With the 21st anniversary of 9/11 coming up soon, I was fascinated to learn, via Dr. Larry Dossey’s excellent book The Power of Premonitions, that only a third of employees showed up for work at the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, with an unusually large number inexplicably electing to stay home that day.

Ninety years earlier, the same happened with the Titanic. An unusually large number of passengers cancelled at the last minute because they’d suddenly got a bad feeling about taking the journey.

When Dr. Rupert Sheldrake carried out research on people’s dreams before 9/11, he discovered hundreds of accounts from people claiming to have had a vivid dream of airplanes smashing into high-rise buildings, whether in New York or somewhere else.

And then there were the results from the Global Consciousness Project’s random event generators, dotted around the world, pouring their continuous stream of random bits of data into one vast central hub. 

Periodically, Princeton University’s Dr Roger Nelson and his colleagues would compare them with the biggest breaking news stories, to see if there was any deviation from random activity, which might produce evidence of a collective consciousness.

On September 11, the machines recorded their greatest variance away from their random course a few hours before the first tower was hit, as though there had been a mass premonition, a giant public shudder of what was about to occur.  

None of this is supposed to happen, according to science. 

There are loads of theories about why premonitions occur. One has it that life is utterly deterministic and everything that is going to happen already has and that people with premonitions are simply tapping into information, which is, on some level, already available. 

Another has it that on a quantum level, we are sending out waves to meet our own future.  Or that scalar waves, secondary waves in the Zero Point Field, enable people to engineer changes in space-time. 

Or there’s the third possibility, that everything in the future already exists at some bottom-rung level in the realm of pure potential, and that in seeing into the future, or the past, we are helping to shape it and bring it into being, just as we do with a quantum entity in the present with the act of observation.

Premonitions can be easily explained if we take account of the observer effect.

An information transfer via subatomic waves doesn’t exist in time or space, but is somehow spread out and ever-present. The past and present are blurred into one vast ‘here and now’ so your brain ‘picks’ up signals and images from the past or the future. Our future already exists in some nebulous state that we may begin to actualize in the present. 

This makes sense if we consider that all subatomic particles exist in a state of all potential unless observed — which would include being thought about.

If consciousness is operating at the quantum frequency level it would also naturally reside outside space and time, which means that we theoretically have access to information, ‘past’ and ‘future’. If humans are able to influence quantum events, this implies that we are also able to affect events or moments other than just in the present.

So here’s an even spookier thought.  There is no past or future.  Life is just one big, smeared-out here and now, and all of it – past, present and future – open to our influence at any moment.

But that hints at the most unsettling idea of all. It might well be that every moment of our lives influences every other moment, forward and backward. And maybe it’s true, like the Terminator, we always go ‘back’ in time to affect our own ‘future.’