Intellectually paralysed by grief over the death of a good friend described in the previous item I sought support from another old friend, in this case a close schoolfriend from our time together at boarding school, a place where potentially lifelong friendships are established. I have mentioned Tony on this site before as being a retired university chemistry tutor in Oxford, where he has continued to live with his lady companion pursuing a very stable lifestyle in comparison to that of my late other friend. Tony and I had stayed in irregular email contact throughout this century and I had often sought his view on my strange collection of alleged coincidences as he had used quantum chemistry calculations in his work, so had a good working knowledge of the principles involved, quantum effects potentially being an explanation for this precognitive phenomenon. However, in his fundamentally scientific approach to life he treated the quantum model as just a way for getting to the required answers in chemistry without accepting it as representing anything in reality more than a practical mathematical aid. Hence I had been posing challenging examples from my experiences to him for years without getting him to be anything but sceptical.
Hearing about the cause of my grief he was suitably enthusiastic about being more communicative than he had been and we made plans to meet up in person for the first time in over twenty years. Also I made yet another attempt to dislodge him from his sceptical view regarding my experiences but I felt that his passive scepticism was too general so I considered picking one of them for him to explain away specifically in a purely mainstream scientific manner. However, my problem was choosing one that was neither too complex nor too simple plus the fact that I had mentioned that a characteristic of my experiences was how timely they seemed, the previous item about my late friend being typical of this. Thus thinking about choosing an example I went to bed but as it turned out I didn’t need to worry as the ideal situation occurred during that very night as though in response to my desire.
Overnight, but seemingly towards the end of the night as I was waking, I experienced a series of vivid dreams about my childhood right back to my earliest memories such as being in my pram with the rain hood up struggling to pull down the apron across the front of it to see the world outside. I could even sense the peculiar distinctive smell of the waterproof coating on the outside of the hood, a material from that time in the 1940’s before modern plastics were in use, and the similar coating on the padded lining on the interior of the pram. Young senses are very sensitive compared to the duller senses we are left with in later life. My dreams were glimpses of my childhood that I couldn’t believe were still retained within my brain but nevertheless seemed so familiar. In my novel I had made reference to “living memory” primarily as a linguistic joke by implying that it differed from “dead memory” by being active connections across time from past events directly to the future as they happened rather than impressions retained and deteriorating within the brain for many years. I have only rarely experienced these vividly detailed recollections in my life but they seem very different from the usual dull replicas replayed from regular memory and I suspect that they may have a very different origin. In fact on one such occasion I experienced a waking dream while sitting in our living room with my eyes closed suffering from a severe headache. I could almost see from my childhood my clockwork toy train set including details of the engine and trackwork that I hadn’t thought about in a lifetime and I could even feel with my fingertips the differences between the painted surfaces on the engine and the bare plated metal parts while smelling the oil within the clockwork mechanism and yet simultaneously I could also hear my wife preparing a meal in the adjoining kitchen of our modern house.
During my waking moments from my more recent overnight encounter with my childhood I started thinking analytically about the experience and to see the whole picture I likened it to a jigsaw puzzle to be assembled from fragments of broken memories held in potentially dying clusters of neurons. Meanwhile in reality my wife and I got out of bed and went to the kitchen to prepare breakfast to bring back to the bedroom and during that time I was still thinking about reassembling the dream fragments but then for some reason started likening them to loose tesserae from a shattered Roman mosaic. We returned to bed with the breakfast and I turned the television on to watch the Breakfast show on the BBC. In my pedantic manner I was thinking that my analogy of loose tesserae from a mosaic was inappropriate as tesserae are usually regular shapes in plain colours that give no clues about where they might once have fitted in a picture, so quite unlike the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, when a news item appeared on the television about a shattered Roman fresco being reassembled from many small fragments. This was of course a far better analogy as these fragments were irregular and had portions of the pictures on their surfaces. This coincidence, of my memories from my early childhood and the fresco both being images from the distant past shattered by the progress of time, was ludicrously timely and typical of my previous experiences, so I immediately drafted an email about it to Tony over breakfast in bed and later did the appropriate diligent research to trace any possible more conventional explanation for it.
My internet searches found no earlier mentions of the fresco and although there was also a corresponding news item on the BBC’s website this had the current date on it, so had probably been placed there while the presentation team for the Breakfast programme had been compiling it in the early hours of the morning for broadcast, a regular overnight task that they sometimes grumbled about during their programmes. It was likely that the decision to broadcast the item that morning had been made around the time that I was having my dreams, so this appeared to be a case of synchronicity, but I continued with my diligent sceptical research. Tony had previously mentioned that he and his companion were going to Italy in the near future but at the time that information had only caused me to think of appallingly hot weather that would never suit my wife and myself and I had rapidly put it out of my mind, so this was hardly a sound cause of my thoughts about Roman mosaics although I did mention it in my full due diligence report to Tony later. The item on the BBC website mentioned that the fresco had been found in London some years earlier along with a mosaic, so I traced the original report of the find from some four years earlier but that only mentioned the marvellous mosaic as the remains of the collapsed fresco had probably still been hidden in the piles of rubble at the time. Unlike Tony’s remark about visiting Italy, this information about a mosaic in London seemed far more relevant to my apparently incongruous early morning thoughts but the broadcast information about the fresco had made an appropriate logical connection between such a mosaic and my mental jigsaw puzzle of images from the past, so satisfying my pedantic mind that all the information now available to me was consistent apart from the anachronistic sequence of its revelation to me of course. As an additional part of my diligence I scanned through the entire Breakfast programme again on the online BBC iPlayer but there had been no other mention of the fresco during it that I could have seen while our television was turned on that might have changed the order in which I obtained the information even subliminally. Also the mosaic didn't appear to have been mentioned in the broadcast at all.
This incident could be regarded as a simple coincidence, a synchronicity or a precognition but the whole subject of precognition has just been friendly sparring of our minds between Tony and myself for many years and we were quite content to accept each other’s views on the matter without any need to agree, so we quickly moved on to the more important matter of arranging to meet up in person. Eventually through another coincidence of existing plans my wife and I took our already planned private cruise up the Thames to Henley on a crewed boat that we had chartered for our sole use and, one of the two man crew being an accomplished chef, Tony and his companion came by train from Oxford to Henley and enjoyed a pleasant afternoon and splendid dinner with us on board. We have now agreed to meet up again soon in the coming year to ensure that our friendship remains strong, which pleases me as friendships maintained purely over the internet can sometimes get far too tenuous as I have sadly discovered.