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256 pages, Hardcover
First published May 3, 2022
In the weeks before Christmas, Fairley and Barker approached Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard, to open what they called a Premonitions Bureau. For a year, readers of the newspaper would be invited to send in their dreams and forebodings, which would be collated and then compared with actual happenings around the world.
Premonitions are impossible, and they come true all the time. The second law of thermodynamics says it can’t happen, but you think of your mother a second before she calls. There is no way for us to see, or feel, things before they occur but they often seem to hang around regardless.
Barker had met Jane at St George’s Medical School, in London, in 1946. He was studying to be a doctor and she was training to be a nurse. Jane’s family was from Gloucestershire; the men served in the military or held posts in the colonies. Her father had been a district officer in Nigeria and died in a hospital for tropical diseases when she was seven years old. Jane grew up with her mother and two younger siblings in a cottage not far from Cheltenham. She had brown hair, which she kept short, above her shoulders, a wide mouth and extremely proper pronunciation.
A useful definition of a delusion is not that it is an inaccurate belief about the world; it is a belief that you refuse to change when you are confronted with proof that you are wrong. The hypothesis fails. The pleasure principle is countermanded by the reality principle. Our best hopes and most extravagant fears rarely materialise. Prediction errors fire through the brain, turning the tiger back into a shadow. Prophecy reduces to coincidence. Your heart rate slows. The experiment does not repeat. The pattern won’t spread.