(Continued from the post of 28th June 2024.)

Unsurprisingly, my get-rich-quick scheme came to nothing. It seems The Gambling Commission frown upon and discourage the practice of taking bets from those with inside knowledge.

However, the entity responsible for trialing that first prophetic dream experiment on me must have been feeling very smug. It had found a ‘live one!’

Having ascertained I was receptive to the notion of glimpsing the future, it set about stepping up the intensity and severity of the trailers it would somehow transmit into my sleep. In old fashioned UK Movie Certificate terms, the ratings would go from ‘U’ for Universal (suitable viewing for all ages) to ‘X’ (explicit content – not available to anyone under age 18.)

I really should have been more diligent in recording these premonition dreams. There have been so many, the details of some becoming sketchy as the years pass. However, in roughly chronological order, here’s a brief selection.

Pets Corner massacre: this would have been @ 1981. I dreamed of walking through some random school playground and there were dead animals all over the place. Small animals like rabbits and cats; goats; various rodents. There was even a skinned snake. It was horrific.

The following day, tucked around page five or seven of a national newspaper, I read of vandals breaking into a nursery or primary school in the south of England, slaughtering all the pets and leaving them in the playground.

I have to say, I was truly shocked – both that human beings could inflict this sort of carnage, and that I had dreamed it. I did say to my work colleagues, but given this was one of the early ‘horror’ dreams, I convinced myself I must have either subconsciously read / heard of the incident elsewhere and replayed it in my dream.

The Dream-Giver had not factored in my West of Scotland pragmatism. But a Dream-Giver worth its salt is nothing if not well prepared. My scepticism was countered by supplementing a unique, stomach churning sensation to the waking process from any future such dreams.

I had been chosen.

(To be continued …)