When he wasn’t ranching or farming or drinking coffee in Mack’s Cafe, this is where my father could normally be found, reading or napping. Here he is dreaming his own dream. Hopefully a happy one.
Prescient
My prescient experiences happened long ago,
shedding vivid spotlights on events I could not know.
Sporadic and unplanned-for, they came to me at night,
employing dreams to bring future happenings to light.
Once, thick in dreams, I woke to the ringing of the phone
and got up to answer its insistent tone.
“Miss Dykstra, this is Ludwig’s. You can come pick up your prints!”
Ready two days early? It didn’t make much sense.
I said I’d be there shortly, but then went back to bed,
hoping to fall back to sleep, but, alas, instead,
the phone began to ring again, so I got out of bed,
“Miss Dykstra? We are calling to say your dad is dead!”
In shock, I dropped the receiver, and as it hit the floor,
it began to ring again. How could it have rung more?
Puzzled, I woke up in bed. The whole time I’d been sleeping!
So I got up in the real world to stem the phone’s loud beeping.
“Miss Dykstra? This is Ludwigs.” The voice was calm and steady.
“We just called to say that your color prints are ready!”
That summer morning, a cold chill rendered me unsteady.
Again, I though it should have been two days ’til they were ready!
I drove uptown to get my prints and when I got back home,
I could hear the ringing of my telephone.
I struggled then with key in lock, but the ringing died
before I even managed to get myself inside.
I couldn’t tell who called me, for I had no means
in those days before cellphones or answering machines.
I went into the bathroom to draw myself a bath.
It would take some soaking to dispel the aftermath
of these weird occurrences. A good half hour or more
had passed before I heard the opening of my kitchen door.
It was my Mom and Sister, both of them in tears.
My dad had had a heart attack, echoing my fears.
In time, it was the end of him, though he lived four more years—
a time in which he had to learn how to shift his gears.
A large man, hale and hearty, and active his whole life,
for those four years he had to depend upon his wife
to open doors and lift things heavier than a phone,
belligerently accepting help for things once done alone.
“We tried to call you earlier, they said. Where did you go?
I’d had two calls to pick up photos, and so I told them so.”
This really did happen, exactly as described. Two sets of phone calls, the words exactly the same in the first set—one a dream, the other reality, although in the second set, I received only the first one in a dream and when I missed the second phonecall, my sister had to deliver the message herself.
Word prompts today are thick, sporadic, prescient, employ, summer and bellligerent.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
WOW! Just Wow!
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Are you having second thoughts about your neighbor?
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Thanks for that sad but interesting dream and reality. My mother would dream things when one of her children were sad or having a problem.. One night she got up screaming, Gordon (my brother) is in serious trouble she yelled~!.. My dad said, You are dreaming, go back to sleep. But again she caused a ruckus and insisted that my dad get up and call his brother who was the local constable.. They went together to where my brother should be, and on the way found that he had run off a high bridge and was down in the not too deep water still inside his car alive but badly hurt.
I think that some animals have this ability, stronger than we do at times. but most humans have lost it due to evolution, no longer needing it, but the innate ability of parents to children and persons who are very close, still have it at times.
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Mine was strongest in my late teens and earlly to mid-twenties. Then it started scaring me and I turned it off–literally. I’ve only had a few experiences since then that I feel it is best not to tell anyone else about…
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I have vivid dreams, often about past life of old girl friends.
My mother saw fit to do what she thought “was necessary” to break up my high school romance, so on graduation we were sent to different schools almost 2000 miles apart. Hers in Houston where she met and married a very nice man, and became very wealthy, with me to Pasadena California where I had a ball~!..
The reason for this was that she was Catholic (with a Catholic / Jewish “train orphan”) as her beautiful mother) and my mother was Evangelical.
We stayed good friends the rest of her life and actually Shirley became close friends with her as well, because we both lived about six blocks apart in the same part of Houston, Bellaire, and their likes, personalities, and intelligence were very similar.
.
This is a poem about the last dream I had about her:
https://mcouvillion.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/dreams-2/
And this is about another close girl friend I had in Dallas, who had a college room mate that decided to say untrue things about us, that broke us up in a very bad way~!.. A re-connection was impossible and the room mate (a professional dancer) turned out to have a crush on her. She got married within a few months of our breakup and ended up teaching art in a Tyler Texas high school, Her marriage did not last very long and later she came to see me when I lived in Lafayette Louisiana. But I had no desire to fix things because It was too late to fix. but we kept in touch and She never married again, and passed away about three years back.
I sent this poem to her a few months before she died, not knowing how sick she was.
https://mcouvillion.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/dreaming/
Ha~!, don’t get me started on my dreams~! Because I have never met you personally, I guess that is why you have never been the subject of one of my awful dreams.. Bet you are happy about that~!
SAM
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I have had several prescient experiences involving people coming to visit when I lived on an island — somebody was on the approaching ferry, coming to see us — or people who had died — most notably a cousin who had died while gardening in his back yard, but I learned it was true several weeks later. It feels a little eerie, particularly when people visit in their death transitions!
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This must have unsettled you. It is unexplainable!
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it is. I guess our minds are more mobile than our bodies regarding time..Witness that we can recall past times but can’t bodily return to them. Perhaps the same is true of the future.
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Perhaps that’s the answer.
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I had an experience the day before my dad died. I was up skiing with my best college friend and her family. I woke up the morning we were thinking of heading back down to Denver and I felt a desperate urgency to get on the road. For some reason I absolutely had to go back to town. I wasn’t very nice about it. We went. The next day I went to class and just a few minutes in, there was a knock on the classroom door. A student assistant came in to talk to the prof. He motioned me to come outside in the hall. They told me to go back to my dorm. I found my Aunt Martha there waiting in the office to tell me the news and to take me home.
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Had your dad been ill? I can’t remember my dad being sick one day in his life before his heart attack–not even a cold! But, that day there had been a wreck in front of our house and the ambulance driver asked my dad if he would kneel in the back of the hearse (which was also thhe ambulance) and hold the guys legs up while he drove him to Pierre, 60 miles away…the only hospital. Dad did so, one his knees and holding the guy’s legs up for some reason.. When he got home, he got in the car with my mom to drive to Wyoming to see us and had the heart attack on the way there. My mother wanted to stop when he developed the pain in his arm but he insisted he wanted to go on to Laramie. By the time they got there he had destroyed most of his heart. The drs. said he had the heart of a 2 year old child. Sad, sad.
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Very sad, Judy. My dad had MS.
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That is sadder. For how long?
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20 years or so.
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Crazy stuff! 😮
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