Is the Gift of Knowing Returnable If I Saved the Receipt?

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Below.

I love movies  (books,  too)  that have  time  travel  in them. for me, pretty much any movie with a time travel subplot will win out over the most award-winning film in theatres.

Attract Him Back

I think it’s because I understand the complicated emotions that are usually overlooked  in these movies.  You know, like how the hero feels when he meets an alternate version of the woman who’s been his true love for years and he’s lost her and now he has a chance to be with her or save her or whatever but she doesn’t remember him or their time together because she’s been in a different time line.  I have a suspense story in mind I’d like to write one day, Room Without a Door, where a woman is pulled from a car crash by a paramedic she was married to in a different timeline where he was killed.  In this timeline, he’s alive, they’ve never met, he’s engaged to the woman who murdered  his  double,  but  she’s  thought  to  be  an  over- medicated frootloop who’s stalking the poor guy.  It will be an interesting  creative  exercise in what is reality and what isn’t.

I guess the idea of alternate timelines appeal to me so much because I’ve had intuitive flashes and warnings for so many years.   The warnings show what might happen and give me an opportunity to prevent it.  It’s like seeing a possible future and changing it.  Nothing big or earth- shaking.  No, it’s usually a matter of getting someone to the hospital in  time or an assurance that everything will be fine.

The more at-ease I become with myself, the more I have those strange feelings of just knowing. I think most of my life, I’ve had these, but I rarely got confirmation so I didn’t trust any of it.

I’ve been more apt to trust it with other people, gifted intuitives I’ve  worked with and researched with.   A few days  ago,  I  chatted  by   phone   with  a  friend  who’s a   medical intuitive who promptly asked  about my right wrist, my lower back, and my headaches. And that I was dehydrated. Yes, my right wrist is bothering  me because of a repetitive  stress injury.           Yes, my lower back is stiff from the sofa I slept on at my mom’s.  Yes, after breathing the fumes from the floor cleaners at the hospital, my sinus headaches have been ratcheted up  to a dull throb and I’m fighting an infection from the irritants.  She was dead-on. And yes, I’m dehydrated.

My Personal  Obi-Wan  recently  listed  about  10  unusual things that she thought I’d have to deal with by the end of December, some coming up a lot faster than others, and the need to be  prepared to act when they happened.  Well, within 24 hours, I’d already run right smack dab into three of them and two of those three were absolutely bizarre predictions involving people I hadn’t seen in years.

Me?  It doesn’t  seem that  cut  and dried  when  the “Gift  of  Knowing”  drops  a  bit  of  knowledge  on  my head. Usually,  I’ll ignore  it.                    Or, I’ll deny it because  I don’t trust it but then friends will get mad at me because to them it’s obvious that I knew something and acted accordingly when to me, I didn’t know it.

Last spring, I sat in my car  with my brother and had a long conversation  with  him  about  people  he’d  known over the years.  We usually see each other only once a year and try to catch up then.  Our  dad had been in the hospital, so this was one of those  “out-of-cycle” visits that happens occasionally.  For some reason, I felt  very attuned to my brother that afternoon.

As we sat talking, I suddenly knew something that was going to happen.  It was…obscure.  The kind of thing you wouldn’t expect to happen, ever. The odds of it happen- ing were  microscopic.  It would involve time, strangers coming together,   and quite a bit of effort   and expense on their  part.       With  life-altering  results,  in a very  bad way.  It didn’t come in a visual flash—more of a sudden epiphany, but  instead  of  understanding  something  that had  happened in the past, I understood  something  that was about to happen if I didn’t speak up and change it.  I had to stop it.

I don’t think my brother believed me then.  Or maybe he did and didn’t acknowledge it.  But I was absolutely certain this thing was on the horizon.   This wasn’t a fear talking. My  fears are much more commonplace.

But I told my brother with  absolute faith in what I knew that “This is coming unless you do something about it.”

To my  knowledge,  it never  happened. Precautions were taken.  Then it seemed silly.  Cassandra syndrome, I know.

A few  days  ago,  I  learned  that  no,  it  didn’t  hap- pen.  But it was attempted. The situation was altered in such a way that the thing  I’ d been  warned about  was pre- vented.

Things like that both scare me and comfort me at the same time.  There are other things I know with total certainty are coming.  Things that won’t make sense to any- one else now, things that  other people would see as an opportunity to ridicule me for alleging, but I know they’re coming.  I know they’re meant to be, and I know it with a quietness that connects me to the Universe with a low, steady hum in my soul.

It’s easy for those who haven’t experienced  it to play the role of  skeptics. Perhaps if they better understood field theory and satellite communications, they would understand the patterns of energy that permeate  the world around us, but most won’t understand because they look for reasons not to.

Meanwhile, I’ll just entertain  myself  with this question:  if you met someone you’d seen yourself with in an alternate timeline, what would you say to him?