The Premonitions Bureau

 

How could I resist? Sam Knight's The Premonitions Bureau is right up my alley. It's partly about 1960s psychiatrist John Barker, who was intrigued by phenomena like telepathy and (of course) premonitions, which he thought might have a scientific explanation; and partly about the loose organisation he set up (just one admin assistant) to collect those premonitions. Barker's interest was sparked after the horrific disaster at Aberfan in Wales in 1966 (featured on The Crown) when mine tailings slipped and buried a school full of children. After the event, a number of people reported prophetic dreams -- one little girl who was killed in the disaster had told her mother about a disturbing dream she'd had which seemed to predict what was about to happen.

Of course it's easy for an element of hindsight to creep in to these kinds of 'prophecies' (and there is a discussion of this in the book) but there really did seem to be at least a couple of people who could genuinely sense the approach of disaster -- plane crashes, shipwrecks, even the death of Barker himself. But the Bureau never attained the kind of official, scientific status that Barker sought, and he himself seems to have been a troubled man. The description of the asylum where he worked is truly horrific, and it's hard to grasp that these institutions existed during my lifetime.

A fascinating, creepy and thought-provoking book, like a really long, gripping weekend magazine article. Great stuff.