Do my premonitions scare you? How would you like to be me? You can get away from me. I can’t.

When I was three years old, I had a paranormal experience with a black devil. (This is the basis for Chapter Three in my novel, Dream Wide Awake.) When I was thirteen, I thought bad spirits were going to infuse their ectoplasm into me and take over my body. For years I couldn’t walk into a funeral home without shaking because I felt like the person in the casket was, somehow, still in the room.

And when I turned thirty? I said, “Well, if mental illness hasn’t surfaced in me by now, it never will.”

These are some of the events in my life that led to my belief in the paranormal, which led to my Novel, Dream Wide Awake. (Read an excerpt and/or purchase on Amazon.)  But truthfully, I’m an extremely logical person. So, from a young age, I thought something was terribly wrong with my brain. I could feel spirits, ghosts, energy, whatever you’d like to call the phenomenon, but because I could not see anything with my eyes, logically, I concluded I had a wild imagination.

Learning the secret

I learned the secret early on: don’t talk about the wild imagination.

When I was thirteen years old, I scared the daylight out of my cousin, Jane, while we babysat. I walked into a house and felt like something or some spirit would overtake my soul. I told my cousin I was afraid I was going to turn into someone else. (I know you remember this, Jane. Believe me, I was frightened, too.)

Shortly thereafter, my mother told me I had to stop talking about “this thing,” or I was going to end up in a mental ward. So, I did. I stopped talking about it for thirty years.

Ignoring the movies

There is no way to make this sound sane. I had to force myself to ignore the movies in my head: A bank teller’s grandmother standing behind her waving her arms. Ignore. My friend’s mother hovering over her at the hospital church mass. Look away. The spirit floating above the gravestone. Leave. The military guy lingering behind a mother who innocently came to my front door to sign her child up for soccer. Don’t tell her.

I remember when that soccer mom left, I leaned my back against the door, slid to the floor, and cried, saying, “I’m crazy.”

But I wasn’t crazy.

The premonition that changed my thinking

I’m not sure why I had the 9/11 premonition. I was never able to see the vision clearly enough to gather what exactly would happen. And even if I had, what would I have done? The only thing I know is if I hadn’t had the vision of being inside one of those World Trade Center buildings when they began to fall, I might still to this day think I was crazy.

The vision began two months before the tragedy. The first time I recorded anything, I wrote notes in the July 11^th box of my desk calendar.

In the first half of this “movie in my head,” I floated toward a city. I realized, months later, I was seeing this from a plane’s view. I was in Northeastern America floating above pine trees and approaching water. I thought I was near a Great Lake in upper-state New York. I mistakenly wrote Huron for Lake Ontario, because I am geographically challenged.

I also wrote tall building and sm city for small city. Later I crossed out small and wrote med for medium. Later still, I put a question mark after med, because with each vision, I came closer to the city and saw its size. I wrote 27 F for the 27^th floor, but I remember thinking, no, 72^nd floor. (I never wrote that down.)

In the second half of this vision, I was at my desk, working, and the building began to move. The first time I had the vision, I thought an earthquake rocked City Hall. The room swayed. I glanced down and saw huge gray floor boulders buckling beneath me. The entire building was collapsing.

That was it. I had this vision three days in a row, and then weekly once or twice for the next two months. I was always at my desk at work, and it was always morning. I wrote before noon, 10:14, and 10:16, but never wrote any more times because I always experienced this vision between 10 and 10:30.

Keeping the calendar

At the end of July, I told myself I would keep the calendar one more month. I was sure a building would collapse.

At the end of August, I attended a training in Washington DC in a building about one mile from the pentagon. The class was in the basement and the entire time I thought, “I hope this isn’t the building that’s going to collapse, because if it is, I’m dead.”

On September 1, I couldn’t throw the calendar away. I said if a building didn’t collapse by September, 30^th, I’d toss it then. (That calendar is pictured in the cover of this article.)

On 9/11

On the morning of 9/11, a co-worker mentioned two planes had hit the World Trade Center. Our director moved his television into our office reception area, so people could watch throughout the morning.

Around 10 am, a coworker walked by my cubicle, announcing one of the buildings had collapsed. I asked if people had still been inside and he said yes. I was mortified. I returned to my desk, thinking about those people. Then I realized—I was sitting in the exact place where I’d had those premonitions.

I went out to the reception area where people had gathered to watch, and said, “I know you guys are going to think I’m crazy, but I’ve had this premonition of a building collapsing for two months. What time did this happen?” Someone said it began at 8:30 and I said that made me feel a bit better, because I always had the vision of the building falling between 10 and 10:30. That’s when our secretary, Sharon, said the building collapsed at 10.

I was so upset, I rushed to the ladies’ room and splashed water on my face. By the time I returned, the second building had collapsed.

Sharon asked if I was all right, and I said she must think I was crazy. Then I remembered my notes. Frantically, I pushed my work aside and exposed the desk calendar, still flaunting July. I showed her and she said nothing.

“I know. My notes don’t really do justice to what I saw,” I said.

“Oh, I believe you,” she replied. “Look where you kept your notes.”

All of the notes I took were inside the box marked 11.

Other premonitions

I’ve had other movies in my head—crazy movies. But I’ll leave those for another day.

For now, I’ll just say that since 9/11, I pay attention to the things I see. I don’t believe in coincidences and so I’m sure that 2001 vision served some purpose. I’m not completely sure what that was. The vision didn’t seem to help anyone—except maybe me.

I no longer believe I’m crazy

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Cyndie Zahner is the author of Dream Wide Awake and Project Dream, paranormal fiction novels inspired by her own experiences. This is the first in a series of blogs about her inspiration behind the novel.