I was taking a little me time at a cabin. Pretty remote, a 45 minute drive down a dicey mountain road to the beginning of civilization (a convenience store and a church). I was there solo to unwind.

One night I made a nice little fire down a hill from the cabin, maybe 40 yards away. Around 10, I put the fire out and started back up to the cabin. The porch lights were on and throwing some nice ambient light, so I decided not to turn my headlamp on and harsh the vibe with blue light. I couldn’t easily see the ground where I was starting from, but the path was well-maintained gravel and I was familiar the terrain.

After ten feet, I froze. I’m a person who struggles to trust my instincts sometimes. But my lizard brain was picking up on something not consciously perceptible, and I have never before or since had every part of my screaming that something was wrong.

I turned on my headlamp and saw, about twenty feet up the path, a fucking rattlesnake. Then I immediately started second-guessing myself. Do we even have rattlesnakes in this part of the country? And it didn’t even rattle, isn’t that their whole thing? Also it’s night, aren’t they active in the daytime with the sun? I stared without moving an inch, barely even breathing, just silently gaslighting myself. After a few minutes it continued on its way and finished slithering across the path back into the woods.

I ran up the rest of the hill and into the house. Promptly grabbed my phone and typed “rattlesnake [regional area I was in]” in the search bar. So, it turns out there are rattlesnakes there, and yeah their pattern is exactly the same as the one I saw. Something primal in my body knew, and I’m really glad I listened to it.

I can’t remember when a premonition saved me, but I certainly can remember dozens or hundreds of times when I had an irrational fear that something would go badly but it didn’t.

I mean, nothing life-saving or earth-shattering, and I don’t put too much stock in it now because memory’s a funny thing in general, but I’ve had ‘premonitions’.

Biggest one was the period when I went to boot camp as a reservist. I had a dream several months prior about a guy saying ‘Welcome to [specific base], welcome to hell’ in a thick French accent outside of a barracks. I wasn’t thinking about joining at the time. After I decided to join, got sent to boot camp and went to have a smoke on my first morning. Lo and behold, members of the Quebequois platoon that arrived the week prior were out there, and take a wild guess what I heard?

Idk, brain’s making predictions all the time and sometimes it gets an eerie hit. We don’t think about the ones that don’t come to fruition as much.

I once accidentally scryed in a puddle: I “saw” a scene outside my friend’s house with police cars and bad vibes. I called them to see if they were OK but they absolutely refused to talk about it, then I started getting threatened online. I tried talking to my friend’s cousin about it too, but she said she promised not to tell anyone. It turned out this friend’s brother got in trouble for domestic abuse after attacking her (I only found out years later). He was likely the one threatening me online.

My best guess is that somehow I subconsciously figured it out and the reflection in the puddle kinda acted as a focal point for putting together details I didn’t even realize I’d picked up. I’d always been pretty good at intuiting some kinds of information, but this was a whole different level. I also haven’t really experienced anything quite like it since.

No

Nah. Most things can be logically explained.

No. I have had dreams that happened later in real life, precognitive (I used to set an alarm early, jot them down, and go back to sleep.) Not big, predictable events. I’d dream of someone I hadn’t seen in years, seeing them in a location, and then see them. Sometimes comically. Never in any way that was helpful.

Most notable example, I dreamed that I went to the local bank, they had a scale to weigh people. I got on the scale but it went backwards! I turned around and saw this girl Joann who I’d not seen since middle school. Wrote that down in my dream journal.

Couple weeks later - I am at the bank I dreamed about. I get on the scale, but it’s broken. Tells me I weigh 30lb. I turned around and who did I see? Joann, who I hadn’t seen since middle school.

I do not say this to convince anyone. It’s my own evidence, and I personally know the dreams were precognitive, only because I wrote them down and often wonder if everyone does this, are we all dreaming the future? It really pissed me off when it happened because it made me feel like the future had essentially already happened and we had no free will.

I guard my sleep more now and don’t do the dream journal, but do still have them somewhere. If I hadn’t written it down when I dreamed it I would have just thought I had deja vous.

As a species we are prone to assigning meaning to coincidences (or even just stuff that happened).