Is Waking Early Presentiment?
Rupert Sheldrake has written a Substack post I found most intriguing, and I cannot stop thinking about it. Interested to know what you think.
The daily miracle of beginning again afresh.
Praise for the singing!
Praise for the morning!
Praise for them springing fresh from the Word!
It’s not yet 7 am in late October, and because the time change is in 5 days, still full dark outside. And yet my body, somehow, knows it is time to begin the day.
Last week, I read the above extraordinary Substack post. I have often had this experience of awakening described therein just before my alarm, and feel curious as to how it could happen. There have been decades of people waffling about with various possible explanations, none of which have convinced, all of which are versions of, “I don’t know, but I’m jolly well unable to admit it, so here’s x or y pseudo-explanation for it instead.”
Rupert goes through a few more unsatisfactory theories after the one described in the first paragaph excerpted above before describing a detailed inquiry he conducted years ago with some graduate students of time sense, whether awake or asleep. Most people reported repeated experiences of waking up a few minutes before the alarm.
Here’s where I became fascinated: they looked at the time sense of the same group while awake, and it was much less accurate.
By contrast, when it came to guessing the time during the day, most said they were often wrong by half an hour or more. This was indeed the case, as I found by suddenly asking everyone to guess the time without looking at clocks or watches. Some were wrong by as much as forty-five minutes…
Of course, there are people who when they had to get up early, they were so worried about oversleeping that they kept waking up all through the night or couldn’t sleep at all!
I don’t know about you, but I have usually had this happen when I both had to get up extraordinarily early and it was extremely important I not oversleep, usually because of a scheduled flight.
I continued to read and then the post took a most surprising and unexpected (to me, anyway) turn indeed.
Perhaps an approximate internal “clock” plays a part when people know in advance when they need to wake, but the precision with which people wake raises the surprising possibility that precognition or presentiment, may play a part as well. At first I was reluctant to take this idea seriously, but the more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. There is already much evidence from parapsychological experiments for presentiment – feeling the future – in the form of unconscious arousal before an emotionally arousing stimulus.
Rupert goes on to seek to substantiate this apparently dubious hypothesis using the results of experiments from about 30 years ago, and describes his own experiences of being a subject in one of the experiments, as well as reports from firefighters who suddenly awaken before the emergency alarm goes off.
I have been wondering if anyone has done a study or might do one on how many people start to get anxious just before an Amber alert goes off…
I then got curious about other posts he has made and stumbled upon this.
If you like watching videos, it looks like it would be an intriguing conversation to watch:
Thanks, Rupert Sheldrake, from your thought-provoking Substack. I am looking forward to reading more, as I just subscribed.