Strange Tales of Yester Year - No.1, Part 3 - Personal Precognitive Dreams

 

'Joseph's Dream', painting by Gaetano Gandolfi, c. 1790

As promised, this post will be about weird premonitions that I've had personally.

Now, if you're going to start reading this, I want you to stick with me.  I've had a long day, and probably in not the best position to be writing posts to prove I'm not insane....and this is probably going to sound like I'm insane, at least to some people.....but stick with it!   I can say that everything I'll be mentioning definitely happened.   There were witnesses that if required I could round up.  But would that make you believe the things I'm going to tell you any more or less?  Frankly, I don't mind.  I know these events took place, and I'm only going to give you the details as they happened in each case.  From those, you can make up your own mind on whether I'm crazy, misguided, weird or just talking nonsense.....

 It's hard to know where to start really.....it's just something I've always been around I guess.  My mother told me when I was quite young about having had dreams that came true,  (I'll maybe save those for a later post) and other people in my family have also had it happen to them...so when it started to happen with me, it just seemed almost normal and to be expected to happen at some point.

Now don't get me wrong...it is still highly odd!  And it always makes me uneasy, but what I mean is, I can't really remember when it started, because it was something unimportant and not really worth remembering....like a Deja Vu type event. "I've done this before" sort of thing.  Only, I was aware I hadn't, and it had been a dream.  Just something like someone saying a specific phrase on a tv program, or some unexpected person showing up that I'd dreamt of the night before...that type of thing.

For instance, there was one occasion when I was at my friend's house, and a whole group of friends were sitting in the kitchen talking, when I realised I had dreamt the very things that were happening, that same morning.  And so I mentioned it to somebody...and told them what was going to happen next.

"Gillian is going to come round the side of the house any second now," I told my friend Kenneth, who was Gillian's cousin, and who wasn't expecting Gillian because she stayed in a different village and had not mentioned any intention to visit.  

Gillian appeared round the corner of the house!

Excited, I told Kenneth what she was going to say when she entered. I can't remember now what it was, but it was something quite odd.  Gillian came in the door, opened her mouth...

......and said something completly different!

This worried me greatly! I thought I had broken the universe by changing what she said. But then it occurred to me eventually that what she had said just been a dream.....things weren't always going to be perfect.

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It wasn't until I was a bit older that things started to get really odd. I began to notice certain things about the nature of the premonitions. First of all, was the great, required need to tell someone about the dream.  

I dream often and love sharing my weird dreams with people, but when I have a precognitive dream it's different. I don't want to tell someone about the dream....I have to tell someone about the dream! It becomes a necessity to either tell the first person I see or to write it down so there's a note of it. Something about the dream has a feeling of urgency....

And this brings me to the second feature of the dreams.....the sense of threat!  

Every precognitive dream that I've had since I entered adulthood has been less of the Deja-Vu type affair, and more like a warning of potential threats to my well being.  It is important to mention that these aren't always real threats...just things that could be perceived as such when viewed from a different perpective.  This probably isn't making much sense, so let me try to explain by way of an example....

There was a dream I had where I was with my mother, in a cinema about to watch a movie....suddenly a group of terrorists entered the cinema and started demolishing the place. Trying to escape through the lobby, I was stopped by a big muscley man with a huge hammer.

When I woke up, I wrote the dream down as I had that weird feeling that I needed to.  

Now, I knew I was going to a cinema with my mother that day, so that would definitely be in my head, and might suggest why that would be the focus of a dream...of course this also made me slightly worried about what was going to happen in the cinema!  However, when I got to the cinema everything went as normal...no terrorists entered the building. Everything was okay......

But when the new trailers before the movie started, there was one ( I think it was for a GI Joe movie, but can't be certain) where members of COBRA show up....one of them was a muscley guy with a huge hammer!

Now, I hadn't seen these trailers beforehand, I had no idea what was going to be shown....but this could all still be coincidence...nothing too massively wild.  But it does show what I'm trying to say. A big guy with a hammer could be seen as a threat.  Luckily it was only in a trailer, but I got the impression my brain was trying to warn me of potential danger.

So that's a thing...but how do we feel about it so far?  It's all a bit odd, but is it paranormal?  Not sure, but we could do with better evidence right? 

Well,......

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After years of dreams of a similar nature to the one above (perceived but not actual threats that could be just coincidence)  I eventually had the one that I consider the perfect precognitive dream.  Everything about this means that there was no way I could possibly have faked a prediction or expected what was to happen,  and even for it to just be a case of coincidental weirdness seems a bit of a push!  So let me tell you the dream first, and then the real weirdness........

When I was younger, I used to work in a spooky old hotel as a kitchen porter.  For some reason, despite this place having been closed for a few years, in my dream I was back working there.  Something that was very unusal about this dream was that the entire cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer were also working there, and I knew them all and they were integrated into my friend group.  But these facts have nothing to do with the precognition.  Like I said, not everything will be perfect......

Towards the end of the dream, I had to get back to the small village I was staying in with my parents which was just a mile or so down from the hotel, and so we all went out and started walking across the fields to get back home.

Suddenly, a huge tornado appeared in front of us, swirling round and round and swaying slightly from side to side....not really progressing very far, but kind of stuck in one position above the woods, still swirling menacingly.

And then at either side of the tornado, another one appeared but farther away so they appeared smaller in view, making a total of three tornadoes.  The big one in the middle, the smaller ones to each side of the main one.

I awoke with a jump, and after grabbing a coffee told my brother and mother about my dream, because I got that feeling from it, and this time it felt really weird.  And being in the UK and not in a tornado zone, I was wondering what to expect....

A couple of hours after I got up, the phone rang upstairs and my mother shouted down to me that a friend I hadn't heard from for a while was calling, and so I went to take the call.  It was my old best friend Alan,  who had got married a couple of years earlier and moved which meant we saw a lot less of each other.  He was calling to say that his wife had taken ill, but they were supposed to be going to see the band 'Texas' in Glasgow, the band's home town, for the first night of their new tour, and being a huge fan he didn't want to miss it, but didn't want to go alone.  So he wondered if I would like to go with him instead.

It seemed like a good excuse for a catch up and as I don't mind Texas myself, it was pretty much a no brainer to say yes to a free ticket and a rare chance to hang out!

A few hours later and we were at the concert.  The support band had come on, and we decided to go get some drinks in before the start of the main show.  At the bar, I decided to tell Alan about my weird dream, as I still had the urge to tell absolutely everyone I saw in case it was to be relevant.

As we headed back to the stage, I was just telling him about the tornadoes and then mentioned the fact that it was one of those dreams I felt I had to tell everybody about, just as the lights dimmed for the band to appear and start the gig.

A huge curtain pulled back from the stage and a big giant TV screen flashed on with a single image.  A tornado,  swirling round and round and moving from side to side.  I looked at Alan.

His jaw had dropped and he pointed to the side of the stage where a smaller screen showing the same image was descending, and then another one at the other side appeared.

Three tornadoes, spinning and swaying, but stuck in their places.  One big huge one, and two smaller ones,  one at each side, that could have been in the distance if they were real.

"You're weird" Alan said, and just shook his head with his jaw still wide open. We watched the concert, and enjoyed it, but my mind was kind of just blown at the oddness of it all, and the journey home was just a bit quiet..Alan didn't really want to dwell on what had just happened.  "You're weird" just seemed to be the general thing to say to me whenever it was brought up.....

But now we have something a bit more odd, don't we.  There was no way I could have known where I was going to be that night.  I had had the dream before Alan phoned, and I wasn't expecting to hear from him at all.   His wife who was supposed to be there was become ill,  so it's not even as if Alan knew I was going to be there.  There was literally no way I could have known I would be going to see Texas.  

It was the first night of their new concert, so I had no idea there was going to be one screen let alone three.  No way of knowing that they would choose a tornado as the first thing to show.   No way of knowing it would be one big tornado repeated on two smaller screens.

But as always, there is a problem.  The only witnesses to this event are people I know.  Anyone willing to accept that this is a thing that happened has to believe that the witnesses aren't lying for the sake of the story.  I would say "Why would they?" but I know that won't be enough for a lot of sceptics.

But I know that for me,  and a few select people I know,  it was a truly weird and spooky experience!  And bizarrely, a few years later, I would have another weird experience...this time even spookier, and again involving my friend Alan in some capacity.....but with one huge difference.  This wasn't a premonition at all,  but something that was happening very far away at possibly exactly the time I was experiencing it in a dream....

....but that, is a tale, for another time...........

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Well, I hope you read that with an open mind, and don't think I'm too weird or anything now....as I said, believe it or don't, it makes no difference to me. It's definitely something that has become something of a passion for me now, as I want to know how and why it happens, having experienced it myself.  

 If  I'd had more time I would have gone into detail about the even weirder, far scarier and downright freaky and unsettling stuff I hint at in the end of the post, but 

1) I'm still slightly hesitant to talk about it and 

2) I didn't "forsesee" the troubles I'd have with bloody buses trying to get back to the parents for Halloween!

Anyway, with this...that's another Halloween over! Congratulations to everyone for making it to the end of another Countdown to Halloween!  There's still plenty of stuff to go look at on everyone's blogs...I've got some catching up to do myself! Go click one of those Countdown badges!!!

All that remains is for me to wish everyone the very happiest of Halloweens, and to say that I'll be back on the blog very soon! Tomorrow in fact, as what with being late today there are still a few things I promised I'd post that need mopped up!  Hell, why not just keep things going until Creepmas, eh!? (Better not get too ahead of myself!)  Anyway, join me tomorrow for some more spooky shenanigans!

Laters, Stuffers!