i was talking about the kind of feeling that might occasionally enter your head, when logic and experience are telling you that everything is as normal.
i quite likely owe my life to just such an implausable thought
Yeah I know what you mean with this. When my cousins daughter was a toddler, I handed her a teddybear and her hand touched mine as I did so. I got this forboding feeling she was dying even though she was perfectly healthy, I felt a real darkness behind her. about 6 months laterI had a dream her stomach was getting bigger and bigger and I screaming at her to go to hospital but she just stood and smiled at me. The sadness I felt in the dream was incredibly real. The next day my mum said they had gone to hospital to check a lump in her stomach, but it wasnt thought to be serious. I knew it would be because of the dream, its like I just expected this to happen. She had cancer and had had it for months. It was malignant and with a 2% chance of survival. They gave her massive doses of chemotherapy which was experimental because the cancer was rare they arent really sure how to treat it, we agreed to let her be a "lab rat" because it was the best course of action.
During this time (she was only 2) she begun talking of seeing our Nanna who had died when she was a baby. she would say things like "nanna came to see me last night" and that Nanna would visit her and hug her singing songs and holding daffodils. Daffodils were nanas favourite flower. We told her these were dreams and she looked hurt and said "well these dreams are when Im awake" We begun getting worried when nanna begun asking her if she would like to go and live with her. We told her to tell Nanna she was not allowed to go and live with her!
anyway, she has been very lucky and survived the cancer, it has been 5 years since then. While she was still small and bald she said many interesting things. We took her into a 500 year old farm house once, she would have been three because her brother was a baby. And she said, just between her and I, that the woodwork so so old, she had never seen such an old house. She tutted under her breath and said "but where is the dog?" then she says to me "oh its sad, the dog got killed" I later asked the farmer about his dog and he said he had run him over with the tractor.
She does not see Nanna anymore, and frequently asks why this isnt the case, she misses seeing nanna singing holding flowers and misses her hugs. Also unfortunately, her father died suddenly last year and she got very upset that she has never seen him the way she see's nanna.
I remember as well when she was very young she mentioned once before she was herself she was another girl who lived in norway with a different mother and was killed age 5, but she refused to mention it ever again, she was quite serious though, it wasnt a game to her.