If you are psychic, can you tell the future?

I believe that it is possible to predict the future, but it can be very difficult to interpret the information given to us about future events.

I’ll be completely honest with you, it’s very rare that you know all the details of an event and its consequences before it actually happens. Sometimes people do and there have been many stories of people managing to warn those involved before the event and successfully averting a potential disaster.

This is precognition at its fullest, but it’s a sliding scale. Below I have outlined my ideas of different levels of ‘forecasting’. I don’t think you will find this scale or these phrases and their definitions anywhere else because I have created this ‘system’ to try and make it easier to understand. (These are just my thoughts, experiences, and quotes, so feel free to disagree!)

These are my different types of precognition, or ‘future telling’.

Helen’s Precognition Sliding Scale

Precognition

This is when we have a dream, have a vision, draw or paint a picture, or just suddenly know all the details of an event in advance. In some cases, we know who is involved (usually it will be our friends or relatives or their acquaintances) and we may warn them in some way. This warning may mean that the event itself may be stopped or modified. Or it could be that we can warn the people involved that they could otherwise be harmed in some way and they can choose whether or not to follow your advice.

perocognition (I made this word up, but it makes sense, at least to me)

This is when we know how a situation will unfold when a chain of events has already started. We, or someone we know, is already in the middle of the event and we can see, feel or know in some way what will happen. Again, we may be able to interfere with the course of events or warn the people involved. I guess it’s a bit like the feeling of déjà vu, you just know what’s going to happen next.

partial precognition

This is more common than full precognition and occurs when we get information from somewhere (divine intervention, our guides, loved ones in spirit, or somewhere else) but it is vague. Again, this information can be on a sliding scale from small bits to more detailed, but still abstract, information. It basically needs interpretation. Examples of this are numerous, such as the person who painted the twin towers exploding but didn’t know where or when the painting was related. Or my own teenage dream of cartoon bombs falling from the sky onto a train track, with various other references in image and cartoon form. I couldn’t interpret this at the time, I just felt weird when I woke up, you know those dreams that just stay with you (typical of precognitive dreams). Anyway, that morning an unexploded bomb was found near the railway in an area that made sense to me, given the other references in my dream. And it was the train track that the friends used to enter the school. If you’ve ever seen ‘Medium,’ the dramatized story of real-life medium Allison DuBois, you’ve seen how she gets abstract imagery and can’t always figure out the ‘who,’ ‘what,’ and most importantly, ‘ why’ of his paranormal encounters. This makes it very difficult to do anything with any message and has one or two results. If the partial precognition is not deciphered, it can be combined or become pericognition, so the symbolism of the dream or vision only becomes apparent when you are in the situation. That may mean that you are in a position to say or do something. Or, alternatively, it can become recognition (below).

Recognition

This is where you haven’t noticed (although you may have suspected) or been unable to interpret what turns out to be a precognition. I mean, all of a sudden you’re like, ‘Ah, that’s what that dream meant’ (I almost called it Ah-Cognition). At one point, some time after an event, you recognize that your dream or vision was in fact a precognition. This can be very frustrating! The other way that Acknowledgment happens is that something will happen that will ‘break a dream’ if you know that phrase. Suddenly you will remember a dream or glimpse something from a meditation and realize that you knew this was going to happen. Once again, it is very similar to deja vu.

You may recognize that some of these things have happened to you. Other questions on this topic might include,

‘If you know about something before it happens, and you can’t do anything about it, what’s the use of knowing?’ and ‘Are events set in stone or can you change them if you know about them in advance?’ Questions for another time, and much philosophical debate.