It was a hot August night in 1962. My bedroom windows were open but there was no real breeze coming in. I lay on top of my covers. The music that I was so accustomed to, to fall asleep, had stopped a while ago. My parents had retired for the night in their downstairs bedroom. My brother was asleep in his bedroom across the hall from mine. And my little sister, sharing the room with me, was breathing heavily. She was sound asleep. I listened to her breathing pattern. It was fast. She was only six. Though sixteen, I tried to imitate it. I figured I could use this pattern to fall asleep. Soon I drifted off.
I don't know how long I was dreaming but what I was dreaming was very disturbing. I broke out in a panic and sat up in my bed to reassure myself that it was just a dream. It was. My sister was right where I had seen her earlier. I put my head back on my pillow and reflected. Why was I so shaken by this dream? Because I witnessed how my dad was dying of a heart attack right in his bed. It was extremely terrifying. Yet I was just dreaming. No need to be afraid. I spent considerable time calming myself with, "He is young and happy. He just passed a heart check up for his life insurance policy. He is deemed to be in good health."
I did not know at that moment that two weeks later my dream would turn into one of the toughest moments of my life. My dad died (see 'Heidi' posts of Sept. 2010) just like I had dreamed it.
E.S.P.?
To this day I am mystified by that happening.
Heidi,
ReplyDeleteI don't necessarily believe in ESP, but I do believe people have experiences such as yours that cannot be explained. Is it just coincidental? I don't know. I have never had an experience like yours, but if I did I would forever be mystified too.
I went to your September entries and read each of them. My heart aches for what you had to endure at such a young age.
Gerry
That is powerful Heidi, I think the Lord may have been preparing you...I have had seveal dreams similar to yours. Dee
ReplyDeleteHi Heidi,
ReplyDeleteI can almost tell who is calling before the phone rings, or when my DH calls, I know right away what he has to say. To dream of bad things and have them happen, not that I recall. Weird feeling about someone, oh, sure.
My brother and I were very close and we knew what the other was thinking, quite frequently.
Sharon
I have very vivid dreams, often, but I have never had a precognitive one that I can recall. It would be very disconcerting.
ReplyDeleteTwo different phenomena are at play here.
ReplyDeleteMost all of us have these experiences where we are thinking of someone and then shortly we are in communication with them and perhaps something horrible has happened. We attribute some remarkable "force" to that event, lets call it a "hit". But we seldom remember unremarkable events, "misses, where we had those thoughts and nothing came of it. Being unremarkable, there being no connection, it does not remain in our mind.
Secondly at play is the "Law of Large Numbers", that coincidental events are far more likely to happen than we realize. For example, if you get a mere 40 people in a room the likelihood that two of them will share the same birthday is remarkably high. If you think that there is a one in a million chance of something happening; on a planet of 6.8 billion people, that event will happen 6,800 times every day.
Combine the law of large numbers and the fact that we recall the "hits" but discard the outnumbering "misses", we mistakenly attribute causation where there is none. It is normal and natural that our brains are not rational; it is an evolutionary process that has favored our survival.
I have never had this happen but right now I can recall some feeling of something is going to happen but did not know what it was at the time.
ReplyDeleteI can relate. I had a dream while on a cruise. My father told me he was dying and needed me to come home. Sure enough, by the time I returned he was in a hospice facility and would die less than a week later. I think it's the power of the soul.
ReplyDelete