It was during my teen's that I began to dream about war on U.S. soil. It was very real, lots of blood and gore and death. A lot of fear and confusion was in the air, along with anger, grief, and sheer panic. There was a lot of fire and smoke and chaos and destruction. All I could see were uniforms, no insignia, nothing I could identify. Years later through repetitive dreams I realized the "enemy" was us truly, our very own military.

I also had dreams that involved the immediate future in my own life. Early in the summer between my junior and senior years of high school I started dreaming that I was attending a much larger school than the one in which I was enrolled. The main parts of the building had at least 2 stories and I felt alone among a lot of strangers.

As it turned out my world got pretty much turned upside down that summer and because of it I was put in that same exact school that fall. I hated it, I only knew a small handful of students there from elementary and junior high.

My senior year I had to deal with a lot of physical pain and this affected both my sleep and my dreams. My dreams became even more violent and bloody. I would have enough of the nightmares sometime between 3 and 4 AM, and lay there awake for several hours waiting for the alarm clock to go off. I was in severe pain most of the day, everyday. I was getting depressed because the doctor I was going to wasn't helping at all and I continued to get worse.

I wanted to die, I hurt that bad. For whatever reason the pain was always worse after lunch period. I hurt so much I couldn't concentrate enough to read, and after attempting to read the same paragraph for the fifth time, I stopped and said to myself, "I wish I could stop hurting for just 5 minutes."

The next thing I knew I was looking down at myself looking at my book and the others in the classroom. I went through the window and felt so free, there was no pain until I slipped back into my body right before the bell rang.

I told my sister about my experience and described the place I had "visited" and she asked me if I was high. LOL

My mother thought the pain was making me go crazy and she called a different doctor. He put me on a sleeping pill and some nerve medication, but I still woke up at 3 or 4 in the morning, and I was still in a lot of pain.

I ended up in the hospital a week later and my new doctor found the problem and I took some medication and was completely pain free within four months.

One night Mom and I watched a movie she had rented named "Red Dawn", and I started crying and got upset. She looked at me and I said, "This is like what I dream!" It wasn't exactly the same, but it was very similar.

At one point I stopped watching movies that had anything to do with war, I saw more than I cared for in my dreams at night and I just didn't feel like watching it while I was awake too.

The second dream was even more frightening. In it I watched an elderly Cherokee man searching nervously for something in a kitchen. What he found was a plain wood box with a glass lid on it and inside was a dead white spider.

As he was pulling it toward him someone (one of his own sons, I was to find out later) kicked in the rickety old door and shot his father in the back twice.

He fell forward and his weight cracked the glass lid and his blood dripped onto the dead spider and it came back to life as he died.

I hated this dream and it repeated itself many times. Eventually the shock of something dead coming back to life wore off (believe it or not) and I was able to understand what I was dreaming had happened long before I was born into this lifetime.

I sensed we were related by blood and I began to think of him as "Grandfather". I wanted to know more about him, maybe find confirmation of what I had seen in the dreams. I told my maternal grandfather about my dream and he got a weird look on his face -fear, I think- and he said, "You're one of them, aren't ya girl?" He hurried away from me as quick as he could.

I decided not to talk about my dreams much with anyone for quite sometime because I didn't want any more negative reactions.

That weekend my paternal grandmother had a heart attack and went to the hospital. She passed away about a week and a half later. I knew the moment it happened, I sensed it and told my best friend at school. She asked how I knew that and I told her I had felt it. Funny, she never acted like it was out of the ordinary.

That afternoon when I got home from school my mother was waiting for me and my sister in the front yard. She told us Grandma had passed away that morning. I told her I knew and that I also knew when it happened.

My parents freaked!! I can see why; they believed it was something evil, this "gift" of mine. I don't judge them harshly or at all for that matter; they believed they were helping me, but what happened next didn't help- it traumatized me.

They spoke with their pastor and he put them in touch with a self-proclaimed demonologist. He came to their church and prayed over me in the pastor's office with my parents, the pastor and all the deacons of their church. He tried to pray the evil out of me, but what it did was scare the shit out of me.

I wasn't possessed or in need of saving. In my 13 yr old mind, since nothing came out of me while they all raised their hands and prayed over me I must have been their evil and that meant the Christian god hated me because He hates evil.

I couldn't accept the "evil" thing, I figured I would know if I was or not.

After that I didn't talk to my parents about my dreams and I didn't share them much with anyone until I was older.