I am not sure what you call it but I occasionally experience an extreme sense of dread and foreboding. My body feels like it has been drained off any life, my stomach sinks and my mind is filled with unexplained unrelenting feeling that something bad is happening or going to happen except I that I am blind to this event. It is a claustrophobic state, akin to that of an anxiety attack except that it does not feed into itself and consume the mind into a spiraling frenzy. I can still go about my chores with relative expediency but the dark clouds are always there; hovering ominously and threatening to wreak and reveal its potential destruction.
Whenever I had experienced this state in the past, I had found (in most cases) that something bad had indeed happened to me or someone I care about. Of course my logical mind can explain that this ‘confirmation’ of my felt-dread is simply a retrofitting of cause-and-effect; the creative mind has found an explanation later to justify or validate that feeling of dread. This is not dissimilar to reading a horoscope’s prediction and searching for a fit in one’s actual life events.
In struggling to find a definition, the best I can come up with is that of ‘premonition’. But even if I allow myself to believe in such a thing, the question begs as to why I get them? Moreover, why have such premonitions if it is never clear enough so as I can ‘warn’ the concerned parties about such impending mishaps? The mind is a mysterious thing indeed.
In looking for an explanation for this most recent ‘premonition’ that filled me the entire weekend, I found out last night that someone close to me had a car accident (albeit minor) because he had too much to drink at a wedding overseas. When he rang to tell me about it minutes after it happened, I advised him to catch a cab back to his hotel. Despite agreeing with me, at the last minute, he still decided to risk it, believing that he was sober enough to drive. This time he was stopped by the police, was given a breathalyser, found to be over the legal limit and in fact put into prison for 4 hours to sober up. The rest of the legal consequences are far too complicated to imagine because he is a tourist. Anyway, the point is, I can justify that my dread had been to do with this incident. Perhaps if I had warned my friend about this feeling upon the first phone call after the accident, it may have prevented the cascade of more serious events. That is, if he took me seriously. Of course, one can also say that it was just coincidence that I learned about this event after my fuzzy premonition and that I am again confirming sometime after the fact. Whatever it is, it seems that I can’t do anything about it.
