Remember last year I told you about the premonition/dream I had about Missouri Gov. Carnahan's plane crash?

It is Monday, September 10, 2001. I have been in a state of great anxiety for weeks. I am on my way to meet a young woman I\ufffdve been seeing. The weather is perfect \ufffd beautiful blue skies, lush green trees, the afternoon sunlight filtering through them kaleidoscopically. The girl I am meeting is the very flower of beauty and grace and intelligence, and I am very happy to be seeing her tonight. I think \ufffd how can anything be wrong with the world on a day like this? Then \ufffd there is going to be a plane crash.

Nonsense, I say to myself, and put the thought out of my mind.

The girl has been going through some hard times. Her twin brother was badly injured in a car accident recently and we exchange stories of disrupted sleeping and eating schedules. In the course of this, I relate to her the following dream \ufffd nightmare - I had the previous night.

I am in a building that is ashen gray everywhere, without light. I run up and down from floor to floor, and everywhere I am greeted by the same sight \ufffd mangled bodies, headless torsos, bodiless heads \ufffd but strangely, no blood, no color of any kind \ufffd only everywhere the same deathly ashen gray, as if everything had been covered by some kind of pallid lunar dust. With one exception \ufffd on the floor a small maroon figure is writhing in pain \ufffd it is partially covered by bandages, or maybe of all horrors, diapers \ufffd it is a baby and I can see from what flesh is exposed that it had been burned from head to toe. I recoil in horror as it reaches out to me and grabs my ankle and I hear its thoughts \ufffd please help me! I wake up in a cold sweat. I could not imagine what such a dream could mean. I prefer not to dwell on it.

We have dinner and a few drinks and chat amiably, then go to visit her brother in the hospital. I am gratified and honored to be with her and her family. The night ends pleasantly. She drops me off near my house and we part, and I think how much I look forward to seeing her again. For once I am at great peace, and fall off to sleep easily that night.

Tuesday morning. I have left the television on and I awake at precisely 7:45 (I instinctively check the clock). On the TV I see an image of the World Trade Center with a gaping hole in one of the towers, with flames and roiling smoke issuing from it.

The rest is silence.

I can't sleep. I'm afraid of what I'll see. Another dream:

I am standing before a still lake of very dark water. All around me is a pale yellow light, coming from everywhere \ufffd and nowhere. Deep down in the water, strange clouds are forming \ufffd they look like mushrooms extending up from the inky depths. Out of each cloud emerges a single fish, breaking the calm surface of the dark lake, leaping up into the yellow light, which glints mysteriously off their silvery sides. I see that nearby are a host of ghostly fishermen \ufffd all alike, without faces, the mere traces of some former living things. All the fish are caught as they emerge from the lake, they do not return. Except for one \ufffd I reach out and grab one of these fish with my right hand. I see that it is not really a fish as such \ufffd more like some strange combination of fish and insect \ufffd some primitive and basic thing with scales and wings and a large, inky black eye that stares back at me without emotion \ufffd some kind of symbol of all life, some overwhelmingly fundamental thing \ufffd it is my own soul. I let it go and it flies off into what I can only call Heaven. The yellow light is God.

I once had a horrifying vision of a nuclear bomb exploding over the Gateway Arch. I saw the emerging fireball, a hundred million-degree plasma, the very force of the Sun, devouring everything out to several miles. Somehow I am immune, and I stand in the middle of a ruined and flattened landscape. Where my fair city stood there is now only a smoking crater. There is a tendency to deny that these terrible weapons exist. Remember this \ufffd no weapon was ever created that was not eventually used. In the coming months, as the political crisis worsens as the result of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the likelihood increases that some set of circumstances, some inexorable chain of events, will release these death-genies \ufffd and once out of their bottles, there is no return. It will be the end of the world as we know it \ufffd or even as we can know it. Every effort, every thought, every prayer, must be bent toward avoiding this end.

The lake in my dream is the world \ufffd and the clouds underneath it are the mushroom clouds materializing over the great cities of Earth, disappearing one by one in a nuclear holocaust. The fish-things are the souls of the millions as civilization \ufffd perhaps even life itself \ufffd vanishes forever. I am as certain of this as I am of the lines on my own hand. But \ufffd this is his message \ufffd it is not too late.

Or is it?