Fact Sheet: Precognition and Retrocognition

In precognition and retrocognition, a person acquires information about the future or the past that is
not logically deduced—or, in many cases, is not even deducible.

Precognition is only one aspect of extraordinary human experience regarding time. It gets particular attention because it seems to offer glimpses of the future, and in ordinary life the future hasn’t happened yet, whereas the past has, which makes the past feel more accessible. Yet any equivalent knowledge of the past—retrocognition—is no less extraordinary. Both phenomena are part of the larger experience of inexplicably knowing something from another time, either past or future. And these experiences often involve something happening at a distance, which shades into what otherwise might be called clairvoyance.

How common are pre/retrocognition?

It is hard to say. Throughout history, there have been seers—people who claimed they could see events distant in space or time. Cicero, the ancient Roman cultural giant, wrote On Divination, an extended discussion of precognition, in which he presented pro and con arguments—including how unhappy Caesar would have been had he known his fate.

Who has pre/retrocognitive experiences?

People of every demographic—such as age, sex, and education level—have reported these experiences. Some people have pre/retrocognitive experiences more frequently, and some people seem to be trainable, but often people have the experience only once in their entire lives. Why some people and not others? No one knows.

These phenomena occur in any state of consciousness— including waking, sleeping, meditating—and both during and as an aftereffect of near-death experiences (NDEs). They usually occur as an image “in the mind’s eye.”

What kind of evidence is there?

Laboratory

In the early decades of parapsychological laboratory work, some precognition experiments seemed to indicate that individuals were seeing targets in the future. But these results were shown to be possibly due to telepathy or clairvoyance. More recent laboratory experiments have demonstrated the ability to react to targets selected just seconds in the future. The experimenters call this “presentiment,” and although it might seem to lack the dramatic personal impact of a precognitive episode, its public announcement brought a vehement attack from the scientific establishment.

Spontaneous Cases

What kinds of things do people have precognitions of? One might think that most precognitions would be about important events such as death, family tragedies, volcanic eruptions, or plane crashes. Good evidence indicates that, indeed, such disasters are foreseen, although often by people with no connection to the event who do not realize the meaning of their dream or vision. However, many previsions or premonitions are about trivial events, which makes psychological understanding more difficult.

Accurate precognitions are almost always personal. Some precognitions do not relate to the experiencer, but researchers have found that visions of the general future—social, cultural, and global—are rarely borne out.

Remote Viewing

In remote viewing, an individual is asked for information about something—a place, an event, an object—distant in time, space, or both. Pre- and retrocognition are often involved, and subjects in remote viewing experiments perceive targets in the past and future as readily as in the present. Because the viewers are awake, it is much easier to get that information than it is from a dream—which is often the source of a precognition.

For example, in 1974, while one experimenter visited a local park with swimming pools, a remote viewer in a laboratory was asked about that experimenter’s location. He described much of it accurately but called it a “water purification plant” and drew nonexistent storage tanks and machinery. The experimenters figured that he was confused by the pools of water. But 20 years later they learned that, half a century before the experiment, a water treatment plant had existed on the site, including the machinery and storage tanks in the drawing.

Near-Death Experiences

An NDE is often accompanied by a life review, in which time is experienced in a very non-ordinary way. In several cases, NDErs have reported precognitions that have been subsequently borne out in their lives. One woman learned of things that were yet to happen, both personal—a third child, a divorce—and public—an election result, a Super Bowl contestant; after the experience she had regular precognitive dreams.

In another case, a 10-year-old boy in 1941 England had an NDE while undergoing emergency surgery. He came out of it with what he described as memories of his future life. One particularly interesting “memory” involved sitting in a chair and looking at children playing on the floor before him. In 1968, he looked up from a book he was reading, saw his children, and realized he was living that “memory.” In the original prevision, he knew that behind one wall was a strange mechanical object he could not understand; in the actual event, it was a forced-air heater, something that did not exist in his world in 1941.

How accurate are pre/retrocognitions?

They range from vague feelings to remarkably accurate perceptions.

Someone might wake up with an uneasy feeling that the day was not going to go well. Is that a premonition or the result of overeating the night before? It’s impossible to say, even if they are right. But someone else might relate a dream from the night before about an earthquake and later in the day hear that such a calamity occurred. In the case of the water treatment plant, the drawing was fairly accurate but 50 years out of date. And occasionally there seems to be “a rent in the veil” that separates the present from the future or the past, and someone gets an accurate, detailed peek into another time.

A 20th-century man named Stefan Ossowiecki, given a handwritten document sealed in an envelope, could describe retrocognitively not only the writer but also the room and circumstances in which the document was written, including persons interrupting the writer.

Pre- and retrocognition, like other forms of psi, seem to be apprehended subliminally—outside of clear conscious awareness—and, as often happens with a telepathic impression or an apparition, they can be distorted or embellished as they come into the conscious mind. People, places, and situations may be imperfectly grasped, and missing details are supplied by expectation or experience. For that reason, it is not clear whether, with precognition, a later occurrence that is different from a precognized vision was inaccurately perceived or was an instance of “changing the future.”

What do pre/retrocognition say about time?

Nothing that we understand!

Researchers, psychologists, and philosophers—anyone who has investigated precognition seriously—have finally been mystified. They have agreed, however, that our understanding of time is inadequate for any theorizing that accounts for the experiences. Scientists are currently trying to find room for pre/retrocognition in modern physical theory, but no model can yet accommodate it.

Some recommended books are:

  • Barrington, M. R., Stevenson, I., & Weaver, Z. (2005). A world in a grain of sand: The clairvoyance of Stefan Ossowiecki. McFarland.
  • Dunne, J. W. (1927/2001). An experiment with time (3rd ed.). Hampton Roads.
  • Krohn, E. G., & Kripal, J. J. (2018). Changed in a flash. North Atlantic Books.
  • Rosenberg, R. (2021). Precognition. In E. F. Kelly & P. Marshall (Eds.), Consciousness unbound (pp. 89–136). Rowman & Littlefield.

The information in this Fact Sheet is based on the suggested resources listed above and on numerous studies published in professional peer-reviewed journals. Written by Bob Rosenberg, PhD