Most people have had the experience of waking soon before an alarm clock goes off and some can even wake before a specified time without an alarm. The usual assumption is that this depends on an exquisitely sensitive time sense, but Rupert argues that it may be explained better in terms of presentiment, or ‘feeling the future’, or even in terms of an ‘extended present’. 

We already know that our sense of the present is not a mathematical instant, but has width, and perhaps it widens over ranges of seconds to include portions of the near future, Presentiment is now a well-established phenomenon in laboratory experiments, carried out at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Cornell University and elsewhere, and may be widely distributed among people and non-human animals. 

It could play an important part in everyday life, and become especially significant in fast-moving sports like downhill skiing, tennis and ping pong. Some people may make use of this ability in day trading where they make decisions on movements of the markets over very short time periods, sometimes only a few seconds. 

Rupert discusses how this ability could potentially be trained, enabling airline pilots and racing drivers to be better prepared for potential accidents, and helping some people to get rich quick – as some day traders already have – by using intuitive abilities that cannot be duplicated by computers. 


References
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An Experiment with Time
by John William Dunne
https://archive.org/details/AnExperimentWithTimeEbook
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Listen to the Animals: Why did so many animals escape December's tsunami?
https://www.sheldrake.org/tsunami
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Predicting the unpredictable; evidence of pre-seismic anticipatory behaviour in the common toad
https://www.sheldrake.org/toads
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Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home
https://www.sheldrake.org/dogs
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Unconscious Perception of Future Emotions: An Experiment in Presentiment
by Dean Radin, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 163-180, 1997
https://www.sheldrake.org/RadinPresentiment