A wave of dread hit me at my desk so hard I called my brother without knowing why. He answered mid-fall from a ladder. My call is the only reason he was not alone at the bottom of it.
I use a snore-tracking app. On the night I dreamed about the grey room, it flagged 40 minutes of "speech" — and I live alone.
Two weeks after we buried Rooster, I heard his tags jingle down the hall and felt him jump onto the foot of the bed, exactly the way he had for nine years.
At Dad's funeral we joked he'd 'send a robin like the mugs say.' Within a week, one robin took up residence at each of his four children's homes — four cities, same behaviour.
A week of dreams put me in a grey meeting room facing three interviewers and one impossible question about bridges. The real panel matched the dream — chair squeak and all.
I hit the cattle guard at 11:04 and the next thing I knew it was 11:26, my hazard lights were on, and my truck was facing the way I had come.
As a new night nurse I was told: 'when they reach up with both hands, call the family.' I've now seen the reach eleven times. It has never once been wrong.
When my dog vanished, I dreamed him sitting under an upturned rowing boat past three blue fences. Two days of searching the wrong places — then I found the fences.
I bought a beautiful old mirror at an estate sale. Movement in it lagged, a heartbeat behind the real room. One night my reflection stayed still after I turned away. I covered it. I still hear it under the sheet.
A friend took me to a place I had never been. Before we sat down I knew the crack in the third tile, the broken clock stuck at 4:20, and that the waiter would drop a tray. He did.
A stranger sat beside me at the late bus stop and greeted me by my full name, then listed my street, my work hours, and my dog's name, smiling, as if we were old friends. I had never seen him before.
My parents had one song. It played on the hospital radio as Dad died — and it interrupted programming, wrong and unannounced, as Mum's funeral car turned into the cemetery.
After dreaming the sequence 7-31-4 for a week I played it in every lottery going and won nothing. Then I ran out of fuel outside 731 4th Street — where my life turned.
Every year on my grandmother's birthday our house fills with the smell of her caraway bread — and last year, the neighbours across the street asked what we'd been baking.
I dreamed of a man holding a cardboard sign with a strange, specific sentence on it. Three days later I drove past him, on a road I had never taken, holding that exact sign.
I dreamed my grandmother stood at my bedroom door in her garden coat and said 'lock up behind me.' The phone woke me minutes later; she had died at exactly that time.
At a viewing I told the agent about the crack shaped like a heron before we entered the room it was in — I had been dreaming that hallway for six years.
My father, lucid to the end, spent his last morning talking to the doorway — and greeted, by name, the brother we hadn't yet told him had died two days earlier.
She said her dress was "cream." It was a floor-length white gown with a small train. She arrived early for photos, positioned herself beside the aisle, and told guests she was "the other bride."
Since my teens, one unfamiliar face kept appearing in my dreams — always at a blue door. At thirty-one, a rental viewing put me in front of that door, and he opened it.
