Dreams/Predictions Premonitions in TV Shows/Movies/Books

[emuboy]

In 1898, an early science fiction novel was published about a magnificent ocean liner far larger than any ship in existence at the time. The book was called 'Futility' and the author's name was Morgan Robertson. Set in a then-futuristic year of 1912, the new Transatlantic liner was second to none in safety and luxury, but on a cold April night struck an iceberg and sank into the frigid sea with heavy loss of life due to a lack of lifeboats. The fictional ship was called the Titan, and in April 1912 the very real Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic, with hundreds losing their lives due to not enough lifeboats.

While the Titan/Titanic foreshadowing is a well known case, it is far from unique. There are many cases of TV Shows, movies and books where there is a premonition of future events, or where innocent words when viewed with hindsight after the fact seem to act as an eerie foreshadowing of what is to come. Or life imitating art for one of the actors. Which are some that you have noticed, or know about? Here are some I can think of:

My Sister Sam - This was an innocent, family-friendly American sitcom similar to many others when it screened from 1986-1988. The main star was Pam Dawber from Mork and Mindy, and it also starred David Naughton (from an American Werewolf in London) and a young rising star actress named Rebecca Schaeffer. It would probably be completely forgotten today if not for one thing. When the show was in production, young Rebecca attracted the attention of a stalker. This man appeared to be more of a nuisance than a danger, until the day in 1989 when he turned up at Rebecca Schaeffer's door and shot her dead. What is eerie are the lyrics to the opening theme of 'My Sister Sam', which go "Everything starts with a knock on the door, you don't know who it is but you know who it's for ..."

Rebel Without a Cause - James Dean, the lead star of this iconic 1955 film never lived to see it released. He was killed in a car accident in September of that year, and a central theme of the movie was that a boy was killed in an illegal car race, and James Dean's character's subsequent anguish over the event.

The Group - In this 1966 movie a character played by Elizabeth Hartman dies after falling from a height. In 1987, Elizabeth Hartman jumped to her death from a high rise building.

The Simpsons - The long-running cartoon has quite a number of foreshadowing episodes. Some better known examples are predictions of a Donald Trump presidency, a 1997 episode where Bart holds up a pamphlet advertising bus trips to New York for $9, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in conjunction with the 9 looking like 911, and a 1994 episode where a casino is opened in town. In the casino episode, a pair of magicians parodying Siegfried and Roy are performing a magic show with a white tiger, which turns on and attacks them. In real life Roy Horn (who died of COVID 19 in 2020) was severely injured when attacked by a tiger in a Las Vegas show in 2003.

ABC 7 New York Late Night News Telecast September 10 2001 - September 10 2001 was a wet and gloomy day in New York City, with heavy rain and a thunderstorm in the late afternoon and evening. By the time the news went to air the bad weather had cleared, and the weather segment shows a shot of the World Trade Center lit up, commenting that 'things look in pretty good shape now'. Throughout the news the presenters talk about the 'perfect' week ahead, meaning the beautiful late summer/early fall weather expected for New York. Then there's the sports report, where it is said that 'the Giants fell'. They of course mean the New York Giants NFL team which lost to the Denver Broncos earlier in the evening. It's all perfectly innocent, but takes on a different meaning after the events of the next day.

Young Talent Time - This year marks 50 years since the popular variety show went to air, and the largest number of former YTT members had a reunion in Adelaide with host/mentor Johnny Young. Sadly, getting all 40 former YTT members together would be impossible as two former team members have since passed away. These are Julie Ryles, a tall red-haired girl from the early 1970s who died of a rare early onset form of dementia in 2011; and Juanita Coco, a member of the team in its later years 1987-1988 who was tragically killed in a car accident in Melbourne in 1993 aged just 17. Last year during lockdown I was watching some old clips of YTT on Youtube thinking about more innocent times when I was a kid. In one 1987 clip, the YTT team sing the song 'That's What Friends Are For', and Juanita's line is 'And if I should ever go away ...' In another show from 1988, the team are performing a medley of Wizard of Oz songs and Juanita plays the witch. A joke is made afterwards for the benefit of younger viewers that Juanita is alive and well, unlike the witch. This of course is all perfectly innocent and wouldn't have stood out at all if one of the other girls had played that role or sung that line or if Juanita Coco hadn't died, but after what happened a few years later its kind of an eerie foreshadowing.

 

[Moonwatcher]

ABC 7 New York Late Night News Telecast September 10 2001 - September 10 2001 was a wet and gloomy day in New York City, with heavy rain and a thunderstorm in the late afternoon and evening. By the time the news went to air the bad weather had cleared, and the weather segment shows a shot of the World Trade Center lit up, commenting that 'things look in pretty good shape now'. Throughout the news the presenters talk about the 'perfect' week ahead, meaning the beautiful late summer/early fall weather expected for New York. Then there's the sports report, where it is said that 'the Giants fell'. They of course mean the New York Giants NFL team which lost to the Denver Broncos earlier in the evening. It's all perfectly innocent, but takes on a different meaning after the events of the next day.

The original Building Big with David Macaulay Skycrapers episode aired in January 2001 with Macaulay standing on a window washing platform at the top floor of the WTC and asking 'What keeps this building from crashing to the streets below?'.

 

[ioppolo]

Premonitions, or pre-planned/predictive programming?

 

[emuboy]

In early September 2001 a Jackie Chan movie was in early stage production in which he played a man who worked at the World Trade Center and discovered terrorists were planning to attack major landmarks and tourist attractions in New York City. Obviously the movie was cancelled.

 

[megadeth86]

Christian ska/punk band Squad Five-O released an album Bombs over Broadway in the year 2000. Check out the original album cover.

 

[emuboy]

One odd one, although not a direct premonition, was the Beatles song 'When I'm Sixty Four'.

It was written by Paul McCartney, long before his Beatles days as a teenager in 1956, but not recorded and released by the Beatles until 1967, and was one of the band's biggest hits.

So how did 2006, the year Paul McCartney reached the age of 64, turn out for him? Not great. That year he and his second wife Heather Mills separated and would divorce acrimoniously with much media attention.

 

[zill]

There was a spin off show to the X-files called the Lone Gunmen. In one episode they uncover a govt plot to fly a passenger aircraft into the WTC. It was aired in march 2001

 

[emuboy]

In early 2021, actress Bridie Carter guest starred on Home and Away playing Susie McAllister, a new real estate agent who arrives in town. In fact, she is a con artist, and scams thousands of dollars from unsuspecting parties, before vanishing with her ill-gotten gains. She doesn't get too far however, and weeks later her dead body is found floating in Summer Bay.

The inspiration for this storyline might seem pretty obvious; that of Melissa Caddick, a Sydney financial planner who in November 2020 vanished without trace after her expensive home was raided by ASIC and the police following allegations of fraud made against her by investors, many of whom lost their life savings. One of Caddick's feet was found months later in the ocean off Wollongong, proving the alleged fraudster was dead but with so little of her body found, just how she died could never be determined and no further body parts have been found to this day.

However, Home and Away episodes are filmed many months in advance, and Bridie Carter's guest role is referenced as commencing in August 2020, months before the Caddick case became front page headlines across Australia and much of the world. So rather than being a case of art being inspired by life, it is more a case of life imitating art.

 

[emuboy]

A couple more I discovered:

Despite its cheerful title the TV show Glee which ran from 2009-2015 has developed a reputation for being cursed due to the premature deaths of a number of young actors, and other problems on the set that came to light after the show went off air in 2015. One 2010 episode sees Glee club teacher Mr. Schue trying to inspire his students, and he writes the year 2020 on the board, asking the teenagers to predict where they will be a decade on. One of the boys, Noah 'Puck' Puckerman, laughs and gives a smart-ass answer, 'Jail - dead - or both.' In 2018 Mark Salling, the actor who played Noah Puckerman took his own life while awaiting a jail sentence after being convicted of possessing illegal pornographic material.

One particularly odd one involves actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, where in 2019 both were caught up in the College Admissions Scandal. Huffman was convicted of arranging for her daughter's SAT to be corrected to gain admission to college, while Loughlin and her husband were both convicted of paying money to have their two daughters enter the USC as members of the girls' rowing team, when in fact neither girl was a rower. Years earlier in their best known TV roles - Lynette in Desperate Housewives for Huffman and Aunt Becky in Full House for Loughlin - both had a storyline that involved academic dishonesty. In Desperate Housewives Lynette and her husband Tom are offered the chance to get their kids into an exclusive private school by paying a bribe, but both ultimately refuse to do so. In Full House, Becky and Jesse with the assistance of Joey attempt to get their twin boys into a private school by submitting an application that to put it mildly is less than truthful.

 

[megadeth86]

One odd one, although not a direct premonition, was the Beatles song 'When I'm Sixty Four'.

It was written by Paul McCartney, long before his Beatles days as a teenager in 1956, but not recorded and released by the Beatles until 1967, and was one of the band's biggest hits.

So how did 2006, the year Paul McCartney reached the age of 64, turn out for him? Not great. That year he and his second wife Heather Mills separated and would divorce acrimoniously with much media attention.

Pentecostal Christians and some others believe that spoken words have power in the spiritual realm and hence what is spoken may come to pass. In Mark 11:23b of the King James Version, Jesus says you will have whatever you say so maybe it derives from that.

Another scary one is Bon Scott of AC/DC singing "I'm on the highway to hell" over and over when the song was a hit single in 1979 and he died of a drink-related tragedy in February 1980.

 

[emuboy]

One I mentioned before on the Claremont Serial Killer thread on the crime board was a storyline in the first series of police drama Water Rats in 1996. Three teenage boys had gone missing - two bodies were found the third was not - and the serial killer responsible proved to be a telecommunications technician. To make things even stranger 1996 was the year the Claremont serial killings began, and in Water Rats the mother of one of the missing boys had believed her son had ran away from Sydney and gone to Perth.

 

[emuboy]

One of the more popular American reality shows in the 2000s was 'Wife Swap' where the wives of two very different families would swap places for two weeks. A memorable Wife Swap episode from 2008 featured the Stockdale family, a devoutly religious Christian family from rural Ohio who home schooled their four teenage sons, prohibited modern technology and the four boys along with their father were part of a successful Bluegrass family band which the wife/mother managed.

When we meet Mr. and Mrs. Stockdale, they advise that one of the reasons they moved from the city to the country was after hearing gunshots in their local area. As it turned out, hearing gunshots outside of their old house would be the least of their problems. In 2017, nine years after the episode aired, one of the sons Jacob took a gun and shot to death his mother and younger brother, then turned the firearm on himself in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

 

[ferball]

There was a spin off show to the X-files called the Lone Gunmen. In one episode they uncover a govt plot to fly a passenger aircraft into the WTC. It was aired in march 2001

The list of art predicting the 9/11 attacks is pretty damn long actually.

This from June 2001 is pretty interesting (the text on the detonator supposedly says "Covert Action Labs.") The record was meant to be released that September.

 

[emuboy]

'My Grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf, so it stood 90 years on the floor. It was taller by half than the old man himself but it weighed not a pennyweight more. It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born and was always his treasure and pride. But it stopped short, never to go again when the old man died.'

This well-known song 'My Grandfather's Clock' had an eerie real-life parallel in Brisbane in 1982, when people noticed that they did not hear the familiar chimes of the clock in the tower of Brisbane Town Hall. Looking upwards, it was found that the clock had inexplicably stopped - at the exact moment the engineer who had designed the clock many years earlier had died. Fortunately the Town Hall Clock unlike the fictional one was able to be repaired and restarted and residents of and visitors to Brisbane can still admire and listen to the beautiful clock to this day, but it sure is a strange tale of life imitating art.

 

[GoTheSwannies]

What if there is a higher consciousness or intelligence that knows all, and all this 'predictive programming' or premonitions are the higher consciousness's way of dropping hints to the human species that there is an intelligence out there. And all we need to do is connect the dots and think, it's highly improbable for this to occur purely by chance.

The higher consciousness would be shaking it's head at all these so called 'intelligent' humans being amazed at all these coincidences. Like "no you idiots, this isn't a coincidence, I'm trying to send you an important message."

 

[emuboy]

One early 2000s episode of 'That 70s Show' parodies the movie 'It's A Wonderful Life', where an angel takes Eric Forman to the past, present and future to see what his life would be like if he never went out with Donna and she began dating Hyde instead. It shows Eric as a complete wimp and never standing up for himself in the past and present, an amusing future scene in the early 1980s where Eric is being relentlessly bullied by his sister Lori's young son and Red laughing and encouraging his grandson to call Uncle Eric a 'dumbass' and finishes where Eric and his friends have their 10 Year high school reunion in 1989.

At the reunion, only Hyde does not appear of the main group of six friends but his wife Donna does. An unhappy Donna reveals to Eric that Hyde is in prison, and she is struggling to get by raising their kids during her husband's jail sentence.

When a sequel to 'That 70s Show' - i.e. That 90s Show - debuted in 2022, Hyde was the only living major cast member not to appear, nor was the character even referenced due to actor Danny Masterson's legal problems and upcoming court case, which resulted in a 30 year prison sentence this year after being found guilty of a number of serious offences.

 

[ferball]

Christian ska/punk band Squad Five-O released an album Bombs over Broadway in the year 2000. Check out the original album cover.

Seen The Coup record cover from July 2001?



i think the detonator says Covert Action Labs from memory.

There's so much stuff about 9/11.

Heaps of art fropm comic books, stories etc etc some of it decades earlier than the actual attacks. There's a song by an Aussie band from the 90s called Scary mother that could be describing it ... maybe.

And afterwards I did a random survey of about 10 people and at least five of them had dreams in the lead up that involved planes or planes crashing into buildings. The guy who dreamed about planes said it was something he dreamed of every night for the three days before the attacks and he remembered each morning and had never had a dream like that before. Basically he dreamt he was sitting on a plane in a passenger seat. Nothing about a crash or anything just just that dream three nights in a row.

The others (including me) all dreamed about the attacks specifically or about planes crashing into buildings.

The weirdest thing was ...

A friend of mine had a psychotic episode at my house. I lived in the bush and she came up to quit her heroin habit. She was able to but the withdrawals triggered the psychosis. (Years later she told me heroin was the best anti psychotic medication she'd ever had, and the least debilitating.)

She was a twin and her sister was in NYC at the time. Part of my friends psychotic episode involved her describing planes crashing into buildings, building falling in NYC, a war as a result, she called it a world war and general apocalyptic chaos. She was spinning out cos she was worried about her sister being there in all that chaos. Her sister came home before the attacks.

She was describing these events as if they were happening in real time at that moment. Of course they weren't and we associated her reactions purely with her psychotic episode. It was the start of 1999 when this happened and when the attacks actually happened it was a bit of a shock to remember she'd described them pretty accurately. And what followed [ the wars in the middle east and the anti terror/muslim fascism.

 

[emuboy]

In one episode of The Big Bang Theory around 2010 the group are at a hospital waiting room, where the neurotic, germ-phobic Sheldon is completely out of his element surrounded by sick people. Worried about getting sick himself, Sheldon tries to find a place to sit where there are no sick people, until he goes through a door into a nice quiet place.

What Sheldon doesn't know is that he has accidentally walked into the infectious diseases ward, where a group of medics in full PPE are tending to a patient, the lead doctor remarking that he never thought he would ever see a case of polio in person. Then the doctors see Sheldon, Sheldon sees the doctors - and then we cut away to the next scene, where Sheldon is in two weeks quarantine in the hospital, talking to his friends by face-time.

Back in 2010, it could only be Sheldon who in trying to avoid germs ended up in two weeks quarantine after getting into the infectious diseases ward by mistake, but a decade later .....

 

[errant bounce]

Movies and books are, yknow, like made up.

 

[Nugett]

In the movie 2001: A Soace Odyssey, the crew are using Tablets. In 1996 the palm pilot was created, which was the precursor to modern day Tablets, which really came out in 2010. Not bad for a 1968 Sci-Fi flick

 

[Moonwatcher]

In the movie 2001: A Soace Odyssey, the crew are using Tablets. In 1996 the palm pilot was created, which was the precursor to modern day Tablets, which really came out in 2010. Not bad for a 1968 Sci-Fi flick

Interesting given how big a miss the public video phone booths were. He didn't imagine everyone having a palm sized video telecommunications device in their pockets.



So right and so wrong in the same film regarding the same technology.

 

[Nugett]

The French author Jules Verne also made some stunning predictions as well.

He thought of the submarine 90 years before they came out, even describing it long and cyclicall, in his novel 20 000 leagues under the sea. In his book from the Earth to the Moon he Predicted the moon landing, where the rocket would launch from(Florida), the parachuting into the sea after deployment, how many crew would go, the dimensions of his projectile (rocket) were very close as well. The name of his projectile was Columbaird, the command shuttle was Columbia. In his book In the Year 2889 he made the predictions of gasoline cars, visual/digital media. So quite a bit of his time.

Mark Twain also predicted the year of his death. He is quoted as saying “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835; it’s coming again next year [in 1910], and I expect to go out with it. It would be a great disappointment in my life if I don’t. The Almighty has said, no doubt: “Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”

Halley’s Comet was last seen in October 1835. Mark Twain was born 30th of November 1835. Halley’s Comet first reported sighting was on 20th of April 1910. Mark Twain died 21st of April 1910..

 

[emuboy]

In a first season Halloween episode of the early 2000s sitcom '8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter' the father Paul Hennessy (played by the late John Ritter) is lamenting how difficult it is parenting three teenagers - two daughters and a son - at once. The doorbell rings, and a young family are there trick or treating, seeming like a version of he and his own kids a decade earlier.

When one of the little girls asks if he thinks her angel costume looks cute, Paul replies sarcastically something along the lines, "Yeah, you may be cute now but just wait until 10 years' time when you kids kill your father" to which the kids look horrified, burst into tears and run to their own father crying out "Daddy!"


Given that John Ritter died prematurely from a freak heart condition the following year, this scene can definitely be added to the 'scenes that didn't age well' file.

 

[errant bounce]

In a first season Halloween episode of the early 2000s sitcom '8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter' the father Paul Hennessy (played by the late John Ritter) is lamenting how difficult it is parenting three teenagers - two daughters and a son - at once. The doorbell rings, and a young family are there trick or treating, seeming like a version of he and his own kids a decade earlier.

When one of the little girls asks if he thinks her angel costume looks cute, Paul replies sarcastically something along the lines, "Yeah, you may be cute now but just wait until 10 years' time when you kids kill your father" to which the kids look horrified, burst into tears and run to their own father crying out "Daddy!"


Given that John Ritter died prematurely from a freak heart condition the following year, this scene can definitely be added to the 'scenes that didn't age well' file.

Not that crazy, really?

 

[emuboy]

Not that crazy, really?

Definitely not up there with Morgan Robertson's 1898 science fiction/disaster novel 'Futility', or even the 2010 Glee episode where Mark Salling's character decides to be a smart-ass and says 'Jail - dead - or both' when the Glee club members are asked where they see themselves in 10 years' time, but given Ritter died prematurely so soon afterwards at such a young age it definitely stands out. If his death had been a decade or so later it wouldn't have stood out at all.