How widespread are precognitive experiences?

More than a decade ago, two psychologists conducted an extensive survey of people in Charlottesville, Virginia, sampling 350 town residents and 262 students at the University of Virginia, asking them 46 questions about unusual experiences in their lives, including this one: “Have you ever had a rather clear and specific dream that matched in detail an event that occurred before, during, or after your dream, and which you did not know about or did not expect at the time of the dream?”

Yes, I have had dreams that came true, was the answer given by 38 percent of the students and 36 percent of the town residents.

Surveys done by Dr. David Ryback, an assistant professor of psychology at a Georgia university, found nearly one out of every 10 of his undergraduates reported having had dreams that came true. Subsequent surveys by Ryback’s colleagues, using an older population, determined that one out of every three reported such dreams.

After Ryback published his findings in the magazine Psychology Today, he received hundreds of letters from precognitive dreamers who often prefaced their comments with “I have never believed in psychic dreams, but...”

How Wealthy People Use The Gift

Numerous examples of the wealth-generating power of ‘gut hunches’ turned up in the research findings of Napoleon Hill, who wrote a bestseller, Think And Grow Rich, a half-century ago. Billionaire Andrew Carnegie disclosed his formula for financial success to Hill and that inspired Hill to study another 500 wealthy people, including Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. What emerged was a timeless and practical guide to the attitudes, behaviors and principles which assist in attracting great wealth.  

For our purposes, Hill’s most important discovery was that all of the super wealthy people he studied were skilled at using their Sixth Sense, described as “vibrations of thought ordinarily called hunches.” Thanks to this capacity, they were “warned of impending dangers in time to avoid them, and notified of opportunities in time to embrace them.” 

This Sixth Sense will fail to function properly, Hill concluded, “if indecision, doubt, and fear remain in your mind.”  An antidote to negative thought  --and consequently a ticket down the road to prosperity--  is to program your subconscious mind by planting specific desires into it, repeating them to yourself as affirmations, while adding intense feeling and unshakeable faith to the process.

Once our minds become magnetized by the powerful, positive thoughts that result, Hill found that we “attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts.” Most recently, that approach to intuition found popular appeal in The Secret, a bestselling book and DVD about the powers of attraction, which, I must confess, I found to be a gross oversimplification of how the process really works in practice, a book that raised and then quickly dashed people's hopes that quick fixes to solve problems and fulfill dreams can be learned overnight.

When I have applied Hill’s principle of how our Sixth Sense functions to an examination of my own intuitive and precognitive dream experiences, I had to ask what was different, or even peculiar, about my life so that these phenomena became unexpected but welcome visitors. My conclusion was that certain mental and physical practices do seem to facilitate our ability to access intuition and increase the frequency and intensity of its appearance in our lives. More on those practices in future columns.

Intuitive Experience As Viral Marketing   
 Once you begin a cycle of experiencing premonitions and precognitive dreams, particularly if you set an intention to do so, an effect may result in which these experiences actually spread to other people like a cold or flu virus.

An illustration of how such a contagion works occurred in the late 1940’s, when a group of 10 psychiatrists in New York City decided to share with each other instances when their patients revealed precognitive or clairvoyant dreams in therapy sessions. They didn’t inform their patients of this intention, yet somehow at the unconscious level their patients responded.

“No sooner did an interest in the possibility of psychic dreams develop than patients began to supply these dreams,” observed Dr. Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner, Ph.D, in their book Dream Telepathy. “These ESP interchanges spread infectiously in an ever-widening circle of emotionally related events and individuals.”

If you have had similar sorts of experiences with intuition and precognitive dreams, or have observed them firsthand, please feel free to share them with me and readers in the comments section of this page.