A perplexing question.
Maybe not ahead but next to?
Several years ago I had a weird experience. I was nearly run over by a truck, crossing the road. My fault entirely -
For a moment, the driver could have hit or missed.
It occured to me that maybe he did hit! At the point just before the occurance, escape and death converged; both dead and alive.
And as it takes us a quarter of a second to register events, I missed the lot, but carried on alive and oblivious in one branch, but dead in the other.
Tic, tic, indeed.
A similar incident happened to me in Paris.
It was midnight, after rain, early August, 1965.
I was crossing the road. A car came from nowhere. Or so it seemed.
I should have been dead. I do not understand how I am alive.
Another curious incident took place that summer. I was sleeping my nights on a park bench, aside the road, in Paris. But those crazy Parisian drivers did not let me.
Every time a car passed me, I woke up. And they passed me all the time.
A week after this hell, I awoke on my park bench one morning. It was passed eight.
I entered a cafe.
While I did, time changed. I was in the middle of the French Revolution.
The cafe was a Jacobin haunt.
All the people who sat there, drinking their coffee, were clad in red Jacobine caps.
I wore a red cap, too.
I received my coffee at the encounter desk.
I took my cup of coffee and I walked to my table and I sat down.
I was under orders to kill the man who had just handed me my cup of coffee.
The man without the red cap. But that could wait. First the coffee.
I gulped it down.
While I did, time changed again. In a sudden, everything was back to normal again.
No read caps. No orders of assassinations.
I am glad I did not kill the poor chap.