I’ve had a few, but here’s a couple of favourites, and actually one of them is my father’s. Note that my father is an atheist and doesn’t believe in anything “supernatural”, deeply uninterested in the subject.
My father’s dream
Short background: His father was a war vet (WWII) and emotionally abscent, unable to connect to his kids. Instead, my father got to know a man who had a workshop, where he hang around for a couple of years during his teens. Later, he moved to another country, got himself wife and kids and having troubles supporting them and no thought whatsoever of the man in the workshop.
One night, he dreamt that he was walking down the road, and approaching him from the other way, was a man with a bad limp. My father saw that it was the man in the workshop, who he hadn’t seen or really thought much of the last ten years.
The man said: “Hello, old friend. Are you afraid of me?”
A bit startled by the strange question, my father said: “No… of course not.”
The man patted him on the shoulder, saying, “That’s good”, and continued limping his way down the road.
This was such a strange dream that my father woke up my mother and told it to her, just so surprised.
Later that year, while we were visiting my grandparents in the land from where my father had moved, my grandmother asked my father if he rememberd the man in the workshop.
“Yes”, my father said, thinking it was a strange coincidence that she would mention him now; had never talked about him before.
She said: “He died earlier this year. He had a thrombus (?) in his leg this winter and got a terrible limp, and later he died.”
Wakinyan’s prayer
I’m not really a christian, and don’t believe much in the bible, and I don’t pray. However, I’m a believer of sorts, and it has happend, probably three or four times the last fifteen years that I’ve actually prayed to God, because… I just needed to do something. This is one of these occations:
At the time, my nephew was three years old, and his parents were beginning to get really worried, because the little boy didn’t develop as other children, and even though they didn’t admit it to themself, really, the boy was different. Nobody knew what it was, but now (two years later) he has been diagnosed with autism. What we knew at the time, was aside of unusal behaviour, that he didn’t learn to talk and so forth. One of the characteristics, which is noteworthy in this story, was that he never looked at you, he barely, if at all, noticed your presence.
Because I felt so much for the boy, was really worried for him and my troubled brother, I prayed for the boy. In desperation I asked God to help him. “Please help the boy”, I prayed. “Help him talk and let him grow up as a ordinary boy, and relieve my brother from all his worries.” If nothing else, I did it to relieve the pressure I felt, and to help the frustration of not being able to do anything for them.
Next time I was visiting my brother’s, I sat down in the sofa, waiting for my coffee. The autistic boy was playing on the floor, and I gave him a glance. Now, something strange happend: He looked at me. He looked straight in my eyes. This was surprising enough, but then he rose, came over to me (never happened before or since), looked straight in my eyes, and stroke me over my head a few times. His look was sad and, really, compassionate. Then he just got back to his toys and continued playing in his own world.
I just sat there, staring, looked around, like: “Did you see that, did anybody see that!?”
I believe that that’s the only time he has ever looked at me straight in the eyes. It’s typical by the way, for autistics to avoid eye contact. It was as if he – judging from his sad, compassionate expression, and gesture – was saying: “Thank you, uncle Wakinyan, but it won’t do any good. It’s alright.”
I still get shivers when I think about it.
