The Dream That Saved My Life

In my senior year in high school I started to have a dream about me being in the hospital. The dream was so disturbing. It always woke me up out of dead sleep. I told my sister about it and she said don’t worry, it was just a dream.

As a high school student I was seriously into sports. I was running every day, doing exercises and riding my bicycle all over the place. My big goal was to go on a bike tour with other people who were also serious bike riders, going from Columbus to Portsmouth, Ohio. The trip was 125 miles one way and then you had to ride it back too. This is something I had never done before, so I had to push my body in overdrive to reach the highest level of fitness possible.

The thing that made me really start believing in the power of dreams is when I accurately predicted a car accident I was in during my sophomore year in high school. I saw both automobiles, where it happened, why it happened, and the exact time when it would happen ~ David Ben Rance

Another reason why I was training so hard was that I had signed up to go into the military the following year, on a split option. I figured, if I can ride from one part of Ohio to another, I would be ready to go into the military.

While all this fitness frenzy was going on in my life, the dream about me in a hospital bed kept getting stronger and stronger. In the dream I could hear my mother say: “You need to do more sit-ups!” From a young age I have always taken my dreams seriously, so I listened to the dream advice and started doing more and more abdominal exercises.

I would keep doing sit-ups until I was completely out of breath. Then I would rest for a hour or so, and then go back to pushing myself to do more. At the time I was living with my sister and her husband. They were cautioning me that I was doing too much exercise and that I needed to slow down, but I would not listen.

Meanwhile I continued to have the same dream.

At some point in the creative process of dreaming, certain dreams appear to qualify as “precognitive” in nature. A seeming unknown potential that does not become apparent to the dreamer, until the dream actualizes and the individual is left with the realization that what was once dreamed of, is now actual ~ Ian Wilson

Finally the day of the bike ride arrived and I showed up with my new, very bright orange bike. Boy, did I get the stares because the colorful bike I bought for the ride was not really built to go from one part of the state to another. It was heavy and made out of steel. It was not like the English racer that my uncle owned.

In the end the bike tour went well, because I was extremely fit, but on the way back my right side started to hurt very badly. Yet, after the race the pain went away after a few days. I thought I had simply pulled something in the right side of my body.

But seven days later I knew something was very wrong. I didn’t realize at the time that my appendix had ruptured, until the poison hit my system. After being rushed to the hospital and having my appendix removed, the doctor who did my surgery told everyone in my family that if I didn’t do all that exercise, and did not have such strong abdominal muscles, I might have died.