It was the start of my summer break in 1990, and I was out playing with my friends. I was really never at home unless I needed something or I was in trouble, and I certainly was not home in the middle of the day for a nap. A nap was never on that list, but on this day, a nap was suddenly and inexplicably the only thing on my mind. I had to get home. I remember telling my friends I needed to go home and lie down because I didn’t feel well. They gave me a hard time about it, like young boys do, but I went home anyway.

I remember walking into the house and seeing my dad mowing the lawn as I walked inside. I felt like I was going to pass out, and I knew I would never make it to my room, but I could make it to the couch, and I did. June in North Texas is hot and humid, and we did not have air conditioning. We did, however, have a brown vinyl couch with a raised floral pattern. It was uncomfortable and slippery, and I didn’t like the sounds it made when you moved or the imprints it left on your skin if you sat too long. Normally, it was the last place I would sit, especially on a hot day. But today, I was not going to make it to my room. I do not remember my head touching the couch; I was out the moment I sat down.

I fell into a deep sleep and immediately started dreaming about my grandfather. He was floating through the clouds and saw me and stopped on his way past. We talked, and he told me he loved me and wanted to say goodbye. There was an end table next to the couch where the family phone stayed. It was a mustard yellow ‌Southwestern Bell rotary phone and was loud. My head was right next to the phone, and it had apparently started ringing right after I walked into the house, but I never heard it. It was loud enough for my dad to hear it outside over the noise of the lawnmower. He came into the house to see why I was not answering the phone, and I was asleep on the couch.

My dad was shaking me, yelling my name, trying to wake me up. When I finally woke up, I was confused and covered in sweat, even though I had been in the house for less than five minutes. Once he was sure I was okay and actually awake, he told me we had to go. My grandmother had just called, and my grandfather had just passed away.

I’ve never forgotten that dream.

During the month of December 2003, my first wife and I took an extended vacation. I wrote about the last week of that trip in my memoir, Fragmented. I’ve never found a better way to say it than I did then:

“During that last week on the road, I started waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and startled, but I did not know why. I would listen for noises and get up to walk around the house wherever we were staying, or in our apartment once we got home, and try to figure out what woke me, but there was never anything there. Just the same lingering dream each night: a funeral, but I did not know for whom. I would walk towards the casket in a dark room, filled with a sense of dread. Before I could open the casket, darkness enveloped me. I would wake up and never see inside.”

During her funeral in January 2004, I realized the dream was about her funeral. And just like the dream, I never saw inside, and I did not let anyone else either.

I looked for an answer to that one for a long time. Psychology calls it apophenia, the mind’s ability to find a pattern in noise, especially in grief. If you’re under enough stress, the brain will manufacture a warning out of nothing more than coincidence and, in hindsight, call it foresight. I suspect that is normally true. I’m not really superstitious or prone to look for signs. But this had gone on for weeks beforehand. That’s harder to dismiss.

Many traditions that I’ve read about have their own name for this, but it’s all the same thing: an omen. The Bible is full of stories of people forewarned in their sleep. Carl Jung called it synchronicity. Meaningful coincidence with no real thread connecting one thing to the other.

I like physics, and it’s helped me try to make sense of this. In quantum entanglement, distance is irrelevant; what happens to one particle happens instantly to the other. What if death works the same way? A fixed event in spacetime sending ripples backward as easily as forward? What if life could be entangled with its own ending? Then her uncanny instincts or my dream of a nameless funeral weren’t foresight. They were just echoes arriving early.

None of it explains why I never saw inside that casket.

Now, 22 years later, my wife fell asleep thinking of an old friend she hadn’t spoken to in years. The next morning, she learned that her friend had passed away.

I watched her process the news, and I didn’t ask if she wished she’d picked up the phone. I know the weight of that question, so I left it unspoken. I know the quiet, incessant guilt of an intuition you can’t act on, and the desperate instinct to shield yourself from it.

Watching her, I finally understood why the casket stayed closed in the dream, and why I kept it closed at the service. It was never a mystery to be solved. It was my shield. I never looked because I didn’t want to know, and I built the rest of my life out of that same retreat: refusing to look at the reality of loss, refusing to let anyone see me breaking, convincing myself that if I never picked up the phone, maybe the worst hadn’t happened yet.

An echo can tell you that a storm is coming. But it can’t force you to open the door.

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