Asd and psychic tendencies.

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You cannot know that your senses did not pick up some indication of the coming danger. You cannot rationally discount the possibility that you perceived the danger at some less than fully conscious level and this came to your conscious mind's attention as a compelling need to stop without an explanation.

I have had many such experiences, some of them very, very compelling emotionally.

Once I had an intuition that my wife was in trouble and without really understanding why, I rushed out to meet the danger. There was a man stalking her and she had tried to shake him by going into several busy stores, but then realized that he was waiting outside. I randomly chose the right direction to head off on into New York City to find my wife as she was stopping at a payphone to call me to come and get her out of this scary situation. I saw her approach the phone and then see me, but I was looking for the danger. Then I locked eyes with a man half a block away and KNEW it was him. He saw me recognizing him and he suddenly ran off down a side street. My wife was amazed--how did I know where to go or that the guy was trouble? I can't find a simple or obvious explanation for these events.

On another occasion, when we were poor students and sometimes very short of cash, my wife (then girlfriend) would routinely find money on the sidewalk in New York, enough to make a difference in our food budget. When I asked her what her technique was for looking for and finding money, she confessed that she did not really have one and attributed this to some sort of guardian spirit. As a rationalist who regarded superstition as a psychological artifact, I found this absurd, but as I loved her deeply I tried not to be dismissive.

I found myself short of cash toward the end of the month, having just put my paycheck into the rent and utility bills, and I was hanging waiting for her by the Student Union. As she approached I said to her something like, "I wish I had your money finding spirit, then that bit of rubbish would be a fifty dollar bill." As I said this I noticed that the shape on the pavement amongst the other wind-gathered bits of trash next to the wall really did look like a bill. I bent down to take a closer look and discovered that it was exactly that and a $50 dollar bill, too.

The rational explanation for this is that I had peripherally noticed the bill, but was not consciously aware of it, so my subconscious signalling to my conscious mind created the strange precision of the "if I had your money spirit" invocation.... or maybe it was some supernatural agency?

Because of these and other experiences, I did try to find some evidence that there was some truth in the idea of a paranormal reality. If you approach this with an open mind, though, it remains utterly unconvincing. The people who have been working at it the longest (the practitioners of the major religions) have nothing useful to say about it. No reliable procedures. No discoveries. Various approaches to mindfulness and meditation do have a lot to offer, but nothing supernatural.

I think about the achievements of the systematic exploration of electromagnetism since Volta discovered the battery with his pile in 1799--the way that exploration has led to electric light, radio, telecommunications, electronics and particle accelerators that have allowed us to confirm the major elements of the standard model in physics all in just over two centuries.

Compare to that the millenia that religious experts have been working a way at ritual magic or systematic prayer, etc. and achieved... nothing. No repeatable experiments. No reliable means of communicating with gods or spirits. No magic-meters, spiritual batteries, prayers or incantations that work in any detectable way. Nothing.

I spent a lot of time reading about and exploring many such systems and it's really a very dismal record. I can see that groups of people who spend time doing religious or spiritual things get the benefit of doing group things (not something I am ever really comfortable with) and will benefit from whatever meditative aspect their tradition may afford them, but beyond that, nothing.

My own intuitions are often useful, so I try to respect them. If I have a feeling that it might not be wise to enter a certain place, I will attribute that to some kind of rapid processing of real information that I haven't been able to consciously process yet and heed the "warning." but I don't see any of this as reason to suppose that the paranormal or supernatural has any basis in reality.

Anecdotes such as the ones you have shared, B19 and lnb1771, don't really provide any more evidence than my own experiences of unexplainable, accurate intuition. If there was some consistency or pattern to these things, then they would have been explored in depth long ago and we would have cellphones for direct communication with the gods by now, but these things never happen reliably and never in way that can be used to understand anything about another aspect of reality (except perhaps in terms of the psychology of the perceiver.)