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The Interview You want to know what the crystal vision is? Good grief, that’s a hard one. For someone who hasn’t got it, it’s unimaginable. I’ll try and explain it if you like, but I’m not guaranteeing that it’s going to help you. It’s like...imagine a window. It’s dirty inside and out, grimy and gritty and no matter what you do you can’ clean it. Right? Now imagine it’s cracked in so many different ways if distorts even the vague light that gets through it. OK, got it? Now imagine that there is something going on behind this window. Because the window is in the way the sound is distorted, only certain pitches get through, so you can only pick up threads of conversations. The only things that you can see are ghost shadows and some colours. For some reason, purple and red seem to be clearer than any. Occasionally, because of the fractal patterns of the shattered glass, you can glimpse a face. Almost as if, temporarily, the glass is clean and clear. That’s rare though. Most of the time you only get images and you have to use your imagination to complete the picture. I don’t really know why it’s called the crystal vision. Crystal is the operative word, I suppose. I think it comes from an old fashioned idea that died out in the late twentieth century, before we discovered that there were people that had extraordinary powers. There used to be people, mostly women purporting to be gypsy in origin, who read a thing called a crystal ball, a large glass sphere. The business of fortune telling by crystal ball was fairly big. I suppose they had to have some sort of precognition or they wouldn’t have been so successful. No, I don’t know if they did true readings. But that’s where the expression ‘crystal’ vision comes from. I mean it doesn’t mean the vision is crystal clear, does it? Definitely not! I haven’t ever had a precognitive incident. Not in the way the dreamers have incidents. The vision is a little different from precognition. Precogs tend to be about places or things, not individual people. Also precogs have affinities for certain items, we have to touch people if we are to get a picture about them. I explained that the vision is about images. Well sometimes, as I said, those images are clearer than normal. Especially if it’s someone that you know. The only time I remember having a particularly vivid vision was one night, after a particularly heavy night in this bar that I know. I was supporting a friend as he threw up in a hedge on the way home. All of a sudden, I saw him wired up to all manner of machines. His skin was all twisted and puckered. His mouth was this gaping hole in his face and he was just staring into space, like he was dead or something. It was a nightmare hallucination that sobered me up rather quickly. I joined him in throwing the contents of my stomach into the hedge. I don’t know if it was drink induced or what. When I told him a few days later about what I had seen he looked at me so strangely. It seems that he had found out that he had cancer the day after our drinking session. There was no way that I could have known. It was fairly far gone and there wasn’t a damn thing he or I could do about it. I only went to see him once before he died and got such a feeling of deja vu that I didn’t go back again. Yes, I know there are experiments going on, using hallucinatory drugs to focus the vision. I don’t relish the idea of being drugged up to have clear visions, though. I’m quite happy with my muddy ones, thank you. I know there are some that think we who are talented should give up our lives to help everyone else. They always conveniently forget we’re still as human they are. Sometimes I think we’re more human because we can see beyond what normal people see. Is ‘see’ the right word? I don’t know. I suppose perception is more correct. We perceive better than they do. I can’t really say that I perceive though, because perception implies understanding and I don’t understand what I see. Does that make us superior? If I knew that, I would be rich. I know most paranorms believe that they are different from the rest of the human race but I don’t reckon that we are. I think that the only difference is that by some weird occurrence our talent has surfaced. I think ALL humans have some sort of paranormal power. It’s just in some people it’s, you know, lying low. The proper word is latent. It probably takes a trauma for the talent to surface. My own trauma? It has something to do with my first ever vision. I was in class. I think I must have been twelve or so. I thought I’d dropped off for a moment. But I hadn’t. My tutor had touched my shoulder for some reason. The vision was violent, a lot of red and a lot of sounds, the image of two cars that had sort of become one. I knew but I didn’t understand, you see? My tutor was killed two days later in a horrific pileup on the M25. The one that got the national speed limit reduced to 55mph. I remember being very ill when I found out. I suppose the onset of puberty and the violence of what was going to happen to her threw the balance of my talent from latency into full operancy. I don’t often see nice things. I don’t know why. Ask anyone with the vision and they’ll tell you that there is a propensity for us to see nasty things. I think because the good things that happen to us don’t tend to make too much of an impact on our future lives. I read this book once. It had a very interesting theory in it. The possibility that there were endless strands of different futures and that we were constantly going down one particular strand. That there is a strand where I don’t exist. Or where I’m not having this interview. Or where nobody has paranormal powers. Endless possibilities. I am trying to take this a bit further. I think there are common ‘nodes’ on these strands. Places where something will happen on all the strands, excepting none of them. It is those ‘nodes’ that we see. Even on the strands where I don’t exist. I suppose it’s only a theory and I could be completely wrong. In danger of mixing my metaphors, we actually see ripples in the space-time continuum. I know that’s a bit of a well worn cliché, but in effect those things that affect us most we see clearer. The bigger the splash the larger the ripples. Unfortunately, those things that usually cause the biggest splash are the nasty things. Same thing with the nodes. The things that affect our lives the greatest are the bad things. I’ve only ever seen a few nice things. I suppose the most memorable was the marriage of my best friend to my younger sister. We were fourteen at the time. One afternoon we were chucking a ball around after school and I tackled him. For a moment I didn’t know where I was. I thought I’d hit my head and then I saw it. Flowers and white and yellow and music; sweet, sweet music like you’ve never heard. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. But there in front of me was a man and a woman I didn’t recognise and this aura of love surrounding them. You must understand that I don’t usually see auras but this one was this great billowing rainbow of colour. Then I saw myself. I knew it was me but it was older and bearded. I screamed. Next thing that I knew was my friend leaning over me. Then I knew the other man that I’d seen was him. He said I’d blacked out for a moment. Went glazed over. I told him what I’d seen. He laughed. It wasn’t until three years later that I finally put two and two together and realised that the woman was my baby sister. You see, she hadn’t been born when I had the vision. My friend was fifteen and a half years older than her. They married when she was eighteen. I keep hearing people saying destiny has nothing to do with life, that we can change the future. That is a load of crap. I tried my damnedest to stop that relationship going too far. I was helpless. It wasn’t the only time that I’ve ever tried to stop one of my visions coming true. I don’t care what the precogs tell you, the future is immovable. They don’t call it the crystal vision for nothing. The vision is as hard as diamond. Very difficult to cut and even more difficult to smash. I’m not saying that it can’t be done, it’s just nobody’s done it yet. How many precogs do you know who have predicted a disaster that has been prevented? The only thing that they have done is warned the emergency services in good time to get to the scene. I don’t honestly know what the use of this talent is. We can’t change our future. These things we see are still going to happen to us, even if we try to stop them. I finally accepted that my sister loved my best friend as much as I did, in her own way. It wasn’t worth all the agony. I think we should live for today and cope with the future when it gets here. I’ve learnt that over the years. Sometimes I see things happening to my wife and children and I ignore them, because I know that, even though forewarned is forearmed, there is nothing either they or I can do to change things. I feel sick when I learn that something I have envisioned has come true but that is a part of my talent that I must accept. I suppose eventually that some bright spark, probably a precog, will succeed in changing the future. I should imagine that there will be one hell of a time paradox and the whole universe will fold in on itself. Maybe it won’t be as drastic as that. Maybe the people who were supposed to die in the explosion find other ways to die on the same day. Or the plane that was supposed to crash mysteriously disappears off of a coast somewhere. Whatever happens the universe will find a way to right itself before it destroys itself. So now you know about my talent, you’ll understand what I was doing outside the jeweler's shop at the time of the robbery. I was being a fool and trying to stop what I knew was going to happen from happening. Yes, of course I know who the thieves are. I had to, otherwise I wouldn’t have known that the robbery was going to take place would I? But I can’t tell you who it was. It wouldn’t be worth my while. Neither you nor I can change the future. |