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Most of us have encountered the eerie or inexplicable: a dream that foretold the future so precisely it appeared psychic, a sudden intense connection to a distant friend at the moment he faced death, a chance meeting so improbable it seemed preordained.  In my own case, a foreboding swept over me on Valentine's Day of the year 2000 at an Italian restaurant in San Francisco.

Sitting across from my wife, I suddenly felt she was going to die.

There was nothing apparently wrong with her and she'd been given a clean bill of health at her last checkup only four months before. After I convinced her to go for another exam two days later, however, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, a disease that usually progresses without noticeable symptoms until it turns deadly.

She was lucky, her doctors explained. Her tumor was discovered and removed before it could spread.

"How could you have known she had cancer?" her oncologist asked. "Are you some kind of psychic?"

I didn't know she had cancer, of course, only that I felt the sudden, alarming sense of her impending death