Prescience

So this is the anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. I have an odd set of memories about that.

The background is that I occasionally have prescient dreams. I generally try to view the world via science and evidence. What are the facts? What are the requirements? So I am *not* generally a woo-woo type, er, not sure I totally understand that word/term/whatever either. But throughout my life, I have occasionally dreamed stuff that turns out to come true or just have bad feelings about something I can’t control and it ends up happening. I don’t know why this happens to me or how to explain it. Or even if it’s real but I think it is.

1986. Teacher in space! Teacher in space! Everybody was all hyped up about sending a teacher into space. It was a great idea and I didn’t actually have a prescient dream about it (I remember those quite clearly) but I had a reeeallly bad feeling about it. I thought she was going to die. What if she dies? How will her students/family/friends/colleagues feel about that? And then the shuttle exploded and the teacher (and everyone else) died. Yeesh.

I can’t actually remember much about what I was doing when Challenger blew up although I *do* remember seeing footage of the accident on TV after the fact and I remember thinking, “I knew this would happen”.

A very weird thing I *do* remember is sending the GG off to work the next morning. I was TERRIFIED that our new VW Jetta would blow up on his way to work. I knew how stoopid this was. He was driving a new vee-hickle across deserted Planet Ann Arbor surface streets to That Darn EPA. As he was leaving I gave him an extra emphatic BE CAREFUL. He replied with something like, “Don’t worry, the Jetta will not blow up”.

Peace to Krista, our first teacher in space wherever she is, and kudos to anyone who has the courage to venture outside our Earth’s atmosphere. Me? I am even afraid to get into a blasted helicopter.

P.S. That’s our VW Jetta (5-speed manual) in the pic. It was the first vee-hickle we bought as a married couple and I don’t think we named it. It was a cool vee-hickle but in the long run it kinda nickled and dimed us to death. The first vee-hickle we named was our first Chrysler mini-van and we named that “The Exxon Tanker Valdez”.

One Response to “Prescience”

  1. Margaret Says:

    I don’t remember being pregnant when that happened but I must have been since Ashley was born June 25, 1986. Weird how little I recall about it besides the shock and sadness. I won’t get in helicopters either. They have always terrified me.