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What it feels like to have a premonition, and for that premonition to come true

We were on our first holiday together, on our third attempt to make the relationship work. It was the first week of September, 2009, and the sky blazed a permanent blue. The door of the Mediterranean summer was still open; heat rolled to every corner. We had come to Marettimo, the emptiest and most seaward of the Egadi islands, named for tuna that are long gone, off the north-eastern coast of Sicily. We were broke in the way that a freelance writer and a freelance film producer who could get the money together for a Ryanair flight and a cheap Italian holiday were broke. We had a whitewashed room with a gas ring and a small balcony that faced the sea. Each morning, blinking against the sun, we turned left and walked a few hundred yards into the island’s only village to buy coffee and a piece of focaccia from the bakery and to think about how to do nothing for the rest of the day.

The problem was that there was nowhere to swim. That’s not right: the sea was everywhere.

But there was barely any horizontal ground next to the sea. No shade. Not a lounger to be seen. There was a beach in a cove not far from the village, but it filled up in the afternoons and, as it did, the waves seemed to rise, stirred by some September shifting in the air, until they pounded the shingle; the sun sloped down, the shore became crowded, and it became hard to think, let alone talk, in the buffeting of light and bodies and noise. So we got into the habit, each day, of walking out from the village with a bag, some water and our books, to find a place to lie and swim — our secret inlet, where no one would find us — and each day, we failed. We perched on rocks that were hotter and more perpendicular than the ones that we had perched on the day before. The walks were the best part, burning and beautiful. The island smelled of sage and pine. One afternoon, when we thought we had found the place, we began to skid down a loose, crumbling precipice towards the glittering sea. “Pericoloso! Pericoloso!”

Holidays are complicated, especially romantic ones. They put you in places that you have never been

We looked down. Some people were shouting up at us from a boat. “Dangerous! You’re crazy!” They waved us back up the hill. We were heat-addled and not making good choices, too skint, too fearful, to hire a boat.

There was a hand-drawn map of the island in a frame on the wall of our room, near the gas ring and the sink. I don’t know why I hadn’t looked at it before. One evening, I noticed a promising bay at the very far end of Marettimo, a perfect C shape, with the name Cala Bianca. White cove. It had to be. The next morning, we climbed the path out of the village that led north, skirting below the highest point of the island, Monte Falcone, towards an emptiness of faded green and baked rock. We carried some focaccia, with tomatoes on top, and a bottle of water. Polly wore a grey dress and a sunhat.

It was obvious very soon that this was a different kind of walk: each step seemed to carry us higher towards the sun. The island had never been more ravishing or more hot. We could see from a long way off where Cala Bianca would be, a secret band of white sand, nestled out of sight at the foot of the distant shore. It was too far to walk; there was no way we were turning back. When we arrived at the place, in the early afternoon, picking our steps with care down the most pericoloso cliff we had yet encountered, I continued to believe, right up until the last moment, until we were putting down our towels on the very sharpest and baking-est rocks that we had found all week — quite the most volcanic— next to a sea that was dark and blue, that we were still about to find the pleasant, perfect cove of our imagination. But we weren’t and we never did. Instead, we were hungry. We had eaten our food. The water bottle was empty. The sun was high and strong. Cala Bianca was a semi-circle of cliffs and caves. It was like a gas ring.

Holidays are complicated, especially romantic ones. They put you in places that you have never been before. I thought we were going to expire on those rocks. Polly, I noticed, had put her towel a little further away from mine than normal. Whether that was because the rocks were simply too jagged to find a space, or because the expedition to Cala Bianca had been entirely my idea, it was impossible to say. I didn’t feel like asking. Every now and again, a boat would sidle into the bay and some more sensible holidaymakers would gaze at the cliffs or jump into the sea for a quick swim and a drink from their cool-box, before motoring off somewhere else. We needed water. I am not a strong swimmer, but the next time a boat came round the corner, I dived off the rocks and swam out, clutching a five-euro note in a small plastic bag, and bobbed, embarrassingly, near the outboard motor. The skipper shook his head at me, like I was hustling him in some way. “Aqua!” I begged. He threw a bottle into the sea. He didn’t want the euros.

I made it back to the rocks and collapsed, shaking a little, onto my hot, hard towel. I gave Polly the water and fell into what remains to my mind as the deepest sleep of my life. Wherever I went, it was far, far down. And while I was there, I experienced the only premonition that I have ever had. I have just written a book about premonitions, and the best definition I came across was of an unaccountable feeling of knowing. You don’t just have an inkling, or a sense, that something might happen. You know. It is a fact, often uncomfortable, and it is something that cannot be changed. When I woke up on those rocks, dehydrated and unsure that we would ever get back to our whitewashed room, I knew that Polly was my wife. I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know if I wanted to be married. I also knew, acutely, this hadn’t happened yet: that there would be many more paths, many more bad choices, many people shouting pericoloso from the safety of their boats, but that this was the future that was there. When you have a premonition, you face a choice about what to do. You can tell people about it. You can struggle, as John Barker, a psychiatrist in the 1960s and the subject of my book, did, to prevent warnings of disasters from coming true. Or you can stay still, say nothing, and hope.

Sam Knight's book, The Premonitions Bureau, came out earlier this year. This piece appears in the Autumn 2022 issue of Esquire, out now