coincidence.  I am by nature a skeptic and I know that, to another skeptic, I can’t prove what happened to be so.  But just because I can’t prove it, and I can’t explain it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

NCAA March Madness is almost over and I have once again failed to predict the Final Four.  I played poker the other day. I had no precognitions.  But I don’t forget what happened to me many years ago.  Mysteriously, I experienced a knowledge of the future, an experience that eludes scientific inquiry or logical explanation. On one memorable occasion an unexplainable ‘out there’ was revealed to me, a world existing beyond the boundary of human reason and understanding.

Horatio:  O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:  And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.                                                         There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

   Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.