Printed in the Conscious Creation Journal
February 2002
September 11th Foretold
by Susan M. Watkins
Since September 11, each of us has had to find a way to reconnect with the world in something like the old routines and philosophies that comprised our individual perspectives before those profoundly shocking events took place. Any sort of belief that our reality might originate from within has not provided an especially comfortable cushion. In fact, such ideas are often unsettling and not infrequently maddening, since they inevitably lead to questions about unconscious knowledge and intent. As in: What inner focus led each of us—every one of us in this reality, wherever we might live and however immediately or not we were involved—to experience this literal explosion of tragedy and social upheaval that seemed to come upon us all without warning? What collective purpose does this represent?
Over time I’ve begun to form my own thoughts about such questions, and within that framework, what is particularly interesting to me is the apparent fact that, however horrific and appalling all this has been, the one thing it was not was “unknown.”
Just on the outward level of apparent happenstance, there were dozens of stories rising out of September 11 about people who lived or died by making last-minute changes of plans, either consciously (in deciding to take an earlier or later flight, or to go into work later than usual, or not at all) or “un”consciously (as with the fellow who fell asleep on the subway for the first time ever and thus missed his morning stop under the World Trade Center). Disasters like this (and indeed all events), whether small and personal or huge and universal, are always surrounded by these tales (the financier George Vanderbilt canceled his plans at the last minute to sail on the Titanic because his mother had a “bad feeling” about it), and they are fascinating and worthy of record and study in themselves. Inner knowing and response to that knowing is the gel that comprises experience, after all.
Just as intriguing is the kind of precognition that comes in the form of dreams and dream-like correlations. As I discovered some years ago when I did the research for a book about dreams in a small town, such prescience, when it happens, rarely gives a complete picture or an explicit warning. Instead, it tends to provide glimpses of the thing to come, as if tailored to your personal need-to-know factor. Moreover, these “glimpses” seem to keep giving out bits of information after the fact, in something like an awareness/response cool-down mode.
“Inner knowing and response to that knowing is the gel that comprises experience, after all.”
I have some examples of pre- and post-cognitive dreams about September 11. My own occurred September 8 or 9, the Friday or Saturday night before. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t write it down (since writing makes things more real for me, maybe this was a subliminal defense mechanism). It was in vivid color and perfectly clear, though confused. I was trying to make my way down through piles of fiery rubble to get to the depths of hell to rescue a friend—someone who in fact had died some years ago. Why this friend should be in hell, specifically the last circle of hell as in Dante’s Inferno, I didn’t know, but it was up to me to find him and lead him out of there. Along the way, through dark-fire mazes of rocks and twisted building girders, I kept meeting other people clambering through the ruins, but nobody would give me any directions or help me in any way. I crawled and stumbled on and on, lower and lower, and the noise and confusion got worse and worse—until I woke up, unsure if I’d found my friend. Had I glimpsed him down there, at the bottom of hell, or not? Had I failed, and left him behind? For several moments, I was disoriented and heartsick.
But as I came awake I also thought of The 13th Warrior, the Antonio Banderas movie I’d seen for the first time the previous evening. It’s a retelling of the Beowulf story, and in it, Banderas and his Northmen companions go deep into a cave to root out the leaders of the mysterious invaders that have been terrorizing nearby villages. The underground scenes are vivid, and lit by fire, so as I came to, I figured this must be the source of my dream’s storyline.
Not until after the WTC attacks and subsequent events did I connect my dream with the scenes of rescue workers digging through the fiery ruins, and for that matter with the associative element of the Northmen searching out the enemy in his cave, the same words and imagery used by US officials in post-September 11 military response.
It’s also interesting that in The 13th Warrior, Banderas’s character is an Arab, a heroic figure who helps defeat the adversary and lives to record the tale. But why, I wondered, was this particular friend of mine the object of my dream-search? Other friends had passed away in recent years; why him?
It wasn’t until later that week, when I was on the phone with Moment Point Press editor Susan Ray, comparing dream-notes, that the connection came to me. Thunderstruck, I realized that my dead friend’s birthday was on September 11! Which seemed like a whopper of a hint of events to come—certainly it’s a whopper piece of hindsight—but nothing compared with the dream that Susan related to me:
“Mathew [my husband] and I are sitting at an outdoor cafe in a wharf-like area. It has a military look about it, and it’s in a city—lots of concrete. Mathew leaves to do an errand at a government- or insurance-type office and soon the sky over my head is filled with huge, black planes. They’re flying very low, very slowly, and I’m filled with dread. But nobody else seems to be paying attention.
“I look to a nearby table and see an older gentleman sitting alone. I know telepathically that he’s been through WWII, so I watch to see his reaction to the planes. He whispers, “Oh, Shit,” with a tone that matches the dread I’m feeling. So I immediately get up to look for Mathew. And in the near distance, in the direction the planes are flying, I can see and hear explosions. Still, no one seems to be paying attention.
“I spend the rest of the dream frantically searching for Mathew, while all around me people are ignoring what’s happening. Everyone has this maddening don’t-bother-me-I’ve-got-work-to-do attitude as I ask them for help. As the dream ends I spot Mathew, back at the table where we started, looking for me.
“That morning—Sunday, September 9—I recounted the dream, in detail, to Mathew. We came to the conclusion that it was a stress dream. But that didn’t ring true to me. I wasn’t particularly stressed and the dream had had an epic feel to it. Two days later, September 11, Mathew called from work (a corporate office building outside of Boston) and said, “Turn on the TV; you won’t believe what’s happening.”
Note the coincidental elements in Susan’s dream and mine of trying to find someone in the midst of a specific kind of chaos, the ultimate nightmare scenario to come out of those scenes of wreckage and horror—at least for those on the ground. James, an email correspondent who lives in England, seems to have picked up on the plight of those in the air. As often happens with precognition, his dream, on the night of September 10, has roots in another, coincidental incident—in his case, a television program he had watched that same evening, a fire fighting documentary on a UK Discovery channel. In much the same way as my watching The 13th Warrior, elements of his UK program merged in a compelling clairvoyant blend of dream and event. “The show featured a giant towering inferno that had happened in Philadelphia some years ago,” James wrote. “The outcome of it in some ways was like another version of the WTC disaster. The pictures of the burnt out and collapsed Philadelphia skyscraper were the last thing I saw before I went to sleep.
“During my dream that night, I had the sensation of flying on a plane (not as a passenger but from an all-angle vantage point) that was certainly on a rocky flight path with emergency lighting on—golden brown diffused light you might get from burning embers.” The next day, he switched on his radio just in time to hear an announcer report the first plane hitting the WTC. And, of course, he watched the rest of it unfold on TV—almost as if official news itself were part of an ongoing prescience.
James also said that for days before September 11, he’d been suffused with “a general feeling of gloom and demolition,” as he put it, “as I used to get when an IRA bomb or threat was imminent here in London.” Reading this email, I remembered a sentence that had been playing over and over in my mind for weeks; I’d thought it was the opening of an oncoming novel (which it might be anyway). “Later,” the sentence droned, “it was remembered how clear the sky had been on that last autumn day of the old world.” After September 11, various news outlets, including The New Yorker, described that day in almost exactly the same words.
Since then, aftermath dreams and reverberations have been spilling over, not surprisingly. Friends have been emailing me dreams filled with panic and guilt, though hopeful resolution has begun to show through, too. One person saw a portion of herself split off to become a second and separate entity that had supposedly been murdered, yet this self wasn’t quite dead and wasn’t quite human, either. Another friend, who is ardently opposed to this country’s military campaign, dreamed of being put to death in an electric chair that was a mini-nuclear device; the condemned, who were dissidents, had to set off the devices themselves. Yet the moment of death was only a sudden, painless sensation of rapidly floating up to the ceiling, “like we’re on our way somewhere,” he said. Reassurance from the psyche? Still another friend dreamed of challenging Jesus and Muhammad to show up and fight it out between them. But the challenge was a no-show; thus, no confrontation came about.
Which is, one would most sincerely hope, the most accurate precognition of all.
Susan M. Watkins is a former newspaper reporter, feature writer, and columnist, and has also worked in radio news. She is the author of Conversations with Seth and Speaking of Jane Roberts: Remembering the Author of the Seth Material, published by Moment Point Press, as well as books and fiction in other genres.
©2002, Susan M. Watkins. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the Conscious Creation Journal. (Feel free to duplicate this article for personal use – please include this copyright notice and the URL.) http://www.consciouscreation.com