One night in 1986, while living in Los Angeles, I had a dream in which I was riding down the freeway in the passenger seat of a car. As we emerged from beneath an overpass, I looked up and to the left, and watched a small private aircraft approach a silver and red commercial airliner from visually above-right, the one o’clock direction from my point of view. The two collided, and the airliner took a rapid arc downward and crashed behind a tree-lined skyline into a residential neighborhood.
The next day, I turned on the television to see the news dominated by coverage of a passenger airliner crash. One news broadcast showed an animation of a small aircraft, colliding in mid-air with a red and silver Aeromexico airliner. The direction from which the small craft approached was exactly as in my dream, as was the diving path taken by the airliner afterward. I was watching my own damned dream, being played back on the evening news. I felt chills all over.
I was, indeed, an eyewitness to the Cerritos air crash. The night before. In my dream.
But if this sounds like a “routine” case of a dream predicting the future, the dream itself is the lesser part of my experience. The real blow-away chapter of the story follows.
Three years later, a coworker, with whom we usually ate lunch, needed cash, so we took a long detour to his bank in Whittier. On the way back, we headed south on the 605 freeway. I had never, ever been on the 605 freeway before. I lived in the San Fernando Valley at the time.
I began feeling a tingling sensation and began looking around. “This place looks familiar,” I thought to myself.
Within a minute, my skin really began to prickle as I began to recognize where I was, its hauntingly familiar skyline awakening dormant memories. When my friend drove under the next overpass, that’s when the significance of the scene truly hit me like a blast of cold water. “Oh, my God, this is it!” I recognized where I was. It was the exact vantage point from which I foresaw the Cerritos air crash in my dream, from the passenger seat of a car emerging from an under an overpass.
I didn’t say anything at the time, but my heart was racing. When we returned to the office, however, I asked my coworker who was driving if we were anywhere near where the Cerritos air crash happened. He took a sheet of paper, penciled a rough map of the area freeways and drew an “X” at the site of the crash, and everything matched. The distance, the angle of sight from that location, everything fit.
I had passed through, and recognized, a place and a scene that I had seen years before only in a dream. What I had seen in my dream is exactly what I would have seen from that spot, had I been there in person. The fact that I recognized the vantage point three years later, and remembered what I had seen there, even though I had never physically been there before, gave me all the proof that I needed that it wasn’t merely a horrible coincidence, but a real premonition.
The emotion still comes over me when I recall passing over the spot. It’s an experience that will stay with me forever.