On Saturday, April 25, 2015 a devastating earthquake hit Nepal. It disqualified me from making important decisions for a bit—it was that disruptive to my personal psyche.

Saturday was day twelve of my Nepali friend’s trek up Mt. Everest. I’m chronicling his mission, the Mt. Everest Expedition for Global Peace and Friendship—a mission to plant 193 flags from around the world to symbolize peace and friendship.

On April 23, the tenth day of Phurba Thile Sherpa’s trek with 193 flags, and a support team, he posted,”Greetings From Mt. Everest base camp.Today we held a Puja–a wishing ceremony with mountain Goddess. Early tomorrow morning planing to go set up Camp 1. (C1: 19,500’/5943m – 3-6 hours, 1.62 miles) Very exciting to walk and climbing on Khumbu Icefall. Sorry I am not able to post pictures because very weak internet here. My health condition is perfect till today.”

A man of meager means, Sherpa personally funded this very expensive expedition. This bothered me immensely. Negative feelings about his personal investment covered my inner-self like a can of spilt black paint. My suggestion to him was to put this expedition off for another year. With my husband, I incessantly talked about my feelings and this climb and expressed my very real concerns. “What if something happens and he doesn’t make the climb? Then what happens to him when the loans come due?” I clucked and worried like a mother hen.

Negativity is not my way. But I couldn’t shake this concern. “It’s not my worry,” I decided, filled with the rationale that I’m a gray-haired grandmother who calls her walks in the woods a hike. “Phurba knows what he is doing. I’ll place faith in his judgement,” I eased my twitch.

On Saturday my concern turned real and I understood this ongoing dread—it was a premonition. I’ve had these before. Some were so strong that they made my stomach turn, and others just strong enough to make me make a left turn when I had planned to turn right. Sometimes these premonitions are spot-on. Other times, not so much.

I’m hardly a wiz-bang psychic and woman of the crystal-ball sight. And I wondered if others get these premonitions that eventually impact their day-to-day life. So I asked friends on Facebook, “PREMONITIONS. Do you get them? And more importantly, how many were spot-on? Do you act upon them? Do you get them about other people? Is this silly mumbo-jumbo?”

Contrary to my other posts, this one received over 70 comments (I posed the question on two separate pages). Of the commentary, just two came from men, both in their sixties.

Ages ranged from young mothers to grandmothers. The thread wandered from “Yes, I get them (premonitions)” to discussion about angels, deja-vu, and prophetic dreams.

Totally unscientific, this discussion showed me that premonitions are not that odd, and that they are easily accepted as normal. “I have a sense when something is wrong with someone close to me…I believe in intuition.” wrote a retired special education teacher.

“Yes I get them all the time about my family. Usually when something is wrong,” confessed a California artist.

A friend from high school wrote, “I believe that premonition’s cousin is superstition. Sometimes we put our premonitions out of our mind because we are too frightened to believe them. Like Scarlett, ‘I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy! I’ll think about that tomorrow !’”

And a mother of three from Arizona wrote, “I do get some kind of sense of certain things…that I always listen to. I don’t necessarily believe its a premonition, more like me unconsciously noticing stuff that I haven’t processed that makes it feel like a prediction or premonition. Like being worried about a house fire to an uncomfortable degree and my husband discovers a smoking cord in the garage the next day…”

From this thread, it seems that premonitions come into play when something unpleasant is in the works. But for maybe one post, there were none about a premonition that something good was in the air.

For me, when I get a feeling that a sudden idea is going to work or materialize and be worth my time pursuing, I follow that gut feeling. And, yes, the majority of times success (to my standards) follows.

Accidents, injury and other unfortunate events were linked with some who harbor strong premonitions. Debi Dreksler, a retired newspaper columnist and businesswoman sent me this, “My lungs collapsed when I was born and a nurse/Nun found me lifeless in my incubator. She revived me. I have always attributed this to why I have psychic abilities… Almost everything comes to me in a dream. I have predicted robberies, illnesses and even knew how a home invasion happened when the police couldn’t figure it out…I have tried to use my abilities to help people. Last week, I delayed getting on the road to head home because I felt I needed to wait. In those extra 5 minutes there was a head on collision and the people were killed.”

Well, what did the men say? One said it would take a bottle of wine and some privacy to share his experience. (I could hear some of the ladies rustling up a good bottle of red to offer this charming man. Just kidding.) But artist Frank Ramme, is pretty much convinced premonition can be a delusion. “If you are talking about some kind of spiritual or metaphysical revelation about the future that is complete nonsense. We all have, premonitions of a kind, because we acutely perceive much more of the world unconsciously than consciously and some of that crosses the threshold of conscious awareness. Furthermore, we delude ourselves retroactively by paying attention to our successes and dismissing our many failures in prognostication.”

Paula Prober, MS, a counselor out of Oregon shared, “Science Links Anxiety To High IQ’s & Sentinel Intelligence, Social Anxiety To Very Rare Psychic Gift.”

The post included, “Empaths who have fully embraced their abilities are able to function on a purely intuition-based level. As Steve Jobs once said, ‘[Intuition] is more powerful than intellect.’”

My Nepal mountaineer friend and seeker of world peace, is marked as safe. We assume that he was at Camp 1 at the time of the earthquake. The mountain is now closed for the season. This leaves this man with a debt to lenders. No one has heard if his home and family are okay. Like much of Nepal, he has much to overcome in the immediate future. This I know from the news, not my premonition.