By Robin Garland
Published: March. 31, 2012
Clairvoyance, telepathy, seeing into the future, second sight, a hunch or a gut level feeling, call it what you will, it goes against the principle of science, that states “an effect cannot occur before its cause”, so understandably there is a lot of scepticism surrounding premonition and déjà vu.
Premonitions are characterized by feelings of anxiety, or vague unease about impending disaster. We are mostly unaware of how many times these sensations occur in our lives, because we are either too busy to notice, or we dismiss them as being fanciful. Fortunately for me, my great grandfather did pay attention to a premonition a hundred years ago when he went to make reservations for his entire family to return to Canada on R.M.S Titanic.
The family was excited at the prospect of travelling home, on, what was then, the largest passenger ship in the world, on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. Needless to say, they were extremely disappointed when their father returned and told them that they would not be going on the Titanic.
He told them that when he reached the offices of the White Star Line he had had a terrible premonition of impending disaster, so he went, instead, into the offices of the Allan Line and booked the family on R.M.S Victorian which was due to sail a few days after the Titanic.
R.M.S Victorian sailed into similar conditions as those experienced by the Titanic, and my great uncle who was 11 at the time recorded in his book “A Naval Career”, that they saw flotsam such as wooden trays and deck chairs on the surface of the ocean in the area where the Titanic went down.
All the publicity had proclaimed, that because of new technology, R.M.S Titanic was indestructible, so it would have been understandable if my great grandfather had ignored his premonition as fanciful, and gone ahead and made reservations on that ill fated ship, but fortunately for us, his descendants, he didn’t and we are all here to tell the tale!
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