The Dream That Told Me Not to Get on the Bus

I am not a superstitious person and I have never had anything like this happen before or since. But one night I had a dream that was less a dream than an instruction.

There were no images I can recall. Just darkness, and a calm, level voice, neither male nor female, that said, very clearly, "do not take the early bus." It said it three times, spaced out, patient, the way you repeat something to a child so they will remember it. Then I woke up, in the dark, with my heart going, the sentence still hanging in the room.

I take the 6:40 bus to work every day. In the morning I lay there feeling foolish. A dream is a dream. But the voice had been so calm and so certain that I could not shake it. So I did something I never do. I let the 6:40 go past without me, standing at the stop watching it pull away, feeling like an idiot, and I waited twenty minutes for the 7:00.