There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet, Act I, Scene V
I am not psychic. I am pretty sure of that. At least not normally. Things surprise me so much that I know I don't generally have any precognition. But there have been a few moments in my life that I have known about things before they happened. Or maybe just thought about them. I don't think it is crazy, and it has been maybe 20 years since I have had one of those episodes. Do you ever have them? Are you willing to share? This is, after all, a season that celebrates the lessening of walls between the worlds.
My stories are below the pumpkin-coloured interchange and my potential explanations of why they aren't really anything. Or are they? I don't really know.
I suppose the most recent feeling I have had was when I was driving and hit an animal, once some 20 years ago and another time more recently (perhaps 10 years ago?). It is possible that my mind thinks about hitting animals with great regularity and only remember those occasions when I actually do. But I very clearly remember the "What would it be like if I were to hit an animal; I think I am going to hit an animal" dialog in my head as I drove a bright and sunny summer country road, only to have a beautiful yellow lab chase another dog across the highway right in front of me. I hit it, and killed it, something I still see in my head. The woman across the highway came out of her house and told me she would make sure the people whose dog it was (who let it run loose along country roads) know what happened. I also remember thinking that before I hit a possum on a late night drive home. There was just the certainty that I was going to hit something.
When I was in 4th grade, maybe, the guy across the street and I entered a weather exhibit in the local science fair, and I dreamed that I got a phone call telling us that we didn't win the first prize but we got second place. And then two days later, when we went to the awards ceremony, he and I did get the red ribbon and a trophy. I have the trophy still, although it is rather shattered, as my Imeny knocked it off the top of the bookshelf. My mother told me that I had been thinking about it and knew the work was good but not that good. It was a logical explanation, but it wasn't what I had been thinking. I had known in advance. But my mom just wouldn't believe me.
It makes sense to explain things away and my mom might be right, I guess, although it still feels to me as though it was true precognition, and remains the one clear example in my memory. I have had those nights I have sat up waiting for the phone to ring for no reason, until it does and the news is bad. I was waiting and waiting for something, I knew not what, when the phone rang and my mother told me that my father had had open heart surgery that day. He had gone for a checkup at the medical center and they told him he needed emergency surgery and my mother had stayed with him until the end of the day and he had come through it all okay, and she had been able to go home and call my brother and me (it was way before the days of cell phones). Insomnia? Or something more? I honestly don't know.
It is reassuring in some ways to be able to explain things away if they don't fit your image of the way the world works. And all of these things can sort of be explained away, although personally I think I knew the Science Fair prize in a way that doesn't fit with normal lines of time. But the weirdest experience I ever had was spirit walking. But then there is the almost hallucinatory experience from grad school, my encounter with spirit walking.
This, the oddest of my "supernatural" experiences, was once in grad schoo. I had a really bad allergy attack and took meds and went to lie down while my flatmate made dinner for the both of us. I was in one of those odd half-waking states and in that state I found myself watching Lisa making a cream sauce by setting the pan on the edge of the electric burner while she was stirring. I told her that I had watched her make dinner, and she didn't understand because I had clearly been lying down. I showed her how the pans were arranged on the stove, and she dismissed it as my having seen her cook several times and not anything out of the ordinary. I suppose that made sense, but I knew, and I still know, that I had been standing there and watching her cook.
That is the one experience I had that really disturbed me. It didn't disturb me at all at the time, but it was really unnerving in retrospect. I still can recall how I felt unconnected, floating, in that odd way you are just when you are going to sleep, and are almost there, but not there just yet. I didn't go far, just down the hall to watch her cook, but I felt later that I could have gone anywhere, and there was that odd feeling of what would have happened if I couldn't find my way back to my body. I haven't done the spirit walking since, and it has been a bit of a decision, I think, as I have really avoided feeling that unconnected state. Odd that I can force myself to avoid this, and I don't know if I could get myself there if I wanted to.
This is the time of year when the boundaries between the worlds are broken down. But the events that I am recounting here were as likely to happen in the spring as any other time. If there are borders between this world and a world of spirits or ghosts, I haven't crossed them, at least knowingly. I lead a boring, mundane life, and don't see dead people or monsters in the shadows. But I do believe there are other worlds, whether they can be explained away by the multiverse concept or some form of imprinting, or some concept we have not yet dreamt of, as Hamlet snidely tells his friend. There are worlds beyond our knowing. Where have you encountered this other world, the one that doesn't fit with modern scientific explanations?
As Longfellow mourned:
The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear.