A sense of what’s to come in Keane’s new book

TWO Clare women talk about their experiences of having premonitions in a new book, Forewarned, by best selling Irish writer Colm Keane.
One of the women said she had sensed there would be a serious car accident in her local area, while another felt she was given advance notice of her brother’s death back in the 1970s.
The second, Elizabeth, had a dream that her brother was going to die and in the book, she explains her views on premonitions.
“I think the dream was some sort of forewarning to prepare me for what was going to occur. I knew something was coming and it did happen. I think people are susceptible to the energies that are there and that pass between us. We all have this ability but some people have thinner veils than others,” she states in the book.
“I think that when something really profound is coming towards you, you get messages. I think that your life is known beforehand and some people have foreknowledge all the way along. Time doesn’t seem to have the significance that we give to it. It’s not linear. I feel I had a forewarning. I know I did.”
The author says that he got the idea for the book following the reaction to a previous work. “I wrote a book two years ago about near-death experiences. When I wrote it, I was quite taken aback by the number of people who talked about developing this ability to be able to see into the future. I did a follow up book called The Distant Shore and I put a section in about it and it kind of opened the floodgates. I got letters and phone calls from all over the country about it and these were just people talking about straightforward premonitions and predictive dreams so I decided to concentrate on this single book, Forewarned.”
Keane says he has looked at science’s work regarding premonitions and is fascinated by it. “There’s a guy called Dr Dean Radin in the States and he did tests in this area. What he did was take a volunteer, put them sitting in front of a desk with a computer on it. The volunteer was rigged up for indications of sweat, heartbeat, things like that. Into the computer he put two different types of images, emotional ones and calm ones. Emotional ones were like autopsys and so on and the calm ones were pastoral fields and so on. The guy sits at the table and he clicks a mouse.
“Five seconds elapses and up comes the image randomly selected by the computer. Then they go back to the polygraph results and they found that during the five second wait anxiety levels increased, but in every case there was more of a reaction before the emotive image. People were anticipating the type of image. He did it over and over again and got the same result. When he was asked what was happening, he’d say he hadn’t a clue.”
Most of the people whose stories are told in the book contacted him after reading his earlier work, while some got in touch after hearing him on the radio or seeing a letter he sent to a few local papers.
Although the book has only hit the shelves, people have wasted no time in telling him about how the book resembled their own story.
“A number of people have come to me since this book came out last week. A woman was on to me a few days ago about a dream she had back in 1986. The dream was in spring and her son was going to be buried and she couldn’t select a coffin. Six months later in November, her son died tragically and the biggest problem she had was that she couldn’t select the coffin because of all the turmoil.”