It’s difficult to talk about it, to share these events and details that I’ve been hiding for the past decades. But I think it’s time to.
From the time when I was 6, I have had precognitive dreams. But unlike the stories I’ve often read about, I have always been able to control the outcome in reality. Sometimes I let life be, and do nothing to change the premonitions I’ve had in my dreams. Sometimes I try desperately to change what I saw in the dreams. When I do try, I have always succeeded in preventing the dream from coming true. Not always to a good outcome, though. But I can ensure that the dream’s reality isn’t fulfilled.
My precognitive dreams aren’t always about impending doom and gloom. They are just as often about random, even happy events.
My first such dream, in fact, was a beautiful one. Beautiful to my 6-year-old self, that is. I still remember the vivid colours of the dream. I was in a candy shop. A proper one, not like a candy van with a creepy potential kidnapper. I remember feeling the cold air icing my cheeks as I wandered around the candy shop, a myriad of pastel colours and sweet scents flooding my senses. I was fascinated by a huge cotton candy that stood out amongst a sea of other smaller cotton candies. At a corner of the shop, someone kept on spinning new cotton candies.
To the young me, fine, even to the current me, cotton candies are the king of sweet treats. They are fluffy, colourful, and seem almost magical. I watched as the shop guy stuck another completed cotton candy in what seemed to me like an ocean of cotton candy clouds. Still, my gaze lingered on the biggest one. It was rainbow-coloured with silvery dust sprinkled on top.
“There you are!” My dad’s voice boomed out. “Don’t you dare run away like that again! Do you know how scared we were?” He sounded furious. I turned, saw his worried and angry face, and felt my heart sink. Guilt enveloped me.
I wanted to tell him that I didn’t mean to run away. That the candy shop’s bright colours and cheerful aura, juxtaposed against the dreary mall, had been irresistible to me. But I couldn’t find the words to relay my very much image-dominant thoughts. I didn’t tend to think in words when I was younger. I thought a lot in images, in visuals. So it was often hard for me to translate what was going on in my head to others.
Instead, I lowered my head. My mum caught up with him then. “Oh thank goodness you’re here! Darling, how many times must I tell you, do NOT run off like that! You nearly gave us a heart attack!”
Tears began to prickle my eyes.
“Listen, I don’t want to upset you. I know you feel bad. But I must put this in your head. It is NOT okay to run off on your own, it is dangerous. Do you understand me?”
I nodded mutely, tears beginning to spill from my eyes.
My parents fussed over me a little more, then prepared to leave the candy shop. I was fully crying sd I turned to leave. Just as I reached the exit, a rainbow-coloured, silver-sprinkled puff of cloud appeared before me. I looked up, a delighted shock knocking the embarrassment, guilt and sadness out of my mind for a moment. The shop guy was holding it out to me.
“I’m sorry, our shop is guilty for luring kids astray all too often! It’s our fault for these gorgeous decorations. Let me apologise to you guys and this little one here with this, free-of-charge.”
My parents protested for a bit, before they caught sight of the blazing joy pouring forth from my face. They sighed, and thanked the shop guy for his gift. I beamed at him, smiling so hard my cheeks hurt.
“Thank the nice young man, dear!”
I thanked him with a small bow, and accepted the beautiful cotton candy.
That was when I woke up.
I woke up with a smile on my face, if I remember correctly. I wrote down the dream in my secret diary, drawing out the shop in almost indecipherable squiggles. I locked up my diary, set out for the day, and soon forgot about the dream.
Until around 2 months later, when it happened, detail by detail, word for word. For some reason, I had clean forgotten about the cotton candies, the bright colours and the shop guy, all up until I heard my dad’s voice booming, “There you are!”
Then the realisation struck me. Everything went as it did in the dream, and I didn’t say anything throughout the incident. Other than thanking the shop guy again, at the end. I was still smiling happily, beaming at him, but at the same time, there was a new sensation of awe and wonder.
I had no idea what was going on then. I remember hurrying to my diary once I got home, and flipping to that entry two months before. It was all written there, just like how the event had happened. The badly drawn shop looked just like I had seen it.
Subsequently, I had more precognitive dreams. Unfortunately, many were not as good an experience. The first horrid one I had was of myself on a school bus, and the school bus going over a bump before stopping. I remember the bus driver going down to check on whatever had caused the bump, and closing the door so that us kids could not follow him down. That was when we saw it from the window. The bus driver was helplessly trying to tend to a small furry creature curled up behind the wheel. A cat. A dead cat. A cat the bus had rolled over. I remember screaming in horror, and snapping awake.
I didn’t think to warn the bus driver the next time I saw him. After all, I had regular dreams and nightmares too, and at that time, I couldn’t tell which was which. But just two days later, it happened. As I watched the dead, crushed cat in real life, I screamed. I screamed and screamed, then burst into tears. Tears of regret, guilt and anger at myself. Why did I not try to stop this? Why didn’t I save the cat?
It’s a horrible memory that still hurts to this day. For the next few precognitive dreams, I was better at knowing when they were special dreams. Dreams that would come true. They had a level of detail that surpassed that of typical dreams. I would always be able to look around and spot random details, such as a pretty leaf on the ground, or a scratch in the window. I was hence able to identify the following two precognitive dreams I had. Both were bad dreams, and related to my classmates.
In one of them, my classmate was angry and flung a stapler at his deskmate. The stapler hit her face at an unfortunate angle, the staple shooting out and piercing into her skin, burying itself tightly into her face.
The screams that ensued woke me up. The moment I gathered my senses, I decided that I needed to stop that from happening.
But the thing is, the timelines are never given, for these dreams. I mean, I knew it would be within the year, as during the dream, this classmate was still in his original seat in this familiar classroom. We would probably change classes the next year. But I had no idea when it would happen. However, I remembered the words he yelled before he threw the stapler at her. “Stop calling me that!”
His nickname was Farty-pants. Mean, I know. But kids can be really cruel. He had farted loudly once in class, a long series of farts, and he had been mortified. Being the stupid kid I was, I had laughed along with everyone else too, and only felt bad when I saw the tears welling in his eyes.
His deskmate, Karine, had never let it go. She was probably a major reason why the nickname had held for so long.
So I knew what to watch out for. Every time Karine yelled “Farty-pants!” at him, I would tense up, prepared to run up and stop him from throwing the stapler. But he didn’t say “Stop calling me that!” for a long time. 6 months, or more, in fact.
It had been such a long time that the dream had faded from my consciousness, and so, on the day when he finally yelled back, “Stop calling me that!” it took me a second or two to realise what was happening. So, by the time I leapt into action, he had already thrown the stapler at her. Luckily, she was standing right by my table when he did so, and I managed to fling my arm out in time to grab the stapler in mid-air, right before it struck her in the face. That was when I began to scream.
The stapler had neatly dislodged a staple into my hand. It was now my palm that was pierced with the staple.
I know, it isn’t the worst pain in the world. But I was a kid! And it was terrifying! Like, to see that neat silver line on my palm, knowing the two ends were plugged into my flesh. I mean, and it hurt. It still really hurt.
Farty-pants, I mean, Bruce, apologised to me so much after. His parents did too, to me and my parents. The teacher praised me. Karine seemed terrified by Bruce’s reaction, and was shakily grateful towards me. I felt like a hero for a whole week, before the whole thing was forgotten and normal life resumed.
Another time, I had dreamt of a schoolmate falling down and breaking her arm. I didn’t even really know her. I really wanted to help prevent the dream from happening, but I had never spoken to her before, and it would have been so weird and creepy for me to start following her around, waiting for her to fall down. I also had no idea when it would happen. So I didn’t do anything. I let things be. Around five weeks after that dream, the news spread, that she had broken her arm tripping over her shoe laces and bracing herself at the wrong angle. All I could feel was guilt. Because I knew that I could have warned her to be careful, that I could have hung around her more, tried to be her friend to hang out and keep an eye out for her, but I had chosen not to. Just because I didn’t want to seem like a weirdo. I had cared more about my own reputation and wellness than I did about hers.
The guilt after each time that I didn’t put in my best effort to help out was haunting. It usually started as a stabbing sensation in my chest, which I would try to ignore. I would keep pushing it out of my mind, convincing myself that there was nothing I could have done. But the guilt would stay, like a weight in my chest, like a fog that muddied up the trenches of my mind.
The ever accumulating guilt was only off-set whenever I was able to help someone out by positively influencing a dream’s outcome. But it would return, soon after. And I never seemed to be able to keep a positive net value of the good I had done versus the bad things I had let happen.
Then, in my early twenties, I had the worst dream I had had thus far. I was in a pretty rundown bookshop, when I turned around to see a small boy trying to pull out a book from a rickety old shelf. Suddenly, the bottom ledge that was holding the bookshelf upright cracked, then shattered, and the whole shelf came toppling forwards. I sprang into action, acting purely on instinct and adrenaline, and pushed the boy out of the way. The shelf crashed down upon me, a hard piece of wood hitting my skull square on. I collapsed onto the floor and knocked my head hard on the ground. Next thing I knew, I was floating above, watching as the people in the shop began screaming and rushing to lift the shelf off me. The boy began wailing, sobbing his eyes out in shock and horror.
I saw the blood begin to ooze out from beneath the shelf, and suddenly knew, without a doubt, that I was dead.
I woke up then, and ran straight to the bathroom and vomited.
I made the most selfish resolve right then and there. I would have to let that child die. No matter what. I could not give up my life for his. I had so much to live for. I had, still have, a wonderful partner who supported me through thick and thin. Someone who would be destroyed if I died. I have family. I have amazing friends who love me. I had tonnes of things ahead of me to look forward to, a mountain of goals that I wanted to achieve.
I had to let that child die.
I repeated that mantra to myself for months. Then years. 2 years passed, then 3, then 5. It has now been 7 years since that dream. 7 years of telling myself, I have to let that child die. But nothing has happened. I have also avoided going into bookstores for the past years, though browsing old, second-hand books had once been my favourite hobby.
The scene has not happened after all these time. So, I thought I had changed things. Perhaps, just by avoiding bookstores, I had changed my fate.
I had a child with my partner three years ago. Yesterday, it was with a sinking heart that I finally admitted the truth to myself. Over the years, he had slowly grown more and more to resemble that little boy I had seen in my dream. Yesterday, as he had burst into tears over a reprimand, he had looked exactly like that little boy. Down to his mannerisms and wails.
My son also has an obsession with exploring. With running away from us and to wherever he wants to go. He’s often so fast, we can’t find him until a good time later, when he has been immersed in some activity or another in some place or another. Usually a book store, because he really likes reading.
I’m not ever going to discourage him from wanting to read. I’m not going to stop trying to catch him before he runs off, despite my abysmal success rate.
But I’ve also written up my will. After all, I have to protect that child.