Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

After our experiences growing up, being open minded about the paranormal meant my mother, sisters and I all researched what ever we could on the subject. We experimented with transcendental meditation, astral travel and mediumship. We find we tend to have what we call a bit of ‘gut instinct’ about things usually… which are usually found to be right.

After a serious work injury in 1980, I was taught self hypnosis as a method of pain control and ended up with a strange and unexpected side effect. I started to lucid dream and have pre-cognitive dreams. Lucid dreaming is when you are in a dream state but become conscious you are in a dream. So while in theory being fully conscious in a dream sound ludicrous – it is possible to be ‘awake’ and conscious inside a dream state. I have since researched and a very specific type of brain waves are necessary to achieve lucid dreaming and what ever I was doing to my brain under hypnosis seemed to trigger it.

I didn’t take it very seriously and mostly had fun with it – making ‘Tom Cruise’ appear at will did seem an amusing side effect! (but it was 1980). The first few pre-cognitive dreams were so insignificant I initially dismissed them as ‘deja vu’. They were usually fragmentary and didn’t make a lot of sense. So I would dream a very short fragment of standing in front of a very unique orange, plastic sculpture and when weeks later I would find myself on an outing in an unfamiliar park standing in front of the same orange plastic sculpture I had never seen before – I didn’t make the connection at first. I thought it was deja vu… until the dreams became more detailed.

The first one that really woke me up to what was going on was my dream of my then boyfriend parking his car atop a steep hill with a small white picket fence and a huge oak tree. His car would be stolen. It would be gone when we returned to this car parking space. Where I lived in Sydney was essentially flat and I didn’t recognize the area.

My boyfriend played football on weekends and this day we had to drive to North Sydney which is right next to Sydney Harbour. As he started up the steep road and started to park his car I saw the place of my dream! “you can’t park here,” I started, “your car will be stolen,” I told him. He naturally looked at me like I had two heads and parked his car anyway. The car was indeed stolen as I had seen but luckily it was recovered some days later without too much damage. My then boyfriend (later husband) looked at me a little askew after that. Though he did come to my appreciate my ability to pick up police ‘speed traps’… yes – I knew where the police were secreted in trees or where ever to try and catch speeding motorists and I would announce suddenly “slow down – there are police up over this bridge,” after about the third time I had correctly warned him he just looked at me and demanded, “how do you do that?” “I don’t know” I admitted “I just get a feeling” was all I could explain. (He was never booked for speeding – but we did drive a rather hot and worked car which pulled a 13.8 down the quarter mile but he was a very safe and careful driver as this car was an investment! and he looked after it and wasn’t silly). Unfortunately, police do make presumptions about teenagers driving THAT type of car but we never had to worry as long as my ‘spidey sense’ was tingling.

Unfortunately I couldn’t learn to discern what was a precognitive dream from a regular dream, so the information I usually got was useless until the event happened and it was all very ‘every day’ stuff – I certainly wasn’t picking up world events!

But one dream I had was so intense I told my then husband about it – which gave me a witness I had spoken to him about it before the event. I dreamt I was in a deserted white tiled corridor – there was lots of glass and I was walking along the corridor. I did wonder where all the people were. It seemed very clean and clinical with all the tiles, glass and fluorescent lightning so I presumed I was in a hospital. As I got to the end of the hall – on my left floating in mid air was a broken leg in plaster… and I woke up. Still thinking it was a ‘hospital’ I told my husband because I was worried someone was going to ‘break their leg’ and I’d have to visit them in hospital.

At the same time I had just been told I had been successful in applying for a new job working in the local office of a health Insurance company. Their head office had given me the job – but I had never been to the office location where I would be working before.

My first day at the new job, I arrived at the shopping centre before opening and walked inside and immediately froze. Stretching out before me into the distance – was the deserted white tiled corridor of my dream! I recognized it instantly. The glass had been shop fronts and yes there was fluorescent lighting. I knew as I came around the bend there would be a big potted palm in a white pot with brass fittings. I came around the corner and there was the potted palm just as I remembered. Already, I was skipping ahead ‘hang on – broken legs can’t float in mid air… how is that going to play out?’ I wondered. I saw the end of the hallway and waited. I turned to my new work place and stopped in shock.

The entire shop front was glass – but one single poster ‘floated’ in the middle of the pane of glass to which it was affixed. A big broken leg in plaster advertised the health Insurance company. I stood there laughing and acknowledged the universe. ‘OK you got me!’ I laughed – and let myself into the office to start my new job.

Unfortunately, my ability to have pre-cognitive dreams never progressed to anything more dramatic than events in my own life. But I still cant pick or interpret them properly.

Written by Jennifer Mills-Young, Copyright 2009

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1 ~~ Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 14