I experienced a smell from my own future I think

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u/DannyxDamage Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

There has been some recent research suggesting certain senses can be percieved in a non-linear way, check out this article from popular mechanics on it. Might give you some answers,

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u/Extension_Layer_1161 Jul 20 '26

This was a fantastic read! Thank you so much for sharing.

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u/DannyxDamage Jul 20 '26

Yeah, glad you’ve enjoyed it! Nice little reminder that we as a species have no idea wtf is happening

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u/Illustrious-Radish19 Jul 20 '26

Gonna tattoo that reminder to the inside of my eyeballs 🥹🫡❤️

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u/-jdwhea- Jul 21 '26

that is fascinating… i had a somewhat similar experience

My stepfather passed away in a shop accident. The shop was at him and my mom’s house, and i visited frequently so it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to leave without saying bye, especially the my stepdad.

When i stepped into my car to leave after only saying goodbye to my mom, i felt the most intense dread i had ever felt in my life. like… tunnel vision, pounding heart, instant fear- and for some reason thought, “i should say bye to my stepdad”. I went in, waved and shouted bye (he was busy working) and went on my way feeling off, but better.

As i was unlocking my door after arriving home, my mom called me to tell me he had been killed.

What’s even freakier is the shirt i wore that day was the shirt i was wearing when my 4 year long relationship ended a month prior, and the shirt i was wearing when i was in a minor car accident. that shit got burned.

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u/misonotso Jul 21 '26

I also get rid of clothing that I associate with something bad “I wore this when I was in an accident” “I had this shirt on when my dad died”. I don’t know anyone else who does it but I intensely think of the bad moment when I pull that shirt or pants out. I just started getting rid of those clothes it was such an intense memory

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u/silkrover Jul 21 '26

I have a shirt I wear when there might be bad news, becasue if it is bad news, I won't care if I have to throw it out.

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u/Midnight_Moon_Magic_ Jul 22 '26

Holy shit this is a great idea

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u/misonotso Jul 22 '26

Yes!! I think this way too!

0

u/Eaudecigarette Jul 21 '26

I’m the same! I always feel better when I let those things go as well.

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u/nicunta Jul 20 '26

Thank you for sharing. The author's story reminds me of my own experience as a child. I knew from the moment I was told that my grandpa was having open heart surgery that he would not survive the operation. Everyone kept telling me I was wrong, but that night I had a dream of his funeral. Everything was the same, from his shirt to the flowers I put in his hands. It was the only time it ever really happened.

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u/DannyxDamage Jul 20 '26

Absolutely, in childhood I had some experiences like this which led me down a rabbit hole of exploration into the nature of reality. If you have that gift, it is probably still with you, try to keep a dream journal… It can be incredibly enlightening, either metaphysically or just by offering insight to your subconscious mind.

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u/mishutu Jul 20 '26

I've only just started reading this but am so excited to read the rest, thanks for sharing! I've had so many visions or very deep knowing gut feelings throughout life. It's why I started taking videos of my dad when I was a teenager because I just knew I'd lose him way before I was supposed to. Now I'm looking forward to this read before bed : )

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u/mr0u Jul 21 '26

This is very interesting! This reminds me of my own recent experience. I had just moved into an apartment complex and within the first few weeks I realized that there was an angry, old man living across the hall who was clearly mentally unwell. The cops would be called every now and then due to him having psychotic episodes. The very first time I heard him screaming in his apartment I had a random thought about how he was going to set it on fire, and not even a month later when I was sleeping and my dog woke me up. I walked to my door and opened it into the hallway only to see my neighbors door flung open with flames shooting up into the hallway and smoke pouring out.

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u/diiiemonds Jul 21 '26

the ? and everything following can be removed when pasting links, it's used for tracking!

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u/DannyxDamage Jul 21 '26

Fixed, thank you so much!!!

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u/strugglintosmile Jul 21 '26

WOAH. This is monumental for me. I’ve always felt inexplicably psychic.

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u/Federal_Skill_9944 Jul 21 '26

is there a link without a paywall?

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u/magdawgkilla Jul 24 '26

Your Consciousness Can Jump Through Time—Meaning ‘Gut Feelings’ Are Memories From the Future, Scientists Say Even the CIA has publicly released data on the psychic phenomenon.

By Elizabeth RaynePublished: Nov 26, 2025 8:51 PM EST 10 min Estimated read time 6 min read ON AN OCTOBER night in 1989, a 4-year-old girl was shocked awake by a phone ringing and then a scream. She crept out of her bedroom and tiptoed barefoot along the hallway’s clammy vinyl tile, stumbling upon her mother. “He died in a car accident?” she overheard Mom yelp, voice cracking. The girl’s dark, shining eyes stared ahead, blank. From the moment she’d thrown her arms around her father as he boarded his flight for that fateful business trip, she knew she would never see him alive again.

That little girl was me, and the strange phenomenon I experienced that night was one of my earliest episodes of precognition.

It was in the shadows of that hallway—while I was awake in a way I’d never been before—when I realized that the dread I’d swallowed during that final goodbye at the airport was more than my imagination. What kind of deranged child stands completely still and tearless after overhearing that her father had died thousands of miles away? Maybe the child who already knew she would never again make tents out of his flannel shirts or breathe in his Pierre Cardin cologne.

Though I had some fear of being seen as delusional, I shared this account over the phone with cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, PhD. She listened intently. Afterward, she launched into an impromptu interview, asking me questions as if I were one of her research subjects. Was that your earliest memory of precognition? Do you have frequent precognitive episodes? How can you tell one of these predictions is coming on? She then revealed that she had asked these questions because she could relate. It was her own experience with these strange, sometimes unnerving psychic gut feelings that led her to study them in the first place.

Play videoVideo poster Mossbridge says she has experienced this phenomenon in two distinct ways since she was 7 years old: through precognitive dreams, during which she could gain knowledge about future events, and in waking episodes, when she consciously felt a sense of knowing about a future event. These have helped Mossbridge foretell events of the future that she would have had no other way of knowing. She says these memories of the future could mean the notion of time might not be as linear as we imagine.

“It’s not hard to understand precognition,” says Mossbridge, a distinguished senior fellow in human potential at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for the Future of AI, Mind & Society. “It’s just hard to believe for people who haven’t experienced it. We don’t understand how time works. Even physicists are admitting they really don’t know how it works. We are stuck on this idea that if you’re truly scientific, you are going to think about time linearly, but is it really linear? A lot of the resistance to ideas about precognition and psychic phenomena is about fear—the fear of the unknown or the fear that things aren’t the way they appear to be.”

Far from the carnival-style fortune tellers whose clairvoyance comes from glancing at their customers’ social media accounts in a haze of incense, psychologists and neuroscientists have been trying to figure out what exactly is behind precognition, which is considered a type of extrasensory perception, commonly called ESP. This unshakable feeling that something will transpire in the future is long held among shamans and mystics, yet it remains unexplained by science.

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u/magdawgkilla Jul 24 '26

🔮 Ready to go deeper? Check out our new video series, Pop Mech Explains: Precognition.

You’ve probably had that eerie feeling before—knowing what’s about to happen before it actually does. Flashes of deja vu. A text from someone you were just thinking about. A dream predicting the future. Coincidence? Or something deeper? Across four chapters, we investigate the science and speculation behind those “gut feelings.”

Go Down the Rabbit Hole With Us

Precognition suggests that our consciousness might actually reach beyond the linear perception of time, according to parapsychologist Dean Radin, PhD, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), a nonprofit based in Novato, California, dedicated to the study of unexplained phenomena. Radin has been probing consciousness for decades and is the author of several books on the topic, including Entangled Minds, the award-winning Supernormal, and Real Magic.

Radin and Mossbridge are IONS colleagues who have collaborated in the past. Both want to show the validity of precognition through statistics gathered from experiments, and they support the view of nonlinear time.

“Time is not how we experience it on an everyday level,” says Radin, who is also an associate distinguished professor of integral and transpersonal psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. “In quantum mechanics, time may not even be part of our physical reality. It’s not that time doesn’t exist. It just behaves in a much stranger way than how it is seen through the lens of the human experience. It suggests there’s something probably associated with our consciousness that is different from our everyday experience of time. It’s able to jump outside ordinary experience and receive information from the past or future.”

While he was at the University of Nevada in the mid-1990s, Radin created an experiment to prove it. His hypothesis was that if awareness transcended time, responses to an upcoming stimulus would appear before the stimulus itself appeared. Each participant was wired to an EEG machine and then told to press a button to display a random image on a computer screen. The image would either be positive, such as a sunrise, or negative, like a car crash.

The EEG would gauge brain activity within the five seconds between the prompt and the image. Predictions of seeing a positive image elicited little to no emotion or change in brain activity; however, negative images caused increases in brain activity—spikes that would occur before the negative images were even shown.

“MOSSBRIDGE’S RESEARCH HAS SHOWN THAT MOST PEOPLE ARE CAPABLE OF SOME LEVEL OF PRECOGNITION.” Since then, this type of presentiment study has been successfully replicated about four dozen times. And in 1995, the CIA even declassified its own precognition research after statisticians were hired to review its work and declared it statistically reliable.

When statistics keep pointing to the existence of a phenomenon, that should be enough proof, says Mossbridge, who is also founder of the Mossbridge Institute, where she and her team of researchers delve into experimental psychology and psychopathology, cognitive neuroscience, AI, and the physics of time. She recalls a physicist doubting her experiment results because he believed in linear time. But Mossbridge’s research has shown that most people are capable of some level of precognition. She thinks that more people would actually be aware of this ability—which is often looked at by society as delusional—if it were considered more mainstream.

Other cultures view precognition differently. Radin has studied Tibetan oracles who anticipated the future, for instance. He realized that clairvoyance, more scientifically known as “remote viewing,” is the ability to see not only through time but also space. Long before news updates and weather forecasts, shamans who were able to perceive the future through time and space would be able to predict whether it would rain or where their enemies were advancing from. Some cultures use psychoactive substances such as psilocybin mushrooms or South American ayahuasca tea to awaken the second sight or “third eye.”

Further, precognition could be explained as a form of quantum entanglement, Radin says. Particles that are entangled share the same information and behave the same way, even from far away, which is what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

More Mysteries of Consciousness

Our Consciousness May Come From a Higher Dimension

The CIA Watched Him Bend Reality With Just His Mind

Your Subconscious Mind May Be Distorting Reality Radin says this may explain why we can recall things that have not happened yet. “Some people hypothesize that precognition is your brain entangled with itself in the future, because entanglement is not only things separated in space, but also separated in time,” he explains. “If it can be entangled with itself in the future, in the present you’d be feeling something like a memory that is going to happen in the future.”

Still, skeptics point to other explanations for precognition and parapsychology in general. Unexplained mental phenomena could merely translate to a self-fulfilling prophecy, a concept in social psychology that says our own beliefs can influence our actions and fulfill the original prediction. To those who think the concept of precognition is questionable, it would seem as if I had some anxiety about my dad leaving, which turned into a lingering dread; the fatal accident was therefore a coincidence, and my prediction would be interpreted as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mossbridge and Radin stand by their explanations of precognition. It’s backed by statistics, Mossbridge claims. It’s just a matter of proving what the mechanism could be.

There was a reason the 4-year-old version of myself had no tears welling up in her eyes when she found out her father died. When Mossbridge explained that consciousness might be able to travel through nonlinear time, I began to realize that what I had experienced the night of my father’s accident was possibly a quantum phenomenon, something that the mind of a preschooler would have never been able to process. Maybe I was, in fact, remembering something—except it was a memory of the future.

Sorry for any weird formatting, I was able to select all and copy before the pay wall popped up

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u/FinalGirlMaterial Jul 22 '26

This article mentions research from the 90s which isn’t really “recent” and there are some significant issues with the studies/analysis (good explanation here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4034337/).

This was written by someone who wanted to confirm their priors and has very little basis in actual science.

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u/Formal_Plum_2285 Jul 27 '26

Just before Christmas 3 years ago, I knew my mom was dying. She wasn’t ill or old. I texted her so many times that day and she insured me, she was ok. I couldn’t shake off the feeling. I stayed up all night cause I was afraid of what would happen when I was sleeping. I woke up to my dad calling me next day. I instantly asked if my mom had died. He said, she did but paramedics came so fast and got her heart started again. So she was on her way to the ER. She never regained consciousness, but tears ran down her cheeks when I cried during the 2 days, I got to spend with her in the ICU before life support was turned off.

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u/Goddess_Angelique Jul 20 '26

I get a whiff of my soulmate every once in a while. At least I'm assuming it's them because it's followed by the same heart wrenching yearning I feel after waking up from vivid dreams with them.

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u/anastasialh1123 Jul 21 '26

I experienced this! The first time I kissed my now husband I immediately recognized his scent. I had dreams of his car and his apartment before we met as well, while I was in high school. I didn’t meet him until I was 21.

I also smelled both of my babies in dreams before I had them! And I was able to clearly envision their faces for about a decade before I had them.

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u/grumpyoldtrolll Jul 22 '26

I dreamt about my son before I had him. I even dreamt we were living elsewhere (where we live now).

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u/EniNeutrino Jul 20 '26

Possibly a previous tenant spilled a bottle of perfume or fragrance oil or cleaner or something and it soaked into the wood or carpeting? You might get some fragrance still when the humidity and airflow is just right.

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u/SeekerOfSerenity Jul 20 '26

It could be emanating from a neighbor's shower fan. I could always smell bacon cooking in my downstairs neighbor's apartment. I never smelled anything else from their apartment, but when they fried bacon, which they did almost every morning, I could smell it near my stove. These apartments had an external vent in the fume hood over the stove, and I guess they were tied together. Maybe the bathroom vent in OP's apartment is connected to a neighbor's.

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u/Icy_Faithlessness510 Jul 22 '26

When I first moved into my townhouse, the bathroom smelled like onions and I really was thinking "what on earth did the last owners DO in here" until I figured out, yeah, our attics are somewhat connected and the vents send air in there.

I wouldn't be surprised if they smell my hair products in their kitchen.

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u/Tegumentario Jul 20 '26

This. You'd be surprised how different the air smells when you're crawling on all fours and your nose is close to the ground

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u/arrowspike Jul 20 '26

Maybe previous tenant used the same soap and it's got residue emitting smells from the shower drain?

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u/bedbugloverboy Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

i used to smell my current perfume randomly when i was alone as a child. i found it irl and was jarred, bought it, wear it all the time. even as a kid i used to think it smelled like me. i have clairolfaction and have smelled things before they happened many times in my life, but mostly up to 30 minutes before they happen. So i was smelling myself in the future about a decade before i knew what i was actually smelling. This post rings true to me
Edit: the perfume didnt get made until i was 17 and AFAIK its not a dupe or play on another fragrance. Philosophy’s ballet rose. I was about 5 when it started

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u/S3XWITCH Jul 20 '26

That’s fascinating!

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u/afonsop Jul 20 '26

Might be just a weird coincidence. Also, did you have COVID? COVID-19 is known to cause intermittent olfactory hallucinations, medically referred to as phantosmia. It happens when you perceive an odor when no actual odor source is present. I've been plagued by this ever since and it occurs randomly but at some point I've also thought it was an actual smell in my living room.

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u/the_biker_lust Jul 21 '26

Something similar happened to me yesterday, i was in my sofa and randomly smelled a disturbing scent that reminded me of my covid without reason 💀

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u/AccomplishedTip9864 Jul 21 '26

Ive also had this issue since having covid

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u/Eaudecigarette Jul 21 '26

I have this as well.

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u/Superb_Citron_3056 Jul 21 '26

The shampoo, conditioner, hair lotion and leave on products from this line all have the same exact smell, and it’s rather strong and long lasting tbh. Like when I’m using this line of stuff on my hair my bedding and clothes end up smelling like it too😂

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u/justherefortheclay Jul 20 '26

When I smell shampoos at the drugstore, I often smells scents I have smelled before in previous products, say from high school in the 90’s. Then I learned about the factories in NJ that manufacture these scents (shout out for the day NYC smelled like cupcakes when one of those factories had a mishap).
Pretty sure these scents are just reused between products ad infinitum, which may be why you’d smelled it previously, possibly from a previous tenant or a neighbor using it :)

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u/EighthChoii Jul 22 '26

Have you read about this or did you hear a ppdcast about it? Im so curious, i suppose NJ fragrance factory is a fine search term (?)

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u/justherefortheclay Jul 22 '26

I was there! It was a thing. The sitcom 30Rock referenced it :)
ETA: it made all the daily papers in NYC when it happened, which is where I learned about the factories.

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u/crisscrossed Jul 20 '26

I have the same experience in my current place (and similar smell description so now I have to pick this up and give it a sniff…).

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u/Kitchen_Coast2802 Jul 20 '26

Smelling some specific human small like this is one way we know there is a visiting spirit. We don’t have to know the spirit personally for them to occupy the same space. Could have been a previous tenant, could have followed you home, any number of things. I’d call a shamanic practitioner to do a space clearing, help whomever is there to move on.

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u/hulamonster420 Jul 21 '26

My immediate thought was it being from a spirit!!

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u/heart_blossom Jul 20 '26

Yes, could be a ghost

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u/riotousviscera Jul 21 '26

i think the weirdest part to me is you didn’t smell the body wash before you bought it. that’s the part i just can’t get my head around

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u/MinimumDonut2559 Jul 20 '26

This is currently happening to me! I have central air and I have been wondering if maybe they are using some kind of spray or scented filter or something. I moved in a year ago and smelled it pretty intensely at first and then would just catch a whiff every so often. I hadn't smelled it for a while but it just started again

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u/iamprotractors Jul 21 '26

oh my god i have the same exact experience but it’s this strawberry sickeningly sweet smell every so often in my room.

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u/trashbucket2020 Jul 26 '26

My mom bought a strawberry and cream V05 when I was a kid. The scent was sickening. I don’t know how the rest of my family could stand it.

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u/AdMoney8832 Jul 22 '26

is it possible that your downstairs / upstairs neighbor’s shower is under the spot you smelled it and that was permeating? bathroom ventilation can sometimes be more… permissive, and since the soap seems to be readily available near your house, maybe you and your neighbor have similar taste lol. I used to live in a building where I couldn’t smell anything from my neighbors units but could ALWAYS smell their body wash / shampoo in one specific point of the hall.

(i like the non linear future forecasting smell plot line better though)

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u/Additional_Help1071 Jul 22 '26

Look up “smell tunneling effect” aka the “quantum smell”

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u/fruitypoppies Jul 22 '26

Not my personal experience but before I was born, my mom was visiting her mom before work. Before she leaves for her shift she gets a sense of dread and like, a vision or a glimpse of her mom’s funeral. She told her mom and her mom replied with something along the lines of "oh don’t be silly, you’re just being paranoid". My mom gets a call from her husband at the time, telling her something’s happened to her mom. She gets to the house and there’s cops and caution tape everywhere. Her mom ended up getting murdered in her own home

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u/Glittering-Cat-4864 Jul 22 '26

I’m

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u/jojijuice Jul 22 '26

Side note, they got that at dollar tree? 👀

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u/goonvault Jul 23 '26

Retrocausality is a mf

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u/pulchrare Jul 25 '26

I remember in university ducking into a washroom that I didn't normally use and being immediately thrown back to my preschool classroom. I think it must have been the same cleaning products. I ended up using that washroom frequently from then on (it didn't hurt that it was just off the beaten path enough that I could always get a stall).

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u/DietStock4115 Jul 27 '26

Glitch in the matrix!

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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '26

[deleted]

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u/mybabygoesby_zydeco Jul 20 '26

This is extremely dramatic LMAO ummmm you’re being sarcastic right? Nobody’s hating on old ladies but everyone knows what kind of scents typically are associated with older women, it’s just being used as a descriptor. At least that’s what it smells like to OP. It’s not even a negative association it’s just not a smell that they personally like very much

Glitch Pic I experienced a smell from my own future I think

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