Second sight

Journalist Sam Knight explores the efforts of a British psychiatrist, motivated by a Welsh disaster, to predict the future.

-  LINDA HERRICK

THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU: A true story, by Sam Knight (Faber, $36.99)

Is there really any way to forecast the future? Predictions - based on assigning meaning to events via superstition, astrology and premonitions, among other methods - have long offered the comforting illusion of control over our passage through life. But when it all goes wrong, we pin it on the exact opposite: fate, luck and chance. "We didn't see it coming." The search for meaning where none exists is the definition of madness, says journalist Sam Knight in The Premonitions Bureau, a mind-bending real-life mystery about an effort to establish the authenticity of premonitions. Our hero is Dr John Barker, a melancholic psychiatrist who set up the "British Premonitions Bureau" in 1967, with the help of a daily newspaper, so readers could submit visions or dreams that they believed to be of future events.

Barker's hope was that by establishing the reliability of premonitions, specifically disasters, they could be prevented.

Knight notes that before Barker's study, premonitions were routinely reported during the trench battles of World War I and the London Blitz of World War II. "Signs" allegedly saved lives. "A more predictable existence is, in theory, a less frightening one," notes Knight in the book, which expands on his 2019 story on Barker published in the New Yorker, where he is now a staff writer.