premonition or coincidence?

i am dreaming of a busy, bustling street full of pedestrians and traffic. it is somewhere in Manila, in the Philippines. i am with Abigail, and we hail a passing jeepney, it stops and we try to cram ourselves inside the already-crowded vehicle. she finds a space inside, and i grab onto the handholds on the outside part of the jeep, at the very back. the driver guns the engine and we lurch forward, and i'm holding on for dear life. people grab me to keep me from falling off... and i wake up, to another windy Berkeley morning.

Soon, I am walking down the hallway to my office, and see Yoshiko at her desk, talking animatedly to someone I cannot see, who seems to be sitting at my computer workstation. Yoshiko-san sees me, and her face lights up and says, "Hey, look who's here..." or something like that. I walk into the office and there's none other but Abigail. She is talking to Carrie and Yoshiko, and though she knows I have just walked in, doesn't look around to greet me, pretending to be miffed at me since I haven't replied to her last few e-mails over the summer. I am stunned, as I remember the dream I just had, which I had completely forgotten about on my walk down to campus. Of course, she gets up soon enough and gives me not one, but two separate hugs ... ^_^ Last time I saw her was in Maui last spring, when she and her husband Matthias visited with me there. I love Abigail. She's an old friend of mine, and we go back a long ways. In fact, she was one of the original ATDP students, when it was first begun in 1981, participating in the pilot program of what was then known as the UC Berkeley Gifted Program.

So yes, it really doesn't surprise me that I had a dream of her just this morning, the very same one in which she'd appear at our office, which we used to share -- as an undergrad, then a Ph.D. student at Cal, she worked part-time at the ATDP, as an office staffer, and also as a Study Lab mentor as well as an instructor. Carrie did say a few days ago that she was expecting Abigail to appear here at ATDP, sometime before I left for Maui, but we had no way of knowing when. Thus, while my subconscious was primed for Abigail's visit, it's still quite eerie that I'd dream about her on the same morning... and it would come true, at once. She appeared, just like in my dream.

Perhaps when you're friends with someone in a truly deep way, the universe binds you together in ways that aren't easily explained by the usual laws of physics. On the other hand, I'm really now getting into this Brian Greene book that I weblogged about the other day, on string theory. Which could, in the end, explain serendipity or coincidences... or not.

P.S.: As a way of explaining my lack of e-mail contact with her over the summer, I showed Abigail my weblog. Of course, I intend to ask her to make one of her own... ;-)

Sep Nov

{ net.casting }
^