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Recently my father told me about the great deal he'd gotten on some polo shirts: $4.99, marked down from $25. He said, “It was at a store that sells sportswear, called Joe … no, it was Joe's … Joe's.…” He trailed off, frowning and pursing his lips with the frustration of not remembering. Without thinking twice, I said, “Eddie Bauer?” He looked a little startled. “How did you know that?”
I didn't know how I knew. But that wasn't the first time.
Twenty years ago, I had a dream about my father. He was lying with his eyes closed in a hospital bed, and behind him, on the wall, was a thing like a thermometer that I understood to be a blood pressure monitor. The blood-red fluid in the monitor began to rise. It rose higher and higher until the top of the glass that held it shattered and it spewed out into the air. I awoke terrified, breathing hard, with the strongest kind of feeling—I would say “knowledge,” actually, though I was reluctant to say that at the moment, there in my bed in the middle of the night—that my father, who had high blood pressure and various other cardiac risk factors, had had a heart attack. Early the next morning I told my analyst the dream and we analyzed it. When I returned home from analysis I received a call from my mother, telling me that my father had had chest pains the previous night and that he had gone to the hospital, where the diagnosis of a heart attack had just been made. I might have suspected myself of secondary revision if I had not already told my analyst the dream.
I am fairly hardheaded about matters such as these. I am impatient with credulous accounts of preknowledge, clairvoyance, thought transmission, and so on. And yet I cannot ignore what happened to me. It's