I’ve written on this subject before (see Precognition under Categories). The subject fascinates me because awareness of the future is the clearest, most compelling sign that our conventional views of reality are incomplete. I’ve argued earlier that the experience of precognition, for those who’ve had it, is compelling. The only way to avoid this subject is by burying one’s head in the sand. The last entry here, pointing to a case of premonition, got me to thinking about the subject again. I avoid it by and large because no answers seem possible. Yesterday I had a bit of idle time waiting at the doctor’s office, and these stray thoughts occurred to me. They are in the category of pondering the nature of time.

I was remembering earlier sessions of thinking about the subject. Time and again, I start by dividing the concept of time into two categories. One of these is that time is the necessary complement of enduring existence, meaning that we can’t imagine anything being unless we envision a kind of invisible environment in which the persistence of something continues. From this comes my notion of time-as-endurance.

We know this time because our consciousness is capable of retaining memories of past moments. The power of remembering is itself something dynamic, however, something analogous to motion. The experience of this moment is stored away—picture it as being put on a shelf. And we can look at the shelf and note a past action, the action of putting the memory there. Never mind that it happens automatically. From this I derive another concept of time, time-as-motion. Just as we cannot imagine persistence without time so, also, we cannot imagine motion without a container in which it takes place. Mental motions, unlike physical, do not require space. To be sure, a purely materialistic viewpoint would deny this. The materialist derives mental actions from neural motions. But I’m personally persuaded that mental actions do not require space—but do require a time container. In physics we speak of a fusion of space and time, spacetime. It is the container. In the mental sphere, time alone suffices as a necessary environment for motion.

Our mental states—as we experience them in this life—are also fused with the physical. For this reason we experience time as spacetime. Now the thought occurred to me yesterday that the experience of time may be closely bound to the dimension we inhabit. Thus in this life, welded to bodies, we may experience time one way—but, possibly, outside of bodies, in another “mansion” of reality—say across the border that I stare at in this blog—it may be quite different.

The justification for this strange thought is that we measure time by motion here. Motion has a speed dimension. And, in this dimension, anyway—if we take Einstein seriously—there is a speed limit. It is the speed of light. Nothing with any kind of mass can travel even at the speed of light. A photon is considered to be a mass-less something. Now if time is measured by motion, in the cosmos we inhabit the passage of time (time-as-motion) is limited to the speed of light at one extreme.

But let us now suppose that other dimensions may very well exist—characterized by different existential laws than those of matter. And let us suppose, just as a thought experiment, that we may have originated in another dimension and are merely temporarily (that word again) encased in matter. Suppose that we are capable of another, higher or different, time perception. Not that it is readily available to us; let’s just assume that we have the capacity, under certain circumstances, to perceive it—and to have that power because we are not originally from this dimension. Most precognitions, for example, reach us in dreams, a state in which, to some extent, we are much more tenuously linked to the physical dimension than we are when awake.

Precognitions may arise from glimpses of this world from another. And from that perspective, which may operate at much higher speeds of change, we may see more of what is already firmly realized than is visible from this dimension while embedded in it.

The Power of Premonitions

with Larry Dossey and Ken Wilber

A dream prompts a mother to remove her baby from his crib an hour before a chandelier falls and smashes it. More than a dozen people are no shows for choir practice for the first time ever at the moment their church explodes. Before his patients ever call to say they’re coming to the hospital, an OBGYN gets a pain in his chest signaling they’re ready to deliver. Visions of planes crashing into buildings causes a mother to cancel her family’s Disney World trip scheduled for 9/11. Are these coincidences, or is something happening that we need to pay attention to?
More than an examination of case studies, The Power of Premonitions reveals the world of science and research that proves the human capacity for knowing the future. Experiments consistently show that human beings are as wired to know what’s coming next as we are to see, feel, hear and think. Dossey uses cutting-edge science to prove the value of what had long been considered the provenance of mystic charlatans and to show readers how to cultivate their natural abilities. This is a book for the skeptical mind, but it’s also for the believer’s heart—because its author possesses the rare gift of having both.

“I’m not asking you to take anything in this book on blind faith, but to open yourself up to the possibility of premonitions and the evidence supporting them. Listen to the stories people tell. Explore the research that demonstrates our capacity to sense the future. Ponder the implications of mind outside of time. Invite premonitions into your life and see what happens. If you do so humbly and reverently, your life will likely become more premonition-prone, and you may touch that exquisite, infinite realm to which premonitions, now as always, are a door.” — Larry Dossey, MD

Take a Moment

Practice deep listening! Assuming that precognition, clairvoyance, and other forms of psi phenomena actually do exist, they appear to be closely related to a peculiar capacity of consciousness known as “intuition”. One way to refine our intuition is to cultivate the ability to listen deeply and to remain attentive to the world around us.  Take five minutes out of your day to sit quietly.  Without exerting any effort, simply listen to all the sounds that surround you—the wind outside your window, the hum of your computer, your own breath and heartbeat.  Do not try to quiet your mind or push away distraction—just sit and listen to everything that arises, moment to moment, becoming absorbed in the sounds of your environment.  Breathe these sounds deep into your belly, and release them as you exhale.  Allow the beauty of your surroundings to fill your heart and put a smile on your face, before opening your eyes and going about your day.

Take the Integral Life PSI survey! According to Larry Dossey, about 67% of people have had some sort of experience with PSI.  Have you?  Take the PSI poll below and find out how the Integral community measures against the general population.

Participate in an online telepathy study! Both Ken and Larry agree that the hard evidence behind PSI phenomena has already been pretty well established, and what is needed now more than anything is a good marketing plan to bring the evidence into the mainstream.  But rigorous studies are still being conducted, now more than ever.  One of the greatest proponents of these studies is Rupert Sheldrake, a scientist who has developed an entire website to help perform quick and easy studies on telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance, many of which only take 5-10 minutes.  Interested?  Visit www.sheldrake.org to learn more.

Herewith a link to a straightforward story presented by National Public Radio of a young boy’s premonition of his own death (hat tip to a member of my family). For those of us of a modern mind but curious and hardy enough to patrol the borders of this zone, nothing is more interesting than reports from our immediate time of what counts as empirical evidence of a wider sphere of reality than is officially countenanced.

Not every dream is a vision;
Not every vision is a dream;
Not every dream is a message;
Not every message is from spirit;
Not every spirit is a guide;
Not every guide is what they seem;
and yet some speak in absolutes.

What is written has been changed;
What is spoken has been distorted;
What is seen has been covered;
What is felt has been destroyed;
What is taught has been convoluted;
and yet some speak in absolutes.

Not every memory is the past;
Not every memory is the future;
Not every memory is our own;
and yet some speak in absolutes.

Not everything is what it seems
and yet some speak in absolutes.

11/20/2009

I’ve written here about my discomfort or incredulity about the existence of “Satan” several times; it just has always seemed like a hokey, outdated idea, and an easy excuse for those who would commit evil acts. (On the other hand, I’ve never had any doubt about the existence of God, so it did seem that it was possible that if there is a force/entity/being who personifies and wills love, that there may well be an opposing force.)

A few recent occurrences (and the fact that, when all of this began a couple of years ago, I was hounded by someone or something whose intent seemed to be pure evil that would not be mitigated, and who still crops up from time to time, especially when I’m learning something new and good) have made me start to re-think my position.

I wrote about one of the things in my blog posts on Mesac Damas (a man about whom I had a premonition-dream a few days before he killed his wife and five children in Florida). The other thing was what I heard somewhere between sleep and wakefulness one night or morning a few weeks ago–”I am your missing number…553.” My post on “Gematria” mentions that 553 is a number representing Satan. And, of course, there is the “Get behind me, Satan”/Peter incident, etc.

I need to preface by saying that for a long time I was told a lot about purging and planting. That was followed by a great deal (almost all in Hebrew or Aramaic) about seeds and fields–the “mabow” (entering) of the seed. In the past few days, I’ve been hearing about the next phases–sprouts/new growth. And, along, I’ve been being told that there’s a “plan” to all of this, but only been given hints as to what it’s about (all I know is that it’s for something good).

All that said, I’m now going to relate the things he’s said in the past two days; he seems to be closer to letting me know the intent of the “plan”.

It started, as I wrote a few days ago, with “put an end to violence,” and, “seeds of peace.”

Then he said, “Two mos ol,” which seems to mean, “Two seeds yoked together.” He clarified with, “Two small tsemach (sprouts/shoots) join…birth of life.”

Early this morning he said, “Together save love,” and “dashas” (another word for sprouts/shoots, it turns out). Shortly after that he said, “duwr owb” (“duwr” is Aramaic for “dwell”; “owb” means “spirit”–dwell in spirit, which is something he’s said several times).

Next he said, “Satan loose.” At first I thought that “loose” was just the English word, but then I realized that it was the Hebrew word “luwz” (depart/go wrong/devious/perverse) spelled out phonetically. I figured that that was how “love would be saved”–make Satan depart.

Next he said “taw bobib,” which I figured out was “t@buw’ah (produce or crop) abiyb (greening of a crop or the time in March/April when that happens).” The seed that’s been planted (in me, and don’t think I don’t know how crazy that sounds) will “green” in spring. At that point it occurred to me to do my little “let the Bible open where it may” thing, and it opened to the page on which Luke 8:15 is. (Don’t know your Bible by heart? Me either. The passage reads: “But on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.”)

Finally, he said, “You make peace robak.” This was one that took me a while to figure out, but I finally got it just now: “roa”=”evil”, and “abaq”=”wrestle”. “You make peace by wrestling with evil.”

Just a few minutes ago I read an update on a doctor (Stephen Wolf) who had killed his 9-year-old son in the middle of the night in (I believe) Oklahoma. Like Mesac Damas, he apparently claimed that the “devil” had influenced him, and called his son “devil” as he stabbed him. His wife, Mary, was stabbed as she tried to protect her son.

I hate to say it, but MAYBE the whole “Satan” thing isn’t always simply the result of psychosis, or a convenient excuse for something as horrendous and inexplicable as killing one’s own child. It still feels very strange to say that…

I’m wondering if any other readers have the same things going on that I do. The more ‘professional’ my readings became, the less I could do readings for myself. Now, I can’t do them at all. Also, I get feelings and premonitions about lots of things, but I can’t find my keys, and I get lost constantly. It’s as if the closer something is to my life, the foggier it gets. Anyone else experience this?

You know those days.  I am sure you have had them too.  You wake up and know that something is going to happen.  You just need to experience a little of your day before it all starts to come into focus.  I had one of those days this week. 

 On average, I wake up bright and early 6-7 days a week to walk, run, bike ride, etc.  By bright and early, I mean 4:45 AM! I mean bright and early!! I do this so that I can get my exercise done BEFORE my family responsibilities  start. It is my time.  I get dressed appropriately for the weather–long sleeves, short sleeves, shorts, sweats, etc.  I put my Ipod  head phones in, crank up the tunes–mainly 70’s, 80’s, and Country music, though I do have a few current tunes. I set off into the darkness and “git’r done”!

When I ride my bike, I wear light-colored clothes, a reflective vest and have a flashing light on my bike.  I like to stay on well-lit roads for obvious reasons.  This week I had a course in mind and set off for a 10-mile ride.  About 6 miles into the ride, I felt my bike pull to the side a bit.  Even with the tunes going, I could hear that something was not right. I stopped to investigate and my fears were confirmed–a flat rear tire.  Not just a flat rear tire, but a flat rear tire 4 miles from home!!

I had heard someone once say that a flat bike tire changes a short bike ride into a LONG walk home.  I assure you this is a true statement!  I rode my bike about 1/4 mile on a “flattish” tire by standing up and putting as much weight on the front tire as I could.  That made for some very sore arms.  I dismounted my bike and pushed it home. As I walked I kept thinking about the breakfast for the kids–remember the family responsibilities I referenced earlier?

I walked and walked and walked and walked.  First pushing the bike with my right hand, then switching to the left hand.  I even tried running, but that became a bit unsafe for me and the bike. I kept hoping a driver in a pickup truck would stop and offer to give me a lift.  I kept hoping I would find a business open so I could borrow the phone.  I assure you that at 5:15 in the morning, no business is open.  ( I was beginning to think I had no business being out at that early hour.)  Even the gas stations I passed only had their “pay at the pump” open!!

 I finally made it home at about 6:15.  That 45 minute bike ride turned into a one and a half  hour ride/walk. My kids were concerned about me being late–mostly because their mom had to get them breakfast!!  She is a great cook, she just does not do breakfast–it is her time to get ready for the day.  (It has been that way since the day we got married. It is an arrangement that really works for us!) I really was not harmed in any way as a result of this ride.  I did have time to think.

First I considered the “premonition” I had as I woke up.  (“What if  I really need my cell phone and don’t have it?” “What does a bike rider do if they find themselves stranded?”) These are all really good questions.  As  Boy Scout and a Boy Scout leader the motto, “Be Prepared”, was memorized and practiced (somewhat).  This week I found myself unprepared and even worse, not listening to the thoughts in my head when I woke.

Through it all I have learned to live, laugh and learn.  Stay positive, and if life deals you a flat tire, dismount and walk. It may be an inconvenience, but it will not be an “exercise in futility”!!!!!

Until next time, keep on smiling!!

Matt was in a hurry to get back to Bedlam, but his old mare was already giving him her best. It wasn’t long until she fell back to her normally slow pace. They arrived 10 minutes earlier than usual. The old girl was happier to be home than he was, and started prancing as soon as she caught eye of the place. Matt was looking on down the road, setting his focus on the legendary oak tree with the graveyard close behind. He was glad to see it hadn’t changed a bit since he’d left. No one was standing around there, and no black stallion was seen nearby. The skies were clear, and the weather warm. The sun was shining brightly. In the mid-afternoon of that day, the scene showed no signs of the menacing features for which it was famous, such as being haunted.

Matt had never believed in ghosts, not even as a child, nor did he ever believe that line about the hanging tree, “Home to a hundred killer’s souls, or more…” He thought all that stuff was ‘a bunch of baloney’, even though he’d repeated it more often than anyone else in town. He stood by the line that says, “Seeing is believing!” He never completely ruled out the unlikely, and fairly thought himself ‘open-minded’. Matt liked to tell scary stories to people who believed in that ‘nonsense’. Though he knew many a fairy tale, he didn’t believe in miracles that could come into being all of their own accord. He imagined that if miracles ever existed at all, they came into being through action. To him, they were not ‘make believe’ stories, they were ‘made to happen’ historical events. According to Matt’s wife, he was a dreamer who often succumbed to flights of fancy. “He forever has his head up in the clouds,” was her claim, but she loved him nonetheless, and looked up to him in many respects. For his part, Matt saw himself as one of those types of men who would think things out before taking action. He’d didn’t enjoy delayed regrets. On his way home that day, he made up his mind in a rational way. He decided on the question he would ask his neighbors concerning the night before. This is what he came up with. “Did you see, or hear, anything strange last night after you went to bed?” Matt liked questions that were short and to the point. He liked to give short answers that were meaningless even more, because he enjoyed confounding his audience.

In her frustrated impatience, Matt’s wife had been waiting outside the house for him with her arms crossed. His hound dog lay at her feet, and didn’t bother to get up. He was late in coming back with the groceries once again. He rode up on his happy dancing horse, pulled back on the reins, and began to dismount before coming to a halt, and almost fell off. “Sorry it took so long. I have an excuse. Hear me out first.” His wife looked at the dog and shook her head. “Here we go again,” she said in a thought to herself. She unfolded her arms and put her hands on her hips. “For pity’s sake! What is it now?” She kept the next few words to herself. We can assume she thought, “This is getting to be old hat.”

Matt goes on to tell her the whole story, but he tried to tone it down a bit. He didn’t want it to sound too awfully bad, because then she’d be afraid to move there. Matt had applied for a job with the railroad, and they’d have to leave Bedlam if he were able to get himself hired on as he had hoped. She took the news rather hard, to say the least, but she took everything personally, so Matt was not too surprised by her hysterical reaction. He calmed her down best he could. Shortly thereafter, he proceeded to go out and make his way around to each and every neighbor. Matt repeated his well-rehearsed question to all, but no one had seen anything unusual, nor had they heard any strange noises. Their closest neighbor was an elderly widow. She had a complaint waiting for Matt. She madly claimed to have heard his hound dog late the night before. He was “…barking and howling away for the hell of it!” as she put it. She was awakened two hours after she’d gone to bed, and in her anger, she’d gotten up and looked out the window. Upon seeing this ‘nothing’, she opened it up and yelled, “Just what in the hell are you barking at, ya damn dog?!!” Matt told her he was sorry, and that he was home and in bed the same time as she, and he never heard the dog. “Are you calling me a liar?” she yelled at him. “No, ma’am, no,” he replied as he walked away. He did have to wonder if his dog heard, or smelled something, but thought no more of it. Having received no surefire confirmations, he went on back home feeling a little relieved.

That vision he had of the riderless horse in the graveyard? As far as Matt was concerned, it was a product of his imagination, and nothing else. He had no foresight, and had never had what one might call a premonition. He didn’t believe in prophecy. Matt didn’t go and investigate the graveyard to see if he could find any evidence confirming his sleepy suspicions. He didn’t go look for trampled down grass near the tombstones. As a matter of fact, Matt had never set foot in that graveyard. Not once since he’d lived there. He’d never read the names, nor the dates engraved on the pocketed, mossy faces. He didn’t feel the need to get a close-up view of the legendary hanging tree. He’d never seen the rings worn into and around it’s lowest limb. He never let his curiosity get the best of him. If one were to ask him why he’d never visited the dead, he would have said, “I didn’t know any of those people, so I’ve never had a good reason to go there.” At this stage of his life, Matt thought that youth could conquer all, so he had nothing to fear…which is another way of saying, he wasn’t experienced.

Later that afternoon, Matt’s wife sent him out to get wood for the stove. She was sickened by the news her husband had brought home. She wished to forget the whole thing, and would do so by starting dinner, and fixing her mind on her work. Not wanting his dearest beloved to have another tizzy fit, Matt took to the task set before him right away, and went out to the back to fetch a few logs. The first thing he noticed was a change in the wind, which was now from the north, and much cooler. The skies were beginning to look hazy, and he knew he should expect there’d be rain or snow by morning. His forecasts he believed in. He was a hunter, so he knew these things. He wasn’t guessing. As he began to choose between the logs, he fell to daydreaming again. This time around it was about building a new house in the new city. For no good reason, he raised his head and broadly cast his gaze up the road. A half a mile or so away, he could see a cloud of dust being raised and blown about in the wind. Quicker than he could say ‘horses’, he thought he knew who it might be. Matt ran around to the other side of the stack, ducked down, and took off his hat. He didn’t know why, and didn’t question his motive. “I bet it’s Sam and his men,” he whispered to himself. The rolling sound of thunder was headed his way. They rode up fast and went right past, then he popped up his head to look. The big man at the head of the posse was Sam alright, and they seemed to be in a hurry. But as they reached the edge of town, they all pulled up right fast. Matt watched in suspense as Sam walked his horse over to the tree, stopped, looked up, and just stared at it for a minute…a long minute. He unhooked a long, winding rope from his saddle , and dropped it to the ground. Then just as fast as they’d stopped, Sam yanked at the reins, took off with a start and his men followed him south down the road. The cloud of dust was reborn, and was closing in on their heels. The northern winds were right behind, pushing them away from Bedlam.

As a follow up to the recent blog post I have noticed a number of people have recently tweeted about having a vivid premonition. In what possibly might be a vain attempt to get this stuff written down, I have created a premonition log (link on the right hand side). Please, pretty please, if you do have one then please log if you can.

Please Note: When you comment it may take a few minutes to be approved. This is so that the site is not inundated with sp@m.

Falling spiral (copyright 2009 Cary Charles - all rights reserved)

Decide now to tap your finger. Do it. I bet the gap between deciding and doing is less than one second . . . almost instantaneous.

So you will understand why I gasped on seeing a mathematician on this week’s BBC Horizon show titled ‘The Secret You‘ perform a similar act. He held a button in each hand and alternated, pressing each according to spontaneous decisions whilst lying in an fMRI scanner . . . as soon as the decision was made, the button was pressed.

Impressively, the scans predicted each decision, but that wasn’t enough to make me gasp. Oh no.

I gasped because the decision was revealed by brain activity 6 seconds before the button was pressed! Now think about that . . . think about the gap you experience between deciding to tap a finger and actually doing it. It is very probably less than a second.

Whilst the decision was consciously known and decided less than a second before the button was ‘instantly’ pressed, the outcome was predictable on the scans some 5 seconds before . . . a period in which the presenter was completely unconscious that the decision had been made. And more impressively, that unconscious processing made the decision that the presenter assumed was made consciously. So when you make every decision in your life, are you actually the final bit of the conveyor belt of consciousness, with the unconscious you having sorted it all out earlier on? It seems so.

For years it has been suggested that our minds are approximately 10% conscious and 90% unconscious. Indeed, in hypnotherapy, we speak directly to that unconscious mind and gain some quite amazing results. I know from experience how that feels and that it works, and now scientific data is really starting to pile up. It is such an exciting time as the stigma has all but gone from research into consciousness.

Taking the overall duration of associated brain activity (6 seconds) as 100%, the results mean that 83% or more of the presenter’s consciousness was unconscious. And I am being charitable there. For almost everyone, the duration is less than a second from thought to action.

As an artist, writer and intuitive therapist this explains so much. Archives are brimming with accounts of famous songs, stories, poems, paintings, inventions and more suddenly ‘arriving’ in minds. Mozart is said to have dreamed some of his music in its complete form, for instance. More personally, I have awoken on several occasions having seen the next painting, fully formed . . . indeed, when that happens, the image does not leave until I have actually manifested it on canvas. Understanding so much of the formative process occurs in the unconscious mind makes such sense . . . and also raises the question of where exactly is the boundary of the individual’s consciousness.

Sometimes things come to us, purely inspired, hitherto completely unknown. We haven’t been exposed to that information in our lives, yet still the unconscious has taken hold and is busy working with it. Could this in some way account for talent . . . how one person automatically has a propensity toward any certain skill? Jung proposed the Collective Unconscious, a kind of genetic memory passed from generation to generation, but here we are nudging towards what I like to call the ‘Connected Unconscious’ – that remarkable ability that we have in special moments to leap with brilliance beyond our life experiences. These are the delicious aha moments . . .

I’m reminded of a classic account of the morphogenic field, perfectly demonstrated when monkeys were being observed in their natural habitat on an otherwise uninhabited island. A monkey imitated a scientist who had washed a sweet potato in the sea. Soon after, others imitated. So far so good, but what really makes you think is that at virtually the same time, several monkeys on a similar nearby island, completely out of sight, took sweet potatoes into the sea and performed the exact same act for the first time.

So next time you hear about a premonition, take time to wonder what the unconscious mind was doing there. Next time you think you decided something, or you become part of some ‘crowd mentality’, just remember that your unconscious mind decided it well before you realised the conclusion and called it your own. If ever there was a reason to start working with your unconscious mind, this is it! It really isn’t practical or pragmatic to think otherwise.

No wonder so many addicts fail to give up their addictions by conscious decision alone!

If you missed the show, it will be available on the BBC i-player site for about a week – of course, your unconscious might already have watched it

10/19/2009

In a recent post entitled “Clairvoyance”, I wrote about a dream I’d had that seemed to predict with some very specific (although not specific enough for me to have been able to do anything to prevent it) details the murder by Mesac Damas of his wife and five children.

As I said in the post, I’ve had quite a few dreams like that; I’ve learned to recognize them by how detailed they are on certain points, and the fact that they seem to have nothing to do with anything that would ordinarily be in my subconscious, dreaming mind. Sometimes they’ve come to nothing, but often they have.

It’s with some hesitation for a number of reasons that I’m going to share the one I had the night before last, but it does seem to fit the criteria for the dreams that seem to be “premonitions.” When it happens, it’s not because of me; I attribute anything like that to God. I’m just the “messenger,” for some reason.

And it may have been just a random dream.

In any case, in the dream I found myself in Ghana. At one point I was at what seemed to be a party of some sort on the beach (OK, Yeshua was there too). There were a lot of flies around.

On another part of the beach, a woman was being arrested or investigated; she seemed to be from Ghana. She had built some kind of model of a city or something (like one of those architectural models, but in the sand, I think), and what I understood was that it was part of a plan to blow up a city or the world (I guess one would call it a terrorist plot). She seemed relatively unperturbed by the investigation/arrest.

After that, Yeshua and I made our way to a bus station to get on a bus that would take us into Manhattan. The people on the bus were none-too-helpful about telling us if we were on the right bus, or if we’d accidentally gotten on a bus to Washington, D.C. (sheesh–I can understand a bunch of NY-types being rude to me, but you’d think that they’d at least help Jesus out, regardless of their religious convictions…).

That was about it (there was also something earlier about talking to God about the possible end of the world, and about “knowledge” and “wisdom”–represented for some reason by a fig and a prune, but that didn’t seem related too much).

A LITTLE LATER
It just occurred to me that maybe “Ghana” was a stand-in name for “Afghanistan” (the details get tricky like that sometimes; hence Mesac Damas escaping across the Golden Gate Bridge in S.F., when in actuality he was near or in a section of Naples known as “Golden Gate”). But as far as I can tell Afghanistan has no beaches, and the beach figured pretty prominently in the dream (of course, the beach itself could be a metaphor for something else, but I kind of don’t think so).

It seems almost everyone I speak to says they have had a premonition of one form or another. Whether this be of an event such as a car accident or simply a vision of the phone ringing and it does. A premonition is the vision of a future event. I guess we all get these but how many of them come true? How many of them are far too vague to be trusted? For example, someone says they predicted a celebrity’s death. However they do this years before it happens? Not exactly convincing is it? For me, it would need to be within a very short amount of time. Also, obviously, it would need to be a shock death and not one thats rumoured anyway through ill health.

It’s not just the average joe that has these kinds of experiences. Almost everyone will have heard of Abraham Lincolns premonition of his own death. He had a strong premonition of attending a mourning in the East Wing of the White House. On asking a soldier present who the deceased was, he answered “The President”. Ten days later he was assasinated.

After asking anyone on twitter of their experiences I noticed quite a theme, which turned out to be some kind of vehicle accident (cars, bikes, planes etc). Here are some of the stories, all anonymous of course! Excuse their grammar, they are limited to 140 chars! As usual I will throw in an alternate explanation if I can think of one. I might have to scrape the barrel with a few of them!

“I dreamed about John Lennon getting shot. It was in very vivid detail on NBC’s Today show. When I woke up, I saw the news and it was exactly as I dreamed it.”
Could it have been possible they were asleep in front of the TV? I know, clutching at straws possibly. I had something happen, not a premonition but I woke up at the exact time Princess Diana’s crash was being first reported on TV. Was the early hours of morning in UK. For some reason I got up and turned the TV on which I never do.

“I had another experience where I just knew my boyfriend and I had seen Raider’s of the Lost Ark. We went to the movie and I told him we’ve seen this. He said no way, it was just released. I kept telling him what was going to happen next and kept asking him “don’t you remember?!!” I was convinced we had watched it on TV together.”
Could it have been possible that this person saw the trailers and this is what they later recalled?

“I had one well you could call it that about a wreck and it happened the next day. It was my dad he wrecked
the car spun around hit the mountain just as i seen it the day before it was wild. Fortunately he was just shook up a little it really got him when i described the wreck to him and i was not there.”
A weird one, can’t think of an explanation if this is true.

“Not so much a premonition but saw a guy on motorcycle drive past me and I thought I shouldn’t change lanes just in case he wrecks. So I stayed in my lane and a few min later his lane stopped and as I was driving by I passed him as he was picking up his bike. Don’t know if he actually crashed or someone hit him but it
freaked me out to see him crashed”
Maybe this guy was riding a little bit unsafe and natural instincts kicked in? Move out of the way?

“I’ve had a few, one that stands out was a dream about a plane crash that happened the next day. That was about 20 years ago, would you call knowledge of someones appearence right before they show up a premonition? I’m talking someone I’ve had no contact with in 10 plus years that sort of thing seems to happen a lot.”
The phone call thing happens to loads of people. Usually its just someone that normally rings. In this case, being 10 years apart, makes it slightly more interesting.

“Strangest one I had was of small plane crash – no one hurt at Local airport. Small airport. I called my dad told him about it. Described plane etc. Sure enough he calls me next day it it had happened. Turns out my ex had been called in as standby to cover at firehouse. Have been lots of silly little things over the years. Only with loved ones. Know when bad thing coming buy now more a feeling than premonitions.”
Another one I can’t really explain if true.

All in all very fascinating. There does seem to be a real trend towards vehicle accidents. Whether it’s the case that these just stand out a load more vivid in the memory, I cannot say. Maybe we have premonitions all the time but they are so unremarkable that we just don’t remember them. As of yet, we still don’t have any definative proof that premonitions are real or just big coiincidences. It’s something we are very much interested in. Whenever I hear of someone who has a premonition I get them to write it down in as much detail as possible (trying to avoid vagueness). This can then be correlated against the actual facts should it come “true”.

Journal #26: The Assholes

The blood-red tour bus with blacked-out windows burns down Rongovia’s one and only motorway. A four lane road that runs straight as an arrow through the sun-scorched desolate countryside. Jim drives, expressionless behind aviator shades. In the booth immediately behind him, Kris Baranovic lies fast asleep, a black blanket wrapped tightly around him. Sitting directly opposite Kris, the hired and nameless trumpet player reclines with his feet up on the table, immersed in a shiny paperback book called “The Utica Flower Company” – from time to time he snorts out short bursts of laughter. Sitting back in the table-less two front seats opposite the front booth is another thirty-something with slicked blonde hair, eyes closed in the air-conditioned shadows, wondering if his boyfriend back in New York will clean the bath while he is away. Two cats called Phillipe and Louis hop and weave around the bus, looking for legs to rub against or things made of glass to knock over. One of them springs up onto the table of the rear left booth. The thirty-year old man sporting four days facial hair growth and cropped hair, wearing a floral long-sleeved dress at this particular booth doesn’t notice the cat because he is too busy strumming a guitar quietly and staring out of the window, occasionally looking up to pull faces behind the back of the trumpet player. In the opposite booth, sitting on the floor of the bus beneath the table, and buried under a mountain of blankets and overcoats is the last Kaleidonaut. The guy in the dress is Jon of the Atom. The guy hiding under the table is me. Jon’s eyes follow a solitary rusty clapped out three-wheeler hobbling up the opposite side of the road, dancing over the potholes, a family of six jammed into the seats, and a dog’s head sticks out one of the rear windows, lapping up the oxygen. It is the first vehicle he has seen since they crossed the border.

“Hey Klaus”, he shouts, “If we’re as famous as you claim we are, then I still don’t know why we couldn’t have chartered a plane?”

The blonde man, stiffly turns in his suit jacket and jeans and pouts impatiently, calls back “I’ve told you already. The army destroyed Rongo Airport, left it burning for weeks. Colonel Strongman’s parting gift to the people of Rongovia was to annihilate as much infrastructure as he could. Moldavia was as close as we could get you”.

“Yeah, well I don’t see why we could have just landed in one of these fields? Look…”, he points out of the window at the shimmering emptiness, “… there’s fuck all out there. Plenty of space to land a plane.”

Klaus just shakes his head and faces forward again. Up ahead, Jim fumbles with an assortment of CDs and locates Handwithlegs “One More Excuse” – synthesized warfare of drums and screaming quickly floods the aisles, the cats jumping for cover, the hired trumpet player putting in his ear plugs, as the bus begins to pick up speed, skipping over the cracks in the road. Jon of the Atom’s fingers tap unconsciously along on his guitar with the menacing beat and Kris Baranovic doesn’t stir, doesn’t move a muscle, mouth open, lost to a dream. In my dark cocoon beneath the back right table, I start to feel the first rising notes of panic flickering in my chest. What am I doing? Why did I agree to this? In all the years that I’ve been writing and singing songs I’ve never played a single note live. There have been countless offers in the last three years – Fife, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, the USA, Hungary. I once joked that someone would need to “put me in a bin bag and force me to play at gunpoint to make it happen”. Technically, this isn’t true – I always thought that I’d have a very hard time not taking the bullet should I ever find myself in that unlikely position. And now here we are. It all happened so fast that I didn’t even have time to think about it.

But I knew it was coming. I knew two years ago that it was coming. Even sat up into the night chain-smoking on the beach beneath the summer moon, holding the borrowed mobile phone in my hands. And when it rang I still just about jumped out of my skin (exactly as I knew I would), and answered, “Okay, I’ll do it”.

An American voice on the other end of the line, thousands of miles away – the first time we’d ever actually spoken in five years of emails. “How do you even know what I’m going to ask you?”

“Just send me the plane ticket man”, I tell him.

He laughs. “What are you doing? What time is it there?”

“Three o’clock in the morning. I’m sitting on the beach”.

“Yeah. I’m just back from an audition for a new film. It’s a porno”, he tells me.

“I know”, I say. “You already told me that in a dream two years ago”.

“Oh yeah? What am I going to tell you next then?”

“You’re going to tell me that you’ve got us a manager. Some guy called Klaus. An asshole like us so he’ll fit right in. You’re also going to tell me that you’ve found us a new trumpet player, and you’re going to ask me to get in touch with Kris to see if he’ll help out on bass. Also they’ve found Jane Gilmore and she’s agreed to sing. She’s going to meet us in Rongovia…”

There is a long pause before he finally speaks again. “Actually that’s not what I was going to say at all. I was going to ask you if Absinthe is legal in Rongovia?”

“I knew you were going to pretend that you were going to ask me that instead. Truthfully I don’t know. I’ve only been there once and I didn’t exactly have the time to go shopping. You don’t need to tell me that Meghan and Katie aren’t going either by the way”.

“Really? You know about that?” he asks, and laughs again. “It’s complicated. But Che Stadium Smally, can you believe it? Have you Googled it? Fifty seven thousand people can fit in there. We’re all over the Rongovian papers – Klaus is telling me that this “Free Rongovia” ticket is just the start… he’s talking merchandise, a full tour in the winter, maybe playing some big shows in Moldavia and Urdluvia if we want. This could be fucking huge”.

“Yeah, well don’t get your hopes up man”, I tell him.

Another long pause. I hear him slurping from a bottle of beer. “You know what happens don’t you?”

“Nope”, I say, “this is as far as the dream went”.

The back-story was actually quite straightforward. From the summer of 2009, the Rongovian Revolution gained momentum – violent clashes between “the kids” and “the corporation”, a battle that began over something as simple as music. In the space of a few months, a whole nation awoke and switched off their radios and televisions. They stopped buying records and instead made their own, sharing them with each other. They ceased to aspire to own the most they could and tried their best to be the most they could. Literature and art quickly fell into this new lo-fi slipstream, and before long people stopped buying mobile phones and fancy cars. They travelled on foot and spoke to one another through paper cups joined with string. They built bicycles from scrap metal and planted seeds in the earth in the hope that they could grow their own food. These were no ordinary hippies. They were people just like you and me – scientific, cynical, and beaten down. Instead of urban flats, they left the cities and large towns and attempted to form moving communes, pitched teepees in the park, their children plucked from the pressures of state education and taught philosophies alongside the practical aptitudes. But as the economy began to collapse, the democratic government grew increasingly desperate and the propaganda machinery of War was rolled out. I’m sure you can imagine what it was like as we’ve seen it all before.

Two summers on and The People’s Party of Rongovia claimed victory by strength of numbers and show of hands. The all-singing all-dancing new military dictatorship of Colonel Strongman was toppled, the army disbanded, and the great palaces and institutes of capitalism were burned to the ground. Thanks to a little known lo-fi psychedelic band from upstate New York called The Real Burnouts, illegally crossing the border in an insane little mini-bus of smoke and ideas way back in 2005, and the ensuing black-out of anything considered outwith mainstream and “safe” radio-friendly music, the records of that period from an equally little known independent record collective called Cozy Home Records, became the soundtrack to the Revolution. Slowly but surely, the records of the new DIY musical movement seeped into the blood of the Rongovians, ever-expanding, and all-embracing. One of those revolutionary records just so happened to be “I Do Not Currently Own A Spaniard (Mine Died)”. And no amount of Beatles or Stones, Kinks or Neutral Milk Hotel, Velvet Underground or Stone Roses, and Bob Dylan or Syd Barrett could overthrow this curious affinity with the songs that had accidentally changed their lives. A chance encounter with a Rongovian translator called Klaus in October 2009 and it was only a matter of time before an entire country came looking for us.

Three weeks later and here I am wondering what I’m really doing here. I should have said “no”, but I didn’t and for the life of me, I can’t fathom why. I was finally happy. Finally idea-less, living in a matchbox down by the brilliant sea on the Fife coast with my wife and kids. Only I’d been carrying that daydream around in my head for so long that for these inexplicable reasons I blurted out “Okay, I’ll do it”.

Over the magical riot of Handwithlegs, from under a stack of jackets and blankets I shout across the bus, “Jon, I don’t think I can do this!”

He stops drumming his fingers and looks down at me. “Too late Smally. You signed on the dotted line”.

“No I didn’t!”

“Okay, well I signed on the dotted line for you. You’re doing it.”

“You don’t understand!” I wail, “I can’t remember any of the words to the songs!”

“They’ll come back to you when we start playing them”, he says.

“I’ll freak out man. I know I will… the last time I was on stage I was twelve and a sheep in the school nativity play – I forgot my lines… I froze…”

He breathes in impatiently. “I’ll carry you. I carried you on the record. Now I’ll carry you live”.

“All I had to remember was baaaaaa! and I couldn’t even do that!”, burying my head in my hands in the suffocating darkness.

Jon laughs and shouts down the aisle. “Hey Jim! Who is this? It’s fucking cool!”

Jim leans back, smiling beneath his aviator shades, the empty shimmering road stretching on forever through the front window. “Handwithlegs”, he yells back.

“Whale!” screams Jon.

“What?” shouts Jim grinning, one hand on the wheel, cupping the other behind his ear trying to hear over the deafening music.

“Fucking whale!” screams Jon again, pointing beyond him.

The road is suddenly not so empty anymore. A great white sperm whale lies across our side of the motorway, easily sixty foot long, its albino skin dazzling in the late afternoon sun.

Jim shakes his head, still smiling and makes to turn down the volume, Klaus suddenly standing up and pointing yelling “Whale! Jim! Whale!”, grabbing the front rail as we careen towards it at ninety miles an hour, me still shitting myself beneath the table and the jackets and the blankets completely oblivious to why people are suddenly shouting “Whale!” and wondering if it has something to do with “Spaniard”.

Jim looks up at the very last moment and grabs the wheel in both hands, heaving it to his left, driving the screeching bus off the motorway, narrowly missing the sprawling white whale, crashing us down a shallow embankment, the smell of burning rubber and smoke, and the bus is rolling, quickly, unstoppably, once, twice, three times. I hear a high-pitched screaming as I roll against the wall and am thrown back again, crashing against the table leg, protected by the padding of my hideout, before finally sliding back against the wall, and for the briefest moment feeling like we have come to a standstill, before we explode.

We literally explode. There is an almighty, all-encompassing roar of sound as the bus is thrown directly up in the air, a sickening shock of screaming metal tearing apart, combined with a horrific sickness in my gut as I’m turned upside down beneath the blankets. A moment later the bus smashes into the hard dirt, something striking me in the ribs with incredible force and I find myself pushed into an artificial tunnel, catching sight of a black cat flying across the face of the sun with a squeal through a gap in the blankets. And then there is nothing. Just the ringing of the explosion in my ears. The smell of smoke and gasoline and a track by Handwithlegs skipping on its disc from a speaker somewhere near my head before fizzling out.

I panic and start thrashing at the covers, getting myself increasingly further knotted in the folds, and force myself to stand, striking my head on something hanging over me. I’m terrified to see what has just happened, can barely bring myself to look, but the smell of petrol is freaking me out and I’m half-expecting there to be another explosion. When I do finally throw the covers to the ground I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

The blood-red tour bus has been torn in two. The rear half where Jon and I were sitting is a contorted mess of metal and upholstery, smoking some thirty feet from the front part of the bus, balancing precariously on its nose, like a partly played accordion. Debris is scattered all around – a metal toilet standing on its own in the earth, elsewhere I see wrecked guitars and a gleaming trumpet, parts of seats and a wheel still rolling away on the horizon. “Hello?” I call out hopelessly, rooted immobile to the spot.

To my right I hear scrabbling in the dirt and then Jon of the Atom’s head appears from behind the underbelly of the rear of the bus. His dark hair sticks up like he has just been electrocuted as he snuffs out a strand that is on my fire, all the while his face remains expressionless, covered in dust and particles of soot. Over the wall of his mangled seat he clocks me and grins, white teeth gleaming in the sun. “What the fuck was that?” he cries, a single peal of horrified laughter running like quicksilver through his question. “And why are you wearing a diving suit Smally?”

Before I get a chance to explain, there is another flurry of movement to our left and we see Phillipe and Louis cautiously snaking through the smouldering wreck. They stop in unison and look in Jon’s direction, before head down sloping off into the emptiness of earth away from the road. “Hey!” calls Jon, kicking himself free from the tangled upholstery, and again more urgently. But the cats either don’t hear him or else they ignore him, breaking into a run beyond where the bus tyre came to rest, their silhouettes like stains receding on the empty landscape, neither of them looking back. “Fucking cats…” says Jon, coming up beside me.

I lift my snorkel visor, just to check what I am seeing, and point a gloved finger at the little black wooden warning message, draped with barbed wire around what I had originally assumed to be a simple Rongovian motorway sign. Quite clearly in English it reads DANGER UNEXPLODED MINES with a picture of a skull and crossbones painted at the bottom. “Look Jon”, I say.

He sees the sign and squints to read it, the words dawning on him quickly, panic surging into his lungs as he yells across the arid vista, “Phillipe! Louis! We’re in a fucking mine-field! You fucking fucking cats!”

Naturally the two tiny specks pay no attention to him, diminishing ever further until they are swallowed by the rolling bands of heat on the horizon. “We should probably check if everyone else is okay”, I tell him.

He stares after his beloved house-cats for a few more seconds and despondently shakes his head. “At least they haven’t exploded yet”, he says.

We call over to the other half of the bus and hear what sounds like a muffled cry from inside the upturned wreckage. Briefly conferring how we should traverse the potentially lethal distance between the two halves of the bus (Jon – “We should crawl on our bellies like you see in the old war movies, picking at the dirt with a toothbrush”, Me – “Have you got a toothbrush?”, Jon “Not on me, no”, Me “Let’s just risk it”), we gingerly tiptoe across the earth and begin to walk around the concertina’d smouldering metal hulk. Immediately I see Kris some twenty metres beyond the front of the bus, lying on his back, still perfectly cocooned beneath the black blanket. I move quickly towards him, every step feeling like it could be my last as I’m blown irrevocably into tiny pieces. When I finally reach him, I hear Jon shouting from behind me, “Is he dead?”

“Kris? Kris?”, I squat over him and slap his cheek and he murmurs something about cinnamon, eyes still closed.

“Fuck knows how, but I think he’s still sleeping”, I shout back, slapping him again but not getting a response.

“That’s good”, says Jon, “Klaus is definitely dead”.

“How do you know?” I ask, with pangs of dread looking back over my shoulder.

“I just accidentally kicked his head. It’s not connected to his shoulders anymore”, he shouts, adding “I think it might have been before I kicked it, but it’s not now”, staring at a spherical-shaped something at his feet.

“Is it definitely his head? Klaus’ head?”

“It’s got Klaus’ hair, and he seems to be… well he’s sort of grinning I think. It’s probably one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen. I think I just threw up in my mouth”, he tells me.

I leave Kris to his cinnamon dreams and gently walk back towards the bus trembling. “Any sign of the others?”

“I don’t know”, says Jon, “I can’t stop looking at Klaus’ head”.

I deliberately avoid looking at the bloody mess, half submerged from under the front of the bus, and step round to the other side, find the driver’s window and squeeze my head and shoulders in. Jim is lying trapped in the front seat, his legs disappearing from view beneath the wheel that has been forced down into the ground. He grins at me and says calmly “About time, reckon you can reach that chainsaw?”, nodding down into the space where his legs are trapped.

I wriggle through and pass the chainsaw up to him. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be better once I cut myself out”, he tells me, “you might want to stand back for this”.

“I can do it if you like?”

He grins and shakes his head. “You’re a walking disaster movie mate. If anyone’s going to saw my limbs off then it’s going to be me”.

Incredibly relieved I ask him if he knows where the hired trumpet player is and he nods towards the back of the front section above our heads. Listening close I hear sobbing and look up through the twisted remains of the bus, see him wrapped around a metal pole, dangling upside down like a monkey. “I’ll go get him”, I tell Jim.

“I don’t want to die!” wails the hired trumpet player. “I didn’t even want this gig. I just wanted to meet Jane Gilmore and she’s not even fucking here! Why couldn’t I have gone in the limo with her? Why did I end up on this fucking exploding bus with you… freaks!? I told Klaus. I want to go in the limo but he said no, Jane’s the superstar and we’re just… we’re just the assholes. Where is he? I’ll fucking kill him…”

“Klaus is dead” I tell him. I’ve climbed up onto the top of the ripped bus and stretch an arm down to him, the sound of Jim’s chainsaw whirring and screeching below us as he cuts himself out.

“Klaus is dead!” wails the hired trumpet player, levels of panic escalating beyond anything I’ve ever heard as he continues to dangle on the horizontal pole, “Oh God! Oh God! Klaus is dead! Oh what will we do? We don’t even speak fucking Rongovian!”

Eventually I talk him into clambering out of the bus, and we drop to the hard earth before walking back round to Jon, now sitting beside Klaus’s decapitated head sucking on an asthma inhaler. “Oh fuck! Oh fuck!” yells the hired trumpet player, falling to his hands and knees and throwing up at the sight.

Jim has cut himself out from beneath the wheel and has crawled free from the wreckage via the broken driver’s window, his bloody ad blatantly broken legs sprawled out in front of him. “Where Kris gone?” I ask.

Jon points a finger in the direction of where we last saw the cats padding off into the sunset together. I shield my eyes and sure enough, there he is, way beyond the warning sign, just a small silhouette walking away from us, wrapped in a black blanket. “Shit! You could have stopped him!”

“I tried”, said Jon. “But if I can’t even persuade my own cats to not walk through a mine-field, then how do you expect me to convince a human being”.

“Kris!” I yell. “Where are you going? There are mines out there!”

I’m sure I see him pause, just for the briefest of moments and turn in our direction, throw a peace sign before continuing to walk away. “Jane’s going to be pissed if we don’t show up on time”, says Jon. “She’s already pissed about having to travel in that limousine. Said she wanted to go on the tour-bus with us”.

The hired trumpet player makes a gargling, drowning sound at the back of his throat and gets to his feet. His beard is matted with puke and his eyes are red raw from weeping. He screams at the top of his lungs “It should have been me in that fucking limo!” and starts to run in the same direction as Kris and the cats.

“Aw shit”, I say and call after him, “Hey! Hey, come back! There’s mines out there you fucking idiot!”

“There probably isn’t”, says Jon, “I mean Phillipe, Louis and Kris all seemed fine. Though fuck knows where any of them think they’re going. Do you think they know something we don’t? And where the fuck did that whale come fr -”

The explosion stops him finishing his sentence and we watch the mushroom cloud of dust in the distance from the exact spot where the hired trumpet player was running, closely followed by the clatter and patter of earth and body parts falling back to earth. We sit in silence as the cloud dissipates and when it does there is nothing there. The poor guy has been blown completely out of existence. “That’s going to be a tough one explaining that to his girlfriend”, says Jon, “plus we’re screwed now attempting the sousa march section of Hammer and Sickle…”

We carry Jim up to the roadside and lay him down, gritting his teeth in pain at the head of the white whale. “This thing’s still breathing you know”, says Jon, running his hand along its great gleaming torso, and placing his ear on the whale’s belly. “Is that possible? Do whales have lungs?”

“Do you reckon it fell out of the sky?” I ask them, hearing Jim grimacing behind me.

Jon just stares at me for a moment before glancing at his wrist-watch. “Considering we’ve got like, two hours before the concert is due to start and I saw only one car on this whole stretch of motorway going in the opposite direction, I’d say we’re pretty fucked. This is all your fault Smally”.

“How’s it my fault?”

“Well for a start, why the fuck are you wearing that stupid frog-suit?”

“What’s that got to do with anything? Why are you wearing a dress?”

“It’s what they’re expecting me to wear. The first rule of playing live is give your public what they want”, he says, walking down towards the sperm whale’s tail.

“Yeah well, seeing as I’ve never played live I wouldn’t fucking know that would I? And if you must know, that’s why I’m wearing this diving suit. So as I can hide behind it!”

“Ha! You’re a fucking asshole Smally!” he shouts.

“No, you’re the fucking asshole!” I shout back, lowering my diver’s mask and sitting down on the ground beside Jim.

“Actually, I think you’ll find you’re the asshole!” he yells, reaching the tail, stroking it once and heading back in our direction. I’m convinced at this point I see the whale’s big black eye flicker, and move from Jon to me as if expecting me to retort.

“Fuck you!” I shout.

“No, fuck you!” he shouts back.

I’m about to shout “Fuck you!” again when Jim stops me, shouting “Would you both fucking shut up! Look…”

He’s pointing up the road from where we came. Trundling into view is a donkey, pulling a cart, and on the cart sits a man with a goatee beard, wearing little round rimmed shades and a big black floppy hat. “Let me do the talking Smally, you’ll only talk too much and fuck things up”, says Jon quietly, siding up beside me.

The curious looking man tilts his head upwards to one side as if he is catching our words on the windless
sky and pulls on the reigns, motioning for the lazy looking old donkey to clop to a standstill. We watch him dismount, slowly and painstakingly, reaching back up into the cart for a stick. The man is blind, begins tapping on the road towards us. “Hey”, says Jon.

“Well hello”, says the man, tipping his hat to us, “and what do we have here? In some kind of trouble?”

The donkey behind him chews drowsily and I notice that his cart is loaded up with crates and items strapped down and tied together with colourful string. Jon clears his throat. “Um, yeah… you could say that. You see, we’re in a band – Kaleidonauts… have you heard of us?”

The blind man pauses to consider before shaking his floppy hatted head. “Can’t honestly say that I have. ‘Cosmonauts’ you say – like Russian spacemen?”

It’s at this point that I notice that for a Rongovian this guy speaks perfect English, his local twang has a strong flavour of American seeping through it that seems to bubble to the surface the more that he talks. “No, no, not Cosmonauts”, says Jon impatiently, “Look, never mind that. We’re on our way to a concert. A big concert. Free Rongovia… at Che Stadium. You know about that right?”

“I know Che Stadium”, says the blind man, leaning on his stick. “That someone else over there?”

“Yeah, that’s our driver” explains Jon, “he’s hurt bad. Two broken legs we think. Our bus went off the road into a mine-field and exploded. There was a whale in the road -”

“Actually there’s still a whale in the road”, I point out.

“Who’s that?” asks the blind man.

“That’s Smally”, says Jon, shooting me daggers, “just ignore him, he talks a lot of shit”.

“Funny accent”, says the blind man.

“He’s Scottish”, says Jon, “which is of course infinitely better than being an American”.

“Of course”, says the blind man smiling. “You said there was a whale in the road?”

“Yes, a white whale”, says Jon.

“Over here?” asks the blind man, tapping his way past us and placing his hands on the whale’s huge head. “This creature is still alive”, he says, “it needs water”.

“No shit”, whispers Jon. “Look, do you have a cell phone so that we can call someone? Our friend needs hospital treatment and we urgently need to get to that national stadium of yours, otherwise we’re all staring down the barrel of another revolution”.

“A cell phone?” the blind man laughs, “Goodness no! But I think I can help nonetheless, if you’d care to follow me”.

There’s something about the way he talks that unsettles me. Maybe it’s just the peculiar sing-song jumble of dialects, but for some reason I feel like we have crossed paths before. We pad along behind him to the back of his cart and he hops up sprightly, starts rummaging around in containers pulling out odd little packages wrapped in rags, bottles, tin boxes, unlabelled jars of colourful substances, a ping pong paddle, some more packages, all the while muttering under his breath “Where is it? Where is it?” and finally “Aha!” as he produced something that looks uncannily like a bottle of beer. “Take this to your friend” he says, passing the bottle back to Jon, “and make sure he drinks the whole bottle”.

“What is it?” asks Jon, looking to me and silently tapping his finger to his temple, before pointing at the blind man, rearranging the items in the trunk he has been delving into.

“Oh, it’s just an old something I picked up on the sea”, the blind man smiles. “Quickly now, we’ve no time to waste… is that Scotsman still there?”

“I’m here”, I tell him, Jon ambling across to Jim with the bottle.

“Good, good. I’ll be needing a hand with these ropes” he says, heaving some great ropes out from under the boxes at the back of the cart. “I’m sure you’re sturdy as your ancestors”.

“Actually no”, I tell him, awkwardly climbing up beside him in my frog suit. “Listen, do I know you from somewhere?” I ask him. “What’s your name?”

He chuckles to himself and continues working on the ropes, handing one end to me and motioning for me to step back down from the cart. “Have you ever been to Rongovia before?” he asks me.

“Once” I tell him, “back in 2009, but I wasn’t here for long. A couple of hours maybe?”

“Then it’s unlikely we’ve crossed paths”, he says, grinning and I notice that he is missing several teeth at the front, “since I’ve lived in Rongovia all my life and unless I was blind drunk then I’m certain I’d remember a peculiar voice like yours”.

I really want to say “But what if you never heard my voice all those times we met?” but he is already hopping down with a second rope in his hands and is instructing me to pull. Over by the whale Jon starts shouting “Hey! Hey mister! He drank the bottle and he’s passed out! Is that normal?”

The blind man chuckles his gappy laugh again and hollers back, “Define normal friend. Long as he’s not coughing up blood or moaning about being cold, I’d say he’ll be right as rain before you know it”.

“He’s not coughing up blood”, shouts back Jon as the two of us heave at the ropes, and they unravel until something cracks on the cart.

“That’s it”, says the blind man. “Now would you fellas be kind enough to help me fetch that big old basket right at the back of the cart?”

Jon and I climb on and shift the assorted boxes and sacks until we reach the big old basket, grasping it on either side begin lugging its weight across the cart. “Seriously Smally, this IS all your fucking fault”, whispers Jon breathlessly as we heave it over the edge.

“Now, now!” says the blind man gleefully, “That’s no way to be talking to a friend!” He has uncoupled the donkey, who lazily shuffles to the roadside vainly looking for something to chew, and has moved round to the side of the cart, grabbing a big wooden crank handle. “Stand well clear lads!” he pipes and starts cranking on it.

“He’s not my friend”, mumbles Jon, “he’s wearing a fucking frog-suit”.

“Like a couple of squabbling brothers”, says the blind man, giggling, his floppy hat rising and ebbing with the turns and we watch in amazement as the cart begins to fold together, at first in a V-shape, the various items stored on it sliding together and toppling into one another, and before you know it we’re standing there staring at a great wooden crate, the blind man puffing and beaming. “Okay, well let’s get that basket opened up and she if the old girl still flies…”

I can barely begin to imagine what we must have looked like from the ground. An enormous hot air balloon with a patchwork skin of countless cloths and fragments of torn fabric stitched together to look like a giant light-bulb, drifting so slowly across the colourful phantasm of autumnal evening skies. It is impossible to explain how the balloon stays afloat, for it may appear to be a conventional hot air balloon, propelled along on bursts of green gaseous flame that every so often is pumped by the blind man into the billowing canopy above our heads, but the jumble of passengers, and more notably the cargo trailing in the air beneath us is quite unlike anything you’d expect to see looking heavenwards. Going clockwise around the basket are the following – the blind man, imp-like and gleefully offering to hand roll us each a dried greeny-black “Tabacky” for sustenance; myself, sitting on the floor in my frog-suit, too afraid to stand up and peek out; Jim unconscious, trousers caked with dry blood clutching his pet chainsaw to his chest; Jon of the Atom leaning on the lip of the basket, looking the blind man’s donkey straight in the eye and saying “Hey there good looking. You and me should get together after the gig… make some little Donkey-Jon’s. I’d get you a back stage pass if our manager’s head hadn’t just been blown off”; and the donkey itself, stoned looking, watery eyed and completely disinterested in anything going on around it (even Jon’s advances). Beneath the basket, affixed to the thick ropes we’d pulled from the cart is the new cubic wooden storage version of the cart itself, and harnessed to that, swinging gently like a pendulum in the sky beneath us all, is the great white whale. “What is this stuff?” I ask the blind man, exhaling a plume of rancid foggy grey smoke.

“That would be seaweed” he says, puffing on a pipe of his own, suddenly bursting into a little animated dance piping “Thar she blows!”

I force myself to stand and grip fast to the big woven basket, my knuckles turning white with fear. Up ahead on the horizon the capital city of Rongo looms into view. It is a sprawling golden city of shadows, illuminated by the ebbing sun, much like any westernised urban centre with its skyscrapers and steeples rising up from the earth. “Hey!”, says Jon, “How did you know that was there? I thought you were blind?”

The blind man ignores him, smiling secretly to himself and continues to puff on his pipe, and as I stare at Rongo I suddenly recall a time that seems so long ago, when I crash landed on my back in a train station and witnessed a white lion padding down the platform. “These animals are like ghosts”, I whisper to nobody in particular.

The donkey mechanically turns to look at me, stares dumbly for a few seconds and then sleepily looks away.

Thanks to the windless day and I suppose the weight of the balloon’s cargo, we make extremely slow progress. By the time we reach the outskirts of Rongo, a sprinkle of stars are winking in the night blue sky above us. We don’t have far to go before we set eyes on Che Stadium – a colossal basin-like stone structure built in the 1950s and badly damaged by desperate last-ditch bombing of key symbolic structures. One side of it has been completely pulverised, like some hideous leviathan entity has mistaken it for a doughnut and taken a bite. As the blind man (I continue to use this moniker sceptically and for want of an actual name) begins to release the pressure from the balloon and we glide in towards it, Jon turns to our mysterious pilot and asks “Hey, how come there’s no lights? Those are torches, right?”

“Naked flames? Yes…”, says the blind man, “Rongo has been without electricity for several months now, but we make do. It’s actually quite rewarding to find alternatives”.

Jon looks slightly alarmed. “No electricity? How the fuck am I going to play my solo on ‘For A Girl’ if there’s no electricity?”

“I’m sure they’ll have generators”, says the blind man reassuringly, “where there’s a will there’s a way a hey-hey”.

If Jon looks slightly alarmed, then that’s nothing compared to me. I am green with nausea and escalating pangs of terror beneath my diving-suit disguise. My stomach lurches in time with the descending balloon and it isn’t that seaweed shit that I’ve been smoking. It is the sound of the crowd suddenly audible below us. Fifty thousand people packed into the ravaged torch-lit arena. Fifty thousand garbled fever-pitch voices mushrooming up, cameras flashing, girls screaming, boys screaming, dogs howling, as they catch sight of the shimmering light-bulb balloon and the swaying white whale emerging from the twilight sky above them. “Jon, I can’t do this… seriously, I can’t…” I whimper, sinking back to the floor with my masked face buried between my knees, hyperventilating.

He glances at his watch and grins, shouting “Unbelievable! We’re actually five minutes early!”

As the screaming swells deafeningly loud and the whale narrowly misses crashing through the packed upper tiers with an audible “Oh!” from the ducking Rongovians, I try again. “I said Jon, that I CAN’T FUCKING DO THIS!”

He hears me this time, and though he can’t take his eyes from the lush green grass of the Rongovian National stadium, or the small torch-lit square expectant stage at the centre of the soccer pitch, he shouts back, “I hear you Smally, but it’s too late to change your mind. They’ll fucking feed us to the lions if we pull out now!”

I look up at him waving to the people taking pictures, a sudden sonic squall of sound when he raises a hand and waves. “JON!” I yell hopelessly, before throwing up violently onto the basket floor.

“Oh, that’s not good!”, pipes the blind man, the whale gently landing on the pitch and moments later we touch down, the basket heaving suddenly as the balloon above us deflates and drags, the donkey braying, and my small puddle of vomit thankfully flowing away from me.

Jon bends down to me, his bearded face alive with excitement, tears in his eyes, and he hauls me to my feet, helping me dizzily clamber over the side, stepping out into the assault of one hundred thousand eyes and lungs. Behind us the blind man is already pumping gas back into the hot air balloon, his black hat thrashing like a butterfly on top of his head as he yells, “All right fellas… next stop the Specific Ocean!”

Over Jon’s shoulder I see what I can only assume are the concert organisers running towards us in a blur of matching red “FREE RONGOVIA” t-shirts. As I stand there trying my best to not be sick again, watching the blind man, the donkey, and the whale (now eerily grinning) lift off from the earth in staccato puffs, I can vaguely hear a woman’s voice in broken English hollering over the screams of the crowd “Incredible! Incredible! This is part of the show yes? Incredible! We told you come in bus but… we think you not be here! Incredible!”

“Our bus fucking EXPLODED!” Jon shouts back as the event manager cups her hand to her ear and grins.

“I don’t understand yes?” she eventually shouts back, eyeing me nervously in my diver’s outfit.

“I SAID OUR FUCKING BUS EXPLODED!” yells Jon, “KA-BOOM! RIPPED IN TWO… OUR MANAGER’S HEAD BLEW OFF! KLAUS! IT BLEW COMPLETELY OFF…”

“Yes?” she asks nervously, clearly not understanding.

“AND MY FUCKING CATS RAN AWAY! ACROSS A MINE-FIELD! BUT THEY DIDN’T EXPLODE!”

“And Kris too”, I add,

“YEAH, AND OUR BASSIST TOO. AND ALL OUR FUCKING INSTRUMENTS. OUR DRIVER HE… HE…”

We look at each other, and then to the balloon now floating up above the stadium. “Fuck! We forgot Jim!” he shouts to me and we go back to watching, before finally Jon shakes his head and says “He’ll be okay Smally. He’s in safe hands”.

I nod unconvincingly and turn to the utterly confused smiling woman in the red t-shirt, standing there waiting for Jon to start shouting again. “ALL OUR INSTRUMENTS EXPLODED!” he yells, “KA-BOOM! BANG! YOU UNDERSTAND? WE HAVE NO GUITARS!”

“No guitar?” she shouts, finally seeming to understand something.

“THAT’S RIGHT, NO FUCKING GUITARS! NO NOTHING! ZIP!”

“We get you guitars!” she shouts, waving a young gangly male steward forward and speaking Rongovian to him.

“WAIT!” shouts Jon, just as the young lad is about to turn and run towards the entrance to the main stands. “WE ALSO NEED A CLARINET! CAN YOU GET ME A CLARINET? AND A PIANO? IF POSSIBLE? OH, AND A BATH-TUB, WITH A SHOWER CURTAIN, YOU KNOW, ONE OF THE
ONES THAT STRETCHES RIGHT AROUND IT? CAN YOU GET US THAT?”

“A clarinet yes? And a piano?”

“YES, AND A BATH-TUB” – he begins to mime running a bath.

“You want bath?” she asks, enthusiastically confused.

“YES, ON THE STAGE. A BATH-TUB WITH A CURTAIN AROUND IT” – he mimes opening and closing curtains and she nods, eyes lighting up.

“Yes! Yes! A bath yes? And coortain? Yes!” she exclaims, barking orders into the young man’s ear again. I watch him and several of their team sprint off to get these items from fuck only knows where.

“IS JANE GILMORE HERE?” asks Jon.

“Jane Gilmore? Yes she is here. In dressing room. Very clever girl and very, very angry she does not go in bus with rest of band”, says the woman, shaking her head.

Jon laughs and then points hysterically over to the track-side where the stewards are returning carrying two acoustic guitars and a clarinet, a further four of them wheeling an upright red piano and a bath-tub with a shower curtain around it. “Fucking hell Smally! That’s efficiency for you!” he says.

We watch as they swarm around the square stage, a chant going up around the stadium as the stadium announcer jabbers something in Rongovian, clapping, tribal urging, awaiting the first note and the woman asks “You are ready yes?”

I try to shout “NO!” but Jon’s hand is quickly over my exposed mouth and he’s dragging me towards the centre of the stadium with his arm around my shoulder giving the flushed woman the thumbs up with his other hand. As we step onto the little wooden platform he screeches under his breath, “Just follow me Smally, we’ll wing it… trust me, two songs in and you’ll be having the time of your life. Okay?”

I stare at him blankly, claustrophobic, dumbstruck in absolute horror. “Just shoot me now” I shout at him while he saunters over to an acoustic guitar, sure enough plugged into amps run by generators and starts twanging the strings. I hear them reverberate around the stadium and an even more deafening roar goes up.

Over the white noise of delirium I hear him shouting “Look, I even got you a bath-tub with a curtain right around you to hide inside.”

I back slowly towards the bath-tub on the far side of the stage while Jon steps up to the microphone at the front, taps it a couple of times with his fingers and roars “Good evening Rongovia you motherfucking assholes!”

A massive cheer exits the stadium and pours into the street causing flowers to spontaneously explode through the sidewalks and little birds to topple off branches. He winks over at me and continues. “Let’s hear it for the real superstar of this band… Jane… Gilmore!”

This cheer is so immense that several of these little birds combust with surprise and most of the freshly grown flowers grow toes and start walking away. As I retreat one foot back through the closed shower curtain, pushing my microphone stand to one side, I see Jane scampering head down, smiling across the grass towards us. “Run Jane run!” goofs Jon quietly into his mic and you can barely hear it over the screaming fans.

She reaches the stage and I wave before stepping fully into the tub, drawing the curtains shut around me. I am just thinking that apart from the sound of the crows, I might as well be hidden from the universe when I feel someone tap me on the shoulder. Outside I hear Jon say “This is my least favourite song on “Spaniard”, it’s called “Our Back Garden”…” and people go mad, screaming and whistling when he starts strumming the first chords.

I spin on my heels and stare at the strange moustached face looking back at me. My first thought is “This guy’s wearing my hat”, but my eyes quickly re-take and my brain swiftly follows. I know this face but somehow it is different… older and somehow sadder. “Becky?” I ask.

“Are you ready?” she says, putting her hand on my shoulder.

“Ready for what?” I ask her. “What are you doing here? Why are you wearing my hat? And a moustache?” – at the back of my mind I already know that I have missed my cue on the song, the chord sequence repeating without me. I notice that she has something strapped to her back – a box – a big blue metal box, and in her other hand she holds some kind of trigger with a red flashing button on top.

“Why are you wearing a diving suit?” she asks me.

“It’s my disguise”, I tell her, but she doesn’t even break into a smile. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

Outside I hear the chords playing softer and the maddened cheers beginning to die down, Jon’s voice growling around the stadium, “Smally!”

“I’ll tell you in a minute”, she says and I watch her thumb suddenly press the flashing button with a “click”.

The last thing I remember hearing before we leap through space and time is Jon of the Atom howling “Smally you asshole!” at the top of his lungs.

We are standing in the lamp-lit shadows of some waste ground in unfamiliar suburbs, large buildings either side of us and a tree rocking in the breeze directly ahead. I don’t know this place, but something about it feels very familiar. Becky’s hand leaves my shoulder and she reaches into the hip pocket of a grey boiler-suit she is wearing, pulls out a small notebook and pen, checks her watch, glances around and starts furiously scribbling on a fresh page. “Becky, what the fuck’s going on?” I ask her, pulling my visor and hood down around my neck.

She bites her lip and looks at me. “I think I finally worked it out Smally. I think I know why they died. Why they keep dying”.

The words are like a kick in the guts and I look again at the blue box strapped to her back. “That’s the time machine isn’t it?”

She nods. “I’ve read and re-read your journal entries looking for something and I think I found it -”

I stop her mid-sentence, cursing silently, hands over my eyes. “Oh I can’t believe you’re using the time machine…”

” – it’s Nate Lowman”, she says.

“I don’t want to know”, I tell her, “I can’t go back and do it all again”.

“Tonight is the night you were supposed to be here to pick up Nate, but you didn’t make it and The Burnouts got busted. You took Tina Burger instead -”

“Tina Burger? What are you talking about? I wasn’t even on the rocket -” I tell her.

“You were the first time Smally. You guys took Tina instead of Nate Lowman… listen…”, she digs into a trouser pocket and pulls out a dictaphone, rewinds through screeching dialogue and lets it play. I hear the familiar voices long gone, lost like ghosts. Simon Piler is saying something indecipherable in the background about “the umiverse”, over what sounds like uncannily like a dog barking, then I hear Bobby saying something like “Tina your toast is burning”, and an unfamiliar American girl’s voice starts screaming, really screaming, and then I hear me… but I can’t be hearing me, I mean, I wasn’t even there, but somehow… somehow I am and I’m yelling “Fuck! Fuck! Switch it off!”, and the dog begins to bark again and suddenly, suddenly there is silence.

Becky stops the cassette. “I’ve tried to change this happening so many times” she says quietly, peeling off the moustache, and handing me my hat.

“I don’t understand”, I tell her, “I wasn’t… it was Simon. And Bobby. And Jazz Monk, and those two kids that found those golden tickets that Simon hid on the ship. It was them…”

“The last time it was”, she says, “the first time it was you, Simon, Bobby, Jazz Monk, and Tina. And it was my toaster. You guys pinched it…”

I stagger over to the tree and sit down on the cold hard floor. After a few seconds, Becky shuffles over to me. “Believe me I’ve honestly tried to change it, but everytime it goes wrong. After the explosion I used the time machine to go back and I hid the toaster but fucking Jazz Monk found it. He was probably spying on me the whole time. So I went back again and I told you what happened, but you didn’t believe me, said you’d had some kind of premonition so it couldn’t be true, and the five of you went again and died again. So I went back again and I um locked you in the basement beneath the ping pong table -”

“It was you that locked me in the basement? I thought it was someone trying to get my place on the spaceship…”

“Smally, I didn’t know what else to do… it didn’t work though. The four of them went anyway because it was ‘what Smally would have wanted’ when they couldn’t find you. I even went way back, and I mean waaaaaay back, before The Mardi… I tried to stop the ship from sailing, but it’s like… it’s hard to explain… there are some things that you just can’t change, no matter how hard you try. It’s like The Mardi was meant to be… had to be. And the more I use this thing, the more fucked up it gets. You were right about the timelines. And you were right about only being able to go backwards. But sometimes it goes wrong. Sometimes you jump between timelines and the alternatives… they fuse together. I’ve been studying this machine it feels like for years and I’ve read the instructions from cover to cover more times than I can remember. This is it though. This is the last throw of the dice…” She stops and looks up at the night sky.

“Becky, I know it’s shit that they’ve gone. I live with it every day wishing that when Simon thought of it that I’d told him how ridiculous it was…”

“Simon didn’t think of it. It was you”, she says, like a sledgehammer to the head. “I changed that too”. She looks down at me, sitting in shock at the foot of the tree. “We’re all to blame Smally. We got carried away you know?” She goes into her pocket again and tosses me a folded sheet of paper. “I need your help this time. Do you remember anything about this?”

I unfold it and hold it up to the dim glow of the street lights. It is a carefully typed transcription of a conversation or communication of some kind entitled “CALLING IN A FAVOUR”:

- Okay man, we’ve scratched each other’s virtual backs many times, but this is the last favour I ask of you
How easy would it be for xxxxx to kidnap Nate Lowman?
I need him for a trip to the moon.

- i’m sorry, but what am i supposed to do? i’ve got the roofies and the duct tape, now what…?

- what’s a roofie?
you need to establish where this guy is at, hire a transit van, get some serious drugs, and find a car park somewhere – show me where it is on xxxxxxxxx and I’ll be there Friday night for the handover. I can’t explain right now how I will get there, but I’ll be there. In the meantime, watch out for Peruvians and/or men in bland suits wearing raybans.
All our future communication on this matter should be in code and I’d recommend you delete all trace of these messages from your email inbox and hard-drive. I’d think of a code name “Project Something or Other”, but you’ve always been better with titles than I am.
Fraternally yours in expectation

- roofies are the date rape drug. ghb. which incidentally would be a great code name for this. if i knew what the fuck was going on at all, that is. don’t worry my email is secured with a password so ingenious it cannot be hacked. however, there is a backdoor which opens out into the alley.

- Just to clarify: I don’t want this guy date raped, I just need him to be immobilised and brought to the attached location, Friday midnight, your time. I know next to nothing about him other than he is potentially “a douche” and previously made xxxxxxx. I don’t think he’ll be armed as he’s since moved onto doing xxxxxxxx, but best be armed yourself just to be on the safe side. I’m glad your email is secure, I hope mine is too.
Also, don’t worry – the confusion you are feeling (“if i knew what the fuck was going on at all, that is”) is pretty much sums up what every single person who hears a xxxxxxxxx record for the first time experiences. Just enjoy it.

At the foot of the transcript is stapled a photograph of the very place where Becky and I now find ourselves. “I’ve never seen this in my life”, I tell her. “I don’t even know what it’s about”.

“That’s you writing though isn’t it? ‘I need him for a trip to the moon’ – that’s got to be you?”

“Maybe”, I tell her, “…probably”.

“Definitely” she says. “What if by not taking this guy and taking Tina instead you fucked up the premonition?”

“No Tina, no toaster?” I ask.

She shakes her head, “No, I’ve tried that. Someone always manages to blow up the Fish Rocket on day four. Always. But this is something. That premonition of yours – what if it wasn’t just a premonition? What if it actually happened on some other timeline and you somehow remember it…”

“What do I have to do? Why don’t I just go back and tell them all that the moon-mission is off?”

This pisses her off, and it’s actually quite terrifying to finally see Becky being pissed off about something. Almost as terrifying as singing in front of fifty thousand people. “Have you even been listening to me Smally? Do you not think we’ve tried all that? Fuck! This is the only way. Recreating the premonition…”

I don’t know what she’s talking about but I don’t get a chance to find out. A white transit van suddenly appears from nowhere and parks up in the shadows, quickly dimming its headlights. There are three people sitting in the front seats, a guy in a transparent mask, someone dressed as a gorilla, and a girl with long dark hair. They look like a cartoon come alive. I’ve seen their pictures a thousand times or more over the years. It is The Real Burnouts.

Paul Burnout switches off the engine and jumps down from the driver’s seat. The back of the transit van opens and Pat Burnout appears in shades with a camera swinging from his neck. Luke Burnout in his gorilla mask, and Katie Burnout continue to sit in the cabin lit up by the roof light, while Paul and Pat disappear back inside the van. I get up and walk with Becky towards it, watching while the two of them struggle with a fifth figure, hands and legs bound and duct tape crudely wrapped across his face. They drop him carelessly and deliberately at our feet and I stare down at Nate Lowman, blue eyes blinking back at me on the ground. “As requested Smally”, says Paul, muffled behind his plastic mask and warmly shaking my hand, “he’s a bit of a handful so be careful – that’s all I’m saying”.

Pat hands me a boating hat saying “Here’s his hat”.

I squat down to him, seeing the horror in his eyes. Fuck knows what he’s thinking is happening to him, snatched by some crazed gang of mask-wearing freaks, and now being handed over to a guy in a diving suit on some waste ground in some town very far away. “Don’t worry man, we’re not going to hurt you”, I tell him quietly, “we just… well, we just want to take you with us to the moon”.

He starts cursing and screaming beneath the duct tape, hopelessly thrashing his bound legs in the dust. “There’s plenty of Roofies left”, says Pat, “if you need them”.

Meanwhile, Becky has removed the time machine/engine from her back and starts strapping it to mine. “What are you doing?”

“We have to move quickly”, she says, “any moment now the police are going to show and arrest us all. Luckily for you guys I’ve had years to prepare for this and know more about the cop than his own family do. Let’s just say he’ll be happy to let us go as long as we’re not caught red-handed with the douche.”

“Becky, I can’t -” I try to protest as she hands me the trigger.

“You can Smally. I know you can. Don’t worry about the machine, it’s pre-set to return you to exactly the right moment in time… although it has been playing up of late… but never mind.” She turns to Paul and Pat and says “Here, give me a hand with the douchebag”.

They pick him up under the arms and Becky places my own hand on Nate’s shoulder. Behind us, the flashing lights of a solitary police car begin to bounce from the buildings, and a siren starts whooping. “It’s the fucking cops” spits Pat, turning and sprinting towards the van, where Katie and Luke continue to sit motionless in the front.

“Right on time”, smiles Becky.

“Good luck Smally”, says Paul, dropping Nate, letting me hold him up on my own, and loping back after Pat.

“Thanks Paul”, I shout after him, “you too man”.

“Now remember”, says Becky, “click once to jump, and if it doesn’t work then try clicking it rapidly until it does. Once you’ve dropped him off it should be set to return you back to here. Give it fifteen or twenty minutes, enough time for me to out-talk the police -”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“It will”, she says, “Don’t worry. I’ll be seeing you back on The Mardi I guess.”

The police car is almost upon us, its siren wailing. “Do I press it now?” I ask her.

She nods, and just before my thumb presses down on the flashing red button, she says “Oh yeah one more thing. Try and avoid yourself in the past. I’ve met myself several times and it always leads to um… complications. Now quick, press the button…”

I look at Nate, his pupils dilated with fear, furiously shaking his head, and press the button.

Travelling through time is seamless. There is no holy flash of light, no physical sense of molecules reconfiguring, no space between the two junctures where you spiral down a tunnel of kaleidoscopic colour. One moment you are here and the next you are somewhere else. Blink and there is nothing to miss. Nate Lowman’s fearstruck eyes blink and when he opens them again we are standing on the Main Deck of The Mardi at night in the middle of a storm. I’m so blown away by being back here that I can’t help but drop him, vaguely aware of him falling to the soaking wooden floor. Two years ago we abandoned ship in this very storm. Two years ago we listened to the horrific sounds of our friends exploding in the sky, a million miles above our heads.

I look around, the rain fogging up my glasses, see the shadow of the “Fish Rocket” in position on the makeshift helicopter landing pad I’d clumsily constructed at the rear of the ship. And it’s strange – as painful as it is to be back here and to be facing up to what happened all over again, I feel curiously happy to be back. Two years can be a long, long time. You forget the immediacy of experience – a surreal battle with a flying broken sandal, a psychedelic congregation of Flower Company members tipping a coffin into the ocean, our medical officer jumping overboard with a surfboard and never coming back, Simon knocked over clutching an elephant teapot, Chase ascending the main sail with Ylfnogards buzzing around beneath him, me blowing a bubble trumpet in a washed out hurricane…

I snap to and grab a now soggy Nate under the arms, drag him towards the hatch that leads down to the cabins. His legs bump down the two flights of metal steps and I haul him along the bottom corridor. I stop outside Bunkroom 3 and listen. The ship rocks and creaks in the storm, but all is typically silent. I look down at Nate and smile, knock the door and sneak away along the corridor clanking quietly with the time machine on my back, heading to hide out in the Machine Room. I can’t resist pausing at the door leading through and peek back through the glass panel. After a few seconds the bunkroom door opens and I see myself, two years younger, cracked glasses in the old ragged Flower Company uniform. I watch me looking up and down the corridor, seeing nothing, then down at the hostage wriggling on the corridor floor. The younger me stoops and tears the duct tape from Nate’s mouth and I hear a volley of abuse from him screaming “Fuck you! Fuck you, you motherfucking freaks! I’ll call the cops! What are you doing to me? Where’s that gorilla? That gorilla comes near me again and I’ll bite his fucking -”, before the duct tape gets stuck back down and he gets hauled inside the room.

Has that been fifteen minutes? It must be close enough. I look down at the trigger hanging from the blue box on my shoulders and my thumb hovers over the flashing red button. I’m about to press it when I hear a voice in the darkness behind me. “Smally, is that you?”

“Jon?”

I squint, my eyes adjusting to the shadows of the room, but all I see are the outlines of machinery and crates stacked up in piles. I must be imagining things and hover my thumb over the button again, taking a deep breath. But before I press it, I quietly say to the shadows, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I am an asshole…”

And as I press the button I’m pretty sure I hear the shadows quietly saying back “It’s okay. I’m an asshole too…”

I’m not back on the waste ground. I’m standing in some kind of small circular wooden hut, with an unlit wood stove, an empty sofa-bed, and a writing desk against the wall opposite me. Above the writing desk is a black and white framed picture of Jack Kerouac, and sitting back-turned at the desk is me. I suddenly realise that I am standing in a foot of golden water, and remembering what Becky said about meeting yourself I stay perfectly still. Something is blatantly wrong. I panic and press the button again, but nothing happens. I’m rooted to the spot as the other me gets slowly up, his wooden chair splashing into the water and he turns to me, smiling with tear-stained cheekbones. In his hands is a huge leather bound book, bursting at the seams with pages and pieces of scrap paper jutting out from between the covers. He wades through the water, now up past my knees and hands me the journal, leans in and whispers something in my ear.

We look at each other for several terrible spellbinding seconds before he finally croaks “You need to keep clicking that trigger”.

I nod, and my thumb jumps.

I am in the Wardroom. Directly in front of me, pressed against the crack of the door leading through to the Kitchen is Jazz Monk. It is such a shock to see him alive again, that I have to cover my own mouth to stop myself from gasping. I press the flashing button with a click again.

I am back on the Main Deck in bright warm moonlight. I hear my own voice behind me and turn to see a ginormous puffin balancing on the stern of the ship. Carrier pelicans frantically flap around squawking anxiously in the air above our heads as the puffin talks in deep and pleasant tones. I hear myself asking him to “At the very least hover along just far enough back from the Mardi so as the pelicans don’t see you, maybe within the folds of a cloud, and in return you can visit us at night and talk as much guano as you want…”

The puffin obliges, but before flapping off, proceeds to squawk about the legend of a long lost treasure chest that is said to contain a melody so beautiful that to hear it is to “experience pure nirvana on earth”.

Just before I press the button again I look up and the giant puffin appears to shit a bright red football. Bizarrely it hits me in the face as my thumb pushes down on the flashing button… .

… and bounces a couple of feet away. I seem to have leapt across space, but not across time. It is still a warm moonlit night and I’m standing on the Main Deck rubbing my throbbing nose, only now I’m standing at the bow of the ship and seem to be leaning against a grand piano. The piano-sub! Fuck, I’d completely forgotten about that. Glancing across the top of it, I see myself leaning on the balustrade, smoking a cigarette, blowing rings into the inky blue. I press the button again, but nothing happens. I press it again, but still nothing happens. My thumb flicks so ferociously on the trigger than I’m certain that the smoking me of the past will undoubtedly hear me, but still nothing happens. The flashing button in my right hand no longer appears to be flashing. I look up and see myself flicking the cigarette end out into space, blowing one last smoke-ring. There’s nothing for it but to hide. And the only place I can think to hide is inside the open piano-sub. I scoop up the red football and jump inside, hunkering down in a corner and in a moment, hear the footsteps of my past padding across the Main Deck

The lid closes with a click, followed shortly by the muffled sound of my own voice just a couple of metres away from me yelling “Erm, could someone please give me a push?”

There is a long pause where only the subtle flop of waves against the wooden keel of the ship can be heard, before the unmistakeable whoosh of giant wings and then that of wood crashing into water with an almighty plop.

10/17/2009

I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that I used to be a pretty serious drinker. I usually didn’t start drinking until 5 p.m. (unless it was a weekend or holiday, when all bets were off), but I wasted no time after that, and I’d panic if I thought that I wouldn’t have enough wine, or whatever, to get me to the place I needed to be–or THOUGHT I needed to be. Then, of course, I’d have to smoke. Then, if my ex-husband and I happened to get into an argument (which we did on a fairly regular basis), all hell would break lose; of course he’d generally have been drinking too. It got ugly. But I figured that it was all a part of what I considered my bohemian lifestyle; I didn’t write poetry any more, but I was a poet. Poets drank. No matter if many of the ones I admired most died as a direct or indirect result.

But anyway, that’s an old story, and none too original. What I’m getting to is that it continued long after I started seeing the amazing things I’d started to see, and after I learned for certain that death isn’t at all the end, and that the man I referred as “Sam” in the beginning of this blog (his real name is David, and I figure that I’ll just simplify things from here on out by calling him that) hadn’t left me alone after all. One would think that the joy in all of that would have been enough to allow me to be just fine without drinking, but it was a hell of a habit.

I was kind of surprised when David asked me to stop drinking (he had, after all, been a heroin addict for most of his life), and more surprised when he became more and more insistent (always in a gentle way, but always making its importance to him really clear). At that time, I was “hearing” (again, really just seeing the words, very clearly, written out in front of me) from what he called “lost souls”, who made it very obvious from the start that they did NOT like me, to say the least. (And I know that some would immediately think that they were hallucinations brought on by drinking, but I can assure you that, even though I stopped drinking a year and a half ago, they still show up from time to time. They just don’t bother me now. And if you read some of the earliest posts here, you’ll find examples of how I was able to verify the existence as living people of some of them by clues they’d given me–clues that there’s no way I could have come up with on my own. If you do a search for “Joe” and/or “dough” on this blog, you’ll find one good example.)

Long story short–it took a much longer time than it should have, and it really did take a lot of prayers asking for help and finally, truly realizing that I couldn’t do it on my own, and that the consequences for NOT stopping would be even worse than I would have thought, not to mention making it REALLY hard for David to keep me safe–God finally grew exasperated enough with my feeble attempts to kind of deliver my own personal, at-home, AA meetings (because I was too proud to go to one), and I stopped cold on May 15th, 2007.

I now have a friend who has a serious drinking problem (she also has a beautiful, sweet daughter who is in my son’s class), and it’s amazed me how important it is to ME that she get things back under control and get well and happy again. I pray for her every day–”Abba, please let her call me today and say she wants to go to AA, please let her get a good new place to live, please let her be OK, please let her daughter be OK.” As I’ve said many times, my prayers seem to be answered EVERY SINGLE TIME. So my friend now has a great new place to live safely and comfortably with her daughter, and for the past week she’s been going to AA meetings every day except for one (she had a really good reason that day, if there are any really good reasons). And I’ve been going with her. Naturally, it makes her daughter very happy that she’s making the effort to gain back control.

I’d never been to a meeting before; as I said, I was too proud, and too certain that I’d run into someone I knew in this little mile-square town (as if that mattered). But at the first one I attended with my friend, I was almost overcome with awe and happiness. If God’s presence could be tangibly felt anywhere, and if what Yeshua tried to teach was put into practice in any setting, it was at the meeting. I watched people unabashedly looking up into the air during the meeting, obviously speaking to their Higher Powers. And I could almost hear God listening. When someone announced that they hadn’t had a drink in 7 days or in 25 years, I applauded and grinned like a lunatic and almost cried with joy every time.

I recently have been asking God (I do call God “Abba”–not as in “Dancing Queen”, but as in “Father”, or really “Daddy”) to give me some hints as to what I’m supposed to be doing with everything I’ve been given, and how to share all this bliss that is continually oozing out from my pores, it seems. And I realized that, yet again, my prayer had been answered (there have been other things as well).

Lately, when I wake up in the morning, I’ll often randomly open up the Bible (not that I think that that is the only authoritative source by any means–just one of many, but I happen to have one) to the Gospels, to see where I end up. Almost invariable I land somewhere where there is clearly a “message” for me–perhaps an answer to a question, or something that gives me just the direction I’d been seeking just then.

This morning, short while before I was to leave for another AA meeting with my friend, I did it again. “Give me something good,” I asked David, and Abba. I closed my eyes, opened the book, and put my finger down at a random place in the page I landed on. Here is what I found this morning:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.

I’ve gone to church a lot in my life; for a while I was kind of into the rituals and other aspects, but I never left as delighted and full of hope and sense of God’s presence as I do at AA meetings. I’ve found my church.

(And when I came home from the meeting today, I went to talk to David; he wrote out “You make me proud.” Can’t ask for much more than that, especially as I’ve come to clearly understand that the things that please him please God as well.)

In the second installment, the only survivor from the first movie has gone a little crazy and locked herself in a padded cell to escape death.

Premonitions continue but this time on the Freeway. Kimberly saves multiple drivers from dying a large freeway pile-up.  Death gets a little annoyed and begins disposing of the survivors in gorier ways than the first movie.

Plot is rather forgettable and under-developed but you stay for the gore.  Shame original hero, Alex died off-screen after a fight with a flying brick.  Loved the drainpipe through the head death the best.

Bit of a disappointing sequel compared to the first.

2/5

-Evan Lewis

Death is your final destination. 

On a high school trip to Paris, Alex freaks out after foreseeing his plane crash and his own imminent death in a pre-flight dream. 

Thrown off the plane with a bunch of hacked off classmates, his premonition comes true but is only the beginning of a series of unfortunate accidents….

The first half of this horror is particularly well-done as Alex starts to freak out over small but strange coincidences.  Look out for the teacher death, that’s particularly good value.

Not much gore, more thriller with a little blood.

“Death has a new plan” – it sure thinks of some ingenious ways to up the body count.

4/5

-Clear Rivers

There’s something odd about me, maybe not that odd but lately I’ve found this little quirk a bit disturbing. I’ve had this strange “talent” since childhood though I never paid attention to those random thoughts which popped into my head, and said thoughts would somehow manifest into tragic results. Like someone dying or an awful disaster.

By random thoughts I mean thinking about people, places, things, events, etc. that have absolutely no personal connection. Sometimes a name pops into my head, and I’d wonder, “Whatever happened to So-and-so?” A few days later that person dies.

Example: Back in the late 70’s Larry Conrad, a Democrat who later worked for the Simon brothers, ran for Indiana governor. He had a really cute campaign jingle that played often on the radio. A few years ago, his name popped into my mind; soon after he was dead. The same happened to other famous and not so famous people. Their names came to me and they’d die within a few days. Now it’s happening to people close to me, either family or close acquaintences. Last week I thought of a woman from my mom’s hometown who I hadn’t seen in years. Friday night Mom gets the call from the lady’s mother. “Mitchie passed last night.”

Then it happened again just this week. Two days before the Samoa tsunami, the memory of the 2004 Christmas tsunami came to me. I sensed the same thing before the earthquake in Indonesia. And I think I foresaw Katrina when I imagined, just after Hurricane Andrew hit (1992), such a storm sweeping through New Orleans. I’ve never been to New Orleans but I could sense the destruction just the same.

Could it be I’m psychic? Seems the older I get the more frequent these premonitions come. And I believe it runs in the family as my maternal grandmother was psychic and believed in omens and divination. I indulged in such in the past but gave it up after I joined church, but now, since I’m not as active in churcn as I was, I’m revived my studies of psychic phemomena. Dug out the books and Tarot determined to get a handle on what’s going on with me.

9/25/2009

The second thing I heard yesterday came as I was making dinner. I heard what sounded like, “Meshaq medrac.” (That was, in fact, what led me to the passage in Daniel; somehow I’d remembered that “Meschach” was the name of one of Daniel’s buddies who had survived the fires of the furnace, so I went and looked it up.)

But I also remembered that “Mesac” (Damas) is the name of the man who killed his family in Naples, Florida (and in my dream—see post before last).

I should start by saying that I’ve been asking a lot lately—in reference to the Damas family and many other things—what makes people do such unspeakable things. Certainly sometimes it’s mental illness, pure and simple (or not pure and simple at all). I know it’s not God playing some kind of twisted, vengeful, divine game; it’s not God’s nature at all, as I know now. And, although the idea has always sounded kind of silly and antiquated to me—not to mention being a poor excuse for bad behavior—I’ve also had to wonder if there really is some kind of “opposing force” out there. I think of the souls/spirits who were SO determined to really destroy me a couple of years back when this all began, and I’ve often shuddered to think what would happen to someone who experienced all that without the same guidance and protection that I’ve been blessed to have. They could, I thought, easily seem “schizophrenic”, but be living in absolute terror of things that are actually very real.

And I think of some of the things that have been said to me about those times—“it’s political” was one that really shocked me (it was quite a while ago). The other, of course, was “Light needs darkness to be seen.” Still, I resist the idea.

But back to Mesac Damas. Yesterday in particular I was also asking why I’d dreamed that particular dream with such detail, in advance of the actual murders, and why I’d been presented yet again (something similar happened last year) with a horrifying case of a black man (the first a Katrina refugee, the second a Haitian man—both likely to face additional animosity from some people based on race and class issues) suddenly killing his children for no comprehensible reason. There hadn’t been enough information in the dream for me to have warned anyone, and I’m no longer asked to speak to and pray for lost souls (as I was in the previous case). But he told me yesterday that there was, in fact, a reason.

Just before I went to look up “Meshaq medrac” in the Hebrew lexicon, I asked yet again, and saw the word “mercy” clearly spelled out…twice. I also saw the word, “black.”

When I looked at the lexicon I realized that what I’d actually heard was, “Mesac madduwach.” “Madduwach” means, “seduction/enticement/”misleading oracle.” Mesac, I seemed to be being told, had been “seduced” or “enticed” into doing what he did.

Just after I looked that up, I went on CNN.com to see what was happening in the case. I read that, while being arrested, Mesac claimed that he was led to kill by some kind of evil spirit (something having to do with his mother-in-law, which probably has nothing to do with it). He was saying, “There is a Satan,” and, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” I was astonished to have found that just after looking up the meaning of what I’d been told. (I also saw the beginnings of some racist comments about the incident online, as I had in the previous case.)

As I’ve said, I think about people left with no protection when they’re “attacked,” as I was back then (it never happens to me anymore). They could easily be driven to the worst things possible, especially when already weakened by other factors like substance abuse (there’s a very good reason that I was pushed so hard to stop drinking alcohol), poverty, and other stresses. No one could, on their own, just decide one day to cut the throats of his wife and children, and then go off to work, unless he was completely insane or, perhaps, “enticed.”

The man wants to be executed, he says. God doesn’t want that to happen, if I’m understanding things (I’m certain that God never wants anyone to be executed, in any case). I said, “The man just killed his whole family and will have to live with that knowledge…what if he really wants to die?” The answer was, “He’ll pay the price.” I don’t know exactly what was meant by that.

Anyway, there WAS a reason that I had that particular dream, and it has to do with mercy.

Ever since I was little I can remember having the ability to see everyday things happening, before they actually happened. I have always wondered exactly what to call it. Maybe you can tell me?
http://www.associatedcontent.comarticle/470600/psychic_ability_premonitions_visions.html

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What does the future hold?

I happened upon a programme recently about a chap who claims he can predict future events…he seemed genuine,but then all his predictions were vague enough to be interpreted in many ways.

Premonition….predicting the future.

Is it a load of crystal balls?

Maybe some of you already know what this post is going to be about….perhaps you knew before I had the idea to write it.In that case,could you just type out the rest while I put the kettle on?

You always hear of people who say they predicted major disasters before they happen….usually we only hear of them AFTER they happen,but that’s life.No-one has ever appeared on television and said categorically that such-and-such is going to happen on such-and-such a date.

They go on TV AFTER the disaster,of course,and say “Oh I predicted this would happen,please give me money.” Really? I didn’t see you.

“I predicted 9/11 !!!”

Where were you on 9/10? C0uld have used you there,mate.Oh and while you’re at it,could you focus your supernatural powers on this Friday night…I really fancy winning the Euro lottery?

“Sorry,my gift doesn’t work like that.”

t seems the only “gift” these so-called psychics have is to look like prophets after the fact.It would be easy for me to say something like,”in the next 10 years,there will be a major disaster in America.” Well..of course there will…on a long enough timescale,anything and everything is possible.

If this ability to predict the future is real,then why aren’t they more accurate? Knowing the exact time and date of disasters etc. would change the world.

The boy Acorah...he sees dead people...but not lottery numbers...

I used to be a believer in psychic ability/paranormal thingies and all that.I even used to think Most Haunted was real,but all those men screaming like babies at “scary” clicking noises put me off.Yvette and Karl have more money than God,you know….they’ve got about 10 cars.Faking supernatural phenomena obviously pays well.

They should never have got rid of Derek Acorah…..he was nuttier than squirrel doo-doo…..talks to a dead bloke on a regular basis,his “spirit guide” who gives him information about…well…other dead blokes.Not so hot on the lucky balls,though.

Not sure how we got onto Derek Acorah….should have seen it coming though,ha ha…but while we’re on the subject of mediums etc,I know that they do give comfort to many people who have suffered bereavements…maybe some are charlatans,maybe not…it’s not really my place to tar all mediums with the same brush.But they always say the same things,like “oh he/she’s in a much better place,now and they’re watching over you” etc.

I have first-hand experience of this,sort of.When my brother died,his “girlfriend” went to a medium who told her that “he was much happier where he is now.” This puzzled me,because this suggested he was still the same person,if you get my gist…..he’s still able to compare where he is now with where he used to be…alive and depressed,in other words.Heaven/the afterlife/the great beyond can’t be that good if you take all your baggage with you.

Depressed in life,depressed in heaven…not a particularly good deal.I was kinda hoping the slate would be wiped clean,so to speak,that the afterlife is so amazing that all your hurts are healed and you can spend eternity in complete happiness.

If that were true,I might start believing in God.

Hmmm…wandered onto religion,now…dangerous ground….which I will now leave sharpish.Don’t want to offend anyone….that is not the way of the Blog Dog.

I shall leave you with this thought…the person sitting next to you on the bus tomorrow could have a Twitter feed straight into your brain…and may be busy RT-ing your very deepest secrets and feelings…think happy thoughts.

The Final Destination is a 2009 3-D supernatural thriller/horror film written by Eric Bress and directed by David R. Ellis, both of whom also worked on Final Destination 2. Released on August 28, 2009, it was the fourth installment to the Final Destination franchise, and the first of which to be shot in HD 3-D.

Tagline: Just because you know it’s happening, doesn’t mean you’ll see it coming.

On December 13, 2008, Warner Bros. released the following plot summary for the film:

On what should have been a fun-filled day at the races, Nick O’Bannon (Bobby Campo) has a horrific premonition in which a bizarre sequence of events causes multiple race cars to crash, sending flaming debris into the stands, brutally killing his friends and causing the upper deck of the stands to collapse on him. When he comes out of this grisly nightmare Nick panics, persuading his girlfriend, Lori (Shantel VanSanten), and their friends, Janet (Haley Webb) and Hunt (Nick Zano), to leave… escaping seconds before Nick’s frightening vision becomes a terrible reality. Thinking they’ve cheated death, the group has a new lease on life, but unfortunately for Nick and Lori, it is only the beginning. As his premonitions continue and the crash survivors begin to die one-by-one — in increasingly gruesome ways — Nick must figure out how to cheat death once and for all before he, too, reaches his final destination.”

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Last night, I had 2 dreams that on the surface seemed innocuous enough.  In the first, I was at some sort of theater event, and I was dressed rather “suave 70s”–white turtleneck, corduroy suit, shades, feathered hair.  I also had a beard and was a mite taller than I am. I was talking with a mother and a daughter.  The girl was about 10 or 11, and was quite precocious.  She had written the introduction to a book and was reading it aloud to us.  I complimented her on it, and she said she thought it needed editing.  I actually agreed with her, but I said it was good nonetheless and she should be proud.  Her mother was all smiles, but she was also anxious about something.

For some reason when I awoke to go to the bathroom, I thought about the pyramids in Egypt, and mused that they were probably a portal of some sort to a spaceship that waited below the site.  Odd that such a thing should arise in my headspace.  But there you have it.

After that, I had a difficult time getting to sleep.  My thoughts drifted to this thing then another, stupid work crap, stupid non-profit organization crap, etc.  I finally got up and went into my parlor and grabbed my morning page notebook and started writing.  Not till after I drew my card, rune & ogham for the day.

The card interestingly was the 10 of swords, which I take to be the end of delusion, the ripping away of the veil.  In short, apocalypse in the classic “epiphany” sense of the term.  My unease increased.  (The ogham was willow, and the rune was Ingwaz, fyi.)

I performed a tarot reading about this unease later, and asked if it was somehow real, or was this just a caffeine related thing.  Interestingly, the first card out was the Tower, covered again by the 10 of swords and crossed by the Hanged Man.  The blocked card was sadly, The Sun, and the final result was the 8 of swords, which suggests apathy and being a drama queen.  The advice of the cards, bafflingly was the 9 of swords, which in the Rider-Waite deck features a woman sitting up in bed weeping or holding her head as if after a scary/sad nightmare.  At least that’s what I usually think of.  It could be that “I’m just scaring myself.”  But there’s also a hint of accepting whatever comes and just being with it.  Later, I opened up a Spanish-English dictionary randomly and pointed at a word, and the word was “case.”

The other dream was about trying to get to work.  First off, I started out in the identiity of one of my co-workers in the dream, and one who seems to be quite stressed.  And I was already late–it was 8:30 a.m. and I was just leaving for the bus.  I seemed to be in the suburb I grew up in at first, then I was on a road that seemed somewhat Albany-familiar, and I saw the bus coming not too far away.  It was a stretch of road I was unfamiliar with however, and I ran to find the stop, and noticed that traffic was halted.  I almost got slimed by a garbage truck, and scooted out into the traffic-heavy street that had basically become a parking lot, and saw that ahead was an exceptionally long semi that was unloading who knows what, and it looked rather stationary for the time being.  I felt that it was going to be there a while, and that catching the bus was a moot point now.

The dream shifted and I was back to being me, and I entered a G/L coffee bar with a lot of books for sale.  There were no men in the place, it was all lesbians, and they had attitude to boot.  I just wanted coffee anyway.

The scene shifted once more and I was in someone’s house, and I was in shorts, but there was snow on the ground.  (How Colorado!)  People from work were there, and they were all at loose ends about the fact that hardly anyone was there.  No one was dressed for work either.  It was all quite cazh.  (How does one spell that word, the diminutive of “casual”?)

Even so, since I was an assistant some people decided to give me things to do.  Yippee.  I woke up wondering about the sanity of one of these people, an attorney named “Mary” who wanted me to photocopy index cards on a non-existent copy machine.  The space for it was quite empty, and I narrowed my eyes at her in frustration.

I’ve been having a bunch of work-related dreams of late.  The other night, one of my bosses gave me work to do.  “I told her yesterday and she said “I’m sorry,” to which I said “How dare you?” ironically.  Quite hilarious.)  Themes often pop up in my dreams.  One recurring theme is the subway, which I think is about needing to see beneath the surface of things, and seeing where these avenuses take me.  Haven’t had one of those in awhile.

On the bus this morning, there weren’t many people on it, but I found it interesting that one person was reading a book called “Why Sh*t Happens: The Science of a Very Bad Day” and I saw another person was reading a book by Eric IDLE. 

Nothing has happened. Thus far.  At least.  I would like to breathe a sigh of relief.  I told Jody about it earlier, and he asked me if I thought he would be all right heading to Williamstown for further research into his cousin.  I said I didn’t feel like I could really say, but that I would feel better if he didn’t go, but that he should at least do his own divination beforehand.  He did so, said it looked all right. 

Wlell.  I don’t plan to blog over the weekend.  Things change however, and I might.  I do have an appt. with a psychic and I’m looking forward to it.  I’ve been wanting a reading with her for awhile, and have felt envious when Jody has received readings from her.

I might blog later, yet again though.  About the fifth chakra in the Jarow book, and visioning through my boredom and frustration.  Ah, yes.  Fecundity in everyday experience.  There if I want it!!!

Coincidence n. remarkable occurrence of similar events at the same time by chance.

You know it really annoys me when simple coincidence is used to explain away happenings that appear to be paranormal in nature. What does saying that it is a ‘coincidence’ really mean anyway? Couldn’t a billion things all be characterised as just a coincidence?  Even though science gives long drawn out explanations of the why’s and the wherefores that boggle the minds of us ordinary lay people, isn’t it possible that some of their theories and models all just coincide with their expectations and therefore become yet more coincidences? Well I don’t know about any of that but I do know that it is really way past time that scientists and sceptics opened up their minds to the possibilities and considered further exploration of the events and strange happenings that they have ruled out as mumbo jumbo.

I watched a documentary on TV last night about a guy called Chris Robinson. He is known as a ‘dream detective’ as he has what appear to be precognitive dreams, that is he gets premonitions of future events while he sleeps. Now, even though I have an exceptionally open mind and never ever rule anything out I was slightly sceptical at first. However, as the program went on to give documented video evidence of this ability at work and my brain went into analyse and ponder on mode I could not totally deny that the dreams this guy has were truly premonitions. The footage shown was very compelling and it got me thinking and chatting to myself  (as these things often do) about the  reasons that scientists are so reluctant to even consider that the paranormal world has a very real place in the ‘normal’ world in which we live.

We (myself and I) came to the conclusion that the scientific world is scared. Scared that if they dare take an open minded, un-sceptical glimpse at things of this nature and what they discover is not quite as implausible or impossible as they currently believe it to be, the the whole basis of science as we know it would have to be completely turned on it’s head. Long standing theories, scientific calculations and models may have to be re-thought and many hundreds of years of scientific evolution might just have to be re-evaluated and started from scratch.

The old belief that the world was flat always springs to mind when I think on things like this. Centuries ago the people supposedly in the know would have laughed in your face had you told them the earth was round (though it actually isn’t completely round at all, lol). I wonder if in a few hundred years time human kind will look back on our comparatively uneducated and ignorant state of now and laugh about the fact that we though ghosts didn’t exist or people couldn’t be psychic. Perhaps there are even more seemingly strange realities that one day we will discover and will become the norm.

Sadly I probably wont be either around or compus mentus enough to see the day. Though that really depends doesn’t it? ; )