I foresaw Hurricane Katrina.
I mean, I didn’t go into some trance and burst out “A storm will hit and the levees will break: people will die.” But I did know it was going to happen, and I did say so.
The week before Hurricane Katrina hit and the storm was building up into what it would become, I felt peculiar. I was on pins and needles for days, thinking that J. and I were going to get into it or something, but the presentiment intensified. I realized that it was much, much bigger than just another fight between us. I believe it was a Saturday night that I finally said something to him about it. We were still separated at the time, and we were on the phone.
I told him something really bad was about to happen. I could just feel it. He assumed that it was something to do with us and automatically thought I wanted to have some horrid, resonant conversation with him. I told him that wasn’t it. I didn’t know what was going to happen. My exact words were “I’m not talking about us. I’m talking about something big, like 9/11 big.” He kind of brushed me off, which I expected him to do.
It was a few days later that all hell broke loose in the south. That’s something that can’t be called a coincidence. I mean, it just can’t. The way that I felt leading up to it…it was…flagitious. Like I knew something , and I wanted to help preclude it, but I couldn’t because I didn’t even know what it would be.
It wasn’t the first time that something like that had happened. My Uncle Turk had been killed when I was 5. I saw it happen. Not in person, no, but in a dream. I recollect it pretty well and my grandmother wrote down exactly what I told her about it back then.
I dreamed that I was following my Uncle through a dirty neighborhood, covered in graffiti and littered with crack heads and unkempt children. He was in a car, and I was…floating or something. He pulled up to a house. His girlfriend, Lala was in the doorway. He went in, and I went in behind him. In the house were a few other guys, all Crips, all people that he knew. They were supposed to give him money. But they didn’t. They wanted his. I don’t really remember what happened after that, but I know that he turned around to leave and the gunshots started exploding. He was shot over and over in the back. He laid there and died. They took his money, which he kept in the cuff of his left sock.
I remember that the last time I saw him, he gave me a Nintendo and two games: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Super Mario. I begged him not to leave. He did. He never came back. He died in the way I dreamed; shot nine times in the back and back of the head. Set up and betrayed by his girlfriend and homies. It’s sad because he was leaving the gang. He was leaving California. He had been helping my grandfather build the house in NC and was going to come live there. He just wanted to gather up enough money for his dream car first, and have that before he left for good. He never realized that goal.
My grandmother told me later that she had predicted it as well. She had told him the day he brought me my gaming system that if he walked out that door, he’d never come back. He did, and he didn’t.
I saw Uncle Turk years later. I awoken to the sound of my rocking chair squeaking. It was rocking, and there was no one in it, at first, but as I stared, he seemed to form out of thin wisps of cloud. I can’t really explain it, but one minute he wasn’t there and one minute he was, solid and seemingly touchable. He smiled at me and said “Get it together Ree”. That’s all I remember. There may have been more to it, but that’s all I remember. I told my grandmother, and she wrote that down too. She really believes in this, because she suffers from it too.
Now my grandmother has whatever it is to a much higher degree than I do. She can predict death. And life. She predicted my relationship with Jason, before I’d ever met him. When I came to visit her once she told me that she’d dreamed that I brought a man to the house and he was either very light skinned or white, and much older to me because he had gray hairs in his mustache. He told them that he wanted to take care of me, and that he loved me. It was months later that things with J. started.
Whenever she dreams of someone that’s already dead, like my Uncle or one of her parents, someone dies within the week. It’s never NOT happened. Usually it’s no one tremendously close to us, but someone we know.
My grandfather has Prostate Cancer. She ’saw it’. I once heard her yelling and crying the in the middle of night and left my room to eavesdrop. I had to because in all the 17 years I lived with my grandparents I have never once seen or heard them argue. Ever. That might be hard to believe but it’s true. So that night was very weird, and scary for me. I listened to her as she told him how she had seen him in a casket, at a wake. The casket was open and his private parts were missing. There was just a gaping hole beneath his navel and above his knees. She wanted him to go to the doctor. He did, for the first time in almost a dozen years, and that’s how they found out.
I could go on and on about things she’s seen, but I really believe that it belongs in a nonfiction novel or a screenplay, documenting her life. She has the most amazing tales to tell…
People always find it difficult to believe in things that they have not experienced first hand. I’m a skeptic myself, but I believe that there are inexplicable things in the world. Like visions/predictions. I don’t believe in palm reading or tarot cards or Miss Cleo, that type of stuff, but I do believe it’s possible to see, and to change the future. You just have to have ‘it’.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I believe our brains are so high-functioning that we have not even begun to tap into the possibilities. Yet we’ve become so inured to external stimuli, being bombarded with it all the time, that we’ve lost much of our ability to tap into the innate, seemingly animalistic levels of comprehension. How is it that animals know when a storm is coming? Because they are aware of atmospheric and environmental changes.
Our ancestors had the same ability, picking up on the slightest cues to alert themselves to danger. They had to in order to survive. But with “civilized” society comes relative peace and safety. Hence, why those primal skills are lost to most of us.
I don’t know if I believe in premonitions, but I do believe that some people are better than others at seeing what is right in front of them. Perhaps you are one of the few!
My mom and I always called it “listening to your gut”.
Imagine our pleasure when our years of gut-reacting were rewarded with the discovery of the Second Brain, or the enteric nervous system. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_brain)
Of course, I am also alternatively spiritual, so I am well acquainted with the “super” natural. I find it perfectly natural, but that is it’s name in popular culture.
@Avery Gray – I know exactly what you mean – it’s like how they said animals were breaking out of zoos and going nuts before the Tsunami hit – they instinctively knew what we’re tuned out of.
they say we only use 10% of our brains; just imagine if we used all 100%. I believe your grandma sees things (mine does too and my dad and myself).