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Sense Of Foreboding

Gellatly, I hope your father has a fast and full recovery. :grouphug:

I get the sense of foreboding quite frequently, but it generally comes to nothing. Instead, it seems to work the other way around. When I have a thought, absent any particular feeling, that something is going to happen, as if it's simply a fact - that's the time it will happen.

For example, the night before the September 11th terrorist attacks, I was just going about my business at home when a very specific thought appeared in my mind for no reason: "the world is going to end tomorrow." There was no feeling of foreboding with it. I told myself to stop being silly, but when I woke in the morning, the attacks were already in progress.

Of course the world didn't end, but it did for a lot of people, and some unpleasant changes came about because of it - so the world didn't end, but was changed. Don't know if that counts.

I wasn't in any physical danger from the attacks, but some of my loved ones were, so perhaps that's why I picked up on it at all.

A few years later I had what I can only call a "prophecy" complete with terrifying vision (which I'm not prone to, BTW, before anyone asks!) but have been hesitant to write about it. But there was still no sense of foreboding with it, at least not in the sense being talked about here.


Here you go! :p

„Die Angst vor dem Tode ist die Angst ‚vor‘ dem eigensten, unbezüglichen und unüberholbaren Seinkönnen. Das Wovor dieser Angst ist das In-der-Welt-sein selbst. Das Worum dieser Angst ist das Sein-können des Daseins schlechthin.“
– Martin Heidegger: Sein und Zeit (1927)


Thanks. I thought Heidegger had something to say about it. And there was Camus, too, who said (strictly paraphrasing here, as I don't want to dig up my philosophy books tonight!) that knowledge of our own death drifts back to us from the future, and that's why we get spooked.
 
That's it - the events of the future drifting backwards to cast a shadow, and the vague knowledge that there's damn all you can do about it. It's also interesting that forebodings seem always to be of negative events, not fortunate ones - unless anyone out there has had an unexpected leavening of the mood, followed by an extremely fortunate event later on?
 
That's it - the events of the future drifting backwards to cast a shadow, and the vague knowledge that there's damn all you can do about it. It's also interesting that forebodings seem always to be of negative events, not fortunate ones - unless anyone out there has had an unexpected leavening of the mood, followed by an extremely fortunate event later on?

This might not be very common, but I did have a friend who would feel ill before something good would happen to her. She called it her "sick sense" instead of sixth sense, because she literally felt nauseated! I can confirm that this was accurate, because she'd often come over to tell me about having the sick feeling - then hours later she'd receive a job promotion, or win a wad of money at bingo, or something like that.
 
If you frequently feel that something bad is going to happen, you'll be right eventually, alas.
Well, yes. I have a foreboding that I will die very soon. Given my age and general state of health, however, this is more of a logical prognosis than something psychic.

But I suppose if I live another 20 years, that will prove my foreboding to have been nonsense.
 
First, I'm glad to hear he's recovering. I hope he gets well soon.

My mom had a similar experience once. We were flying to Washington for a wedding. Once we got on a plane, she got anxious, (more so even than usual, she hates artificial heights) and said she had a bad feeling about the flight.

Shortly thereafter, the flight was delayed for repairs. Once we re-boarded, her anxiousness was gone.

That said, as I said, she hates flying and anxiousness isn't unusual, so it may have been that she just got it right for once.

As for your experience, you called it a shadow. There a long standing hypothesis that all of time is happening at once. Maybe when your family sensed it, it because he feeling was leaking through. Did you ever find out when your sister and mom started having the sense of foreboding.
 
This happened somewhat recently so it's a little hard to talk about it but around Christmas, I had a lucid dream of one of my sister's sitting on a log raft that was being navigated by our long deceased grandmother. They were crossing an ancient, dark, murky river in a thick fog and the message to me was to watch over my sister. I woke up right after I had it still feeling the same sense of impending gloom as when I was watching the dream unfold. And that dark, dark gloom lingered on for awhile before it finally dissipated into the morning light.

Well, in March of this year, that same sister ended up having a life threatening allergic reaction to some prescription medication she was taking. She had had a few glasses of wine too so that combo turned out to be lethal. Had she not received immediate medical attention when that happened, she quite possibly would have died. As I was there visiting her at the time when that incident occurred, I was the one who called 911 for an ambulance to take her to the hospital. Had I not had that dream, I don't know if I would have reacted so quickly to her medical emergency and I don't know if she would still be alive today.
 
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I'm not sure if this counts as foreboding but it was when my husband's father died. He was in hospital but was supposed to be getting better.
I had an uneasy feeling all afternoon and when my husband came home from work said that we should go to visit him.
My husband said that he was tired and didn't want to go.
Later that night his mother rang to say that after enjoying a nice meal the man next to him said that he gave a gasp and died.
 
There's a word for that sudden feeling of sadness and fear, can't remember it, but it's a foreign term. Not panic exactly, just a fleeting sense of grief for no good reason.

We have threads on Places that make you feel sad or something, where people find that being in a particular spot makes them inexplicably unhappy. I suspect that if someone randomly has the bad feeling in a place, they might feel the same again on subsequent visits through habit.

It's all very weird. ;)
I wondered if the word could be sehnsucht? "that unnameable something"
 
My account of foreboding is a bit of a non event really but the memory is still vivid even nearly 50 years later.


Back in the late 1960s I was around 9-10 years old and my Mum, Dad and I set off on holiday for a week in the West Country in the UK. Our form of transport then was a motorbike and sidecar so as well as being excited about the holiday , the journey itself was always an adventure.


We hadn’t booked anywhere for the first night as my dad planned to just find a B&B when he had had enough of riding and we eventually hauled up in a small village near Warminster in Wiltshire. The village was just a few houses dotted either side of the road and we pulled up outside a terraced cottage that had a B&B sign in the window.


Mum and I waited in the sidecar whilst my Dad knocked on the door and after a brief chat with the owner he came back to tell us that they had a room for the night and the landlady was making a cup of tea –as I said previously I loved being on holiday and was looking forward to staying in different places but the moment I stepped in the front door I was hit by an incredible sense of panic and can remember the hairs on my neck prickling.


The front door opened straight into a lounge/ dining room and there was a big round heavy table to the right and stairs to the left with the kitchen straight ahead –it wasn’t all that big a cottage. The landlady was quite old but very friendly and asked us to sit around the table while she made some tea. I was starting to shake at this point and my parents were a bit surprised and were trying to calm me down but I was just saying I didn’t want to stay there and wanted to leave immediately. The cottage was very old fashioned and I remember the lady going into the kitchen and out of the back door to pump water from a hand pump and what was quite weird was that looking into the kitchen from where we were sitting the small yard appeared to be backed by a sheer rock face like the wall of a quarry.


The lady came back with a tray of tea and by now I was getting even more scared and was shaking like a leaf – I was barely able to speak even as my teeth were chattering too much and my Mum said that we would have to leave as she was scared I might have some sort of fit or worse, so my Dad apologized to the lady and we left –as soon as I stepped outside I was fine.


I remember I wasn’t scared of the lady or the house itself as such –I just had an overwhelming sense that something horrible would happen if we stayed there – but no idea what that would have been. It was incredibly old fashioned even for the late 1960s –my Mum visited the toilet which was under the stairs before we left and was surprised that it was an old ash pan type which had a removable tray of ash beneath it and so didn’t seem the type of place to do bed and breakfast what with no running water etc so maybe it was the style of the place that set me off but my memory of the day is still vivid and we spoke about it quite often in later years . I still don’t think it was the house or the old lady who spooked me as such and I have never had a feeling anywhere near that before or since. In fact we headed off and found an old hotel which was big and virtually empty which on the face of it should have been far more scary but I was quite happy there!

Years later I became aware of the UFO activity in the Warminster area in the 1960s but had no knowledge of this at the time and I don't think could have been relevant but I do wonder what -if anything - would have happened if we had stayed!
 
..Years later I became aware of the UFO activity in the Warminster area in the 1960s..

I visited the Warminster area on a cycle-camping trip in the 1970's to check out all the famous UFO and entity sites mentioned in the book "The Warminster Mystery" but didn't see anything odd myself.
But one minor incident is worth mentioning, namely that as I cycled along a country lane, I was hit by the smell of ozone out of the blue (smelt like burning plastic) but could see nothing that might have produced it, the road was open and windswept with views for miles in all directions.
I later heard that the smell of ozone is sometimes associated with UFO's.
 
My account of foreboding is a bit of a non event really but the memory is still vivid even nearly 50 years later.


Back in the late 1960s I was around 9-10 years old and my Mum, Dad and I set off on holiday for a week in the West Country in the UK. Our form of transport then was a motorbike and sidecar so as well as being excited about the holiday , the journey itself was always an adventure.


We hadn’t booked anywhere for the first night as my dad planned to just find a B&B when he had had enough of riding and we eventually hauled up in a small village near Warminster in Wiltshire. The village was just a few houses dotted either side of the road and we pulled up outside a terraced cottage that had a B&B sign in the window.


Mum and I waited in the sidecar whilst my Dad knocked on the door and after a brief chat with the owner he came back to tell us that they had a room for the night and the landlady was making a cup of tea –as I said previously I loved being on holiday and was looking forward to staying in different places but the moment I stepped in the front door I was hit by an incredible sense of panic and can remember the hairs on my neck prickling.


The front door opened straight into a lounge/ dining room and there was a big round heavy table to the right and stairs to the left with the kitchen straight ahead –it wasn’t all that big a cottage. The landlady was quite old but very friendly and asked us to sit around the table while she made some tea. I was starting to shake at this point and my parents were a bit surprised and were trying to calm me down but I was just saying I didn’t want to stay there and wanted to leave immediately. The cottage was very old fashioned and I remember the lady going into the kitchen and out of the back door to pump water from a hand pump and what was quite weird was that looking into the kitchen from where we were sitting the small yard appeared to be backed by a sheer rock face like the wall of a quarry.


The lady came back with a tray of tea and by now I was getting even more scared and was shaking like a leaf – I was barely able to speak even as my teeth were chattering too much and my Mum said that we would have to leave as she was scared I might have some sort of fit or worse, so my Dad apologized to the lady and we left –as soon as I stepped outside I was fine.


I remember I wasn’t scared of the lady or the house itself as such –I just had an overwhelming sense that something horrible would happen if we stayed there – but no idea what that would have been. It was incredibly old fashioned even for the late 1960s –my Mum visited the toilet which was under the stairs before we left and was surprised that it was an old ash pan type which had a removable tray of ash beneath it and so didn’t seem the type of place to do bed and breakfast what with no running water etc so maybe it was the style of the place that set me off but my memory of the day is still vivid and we spoke about it quite often in later years . I still don’t think it was the house or the old lady who spooked me as such and I have never had a feeling anywhere near that before or since. In fact we headed off and found an old hotel which was big and virtually empty which on the face of it should have been far more scary but I was quite happy there!

Years later I became aware of the UFO activity in the Warminster area in the 1960s but had no knowledge of this at the time and I don't think could have been relevant but I do wonder what -if anything - would have happened if we had stayed!
I'm just thinking that you may have experienced a time slip event and subconsciously, you realised that something was amiss - but your parents didn't.
 
That did cross my mind too - I remember my Dad brought some of my toy soldiers in, to take my mind off things I suppose and the lady said to 'mind the table as the lead soldiers may scratch them' they were plastic of course but maybe the lady remembered her children playing with lead soldiers before the war and hadn't moved with the times -the view from the kitchen window sticks in my mind too -we all thought it was strange to have such a narrow yard, of only a few feet wide it appeared, then a sheer rock face. I did think after that maybe that was meant to be the limit of all we had to 'see' if it was not normal.
I have never been receptive to strange things in any way over the course of my life so far, in fact my Mother was always more likely to feel atmosphere in strange places which my dad and I used to laugh off! and yet she wasn't worried about this place as such, other than the very old fashioned nature of it all. As I said above -it seemed strange for someone doing B&B to have no mod cons - none of us remember seeing anything modern at all, bearing in mind the room we were in and the kitchen and WC seemed to be the only rooms on the ground floor, like a TV, radio, telephone etc. and to have a toilet that had to be emptied of ash on a regular basis wouldn't be ideal you would think!
 
A couple of nights ago the need for a pee forced me from my bed so i tootled off to the loo, not bothering to switch the hall light on. As I reached for the toilet door handle a sense of dread and foreboding overcame me that stopped me In my tracks from opening the door. I stood there for what seemed like a minute, but in reality was probably no more than a second or two. I don’t know where the sensation came from. It wasn’t as if I anticipated something lurking in the bathroom. I have no fear of the dark and quite welcome it. I assume I was not fully awake and carried with me the remains of a dream, but it was really weird and not something I have previously experienced.
Any ideas?
 
A couple of nights ago the need for a pee forced me from my bed so i tootled off to the loo, not bothering to switch the hall light on. As I reached for the toilet door handle a sense of dread and foreboding overcame me that stopped me In my tracks from opening the door. I stood there for what seemed like a minute, but in reality was probably no more than a second or two. I don’t know where the sensation came from. It wasn’t as if I anticipated something lurking in the bathroom. I have no fear of the dark and quite welcome it. I assume I was not fully awake and carried with me the remains of a dream, but it was really weird and not something I have previously experienced.
Any ideas?

I sometimes wonder if that sudden sense of dread can - in some instances - be an overreaction to environmental factors. I have occasionally found myself in, if not exactly a state of dread or foreboding, one of nagging and irrepressible unease - and realised later that something was out of place or unusual in the circumstances ; not necessarily dangerous or threatening, just different to what I was expecting - and maybe I've simply picked up on that difference without even registering it directly, and the message has got garbled.

From an evolutionary point of view, the act of taking a piss can be quite a hazardous undertaking. (And I've often wondered if that has something to do with shy bladder syndrome.) You were also in the dark. Neither of those factors might cause you any concern whatsoever under usual circumstances, individually or combined - but I wonder how much of a trigger one needs to set ancient alarm bells ringing.

I might be barking totally up the wrong tree here - but was there anything at all different about your surroundings? And I don't mean anything overly significant - just little things, like some furniture you'd moved to a different place that day, the smell of new paint, or a door you usually shut that had been left open.

I have long believed that an awful lot of what might appear to pass for something more esoteric in our natures is down to the fact that we process much more information from our environment than we really understand, and that sometimes the experience sends us straight back to the forest.
 
I sometimes wonder if that sudden sense of dread can - in some instances - be an overreaction to environmental factors. I have occasionally found myself in, if not exactly a state of dread or foreboding, one of nagging and irrepressible unease - and realised later that something was out of place or unusual in the circumstances ; not necessarily dangerous or threatening, just different to what I was expecting - and maybe I've simply picked up on that difference without even registering it directly, and the message has got garbled.

From an evolutionary point of view, the act of taking a piss can be quite a hazardous undertaking. (And I've often wondered if that has something to do with shy bladder syndrome.) You were also in the dark. Neither of those factors might cause you any concern whatsoever under usual circumstances, individually or combined - but I wonder how much of a trigger one needs to set ancient alarm bells ringing.

I might be barking totally up the wrong tree here - but was there anything at all different about your surroundings? And I don't mean anything overly significant - just little things, like some furniture you'd moved to a different place that day, the smell of new paint, or a door you usually shut that had been left open.

I have long believed that an awful lot of what might appear to pass for something more esoteric in our natures is down to the fact that we process much more information from our environment than we really understand, and that sometimes the experience sends us straight back to the forest.
There would have been nothing out of place that night that I believed could have been a trigger.
We did have someone recently try to break in at 1am in order, we are told, to try and steal the keys for the wife’s car. She picked up her new car Saturday morning but by the evening the kids were messaging us about a similar crime that afternoon https://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/18...-cronin-19-speaks-knifepoint-burglary-witham/
I wonder if these series of events were toying with my subconscious and were the trigger to this weird episode.
 
I've heard that a lot of women on their wedding nights experience a sense of impending groom.
 
I sometimes wonder if that sudden sense of dread can - in some instances - be an overreaction to environmental factors. I have occasionally found myself in, if not exactly a state of dread or foreboding, one of nagging and irrepressible unease - and realised later that something was out of place or unusual in the circumstances ; not necessarily dangerous or threatening, just different to what I was expecting - and maybe I've simply picked up on that difference without even registering it directly, and the message has got garbled.

From an evolutionary point of view, the act of taking a piss can be quite a hazardous undertaking. (And I've often wondered if that has something to do with shy bladder syndrome.) You were also in the dark. Neither of those factors might cause you any concern whatsoever under usual circumstances, individually or combined - but I wonder how much of a trigger one needs to set ancient alarm bells ringing.

I might be barking totally up the wrong tree here - but was there anything at all different about your surroundings? And I don't mean anything overly significant - just little things, like some furniture you'd moved to a different place that day, the smell of new paint, or a door you usually shut that had been left open.

I have long believed that an awful lot of what might appear to pass for something more esoteric in our natures is down to the fact that we process much more information from our environment than we really understand, and that sometimes the experience sends us straight back to the forest.
I think you are on the right lines there S. In the north west of the UK we have been experiencing some weird weather with very sudden changes from warm temperatures to torrential rain often on the same day presumably as a result of pressure changes. I know a couple of people who experience feelings of almost panic and doom at these swift alterations. The brain is a funny thing.
 
Mr GIT gets migraines with changes in atmospheric pressure. Maybe it’s a related thing? It’s hard to deny the physical reality of a crashing migraine. Sometimes there’s an almost imperceptible shift in light quality or just a threat of distant storm in the air... and he’s off.
 
I think you are on the right lines there S. In the north west of the UK we have been experiencing some weird weather with very sudden changes from warm temperatures to torrential rain often on the same day presumably as a result of pressure changes. I know a couple of people who experience feelings of almost panic and doom at these swift alterations.

I don't know about brain effects but the weather recently has been (a) rendering my (almost waist-length) hair unvbrushable, and (b) giving me electric shocks EVERY time I get out of the car and shut the door! ;)
 
I think you are on the right lines there S. In the north west of the UK we have been experiencing some weird weather with very sudden changes from warm temperatures to torrential rain often on the same day presumably as a result of pressure changes. I know a couple of people who experience feelings of almost panic and doom at these swift alterations. The brain is a funny thing.

Over here (western plains of New South Wales), it is very common for a rise in temperature prior to rain (rain??) or a weather change, with a drop in temperature of 12 degrees in a matter of half an hour, ( 20 degrees F) not being unusual when the change comes through...The feelings here, though, are of relief Pete.
 
Over here (western plains of New South Wales), it is very common for a rise in temperature prior to rain (rain??) or a weather change, with a drop in temperature of 12 degrees in a matter of half an hour, ( 20 degrees F) not being unusual when the change comes through...The feelings here, though, are of relief Pete.
Yes I can imagine the sense of relief M. I don't enjoy very hot weather myself.
 
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