Do you believe in the supernatural?
It's a generic question, I know, but I feel that it's an important ask to judge whether or not this whole diatribe is even worth reading. Even from the most "logical" people, you often hear platitudes on the idea of karma, balance, enlightenment, some kind of self beyond the self that exists as an amalgam of both your physical body and what your brain makes up into your overall being. I'm not here to give you any kind of argument on anything, but rather relay to you a phenomenon that exists beyond my own self that I've experienced since birth. It isn't one that exists strictly within the realm of feasible explanation other than outright denial, hence the dramatic questioning.
Basically, for as long as I can remember, I've had a twinge of clairvoyance. I can recall a few instances of when I was a child dreaming a regular dream of no real significance, odds ad ends of what make up the typical dream intact, but later (days, weeks, months, years later) these dreams would come to be vividly true. It may be meeting someone that would go on to be a friend of mine, having seen their face in great detail, events in my life like places that I'd travel to well before having been there, and, as I got older, very explicitly clear moments that I would wake up remembering down to each word. I've had moments where I've been speaking with someone only to interrupt them with the rest of their sentence or next thought unconciously as that dream from my youth was called up. These instances always give me a distinct feeling of deja vu, as well as a feeling that I can only liken to the fictional depictions I've witnessed of a flashback. There are other examples, such as being able to make unnaturally good guesses and describe things that I can't see, but those are mostly irrelevant.
I say all of this not to brag or build some cool aura about myself, but rather to lament what honestly feels like the end of my life through this lens. After a point in my life, I was sure that these dreams simply stopped. I haven't had a single prophetic dream since I was maybe around the age of 16. I could always tell what dreams were and weren't of the sort and it felt as if the ability to had suddenly left me. I had an unnatural fear of an early death ever since. Recently, more and more of the dreams that reached me as a child have begun to come to fruition, so much so that I can notice them more than once a day. This wouldn't be such an issue had I not since stopped having these dreams, but the idea that I'm catching up to the future I was so used to peeking into is, in all honesty, scary. It feels like every dream began at a point in my life, the point at which I had it, and was threaded along until they hit their end. The further I get from these points and the more that seem to reach their end now, the more I feel that my life, or rather, I myself am coming to a point. It's almost like reading a book all the way through for the first time after breaking the habit of reading the last page first; I'm reaching the first conclusion that I had no previous knowledge of, and for the first time as well. It could easily be explained away as false memories, coincidences from the infinite possibility of dreams, what have you, and as much as I'd like to agree, I just can't shake that feeling that one day I'll loop back into a memory of my own death, and it'll be right there, waiting for me.
Say what you want about the supernatural, but that fear just isn't one that I can shrug.