The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold

by Sam Knight

Merthyr Mountain

but they also occurred infrequently enough “to pass unheeded into the limbo of forgotten things.”

a few days later and wrote Darkness at Noon, a classic novel about totalitarian power. After the war, Koestler

One of his patients was obsessed by angel shit.

Friston was impressed that a mind could become occupied by such a question. According to Friston, such delusions develop when, for one reason or another, the relationship between our expectations and the feedback from the world goes awry. We fail to correct our hypothesis, even though it is wrong. She loves me. Or we respond too strongly to stimuli, seeing meaning where there is none. The shadow that looks like a tiger becomes a tiger. Why am I covered in angel shit again?

“We get excited by things that appear to give us a leg up in the predictive world because that’s really, really advantageous,” Corlett said. “It’s sort of what we were put on the earth to do.”

In 1926, Freud tried (and failed) to reassure Jones in a letter. “Just answer calmly that my acceptance of telepathy is my own affair,” he suggested, “like my Jewishness and my passion for smoking.”

Barker was an especially only child.

The difference between science and madness is correcting your explanation when it doesn’t map on to the world.

Prophecy is almost always in decline.

The disease was first identified in the 1540s by a scholar from Verona named Girolamo Fracastoro, who also gave the first full medical description of syphilis in a poem that was 1,300 verses long.

“New York Mining Disaster 1941”

The word “embolism” has come to mean a blockage, normally in the body somewhere, but the term originally described the adding of days to the calendar to align the twelve lunar months of the year with the Earth’s 365-day orbit of the sun. It is an intercalation. A correction of time.

idiom of distress.

“railway spine” and “profit neurosis”)

If there is no disaster, there is no premonition to precede it. Socrates raised the hemlock to his own lips. “That which has happened to me is doubtless a good thing,” he reasoned, “and those of us who think death is an evil must be mistaken.”

Once he began studying old rites and the verses of medieval danses macabres, Ariès found that he could not stop.

Ariès came to the conclusion that, over the course of a thousand years, death had become increasingly private, to the point of invisibility.

Ariès published The Hour of Our Death,

Our lives are not tests available to be rerun.