You Are a Pre-Cog (Part 1)
The mystery of the exploding church, eerie dreams of 9/11 and famous people who predicted their own deaths
The exploding church 💥
The year was 1950 and choir practice was scheduled to begin at 7:20 pm at the West Side Baptist Church in Beatrice, Nebraska, a small town with a few thousand residents. Typically 14 or 15 people would show up for practice.
At 7:25 pm, due to a faulty gas pipe, the church exploded. The explosion could be heard by everyone in town and all the lights in the city went out. The radio went off air and windows nearby were shattered.
Here’s the incredible part: No one died…because no one was at practice. On any given week, there would be 15 attendees who would come. But on that day, every single person was running late, for one reason or another.
Fifteen-year-old Ladona Vandegrift who usually arrived early was struggling with a geometry problem, and determined to solve it ended up losing track of time.
Reverend Klempel, his wife and their baby daughter usually came to practice 10-15 minutes early, but that evening their daughter stained their dress and their clock happened to be set back 5 minutes — they thought they had time but were actually running late.
Another regular, Joyce Black, lived across the street but was feeling lazy for some reason and didn’t want to leave her house. When she opened the door at 7:27, the church was disintegrating in front of her eyes.
Every single one of the attendees had a story like this. I had to mail a letter. I got caught up listening to a radio show. I didn’t feel like it. When looking at the past attendance rates of the choir practice, there had never been a practice where everyone had been late.
The story would eventually be featured in Life magazine and retold countless times. People called it a miracle. Divine intervention. I mean really, what are the odds? Well, Snopes did a thorough myth-busting on this story and found that the facts checked out. They concluded that there was 1 in a million chance that every one of the churchgoers would be late that day.
What are premonitions? 🔮
Premonition = a strong feeling that something is about to happen, especially something unpleasant
Usually, premonitions will not come as a literal vision of a church exploding. Instead, they are more subtle and go totally undetected to you. It’s more like a nudge from the universe. In the case of the exploding church in Beatrice, none of the attendees had any vision that the church would explode, they all just had different “reasons” for being late.
We get premonitions all the time, we just call them by different names:
Gut feelings and hunches: I have a bad feeling about this and I can’t explain why. Or I’ve got a hunch that I should do X instead of Y
Coincidences: It’s odd that this person suddenly called me when I was thinking about them, maybe it’s a sign (synchronicity)
Dreams: I dreamt this would happen, but it was only a dream…
CEOs often cite market analysis, data and their deep insights as the reasons behind their big decisions. But when you drill down, they often can’t explain them. They just follow their gut and “know.” No one calls them premonitions because it sounds too mysterious. We want to sound like we have control.
But in some cases, the premonitions can be very literal messages.
9/11 and Visions of Destruction 🔥
There are numerous reports of people who had visions of 9/11 happening days before the Twin Towers collapsed and who then decided to cancel their flights. For some people it took the form of unexplainable dread that told them not to go to work at or near the WTC that day. For others it was intuition that prompted them to simply turn around and go home.
In his book Living in the Borderland, Jungian analyst Jerome Bernstein tells the story of Lawrence Boisseau, the Safety Director at the World Trade Center. Lawrence had a vivid dream of the WTC collapsing on him in early September. His wife also had a similar dream that debris were falling on him! They even spoke about these eerie dreams but brushed them aside, as his wife says in his obituary. He was killed on 9/11 by collapsing debris when trying to knock out windows in the child care center on the ground floor of the WTC.
Of course, we can’t blame Lawrence for not following his premonition and for trying to save the lives of children! Also, the dream did not come with any due date. So, how could he have known? If he chose to take it seriously perhaps he could’ve skipped work for a few days, but for how long? Premonitions aren’t always crystal clear, they are more like whispers (or sirens) that we can choose to pay attention to, or not.
Often these premonitions just push us in a certain direction — away from danger. Did you know that the planes that were hijacked during 9/11 only had a 20-25% occupancy rate? American Airlines Flight 11, the Boeing 767 that crashed into the North Tower could hold 351 passengers but only had 92 people onboard. It was 74% unoccupied. The airlines don’t release the occupancy data for that year so it’s hard to know if this was abnormal or not. But looking at trends globally over time, most flights seem to be occupied on average 70-85%.
Premonitions can come in different forms — dreams, hunches, and even art. A hip-hop group called The Coup finished their album cover a few months before 9/11 that featured the Twin Towers in flames. As you can imagine, a few days after 9/11 they received a barrage of angry phone calls and were forced to pull the cover.
Or take the beautiful Gaia painting by Alex Grey that he created in 1999 that shows two planes flying over the WTC, with the branches of the world’s life force alit in flames.
It may be easy to dismiss individual accounts of these dreams or paintings as coincidence. But when you take into account the hundreds and thousands of stories and premonitory signs like this, it’s harder to ignore.
Famous people who ignored their premonitions 💀
Like the example of the Safety Director at the WTC, these premonitions aren’t always clear or easy to follow, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore them. People throughout history have seen vivid dreams or visions that forebode terrible events. Here are a few more notable examples from history:
One famous case was Abraham Lincoln who predicted his own death. Three days before President Lincoln was assassinated at the Ford Theater, he had recurring dreams that he was going to die. He shared this vivid dream with his friend and biographer William Crook as well as his bodyguard Ward Lamon. This is Lincoln’s description of his own dream:
"There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs... people weeping... the silence broken by pitiful sobbing... There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me... rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers... and... a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse... others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers, 'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin.'" -Abraham Lincoln
Even though it seemed to be very clearly talking about is own death, Lincoln claimed that the body in the dream wasn’t his own. Just a silly dream, he thought. Another president perhaps? Denial? On the day of the play at the Ford Theater he was very hesitant to go, according to his bodyguard. But he went anyways, ignoring the dream.
The same happened to famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. One night he dreamt of his patient Irma who he was treating for hysteria. In the dream, he was trying to psychoanalyze her when she complained of a pain in her throat and said, “Stop, you are choking me.” Investigating further, he opened her mouth and discovered a very large white patch on her throat and a bone-like structure that reminded him of the nasal cavity. He called his colleague, a doctor, who gave her a syringe with medicine but to no avail.
In his comments on the dream, Freud used it as a basis of his theory on why we have dreams (for “wish fulfillment”). He interpreted the syringe as phallic, and the point of the dream as a stroking of his own ego when his colleague couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. Interestingly, Freud did not believe in dreams or foretelling of future events. This was a point of disagreement with his peer Carl Jung, and one reason that they split off.
Twenty-eight years later, surgeons removed a cancerous white legion and scab from Freud’s throat, in the exact same location described in that dream (no doubt due to his cigar-smoking habit). In fact, even the detail about seeing the nasal cavity proved to be an accurate predictor of what happened to Freud.
His beloved dog would howl in his presence due to the scent of Freud's necrotic jaw bone. He was also forced to wear an oral prosthesis to keep his nasal and oral cavities separated, making it difficult to either eat or speak.
Thus begun a series of surgeries in his fight against various cancers that proved futile. He was in so much pain and agony that eventually he asked his doctor to administer a lethal dose of morphine and died in 1939.
One last example of one of the most famous psychic dreams. On June 27th, 1914, Bishop Joseph Lanyi had a terrible nightmare that his friend the Archduke Ferdinand was attacked while riding in a wagon. In the dream, upon being attacked, the Archduke hands the Bishop a letter with the following text:
Dear Dr. Lanyi,
I herewith inform you that today, my wife and I will fall victims to an assassination. We commend ourselves to your pious prayers.
Kindest regards from your
Archduke Franz
Sarajevo, the 28th of June
3:45 A.M.
Well, it doesn’t get any more literal than that! He was so shocked by this dream that he drew a picture of the dream and wrote a letter to his friend recounting his dream. Later that next day, the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated. His death is generally agreed upon as one of the falling dominos that started World War I. Proof of the letter with the recorded dream was later investigated and found to rather accurately describe the way in which the Archduke actually died.
It makes you wonder: What if Lincoln, Freud and the Archduke had listened to these premonitions? History could have certainly taken a different direction.
You are a pre-cog 🧠
So, why do we have these premonitions? A simple theory is that they serve a clear evolutionary purpose. People who had strong premonitions could save themselves and the lives of others and pass on their genes. Just like the way our brain is wired to constantly scan the environment for predators and food, from the point of view of evolution, having these powers of premonition can benefit the survival of the species.
In all these examples those that ignored their hunches and dreams faced the ultimate consequence — which tells me that if the feeling or dream seems out of the ordinary, we should probably pay attention. Beyond the notable examples I’ve already shared, research shows that at least 1/3 of people report having precognitive experiences sometime in their life, and something like half of people report having premonitions in dreams. The occurrence of premonitions is a lot more common than you’d think. In other words, it seems that many of us are pre-cogs.
In case you missed the reference, “pre-cogs” come from the movie Minority Report starring Tom Cruise. The pre-cogs have premonition-superpowers and work for the police to predict crimes that lead to preemptive arrests. (Great movie, btw).
But perhaps you’re not convinced and think these events have logical explanations. The WTC had previously been attacked in 1993, so it’s not odd that people would still have dreams of destruction. The album cover and art isn’t that odd because the towers are a sign of the “establishment” and it’s not farfetched to imagine people pointing their middle finger to the system. Presidents and politicians get assassinated so it’s not weird to think that Lincoln or the Archduke Ferdinand (or their friends) would dream of their deaths…
It’s true that at least some of these premonitions can be explained by coincidence. The human brain has a tendency to see patterns and make connections. But could all of them really be explained by mere coincidence? If you’re skeptical, you don’t have to make a huge mental leap. There are in fact a few incredible studies conducted recently that have shown that premonitions are very real and that every single person has precognitive abilities…
(to be continued…)