The inner life
Premonition
Direct answer
Premonition: A premonition is a strong feeling, with no reason that can be given, that a particular thing is about to happen, usually something unwelcome. The word means a forewarning.
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At a glance
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Precognition, Confirmation Bias, Premonitions Bureau, Intuition
A premonition is a strong feeling, with no reason that can be given, that a particular thing is about to happen, usually something unwelcome. The word means a forewarning.
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What is a premonition?
The word comes from the Latin for warning beforehand. In ordinary use it means a foreboding: an unease about a journey, a sudden certainty that the telephone is about to bring bad news, a dream that seems to point at a coming event. Surveys find that many people say they have had one that came true, which makes it among the most common of uncanny experiences.
What a premonition is evidence of is a separate question. Most forebodings are vague about what, where and when, and the ones that come to nothing are forgotten. Worry about a thing that is really likely, such as the health of an old relative, is reasoning and not foresight. Researchers keep the word premonition for the feeling and use precognition for the claim that the future is actually known.
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What sets Premonition apart
A premonition is defined by its timing and its vagueness together. It comes before the event, which is what makes it feel like knowledge, and it seldom says exactly what is coming, which is what lets so many events count as its fulfilment. The feeling has a bodily side: unease, a tight stomach, an urge to turn back. The same sensations go with ordinary worry, and nothing in the experience itself tells the two apart.
- Word: from Latin praemonere, to warn beforehand
- Usual content: something unwelcome: an accident, an illness, a death
- Usual form: a mood or conviction; less often a dream or a waking image
- Fair test: written down with a date and details before the outcome is known
- Largest registers: London, 1967, and New York, 1968: few matches among many entries
Often mistaken for something else: Intuition draws on experience of similar cases and can be right for good reason; a premonition claims knowledge of an event that nothing present points to.
The story behind Premonition
Stories of forewarning are ancient, and many famous ones were set down late: the dream of his own death credited to Abraham Lincoln was first told in print by a friend many years afterwards. After the Aberfan disaster of 1966 the psychiatrist John Barker collected accounts from people who said they had foreseen it, and in 1967 he helped to open a bureau in London to register forebodings in advance. A registry on the same plan opened in New York in 1968.
Why Premonition matters
Premonition is the uncanny experience people most often have for themselves, so how it is weighed shapes what they make of all the rest.
How to read Premonition
People use the word for any strong foreboding; researchers ask that it be written down, with a date and details, before the outcome is known.
Premonition in practice: an example
Someone uneasy before a flight writes the feeling down with the date, flies, lands safely, and has one honest entry for the record.
Where readings of Premonition go wrong
A foreboding is not a reason to cancel what matters or to alarm another person, and lasting dread is worth raising with a doctor.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
Premonition will not tell you that you are psychic, or that a premonition is true.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- premonition meaning, what is a premonition, premonition dreams, are premonitions real, premonition vs intuition
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is a premonition?
It is a feeling that something is going to happen, arriving without evidence or reasoning the person can point to. It may come as a mood, an image, a dream or a sudden conviction, and it usually concerns something unwelcome.
Are premonitions real?
The feelings are real and common. Whether they carry knowledge of the future is another matter: no collection of forebodings written down before the event has been shown to do better than chance would allow.
