I hit my head pretty badly a week before Thanksgiving last year. I knocked myself out for a few seconds. I don’t know how long I was out, witnesses say less than 30 seconds, but how reliable are uninterested people? Anyway, as soon as I woke up, I started to get flashes of events. I saw them put me in the gurney right before they did, I saw them staple my head right before, etc. It happened that way all night. I laid in bed the next day, and mostly just tried to recover from knocking myself out. But my dreams were different. I saw things all through the hotel I was in. I could see the maid knocking on each door, “Housekeeping…” I must have heard her say that 1000 times while I tried to sleep.
When she came to my door, I yelled out, “Not today!!!” before she knocked. I think. Maybe in my confused state things were happening like normal, my reaction time was just that much slower. But as I healed, the “premonitions” were still there. They’re hard to explain, I get them right before the thing happens. I mean, how useful is that? I don’t have time to react in most cases. But it’s not just bad things I see, I see everything right before it happens. It’s like I’m viewing the world through a DVR on 5-second delay. I’m learning to deal with it, because sometimes, what I see causes me to physically react.
For instance, one time I flinched right before my cat jumped up onto my head. I saw it coming and had enough time to react and move, which meant it didn’t happen. Until that time, I thought I was seeing the future, ever so slightly ahead of everything else, but as it turns out, it can be changed, if I can just react quickly enough.
It’s exhausting. I feel like a shortstop during the World Series facing the best line-drive team ever. I’m constantly on my toes. I ignore 99% of the things that happen to me. Like I need to see myself making coffee 5 seconds before I make coffee. But to keep the analogy, I have to watch every single hit to see if I need to field it. By the end of the day, I can’t keep my eyes open. Even something as simple as reading now takes enormous focus and effort. I’m also becoming a recluse. I can’t stand to see what everyone is about to do all the time, so I’ve taken to just staying home. I took a day last week and meditated. It was odd. I had to focus my thoughts to be clear, but I could see that I didn’t have clear thoughts. I’ve kept at it, and it seems to be helping. With effort, I can slow the pace of the visions and limit their scope. I’m up to meditating 5 times each day, but I hope more will help me train my brain to a new level. I can’t keep going the way it is right now.
—
Gary had no idea what had happened to him. There was a small area in his brain that had been jostled and “activated,” but he hadn’t learned how to use it yet. It was turned on, but not being exercised. Through his daily meditations, he would learn that he could stretch out the timing of the visions. He would also learn he could control the length. This would give him eventually the ability to see into the future, although only the future of something he focused on.
The visions made him wonder what else we didn’t know about the human brain. What other mysteries can be unlocked if the right portion of our brain is just stimulated? He started to do intense research on the subject, including reaching out to avant-garde neurologists who were working on similar experiments.
Before long, Gary became a studied subject – he was a freakish curiosity in neurology circles. He proved out his abilities through a series of card deck related tests – where he would be able to predict the cards without fail 100% of the time. The doctors put him through test after test. CT scans, MRIs, and finally, they wanted to operate. He drew the line at brain surgery. “I’m sorry, guys, that’s just not going to happen. I’m as curious as the next guy, but I kinda need my brain intact,” he told them.
The part of his brain that had been “activated” was still a mystery. But the time spent researching and working with neurologists had allowed him to practice controlling it. He still got flashes continually, but he was able to ignore the ones that happened involuntarily mostly. But he found if he meditated on a person, or an upcoming event, he could get completely clear visions of how the event would play out, or how a certain day would happen for the targeted person.
He now had to figure out why he had been given this ability, whether he should utilize it, and if so, for what end? Clearly, he could help find people, and help the police. But then a nagging voice popped up in his head, “What have the police ever done for you?” It was a strange voice, it wasn’t his internal voice, his regular voice. It was foreign, at least that’s what he thought at first. He tried to focus his new-found power on the voice, on the area of his head that had been activated, but nothing happened.
“That’s odd, I’ve never had ‘nothing,’” he thought. The thought was in his normal voice, not the voice that had just communicated with him. It seemed to be gone now, or at least hiding, realizing that it had peeked out a little soon, possibly.
That was the first time he second-guessed his new abilities. Until that point, he had thought he just “knocked something loose” inside his brain or had literally knocked some sense into himself. Now he wondered about the true source of this ability.
Thanks for reading. Please subscribe here – feel free to leave a note in the comments! Please?? C’mon, I asked nicely!
The Naive Romantic 