CENTRAL PREMONITIONS REGISTRY

HISTORY OF PREVIOUS CENTRAL PREMONITION REGISTRIES

There have been two previous attempts to run such institutes. One was the Central Premonitions Registry in the U.S.A., and the other was the British Premonitions Bureau in England.

How did it all start? On Oct. 21, 1966 there was the famous Aberfan disaster, when a coal mine collapsed in the Welsh village Aberfan and killed 128 school children. The British Psychiatrist Barker assumed that since this event caused such strong emotions and a storm in the media, it was very likely that some people had dreamt about it before. So he requested people through the Media to contact him about this. Of 76 answers that arrived, there were 24 that had sufficient corroboration, and these 24 case Barker ranked by order of strength of the evidence for Precognition. One of the best cases was that of a 47 year old woman from Plymouth that dreamt about an old school building in a valley, and then there was a Welsh coal miner, and then an avalanche of coal down a mountain. Near the bottom of the mountain was a little boy with a large stroke of hair that looked scared to death, and then she saw various rescue operations and had the feeling that this boy was saved. Near the boy stood in the dream one of the rescue workers, who was wearing a strange pointed hat. This Lady described her dream in Church on the Saturday, Oct. 20, 1966 (one day before the disaster), and there were 6 witnesses who later corroborated this. The next day, on Sunday at 8.30 in the morning (still before the disaster occurred on that day) she also told about it to her neighbor, who also confirmed the testimony. And that day in the evening, the British TV report on the disaster showed this small child talking to a reporter, and a rescue worker with exactly the same hat as reported in the dream. This research on the Abrefan disaster was published on the British Journal of the Society for Psychic Research (vol. 44), 1967.

Following this disaster Barker established in England the British premonitions Bureau in 1967, and a year later the Central Premonitions Registry was established in New-York. The purpose was to invite anyone who had dreams (or other experiences) which they thought might contain precognitive information on events that could have public significance to phone and report them. This way Barker wanted to achieve 2 goals: 1. There would be an official record of the dream before the event. 2. If a number of people phoned and described a similar event, this might serve as an early warning system and avert some of the disasters that might happened. In the 6 first years since its establishment the British Bureau received 1206 calls. Some of them indeed seems truly precognitive of events of public interest, such as the death of 14 children in a fire in an institute for the retarded, or the death of a pair of twins that were trapped in a refrigerator and suffocated. But there was no clear pattern, and there was never a flood of reports that all referred to the same incident. Also, most of the cases that looked really precognitive were by a small number of people who reported dreams repeatedly, and altogether there were many fewer significant cases then expected. Therefore the practical goal of these two institutes was not accomplished and so they were gradually closed.

However, an analysis of research and theories of Precognition shows that the main problem was that most precognitive dreams concern personal and trivial matters, and even when they refer to a public event, they are usually from that person's subjective perspective. Also, since most precognitive dreams are fulfilled within a few hours, usually people don't have time to report them until it's too late. So this is why it's hard to use it for practically averting disasters, and this is why you should e-mail us the dream immediately upon writing it down.

But we would like to conduct a more general research on Precognition, so we don't mind if many of the precognitions will deal with personal or trivial matters. But of course cases will be given evidential value only if there are witnesses who can corroborate them. Clearly the research needs to go on, and the Internet offers a great opportunity to do it. Without such an institution, nobody knows for example how many people dreamt in advance about the explosion in the Federal building in Oklahoma On April 19, 1995 that killed 168 people and injured over 600. By the way, people who had dreams about this incident before it happened are invited to report it to us, as long as they have witnesses who can confirm that they told them about it before the event.