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A Friend's Deathbed Encounters

Roland Deschain said:
In the greenhouse I became aware of a voice, his voice calling me. He then relayed a message for me to urgently tell my Great Grandmother - just little things really - not to worry, he's ok they will be together again etc. There was a bit more to it and he was very reassuring to me when I asked him where he was and why he wasn't here.
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Can you clarify that bit...he remained soley a disembodied voice? Or he appeared visually too after he got your attention?
 
As I reported yesterday on the thread about dreaming of places before you've seen them in real life, the friend who is the subject of this thread is currently in Egypt for a few weeks with work. Yesterday, to quote what i wrote there, he

"called me from there to express his overwhelming sense of foreboding. Specifically it was triggered by/tied in with what he kept referring to as constant deja vu all day. (.....) I asked is it just in the moment that he encounters a thing that he has the sensation or is he actually anticipating what's around the corner before he gets there. He insists its the latter. The example he gave - if ive not misunderstood him - is of telling the people he was in a car with that a stranger was going to pass in front of them next. and - again if ive not misunderstood - a very specific person whose face he had in mind, mole on chin and all - then did so.

I asked if he had this feeling before and if so did anything come of it. He says he only has it before a death. And indeed he did once report - and i repeated on these boards - about his having this restless presentiment prior to a particular family death. "

The latter is of course a reference to this current thread. He was on the phone again tonight that the foreboding and deja vu have continued unabated. I pressed him further for details of the latter and what he described appeared to be more precisely psychic flashes of the future. Images popping vividly into his mind's eye.. one such this morning had prompted him to ask a female work colleague in his new workplace if there was anyone who fit a very specific description..smokey grey beard, glasses, yellow shirt, name beginning with R (he saw these things in his mind).. An hour or two later he spotted the person he was describing , right down to the colour of his clothes and pointed it out to his colleague. "That's Rashed" she told him.

Such examples are clearly precognition or clairvoyance rather than deja vu as you and i might use the term. They are not a normal daily experience for him, but are the trigger for his familiar sense of dread. He ended our conversation saying wearily he's going to phone his mother back home and see if everyone is alright.

An hour later he rang me back. He reports as soon as he spoke on the phone his mum started sobbing "have you heard the news?" A close cousin, a young man under 30, had been involved in a car crash and died of a cardiac arrest. It happened yesterday....
 
gattino said:
As I reported yesterday on the thread about dreaming of places before you've seen them in real life, the friend who is the subject of this thread is currently in Egypt for a few weeks with work. Yesterday, to quote what i wrote there, he

"called me from there to express his overwhelming sense of foreboding. Specifically it was triggered by/tied in with what he kept referring to as constant deja vu all day. (.....) I asked is it just in the moment that he encounters a thing that he has the sensation or is he actually anticipating what's around the corner before he gets there. He insists its the latter. The example he gave - if ive not misunderstood him - is of telling the people he was in a car with that a stranger was going to pass in front of them next. and - again if ive not misunderstood - a very specific person whose face he had in mind, mole on chin and all - then did so.

I asked if he had this feeling before and if so did anything come of it. He says he only has it before a death. And indeed he did once report - and i repeated on these boards - about his having this restless presentiment prior to a particular family death. "

The latter is of course a reference to this current thread. He was on the phone again tonight that the foreboding and deja vu have continued unabated. I pressed him further for details of the latter and what he described appeared to be more precisely psychic flashes of the future. Images popping vividly into his mind's eye.. one such this morning had prompted him to ask a female work colleague in his new workplace if there was anyone who fit a very specific description..smokey grey beard, glasses, yellow shirt, name beginning with R (he saw these things in his mind).. An hour or two later he spotted the person he was describing , right down to the colour of his clothes and pointed it out to his colleague. "That's Rashed" she told him.

Such examples are clearly precognition or clairvoyance rather than deja vu as you and i might use the term. They are not a normal daily experience for him, but are the trigger for his familiar sense of dread. He ended our conversation saying wearily he's going to phone his mother back home and see if everyone is alright.

An hour later he rang me back. He reports as soon as he spoke on the phone his mum started sobbing "have you heard the news?" A close cousin, a young man under 30, had been involved in a car crash and died of a cardiac arrest. It happened yesterday....
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This must be an horrendous burden for your friend. Not something I would want in my life that's for sure. Having said that a small dose of clairvoyance would have been very handy for me on a good few occasions in the past, but not premonitions of death.
 
So, more....

The sense of doom lifted with the confirmation of a family death. But i'd been intending to explore further what conceivable connection that sense might have with the accompanying psychic flashes /"deja vu" (as he called it).. i mean none of his mental glimpses of the future themselves related to the death.

He was on the phone this evening again. He no longer, as I said, had any oppressive feelings..however the deja vu (this time in the proper sense of the term) has persisted, he tells me...every place he encounters seeming inexplicably familiar. Separate to that, and this is how the conversation re-emerged, he described a visual image that had been popping into his mind repeatedly since Friday....

The level of description is very vivid, and suggests a mind's eye that produces far more photographic imagery than mine does. But for the record he tells me what he was seeing in his mind even as we were speaking was a man, presumably egyptian given his location, but certainly dark skinned, green/khaki t shirt, darkblue/grey jeans and male pattern bald. ie..hair around the sides....above all the man is very, very dusty, lying face down on a the side of dusty/yellowy road, his face turned slightly to one side.

He brought this up spontaneously as he was talking to me and and as i say claims he's been "seeing" it since Friday.

No other details beyond the physical description. I must repeat, this is not a regular experience and he's never spoken of having such visions prior to his arriving in Egypt.

I mark them down here as potential evidence in advance of a matching event.
 
Gattino, your original post reminds me of a story related to me by a dear Egyptian friend, with whom I shared many happy hours during our PhD studies. Her sister's father-in-law died and shortly afterwards - may even have been the day of the funeral - her son came to his parents and said that he had dreamed about his grandfather, that he was okay and a list of names that the dead man recited. The last name on the list turned out to be a former business associate whom he had not seen for about thirty years, and who would never have been spoken about in the family.

Sadly my friend's nephew was killed in the violence following the last Egyptian uprising.
 
GNC said:
It didn't read that way, I read it as a kid and the thought that 3am and not midnight was the witching hour blew my tiny mind.
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From Wiktionary

witching hour (plural witching hours)
  1. The hour after midnight, when witches and other supernatural beings were thought to be active, and to which bad luck was ascribed.
  2. (less common) The hour between 3:00 a.m. and 3:59 a.m., associated with demons. [from late 20th c.]
T63
 
Yes. Yes it was. I find myself returning to John Donne, for this poem as well as for many others:


No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee
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It's usually seen in modern english but this is the original, according to wikipedia.
 
Frideswide said:
Yes. Yes it was. I find myself returning to John Donne.
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Did Donne at university. Once, all alone, I watched an edition of Mastermind which had a contestant who specialist subject was Donne, and I got every question right! But there was only the cat as a witness.
 
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