Luge Slider Had A Premonition Of His Death

By James Donahue

After luge competitor Nodar Kumaritashvili died in a high-speed crash during a test run only hours before the Winter Olympics opened last week on Vancouver, his father told the Wall Street Journal that his son reported a fear of that particular track.

“Dad, I’m scared of one of the turns,” Kumaritashvili reportedly told his father during a telephone conversation earlier in the week.

The 21-year-old Kumaritashvili specialized in that particular sport and obviously understood the dynamics of high speed racing on packed ice/snow luge tracks, there is something peculiar about his conversation with his father only hours before his death. It was as if he knew that he was about to die on that track.

Premonitions of doom are not uncommon. It was said Abraham Lincoln had a vision of his own death prior to his assassination at the Ford Theater.

In 1914, Newfoundland sealer John Howlet awoke from a nightmare in which he saw himself lost, alone and freezing on a mountain of ice. He said he was surrounded by vague, indefinable “things” on the ice around him. A few weeks later Howlet was among a number of men left accidentally abandoned on an ice-floe in the North Atlantic. A ship’s captain failed to notice they were missing and sailed off without them. By the time they were rescued, more than half of the sailors were dead. Howlet, who was among the survivors, recognized that this had been his dream. The “indefinable things” he saw in his dream were bodies that were covered in snow.

Other major disasters throughout history have produced people who had premonitions. Boston shoe dealer Edward Bowen told friends that he and his wife canceled his passage on the ill-fated liner Lusitania in 1915 after “a feeling grew upon me that something was going to happen.” He said it was a difficult decision because he was going to miss what he said was going to be an important business meeting in London. The ship was sunk by a German U-boat on that trip.

After the terrible disaster involving a mountain of coal that collapsed and buried an elementary school filled with children in Aberfan, Wales, in October 21, 1966, a mother of one of the dead children told of a dream her child had the night before. He told her: “I dreamed I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.”

There have been many stories about people who booked passage on the ill-fated liner Titanic but then refused to board the great ship because of “bad feelings” or dreams of impending disaster. Among the more dramatic stories was that of an event that occurred among watchers along the coast of the Isle of Wight as the Titanic steamed past on what was to have been its maiden voyage to New York. Suddenly a woman identified as Miss Marshall began screaming: “It’s going to sink! That ship is going to sink! Do something! Are you so blind that you are going to let them drown? Save them! Save them!”

The strange list of premonitions of disasters involving aircraft, ships, trains and terrible fires can fill books if one digs through the mountains of old newspaper clippings, books and family stories.

All of this points to a strange and uncanny ability some of us . . . and perhaps all of us seem to have to catch glimpses of major events in the future. And in that lies the long-debated theory among quantum physicists that time is not what we think it is. It is believed by some that time may even be non-existent outside of three-dimensional reality.

Yet another story filtering among us during these strange and changing times is that the world is preparing for a dimensional shift, and as this event looms, the veil separating our current realities from the spiritual world around us is beginning to tear.

Those of us who are aware of these changes, and who acquire the ability to glance through the rips in the fabric from time-to-time, appear to capture glimpses of not only the spirit world, but important spikes in time that point to future events we need to be aware of.

Unfortunately, young Nodar Kumaritashvili did not recognize his emotional reaction to the luge track as a personal warning. Indeed, even though he feared the course, after months of intense training that got him picked as an Olympic competitor, it was emotionally and socially impossible for him not to have taken that fatal ride.