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A GenePoool.com Essay
Premonitions
A few nights ago I had a very odd dream. It was odd for a number of reasons. For starters, I don't usually remember my dreams, at least not unless I've had Mexican food the night before. The subject of the dream was a girl I dated in high school, someone I haven't seen for nearly twelve years. In the dream, for some reason, we had cabins next to one another on a cruise of some kind. (I'll save all of you the trouble of speculating, especially any of you who may legally be my wife: this was not a sexual dream.) Now, given the all-seeing nature of dreams, I was privy to everything that was going on in the cabin next to mine, which is how I knew, from the safety of my own cabin, that she was slashing her wrists.
Needless to say, this sort of dream is disturbing. It was very vivid, and it stuck with me for a long time after waking up, especially the part where I knew she was killing herself and didn't do anything about it. While it was still fresh in my mind I called a friend who had an outside chance of finding out if my former girlfriend was, in fact, okay.
Which brings me to my topic. Did I have a premonition?
How would I know?
I suppose the most obvious way to find out is if it turns out she's okay. (I'm frankly assuming as much.) But what is the time limit on a premonition? And how specific does it have to be?
Say I find out she IS dead, just for argument sake. If she was actually hit by a bus, is the premonition still valid? What if nothing happens to her for six months? A year? Five years? What if it happened a month ago? If I stretch the time limit enough, I'm eventually going to be "right," provided I outlive her. And what if I contact her and find out she's feeling suicidal? Or if she felt suicidal at one time in the past? Or what if she's about to go on a cruise?
Dreams are funny things. Odd connections are made routinely, which is what makes them so interesting. Sometimes those connections are memorable. Sometimes they're so striking and disturbing that they stick with us for a long time. Images have emotional power, without question. I may have been shaken by this dream, but not so much so that I don't recognize how the emotional impetus might affect my judgement concerning its validity.
If I choose to succumb to the emotional reaction I might be prepared to conclude I have definitely had a premonition, and as soon as I conclude that I can find the facts to fit the assumption. If I can't fit my ex-girlfriend into the equation there are still a fairly large number of possibilities. I went to high school with a lot of people, after all. What if one of THEM is dead, or will be soon, or are about to go on a cruise, for that matter. It's not a huge leap to suggest that the person I dreamed about REPRESENTED another person. She could also represent someone I hardly know but am attracted to. What if something happens to them? The circle widens with each small presumptive jump.
If I were so inclined, I could stretch this dream out in enough directions to fulfill the theory that I've had a premonition. Dreams can be literal. They can also be symbolic. They can take place in the present, the past, or, if I'm feeling particularly credulous, the future.
Or I could forget about the whole thing. Say I decide, reasonably, that the dream can only represent her. Say I check her out thoroughly and conclude that not only has she not committed suicide, she is alive and well, will not commit suicide in the near or distant future, and is living a hale and hearty existence. Say I reach the conclusion that this was not a premonition; it was only a dream.
Then the next time I have a particularly jarring or otherwise realistic and disturbing dream, I check it out, and it's true! NOW have I had a premonition?
Not necessarily.
This is called remembering the hits and forgetting the misses. In the above example, the first dream would be considered a miss, and the latter dream a hit.
Say I have ten dreams in the space of a year that have elements that could be considered predictive in nature. While there is no way to quantify such a ratio, it seems fair to me that if I submit these ten dreams to a strict demand of accuracy, pure chance will result in one of them being accurate. Of these ten dreams, the one I'm most likely to remember is the one that seemed to be genuinely predicting the future. I've remembered the hit and forgotten the misses.
So going back to the original dream, are there other possibilities that might result in a more prosaic explanation?
A couple of days before this dream I played an album I hadn't heard for years: Pink Floyd's The Final Cut. At one time, Pink Floyd was the soundtrack to my life. I listened to it constantly at a time when the one word I would choose to describe myself was the word "angst." In other words, I will always associate Pink Floyd with high school.
The Final Cut is easily the most depressing of their opus, springing, as it does, mostly from the mind of Roger Waters, who is a deeply disturbed individual. It deals frankly and frequently with war, death, and suicide, and I should know, because I know all the lyrics.
Since listening to the album, I've been singing bits from the title song in my head. The last four lines of the song:
"I held the blade in trembling hand,
prepared to make it.... but,
just then the phone rang.
I never had the nerve to make the final cut."
So I am left with two possible conclusions.
1: I'm possessed of some previously undiscovered scrying ability that allows me to occasionally catch glimpses of the future.
2: I had a dream wherein a girl I haven't seen since high school acted out the lyrics to a song I haven't heard since high school, the same song I've been singing repeatedly for the last week.
I'm inclined toward the second option.
Oh, I and also had a plate of nachos that night.
Like I said, Mexican food does it every time.
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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