I believe in precognition and seeing the future. I believe in knowing people from another time or place. I’ve had dreams since I was a young girl of future events. When I was a child, I would predict the death of my pets. Later, I would foresee car accidents. As an adult, friends would appear in my dreams and tell me about what was happening in their lives. Months before I knew my family and I were moving to Washington State, I saw our future home, our future town, our future landlords, and a future car accident, in a dream.

In my early forties, when job circumstances altered for my husband, I utilized the change of employment tide to encourage my husband to search beyond California for work. For years, I’d felt called to move up north to Oregon or Washington. I longed for the clean air, the thick forests of trees, and to be near water.

A week into our job search, my husband was contacted by an old colleague via email. The colleague and my husband hadn’t spoken in years, and she did not know my husband was job searching. At this exact time of our search, she happened to email a job possibility in Washington State.  As it turned out the job did not pan out. However, a week later, once again the same colleague emailed with another job.

This time, after extensive interviewing, my husband was offered a job in Washington.

Months before we ever started considering the real possibility of moving out-of-state, I had dreamt of our soon-to-be home in Washington.

I remember because I awoke with a feeling of knowing after the dream and had later phoned my mother to tell her the details of the dream.

I had dreamt of a house set up on a hill with many large windows overlooking a beautiful body of water. A woman and her husband, both dressed in Hawaiian attire, had greeted us at the door of the home. The woman had shown me around the house, as if I was to live there. She directed me to look over the water and said: “This will be a place of healing for you.”

Then she pointed to walking trails and a local farmers market. I remember thinking how odd to have a farmers market outside your window. At the end of the dream, there was a flash, and I saw a vehicle crash, with images of tires rolling and a huge impact. I woke up bewildered and startled.

Fast forward months later, in the state of Washington on a mad-dash, house-hunting weekend, we (family of five + my mom) just happened to be one of the first families to query about an advertisement about a home for rent. Though after learning over the phone about the circumstances surrounding the home, we deduced it wasn’t the right timing for us to move into this particular house: they didn’t take dogs, there was no fenced yard, and we weren’t certain about the area. Regardless, the homeowner who had placed the advertisement on a whim felt an immediate connection to me over the phone.

The landlady insisted we come over to meet her. She wanted to at least show us around the neighborhood. When we arrived, she opened the front door and said, “Welcome home.” Upon seeing one another, we both instantly felt we had met before.

The house was like the house in my dream, set upon a hill with large windows over looking the water. I soon learned the owners were moving to Hawaii. Later that day, the landlady took us to the local Farmer’s Market.

We rented the house pretty much on the spot, despite the timing and perceived conflicts. Not waiting more than a few hours to make up our mind. We’d make the situation work. We made an immediate connection with the owners.

Before the move, my husband had to go up north to work, a month prior to the kids and me arriving. During my husband’s visit to the house we were to lease in Washington, the owner told my husband this: “I really like your mother-in-law, I really like you, but I am giving this home to you because I feel it will be a place of healing for Sam.”

I had never told my husband the words the woman had spoken in my dream; only my mother had known.

All the pieces of the dream were fitting together, except for the car accident I had seen.

I’d mentioned the accident to my mother, and was nervous to drive my children on the eleven-hour road trip back up to Washington.

A few days before I was to drive to Washington, I drove to the bay area in California with my mother. While driving on the freeway, I panicked, turned to my mom and, after reminding her of the dream,  said, “I have a lot of anxiety right now, with all of these trucks and large vehicles around us.”

Minutes later, a tire on a truck blew, directly in front of us on the freeway, and pieces of rubber flew out. We were fine, and the anxiety left.

I tried to convince myself that the tire blow out that had just occurred was the accident in my dream. After all, it was in the same time period. Even said so this to my mother.  Close enough, I told myself.

Still…..the feeling remained.

A few days later, on the way up north to Washington, with the van jammed pack with people, animals, our belongings, and a friend who was coming along to assist, we stopped at a hotel in Oregon. The hotel staff confused our reservation and gave us an inadequate sized room.

I decided it was best to leave the hotel and travel more. I wasn’t tired, after all.

Back on the road, during our search for another hotel, I was in the fast lane, moving along at an average speed, when directly in front of me, some four to five car-lengths ahead, an old-style silver motor home blew a tire.

Large chunks of tire came flinging towards our windshield, bumped off the van, and splattered and spun down the highway.

A knowing came over me: a remembering.

I gently hit the brakes and turned on my hazard lights.

The motorhome driver could not gain control. The vehicle started wobbling to the left, to the right, and back and forth, tilting this way and that, faster and faster, and closer and closer towards the road. There was nowhere for me to go. Cars were breaking behind. And there was a steady flow of traffic to my right. The shoulder to my left was a ditch of dirt. At my speed we’d crash, if I tried to pull over in the dirt.

I watched trembling, as the motorhome started spinning like a top at full speed, backwards towards us. I thought this might be the end. If that vehicle hit us, we would be crushed.

Seconds passed in slow motion.

I took a deep breath.

An hour before I had told my friend sitting in the passenger seat that because of my prior dream months ago, I felt protected on this journey.

I wasn’t so sure anymore.

The motorhome made a final spin before it tipped over onto its side and did several three-sixties, turning round and round, crashing and crashing, sending up clouds of dust.

At first I feared the vehicle was coming towards us. But it slid rapidly on its side, across the ditch, in a direction horizontal to us, all the way across to the other side of the freeway and oncoming traffic.

With a loud thump, the motorhome came to its final landing.

People from all directions came running towards the vehicle to help. I pulled over to the right side on the roadside, too shaken to move. Then my friend sitting next to me said exactly what I needed to hear. She said, “You know, if it hadn’t been you directly behind the motor home, if someone else had been driving and following closer behind, it could have been a lot worse.”

Her words comforted me.

I realized then that no one outside of the occupants of the motorhome had been involved in the collision. No fender benders, no spinning off the road, no severe braking. Everything around had remained calm.