Heart Knowledge

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Last week, I mentioned writing about that little bit of precognition or clairvoyance or "shine" as Stephen King put it, that so many of us seem to have. There are little things, like getting a song in your head and then hearing it on the radio a short time later. Or maybe thinking about a movie scene and then running across that movie on the TV when you turn it on. Sometimes it's getting a phone call from someone you haven't seen or heard from in ages, but who randomly popped into your head. I know people who have picked up the phone to call someone (this was on the old land lines, mind you) only to have that very person already on the line. The folks I know had intercepted the call before the phone had time to ring.

But sometimes, when relationships and emotions are factored in, the info we draw seemingly from thin air is a lot more complex.

When I was in high school, I fell head over heels for my first real love. (Ask anyone who was with me during my senior year; they heard all about him ad nauseum.) As things worked out, I was much more enamored with him than he ever was with me, and I carried that brilliant but very heavy torch for more than a year. He was also a class behind me in school, so I was already in college when he departed for his own freshman year at his chosen university out west.

At the time, he was the love of my life and everyone knew it, including his family. I had gotten quite close to all of them, especially his dad, who was like a second father to me. Well, one morning I was sitting in lecture at U of I (Chicago Circle, as it was called back then) when I started feeling ill. I mean, really ill. I put up with it through the rest of class but by the time lecture ended, I knew I needed to go home and crash. So I did.

And while I was sleeping, I dreamed about my guy who was away at school, about a girl named Candy who had long blonde hair and blue eyes, and who also had a white Mustang. And when I woke up, all I could feel was anxiety. Cold, gut-clenching worry. I held out and tried to will myself better for the rest of the day, but by that evening, I called his dad and said, "If your son had been injured or was really sick, you'd know about it, right?" That piqued his interest. I told him about the dream and he said, "Well, that's got me curious. I guess we'll have to pretend that his mother is missing him and give him a call." About an hour later, he got back to me with some information.

Yes, his son was injured. Not in a bad car-crash way, but hurting enough to make going to class impossible for a day or two. Yes, he was with a blue-eyed blonde whose name was Connie, not Candy (oops). And yes, she did indeed drive a white Mustang. After he finished telling me that, he said that I could stop worrying. And I'll bet his son said that I could stop dreaming. Actually, the nature of our (almost non-) relationship changed after that phone call. I think I maybe frightened him a little. I think I frightened myself a little.

But what I've decided is that I'm a better receiver than I am a broadcaster, if that makes any sense. I pick up things from people I'm close to (not physically, but emotionally) and in weird ways, at times. I had a very close friend in high school who was prone to depression, and sometimes if we were sleeping over, she would wake me up to talk. I woke up one night to hear her calling my name and was out of bed to go sit on hers and chat before I remembered that she had married and moved, and that I would probably never have that kind of middle-of-the-night talk again. But I did call her the next day and she admitted she had been so depressed the night before that she almost called me. She didn't because it was so late.

I don't get information this way all the time (and thank God for that!) But I do get it, sometimes. I like to think that when people are really close, they find ways to share without needing words, or a phone, or any other kind of device. Just a kind of mind-to-mind thing. Or maybe mind-to-heart. I don't know. I know hard-core scientists scoff at this kind of stuff because it can't be replicated or proved in a lab. But then again, I don't know that love can be proved in a lab either, so I'm okay believing what I do without any scientific proof whatsoever. After all, as Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of...We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart."