RESEARCH INTO PSYCHIC ability has primarily focused on testing telepathic or clairvoyant messages sent in real time. However, according to Dr. Richard Broughton, a leading investigator into psychic phenomena, more than half of all psychic experiences impart information about events that have not yet occurred. These experiences fall into three categories: premonitions, precognitions, and predictions.

Premonitions are vague feelings that occur while a person is awake. An example of this would be the feeling that a friend's plane is about to crash or that a relative is about to call. In contrast, precognitions are specific images of future events. They often occur during dreams or meditative states. Dr. Broughton describes one woman's experience with precognition in his book Parapsychology: The Controversial Science:

[She] had a vivid dream in which her husband was out hunting...