EXCLUSIVE I had a premonition about how my grandad would die - no one believed I'd seen the future...but then it came true
In the summer of 1977, 12-year-old Andy Thomas watched from the window to see his mother approaching in floods of tears.
At that moment, Mr Thomas knew that the bad news they'd be expecting was coming: his grandad was dead.
As the family's holiday was interrupted by their sudden loss, Mr Thomas sat back and watched his grieving relatives, trying to process what had just happened.
Then, without warning, Mr Thomas woke up back in his bed, relieved to discover that it had all been nothing more than a bad dream.
'It was one of those moments when you just think "thank god for that",' Mr Thomas told MailOnline.
However, Mr Thomas's relief proved to be short-lived when he looked out of the window and saw his mother walking towards the house, once again in floods of tears.
And much to his disbelief, he found that his premonition had come true - his grandad really had died.
Mr Thomas says: 'Every single thing unfolded just exactly as I just dreamt it. Not even just slightly, it was the same thing, and I just re-lived it twice. I tried to tell people, but in all the chaos they just didn't want to hear it.'
Mr Thomas, now a prolific paranormal investigator and author of STRANGE: Paranormal Realities in the Everyday World, says that even as a child he knew something was wrong.
He says: 'I knew this wasn't normal, this wasn't right. I was watching everything unfold in front of me and I knew what everyone was going to say, who was going to do what, and who was going to walk across the room.
'It was exactly the same, everybody was just the same. The only difference was that I knew what was about to unfold.'
This might sound a lot like déjà vu - a peculiar sense of familiarity for something you haven't experienced before.
However, Mr Thomas insists that what he experienced that morning was something far more profound than a sense of familiarity.
'This wasn't just a passing feeling of "hang on, haven't I done this before", this was very precise,' Mr Thomas says.
'Déjà vu tends to occur for a few seconds, we're talking about something that went on for several minutes here.'
Likewise, Mr Thomas says that he could accurately predict his family's actions, while studies have shown that experiencing déjà vu does not help you predict what will happen next.
What is déjà vu?
Déjà vu is a very common condition, with studies suggesting that about two-thirds of people experience it at least once in their lives.
Scientists still aren't exactly sure what causes this strange feeling, but the explanation is decidedly not paranormal.
The best theory is that déjà vu is caused when something goes wrong in a region of the brain called the medial temporal lobe, which controls creating memories and giving you the feeling of recalling something.
When the brain gets overexcited it's possible that this region starts to signal that you're recalling a memory even while the memory is being formed.
As the rest of the brain catches up with this false signal you get the strange sense of confusing similarity that characterises déjà vu.
Whatever the cause, that strange morning turned out to be a pivotal point in his life that would forever change how he thought about brushes with strange phenomena.
Mr Thomas says: 'This stuff gets rubbished and you're always told that it's a hallucination, but I've experienced enough myself to know that I have to be open-minded about it.'
Now a full-time paranormal researcher and author, Mr Thomas says he has spoken to 'hundreds' of people at events across the country who report similar experiences.
While he says that ghost sightings are the most common paranormal experience people report, many others have had similar moments of what Mr Thomas calls 'precognition'.
In one incident reported to Mr Thomas, a woman named Janet Tucker was woken the night before a car trip by a terrible nightmare in which she saw her mother being pulled through a window by paramedics.
The next day, the family campervan was struck by a car at a crossroads and veered off the road into a brick wall.
As emergency services arrived and Janet climbed from the wreckage, she looked back in horror to see paramedics pulling her mother through the campervan's sliding doors - just as she had seen in her dream.
Mr Thomas believes that precognitions may be far more common than is openly acknowledged as people hide their stories due to the fear of being seen as crazy.
Mr Thomas says: 'This is happening on a really everyday basis to somebody somewhere.
'I think the more we speak openly about this, I think the more people are going to come forward, and we're going to discover that actually, this kind of stuff is going on a far more regular basis than we know.'
However, even though Mr Thomas is a staunch believer in the supernatural, he still believes that a scientific explanation is possible.
'On one level there is no such thing as the paranormal, it's just something that science hasn't explained yet,' says Mr Thomas.
'I love science, but it needs to apply itself to things that have previously been assumed to be not worth consideration.
Mr Thomas currently believes that the scientific explanation for his premonitions of death could come from the world of quantum physics.
Cutting-edge research is now showing that, in quantum physics, the future can affect the past in a process called 'retrocausality'.
In some experiments, researchers have found that a pulse of light can sometimes appear to spend 'negative time' passing through a material - emerging before it enters the other side.
For some researchers, this has called into doubt the fundamental assumption that time moves in one direction with cause always preceding effect.
Some scientists even believe that ditching the idea of time as a one-way street is the only way to solve some of the fundamental problems of quantum physics.
Mr Thomas believes that these quantum concepts could explain how some people seem to access information from the future.
He says: 'If you look at what quantum research is suggesting, time doesn't run from A to B; it can go in either direction. I suspect that there's a general flow of time but if you chuck a stone, a big event sends ripples back and you just briefly pick them up when time gets stuck in a groove.'
It is important to bear in mind that retrocausation has only been observed in extremely specific experiments under laboratory conditions and scientists don't think it would allow for memories to travel backwards in time.
Likewise, retrocausation only affects the measurable states of quantum scale particles like photons, not big objects like human brains.
However, for Mr Thomas, the goal is not necessarily to provide a definitive explanation for these experiences but, rather, to encourage scientists to consider them something worth trying to explain.
He says: 'We are brought up with certain attitudes and told, this is the way the world works but can we, just for a minute, put aside the sceptical thing and ask: "What else could be going on here".'
WHAT IS QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT?
In quantum physics, entangled particles remain connected so that actions performed by one affects the behaviour of the other, even if they are separated by huge distances.
This means if you measure, 'up' for the spin of one photon from an entangled pair, the spin of the other, measured an instant later, will be 'down' - even if the two are on opposite sides of the world.
Entanglement takes place when a part of particles interact physically.
For instance, a laser beam fired through a certain type of crystal can cause individual light particles to be split into pairs of entangled photons.
The theory that so riled Einstein is also referred to as 'spooky action at a distance'.
Einstein wasn't happy with theory, because it suggested that information could travel faster than light.
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