I'm riding a slow train on a sinuous track through suburban hills. Suddenly I visualize a tunnel ahead. In the vision, colored images cover the tunnel walls--strangely, they're colors I wouldn't dream of using! They look okay--just not my palette.

We round a bend, and there the tunnel is, just like my vision. Its walls are all cartooned with Disney animal-people in archeological adventures like RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. The colors are dimmer than what I saw, or maybe it's just bad lighting.

Still, I wonder in the tunnel if my vision of it was a precognitive dream (sic). Could I be mistaking coincidence for precognition, by selecting only the similar elements? Weigh the similarities and differences between the two mural-tunnels--vision and reality.

As I ponder the possibilities (and it still looks like prediction to me), a bandit with a bomb climbs forward to the engineer's cab and yells "Stop the train, or I'll blow it up!" I'm upset because I had my heart set on reaching San Francisco, and I know we're nearly at the end of the tunnel. The train slows and stops--in the light. Mouth of the tunnel! We get off. I'm disappointed we've lost our transport, but at least we're alive.

I'm uneasy because we're near a nuclear power plant. If they threaten to blow THAT up... But I see the twin towers of the Golden Gate Bridge a mile or two off--this is the Waldo Grade tunnel, in the Marin Headlands!

Even terrorists can't stop me now. I can walk to the City from here.

NEXT MORNING

Write the dream down thinking that's a rarity--not a precognitive dream, but one where I contemplate precognitive dreams IN THE DREAM. Weird.

I go into the kitchen for breakfast and find the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle has a photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands. Next to it is an article on the Salvadorean rebels blowing up the most important bridge in the country.

Okay, okay, maybe it WAS precognitive as well as contemplative. Next time I assume I'm just wilfully selecting similarities in chance patterns... I'll wait till the whole pattern's in. Day and night.