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Knowing that you are about to die

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KNOWING THAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE | Michael Tymn blog on White Crow Books

In her intriguing 2010 book, Messages, Bonnie McEneaney, the wife of one of the victims of 9/11, tells about her husband having some kind of premonitions, or precognition, that his days were numbered. “I’m going to die before you,” Eamon McEneaney told her in a somewhat matter-of-fact manner on September 4, 2001, a week before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, where Eamon worked in mortgage-backed securities. Bonnie McEneaney says that her husband always believed that he would die young and, in the weeks preceding the disaster, seemed to have a sense that something monumental was imminent.

Monica Iken, the wife of Michael Patrick Iken, another 9/11 victim, informed Bonnie McEneaney that her husband began acting a little strangely during the summer of 2001. When they received an invitation for a December wedding, Michael told Monica that he couldn’t see himself being there. Around September 1, Michael’s behavior became even more abnormal. When, on September 10, Monica told Michael that she was planning to visit a sick family member in New York City the following day, Michael became upset and told her not to come to the city that day.

McEneaney further tells of Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader who died in the attack. His friends and family noticed that he began acting very strangely during the summer of 2001. He was described by friends and family as being “depressed,” and “restless,” and, on Labor Day, his mother remembered that he seemed very “melancholy,” which was not characteristic of him.

A woman named Lorraine told McEneaney that she had a dream a week or so before 9/11 that seemed to suggest that her husband, Bill, would meet with a tragedy. She didn’t tell her husband about the dream, but she also observed that Bill’s behavior and attitude the weekend before 9/11 were very different from what they normally were.

A recent rerun of the Lisa Williams show on TV featured the parents of an 11-year-old boy who was killed in a boating accident off Waikiki in Hawaii. There was much evidential information passed on through Williams, a medium, to the parents, including the fact verified by his father that he did not want to go on the boat but was more or less talked into it by the parents. Williams told the parents that their son knew beforehand that he was going to die soon. When Williams mentioned this, the mother told her that after they returned home following their son’s death, they found that their son left a message for them on his computer that he expected to be dying soon and looked forward to seeing his parents after they crossed over.

A December 7, 2007 Associated Press story tells of a Minnesota man, Fidel Sanchez-Flores, who died accidentally on his job. A week before his death he told his niece “to pray really hard” because “something is approaching.” The day before his death he told his wife that he loved her and would continue to love her after his death. When his wife asked why he was saying that, he replied that he didn’t know.

In his 1974 book, On the Death of My Son, Jasper Swain, a Republic of South Africa lawyer, tells of the death of his son Mike in an auto accident and the communications he received from Mike through several mediums. “My death was okayed well ahead of the accident,” Mike told his father at one sitting. “To be exact, on the previous Monday, while I was watching the races at Kyalami, I suddenly knew that my life was coming to an end, even though I did not know the exact moment. I didn’t regret it, because I was also aware of the wonder, the love, and the beauty of the world that awaited me.” Mike also mentioned that he left his body an instant before the head-on impact with the other vehicle and was able to observe the collision from above.

The story of President Abraham Lincoln’s precognitive dream of his own death is well documented. One evening, about a month before his assassination, Lincoln sat in the White House with his wife Mary and several others when the subject of dreams came up. When Lincoln said something to the effect that there may be something to dreams, Mary asked him to elaborate on his beliefs. With some reluctance, Lincoln then related his prophetic dream. “About ten days ago, I retired late,” he began the story. “I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs.”

As Lincoln, in his dream, wandered around downstairs, he continued to hear sobbing, but he could see no mourners. In fact, he saw no one. Lincoln was puzzled and alarmed at hearing the sobbing, yet seeing nobody. He continued walking until he reached the East Room, where he saw a catafalque, one which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were soldiers posted as guards. Lincoln then asked one of the soldiers who had died. “The President,” was his answer, “He was killed by an assassin.” A loud burst of grief from the crowd awakened Lincoln, who could not sleep the rest of the night.

After Lincoln told of his dream to his wife and the others, Mary Lincoln (below) was horrified, but Lincoln assured her that it was only a dream and suggested they forget about it.

Renowned French astronomer Camille Flammarion wrote about the dream of Edwin Reed, director of the Museum of Natural History in the city of Conception, Chile. Two months before his death, Reed had a dream in which he saw a tomb with a cross on it with the following inscription: “Reed, naturalist, November 7, 1910” Reed jokingly related the strange dream to several friends, all of whom apparently shared in the humor of it until Reed died on November 7, 1910.

All of the above cases involve people who died suddenly, accidentally, or prematurely. There are numerous accounts of people on their deathbeds reporting visions of deceased loved ones visiting them and predicting when they would die. One of the more intriguing cases on record was reported in the June 1918 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. It involved 10-year-old Daisy Dryden of California, who was suffering from typhoid fever. When Daisy’s mother was sitting at her bedside, Daisy mentioned that Allie, her brother who had died of scarlet fever seven months earlier, was standing next to her. When the mother looked for Allie, Daisy told her that Allie said she could not see him because her spirit eyes were closed. When the mother asked Allie how she was communicating with Allie, since she did not observe Daisy talking, Daisy explained that “We just talk with our think.” When Daisy’s sister started talking about angels with “snowy wings,” Daisy told her that the ones she could see didn’t have any wings.

At 8:30 on the evening of her death, Daisy informed her mother that Allie would be coming for her at 11:30. At 11:15, Daisy asked her father to take her up as Allie had come. As they sang, Daisy breathed her last at exactly 11:30.

American doctors William Green, Stefan Goldstein and Alex Moss reportedly researched thousands of stories about patients who died suddenly and unexpectedly. They concluded that most people had anticipated their own death. While the majority of them may not have understood their premonitions, there was something at the deep soul level or in the subconscious that at least alerted them to the fact that death was approaching.

Thus, it would seem that whether the person is on his or her deathbed or about to die by unexpectedly, the soul knows beforehand that transition is about to take place. It may be that the more conscious, i.e., spiritually awakened, the person, the closer the awareness is to the conscious self.

Do people know when their time is up?
 

Galena

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The idea of this terrifies me just to read about, seeing as the chemical nature of my brain is that a sense of impending doom is normal for it. But that's been true since childhood, and I'm still here.
 

Lark

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They Vikings talked about this, although they thought that others could detect it too, I think they referred to it as someone's "weird", although maybe it wasnt spelt like that, nor exactly pronounced like that, and they would say that a warrior's "weird" was upon them, I think it was an aura or a glow, and they wouldnt want to join any war band with someone like that in it because they thought it was doomed.

It could be some kind of gloom or foreboding, mind you, it was a culture in which straight out of the womb a lot of them were thinking only about dying and how best to do it.
 

Tellenbach

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There are numerous accounts of people on their deathbeds reporting visions of deceased loved ones visiting them and predicting when they would die.

I read a book about this topic many years ago: "Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms: Who and What You See Before You Die". People should start sharing these stories on Twitter so that there's documentation before the fact.
 

SearchingforPeace

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My grandfather had his deceased father appear to him in a dream and tell him to get his business affairs in order as he would die within one year. My grandfather has in good health and in his forties.

He went and sold all his businesses and did financial planning. And, sure enough, he suddenly died within one year. My grandmother did not need to do much of anything, as it was all done, even the funeral planning......
 
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My maternal grandfather was in the hospital for liver cancer, and it might've been the drugs but in the weeks before he died he kept talking about how his father (long dead) was at the door and waiting for him. He would have long conversations with his father saying that he didn't want to go. He would thrash about like someone was trying to pull him. He passed away shortly after.

My maternal grandmother had been hospitalised for problems with her kidneys after being on high bp medication for many years and one night one of my aunts (whom grandma had been living with) dreamt that grandma came home, didn't say anything to her, and went straight to the telephone. When my aunt asked her who she was calling, she smiled gently and said "Dad" (grandpa above). The next day, we heard that she fell in the hospital bathroom and suffered a massive stroke. My family decided not to keep her on life support because she would have no quality of life.. and she passed away soon after.

My paternal grandmother passed away very suddenly; she too had a stroke at home. My cousin who was very young (early teens) was very close to her, and had a dream that she came to visit him and told him to "be good". When my aunt found my grandmother, my cousin already "knew".

I'm a pretty scientific and logical person, but I do believe that there are things that we will never be able to measure or understand.
 
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The idea of this terrifies me just to read about, seeing as the chemical nature of my brain is that a sense of impending doom is normal for it. But that's been true since childhood, and I'm still here.

It seems like this process is similar to becoming tired before going to sleep, and the body and mind are shutting down together. Guess sleep doesn't always happen that way, but it is nice when it does. Anyways, when someone has accepted the fact that death is coming for them soon, and there's no getting out of it, it seems like the process would be less traumatic.
 
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I read a book about this topic many years ago: "Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms: Who and What You See Before You Die".

No one I know reads as many books as you.

People should start sharing these stories on Twitter so that there's documentation before the fact.

Is that what you would do? That's nice of you. Tell your twitter followers when you're dying and they won't wonder why you stop retweeting them.
 

Galena

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It seems like this process is similar to becoming tired before going to sleep, and the body and mind are shutting down together. Guess sleep doesn't always happen that way, but it is nice when it does. Anyways, when someone has accepted the fact that death is coming for them soon, and there's no getting out of it, it seems like the process would be less traumatic.
Yes, while that is eerie from the outside, I do think there are mechanisms that get the person themselves emotionally or at least brain-chemically ready for it...unless one is really unfortunate.

I'm probing this in a piece of writing I should be working on right now instead of messing about on forums, where there are these space creatures who are incubating baby universes and absorb people into them because the people's memories are where the baby universes get their content from. So, they're kind of like walking afterlives. There are two characters in particular that this makes me think of, who were absorbed in the same traumatic incident. When we meet them later in their new universe, they're inseparable, but don't know how to describe their relationship in the languages of the living. One of them tries: it's love, but they're not lovers; it's blood, but they're not family. And it's ten times a more forgiving bond than either of those.
 

Virtual ghost

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Call me skeptical but every day endless amout of people have this feeling and usually nothing happens, so the whole thing is forgotten quickly. However since one in 10000 comes true this is suddenly considered visionary line of thought. For me this is pure abuse of statistics.


We are all going to die eventually and we all have that feeling from the moment we develope conciousness. But that on itself in probably nothing more than a feeling.
 

Mole

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We would never guess that the Western Enlightenment of the 18th century replaced superstition with evidence and reason.

We would never guess because astrology is pure superstition as is mbti.

And we see above us highly manipulative stories of pre-knowledge of death that are pure superstition.

But what is worse is the way the superstitious revel in their fantasies and seek to validate them by sharing them with others.
 
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Call me skeptical

I'm going to call you Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

but every day endless amout of people have this feeling and usually nothing happens, so the whole thing is forgotten quickly. However since one in 10000 comes true this is suddenly considered visionary line of thought. For me this is pure abuse of statistics.

We are all going to die eventually and we all have that feeling from the moment we develope conciousness. But that on itself in probably nothing more than a feeling.

This, your ideas, probably occurred to most people. A logical explanation does not, however, disprove precognition.
 
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We would never guess that the Western Enlightenment of the 18th century replaced superstition with evidence and reason.

We would never guess because astrology is pure superstition as is mbti.

And we see above us highly manipulative stories of pre-knowledge of death that are pure superstition.

But what is worse is the way the superstitious revel in their fantasies and seek to validate them by sharing them with others.

That seems narrow-minded of you.
 
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Matthew 7:13 "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it".

If someone has a dream about their death and interprets correctly, I don't see how that is contradictory to the bible.
 

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My husband's father, around a week or so before his death, suddenly and abruptly wanted to apologize to all the people in his life that he has caused pain, his ex-wife (my mother in law) especially. She wouldn't hear any of it, convinced that he's just being manipulative. And just like that, he died in his home while his caretaker was around. So, there might be some truth to what you posted, OP, and it really is terrifying. I wonder if people go through a private purgatory inside their minds before they leave this world, and hence why people tend to behave so uncharacteristically like on their last few moments alive.
 
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The thought of death drives most people crazy. If you ever faced some serious difficulties you know that death isn't the worst thing that can or will happen to you. Being driven by fear can have only bad consequences.

I can't imagine my last days sticking around people crying. That would leave bad memories about me and my death would cause bigger pain for them than simply disappearing. If you create mess during your life then clean it up as soon as possible not only moments before your death. I'd like people to remember me from good old days. Dying alone (or any other way) or simply spending my last days "normally" doesn't seem to be difficult after living a life without regrets.
 
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My husband's father, around a week or so before his death, suddenly and abruptly wanted to apologize to all the people in his life that he has caused pain, his ex-wife (my mother in law) especially. She wouldn't hear any of it, convinced that he's just being manipulative. And just like that, he died in his home while his caretaker was around. So, there might be some truth to what you posted, OP, and it really is terrifying. I wonder if people go through a private purgatory inside their minds before they leave this world, and hence why people tend to behave so uncharacteristically like on their last few moments alive.

That's interesting, the purgatory part.. [MENTION=17945]Alaska[/MENTION] said it was scary too. I suppose it could be, but I like the idea of order in the universe.
 

Ursa

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My great-grandmother claimed to have seen Ulysses S. Grant before her death. My history buff grandfather asked her if his uniform was for sale - hehe!

I always chalked similar experiences up to oxygen deprivation. But sometimes I wonder.
 
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