Theos-Talk Archives (September 1996 Message tl00379)

This past week I had a strange experience involving dreams, and
would like to ask for comments on it, based on how other people
understand dreams.  Sometime in midweek, I had a very vivid dream that
woke me up.  In it I was driving in mountains, got distracted
trying to shift gears (I have an automatic) and went off a
cliff.  Or rather, was so far off it in the dream that I awoke
before crashing down the mountain.  The next night I dreamed
about being in a building that exploded.  Two nights later, I
dreamed (vague details) again about a car wreck, combined with
another sinister one about a run-in with Russian police.  None
of this stuff is at all typical of my dreams.  So
when my friend Pat called and asked me to go up to the Blue
Ridge with her this weekend, and perhaps go on a canoe/kayak
trip, I was nervous.  Didn't want to say "I can't go because I
have had scary dreams this week," besides which this was a
beautiful place to go, I had no other plans, and I enjoy her
company.  So I went, but told her about the dream and asked her
to drive extra carefully.  The drive up was hairy due to a
heavy rain and the hatch being open to hold my kayak, but we
arrived safely although cold and wet (and had an unexceptional return.)

Sunday morning, the day of the paddling trip, while
awakening I had a vision of a death's head skull, sort of face
to face with me.  As in "staring death in the face."  Since I
had looked up my astrological transits and saw two accident
prone ones around this time, this made me even more spooked.
But the morning passed pleasantly, and around noon we got on
the river.  I drove Pat's standard transmission car through the
stretch of Shenandoah Valley between the put-in and take out,
admiring the view of the mountains.  Although not very wide and
having only one class 3 rapid (semi-dangerous) the river had high
water from the previous night's rain, and a fair number of downed trees from
Hurricane Fran's passage.  Still, I breezed through all the
rapids, had a great time, no one spilled, and even the big
class 3 was no problem.  BUT I eddied out of it, waited for
someone else to go ahead, then tried to follow their path
through the remaining part of the rapid.  Not realizing the
strength of the current in this last part, I failed to get out
into the center of the stream enough to avoid a "strainer"-- a
place where a tree blocks part of the river.  And the powerful
current sucked me and my boat under the tree and underwater.  This is the
single most dangerous thing that can happen to a paddler, the
cause of most river drownings.  But there was no time to be scared,
or even conscious of when and how I and my boat got separated,
as I held my breath while being swept beneath the tree and
struggling to surface on the other side.  All ended well with
dry clothes, lunch, and a beautiful rest of trip.

But I am left with a lot of questions.  The same kind of
questions I had after feeling spooked and nervous before
leaving on my summer vacation, almost to the point of
cancelling it, in a way no air travel had ever worried me
before.  I flew TWA out of JFK airport on an international
flight the month before flight 800 went down.

So-- how should we deal with "warning" impressions, either
through dreams or intuition?  Especially when they don't seem
to be right on the money, but just approximate?  At this point
I feel that I was a fool not to stay home last weekend in the
wake of all the foreboding omens.  But all did end well, and
none of the "warnings" were specific enough to alert me to the
particular danger that could have killed me.  With the TWA
flight, I felt *something* threatening but didn't know what,
and now figure it was the airport and airline rather than my
flight or destination that somehow conveyed alarm.  My dreams
conveyed the sense of disaster on a mountain trip, but nothing
about almost drowning.

Also, how can we become sensitive to guidance while avoiding
turning into paranoid weirdos?  On one hand, I'm very grateful
to my subconscious mind for alerting me to dangers, but on the
other it's still awfully embarrassing to tell people that I
won't do something because I'm scared due to bad omens.  A
skeptic would probably say all these things are coincidences or
maybe the dreams actually made me more prone to accidents.  But
since such impressions are very rare in my life, I'll be
inclined to take them a lot more seriously from now on.

Finally, isn't it a paradox that an astrological configuration
can indicate an period of accident-proneness?  It would seem
astrology points to an ordered universe; yet it can also
identify periods when the order in one's personal universe is
most likely to break down.

These are heavy questions I'm throwing out, and not very
clearly expressed.  But I hope they inspire some philosophical
or spiritual wisdom in some readers.  Thanks for reading.

Cheers
Paul