Premonitions and the Butterfly Effect

Posted On October 20, 2025 / Written by Dr. Linda Gadbois

I’ve had many premonitions throughout my life, but for the purpose of illustrating the impact some can have, I’m going to focus my description on the one that had the greatest impact on me, because in recognizing what it was I worked to try and change it, only to have it transpire another way. This experience, which involved the death of my husband, completely changed my perspective on fate, destiny and karma. I want to point out that at the time this occurred, I considered myself an atheist in terms of conventional religion, though I was very attuned to the spiritual realm that underlies and orchestrates this one. I won’t go into a lot of detail but just try to convey the nature of the experience and how it changed the course of my life and my understanding of the spiritual realm by having gone through it.

My husband and I had been separated for around four months when I first started having the premonition. At the time I had a 68 Camero, and he had a 72 Pontiac Formula, which are basically the same car in terms of design and engineering. He had bald tires on his car, and my tires had a deep groove worn in the outer sidewall from rubbing against the fender and the canvas was showing through. I was driving to work one day when suddenly I had a distinct vision of my husband having a blow-out in his front driver’s side tire at a high speed, losing control and wrecking, killing him. At first, I didn’t know if it was a true premonition or a fantasy, because at the time I was trying to figure out how I was going to get away from him, because he was stalking me and constantly trying to get back together. But the vision came out of nowhere and continued to come with an increasing sense of urgency to it, and that’s when I started realizing it was a premonition of what was about to happen.

At that time, I thought the reason I was having the vision was so I could intervene and try to prevent it somehow. For those of you who have never experienced a true premonition, the biggest difference between these and a normal fantasy or imaginary idea or the images that form an intuitive vision, is that they come as more of an experience where you “feel it” as if it’s happened. They have a strong form of dread and urgency that can make you feel overwhelmed with a panicked feeling. They don’t have a time-frame associated with them, but they do have a pervading sense of urgency which tells you they’re going to happen relatively soon. I wondered why I was given the premonition, what was the reason, what was I supposed to do, and decided it was because I was meant to try and prevent it from happening. I saw it as a form of divine intervention where the higher powers were using me to alter the course of events about to take place.

A short time after I started having the vision, he came over to my house one day with a brand-new set of tires for my car. When this happened, I immediately thought about the vision, and thought this was my opportunity to prevent what I saw happening, so I insisted that he use the tires for his car, and I would buy some later. I thought at that moment that I had possibly prevented the accident, which would have happened due to bald tires, and I felt a strange sense of relief. At around this same time, the company I worked for was planning a Christmas dinner, and I decided to buy a new dress for the occasion, and I ended up buying a black dress.

A few weeks passed, and on my way home from work, doing around 80 miles an hour on a country road, I had a blow-out in my front driver’s side tire, but was able to control it and safely pulled off the road. When I went to get my spare out of the trunk, it was flat and needed air. I was on a country road that had very little traffic, and what I would have normally done in this situation was call my husband to come to help me, when suddenly one of my co-workers was passing by and stopped to help me. He had an air compressor built into the trunk of his car, inflated the tire and changed it for me. This was the first event that changed the course of activity that would transpire through the night.

Later that evening my husband came over, wanting to stay the night, and when I said no, we ended up in a shoving match when I was trying to close the door. He was mad and frustrated and peeled out, screeching his tires for several blocks. After I was the one who had the blow-out in my front tire and was able to safely pull over, I thought about the vision, and thought I had prevented it by insisting he took the new tires. I did feel a bit perplexed that what I saw happening to him ended up happening to me for the same reason, but I didn’t wreck. Later that same night, after I had gone to bed, the phone rang, and it was one of his friends in a panicked mode telling me he had been stabbed. At first, I thought it was a prank that he had put his friend up to, so I went back to bed, but then I kept thinking about the vision, and decided to call the police to see if something had actually happened. When I spoke to the police and told them who I was and what I was inquiring about, two cop cars immediately pulled up to my house, as they apparently didn’t know for sure who he was. They then told me he had been stabbed in the chest and was taken by Flight-for-Life to a hospital in Denver. One of the cops drove me to the hospital in Denver where he was undergoing open heart surgery. Turns out he was stabbed through the heart with a hunting knife by someone who followed him to the restaurant after having an argument with him over a pool game.

He survived the surgery and was put in ICU and the doctors gave me a complete description of what had happened. He was dead when the ambulance arrived and was resuscitated before putting him on the helicopter. During the helicopter ride, he was resuscitated two more times and was resuscitated again while prepping him for surgery. They told me his heart was closed (collapsed) when he was stabbed, and if it had been expanded, it would have popped and been torn apart. After spending five days in ICU, he was moved to a regular room, and I was able to bring our son, who was seven years old at the time, to see him. After leaving and going home for the evening, our son made him a card, and I was overwhelmed with an extremely strong urge to take it down to him, but I had to work the next day, so I went to bed instead. Right as I was falling asleep, the phone rang, and it was the hospital telling me there was a problem and I needed to come down right away. I could sense what had happened, and after taking our son to his grandma’s, rushed down to the hospital in a panicked state.

When I went up to his room, the hallway was dark, and his door was locked. The nurse’s station was lit up at the end of the hall, and I could sense what had happened. It was almost like being in a dream, it didn’t seem real. As I walked towards the desk everything seemed to be in slow motion, and when the nurse saw me she had a dreadful look on her face and called for the doctor to come down. When he told me what had happened and that he had died, it was as if I spun off into a different reality. At first, I refused to accept it and insisted on seeing him. Concerned with my response, they took me to his room and left me alone with him to say my final goodbye. His head was leaned back with a large tube down his throat that was taped to his head. I naturally hugged him and laid my head on his chest sobbing uncontrollably, when I was overwhelmed with the realization that there was nothing there anymore. His body was already cold and completely void of life. It was a strange experience that showed me that his spirit and soul had completely left his body. After sitting with him awhile and starting to calm down, I realized someone was in the room, and turned to see a catholic priest sitting in a dark corner of the room. At first it almost felt creepy, and I felt as though my privacy had been invaded during a very vulnerable moment, and I told him to leave.

After calling his mom and brother, telling them what happened, and being with them when they came down to see him, I left and had to stop at the police station on my way home, where I was questioned and told what the charges would be. Fortunately, they apprehended the guy who did it a short time after it happened, but the police searched his vehicle, where they found the murder weapon, and entered his apartment without a search warrant, which caused problems in terms of his trial. As I was driving back from the hospital I could feel my front tire wobbling, and when I pulled over to look at it, two of the lug-nuts had broken off, and the others were loose. When the front tire was changed, he apparently didn’t tighten the lug-nuts enough and they had worked loose. I had driven to the hospital that night (which was about forty miles) at over a hundred miles an hour with my front tire about to fall off and didn’t even know it until I was on my way back.

I won’t go into what his death, now slated first degree murder, set in motion, because that’s a whole different story in itself that completely changed the course of my life, and set me firmly on my spiritual path. I couldn’t figure out why I had been given a vision if I wasn’t meant to prevent it, and in trying to prevent it, it happened to me instead, but with a different outcome. This set me into a bit of a tail-spin, so I decided to talk to a few psychics to see if any of them had had a similar experience or had been about to give a reading where they saw the person’s death, and what they did about it. Several told me they had initially tried to intervene, only to have it happen in a different way. Some said they simply told the person they couldn’t do a reading because they couldn’t pick up on anything, and when the person left, they found out they died the way they had seen it.

The experience set an extensive quest in motion to try and figure out why we’re given a vision of a future event if we’re not meant to try and change or prevent it. Or where, in trying to change it, the same thing happened to me, with a different outcome. Five days later, I wore the black dress I had bought a couple of weeks earlier to his funeral. What I realized through this experience was how to tell the difference between a true premonition or vision of a future event and a self-produced imaginary event. This is a valuable lesson to learn, because I continued to have them periodically whenever I was heading into a future stage of events that altered my life’s course. I had several premonitions before this, but I didn’t understand what they were at the time, or the fact that they were visions of what was about to happen, rather than purely intuitive visions that were formed out of my emotional state and the energetic matrix of life. One comes as a kind of notion born out of a feeling that guides you on what to do during a crisis of some kind, and the other comes as more of a snapshot into an actual event that is about to take place, without any form of guidance on what to do.

As I was contemplating how I was able to see a future event before it happened, I realized I was tuning into the memory of it, providing me with the means to prepare for what was about to happen. I realized, with extreme clarity, that our life is predestined, not in an exact manner as a set of fixed or rigid events, but in terms of archetypal or metaphorical ideas that systematically adapt to whatever is happening and still come about in whatever way the situation allows. I realized that it was his time to go, and if I changed the original vision, it simply happened a different way, which was often more tragic than the original vision. After dying at the scene, and being resuscitated four times, and undergoing five hours of open-heart surgery, he died from a blood clot that broke loose in his abdomen and hit his heart, stopping it, the first day out of ICU. I realized how events naturally transpire that lead to or set the basis for particular type of events, and no matter how I tried to change them, they still happened a different way. When it’s our time to go and our life has run a predetermined course, we go. There’s no preventing it, only preparing for it. If we can prevent it, which still comes as a snapshot into what seems like a future event that’s unforeseeable at the time we have it, it’s because we’re meant to prevent it, and in preventing it we have a profound experience that changes the course of our life.

This experience set me on my spiritual path, which started because of the premonition and what became my obsession with figuring out what happens to us when we die. It turned out to be a catalyst that not only set me on an entirely different path with a brand new attitude, but gave me tremendous insight into the deeper, hidden realms of life and the truth about our soul’s destiny and divine providence as a grand plan for our life that can’t be change through personal will. This is inherently tied into what we refer to as karma, which is another word for predestiny as a life-span that can’t be altered using personal will. This experience, which was the first one I recognized for what it was and participated in consciously trying to change, opened the door to a whole new way of thinking about things and set my true life path in motion as a complete devotion to the spiritual essence of life and the divine mystery of our own existence as both a physical and spiritual being.

Dr. Linda Gadbois     

Transpersonal Psychologist and Mentor for Personal Transformation and Self-Mastery