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Yes, I do think experiences with time not seeming to work at all as we "normally" expect (and not due to coincidence) are, in fact, "normal." Or at any rate, maybe not that frequent, but near-universal. Try asking anyone: many will tell you such stories, sometimes with a lot of specifics.
Since the stories here tend to be dark, here's my more positive one.
This was a long time ago.
The dream: A woman and I are on our knees on a beach, embracing and kissing. A high blazing sun is shining into our shut eyes. I know her face and form clearly, and I know she is German. I also know her
name, which is French. I have never met this woman before this dream, nor is she an analogue to anyone I've met before.
At the time I was traveling and journaling in a notebook. So I journaled this dream. I also mentioned the name and nationality of this dream-woman to a friend I was visiting in Cairo, where the dream had come to me. Unwittingly, I had set up an experiment.
About a week later, I saw a woman with the same face and form. This was not only a matter of a "type" that I liked to dream about. She looked exactly the same as in the dream. (Here one can argue that memory adapts, of course, and the dream leaves no archival record to check, so I'll have to accept that objection.) But the dream was not on my mind when I saw her, or in the immediate wake. I just knew I liked her.
She was in a guided tour group at the Karnak Temple in Luxor, where I was a stray tourist. Pretty fucking dramatic place. I attached myself to the tour. In fact, before I first saw her, I'd seen the Egyptian tour guide standing by himself and waving a little paper Stars and Stripes on a stick to signal that he was about to begin the group tour in English. Not realizing this, seeing only an Egyptian fellow waving a US flag on the floor among the columns of Karnak Temple for some unfathomable reason -- how young & naive was I -- I walked up to him and took out a lighter and joked about burning it. No kidding. (The paper flag, not the temple.) He was confused by that, but friendly. That was his job. Then the group coalesced around us, I figured out what the flag was for, and I saw her. Still, I was not thinking about the dream.
I strayed off and later quietly attached myself again to the edge of the group. After the tour, while the tourists were at some tables waiting for their company bus, she was sitting by herself and I approached her. As these things go, sometimes (but usually not!), she invited me to go back to town with her, on the bus. I had to negotiate a payment with the tour operator. Price of the taxi, no more.
And then we got involved. A day or two later she suggested we go to Hurghada, a Red Sea beach resort, which we did. That was her idea. I don't generally choose to go to beach resorts. And in Hurghada, the exact moment from the dream happened. And only then did it flood in for me that this was, indeed, the exact dream, same woman, same name, same embrace, same kneeling on the sand, same sun in our shut eyes.
Now one might say I steered at least the last part -- beach, kneeling, sun, kiss -- so that it would come out as in the dream. If so, it was not conscious. Now think of all the other variables involved. She looked (and moved, and sounded) like she did in the dream. Same hair, same face. She was German, like in the dream. And here's the kicker: She had introduced herself by the exact name from the dream,
but it wasn't her actual name.
Her real name may belong to as many as 1 in 50 women in Germany, but the day before she met me she had decided, spontaneously, to start calling herself by its French analogue. She had never identified herself by the French version in her life, until arriving in to Egypt, but she told me it was her name, and that is how I knew her until weeks later. This was not meant as a deception. She had taken a week-long tourist flight to Luxor spontaneously, at a time when she was frustrated with shit happening back home. Her family had told her she was crazy to go -- single tourist woman in Egypt! Just as spontaneously, she decided to play at "being someone else" during this vacation, and so she changed her name. To the name from my dream. As a game.
A couple of days after that, she took her flight back home. I visited her in Germany about six weeks later, where she had of course resumed using her actual name, the one by which I still know her. We would later live together in Germany for a couple of years. Yes, she was my first great love, and I was hers, and many days still I wish it had stayed that way. And I dreamed about her before I met her. Stupid men. I am one.
The many elements that constitute "an event" are not easy to delineate with precision, and thus it is impossible to assign a numerical probability of realization (the actual person, kissing, and location as described) to a particular combination of details that one specifies in advance (the details in the dream). The dream, which itself felt important when it happened, set up a set of details that then happened, exactly as detailed. The parts that she decided, unprompted by me (to be there in that temple in the first place; to respond well to my proposition; to introduce herself with a name that was not hers; to suggest a visit to the beach resort) are all fairly low to extremely low probability. One must multiply the (theoretical) fractional odds of each detail in turn, yielding an ever-decreasing fraction.
Now every couple of weeks someone wins the big-jackpot lottery, which has odds of like 400 million to one, and I'll guess nearly all lottery players have had dreams about winning it. Those don't mean anything, we say, any more than a horny young American man's dreams about the start of an affair with a German in Egypt. (We all know the Germans fly south to mate, right?) If someone dreams a set of jackpot numbers and plays them and then
wins it, we don't think that's special either, because almost everyone playing the lottery has dreamed numbers that they played and then 399,999,999 of them do not win. Since there's a winner every couple of weeks, the sheer volume of players is going to produce more than one winner who dreamed the numbers and then played them. Regularly.
But don't tell the winner otherwise. She won't believe you; and so what? The winner can believe whatever she likes, and it makes her happy to have a narrative for the lucky break in her life, rather than view it as random. The only problem in the lottery example happens when her story of having dreamed the winning numbers is told to all the losers, as though it is evidence that a higher or unknown power chooses lottery winners, so that the losers keep playing, and losing, and playing, and losing.
Every day random events happen around us that, depending on how we might have defined them beforehand, might be one-in-quintillion events. We don't even notice. Nevertheless, my inclination, unsurprising in a human, is to accept my experience (and a couple of others I've had, and those described by several posters on this thread) as true precognition, for two reasons. One of my reasons is subjective and emotional, the other more rationally argued. The emotional reason is that re-creation of all the details from a moment of the dream in real life felt exactly like the fulfilment of a precognitive signal that was deeply moving and damned important to me. It felt like a powerful echo had been released, and come back in time a few days to create my dream of it, and it felt like I didn't do anything conscious to make any of it come out that way, and it felt like I did not even think about the dream after I'd journaled and joked about it until a week later, when bam: Revelation. You are the one from my dream!
The rationally-based argument proceeds from a contestable assumption about the odds that we don't understand time-space, that it may have geometric loops or tachyons or as-yet unmeasured feedbacks or no damn linearity or plane at all, and that some of the people (even mainstream university physicists) who allow for such occurrences in theory might be right to do so. These odds that time is
normally not normal cannot be enumerated, so we are stuck with Bayesian guesses on how likely it is, no matter what. The odds just seem waaaaaay higher than the odds of all of these stunning precog experiences most people have experienced being always a matter of coincidences. I get it. It's ridiculous. Call it my version of Pascal's Wager.
"Now I am experiencing the Clear Light of objective reality. Nothing is happening, nothing ever has happened or ever will happen. My present sense of self, the voyager, is in reality the void itself, having no qualities or characteristics. I remember myself as the voyager, whose deepest nature is the Clear Light itself; I am one; there is no other. I am the voidness of the void, the eternal unborn, the uncreated, neither real nor unreal. All that I have been conscious of is my own play of consciousness, a dance of light, the swirling patterns of light in infinite extension, endless endlessness, the Absolute beyond change, existence, reality. I, the voyager, am inseparable from the Clear Light; I cannot be born, die, exist, or change. I know now that this is my true nature." - Ralph Metzner, RIP
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