E's Friends: Dreams and Nightmares

Have you ever had a nightmare or a dream that felt so real, that you couldn't tell if you were awake or still caught in that dream? Has it ever happened where, a day or so after you had that nightmare or dream, that it happened for real? My good friend Joshua Pond (@JoshPond10 on Twitter) has submitted to me some of these dreams that have both terrified and have come to pass. I'm not saying that these things are supernatural in nature, but they most definitely are hard to say they're not. Today...we explore this phenomenon. Let's get right to it.

"Dreams...This hasn't happened too often, but a few times I have had dreams that all into the category of ‘things that I can’t deny, but can’t explain.’ Four times I have had incredibly vivid, lucid dreams, about something very odd that turns out to be either what you’d call prophetic or somehow tapping into events happening at the same time as the dreaming. I don’t dream, or, rather, I never remember dreaming. Every single day of my life I wake up totally unaware of having dreamed anything at all. So, what this means is, these incredibly vivid dreams are the only dreams I’ve ever had. I can best explain what they’re like by simply telling you the four. Three of them were ‘solved’ within hours of my waking, the fourth I still can’t explain.

1.
The first one was when I was about ten years old. We were planning to go to the county fair the next night. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, I heard someone in my room. I looked up and saw that it was my room but only partially. There were also barrels with plywood across their tops, like makeshift tables, and some serving as trashcans. The ground was grass and saw dust. There was a smell of the fair and a man was yelling things at me. He wanted my shoes and my money. I was so confused that I didn’t respond for a second. Then he shot me. I could feel it and even smell it,
but I didn’t fall over or anything. I looked down at myself and there were no wounds. Then I looked down on the ground and there I was. There was my dead body with my shocked, lifeless eyes staring up at me. I touched the cheek of that other dead Josh and it was cold. I looked up and the man was staring at my body for a moment, then ran off. I went and got in bed with my sister and didn’t sleep a wink. The next day I felt absolute certainty that this was no dream. I told my parents. They
said I just had a nightmare. I begged them for us not to go to the fair. At first they brushed it off, but they could see I was serious. Ok, no big deal, we can go the next night.

That night we watched the news and on it a story came on. It was a story of how a young man had been shot to death at the fair that night and his wallet, shoes and jacket taken. They showed the scene and it was exactly what I saw. They also said they had caught up with the perpetrator nearby. It was him, 100%. I looked up and my entire family was staring at me with ‘oh shit’ written all over their faces.


2.
The next happened when I was 12. I woke up in the night hearing someone calling my name and calling for help. It was an odd, ominous voice, almost like a mixture of wailing and singing. It was also the voice of a young woman. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. At first I thought someone just had the TV on, but they were calling my name. I got out of bed and walked to the TV room, it was off. Our TV was in a room near the back door. We lived a few feet from water and there was a small island just off shore, creating a sort of channel between us on the mainland and the island. It almost sounded like the voice was coming from the water, so I went to the window. The voice was stronger. Now she was saying, 'come find me, Joshua, come save me.' I looked out into the water and saw nothing, then something on the island caught my eye. I stepped outside to look closer and there she was, standing on the shore of the island. The problem was, I knew she wasn’t real in the sense of a living, breathing person. But there she was, plain as day, and I could hear her voice so clearly, like she was standing inches from me. Her voice became pleading, begging me to find her. She was wearing what I can only describe as traditional Native American garb and her hair was back in a braid. It broke my heart, I started to sob, I sat down crying and telling her there was nothing I could do. It was at that moment I woke up in my bed and it was morning.

I never figured this one out. My parents didn’t let me go out to the island and were poor, so we certainly didn’t have a boat or anyone we could hire. I tried doing some research and learned that our town had been the site of one of the mass graves created during the Jackson administration during his ethnic cleansing of natives. I have no idea, however, if that is connected, but it certainly felt connected. I have very little doubt that I’d find her bones out there, but have never looked and never
found her. Even to this day, I can feel the pain I felt coming from her.


3.
I was 17 and I woke up to the sound of a phone ringing. Weird thing was, I couldn’t figure out where the phone was. I went to every phone in the house, none of them were ringing, but that phone just kept ringing somewhere in the house. I searched and searched and then could tell generally where it was, but where made no sense. It sounded like it was ringing in my mother’s closet. I went in and it was loudly ringing behind her clothes. I pushed them aside, but there were just more clothes. The deeper I went in, the louder the phone rang and the deeper I had to go. The closet seemed endless, then, suddenly, I ran into a desk with the ringing phone on top. I picked it up and it was the sound of my grandfather. I could tell he was trying to warn me of something but his voice was so faint and so far off that I couldn’t tell what he was saying. It was like he was standing far away from the phone. What’s more confusing is my grandfather had died the year before. I desperately tried to get him to speak up, I wanted to hear him, I could feel the desperation in his voice, but it only got fainter. Then suddenly my grandmother came on and asked who I was and why I was calling. Before I could answer, she hung up. When she did, I instantly woke up. It felt so similar to those other one’s, but I just brushed it off as a super weird dream.

I went to school like normal. When I came home I learned that while I was at school my grandmother had called my mom and asked her to come over to pick up some food my grandmother had made. This was not an unusual occurrence. My grandmother lived two blocks from us and she’d cook meals that were way more than she could eat and she’d send us the leftovers. This time, however, my mean, vile grandmother had other plans. She hated my mother and, as it turns out, my mother went to the house to find, not a casserole, but my grandmother’s body. She had hung up with my mom and shot herself in the head. Her final 'f*ck you' to my mother was having her be the one to come find her. She was truly awful. The phone, the warning from my grandfather, the disconnection by my grandmother, it all came back to me like a lightning strike. I felt like I couldn’t breath. I knew instantly why I’d had that dream.


4.
I was 21. Suddenly I woke up to find myself floating down a river in a little inner tube. I felt so relaxed, staring up at the stars in the sky and feeling the water with my hands and feet. Then I realized how odd it was and began to look around. Wait, where the hell was I? It looked like lower Manhattan on the Hudson. I’ve never lived in NYC, but I’ve had family there my whole life and have spent tons of time there. But I was living in Austin. How’d I get from Austin to the Hudson? I was so confused. I decided to let it go, closed my eyes and just floated. Then I heard an explosion. Not some little explosion, but a violent, raging explosion, full of fire and fury. I looked up and there was flaming wreckage flying out of the sky at me. I leaped out of my tube and felt and saw pieces of flaming debris falling into the water all around me. It was terrifying. I propped myself back up on the tube and started to paddle away. Then I saw what looked like a wall of dust coming at me at blistering speed. Just as I was enveloped in the giant cloud, I woke up. I instantly felt the compulsion to turn on the TV. When I did the station was talking about the first plane hitting the first tower of the World Trade Center, located in lower Manhattan. I felt like all the blood drained out of me. Later that day I saw that giant cloud of dust when the towers fell and I knew it was the same one..."


So? What do you guys think? Premonitions? Something from the void reaching out to send warnings? When we sleep, does our consciousness enter a new realm or reality? Maybe even the future? If you'd like to hear more from my good friend Josh or any of my other friends, let me know via Twitter @EnzosReviews or if you'd like to speak to Josh directly, tweet him @JoshPond10. Thanks for reading! Sleep tight....