#32 Text:
Aus einer Familienchronik: Anna Determann wurde geboren am 27. September 1812. Aus ihrer Jugendzeit erzählte ihre Tochter Hermine folgendes: »Als Mädchen von zwölf Jahren steht die Mutter einmal in Ueffeln, wo ihr Vater Kantor war, vor der Haustür und sieht über den Kirchhof einen Leichenzug gehen. Voran ihr Vater mit den Schulkindern, dann eine Kindsleiche und einige Männer und Frauen als Gefolge. Der Zug kommtnicht durch das Tor des Kirchhofes ihrem Hause gegenüber, durch das alle Leichen getragen werden, sondern durch das Tor an der anderen Ecke, das nur für die Kirchgänger bestimmt ist. Da meine Mutter ihren Vater in der Wohnstube weiß, erschrickt sie heftig und schreit: >Vater, Vater!< Der kommt aus der Stube, und da erzählt sie ihm, was sie gesehen. Er will es ihr ausreden und sagt: >Sieh mal, Kind, schon deshalb kannst du es nicht gesehen haben, weil durch dieses Tor niemals eine Leiche getragen wird.< Einige Tage später stirbt das Kind eines Heuermanns, und in der Nacht vor der Beerdigung stürzt das Tor ein, durch welches alle Leichen getragen werden. Das Kind muß durch das andere Tor getragen werdengerade so, wie meine Mutter es gesehen hat.« Translation: From a family chronicle: Anna Determann was born on 27 September 1812. From the time of her youth her mother Hermine told her daughter the following story: "As a girl of twelve my mother once stood in front of her house in Ueffeln, where her father was Cantor, and saw a funeral procession passing over the churchyard. At the head her father with the schoolchildren, then the body of a child and several men and women in train. The procession comes not through the churchyard gate opposite her house, through which all bodies are carried, but through the gate at the other end, which is designated only for churchgoers. "Since my mother knew her father in the living room, she took great fright and screamed: 'Father, Father!' He comes out of the room, and then she tells him what she saw. He wants to talk her out of it and says: 'See here, child, you can't have really seen it, because no body is ever carried through this gate." Several days later the child of a hired hand dies, and in the night before the interment the gate through which all the bodies are carried breaks down. The child must be carried through the other gate--exactly as my mother had seen." Comments: Now we have a vision not only with details, but with one detail contrary to previous practice, and yet this vision too comes to pass. It's as if the Scotsman saw a trout swimming next to his brother in a pond that never had trout, but before the vision became real a stream with trout was diverted to the pond. The point that EJ seems to be making is that a true vision actually does predict the future: it sees things before they happen. This could mean a lot of things, but I will suggest just one: powerful intuition. It so happens that I "foresaw" the Challenger disaster of January 1986. On the night before it happened, I was preparing supper with the television on in the next room. The announcer was saying that a group of schoolchildren had come from Japan, I think, to see the lift-off and the teachers hoped that they would not be disappointed by a postponement due to rain. I said--out loud, for some reason--that they were going to be more disappointed when the spaceship exploded. I had a momentary flash of the event in my mind and a momentary urge to warn somebody, but then laughed it off and finished making my supper. When the next morning the engineer called in from the other room (I work at a radio station), it took me a moment to remember my "vision." He was horrified and was jumping up and down while they showed the re-runs. I was not surprised at all and only smiled gloomily, which made him wonder. So then, am I a seer? Not at all. In the preceding week at the radio station I had handled the news, which included daily items about weather and problems with the Challenger. There had been four postponements, and NASA clearly wanted to get the shuttle off of the ground. It was not hard to foresee a disaster on the way, but hard consciously to accept it. My unconscious mind had no such hesitation and made the bizarre manifestation of speaking the warning out loud. The "vision" was just my imagination. Similarly, I think, the Scotsman in #31 might have feared that his missing brother had gone a-wandering in the bogs; his unconscious mind presented him with a likely picture, complete with trout detail. The mother in #32, though a little girl, may have seen that gate crumbling in the same week that she saw that little workman's boy coughing so hard. Her unconscious mind might have worried, "How will he be buried if he can't go through that gate?" We need to know more before we can credit the two with some kind of supernatural vision. There is another factor: There may be a tendency, after the vision becomes reality, for the seer to recast the original vision to make it conform more exactly with what actually took place. And a final factor: The seer may have many other visions that prove to be wrong, so that the one that proves right begins to look like a coincidence: reality confirmed one of the many potential futures envisioned by the unconscious mind. I had another bold vision besides the one about the Challenger. It was that Robert Kennedy was going to declare himself a candidate for President against Lyndon Johnson, and he was going to win. When he was shot in 1968, I remembered my vision and said to myself: "Well, I knew something important was going to happen about him." If I told you all of my premonitions, you would think I was blind and had no powers at all. But if I told you only about the Challenger you would think I was as clairvoyant as that little girl. Question: Is Heuermann a hired hand or a haymaker?
