In the late fall of 1976 I had an experience that would change my life.
While asleep, I heard a female voice call out my name, twice. It resembled the voice of my
sister or my mother. I woke up in a panic, with the distinct impression that the ceiling
was about to collapse on me. I jumped out of bed and ran outside my bedroom. Moments
elapsed, as I moved from one room to another, not quite sure what to do with myself. I
checked the door locks, thinking that maybe, in my sleep, I had heard the sound of someone
trying to break in. After all, this was Bedford-Stuyvesant -- one of the roughest
neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. Nothing...
There was dead silence everywhere, and everything seemed quite normal. Yet, never before
had I had such a strong sense that something was wrong; my gut was telling me that I was
in imminent danger. Eventually, though, I convinced myself that this must have been a very
bizarre kind of nightmare. I returned to bed, and fell asleep again.
The following morning I was startled awake by a phone call. A Greek friend of mine was
calling to tell me that a terrible earthquake had hit Thessaloniki, the northern capital
of Greece, where my family was living at that time. I was practically sick with anxiety,
realizing, suddenly, the significance of the episode I had just lived through. When I
finally got through to my parents on the phone, I was relieved to discover that they were
unharmed, though thoroughly shaken by this unexpected event. My mother, alone in the
apartment when the violent shaking had begun, had run out into the street, like thousands
of others, fearing that the building's collapse was imminent. |
