Premonitions & Intuition

What is the definition of a premonition and intuition?

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

Premonition is defined as:

1. previous notice or warning

2. anticipation of an event without conscious reason

Intuition is defined as:

1: quick and ready insight

2 a: immediate apprehension or cognition b: knowledge or conviction gained by intuition c: the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference

Have you ever had a premonition or experienced intuition?

I want to share with you some famous episodes of people experiencing intuition or premonitions and tell you a little bit about my personal experiences.

• Adolph Hitler had a dream during WWI that caused him to jump out of his trench just moments before a shell struck and blew up his trench killing everyone.

• Just 10 days before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln had a dream of people crying coming from the East Wing of the Whitehouse. When he investigated he was told by soldiers on guard that they weeping for the president who had been assassinated. Days later his body was held in state in the East wing so people could pay their respects.

• Mark Twain predicted that Halley's Comet would be seen on the day of his death, just as it was when he was born. Twain died on Halley's 1910 appearance on May 18. Mark Twain also had a dream where he saw his brother in a casket. Less than a week later, his brother was killed in an explosion on a boat. Upon arriving at the town where it took place, he saw his brother laid out in a casket just like in his dream.

• Nostradamus is also believed to have predicted his own death and the date in which his tomb would be opened

• Julius Caesar's wife Calpurnia had a dream the night before he died that he would be stabbed by a friend, and she warned him not to go.
• Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist interested in the paranormal, recorded more than 19 incidents of premonitions within the two weeks before the Titanic sailed

I don't recall any personal experiences with premonitions, although I have an uncle that has experienced a number of premonitions that include the birth of my two children and how much they looked alike, the death of my grandmother (his mother), and the marriage of my cousin and her husband.

My experiences have been with intuition or a feeling I get.

One of the first experiences that I can still recall quite vividly was when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. My father was a garage sale nut. As a pre-teen/early teenager, it no longer excited me like it did when I was smaller. On this particular day, I remember sitting in the backseat of the family car while my parents rummaged through boxes of stuff in someones crowded garage. As I turned to look at them, a song popped into my head. The song is "Crystal Blue Persuasion" by Tommy James and The Shondells. I found my self staring at a particular box about 50 feet away and knowing that record was in that box. I got out of the car, walked straight to the box and went straight to the record. I bought it and I own it to this day.

In the mid-80s, I seemed to have a number of experiences of intuition.

At the time I was working in a position where I handled a lot of money on a daily basis. During peak times, I sometimes handled a million dollars in one day. With constant contact with money, you tend to get pretty good at knowing how many bills you have in your hand by how they feel. I could grasp a stack of twenty dollar bills and tell you how many were there. You just got a feel for things. I don't consider that intuition, just getting really familiar with your work. But it was different with checks. This is always difficult to explain. I used to be able to grasp a stack of customer checks and tell you if one in the stack was unsigned without looking at any of them. I just knew. Without fail, if I had that feeling, there would be one with no signature. Now, one could assume there might always be one unsigned check in a bunch, but this wasn't like that. I always knew when there was and when I didn't have that feeling and checked them anyway, there would never be one unsigned.

During this same timeframe, I experienced a similar thing at home. Due to the rural area in which we live, we are required to have a post office box. I found that when I went to get the mail out of my box, I could always tell, just by touching the stack of mail, if one of the envelopes was not addressed to me. I learned to trust this, and every single time I had that feeling, one of the envelopes would be addressed to someone else. I never found an envelope that wasn't addressed to me without having that feeling first.

I know you're probably thinking this is no big deal, but it is the degree of accuracy that always surprised me. I always marveled at how quickly the feeling came and how instinctive it was. I didn't question it. It was feeling of certainty. Afterwards, I always asked myself how I could know that. I had no way of knowing it, yet I did.

Nowadays I seem to have lost touch with this ability. I'm sure it is there. In fact, I'm fairly certain we all possess it. I guess I've just gotten too busy to relax enough to feel it or sense it. I think I'll work on that.