6 min readON AN OCTOBER night in 1989, a 4-year-old girl was shocked awake by a phone ringing and then a scream. She crept out of her bedroom and tiptoed barefoot along the hallway’s clammy vinyl tile, stumbling upon her mother. “He died in a car accident?” she overheard Mom yelp, voice cracking. The girl’s dark, shining eyes stared ahead, blank. From the moment she’d thrown her arms around her father as he boarded his flight for that fateful business trip, she knew she would never see him alive again.That little girl was me, and the strange phenomenon I experienced that night was one of my earliest episodes of precognition.It was in the shadows of that hallway—while I was awake in a way I’d never been before—when I realized that the dread I’d swallowed during that final goodbye at the airport was more than my imagination. What kind of deranged child stands completely still and tearless after overhearing that her father had died thousands of miles away? Maybe the child who already knew she would never again make tents out of his flannel shirts or breathe in his Pierre Cardin cologne.Though I had some fear of being seen as delusional, I shared this account over the phone with cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, PhD. She listened intently. Afterward, she launched into an impromptu interview, asking me questions as if I were one of her research subjects. Was that your earliest memory of precognition? Do you have frequent precognitive episodes? How can you tell one of these predictions is coming on? She then revealed that she had asked these questions because she could relate. It was her own experience with these strange, sometimes unnerving psychic gut feelings that led her to study them in the first place.Mossbridge says she has experienced this phenomenon in two distinct ways since she was 7 years old: through precognitive dreams, during which she could gain knowledge about future events, and in waking episodes, when she consciously felt a sense of knowing abo