Premonitions And Extra-sensory Knowledge Part I by slaveofone
Sometimes I see or know or dream things before they happen. When I was little, I called it deja vu. Since my youth, it’s happened often enough that I no longer take much notice and just shrug them off. The strange feeling of deja vu that accompanied the occurrences in the beginning is now long gone.
My premonition or dream experiences range all along the spectrum from small and insignificant to large and disturbing. Yet even the smaller ones have remained in the memories of my friends and loved ones. So far, I’ve had four different kinds of foreknowledge: dreams of future places or events, knowledge of what a person is going to say, knowledge of something that is going to happen, and knowledge of details in a person’s life that I have never met before and have no reason for knowing.
The premonition dreams are no different than any other dream. They come, go, and are instantly forgotten. They seem to have no correlation at all with reality. There’s never reason to single one out from another until I will suddenly realize that I have already been to the place I’m at or seen the event unfolding before me. The more recent the dream to the occurrence, the clearer my remembrance.
For instance, I once took a vacation with a girlfriend and her family to Lake Arrowhead. I had never been there before. When we arrived at the lake, we parked in front of a large lodge. As we walked the stretch of concrete between wooden pillars toward the doors of the building, I suddenly took notice of my surroundings. When we walked in and I looked around, I recognized the interior from a dream several months prior. The dream was fresh enough in my memory to recall significant details. I grabbed my girl’s hand and excitedly announced how I had dreamed of this place. I told her that in my dream there was a grand curving staircase that went one level up and one level down around the far corner where the building bent. We walked the length and when we turned the bend, there was the staircase. Of course, she couldn’t see that it was the same grand curving staircase from my dream—only A staircase. I then told her that in my dream, I had gone down the stairs and played on a pinball machine on the right across from the stairs. I was eager to see if what was down there. After all, it was a pretty decadent place–not one in which you would expect a pinball machine! What were the chances that a pinball machine was sitting in the exact place as I had seen it in my dream? My girlfriend didn’t seem as eager as I to find out. We approached the stairs, looked over the rim, and there was a pinball machine sitting up against the wall exactly where I described it. I wanted to go down and play, but my girl pulled me away and told me I was scaring her.
Other times, dreams are far removed from their real world counterpart. Recently, for instance, I attended an anniversary showing of a movie we’ll call 1968. Nothing about the place brought any recollection to mind like the lodge at Arrowhead. But after the film, circumstances changed. Several men who had worked on the film were sitting on stage being interviewed. I was sitting behind a man taller than myself. This was fine during the movie, since I had to look either up or straight ahead. But when people were sitting down on stage, this became a bit of a problem. Since I had an aisle seat, however, I merely leaned out to the side into the aisle. This gave me a somewhat distorted viewpoint, but an unobstructed one nonetheless. Suddenly I knew this was not a unique viewing. I had seen this same number of aged men men sitting in these exact same positions in that same kind of lighting before and from the same kind of skewed viewpoint. Unfortunately, the dream was too old to remember anything more than the sight of it. A similar occurrence happened when I was in Ireland with my brother last year. I was in a whole new world for two weeks (I had never been to Europe before that time). And yet in the middle of this grand adventure over the emerald isle, I suddenly stumbled upon a bit of the island that was more than familiar—I had been see it before in a dream. There was nothing about the place that would stand out to anybody except me. I told my brother I had seen that place before in a dream. I don’t think he paid it any mind and neither did I. We went about our adventure.
My father told me a story when I was young about how he had dreamed of an event before it occurred. In his dream, he was riding his bicycle down an incline not far from home. For one reason or another, he lost control of the bike and crashed. A lady who was driving down the hill saw the incident, pulled over, and helped him up. She opened the door to her car and ushered my father in. Although Dad doesn’t remember her face, he vividly remembers her car and the bottles of soda that were on the floor. He had to step over them to get inside the vehicle. The lady then drove him home. The events happened exactly as he had seen it. He was riding down the same hill in his dream. He lost control and crashed. A lady pulled up in the same car of the same color. And he had to step over the same bottles of soda on the same side of the car to get in as he had dreamed.
The amount a person is going to say does somehow relate to how early or late I know it. If someone is going to say a few words, it usually comes to me within a matter of seconds before they say it. If more is involved, it comes to me at an earlier time. For instance, I was visiting an aunt and uncle on my mother’s side in Fresno. I mentioned that I was thinking of going back to school for a Masters and was currently studying Hebrew. My aunt told me she attended seminary (where she met my uncle) and had taken Greek. She then said she couldn’t remember Greek anymore except for one thing… I couldn’t hold my tongue. I blurted out anthropos!
before she could take a breath. Her jaw dropped. She just stared at me, dumbfounded, then asked how I knew she was going to say that very word. I admitted that I sometimes just know what someone is going to say. She looked at me for a moment then asked me what she was thinking. I said it didn’t work like that. It came and went on its own. Over the course of the night and into the next morning, she continued to bring it up either to ask me again how I knew out of all the Greek words in the language which one she was going to say or to simply proclaim her amazement at the fact of it. It was no big deal to me. Just one instance of many.