The Cassandra Syndrome by Colin Brookfield, Colin Brookfield (an ebook reader .txt) 📕

I had taken up surfboard riding and had been doing so safely, for several years. That is, until that day when I would meet my nemesis.

There were just a few other board riders on the beach when I arrived; they were scattered here and there in the cool placid shallows, as I was soon to be, whilst my wife preferred to watch from the dry sand.

There had been a vicious cyclone during the night that had left the sea so ragged and violent that all ships had been kept harboured in port. There would be no board riding that day or venturing any closer to the sea than these shallows. Then the impossible thing happened!

I was just about to leave the safe (below-knee) shallows for the dry sand, when I was seized by an unnatural force from above the water level, which hauled me seawards into the violence and just kept going further and further. I hung on to my board for dear life, even though I knew death had already claimed me. Nobody could survive in that maelstrom – not even for a minute but, something else knew otherwise. Time had no meaning anymore, it was as though it had stopped. Then miraculously, a smooth, rolling board-rider’s wave, obeying its own laws of physics, came smoothly through the chaos towards me. It took a major act of courage to let go of my life support and jump on it. That same unbroken rolling wave, carried me on through the surrounding violence for about a quarter of a mile, right back to the beach. I wondered how I could have found myself that far out, in what had felt like, a few seconds.

My wife and some landside board-surfers had watched everything. They said they had given me up for dead and could not believe the miracle they had seen. I had another shock, when my wife confirmed I had been out in that sea for an hour.

With absolute certainty, that same satanic influence had again set itself upon my destruction but, with equal amazement, an angelic influence had decided otherwise. My time in that sea had taken place within an entirely different time frame. This display firmly puts the reality stamp on both the dark and light entities.

I am Not That Easy to Kill

My life was saved again whilst working 18 floors up on a new high rise building in Surfers Paradise. We were constructing a walkway that extended beyond the outer walls of the structure. This was the top exposed slab, ready for the next floor to be constructed. During this process, a long length of timber that was supposedly secured, gave way beneath me and, I slid out into open space. I would have continued had it not been for the fellow workman, quickly taking hold of the other end.

Luck rubs off on others

After returning to the U.K. five years later, I was walking with my wife and her father along the main road pavement at Virginia Waters, when I saw a speeding vehicle mount the pavement in front of us. My wife and her father were so engrossed in conversation they had not seen the immanent danger. In a lightning move, I literally jumped them off their feet sideways and, we all lived for another day.

Early morning encounter

My wife and I were living in the London suburbs at a time of a rather strange encounter.

We had been asleep in the dark hours well after midnight, when Cita, one of our Siamese cats, awakened us with her yowling at our front gate. So feeling brave, I asked my wife if she would like to investigate.

Our bungalow was situated in the corner from which two roads diverged away from one another at 90 degrees and where Cita had taken up position to defend her property from something that had angered her. My wife hurried out to join the cat and the approaching scene that disturbed it.

A young lady was approaching with arms outstretched and, moving forward, as though guiding the black cat in front of her. As she reached the street lamp near our gate, my wife realised that she could not hear any footsteps from the girl. Her clothes were of expensive 1920s fashion, with black high-buttoned boots. Although the girl came quite close, neither she nor her cat, seem to be aware of my wife or our yowling Cita, who by this time, was ‘boxing’ in the air as if to warn off a predator. They then bore sharply to the left along the other road.

We did some research the following day and discovered that the land, before the houses had been built, had a large mansion on it in the nineteen twenties that served as a school for well-to-do young ladies. We also discovered on the local map of that time that a deep ditch had run across the outside of our gate and then parallel to the right of the path the ‘apparition’ took, as she disappeared into the distance. Therefore, in her alter-world she had finally turned away from our direction to avoid the ditch in front of her.

Written at the time:-

Otherworldly Encounter

A voice was on the night air rung

and spoken in the Siamese tongue,

Its sound upon the quietness broke,

upon my mind thus I awoke.

This urgent tone quickly worsening,

called to mind my Siamese nurseling,

so curious what my kitten faced,

I stumbled from my sleep in haste.

Soon the door was opened wide,

to find me in the night outside

and there beneath a street-light sat,

my kitten and a large black cat.

But something else moved in the night,

with soundless feet towards the light,

It was a lady, of some substance,

I stayed no less, though with reluctance.

For what was elegance and grace,

doing where it had no place,

with clothes a hundred years out-dated,

we were sharing times unrelated.

Her arms reached out unnaturally,

towards the silent cats and me,

I saw the large black cat respond,

as though the two of them belonged.

Then she turned with arms out-stretched,

her cat went too, though it were fetched,

they wandered outward from the light

and then away towards the night.

She came it seems, to guide its paws,

back through times re-opening doors

Forces and influences beyond the ken of mankind

My wife and I went to our local theatre to see the band of the Blues and Royals concert. It was a cold evening, so the police stayed in the warmth of the theatre. This rather annoyed me at the time and I said to my wife, “They should be doing their job properly and checking the outside perimeter to protect us from the IRA.” As usual, it was a fine concert but the next morning, our neighbour’s dog Honey, whilst sniffing around, discovered a bag with 27lbs of Semtex explosive; its timer had malfunctioned.

This was the largest bomb ever planted on the British mainland at the time and had it gone off, there would have been no one left to bury.

Sociopaths bent on murder

In 1995, my wife and I visited Cyprus to attend a friend’s wedding and hired a car. On the way to our hotel, we were held up by a traffic queue behind two huge tankers. Eventually our car was in position to overtake and the gently rising hill in front of us was clear, apart from a car that was too far in the distance to be a hazard, but once committed, matters began changing rapidly.

The tankers were tailgated and travelling at top speed, whilst other cars behind had blocked any opportunity of returning. Then our position changed to critical; the man coming towards us had deliberately speeded up, as though on some kind of pathological suicide mission.

The two tanker drivers at the side of us were aware of our plight and could have saved us. The cars behind them could have opened up a gap for us to return into but did the opposite. We were being deliberately trapped in all directions by sociopaths. How we managed to save ourselves was nothing short of miraculous; the final escape almost had our paint scraped off on either side. We never forgot that killer driver coming towards us; his face was transfixed in suicidal determination.

Something angelic had again interceded on our behalf and induced an unnatural calm both during and after the event that had made us coldly focussed, without the slightest sign of nerves – even afterwards – and that was very unnatural.

As for the psychopaths, each one saw our predicament and could have saved us but were collaboratively trying to kill us. That is an impossible happening in a civilised place, without the intervention of something evil having exerted a concerted influence over all the drivers. There is nothing new here. It can be seen quite clearly amongst these pages, where the same dark side orchestration of people and events recur and do so, in much the same astounding way as it did in the beginning times with the manifestations of my parents’ ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ alter-egos.

The dentist and the helper’s warning

I paid three thousand euros in advance, to a Cypriot Hospital’s dental department to have screwed-in type titanium dental implants. It was not until the surgeon began to work on me that I discovered he had other ideas. He started banging the implants in, instead of screwing them.

“I prefer my method”, the surgeon informed me as he then banged some titanium plugs into the insert holes. At the age of eighty, the constant impact made me feel disorientated, but at least, it seemed the worst was over. However, the plugs fell out on the way home.

The hospital arranged the next appointment for two days later, but by then, the gums had encroached so close to the open holes that when the plugs were banged back in, they splattered parts of the gums. I went back and forth for weeks and was suffering severe headaches. Then I had an ‘other-worldly’ warning.

I came down for breakfast one morning and found a pencil sharpener on the table. When I picked it up to put it away, something rattled inside, so I opened it. My wife and I were stunned! One of my titanium plugs dropped out. Then I discovered the plug was missing from my mouth. Something ‘mysterious’ had removed it whilst I was asleep and placed it in the sharpener and as I have said before, I am not somnambulistic.

I realised that I was heading for some serious harm if I allowed that surgeon to continue, so I never returned to that dreadful place and the money was lost.

Drugged, saved unconscious from the sea

The experiences I was subsequently subjected to by foreign authorities, are rather too brutal for reiteration here. Again, my angelic helper intervened.

Right of Passage

As I have already mentioned, Plato castigates us for our unworldly choices, whilst many centuries later, Dante (13/14th century), produced the solution to Plato’s observation. It came in the form of Dante’s Divine Comedy’. Its narrative describes Dante’s descent into hell with his guide Virgil, where he must face all the most evil features of human nature and hideous inflictors. There was no other road by which, to reach and ascend, the mountain of Paradise and be at one with his God.

Naturally, Dante’s lower Inferno place is a complete fiction but, it did fill a lot of pews at the time, as it did again in times later, with Botticelli’s descriptive painting of Hell and its warning, ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’.

After dismissing the Dante fiction, it must be looked at again, this time for the genius of its psychology because, Dante’s purging descent into the inferno, delivers us