This Means Something

Something important is going to happen to me in Thailand. Unseen forces have catapulted me into this trip.For the last six months I had the strangest feeling that I was coming to the end of my life. I told my friends I felt like Richard Dreyfuss in the movie ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’, when he’s sitting at the dinner table piling up a huge mound of mashed potatoes on his plate and saying:
“this means something.”
I feel the way you do when you’re waking up from a profound dream but you can’t quite remember the details. I even feel this way now as I write this.
In the last week of October I had a premonition that I was about to die. Just think how strange it was for me. On November 2nd I was engaged and living a quiet life with my fiancee in Calgary. Then the next day, my engagement was suddenly over. And in that two minutes when it all ended, I suddenly told her, without a moment’s hesitation, that I was going to move to Ontario, then travel to Thailand. I was as shocked as she was, to hear myself saying it.

I had wanted very much to live closer to my family in Ontario. Melissa had a dream six months ago, in which I was fixing her garage door She felt this dream was really going to happen. But when she recounted the dream to Mom, she said. “There’s no way it could happen because Steve and Kahlin would never move from Calgary. Kahlin would never leave her daughters and her mom to come here.” Almost three years ago, to the day, I had been making plans to do this exact trip. I went to see a psychic friend of mine, Carolyn. She said; this is definitely a trip you will go on, Steve. And it’s one you will go on alone. As I was leaving, she handed me a string of brightly colored stuffed cloth birds.
“I got these from a dear friend who met the Dali Lama. I’m supposed to give these to you now, because you are going to meet the Dali Lama on your travels.” Soon after that psychic reading, I met L and we began our romance.

Then, last December, I felt so strongly about this trip again, that I actually booked it. But Kahlin didn’t want to go with me so I cancelled it. I also had a very strong intuitive feeling that if I went without her, somehow our relationship would end. I told her I had always avoided going to Third World countries because I felt that if I saw people in such great need, I would never be able to leave.

Now suddenly, I’m single again. I booked my ticket in early December when I arrived here in Ontario. As soon as I booked it, everything seemed to be about Thailand. My Mom’s favorite show: ‘CSI Crime Scene’ had an episode about a murder in a Thai Buddhist Temple. There were specials on TV about Thai monks. When I went to the travel agent, she had posters of Thailand plastered on the wall behind her. It wasn‘t just me; my relatives all started commenting on how many Thai references they were running into.
We thought it was just that we were looking for it, until Boxing day when the Tsunami hit and the News kept showing footage was from Phuket, Thailand.
What’s also amazing about the timing is that I was originally planning to go to Thailand eight days after the Tsunami hit. But I lost my birth certificate so I had to buy my ticket for a month later; February 4th. And to get my passport faster, I had to actually buy the ticket early, which I did. If I hadn't bought it when I did, I might have changed my mind.
With all the pain I’ve felt from all these sudden changes in my life, I have never felt more sure that I am exactly where I should be, and that my journey to Thailand is exactly what I'm supposed to do. And now, just like Richard Dreyfuss, I am excited to find out if I will wake up and remember what this dream means.