The mind will build it’s own rationalization and reality contrary to what exists unbiasedly, especially in traumatic circumstances.
So its simple and understandable that someone will look back afterwards and think to themselves, “I completely felt that”. This is also called a confirmation bias.
I can give you an example. If person A leaves on a motorcycle in the rain and person B is concerned they might get in an accident, and person A actually does get in an accident, that merely confirms that person B was subconsciously expecting something to happen, at which point their mind interprets as premonition as opposed to logic.
For someone with MacBean’s experiences, we’re just more apt to remember the correlating incidents than the thousands of instances that didn’t line up.
Another example of this phenomenon is when a person walks under a street lamp and notices that the light goes. This only has to happen a few times for someone to draw the correlation “Every time I walk under a street lamp, it goes off”. They fail to calculate the many, many times they walked under it without it going off. Its just that the times it “reacted” were more memorable, and therefor skewed the data.