On Oct 9, 2017, my home and office in California were incinerated by a massive wildfire. My wife, Christine, and I got out with moments to spare.

We woke up at 12:45 a.m. and saw the flames racing toward us. Running to the car, we got out just ahead of the inferno. Many of our neighbors weren’t so lucky. Reports from firefighters later estimated that the fire traveled the length of a football field every three seconds. Forty-two people didn’t escape in time. But thousands did. Why?

The Power of Premonitions

In the weeks after the fire, that time of 12:45 a.m. kept cropping up in conversations with friends and neighbors. Many of them report waking up at that exact time. When asked why they woke up, they couldn't explain it. After they awoke, they might have smelled smoke or seen the glow of the fire on the horizon. But what woke them up in the first place?

Many people seem to have premonitions just before disasters. The New York City police department produced the first official estimate of the death toll from the attacks on September 11, 2001 at 6,659 dead. It was based on reasonable estimates of the number of people who should have been at their desks in the Twin Towers on a weekday morning.

But the final death toll was only 2,753. Where were the missing people? Many were evacuated successfully, but many others reported unusual circumstances that kept them away. Some had premonitions of disaster. Others had disturbing dreams that led them to alter their routines. These subtle signals may be a relic of the sixth sense that human beings have had since the dawn of history.

Picking Up Subtle Signals Inherent in Nature

A remote chain of 500 islands called the Andamans and Nicobars lies off the Bay of Bengal. Andaman Island itself is inhabited by an aboriginal tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Jarawa. They are fiercely independent and self-sufficient, rejecting all contact with outsiders.

On December 26, 2004, a massive tsunami struck the coast, with the Andamans and Nicobars directly in its path. Anthropologists feared that all 250 members of the Jarawa tribe had been washed away. On the neighboring island of Nicobar 1,458 people died.

However, when government helicopters arrived to render aid, the Jarawa fired arrows at them. Eventually, seven men emerged from the forest wearing loincloths and amulets. They told aid workers that not a single member of the tribe had died. Just before the tsunami struck, the entire tribe had moved deep into the jungle.

In my forthcoming book, Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science Behind How Your Brain Creates Material Reality, I summarize more than 400 studies that show a link between the electromagnetic fields of individual human beings and planetary information fields. The Earth’s North and South poles remind us that we live on a giant magnet, and many animals are able to sense these geomagnetic fields. Dolphins, cows, and migrating birds are all able to perceive them.

The human brain also contains strings of magnetic particles. These may be sensitive to the Earth’s field, picking up information as well.

“We’re all like little cells in the bigger Earth brain—sharing information at a subtle, unseen level that exists between all living systems, not just humans, but animals, trees, and so on,” writes Rollin McCraty, director of research at the HeartMath Institute.

Human beings are part of the web of life. Modern humans are capable of picking up on the subtle signals inherent in nature, just as the Andaman islanders did.

I also believe that with practice we can hone our abilities to tune in to global natural cycles. Like any skill, the more it is practiced the stronger it becomes. Meditation, prayer, and spiritual practice all can put us back in tune with natural cycles larger than our individual lives; 12:45 a.m. is my personal daily reminder of the presence of these global rhythms.