A few days ago another unidentified body was found--

--no, wait, I should go back farther--
In September, I was looking for someone who was supposedly in my "community"--
--no, even farther back--
In 1999, a body was found not far from where I was staying.

A few months earlier, I had my first concrete proof that I had out of body experiences.
I was on a music site Radiohead message board and had become quite close with the small coterie of regular posters. A newish one, her name was Michelle, was in Australia and still young, in high school. I woke in the afternoon after a particularly odd and disjointed dream.
I don't usually have odd dreams, in the sense of people who fly and ride unicorns and shoot through the circulatory systems of frogs. My dreamscape is not only rather banal but mapped, literally, with regular places regularly visited and--
--well, to go on could be its own story. Suffice it to say, when something is not as usual, it stands out like a Lurch at a little persons convention.
All perspectives were from the floor or by the ceiling and of things I'd never seen: a train station by water, an attic of a music store with record bins, something bright orange, flat with corners, a basement, and on an on, and Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. I never had random guest appearances in my dreams with the few exceptions of incidencents like Blair from "Facts of Life" standing over a cardtable heaped with smoking cigar butts, inhaling deeply.
Online later wanting to report it, my skin crawled with electricity as I read Michelle's entry of meeting Jonny Greenwood in a record store. I mailed her immediately with questions before she could say something that could change the content of my memory. She mailed back and we compared details. She came in on a train by water, she met Johnny at an old record store, the orange thing was found to be a zine her friend had given him that same day, it had happened at the same time I had been asleep.
Now I understood what had happened on and off for as long as I could remember, these "other people's dreams" as I'd thought of them. And I had proof.
Some details never got sussed out but we became friends until she disappeared some time not long after. She posted she had shaved her head and was gone.

Back to waking on that very odd day months later, from a very odd dream I repeatedly had to wake myself from, not from what I was seeing but what i was feeling:
they know, they know, they'll find me, they'll find me
The unbearable anxiety, fear, horror, of being found out, as the walls went by, the pictures on the walls, pacing, turning--

Fuck, I thought, I don't want this. And I woke myself up.
I went back to sleep immediately and was back again:
they know, they know
but this time, a field, a tree, a road, a dog, a fence, a house--
this time I was female and moving toward a house from behind to look in a window at an older man eating dinner alone.
he doesn't know

I woke and came downstairs still groggy from stress, feeling totally unrested. I was staying at my parents and my mother was in the kitchen and I sleepily started to say I had the worst weird dream--
She automatically responded that I should forget about it.
I turned on the tv on the counter to hear:
"An unidentified body has been found in a field--"

Still, it didn't sink in until the evening news and suddenly the whole of that day made a horrible kind of sense.