Here is where you wonder if I'm off my meds.

And I'll tell you ahead of time that since I am not ON any meds, the answer is NO, I am not off my meds.

You see, once in a great while there seems to be a correlation between my dreams and an upcoming event.

Note that I did not say that my dreams come true or that my dreams predict the future or that I am psychic. Because as a rational person, I would need more proof that such things actually do happen before making such a claim.

But whatever you call it, it happened just before Memorial Day.

The colors were a little deeper, the mood a little more intense, all the things that in the past have warned me that this was one of "those" dreams.

It involved me finding the body of a family friend, who is approaching 90 years old. She was lying in an abandoned house on her back, with her left arm relaxed at her side and her right arm held at an odd angle, covering her face.

She opened her eyes, but she didn't remember how she got there and could only remember snippets of her life.

Here is where the "those dream-ed-ness" ended and my creative mind took over and tried to make sense of it. It created this whole backstory.

This was the ORIGINAL Lillian, you see. The one whose body had given out on her, so her family had all her memories transferred to a clone that had been artificially aged to her present age. The problem was, this original, like all originals that underwent this procedure, was supposed to die painlessly in the procedure or at the very least have all of her memories erased.

Something had gone wrong this time. This one didn't die and her mindwipe hadn't been total. Some of her memories had been copied rather than transferred. She had wandered in lost, confused partial amnesia, until she found this abandoned house, where she'd slept for who knows how long before I found her.

The dream unsettled me so much that the next day, after taking some flowers to the cemetery, I took my mother over to Lillian's house to check on her. They hadn't seen each other in person more than a handful of times since we'd moved to Thayer, and had talked on the phone too infrequently.

We arrived at her house and she was fine, just as spirited and ornery and full of life as ever. She and my mother had a long afternoon visit.

Days passed, and eventually I began to believe that maybe it had just seemed like one of those dreams.

Yesterday, we received a phonecall.

Sometime over the weekend, Lillian put a cake in the oven and collapsed on the kitchen floor with a stroke. She has lived alone since her husband died, so it's not known exactly how long she lay there, but it was at least half a day before someone found her. Her right side is paralyzed and she can no longer speak.

06/05/07 UPDATE: I didn't connect the dots on this until this morning, so it just seemed like one of those weird dream details, so I didn't mention it. The room I found her in was the kitchen, and in place of cabinets, bolted to the wall, sometimes stacked three or four high, were all these old, I assume non-working, ovens.