One of the wonderful side benefits of the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve is getting together with old friends. A couple of times a year, Melissa visits her family in our old neighborhood where we lived for the first eleven years of our daughter’s life. Melissa, who is ten or eleven years older than Megan, used to babysit for her.
Today, she lives in Manhattan with her husband, Jon, a videographer, and their very old cat, Star, and is an avid chronicler of how the weird and the strange – synchronicity, spirit contact, the paranormal – manifests itself in her life. So when Melissa tells me a story, I listen closely.
We met for lunch shortly after Christmas, at our favorite spot, the Macaroni Grill. The place was empty, so we got a great booth at the back of the restaurant. Melissa doesn’t waste time; she immediately launched into her “sensing the future” story.
On Christmas, she and her family – parents, her three brothers and a sister, were sitting out in the yard, sipping champagne while her dad was trying to fly a drone he got for Christmas. They live on a lake, so there’s plenty of space to play around with a drone. But her dad, she says, didn’t know what he was doing. As she sipped from her glass, she felt a sudden certainty that the drone was going to hit her glass of champagne.
“This was a gut certainty,” she said. “I knew it was going to happen.”
She quickly set her glass down on the table and just seconds later, the drone struck her glass, shattering it.
Granted, this isn’t a sweeping precognition that ripples out through the larger world and changes events, belief systems. But it rippled through Melissa’s personal world so that she sat there, staring at the shattered glass, thinking, OMG, I knew this was going to happen.
This kind of precognition beautifully illustrates how precognition works on even the most mundane levels in our lives. We might have a sudden impulse to do something we’ve never done before – take a different route to work, try a food we’ve never sampled before, talk to a stranger – and a new world suddenly opens to us. We have come face to face with our own ability to sense the future.
The larger question here, I think, is what do we do with this knowledge, this realization?
Nearly seventeen years ago, in June 2000, I returned home, exhausted, from a writers’ conference. In the early morning hours, I dreamed I was conducting my workshop and someone at the conference handed me a Post-It with a message on it: You just got a call that your mother has died.
At the time, my mother – Rose Marie – had been in an Alzheimer’s facility for more than two years, my dad was living with us, and our daughter was sleeping in the living room because she’d given up her bedroom to her granddad. The dream scared me. I walked out into the kitchen, where my dad and Rob were sitting, and told them my dream.
My dad went pale. “I was just telling Rob that last night I dreamed that Rose Marie died.”
And several weeks later, she did.
From the mundane to the profound: that’s how precognition works. You can sometimes summon a precognition, create an inner climate that is conducive to it. But usually, external circumstances thrust that awareness at you, right in your face. From a drone shattering a glass of champagne to the death of a parent, sensing the future doesn’t seem to have any boundaries or borders, any rules, and only a single piece of advice: pay attention.
Melissa did. And perhaps she avoided cuts to her hands as that glass of champagne shattered.
I paid attention and that precognitive dream helped me to prepare myself emotionally for my mother’s death.
What are your experiences telling you?
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
