Volume 5, Issue 6 , Pages 309-312, November 2009
The Power of Story: Observations From a Book Tour
Article Outline
- Anecdotes
- The Insistent Friend
- “The Cancer is Right Here”
- A String of Numbers
- An Intimation of Doom
- The Collapsed Bridge
- The Secretary Knows
- The Rogue Wave
- Not Just Stories
- References
- Copyright
For several months I have been peddling my wares around the nation. My peddling has taken the form of an author's book tour and has involved scores of radio and television interviews and lectures in bookstores, conferences, universities, and healthcare institutions. My wares have been my book The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives.1
My dictionary tells me that one of the definitions of tour is “a journey for pleasure.” This suggests I may have signed onto the wrong kind of tour. A book tour can be literally disorienting, such as waking up in the gray dawn uncertain which day it is or which city you are in. Or when your mind becomes an echo chamber when you are asked the same questions over and over in interviews. Am I repeating myself? Did I just say that, or was it a week ago?
There are genuine pleasures as well, as when book lovers take time from their busy lives to honor you with their presence at bookstore talks and signings. And when they corroborate your book's theme by revealing the intimate details of their lives—well, it doesn't get much better for an author than that.
Anecdotes
During my meanderings, I have been flooded with people's experiences of premonitions. Everyone, it seems, has a story. Some of them are so graphic and arresting they make one's hair stand on end. Not all my friends are impressed by them, however. One of my professional colleagues sniffed disapproval, saying, “This is pretty soft stuff. After all, they are just stories.” He was correct. They are stories—but that doesn't mean they are not true, or that they do not provide insights into the nature of consciousness and how it manifests in the world.
The criticism of “just stories” is a peculiar one for a physician to make. We physicians spend our lives listening to stories. We call them case histories, and every patient has one. Every medical student learns to begin a patient interview with a “history of the present illness,” the HPI. Of course, physicians supplement history taking with more objective forms of information gathering, such as a physical examination and laboratory tests. But the HPI is the bedrock on which everything else rests.
There is a double standard in medicine about the stories patients tell. According to an old saying, “If you don't like a story, you call it an anecdote. If you like it, you call it a case history.”
Modern clinical medicine would not exist if it were not for people's stories. One of my favorite books in medical history is Classic Descriptions of Disease by Ralph H. Major, MD.2 It contains firsthand observations by famous physicians whose names have become associated with the diseases they described—Graves' disease, Addison's disease, Alzheimer's disease, Paget's disease, Cushing's disease, and so on. The scenario was nearly always the same. A troubled, sick patient went to some clinic, or a physician made a house call, and the suffering individual told a story while the physician listened. Over time, similar stories were heard and careful observations were made. A composite picture was pieced together, and the name of the first physician to describe it became attached.
I have been reminded on book tour that people's accounts of their premonitions are not always accurate. They may remember incorrectly or embroider their experiences, sometimes unconsciously. The sternest critics say stories of people's premonitions should never be taken seriously in view of their potential for inaccuracy.
This is an odd position for a physician to take. When a patient comes to us for help, we do not automatically assume they are lying. The clinical encounter does not work well if intentional deceit on the part of the patient is assumed by the physician. Neither do we physicians send out snoops to investigate and falsify patients' stories, yet skeptics often demand this be done before taking a person's premonition seriously.
Across thousands of patient encounters, good physicians develop sensitivity for the genuineness of stories. When the Nobel cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock was asked how she made her stunningly original discoveries about the chromosomes of maize, she explained that she had developed “a feeling for the organism.”3 Just so, it is possible to develop “a feeling for the story,” whether the story deals with an illness, a premonition, or something else.
Permit me to share some of the premonition stories people have told me on book tour the past few months.
The Insistent Friend
A young engineer flew to South America on a private plane piloted by an acquaintance of his. He planned to visit a friend whom he had not seen since college days. When it came time for the return flight to the United States, his friend came to his hotel room and told him he should not fly back on the plane. He'd had a dream the night before that the plane would crash and everyone on board would be killed. The engineer told his friend his premonition was nonsense, and an argument followed. A fight ensued in which the engineer's friend tackled him and physically restrained him. Not until the plane's departure time had passed did he let him go. The engineer was furious; he would now have to fly home at his own expense. Then word arrived that the private plane had indeed crashed, killing everyone on board.
During my book tour, Air France Flight 447 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, carrying 216 passengers and 12 crew members to their deaths. Immediately following the crash, Stefan van Oss, a middle-aged man living near Amsterdam, was interviewed on Dutch television. Van Oss held a reservation on the doomed flight. A close friend of his had a premonition that something bad would happen, and that if van Oss got on the plane he would never return home alive. Van Oss trusted his friend's premonition, cancelled his reservation, and lived to tell about it.4
“The Cancer is Right Here”
A woman had a dream one night that she had breast cancer. Worried sick, she visited her physician the next morning. She pointed with an index finger to a specific spot in her upper left breast where she'd seen the cancer in the dream. “It's right here,” she said. She could not feel a lump, however, and neither could her physician. A mammogram was done, which was normal. When the physician reassured her that nothing was wrong and that they should take a wait-and-see approach with frequent exams, she was not satisfied. “I know I have breast cancer at this exact spot,” she protested. When she insisted on going further, the physician pressured a surgeon to do a biopsy “where she points.” In a few days the pathologist called the original doctor with the report. “This is the most microscopic breast cancer I've seen,” he said. “You could not have felt it. There would have been no signs. How did you find it?” “I didn't,” he replied. “She did. In a dream.”
A String of Numbers
A middle-aged woman living on the East Coast suddenly developed a powerful feeling that her son, who lived thousands of miles away, was in serious jeopardy. She tried to ignore the feeling, but it became stronger. Suddenly a string of numbers popped into her mind, whose meaning was utterly obscure. Then she developed the urge to dial the strange cluster of numbers on her telephone. This connected her with the emergency room of a major hospital in the far-off city where her son lived. A physician came on the phone. The woman told him she was desperately worried about her son. The physician said that he had just taken care of him and that, although he was seriously injured, he was going to be fine.
A nearly identical story was related to me in another city by a woman who suddenly became concerned about her daughter for no apparent reason. She also saw “a jumble of numbers,” dialed them, and was connected with the hospital emergency room where her daughter was undergoing treatment following an automobile accident.
An Intimation of Doom
In December 1972, an American businessman was visiting Nicaragua. He had been in the capital city of Managua for a week and planned to stay a week longer. He suddenly experienced an urge to leave the city. This made no sense, because leaving early would mean that his business deal would probably collapse. The compulsion became so strong that he knew he must leave as soon as possible, so he gathered his belongings, dashed to the airport, and fled the country on the first available flight. He felt silly doing so until he heard about an event that occurred two hours after he left. On December 23, at 12:29 am, an earthquake of magnitude 6.2 occurred beneath the center of the city, and within an hour two severe aftershocks occurred. Five thousand people were killed, 20,000 were injured, and a quarter million were left homeless. The hotel where the man was staying was demolished.
The Collapsed Bridge
On August 1, 2007, a middle-aged woman was commuting home from work during evening rush hour in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her route was so routine she said she could drive it blindfolded. Her boredom was interrupted by a sudden compulsion to take another route home. She knew any other route would result in a considerable delay, so she resisted the urge. The feeling grew to such an intensity, however, that she found herself veering onto an alternate road. Before she reached home she heard on her car radio that the I-35W Mississippi River bridge, which was on her customary route, had collapsed into the river, killing 13 people and injuring 145. She was so shaken she had to stop her vehicle to regain control of her emotions before proceeding.
The Secretary Knows
A young woman who worked as a secretary on a busy medical ward of a large metropolitan hospital realized that she knew in advance which patients were going to experience medical emergencies such as cardiac arrest during her shift. She had no medical training nor any direct contact with patients, however, and she knew that if she went public with her premonitions she would be scorned and possibly fired. When she learned that a particular nurse on her shift had an interest in such matters, she made friends with her and eventually opened up to her. At the beginning of each shift, she would covertly tell the nurse which patients required special attention. She was almost never wrong. She and the nurse kept their communication secret for years. Both women were certain that many patients' lives were saved as a result.
The Rogue Wave
In early 1991, Marilyn Winkler, of Dandridge, Tennessee, and her husband David decided to take a break from parenting and go on a vacation to the island of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean (M. Winkler, personal communication, May 14, 2009). Her mother-in-law came for a visit to babysit their 15-month-old daughter Kate.
After they settled into a Marigot Bay hotel on Saint Lucia, the Winklers boarded a water taxi, a 22-foot motorized boat, to take them to the coastal town of Soufriere, where they planned to have lunch. As they hugged the coastline on the 50-minute trip, the weather was perfectly calm and no storms were predicted. Oddly, Winkler started glancing down at the floor of the boat and started picking up small items of debris, such as a rusty nail, and throwing them overboard. This turned into an obsession as she visualized these objects as projectiles if the boat were wrecked. There was no apparent reason for this concern; she was at home on boats, she was a good swimmer, and the weather was ideal.
She found herself continually looking toward the east and surveying the horizon. She looked for other boats and saw none. As they approached Soufriere, Gregory, the local water taxi helmsman, and Stan, another local crewman, decided to enter Soufriere Bay by sailing through a cut in a reef, rather than circle around the reef and enter the bay from further out to sea. Winkler knew instinctively it was wrong to enter the cut, and she started yelling at her husband to take the tiller from Gregory and steer them clear of the cut. The men laughed at her and began making chauvinistic remarks. She fought back an urge to seize the tiller herself. Then she started stuffing her personal items into waterproof bags, as if preparing for an emergency. Again she looked around and saw no other boats in the vicinity.
Halfway through the cut, a gigantic wave appeared from nowhere. It lifted their boat onto its 20-foot crest, turned it upside down, rotated it 360 degrees, then slammed it down, smashing it into “toothpicks,” as Winkler put it.
Winkler and Stan found themselves 30 feet under the surface of the ocean. Then, Winkler remembers, time seemed to stand still. As she saw the beautiful rays of the sun beaming down, she felt complete peace. Her thoughts suddenly turned to her daughter Kate, whom she heard yelling “Mommy” as clear as a bell. Then she felt two hands behind her chest lifting her, pushing her to the surface, and she began to swim. When she popped to the surface she looked toward the shoreline to orient herself. She saw that all three men had surfaced. She again looked for other boats, but saw none.
Then out of nowhere an elderly solo black fisherman with a long, gray beard appeared a few yards away. He calmly invited the swimmers into his boat, and held out his hand to each in turn. He took them into Soufriere, where locals gathered around them and walked with them to a clinic. It must have been a difficult walk, because they had to pause, turn upside down, and spew water from their lungs. Gregory, the helmsman, had a broken nose, and David had a bleeding scalp laceration that required 20 stitches.
Shaken up and lucky to be alive, the next day they caught a flight and returned home, arriving back in Tennessee late at night. They told her mother-in-law they had been shipwrecked, but before they could explain further she said that little Kate, the day prior, while being fed her lunch in her highchair, had suddenly started saying “Mommy and Daddy are drowning!” and “Daddy is bleeding from his head.” She further said that a shark was in the water. Although Winkler had not seen a shark, it was conceivable in view of all the blood in the water. Winkler states that her daughter could barely talk at this stage in her life, had spent all her 15 months in the Smokey Mountains, had never been to the ocean, and may not even have known what a shark was. But Winkler had no doubt that she really had heard Kate saying “Mommy” while she was in the ocean.
Winkler's premonition of disaster was especially noteworthy on several counts. It was so profound that she spoke to others about it before it happened, started preparing for it by tossing loose items overboard, and began stowing her stuff in waterproof bags. Her toddler, around 3,000 miles away, seemed to know what was happening to her parents, and she seemed to speak to Winkler as she nearly drowned. But what of the hands she felt lifting her up? And the old fisherman who appeared from nowhere, who disappeared just as suddenly once he had delivered them onshore?
Not Just Stories
And so it has gone on book tour, as ordinary Americans have opened their hearts and revealed experiences that, many of them said, they'd never told anyone before. Even physicians have come forward. In one lecture I presented to a large group of physicians, one female internist announced to the entire group, “I get numbers in my dreams. I see the actual values of my patients' laboratory tests before I even order them.”
I have often been told that “real” scientists don't believe things of this sort. This is a false claim. In one survey of more than 1,100 college professors in the United States, 55% of natural scientists, 66% of social scientists (excluding psychologists), and 77% of academicians in the arts, humanities, and education reported believing that extrasensory perception is either an established fact or a likely possibility.5
James Parkinson, Alois Alzheimer, Robert Graves, Thomas Addison, and other legendary figures whose names have become attached to classic diseases didn't stop when they heard stories of illness from their patients. They wanted proof, so they followed up with physical exams and tests, and they remained on the lookout for similar cases. Eventually they published their findings for discussion and criticism.
Stories of future knowing have been around for millennia. Foreknowledge is an essential part of the worldview of shamanism, which has existed for 50,000 years. The sacred texts of all the great religions, including the Holy Bible, are filled with prophecies, which are premonitions by another name. Shakespeare seemed to know humans could apprehend the future. In Hamlet, he wrote, “What a piece of work is man … in apprehension how like a god.”6 But the unbroken thread of premonition stories is not sufficient, so in recent years the loop has been closed by the addition of evidence, just as the great clinicians above solidified the stories they heard with empirical findings.
I have reviewed the scientific evidence for future knowing in The Power of Premonitions1 and in a recent column in this journal.7 These research findings have deepened our understanding of future knowing. Of course, the empirical evidence does not prove the validity of any single story, but it undercuts the perennial complaint of skeptics that all such stories are impossible in principle and must therefore be false.
Story comes from the Latin historia, from which history is also derived. The etymology of story reminds us that when we reject story, we deny our own history and sever our links to the past. Many premodern cultures believed this was suicidal. Story kept alive the connections with the ancestors, a source of wisdom and power in the present. To reject story was to be adrift, directionless, effete.
I have learned on book tour from many courageous storytellers that story can be about the future as well as the past. Story, as a remembrance of things future, is therefore an arrow pointing to a timeless aspect of who we are—the most glorious story of all.
References
- . The Power of Premonitions. New York, NY: Dutton; 2009;
- . Classic Descriptions of Disease. Springfield, Ill: Charles C. Thomas; 1945;
- . A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman; 1984;
- . Hunch prompted Dutch man to cancel flight on Air France 447. Seattlepi.com. June 1, 2009 http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/archives/170003.aspAccessed July 29, 2009
- . Attitudes of college professors toward extra-sensory perception. Zetetic Scholar. 1979;5:7–16
- . Hamlet. Act 2, scene 2, lines 303-312 Enotes.com.http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/what-piece-work-manAccessed September 24, 2009
- . Premonitions. Explore (NY). 2008;4:83–90
PII: S1550-8307(09)00291-2
doi:10.1016/j.explore.2009.09.001
© 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Volume 5, Issue 6 , Pages 309-312, November 2009
