I cannot think of any occasion when I have positively foreseen the future. Fragments of thought such as words, phrases or ideas have surfaced inexplicably in my mind but there have been no indications of their origins and I have only regarded them as whims at the time. Only later when the experiences to which they relate have occurred can I recognise them as having been what I choose to call souvenirs from the future. To establish just how appropriate this term is it is necessary to consider the nature of souvenirs in general.
We tend to think of souvenirs as objects which elicit past memories, but in fact the objects are only such in the minds of the people who hold those memories and the souvenirs aren’t properties of the objects at all. For example an unusual pebble is just that except to the person who remembers where they found it and the circumstances. Hence a souvenir is actually a thought which is the key to a collection of thoughts otherwise locked away in the unconscious mind. The French word “souvenir” actually means “come from below” i.e. from the unconscious.
A fragment of thought that has somehow crossed the time boundary from the future may be regarded as a souvenir rather than a full precognition. Unlike a souvenir from the past it cannot elicit memories as they have not formed yet, so remains at most a curiosity, an apparently spurious thought that is most likely quickly disregarded. Only when the full future experience occurs later is it possible for the souvenir to be associated with it if it has itself been remembered or recorded in some other fashion in the meantime. The problem with this is that those sceptical about the possibility of any form of prediction ridicule this phenomenon as being postdiction, simply a contrivance fabricated after the fact. In simple cases this may be seen as a legitimate criticism but in more complex cases involving many such souvenirs this argument may be outweighed.
Common advice given to people who suspect that they predict future events is to write down their predictions when they occur. Often such premonitions occur in dreams so people are advised to keep dream diaries. However, anyone doing this may be regarded as being predisposed to seriously believing that they can predict the future and therefore more likely to contrive evidence. Sceptics seem to have a suitable argument to counter every claim made and I feel that only first hand experience such as mine can convince just the experient and probably nobody else of anything. Therefore I am pleased that my own experiences have given me inside knowledge about the phenomenon. In my case I didn’t write a diary of my premonitions as I wasn’t aware of having any and hadn’t even considered the possibility of foreseeing the future at the time. Instead I wrote an entire novel apparently by unwittingly taking many souvenirs from my future and weaving them into a complex story, which in some cases happened to be similar to the future events from which the souvenirs apparently originated. Even my motive for writing the novel wasn’t evident to me at the time, so it is difficult for any suggestion of contrivance to be levelled at me.
Another feature of my experiences that I noticed was that a souvenir from the future was often accompanied by a synchronicity in the form of a roughly simultaneous unknown remote event that was connected with the later event from which the souvenir originated. That was hardly surprising in a way. For example, I couldn’t read a document in the future until the author had written it, so it was likely that a souvenir from reading the document would appear in my mind around the time that it was written if at all. Of course I seldom had any definite way of confirming the existence of these remote events, only speculation based on clues, but I became sure that such a pattern was emerging.
After this lengthy explanation of my accumulating suspicions about my experiences I will now give you an important example of them in the form of the key incidents that occurred in 2017 so that you can judge for yourself. Personally I was so overwhelmed by these that I deleted the whole of a previous version of this site which included a journal of my experiences to date and many observations concerning them around the time that they occurred. Only now am I considering rebuilding the site in a more conservative way taking into account new knowledge that I have acquired since then. I should mention that a key criterion used by assessors of possible predictions is that they are suitably close in time to the predicted events. On that count my experiences in 2017 are completely off the scale, being exactly six years after I wrote my novel, so they should be completely unjustifiable even as postdictions and yet they were convincing enough to scare me seriously for a while.