I was fifteen on my first family holiday in Portugal. I shared a room with my cousin and my bed was about eight feet from the door. One night I awoke to my uncle Tony opening the door, it was pitch black save for the sandy light on the wall behind him. He stared into my soul and chanted "You've got to get back to Calcutta!" So being the rational person that I am I deduced I was dreaming. I had no idea where Calcutta was and didn't know anything about such a place. When the image faded I had a few moments of confusion to myself until I awoke to the door being opened for real, and there, in the darkness, with the light behind him stood my uncle Tony and he said "Wow! It's like the Black hole of Calcutta in here..."
I don't like to label that as precognition or premonition as nothing really happened except for a significant glimpse into the future. But I had felt such an intense surge of displacement from that experience that it left me excited and scared. Afterwards I repeatedly asked my Uncle why he had said that to which he answered "I don't know," each time. I couldn't leave it there so I nagged him for hours about this Black hole of Calcutta' the only thing he knew was a little bit on Mother Teresa's work there. I could not forget that night but people began to get annoyed with me for going on about it so I stopped pursuing it.
Until it happened again.
I was twenty two this time, living in a flat with friends nothing unusual was going on in my life. One night I slept and dreamt of something that at the time I thought was just a normal creation of the sleeping mind.
I was telling a joke to my friends in the pub, as you do, and I made a terrible job of it as always. Most dreams as you'll know can be vague and this one was no different except that the words of my joke were stood out to me; "What's the best thing to come out of England...? The highroad to Scotland" I know! It's not funny and doesn't even have a respectable punch line. I found it an odd thing for me to be saying even in a dream.
I started reading a book a day or so later; Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell (a very good book) and when I got to page seventeen I felt the same surge of distortion I had seven years ago. Sergeant Hakeswill says "What is the finest thing a Scotsman ever saw? Answer me that... The high road to England, that's what..." Yes his words don't match perfectly with mine but I still got that same intense feeling of glimpsing the future.
Just like the first time, I went on about it for days comparing the two incidences, my friends can vouch for that. The dreams themselves were paranormal but I also came across some other eerie coincidences that link the two dreams together; My Uncle Tony is a great fan of 18th/19th century european warfare (The time period of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe Series) and has often declared he was born in the wrong century himself. I can't help but feel the connection there.
Another other is that Mary, the main female character in 'Sharpe's Tiger' is from Calcutta. That coincidence is self-explanatory.
Another weaker one is that Richard Sharpe is twenty two in the book as was I at the time I read the book.
The Third and final dream was unrelated to the first two but delivered the same shock of displacement. A brief dream of playing my old guitar. I dreamt my fingers were like jelly on the strings. I hadn't seen the guitar in years and then to my surprise what should be presented with me the next day? That very instrument and when I gave the old fender a strum I found I couldn't get my fingers around any of the cords. There is one small link there and that is the guitar was being kept safe by my friend who still lived in the flat where I had dream number two but that's it.
So here I am now with all these pieces. Hungry with questions. Why? What is so important about Calcutta? Do I need to go there? Does my uncle play a bigger role than I think? Will I have more dream glimpses? My theory is that this is a quest, a life quest, for what? I don't know yet, hopefully for some humble revelation or enlightenment.
I truly believe in this and believe you have a your own puzzle too. What's your advice?
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