'I see the Line'

I don't talk much about the line, few people know about it. The term comes from Steven King, he uses it in Dreamcatcher, trust me, the book is much better then the movie.I realize that most of you out there will not believe what I say, but that is OK, I don't expect you to and really don't care what you believe.When I was a kid, I didn't know that it was that big a deal, hell I figured everyone could see the line, when I found out that wasn't true, I started calling it my 'spider sense'. Hopefully everyone out there has figured out what the line is or at least what I am talking about. let's move on.

I could always 'tell' what was about to happen, small things mostly, who was gonna get picked, who was going to win, things like that. I'm sure you're all shaking your heads and thinking that you did that too, and maybe you could, who knows. One of the times I remember was the bike ride. If you've read the partial Bio I wrote you may remember the ride I broke my foot. I was on the handle bars and almost as soon as I got on I knew what was going to happen, I know what you are thinking, why not get off? well it doesn't really work that way.

As I got older it continued, I had read that Einstien would only sleep for three hours a night, so I started doing that, the rest of the night I would read, it kept the dreams from coming mostly. I don't remember the dreams that much, but I remember not liking them at all. I don't remember if the dreams meant anything back then, but then the dreams are never striaght forward.

'Oh I do that all the time'

I noticed this little tidbit when I got a job that had me traveling all the time. I never thought much about it till then because everyone says that it happens to them all the time. I know what the next song will be on the radio. I can see you rolling your eyes and thinking 'what a moron'. but here's what I realized. driving for hours straight listening to the radio, i knew what the next song would be, not every now and then not even a lot, I knew all the time! it would just pop into my head before it started playing. and not, as you are thinking, just songs that I knew, even songs I didn't. And no, it's not a trick that I can show off, i have to not be thinking about it, if I'm thinking about what the next song is, most of the time it won't happen. I also know what is on other stations, if a song I like is playing on another station, I would change automatically to that station. This usually happened with Pink Floyd songs. another thing that I noticed was the cops, I didn't have a radar detector and was told I should get one or I would get a lot of speeding tickets, In the year I traveled, I got no tickets, most of the other photographers got some even with radar detectors. I learned to trust that when I slowed down for no apparent reason, to look around, there was a cop somewhere. I have gotten two speeding tickets since I started driving, both of them I knew I was going to get and both times I had a radar detector. The one time was on a trip to New Orleans with Rachel, I actually was surprised, I thought I was going to get two tickets but only got one, of course when we got back, Rachel got a ticket a day or two later, so it was two tickets.

I always know when I am going to win something, always have. I was at a computer show and filled out a slip for a contest. I was walking around looking at the computers they had set up when the MC went on the stage at started talking, after talking for a while he started drawing names of the contest winners. I wasn't really paying attention to him, he gave away several prizes before I knew I won. I started making my way throught the crowd to get my prize (some software, T-shirt, pencils) and when I got to the front I stopped and he reached in and pulled out my name! Anoher time I was at work, I was just starting my lunch break and listening to the radio in the back room, they said they were giving away a CD player to the ninth caller. as soon as he said it I knew. I got up and walked to the lab (photo) asked my boss if I could use the phone, (sure), called and won on the first dial. My boss was surprised that i didn't look as if I had just won something, it was worth 6 or 7 hundred dollars as they had just come out, he didn't even know what the hell it was. And another time. A group of us went to a comedy club, before going in we filled out forms for a contest. We sat through the show drinking and having a good time, when the show was ending the MC came out and said they were giving away two glasses with the clubs name on them (Comedy Zone). As soon as he said it I stood up and was about to start walking to the stage, everyone at the table asked where I was going. 'I won' I told them. Since I had won and gotten lots of glasses recently, everyone at the table laughed thinking I was kidding and/or drunk (just a little) I then turned to go to the stage and they called me back, still thinking I was kidding. That is about the time they called my name as the winner. everyone burst out laughing as I went to collect my prize.

'In Dreams'

Now comes the part I don't like to talk about... The Dreams.

My dreams are usually strange, weird drug indused like. mostly hard to figure out what is going on. In January 1986 for several nights I had a dream, I was on an airplane, at least that is what I thought. I could hear the control tower and people were talking around me. It was dark and I couldn't tell what was going on, we were moving and things looked fine, then something happened and we were falling, I could hear the others around me. I would wake with a start when the fall stopped. It was the third dream before I realized It was a shuttle in the dream. I told a friend about the dream, I think they laughed. a few days later, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched.

In april of that year I started having another dream, I was somewhere that I didn't recognize, it seemed like a small town, the people there didn't speak english, I couldn't tell what the hell they were saying. In the distance was a factory and a fog was coming from there. as it advanced the people it touched would die, they didn't seen to understand and would just stand there as it came. I didn't understand this dream, I thought that it was from having read Steven King's the Mist, but I had read it long before the dream, at least several months if not over a year. the dream went away and I forgot about it. In May, the news of Chernobyl started coming in, I didn't really put much thought into it till one night on the news they showed a picture of Chernobyl, It was the factory from my dream, I had only seen US nuclear power plants and thought they all looked like that, with the large cooling towers, Chernobyl looked like a factory to me.

Someone asked me if I dreamed about 9-11 and no I didn't. I do remember that I had not slept much in the week before and I remember when talking to someone on that Saturday or Sunday, I mentioned that there hadn't been a terrorist attack in the US in a while, I paused for a few seconds then added, 'or an airplane crash'. At that moment, I thought of the towers, i figured it was because of the attack there in '93, and maybe it was?

One of the most recent dreams was back in December '02/January 03. I was driving and heard an airplane exploding overhead some distance in front of us over what I thought was the ocean. We drove as fast as we could towards the explosion and it wasn't over the ocean, the parts were everywhere littering the landscape and parts were still falling. the cockpit was the only part I could make out and I wondered where the bodies were. A few days later an airplane crashed in the mountains in some other country, I forget which. they showed the airplne scattered everywhere and I figured that was the dream. It wasn't till this summer, June/July that I was watching Tv and I saw a landscape just like the one in the dream, parts were scattered everywhere just like the dream. I had forgotten the dream after the plane crash and only seeing the picture brought it back. It wasn't of the plane crash in the mountains (there were no mountains in the dream), it was of a field in Texas, it was the Space Shuttle Columbia.

 

This is just a small list of 'seeing the line' so to speak. I don't expect anyone to believe any of this, some have seen it in action and may believe, others may or may not. As I said at the start, it really doesn't matter to me.