According to the Queen in Through the Looking Glass, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

An article in the UK’s Daily Mail reveals that many scientists are beginning to accept what many of us have always known (bits snipped from this excerpt):

Do some of us avoid tragedy by foreseeing it? Some scientists now believe that the brain really CAN predict events before they happen.

Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Cambridge University, says: “So far, the evidence seems compelling. What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future.

“In fact, it’s not clear in physics why you can’t see the future. In physics, you certainly cannot completely rule out this effect.”

Virtually all the great scientific formulae which explain how the world works allow information to flow backwards and forwards through time – they can work either way, regardless.

Shortly after 9/11, strange stories began circulating about the lucky few who had escaped the outrage. It transpired that many of the survivors had changed their plans at the last minute after vague feelings of unease. It was a subtle, gnawing feeling that ‘something’ was not right. Nobody vocalised it but shortly before the attacks, people started altering their plans out of an unspoken instinct.

One woman suffered crippling stomach pain while queuing for one of the ill-fated planes which flew into the World Trade Center. She made her way to the lavatory only to recover spontaneously. She missed her flight but survived the day. Amid the collective outpouring of grief and horror it was easy to overlook such stories or write them off as coincidences.

But in fact, these kind of stories point to an interesting and deeper truth for those willing to look.

If, for example, fewer people decided to fly on aircraft that subsequently crashed, then that would suggest a subconscious ability to divine the future. Well, strange as it seems, that’s just what happens.

Although these premonitions are not in glorious Technicolor, they are often emotionally powerful enough for us to act upon them. In technical parlance it is known as ‘presentiment’ because emotional feelings are being received from the future, not hard facts or information.

The military has long been fascinated by such phenomena. For many years the US military (and latterly the CIA) funded a secretive programme known as Stargate, which set out to investigate premonitions and the ability of mediums to predict the future. Dr Dean Radin worked on the Stargate programme and became fascinated by the ability of ‘lucky’ soldiers to forecast the future.

These are the ones who survived battles against seemingly impossible odds. Radin became convinced that thoughts and feelings – and occasionally-actual glimpses of the future – could flow backwards in time to guide soldiers. It helped them make life-saving decisions, often on the basis of a hunch.

If we are all regularly sensing the future or occasionally receiving glimpses of it, as some mediums claim to do, then doesn’t that mean we can change the future and render the ‘prediction’ obsolete? Could such science fiction have a grain of truth in it after all? The emerging view, Bierman explains, is that ‘the future has implications for the past’.

“This phenomena allows you to make a decision on the basis of what will happen in the future. Does that restrain our free will? That’s up to the philosophers. I’m far too shallow a person to worry about that.”

The problem with presentiment is that it appears so nebulous that you can’t rely on it to make reliable decisions. That may be the case, but there are plenty of instances where people wished they had listened to their premonitions or feelings of presentiment.

So should we listen to our instincts, hunches and dreams? Some experts believe we may already be using them in our everyday lives to a surprising degree. Dr Jessica Utts at the University of California, who has worked for the US military and CIA as an independent auditor of its paranormal research, believes we are constantly sampling the future and using the knowledge to help us make better decisions. “I think we’re doing it all the time,” she says. “We’ve looked at the data and it does seem to happen.”

We don’t always listen to the voices that guide us because we don’t trust them; not knowing where they come from we tend to disregard them as fantasy or mere thoughts. Quieting the mind and being present in the moment is a skill that takes time to learn, but in becoming more present with ourselves we become more attentive to what goes on inside of us as well as around us. It has long been known that animals are aware of severe weather events before humans are; before the Tsunami hit a few years ago the animals had already left for higher ground.

Keeping a journal can be a good way to clarify messages that come through our intuition or dreams. Once we develop a habit of listening to the voice of guidance within us, a world of synchronicity and magic opens up. This is not to say that we will successfully avoid tragedy, but the flow of our lives becomes easier and more magical as we learn to tune in to our own internal guidance. Whether it comes from the future, as these scientists suggest, or from the wisdom of our higher selves, that guidance is a gift.