Humour from The Other Side: Premonitions (ii)

Outer Hebrides, Scotland, August 1985.

My father died in July 1985, and early in August Ian and I took the children to my parents’ home for our usual summer visit. It felt very strange, this time, to stay with my mother only.

As usual, we trundled round various relatives during the week we were up, and on August 6th went to see my characterful uncle, Red Angus the poacher, then in his seventies, of whom Ian was particularly fond. Angus did not disappoint, handing round large glasses of whisky and telling tales of derring-do involving the usual props: salmon nets, predatory seals, and pesky interfering police.

As we drove away from his house, waving goodbye, Angus with his battered hat as usual perched at a rakish angle and his whippet Joey beside him, I had that feeling which I’ve only had a few times in my life – that I would never see him again. I didn’t. He died the following January.

Starlit Hebridean Night

My brother and I attended Uncle Angus’s funeral which took place in a small village on the wild, beautiful Atlantic coast where our ancestors come from.  The night before, we drove on a clear, snowy starlit night to attend the evening religious service which traditionally takes place then. We were sitting with our heads bowed in a crammed room full of friends and neighbours come to pay their respects. The chair opposite me was empty.

At one point, as the Free Church minister droned on, struggling not to let my mind wander, I looked up. For a fleeting second, there he was. My father, his shirt sleeves rolled up above his elbows as usual, his greying forelock falling over his forehead into his eyes. He never had had any truck with the Free Church brand of religion. He looked straight at me, grinned, winked – and vanished.

(note: there are two more episodes in the Premonitions section which will be appearing in the full memoir in due course)

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TO BE CONTINUED……next chapter is Part Ten: Reincarnation

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300 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

Shadows of the Future: Premonitions (i)

“The distinction between past, present and future is an illusion, however persistent.”

Albert Einstein

Definition of a premonition: “a forewarning; a presentiment.” (p 1142, The Oxford English Reference Dictionary, Oxford University Press 1996).

Here I would like to quote at some length from Stuart Holroyd’s Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives,(1989) p164, whose commentary on precognition – the ability to obtain knowledge of future events – is lucid and sensible.

He states that it is “quite consistent with (the theory of) relativity and quantum theory to propose that significant events cause a perturbation in the space-time in which they occur, and, like a stone thrown in a pond, send out waves in all directions, backwards as well as forwards in time, so that memory traces may be created in a person’s brain by the precursor wave of a future event.

Before the 1966 Aberfan disaster in Wales, UK – in which 116 children were killed when a mountain of coal waste slipped and engulfed the village school – scores of people all over Britain had dreams of the event, and a subsequent investigation showed that the dream premonitions went back over several weeks but had become more frequent in the days just prior to the disaster; a pattern that would be consistent with the idea of a precursor wave diminishing in power as it propagated outwards.

….physics aside, it may be reasoned that when we speak of the present moment we do not speak of a point in time but of a duration of awareness, and that in different states of consciousness this duration may be extended or contracted. People of acknowledged psychic ability have expressed this sense of extended awareness. Alan Vaughan, a psychic who predicted Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, has written: ‘As I become highly activated, sufficiently to lose my sense of ego-identity, then conventional time loses its meaning, as I get caught up with extra-dimensional adventures in the future’ .

The concurring testimony of poets, mystics and psychics, supported by the findings of modern brain research, leaves no doubt that there are other modes of temporal experiences than the linear, sequential mode.”

I found the foregoing very helpful in clarifying my experiences of premonition.

Emerging.......

Perthshire, Scotland, UK, Autumn 1972

The earliest premonition I recall having was on a night time drive back to Perth with Peter, my boyfriend at the time. We had been at the Edinburgh Festival, and were both tired and eager to get home. He was driving. We were taking the easiest and fastest route, on the main dual carriageway from Edinburgh to Perth.

We were driving along quite peacefully and quietly. Suddenly, I got a very strong feeling that we should get off the main road at once, and continue our homeward journey via back roads. I knew this would take much longer; but the feeling was so strong that I insisted. Peter, having got used to my ‘other’ side by this time (which suggests there must have been other episodes before this which I just can’t recall ) did so, and we got home late – but safe.

I never checked, probably because I didn’t want to find out. So I have no idea whether there had been an accident on the stretch of road we  avoided that night.

I have also remembered a whole series of premonitions of impending deaths. These following are the only ones I can recall clearly enough for it to be worth writing them down. But I have a feeling that there were others. This is the type of paranormal experience with which I have had most difficulty, and which I especially hope never comes my way again….

Home, Glasgow, Scotland: Friday 28 June – Monday 1st July 1985

My mother-in-law Emily had been with us for her annual visit. She and I got
on well, having a number of things in common besides Ian! She was also very understanding and helpful regarding my working from home, and the constraints during the day which that put on any visitors. So I felt very relaxed around her.

However, I was in rather a strange state the weekend before she left. I had been seized with an obsessive desire to re-read Joe Fisher’s book on reincarnation, doing so compulsively throughout the whole weekend. That was bad enough – but at least I could read in bed without being unsociable. Worse was that I was seized out of nowhere with a bout of extreme exhaustion, having been feeling energetic as usual up until the weekend. It was embarrassing and disappointing, although Emily was her usual understanding self.

We drove to the Trossachs, a beautifully scenic area of hills, woods, lochs and sparkling rivers about thirty miles from Glasgow, on what proved to be a sunny Saturday afternoon. I had to stay slumped with exhaustion in the back of the car whilst everyone else went off for a walk. It was as though something had simply sucked all my energy out.

On Monday morning, managing to see Emily off on her train since Ian was at work, I returned to my house at about 11.30 am and settled down to catch up on some admin, still feeling abnormally tired and drained. At 1.50 pm the phone rang. It was my mother, hysterical. Then my cousin Phil spoke – to tell me that my father had just dropped dead.

Later that day, as I prepared to return home to be with my family, I realised that my energy levels were absolutely normal. They had returned along with the shockingly unexpected news of my father’s death. On subsequent reflection, it seemed that at a level (or levels) of body and spirit outwith my normal consciousness, there had been an awareness of my father’s impending death….

TO BE CONTINUED……

next post is Premonitions (ii)

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1000 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page