Forewarned, the follow-up to Colm Keane’s number one bestsellers Going Home and The Distant Shore, is a riveting collection of stories concerning premonitions and predictive dreams.
Featuring 70 real-life stories from all corners of Ireland, the book recounts dark tales of deaths, car crashes, and ill health, along with brighter tales including lottery wins.
Did you ever have a feeling that something bad was going to happen? Perhaps you dreamt of a future event? Maybe you had a gut feeling that something momentous was about to occur?
Most people, at some time in their lives, have experienced a forewarning of the future. It may reveal itself as a sense of unease. Alternatively, it may be more intense and involve a terrifying foreboding. Perhaps it brings good news.
Forewarned is the first Irish study of this intriguing phenomenon. Crammed with fascinating stories, the book also presents the latest scientific evidence proving that the future is closer to our minds than we think.
Forewarned is currently on sale in all leading bookshops.
Helen, from County Westmeath, dreamt of her friend’s father’s heart attack. It happened back in the 1980s.
I was about 20 years old at the time and I was working in Dublin. I came home one Friday night, as I did every weekend. I went to bed as usual. That first night home I had a bad dream. It was very vivid and multicoloured and I felt I was there watching what was going on. The dream was about my friend’s father, whom I hadn’t seen in about a fortnight. I dreamt he had a heart attack.
I could see my friend in the back of the ambulance with her father. It wasn’t her mother or her sister in the ambulance, it was her. You would normally expect it to have been the wife. My friend was strapped in with a seatbelt and she was very agitated and upset. The paramedics were working on her father. I could actually see them bending over, trying to restart his heart.
I woke up in the morning and my mother came into the room, bringing me a cup of tea. I explained to her the whole thing in detail. I told my mother specifically that it was my friend who was in the ambulance. And I told her about my friend’s father’s heart attack. My mother said, “Oh, that’s terrible! I saw him the other day and he was in great health”.
I then thought no more about it until that afternoon when I bumped into my friend’s sister down the town. She came over to me in the street and stopped me to tell me that her dad had experienced a heart attack in the early hours of the morning, at five o’clock. She also told me that her mom was in such a state that she wasn’t able to travel in the ambulance and my friend travelled instead.
I was amazed when I heard it. It was so strange that I bumped into my friend’s sister. I hadn’t been in touch or anything and my friend hadn’t been in touch either. It wasn’t even that my friend had been that close and I wouldn’t have been talking to her about her dad that much. She was more of a good acquaintance than a friend.
It also wasn’t like I had any reason to see the heart attack coming. My friend’s dad hadn’t been sick at all. His health had been good up to that. He had no sort of heart complaint or anything. I didn’t have any pre-knowledge. It happened out of the blue. I feel it was strange that I dreamt about something that had no real connection to me.
I went home and told my mom. I said, “What did I tell you this morning? What was my dream about?” She repeated it before I prompted her. She told me the dream as I had told it to her, more or less. I then said, “You won’t believe this but I met one of the family down the town and she told me her father had a heart attack this morning.” My mother couldn’t believe it. Even though she is in her late 80s now, I’m sure she remembers it. It was a talking point among us for years to come.
It was the one strange thing that ever happened to me. Nothing else strange has occurred. I never had any dream like that since and I never had any dream like that about my own family. I wouldn’t even be into that sort of thing. I’ve been to a fortune-teller a couple of times and I think it’s the greatest waste of money ever. I think most of it is due to luck. And I wouldn’t read my star signs or anything like that.
But this I really feel did happen. I believe, to this day, that I saw it. My only theory is that the brain is amazing and capable of more than we know. There’s something there that is beyond our understanding It’s a fascinating thing. Yet this one dream is all that has ever happened to me. But it certainly did happen and, even with the passage of time, I remember it vividly still.
