Ever had a dream about someone only to have them call you the next day? That's a tiny taste of what precognition claims to be—the ability to perceive future events before they happen. While skeptics dismiss it as coincidence or selective memory, the phenomenon has fascinated humans for millennia and occasionally produces some truly head-scratching cases.

The most famous precognitive experience might be Abraham Lincoln's dream about his own assassination. Just days before his death in 1865, Lincoln reportedly told his wife and friends about a disturbing dream where he walked through the White House and found a corpse in the East Room. When he asked who had died, someone told him it was the President, killed by an assassin. Pretty chilling, right? Then there's the case of the Aberfan disaster in 1966, where a coal waste avalanche killed 144 people in Wales, mostly children. British psychiatrist John Barker documented over 60 people who claimed to have had precognitive dreams or visions about the tragedy before it happened.

Scientists have tried testing precognition in controlled settings, with mixed results. In the 1930s, researcher J.B. Rhine at Duke University conducted thousands of card-guessing experiments, finding some subjects who scored consistently above chance. More recently, controversial studies have explored "presentiment"—the idea that our bodies might physically react to future emotional events seconds before they occur. Whether it's real remains hotly debated, but one thing's certain: humans can't seem to shake the feeling that sometimes, just sometimes, we glimpse what's coming.