14. A Psychic Connection
(or “I Wished it had Happened to Me… uh…well… except for the mugging.”)
Mum heard Uncle L call out to her one night, when I was thirteen or fourteen years of age. The strange thing about that was he was miles away. His voice was so clear, she said later, that she immediately got out of bed and slipped into her housecoat, certain that her brother must have left his keys behind; but when she looked outside, no one was there. His bedroom door was ajar, and she could see it was not occupied, so she checked the kitchen and the living room. They were vacant too. She looked in on me, but I was asleep. Puzzled, she looked in every room again, before finally returning to bed, unwillingly deciding that it must have been a dream.
My mother was slightly uneasy in the morning. His tone, she said, had sounded as if he needed help and she could not rest until she knew he was all right. Thankfully, he was due home that morning after visiting friends. She figured she was being superstitious. After all, it was “only a dream”, she told herself. Just the same, she felt a little funny about it, for she was certain that she had been awake, thinking of other things, when she heard his voice.
Later that day he came home, looking rather scraped and rumpled, but he waved off his sister's concern and changed the subject. My uncle was epileptic, and during that period of his life, did not always remember (or maybe didn’t like) to take his medication, so from time to time he had cuts or bruises from falling in a seizure. It was not until afternoon tea that my mother told him how convinced she had been that he had called out to her during the night.
As she relayed her dream, I could see my Uncle L’s eyes widen ever so slightly. And when he asked her what time it happened, he fell quiet when she told him.
“What?! What?! WHAT??!!” I silently demanded, wanting to interrogate my uncle immediately to find out why he was looking so freaked out.
It was obvious that my mother’s experience was significant to him in some way. I waited while he wrestled with her story.
Finally, he said, “I was calling out at that time. I did need help at exactly that time!” (A little later, we learned that he’d been in the worst of places at the wrong time and had had a violent run-in with a strung-out mugger.)
“Far out!” I thought. “A real-life, legitimate case of psychic communication! Wow!” And I knew that my uncle – open-minded and ethical as he was – thought it was pretty strange too, or he'd never have mentioned the incident. He hated being fussed over. I knew that he had spoken about it only because he felt honour-bound to share what he knew about my mother’s psychic impression, and not keep it to himself and cause her to overlook this intuitive insight.
For a long instant, my mother was silent, and then quickly she shifted her focus to her brother’s experience. But it was over as far as he was concerned; he didn't want to discuss it; that was not why he had mentioned it. And Mum didn't want to talk about her moment of psychic contact. It was too weird, too unexplainable. She wanted no part of such clairvoyant episodes, for what good was hearing someone call you, if you did not know where he was, and could not help him? Because it was never discussed again, the episode was more or less forgotten, or at least shoved to a more distant level of memory. And life went on as usual.
As far though, as this “psychic phenomenon” was concerned, it made sense to me that my uncle’s plea for help had reached my mother’s psyche, for she had always displayed much kindness towards and understanding of her brother.
Bio XV
posted by Winter Child @ 10:33 a.m.
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