I was in the limbo between sleep and wake when the vision came with its wounding clarity.

It was 7am and I sat up in bed, my heart racing and my pyjamas damp with sweat; the sounds of sirens and screams still rang in my ears.

With the vision fresh in my mind, I tip-toed downstairs to the conservatory, which was aglow with the morning sunlight flooding through the French windows.

As I knew they would be, my younger sister’s pencil crayons and drawing paper were strewn across the table. I was a bookish, serious child with little desire to express creativity; I was – and I suppose I still am – far more interested in what is proven than what is thought. And yet something told me to capture what I’d seen. Even at the age of ten, I understood the need for tangibility. For my own sake if nothing else.

I drew the scene on a large sheet of crisp white paper: the clear blue sky and the crowds of people on the pavement looking up, their hands over their mouths in horror. I used a ruler to draw the tall steel buildings with their neat rows and perfect columns of windows, all as yet unbroken.

I’d just drawn the first plane when my father appeared in the doorway.

‘What are you doing up so early?’ he asked, tightening the belt of his dressing gown over his expanding belly.

‘Just felt like it,’ I said, ashamed of my fear. How could this be anything more than a dream?

As my father made coffee in the kitchen, the burble of BBC Radio 4 coming through the open door, I wrote the numbers of the planes on their sides: 11 and 175.

My father came back into the room and stood next to me. He smelt of last night’s beer and this morning’s coffee. I leaned away from him and hoped he didn’t notice.

‘I don’t know where you get your imagination from,’ he said, an observation usually reserved for my sister. He took a slurp of his black coffee. ‘It looks to me like that plane is going to fly right into that building.’

‘It will,’ I said, the vision playing in the back of my mind like a TV left on in the background.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, suddenly self-conscious.

He looked at me for a moment, then walked into the living room, flicked on the TV and fell into the sofa with a sigh.

That was in 1994 and over the years that followed, I put the vision to the back of my mind, but I was never able to forget it completely.
 
I was a Project Manager at a large insurance company when it happened.

The TV screens we used to monitor the volume of calls were tuned into the news channel and I joined colleagues in stunned silence as we watched the planes loop, one after the other, into the North and South towers.

I froze. The sounds of the people around me droned into silence. All I could hear was my heart thump-thumping against my chest. The footage on the screen was exactly what I’d seen in my vision: the crashes, the smoke, the crowds. The sheer terror on people’s faces.  

I became aware of someone saying my name and turned to see Pete, a member of my team, looking at me with his head cocked to one side.

‘You don’t look very good, Mark,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

The next thing I knew, I was at home in bed, my wife leaning over me with a cup of tea in her hand.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

‘It’s what I saw as a kid, Catherine,' I said, staring ahead out of the window at the afternoon sky. 'That dream I told you about. It’s what happened today. Two towers, two planes. I knew it was going to happen. I even had the numbers of the flights. Do you think I could have done something?’

Hearing the hysteria in my voice, I let Catherine soothe me with her soft words and gentle touches, then fell into a dreamless sleep.

I woke the next morning with an overwhelming sense of guilt that took years of counselling to alleviate.

I will never know why that vision of an atrocity in New York came to a ten year old in leafy Surrey seventeen years prior.

I just wish I’d known exactly when it would happen, but like Catherine says, what could I have done?
Who would have believed a child with nothing more than a picture as proof?

Maybe knowing and not being believed would have been worse.

That's what I've been telling myself anyway.