Research has shown premonitions can happen o anyone: men and women, children and adults, scientists and artists, waiters, farmers, police officers, nurses and teachers, business consultants. Premonitions can happen to anyone, regardless of their personal comfort with them. Most people I know can tell at lest one story of a moment in which someone—maybe a friend, maybe themselves—seemed to know what was going to happen before they should have known it.

Surveys throughout the world have shown somewhere between half and three-quarters of the people report have had some kind of psychic experience at least once, with about half of those events being premonitions, according to Dr. Richard S Broughton, Director of Institute Laboratories. That is an enormous number of people acknowledging an experience our culture insists cannot exist. Even if researchers are correct when they estimate only 10 or 15% of the general population have experienced something that cannot be explained away as anything but a premonition, that sill adds up to tens of millions of people in North America alone.

Stories about premonitions appear in every culture and in every time period, including our own modern western culture. In nearly every other culture premonition are welcomes as significant events, but here they are often greeted with confusion and fear, or dismissed as so much nonsense.

Still, our disbelief doesn’t stop premonitions from showing up, pushing their way into our modern daily life regardless of our carefully reasoned arguments against them. Their intensity and irrational clarity challenge us to respond to them as if they are real.

We don’t have to feel lost or confused by premonitions. After researching them for nearly a decade I have come to think of premonitions as fundamentally a human experience. Whether we believe they originally descend from a higher guiding spirit or spark from the firing synapses in our brains, we all live through them in a similar human way. They are us, they are a part of being human. They can give us comfort and occasionally they offer us the most radical of all freedoms, the chance to chose our actions as second time and so possibly change our futures.